Probably one of the best interview questions that I've been asked over the years, is to write a script (can't remember the purpose) in bash, using pen and paper.
The idea of a black dwarf is also pretty wild. The universe isn't old enough for any black dwarves to exist yet, but eventually the brown ones will radiate enough heat away that they're no longer held up by the vibrational energy of the atoms they contain. They'll stop being fluffy and settle into a mode where they're held up only by electron degeneracy pressure (a.k.a the Pauli exclusion principle)... it's a bit like how neutron stars are stable because they're not so massive that they collapse to a black hole. Black dwarves will be stable because they're not so massive that they collapse to a neutron star.
What will this substance look like? Will it ring like a bell if struck? What color will it be? Will it conduct electricity? If so, how? Are the atomic nuclei now the charge carriers because the electrons are stuck? It would likely be a super-thermal-conductor, does that have any analogous properties to a super-electrical-conductor? Which of these can we observe without the sensor collapsing to degenerate matter itself?
I hope there's life around to conduct these experiments when they become possible.
Neutron stars are held up by neutron degeneracy pressure, btw, not electron degeneracy pressure. White dwarfs stars are held up by that (even though they can be very hot; the temperature needed to "lift" degeneracy increases with the mass of the object.) Even the cores of some very large stars are electron degenerate; this is why they remain stable against the "pair production instability": there aren't any states into which newly created electrons can go, suppressing pair production.
looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo.
And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!
This brought back fond memories of my favorite kebab cart in college. Looked back at their cart on Google Maps and some of the menu items are just the same image stretched differently.
Err, there were, prepare to feel old "Cookie consent pop-ups first started appearing following the adoption of the ePrivacy Directive in 2002" 25 years!
Cool, I thought this was a CPU custom designed for Doom, but I guess that's just a 486 :)
edit: I went to down a quick hole "The historical footnote is that a version of this genuinely happened. SNES Doom shipped with a Super FX 2 in the cartridge, a custom RISC chip with a pixel-plot instruction, because the console's own CPU had no chance. Jaguar and PlayStation ports both moved the rasteriser onto dedicated hardware. Doom's design was shaped by the absence of an FPU, and then hardware kept getting built to catch up with it."
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