t’s easy to imagine how small, ancient boats of old would steer through the seas - simply stick an oar in the water and let physics do the rest. But how does a behemoth passenger liner do it? How does one wrest such control (or in some cases, not) over such a significant machine of metal and wood?

The ocean liner SS United States - renowned for her beauty and record-breaking speed - lies in wait in Mobile, Alabama, counting down the days until she is sunk and turned into an artificial reef off the coast of Florida. It is a controversial end for a vessel of such luxury and grandeur; one with a rich and magnificent history as one of the greatest ships to ever grace the waves of the Atlantic. Together, let’s celebrate her legacy through some of my own illustrations, and explore everything that made SS United States truly one of a kind.

Two colliding blocks compute pi, here we dig into the physics to explain why.

The original paper by Gregory Galperin: https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~lebed/Galperin.%20Playing%20pool%20with%20pi.pdf

Adam Brown’s paper on the analogy with Grover’s Algorithm: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02207

Green sand and razor blade. Nice video. From https://www.tiktok.com/@qiaobiangugu

From The People’s Elbow to The Manhandle Slam, here are five finishing moves you might see at WrestleMania 40 — performed in stop motion.

The title doesn’t lie, and the answer is mildly cursed but par for the course. Something I didn’t mention is that this applies to almost all consoles released in the entire decade, and in fact a significant number (like the Colecovision) ONLY had RF out; the NES was one of the first consoles to have composite at all. If I could do it all again I’d mention that. I’d also keep my Casio CZ-1000 instead of throwing it away when I was 25.

This showcases a demo of megatextures running on n64 hardware. A “megatexture” for the n64 is really just a normal sized textured by modern standards but with that you can do some prebaked scenes that look like they don’t belong on the n64.

https://github.com/lambertjamesd/n64brew2023

Barbara Blackburn is often cited as the fastest typist in history. She even appears in the Guinness Book of World Records! She must be legit right? Well, maybe not. I was supposed to make a video about the new typing speed world record, and instead got pulled into a Barbara Blackburn rabbit hole that I can’t seem to escape. TL;DR She’s not that fast.

Two boxers. No flicker? How is this possible? The MMC2 Mapper chip: Explained

How to draw too many sprites by making one a background, then how to smoothly animate it by side scrolling.

Modern video encoding standards such as H.264 are a marvel of hidden complexity. But with hidden complexity comes hidden security risk. Decoding video in practice means interacting with dedicated hardware accelerators and the proprietary, privileged software components used to drive them. The video decoder ecosystem is obscure, opaque, diverse, highly privileged, largely untested, and highly exposed—a dangerous combination.

We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically spec-non-compliant video files. Using H26FORGE, we uncover insecurity in depth across the video decoder ecosystem, including kernel memory corruption bugs in iOS, memory corruption bugs in Firefox and VLC for Windows, and video accelerator and application processor kernel memory bugs in multiple Android devices.

https://github.com/h26forge/h26forge

The world’s strongest magnet is a million times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.

A tour of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and its 45 Tesla magnet.

The p-adic numbers are bizarre alternative number systems that are extremely useful in number theory. They arise by changing our notion of what it means for a number to be large. As a real number, 1 billion is huge. But as a 10-adic number, it is tiny!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number

Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRaq4aYPzCc

The JPEG algorithm is rather complex and in this video, we break down the core parts of the algorithm, specifically color spaces, YCbCr, chroma subsampling, the discrete cosine transform, quantization, and lossless encoding. The majority of the focus is on the mathematical and signal processing insights that lead to advancements in image compression and the big themes in compression as a whole that we can take away from it.

A new kind of computer architecture that’s more elegant than 1s and 0s, being based directly on Mathematics.

Recap of a lot of work, optimizing and rewriting code to squeeze out performance on limited hardware.

source: HN

Making hard drives out of pings, tetris, and covid tests.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Making a meat berry.