thegreatbeyond

More color fun: Niether the RGB nor the CMY systems completely cover the visible spectrum, and for printing purposes the system usually used is CMYK, where the K represents black ink. This is used because it would take a lot of cyan, magenta, and yellow ink to absorb enough light to produce very ...

What's this? Folk etymology? Searching for the word "cookie" in online dictionaries gives this explanation: the dutch word for cake is koek, and the dutch word for cookie is koekje.

The chlorophyll in plants doesn't break down into other pigments. The other pigments are already present in the ...

I didn't like Chromus's answers.

He said nonflammable wasn't a word.
He failed to acknowledge that "could care less" came from "couldn't care less" and instead came up with that weird "idioms aren't supposed to make sense" nonsense.
His artificial gravity answer didn't mention simulating gravity ...

Nonflammable is a word. It means "not flammable". If something is not flammable, it should be labeled as nonflammable. The word inflammable means the same as flammable and is generally avoided since it can be confusing.

"Could care less" is now an idiom, but it was created as an inexplicable ...

There is a story about lower dimensional worlds called Flatland. It describes a strange two dimensional world called Flatland, and also goes into some stuff about extra dimensions (the main character, a square, is shown the three dimensional world by a sphere, and also encounters 1 and 0 dimensional ...

According to http://ufbir.ifas.ufl.edu/chap30.htm the largest insects are of a few species of beetles. This page looks at the largest specimens of these beetles. The beetle Titanus giganteus can apparently grow to over 16 centimeters (over six inches) long. Even the average Titanus is reported to be ...

Which should I have for lunch today: a chicken sandwich with mayonaise, or a chicken sandwich with ketchup? or maybe I should be really daring and try something I haven't had before, a chicken sandwich with russian dressing? That sounds weird even though it is just a combination of the other two ...

Fusion refers to the fusing of light atomic nuclei into heavier nuclei to release energy. Currently nuclear powerplants use fission: breaking apart heavy nuclei into lighter nuclei to release energy. Medium sized nuclei are the most stable, and tremendous energy is released in breaking apart heavy ...

Notice that the "blue blocker" sunglasses look yellow. The purpose behind this is to tint everything yellow, which has some other effects. Remember from my color rant some pages back that yellow is equivalent to -blue. Because the lenses are tinted yellow, everything you see through them has yellow ...

Cel shading is just slightly harder to program than normal shading. The normal way to draw things is to interpolate colors smoothly, for smooth shading. Graphics cards do this pretty easily. Cel shading can take just a little bit of extra programming, since instead of just calculating colors and ...

The NES has the following ways to produce sound: two square wave channels, a triangle wave channel, a noise channel, and a delta modulation channel. The square waves and triangle wave work by having the program specify the frequency and volume of the sounds, and they produce their specific wave form ...

Chaos theory is all about how predicting things is a very difficult if not intractible problem. Even if you know all there is to know about a relatively simple system, complex patterns can still emerge that defy attempts at prediction. And if such chaotic patterns can emerge in relatively simple ...

There's some sort of story floating around about how according to modern physics, bees can't fly. Some searching around on the internet reveals that this is quite an old story, from the 1930s or something, and apparently some physicist just did a few quick calculations one time about bees and it ...

Programs need to be moved into the computer's primary memory (RAM) to be executed. Executable files contain information for the operating system to use in addition to the executable code. This information tells the operating system technical stuff for placing the code into memory. When a program ...

OK, here's a brief overview of what a turing machine is.

There's an infinite tape. This tape is divided into cells. Each cell contains one symbol (or it is empty, an empty symbol). There is a read/write head that is over one of the cells. There is also a state that the machine is in, which ...