...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
MOND has very little to say about gravity. It claims that f=ma breaks down at sufficiently low values. That, in turn, implies that the rules should still be consistent with these modifications, and that galaxies with apparently different proportions of dark matter (as it's understood) shouldn't exist - all galaxies with similar visible sizes and structures should be essentially identical in gravitational behaviour, and that simply hasn't been demonstrated to be the case.
This galaxy is very much not in the normal range of "sizes and structures", and is highly dissimilar to almost all other galaxies observed.
the stuff about changing F=ma vs changing Fg is kind of pedantic and immaterial to the topic of simulation, given that the accleration due to gravity is the only thing that is being simulated.
I’ve linked above to a paper that attempts to establish what to rotational speed of the clusters should be based on MOND and it’s close enough to the observations that in isolation it still the case that the galaxy either has 1/400th of the dark matter density a normal galaxy would have vs we don’t need dark matter due to MOND.
The lingua franca wasn't "the language of the Franks", it was an elaborate pidgin used for Mediterranean trade that encompassed a lot of broadly Romance features with a vastly simplified grammar and a vocabulary core that could be described as most closely resembling a mixture of Occitan southern France and Savoyard (which are both, admittedly, umbrella terms that incorporate rather a large number of dialects). The term lingua franca has gone on to mean any (usually simplified) language that's used to communicate between groups - like Swahili in large parts of east Africa (it is by far the simplest of the Bantu languages, and has only a relatively small population of native speakers).
Coke was Abraham Darby's doing (around 1709-1710), and that was mostly to corner the market for cheap pots and kettles. There was no way for the charcoal crowd to compete on iron, and the bronze bunch - the norm for that sort of thing up to that point - was left forever in the dust.
That series still isn't over. It just got interrupted a couple of times. The first interruption was explained in Episode 10 - that was the discovery that the way one of the wheels was divided in the remaining teeth likely indicated that the mechanism was based on a lunar rather than a solar calendar, and that part needed to wait for the peer review and publication of a paper before the series could continue. The next interruption had more to do with Chris's real passion of watch and clock making - he had access to a couple of decorative engines (a straight-line engine and a rose engine), probably temporarily, since they would in no way both fit into the little closet he has for a shop, and he did some rather impressive guilloché and enamel work with those. When the series picks up (if it does), the hard parts are yet to come, like the planetary dial and its crapload of pointers.
One thing Chris has done that people like Michael Wright didn't was to assume that anyone who was building something like that, with its obvious signs of not being a rough prototype, would have made some sort of jig for some of the parts rather than, say, laboriously walking off tooth spacing for every single gear, and that some sort of lathe, which was known to exist and be used for wood from illustrations both contemporary with and far preceding the device, would have likely been used to make round things out of soft metal.
I found them extremely accessible, and I was a high-school dropout. (Admittedly a very late dropout, but a dropout nonetheless.) That was back when volume 4 didn't even exist as listicles yet. And, let's face it, the sheer size (and cost) of the thing, even then, was a bit intimidating, but there's nothing in it that can't be followed with a bit of algebra and the barest hint of what the kids these days call "pre-calculus". While it may be a bit of a slog to listen to Knuth, his writing is about as clear as it ever gets, things are laid out in a clear progression, and nothing jumps out at you suddenly without a clear buildup and foundation.
Concrete Mathematics, which isn't the easiest but also not the hardest math textbook, developed out of a course teaching the math from Chapter 1 of TAOCP. For people who find the first chapter, in particular, intimidating because of the math portions, it may be a good option to study before resuming TAOCP rather than just dropping TAOCP.
And he is a funny writer. I didnt do the homeworks but found it surprisingly accessible
IronicaLly, I put off reading Seminumerical Algorothms for years because didnt understand it was numerical algorithms for computers without reals. The random number chapter alone is so awesome.
And what of the excruciatingly painful existence that doesn't come with a near-term "inevitable death". What you're advocating is long-term inescapable torture.
