Unless I'm overlooking something, the demo only requires DOSBox to have a machine with predefined execution speed. There are no DOS interrupt calls that I can see. Other than that, the program could probably even be trivially modified to fit in a floppy disk MBR and could potentially run without underlying OS.
To be more exact (in an excessive way), it uses the BIOS's code to set the video mode (INT 10h) which is probably a few dozen bytes (at least?) although I have been remiss at not ever reading them. And it depends on DOS configuring the memory space to leave an INT 20h call (to terminate the program) at a place that's easy to RET to. But, yeah, very little extra. But I'm not being negative at all and this is pretty nice code and on the impressive side of 256 byte demos from the 80s and 90s (and onward).
Yes, this is very minimal; if it were self-booting the INT 20h call wouldn't be needed, but there's no getting around the INT 10h, unless you specialize for very specific hardware.
The entire 5150 BIOS fit in 8k, so even if it were laden with BIOS calls (which it's not) then that would be an upper-bound.
Also, MIDI - I'm not very familiar with demo programming, but I guess using MIDI saves a lot of bytes compared to trying to do something similar with only the PC speaker?
Sure, it saves a lot of bytes compared to PCM encoded wave-form data, but it's not really cheating anything unless we also consider the red, blue and green parts of the computer monitor to be cheating because we're not outputting colours as raw wavelengths, but instead the monitor is decoding compressed signals into actual colours.
What is this "cheating" you speak of? I wasn't expressing any judgement, just saying that using MIDI helps save bytes. But now that you mention it, the bitmapped graphics that we take for granted nowadays also help (it gives you a whole memory space to work with that doesn't count towards the length of your program, rather than having to "race the beam" -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam). Not sure if there's a demoscene for the Atari 2600, but that would probably be the most "bare-metal" you could get...
Why is that bad? If the bytes could easily run within the same constraint in another env/language why the hate?
I am with u on the excessive ram of browsers. It is insane. Still, it is one of the most portal and easy ways to share something. Heck, u can run a dos emulator in your browser.
This is probably in reference to things like Dwitter.net (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557489), where the browser (plus the Dwittet-specific runtime harness) contributes significantly higher-level functions than traditional demoscene targets like DOS PCs.
It’s just a different thing. I see no “hate”, only an expression of preference for “bare-metal” demos.
Yeah, but it's a slippery slope, because no program runs in complete isolation. Even on the simplest 8 bit machines where there is no OS to speak of, you are still benefitting from the capabilities of the hardware - generating sound and music with the C64's SID takes a lot less bytes (and still sounds much better) than trying to do something comparable with more primitive hardware like the PC speaker. That's probably also the reason why this demo uses MIDI.
if your OpenGL driver had a glDoACoolDemo(); function, you wouldn't be allowed to call it. But if you find that among the regular functions are some code blocks that just happen to form a cool demo, you can use them and take credit for your discovery...
Probably because JS has larger runtime, in JS you don't have to write about most of the low level code. So it's easier to squeeze code in JS than in ASM or machine code.
That actually deserves a competition of its own. Just what can you accomplish with a 256 bytes prompt? Or maybe 32 bytes, to compensate for expressiveness of natural language.
I checked out some subreddits on the mission, and left pretty quickly for that reason. It's nice to find some positivity and wonder at it. I love what Artemis II is doing, found the launch very exciting and a little nerve wracking, and can't wait until they get even closer to the Moon.
I had to do a double take: remembering the i3s as the little almost SmartCar-sized EVs. Great cars, I still see a few around here, but I couldn't imagine them extending the range of those to 900km!
Turns out they just released the i3 sedan, which is like a 3-series. And good to see they're making the design similar between the new 3-series and the new i3. I like the i4, but really need something more 3-series in size.
Yes that new one is not an i3, not even in spirit. The original i3 was super light, quirky, fun, innovative in so many ways. They just didn't sell enough. People wanted more boring cars.
It was also $50k for a car that only got 120-150mi of range. It was a joke car. The reason it didn’t sell well is because it was a compliance car, not because it didn’t innovative. If it had a reasonable range (say, Chevy Bolt 200-250ish) in all electric for the same price, I bet it would have sold much much better.
Sure, it’s useful for that, but its absolutely a horrendous deal compared to other EVs on the market at the same time. Anyone buying one for MSRP either loves BMW way too much or just was not aware of the market at the time.
A Chevy bolt, albeit not as nice inside, had nearly twice the range and cost half as much.
If you get one second hand for cheap, sure why not.
I feel like the lesson from other countries is that the military will be the last thing to go. Public funding of everything else will be sacrificed to keep the military powerful, and leaders will be from the military. That will be a complete breakdown of democracy of course.
"Analysis of the data suggests that a blue whale’s heart is already working at its limit, which may explain why blue whales have never evolved to be bigger."
Incredible to think of the volume of all the blood it's pumping around.
I don't understand how that would limit evolution. Bigger bodies can evolve together with bigger hearts, as already witnessed with the very whales being researched.
The volume of blood that needs to be pumped increases e̶x̶p̶o̶n̶e̶n̶t̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ cubically with size, meaning the cells have to do more work, or there have to be more of them. The size of the heart has to match the volume of blood being pumped - if they evolved to be larger, the heart might have to be so big that it creates pathology in other areas, or has to pump so hard it damages tissue, or creates forces so great that veins or arteries collapse or burst.
It's probably not as dramatic an issue as that. It could also be sensory - past a certain size, in order to be sensitive enough to detect damage and deal with normal conditions, it would have to be irritated all the time, or numb to potential hazards.
There are all sorts of second and third order consequences limiting how various vital systems can interplay, so more than likely, it's a combination of a whole bunch of things that subtly limit the overall size to where it's at, and any further increase degrades its abilities to survive.
They're just so huge. Their brains are 4 times larger than a human's brain, but we share a whole lot of structure, from the cellular level to the macro, with two lobes, some shared sulcal features (same folding pattern) which indicates that we likely share enough connectomic structure for the ways in which our brains operate to produce similar conscious experiences. Someday, in the distant future, we should be able to use BCI to feel exactly what it's like to be a blue whale (and vice versa.)
Their brains have similar cortical structure, but even though the brains are about 7 times larger, their cortical surface area is only 2-3 times that of a human. It really puts into context how bizarrely massive our brains are for our relatively tiny size.
For contrast, titanosaur hearts would have been around 500 lbs and up to 6 feet in diameter, and their brains were about the size of a big walnut. These land animals were up to 40m long and 100 tons.
Anyway - physics of tissue and frailties of being made of meat are what keep the whales from getting much bigger.
Size of one heart has restrictions that are determined by diminishing return of physics. That doesn't mean engineering a larger system is impossible or even that very difficult. Same as any other pump system. i.e. there is no reason not to have 2 or 10 hearts.
We do this to move any fluid like water or concrete up to steep terrain or maintain pressure in everything from sewage to oil or gas pipes over long enough distribution systems.
Romanticizing in popular culture not withstanding, heart is just a pump[2] and today can be replaced by (albeit for short duration) entirely by a machine or replaced in a transplant.
We are not talking about say the brain or the central nervous systems[1]. That would be like going to multi-master from single node - lot more fundamental complex rebuild and rethink of the core architecture.
[1]We are not even remotely close to fully understanding let alone attempting to replace.
[2 Amazingly well designed, very efficient, something today we probably could not (yet) build synthetically with similar reliability and durability but it is still a pump nonetheless.
> We are not talking about say the brain or the central nervous systems. That would be like going to multi-master from single node - lot more fundamental complex rebuild and rethink of the core architecture.
The central nervous system already is “multi-core”, with tiny logic handling such things as the patellar reflex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex#Mechanism: “This produces a signal which travels back to the spinal cord and synapses (without interneurons) at the level of L3 or L4 in the spinal cord, completely independent of higher centres”
But also internal space is increasing cubically—so any reason it couldn’t have mutated to have 2 hearts servicing each side of the body?
You could also claim our bodies have massive surface area, molecularly speaking. We just are factory-configured to not sense things that are too small to matter to ourselves as a whole (like small bugs and below)
> any reason it couldn’t have mutated to have 2 hearts servicing each side of the body
There are probably no hard reasons. It is most likely that the path of incremental changes leading to that solution is either unlikely, or does not convey an advantage to propagation of genes.
There are measurements suited to purpose, then there are "technically you could do that" measurements, and it's the former we'd want to use when measuring what sorts of power and pressure and material properties of the vascular system and cardiac tissue of a whale. Enormous amounts of blood are being pumped around, and I'd have to imagine you're in the million miles of arteries and veins and capillaries ballpark, so there's a lot of pressure holding that mass back.
That'd be a fun model to figure out for a weekend project - what sorts of forces are we talking about - how efficient is it compared to say, a hummingbird, or a human, or an earthworm heart?
Because the cost to things that allow the whale to survive is greater than the benefit of being larger, on the whole. If they get bigger, they die and are survived by slightly smaller versions, and over a long period of time, you get a range of slightly bigger and slightly larger whales, centered around whatever average size best fits the niche for that particular time span.
It's usually a whole suite of interrelated reasons that are affecting any given feature - size would include hearts, nervous system performance, food intake, protection from predation, and so on, with dozens of factors playing a part.
Some animals have multiple hearts, for instance cephalopods, like octopuses & squids, have 3 hearts.
However, for vertebrates it would be difficult to evolve to have extra hearts, because they have relatively rigid bodies.
A heart needs a space in which to expand, so it is not enough for the muscles in the wall of a blood vessel to increase in size and become capable of periodic contractions. You also need for all the space around it to evolve in providing an extra cavity inside which the new heart will be able to move without interaction with the surrounding organs, like the pericardium provides for the heart. In vertebrates, it was possible to evolve the pericardium because it has not evolved from nothing. It has evolved from a cavity (the so-called coelom) that existed in the ancestors of vertebrates long before having a skeleton and long before having a dorsal chord and even before having a blood vascular system. The modification of the coelom into a pericardium was a simple change, while the creation of a new internal cavity would be a very complex change. Moreover, also the nervous system requires changes, to be able to control the new heart.
So such changes are very unlikely in an animal like a vertebrate, because any intermediate stages would result in an animal that is disadvantaged in comparison with its competitors, only the final stage, with a functional second heart would be an improvement.
In general the evolution of animals does not happen at a constant rate. When an animal reaches a well optimized structure, it can keep that structure unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, because any deviation would result in a less competitive animal, which would be eliminated without descendants. For instance, there are a few species of sharks that have changed very little since Triassic, more than 200 million years ago.
Great changes in the structure of an animal happen only when there is no competition, which allows the intermediate worse forms to survive and produce descendants. Such lack of competition happens when a natural catastrophe kills most competitors or when an animal succeeds by chance to arrive in a new place, where nothing like it lived before, e.g. when passing accidentally to a different island or continent.
I don't understand how the square-cube law is relevant here. The volume of blood indeed scales cubically with the length, but so does the volume of the heart. Where is the quadratic part of the equation that limits the maximum size of a whale? Why would it not work to take a whale and arbitrarily scale it in photoshop?
> Where is the quadratic part of the equation that limits the maximum size of a whale?
Muscle power output increases with cross section area, ~L^2, not with volume. The heart have no separate power unit. It relies on the same muscle walls that comprise its chambers to power itself.
Wall thickness increasing by x increases cross section/power by x^2, but also increases chamber volume/workload by x^3. So workload outruns available power. It's because of this people abusing steroids get heart failure eventually.
Cardiac tissue is a surface. Blood is a volume. I think they’re saying blue whale hearts are near the largest current biology can evolve. Which is interesting because it suggests if we could e.g. engineer whales with carbon-fiber hearts or whatever, they’d evolve to grow even bigger.
Blackheart the whale, lurking the oceans, ever devouring and growing. I think you've got a good Lovecraft/Pirates of the Carribean/Black Mirror mashup premise here.
Yes, but the force of a muscle does not increase with volume, but only with its section.
So a bigger heart would need to have thicker walls in comparison with its internal volume, which would increase disproportionately the volume of the heart walls, so for bigger and bigger hearts the useful internal volume that is filled with blood would be a smaller and smaller fraction of the total heart volume.
The lower efficiency of a bigger heart would require a higher contraction frequency to compensate, but the bigger a heart is the smaller is its maximum contraction frequency, due to the small speed of the propagation of an excitation through muscle cells and nervous cells.
>The lower efficiency of a bigger heart would require a higher contraction frequency to compensate
If that's the case, then how come rats have a higher heart rate than humans, who have a higher heart rate than whales? Do whales have hearts with thinner walls than humans, while rats have big lumps of muscle with teeny tiny chambers?
> the force of a muscle does not increase with volume
It does. But it must still impart that force through a surface to a volume. And at a certain point, you hit the mechanical limits of that surface’s ability to hold itself together.
Yes. There are many extinct animals that had sizes comparable with sperm whales, including some dinosaurs, but none of them had sizes comparable with blue whales.
The reason for this is simple, few animals have developed a method of feeding like that of the baleen whales, by filtrating huge amounts of sea water, which can provide enough food for such a huge body.
Other animals that have developed similar feeding methods, like 4 groups of species of sharks or rays, including the whale shark, have also become much bigger than their relatives.
PageMaker was an iconic program of the DTP revolution for me, along with the Aldus logo. We couldn't afford a Mac at the time, so I made cargo-cult copies of programs like this on my home computer, and pored over the screenshots I saw in magazines. Years later, my Mum got a job in her office producing the in-house company magazine using PageMaker. I spent hours getting to know it while helping her out.
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