Totally useless information/trivia

[BOF]

2 hours ago, Chindie said:

Tetris has been completed.

Or more specifically it's been beaten. 

Tetris on the NES has long been a title used to set gameplay records, like the long known competitive playing of Pacman and Donkey Kong, but Tetris is a bit different. Pacman, if you are very, very, very good at it, is fairly reliably beatable - you can reach a level at which the games' programming breaks, a 'killscreen', and that's the furthest you can get with it.

Tetris, on the other hand, is much more difficult to do that with. Tetris actively fights the player in such a way to make it effectively impossible to beat. When you reach level 29 in Tetris on the NES, the tetrominoes fall so quickly it's impossible to move the blocks from one side to the other before they land in normal play, effectively meaning at level 29 the game is made to end - it's been programmed to prevent a normal player being able to go further.

However, people worked out that you can beat level 29. You just have to play the game differently. First they discovered a technique of tapping the Dpad extremely quickly (extremely quickly - over 15 times a second), called hypertapping, which would allow you to manipulate the pieces faster than the game expects you to at level 29, which lead to a guy reaching level 30 in 2011 - just the 22 years after the games' original release. That record stood for 8 years, and then other players started to slowly push on the record into the mid-30s. After that another technique was discovered, called rolling, whereby the player taps the bottom of the pad with a series of taps of their fingers in succession (like the classic bored rolling tap on a table) while shifting the Dpad direction. This technique allowed people to hit the buttons at a speed similar or better than hypertapping, but much more easily and with much less strain on the hands. Where hypertapping was very difficult, only doable by a small group of players to a high level and lead to injuries, rolling anyone could do, with practice.

This then lead to breakthroughs with how far players could get. Quickly people broke through beyond level 100. The community knew that there had to be a point where the game would break - all these 8-bit games eventually have a point where the programming breaks, mentioned in a previous discussion of these kind of old game records, where the programming hits an overflow error (which is what causes Pacman to go to a killscreen, is programming runs out of numbers it can use and it crashes). A programme was created to play Tetris at a level a human can't to see how far it would need to be taken to hit a killscreen. The bot found one at Level 237, but it wasn't clear that this was a set in stone killscreen like Pacman (Tetris would definitely break at the same level as Pacman, 256, because of byte based programming) and there was a theory it might depend on the actual flow of play. It was then theorised that, with the right flow of play and events happening, the game would crash at Level 155.

This week, a 13yo did it. He actually did it at level 157, because he missed some of the prerequisites to get the 155 break, but he got a NES Tetris killscreen, the first ever, 35 years after the game was released.

Yeah I read about this. It's incredible that it took this long, in a game played so ubiquitously. Hat's off to him.

[BOF]

An interesting video on the above.

 

[colhint]

When repairs are made or inspections done to millennium bridge, an ancient law is triggered. The work is carried out by people abseiling underneath. Thus reducing the safe height. The port of London introduced a warning to shipping by lowering a bale of hay. This was thought large enough to be seen by the ships

Edited January 7 by colhint

[Chindie]

If you've watched enough action movies, or played N64 classic GoldenEye, you'll know that a gun with a silencer makes a person instantly stealthy and that a gunshot from a silenced gun makes a distinct quiet 'pew'.

In reality that's not true at all. A gun isn't silenced, it's suppressed, and when a gun is fired with a suppressor it's still ear shatteringly loud, the suppressor is more about dispersing sound than particularly muffling it.

Or is it? It turns out there is a very, very quiet gun. It's called the Welrod, it was made by the UK in the Second World War, specifically designed by the Special Operations Executive, the department that specialised in making equipment for spies, and at least some of them were probably built by BSA. The SOE mostly specialised in the development of explosives and related equipment (famous things including explosive rats, yes seriously, and various types of fuses), focused on sabotage in the main, but they also realised their operatives might need an 'assassination weapon', so developed a gun.

Cool and everything, but what's interesting about that? Well, a few things.

Firstly this gun was intended to be used in assassination missions, so it needed to be very quiet. Every part of the gun was designed to be quiet. It used a type of round that was comparatively weak and slow, as a more powerful round would be supersonic and therefore loud. It's barrel was designed to further slow the round, allowing gas to escape the barrel rather than speed the bullet, making it even quieter. It has a long integral suppressor that used metal baffles and, importantly, solid rubber discs that the bullet would have to pass through which further muffled the sound. The end of the suppressor was also slightly contoured so that the gun could be fired in contact with a target and even more efficiently stifle sound. The mechanism of firing, a bolt action, was chosen as the quietest method of firing a bullet (as the basic mechanism of most other types of handgun are actually quite loud even without the sound of the gunshot, whereas a bolt action is essentially silent when fired). It's an exceptionally quiet gun, for a couple of shots anyway - the rubber discs get worse with every shot and quickly stop working. Tests have shown, for example, in a reasonably busy environment a shot from the gun in contact with it's target couldn't be heard by the shooter. In a quieter environment it couldn't be heard outside of a radius of a few metres.

Obviously it's a spy's weapon, so helped to be fairly innocuous looking. Which it is. It doesn't really look like a gun. It doesn't have a grip like a normal gun, it has a small magazine with a rubber cover over the bottom, which means when the magazine is removed the thing looks like a long tube, like an old fashioned bike pump minus the handle (it got nicknamed the bike pump by some groups as a result). It also doesn't have a classic looking trigger, or any normal looking pistol mechanisms and controls. It's fairly awkward to use as a result, it's not easy to hold and has unusual controls.

There were a lot of these guns made, although it's not clear how often they actually were used. There was a plan to essentially flood Europe with these amongst resistance groups and espionage agents and encourage a mass assassination movement of Nazi figures, but that plan was shelved after Czech resistance fighters assassinated Heydrich during Operation Anthropoid, which lead to particularly vicious reprisals by the Nazis against the Czech people. It is also known that these guns were part of the Cold War resistance plan Operation Gladio, the plan to resist a mass Soviet invasion of Europe, as they were found in weapons caches hidden for that purpose. They were also rumoured to have been used in the Troubles, and in Vietnam. But perhaps most bizarrely, they allegedly got used as recently as the first Iraq War, and it's believed they are still potentially in use by some special ops forces.

Which means there might be spies and particularly specialised hit troops running around, in 2024, with a Hollywood quiet 'pew' gun from World War 2, a gun so quiet it could kill a person in a crowded street and nobody would know.

[mjmooney]

12 minutes ago, Chindie said:

If you've watched enough action movies, or played N64 classic GoldenEye, you'll know that a gun with a silencer makes a person instantly stealthy and that a gunshot from a silenced gun makes a distinct quiet 'pew'.

In reality that's not true at all. A gun isn't silenced, it's suppressed, and when a gun is fired with a suppressor it's still ear shatteringly loud, the suppressor is more about dispersing sound than particularly muffling it.

Or is it? It turns out there is a very, very quiet gun. It's called the Welrod, it was made by the UK in the Second World War, specifically designed by the Special Operations Executive, the department that specialised in making equipment for spies, and at least some of them were probably built by BSA. The SOE mostly specialised in the development of explosives and related equipment (famous things including explosive rats, yes seriously, and various types of fuses), focused on sabotage in the main, but they also realised their operatives might need an 'assassination weapon', so developed a gun.

Cool and everything, but what's interesting about that? Well, a few things.

Firstly this gun was intended to be used in assassination missions, so it needed to be very quiet. Every part of the gun was designed to be quiet. It used a type of round that was comparatively weak and slow, as a more powerful round would be supersonic and therefore loud. It's barrel was designed to further slow the round, allowing gas to escape the barrel rather than speed the bullet, making it even quieter. It has a long integral suppressor that used metal baffles and, importantly, solid rubber discs that the bullet would have to pass through which further muffled the sound. The end of the suppressor was also slightly contoured so that the gun could be fired in contact with a target and even more efficiently stifle sound. The mechanism of firing, a bolt action, was chosen as the quietest method of firing a bullet (as the basic mechanism of most other types of handgun are actually quite loud even without the sound of the gunshot, whereas a bolt action is essentially silent when fired). It's an exceptionally quiet gun, for a couple of shots anyway - the rubber discs get worse with every shot and quickly stop working. Tests have shown, for example, in a reasonably busy environment a shot from the gun in contact with it's target couldn't be heard by the shooter. In a quieter environment it couldn't be heard outside of a radius of a few metres.

Obviously it's a spy's weapon, so helped to be fairly innocuous looking. Which it is. It doesn't really look like a gun. It doesn't have a grip like a normal gun, it has a small magazine with a rubber cover over the bottom, which means when the magazine is removed the thing looks like a long tube, like an old fashioned bike pump minus the handle (it got nicknamed the bike pump by some groups as a result). It also doesn't have a classic looking trigger, or any normal looking pistol mechanisms and controls. It's fairly awkward to use as a result, it's not easy to hold and has unusual controls.

There were a lot of these guns made, although it's not clear how often they actually were used. There was a plan to essentially flood Europe with these amongst resistance groups and espionage agents and encourage a mass assassination movement of Nazi figures, but that plan was shelved after Czech resistance fighters assassinated Heydrich during Operation Anthropoid, which lead to particularly vicious reprisals by the Nazis against the Czech people. It is also known that these guns were part of the Cold War resistance plan Operation Gladio, the plan to resist a mass Soviet invasion of Europe, as they were found in weapons caches hidden for that purpose. They were also rumoured to have been used in the Troubles, and in Vietnam. But perhaps most bizarrely, they allegedly got used as recently as the first Iraq War, and it's believed they are still potentially in use by some special ops forces.

Which means there might be spies and particularly specialised hit troops running around, in 2024, with a Hollywood quiet 'pew' gun from World War 2, a gun so quiet it could kill a person in a crowded street and nobody would know.

Called the Welrod, because it was designed in Welwyn Garden City. 

[Chindie]

7 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Called the Welrod, because it was designed in Welwyn Garden City. 

Indeed. Welwyn was the home of SOE development branch, and they gave many of their items names beginning with 'Wel', such as the Welbike (a tiny motorbike designed to be used by paratroopers) and the Welman, a one man submarine.

Incidentally that is a Mk1 Welrod, which featured a trigger guard. The MK2 didn't save looks even less like a gun.

As an addendum to the Welrod, the design was basically copied by a Swiss company in the 2000s, who made some minor modernisations and sold them as 'veterinary tools'. They claimed it was important for a vet to be able to put down a cow silently. I imagine they don't sell many to be people with degrees in veterinary science...

[Stevo985]

On 05/01/2024 at 10:02, Chindie said:

Tetris has been completed.

Or more specifically it's been beaten. 

Tetris on the NES has long been a title used to set gameplay records, like the long known competitive playing of Pacman and Donkey Kong, but Tetris is a bit different. Pacman, if you are very, very, very good at it, is fairly reliably beatable - you can reach a level at which the games' programming breaks, a 'killscreen', and that's the furthest you can get with it.

Tetris, on the other hand, is much more difficult to do that with. Tetris actively fights the player in such a way to make it effectively impossible to beat. When you reach level 29 in Tetris on the NES, the tetrominoes fall so quickly it's impossible to move the blocks from one side to the other before they land in normal play, effectively meaning at level 29 the game is made to end - it's been programmed to prevent a normal player being able to go further.

However, people worked out that you can beat level 29. You just have to play the game differently. First they discovered a technique of tapping the Dpad extremely quickly (extremely quickly - over 15 times a second), called hypertapping, which would allow you to manipulate the pieces faster than the game expects you to at level 29, which lead to a guy reaching level 30 in 2011 - just the 22 years after the games' original release. That record stood for 8 years, and then other players started to slowly push on the record into the mid-30s. After that another technique was discovered, called rolling, whereby the player taps the bottom of the pad with a series of taps of their fingers in succession (like the classic bored rolling tap on a table) while shifting the Dpad direction. This technique allowed people to hit the buttons at a speed similar or better than hypertapping, but much more easily and with much less strain on the hands. Where hypertapping was very difficult, only doable by a small group of players to a high level and lead to injuries, rolling anyone could do, with practice.

This then lead to breakthroughs with how far players could get. Quickly people broke through beyond level 100. The community knew that there had to be a point where the game would break - all these 8-bit games eventually have a point where the programming breaks, mentioned in a previous discussion of these kind of old game records, where the programming hits an overflow error (which is what causes Pacman to go to a killscreen, is programming runs out of numbers it can use and it crashes). A programme was created to play Tetris at a level a human can't to see how far it would need to be taken to hit a killscreen. The bot found one at Level 237, but it wasn't clear that this was a set in stone killscreen like Pacman (Tetris would definitely break at the same level as Pacman, 256, because of byte based programming) and there was a theory it might depend on the actual flow of play. It was then theorised that, with the right flow of play and events happening, the game would crash at Level 155.

This week, a 13yo did it. He actually did it at level 157, because he missed some of the prerequisites to get the 155 break, but he got a NES Tetris killscreen, the first ever, 35 years after the game was released.

Darren Bent on talksport last weekend was claiming he'd previously beaten Tetris.

It wasn't a joke. 

[Seat68]

Just now, Stevo985 said:

Darren Bent on talksport last weekend was claiming he'd previously beaten Tetris.

It wasn't a joke. 

Sol Campbell was also on talking about the reasons he never beat Tetris, alarming if true.

[mjmooney]

1 hour ago, Seat68 said:

Sol Campbell was also on talking about the reasons he never beat Tetris, alarming if true.

Dwight Yorke has applied to beat Tetris. 

[one_ian_taylor]

23 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Darren Bent on talksport last weekend was claiming he'd previously beaten Tetris.

It wasn't a joke. 

Used a beach ball to divert  the blocks?

[Mandy Lifeboats]

At the same time that the ancient Egyptians were building the pyramids they had archaeologists looking for more ancient buildings.  

[Marka Ragnos]

I watched in a state of unexpected glee today as our borough garbage truck came by and swallowed our old sofa. We'd put it onto the curb, beside our weekly trash can.

Seeing the compactor munch down our once beloved couch, splinters flying, springs popping, stuffing suddenly luridly unstuffed, was just excellent as hell.

Even the sanitation crew seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. It prompted, between them, some sort of discussion about the different types of furniture their truck could handle. It all seemed like a sort of treat for everyone.

"Just no sofa beds," the one guy told me. "They cause problems."

Edited January 26 by Marka Ragnos

[mjmooney]

4 hours ago, Marka Ragnos said:

I watched in a state of unexpected glee today as our borough garbage truck came by and swallowed our old sofa. We'd put it onto the curb, beside our weekly trash can.

Seeing the compactor munch down our once beloved couch, splinters flying, springs popping, stuffing suddenly luridly unstuffed, was just excellent as hell.

Even the sanitation crew seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. It prompted, between them, some sort of discussion about the different types of furniture their truck could handle. It all seemed like a sort of treat for everyone.

"Just no sofa beds," the one guy told me. "They cause problems."

Nothing like that here. To get rid of a sofa you'd have to pay them to take it away on a flatbed truck. 

[Marka Ragnos]

14 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Nothing like that here. To get rid of a sofa you'd have to pay them to take it away on a flatbed truck. 

It surprised me, too. I had called the borough ahead because I didn't want get a fine or extra charge I didn't know about, but they were like, put it out there. This isn't my town here,  but this is what it looked like. 

 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

8 hours ago, mjmooney said:

Nothing like that here. To get rid of a sofa you'd have to pay them to take it away on a flatbed truck. 

Handy Hints & Tips -   Get rid of an old sofa by smearing it with blood and making a 999 call to report screaming from your address.   The police remove it for free.  

You're welcome.

 

[The Fun Factory]

Although located on the same island of Hispaniola, the  Dominican Republic has an economy ten times the size of its neighbour Haiti.

[bickster]

The artist that has played at the Grammy Awards ceremony the most is none other than Bonnie “never heard of her” Raitt. She’s performed a total of 9 times.

[mjmooney]

The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments. 

No, really.

[sidcow]

R2D2 was a Brummie and the actor originally turned down the part because he'd got through to the final of Opportunity Knocks. 

[Chindie]

3 minutes ago, sidcow said:

R2D2 was a Brummie and the actor originally turned down the part because he'd got through to the final of Opportunity Knocks. 

Kenny Baker.

Iirc he also, like most of the cast of Star Wars, thought Anthony Daniels, who played C3-PO, was a clearing in the woods.