The slowness of black hole evaporation really is astonishing. Even though I already understood stood as much, I was still taken aback by how small the correction to the event horizon size because of it turns out to be. I figured it would at least be, like, a micrometer or something, which you ...

The forums are so silent these days, so here's a challenge question, something I certainly struggle to wrap my head around. For a distant observer it will take an infinite time to see an astronaut fall into a black hole. But it will take a finite time for the same observer to see the black hole ...

Hey I'm having major problems with SE after the update.  It wont load at all because it says I need to have the Steam client running in order to play it?  But I get that same error message whether I try to run SE from the desktop or from the Steam Client itself-- what's going on?

Sort of reminds me of the US in Vietnam or either the US or Russia in Afghanistan.  More wars that should never have happened.

My Olympus M43 cameras do the same thing when in "Live View Boost" mode, they increase the gain to make star clusters visible in the live view LCD even in areas of high light pollution. Very useful for proper framing and for using manual focus. The only drawback is the frame rate goes down (but who ...

I need to report that changing max percentage of RAM for SE to use to 100% was a bad idea, I crashed my computer as soon as I went to a black hole and tried to use my browser (Firefox) at the same time lol. So I put that back down to 85% (default) and it's working fine again.

I also had to shave 15 ...

I made the following changes:

changed max video memory for SE to use to 8 GB

changed max RAM for SE to use to 32 GB

changed max percentage of RAM for SE to use to 100%

changed various other minor settings like setting jpg screenshots to 100%

I noticed that vram usage is set to 1 (maximum ...

Thanks Doc! Do you think I should go into my main-user.cfg and set the VRAM to the maximum of the graphics card? I'm not sure how well that setting works because according to Afterburner OSD I am using close to the full 6 GB even when setting it to 4 GB in the cfg file. In practice, are you supposed ...

Thanks, what is Vulkan....programming language?
Vulkan is a graphics and compute API - what SE is currently using is OpenGL, which had its last stable release in 2017.
It should also enable better performance related to graphics, and also supports compute shaders.

We're also using this ...

Timing is important. If you want to judge the effectiveness of lockdowns, we should look at the time frame where lockdowns were the most important factor. That was during spring and summer of 2020. Sweden's excess mortality rate then was higher than almost anywhere else in Europe except Great ...

Covid is not gone, but enough time has passed to evaluate the countermeasures like lockdowns, social distancing, face masks. The following statistics is interesting. As we know, Sweden remained largely open. This does not mean that everything was business as usual, individual common sense could ...

Thanks, what is Vulkan....programming language?
Anyway no rush, having shadows by the end of the year would be a nice New Year 2024 present ahead of the big total solar eclipse coming next year!
I hope it will include accurate penumbral shadows too, something Wat and I and Mid have been discussing ...

Wow this is fascinating, Wat....how wide would the area under a total solar eclipse be on both Charon and Pluto?

Half a millimeter wide penumbral shadow sounds surreal....I hope when shadows get done on SE we'll be able to see this (on rocks and mountains/hills/cliffs of course, but maybe we could ...

That sounds very interesting, I wonder if that means there is no penumbral shadow?

So glad to see you back Vlad!  I run on medium settings myself at 1080P for SE... is that what you are doing too?  I hope you are doing better now!