But the Earth isn't a plane.

Sure, human scaled patches of the Earth's surface can be approximated by a similarly sized patch of a plane, but if we're talking about tiling the entire surface of the Earth with buildings, it can actually be done using twelve pentagons or twenty isosceles triangles. We just need buildings whose footprints are roughly 1/12th and 1/20th the Earth's surface respectively.

For the pentagon, that'd be around 510.07 × 10^{12 m² divided by 12 = 42.505 × 10}12 m². With the Pentagon building having seven floors, one such building would have roughly 297.541 × 10^12 m² of floor space.

For the triangle, that'd be around 510.07 × 10^{12 m² divided by 20 = 25.503 × 10}12 m². Assuming this building has seven floors like the Pentagon building does, it'd have roughly 178.524 × 10^12 m² of floor space.

The good thing about dividing into triangles, however is that it can be subdivided into four similar isosceles triangles, which can be applied recursively down to a far more realistic scale.

Doing that, we can subdivide the original triangles sixteen times yielding the following:

25.503 × 10^{12 m² / (4}16) = 5.937 × 10^3 m²

And since the area of an isosceles triangle is equal to s²(√3)/4 we can rearrange things to find the side length of a compound with area of 5 937m²

s = √(4A/(√3)) = 117.103 m

I think that's a human-enough scale for buildings.

In total, there's 85 899 345 920 such buildings, covering the Earth.

If one such building has 7 floors, it'd have at most 41 559 m² of floor space.

EDIT:

Hit enter too soon. Additional proofreading.

Damn, I discovered a small mistake in the calculations partway through. Corrected.

We've had a Color Coding Scheme here for years, and no one bats an eyelid at those words even though it could be horrifying for someone in the US.

I've used to like grids, but I'm now very partial to lists. I used to like how grids enable you to scan thumbnails quickly, (like in games, music, images and files), but now I find them to be quite distracting. In lists, if I know what I am looking for (name, file type, etc), I can quickly go to where I need to be, and only need to scan a few items.

Of course, if the list is incredibly long, it'd be more difficult, but even more so with a grid of thumbnails. The only possible exception here is images. Knowing when a photo was taken can give me a clue, but hell do I remember what I took that got saved as IMG_20230303163333.jpg is and how the content differs from IMG_2023030316303030.jpg

[email protected] for an instance-agnostic link.

I was actually thinking “It's just 100 × $100 bills, how thick can it be?” until I did the calculations just now. I found the value of 0.0043 in for the thickness of a 100 USD bill somewhere online and did the calculations.

 undefined

    
(10 000 USD) × (1 bill / 100 USD) × (0.0043 in / 1 bill) 
= 0.430 in
≈ 1.0922 cm

  

I greatly underestimated the thickness of a stack of 100 USD bills. At just over a centimeter thick, I doubt I can even roll using the short side (for a smaller circumference).

Some stupid ideas:

• Roll the bills and stuff them into a condom. Shove it up my ass. It might feel uncomfortable for the next couple of hours, and a few more hours after that, but hey, 10k USD, right?
• I have a bunk bed that is made out of hollow metal tubes. Roll the bills, insert into a plastic bag and drop it into one of the vertical tubes holding the bed up. It should fall all the way down, with no way to see it unless you already know it has fallen inside it.
• Put the bills (flat) inside a plastic ziploc bag and shove it inside my PC. I'll insert it between my SSD, or underneath the motherboard.

Of those ideas, I quite like the first two. Easiest to do is the second one, so that's probably what I'd do.

I can count to ten in seven languages. Not as many as some of the others here, I suppose?

Yes, I sometimes count in one of my target languages.

I always found the Gilgamesh -> Holy War conversion far more useful for the Omega Weapon fight, especially if the fight is over before I even manage to use half of the 10 items the conversion gives me.

With a low enough level, and a powerful enough junction setup, every single fight (even the final boss fight) is complete child's play. Too bad I didn't already know that on my first playthrough.

That comment about phone apps is so true! One time my SO tried playing Outer Wilds in JP, I had my phone out ready to to decipher kanji via JP handwriting support. We competed on who can get to a definition of the kanji or word the fastest, and I won almost everytime. Whereas I tried to do it via handwriting, my SO tries to sound out the word first, and then search it via romaji.

A huge difficulty with those JP SNES games is that

• if a word (or a part of one) is presented as kanji, I have no idea which stroke or strokes a bunch of pixels is supposed to represent!
• if a word is presented as kana, I have no idea where the word starts or ends, especially if it is part of a sentence I can barely recognize any words in.

It is a measure of how your actions get you closer to your goals.

Hence, if my goal is learning Japanese, and I spend time in reading raw manga, I can argue I'm being productive. However, if my goal is to learn Rust, then reading raw manga is not being productive.

Productivity does not have an end goal other than what you set for yourself.

EDIT:

Edited the last sentence to make it say what I meant it to say. "Productivity has an end goal…" isn't it. 😅

Reminded me of that time I tried playing JRPGs in Japanese to shore up my target language input. In between the pixelized kanji and lots of uncommon vocabulary, I gave up thinking I was just too early for that kind of thing.

I suppose playing Chrono Trigger and FF8 in JP was not a very good idea. I also have my doubts since some of the earlier consoles had JRPGs using kana exclusively (due to the state of character encoding at the time), and reading all-kana text is just a headache I am not prepared for.

EDIT:

Reworded some stuff for clarification.

I've never fished at all, but I've seen some people do some sort of fishing (with a fishing pole) along the coast. I haven't really stayed long to observe what they do, but I saw that it involves a lot of waiting, and I feel increasingly awkward watching a guy do some fishing so I left. It might be that the spot that guy chose (or the area in general) just doesn't have enough fish, being in the city and all. That, and pop culture (including some anime) characterizing fishing as needing patience and the capacity of being incredibly still while being capable of incredibly fast movements. Like a ninja meditating, only to do intensely quick movements to pull in the fish even before it had the chance to react.

Thanks for clarifying the misconceptions I had. I'll look forward to having an opportunity to do some lure and fly fishing.

I can't really explain it, but it is akin to tuning it out. Basically ignoring it as it it were tinnitus.

Of course it can only be done if you can afford not to engage it (or engage in it such that you can fake engaging in it). IDK, it's really hard to explain.

It was okay. Nothing much but relaxing after Palm Sunday services.

Vagrant Story (PS1)

Yes, it's a huge pain in the ass to jump in blind, even to play with guides and walkthroughs on hand. But that's exactly why!

I want to play it again for the first time. Preferably, with no knowledge of its game mechanics. Discovering its game mechanics should be either a very frustrating experience (which is my actual first-time experience with it) or a very rewarding experience depending on whether or not I actually manage to crack the code.

My actual first time with the game got ruined by the frustration, and failing that, getting the gameshark cheat codes. I still needed to get a walkthrough because there's only so much an infinite HP cheat can do in that game.

Oh, I know! 😅

In my current playthrough, I used just a few of the techniques I know to get 3×100 Flare for my party to junction to STR and 3×100 Thundaga to junction to Elem Atk (you can get two of them, and the Siren has the third IIRC--it's been a while since the SeeD exam and the playthrough proceeds at a snail's pace) before the SeeD exam in order to defeat the "Crab Mecha" on the first available opportunity. All that, while keeping my levels at a minimum (under lvl 10, ideally).

I have the patience for it, but it still gets incredibly tedious and dull.

Disengagement.

If I can physically disengage, walking away from the situation, I'd do it. If not, I'll mentally disengage. Enough times of this, I'll just default to it: not giving a shit because apparently, no one does.

If I must engage in it anyways, maybe I'll return to it once I've calmed down. If I must do it there and then (so, no time to compose myself), I'd do minimum I can get away with.

In real life? Nope. I don't think I have the patience for that, sitting perfectly still for hours on end. I would probably enjoy the scenery and the vibe though.

Triple triad + Card mod ability = broken game

It might have had a factor in my not enjoying the Triple Triad mini game, as I sometimes get bogged down in just collecting cards to convert into spells and items. Also, the Queen of Cards is a huge pain. And the CC Club sidequest.

The fishing minigame from Breath of Fire 4. There's just something that's both simple and relaxing, as well as complex and engaging in that minigame. Even better, it's not a requirement to finish the game.

And then there's the fishing minigame on Stardew Valley.