Thanks, I was not sure if it was light hours or minutes away, but I knew for sure it's not light weeks (emphasis on plural here) away. I will probably forget again in a couple of years.
> I would almost bet that the two functions are not the same, even in the limit as it becomes a Poisson distribution plus whatever the last rows do.
A Gaussian distribution, I think. But they're certaintly not the same function, and it should be immediately obvious to a math grad with experience in physics. The sinc function, for one, has secondary maxima (its plot in the article is very convenienty cropped to allow pretending those don't exist). Just put a hair in the path of a laser beam and you will see the local maxima in light intensity! Their "single-slit" string procedure, on the other hand, can only generate a single central peak. This really makes no sense at all.
There are also perspective issues: the relative sizes of the foreground (the people sitting at the café) and the background (the market) are incoherent. Same with the "snowy Tokyo with cherry blossoms" video.
The more "useful" you PoW algorithm is, the cheaper 51% attacks on your chain will be. To be maximally secure, a PoW algorithm should only generate useless data.
> There's no such thing as "one" in nature: there's not "one" apple. An apple is a monstrously complex collection of cells and dynamic chemical processes, it's not "one".
> The concept of numbers are a tool that humans use to categorize, summarize and model the world around us.
The sun is eight light minutes away.