Gregorian Leap Years

In the case you don’t know how exactly this goes. Every year divisible by four is a leap year. Unless it is also divisible by 100 – then it is not. Unless it is also divisible by 400. In that case it’s a leap year.

An algorithm in a computer language may follow these instructions. Usually it does. But here you have something better. The first 100 leap years generator. It is in a “Taylorian manner”, where just a relative value from some initial point is given. The first leap year is zero, the second 4 and so on. You have to add this results  to 1600, 2000, 2400 and so on. The cosine function is employed to calculate the next leap year in the R0 register.

I wouldn’t mention it at all, but the inventor is not a human being and it’s a very good example of  a “pure mechanical invention”.

Fiber Across the Universe

Often, we consider Earth as small relative to the Universe. But if one used all the Earth’s mass to produce 1 mm thick fiber, there would be enough wire to span from here to the farthest galaxy and back, several times.

It’s not only the exponential function which is difficult to understand, but even the humble cube is behaving weirdly for our default understandings.

Black Holes

In the center of our galaxy, there is a supermassive black hole. I have little doubt of that.

Say, that you go there. It will take about 25000 years according to our Earth clocks, and less than say, 100 years according to the travelers’s clock.

What will you see there, on the other side of the event horizon of the central black hole?

Don’t worry, you won’t necessarily die there, crossing the surface of the central black hole’s horizon.

It could be, that you will see another, smaller black hole, orbiting and swallowing a big star, which (the star) has another black hole in its center! Maybe you’ll only see one million or so ordinary stars of all types and many neutron stars orbiting around each other.

What is a black hole from the inside? Maybe a giant “solar system” with millions of stars and even more planets and gas clouds orbiting each other. No singularity anywhere.

It’s possible that there are only stars inside a black hole! And some pulsars or neutron stars, perhaps. And some smaller black holes, too. Some of them might be nothing else than a lot of stars, again orbiting around each other!

It’s very much like frying eggs on a frying pan. Breaking one egg, usually means seeing the yoke and the white. But sometimes there is another egg inside. I am sure  you have seen this on youtube.

In the case of black holes, it’s just much more diverse. A black hole may have a lot of stars inside. And a star may have a black hole inside. And a planet, which could have a black hole inside.

It’s not necessarily all black inside the supermassive central galactic black hole!