Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it’s growing fast.
In the original it also supposedly amounts to more grain then there is in the kingdom.
Not supposedly, but mathematically. Even if the grateful king ruled the entire planet and the great warrior were willing to settle for grains the size of a single atom, the king would be unable to pay in full; the total of grains on the whole chessboard would be 2^64 grains, but there are only 2^50 atoms on Earth.
Ooh, so I am thinking we make a black hole seeded with nothing but rice.
Theoretically you could make a black hole with a single grain of rice. You just have to figure out how to crush it down enough.
Obviously this is just more theory, but I think I’ve heard that the minimum size for a black hole is about on the order of a big mountain’s mass; something to do with the amount you can increase density before you’re actually forced to compress electron clouds down toward the proton.
I think that happens in any black hole formation. At least that’s my understanding of how neutron stars are formed. The electrons get forced into the nucleus and turn the protons into neutrons. From there it’s quark gluon plasma then a black hole.
In any case, I have no idea how either a grain of rice or a mountain could be made to do such a thing.
Oh, you know, I think you’re right. Good call.
It also wouldn’t last very long due to Hawking radiation, but that’s another thing.
Fun fact: while Hawking radiation will eventually evaporate away almost all of a black hole’s mass, the black hole will eventually become small enough that physicists think the system would stabilize (because it would have so little mass that it would actually have to reduce entropy in the system in order to evaporate any further). It would then just wander the universe, interacting with gravity in a tiny way, but being utterly invisible to any other means of detection we have. Add to that the fact that there were likely a huge number of black holes in the early universe, which was long enough ago for sufficiently-small black holes to have evaporated to this stable state, and you come up with a plausible explanation…for dark matter.
Yeah, I appreciate the reference, it’s just that my brain got stuck on the comparison breaking due to using percentage instead of some absolute count.