The most outward symptoms of being sick are induced by your own immune system. Fevers, chills, congestion, body aches, etc, are triggered when your immune system reacts to an infection. People who “don’t get sick often” usually just have a weaker response to infection. People who do get sick often (myself included) have immune systems that tend to overreact. A “good”, or preferable, immune system is one that doesn’t overreact to minor illness. That is, if your body is infected with a common cold virus, a healthy immune system can eliminate the virus without causing congestion and fevers.

A good case study for this is the original H1N1 flu that killed young adults more than people who are generally more susceptible to illness. Their healthy immune systems reacted too strongly (something called a “cytokine storm”), that the response was far more lethal than the virus itself.

Woops. Thanks for catching that. Will edit

To put this into perspective, a relatively low resolution monitor is 1920x1080 pixels. That is over 2 million pixels that need to be potentially sent 3 numbers (red, green, and blue values) for every frame. One gigahertz is 1 billion operations per second. Rendering 60 frames per second is 60 frames * 3 color values * 2 million pixels = 360 million operations per second -- 1/3 of 1 GHz. Even further, graphics depend on tons of other operations like rendering, lighting, antialiasing that need to happen for every frame that is displayed.

It becomes clear that raw speed is not going to solve the problem. We like fast processors because they are more responsive, just like our eyes like higher frame rates because it is smoother. To get smooth, high frame rate video, we need specialized processors that can render millions of pixels dozens of times a second. The trick with GPUs is parallelization.

GPUs have relatively low clock speed (1GHz) compared to CPUs (3-4Ghz), but that have thousands of cores. That’s right, thousands of cores. They also use larger instruction size: usually 256 bits compared to CPUs’ 64 bits. What this all boils down to is boosting the throughput. Computing values for those millions of pixels becomes a whole lot easier when you have 2,000 “slower” cores doing the work all together.

The typical follow up question is “why don’t we just use GPUs for everything since they are so fast and have so many cores?” Primarily because GPUs are purpose built for the task they were designed for. Although that doesn’t prevent the possibility of general computing on GPUs, we humans like computers to be super snappy. Where CPUs can juggle dozens of tasks without a hiccup, GPUs are powerhouses for churning through an incredible volume of repetitive calculations.

PS: Some software takes advantage of the GPU for churning through data. Lots of video and audio editing software can leverage your GPU. Also CAD programs will use the GPU for physics simulations for the same reason.

The most likely reason is that it gives an easy analogy between classical computing and quantum. The types of problems quantum are supposed to separate themselves with involve a lot of iterative steps for classical computers.

The output of classical computers can be larger than the number of bits that the processor works with. For instance, in some mathematics software you can do math with numbers much bigger than 2^64. Quantum computers can’t really do that. They have to fit each step of the problem into their bits at the same time to process. In essence, you can only solve problems that will output how ever many qbits you have, or less.

In fact, quantum computers must interface with classical computers to set the inputs and read the outputs. This requirement for interfacing with classical computers means that using a power of two makes some sense.

Finally, qubits represent a binary state, so the data representation is analogous to binary. The resulting qubits will always represent a 0 or a 1. For most computer scientists, it makes sense to conceptualize binary results in base 2.

These reasons are not important or required.

You know how cling wrap sticks to itself really well? And if you pull out a lot of cling wrap, it is almost impossible to pull all of it apart at the same time? The Nitrogen in air (N2) is similar to that. It sticks together very strongly. Nitrogen sticks to itself about 3 times stronger than it sticks to a single Hydrogen. It takes a lot of energy to break apart N2, so plants instead get the Nitrogen from sources where it is bonded more weakly with other atoms, like nitrates (bonded to Oxygen) and ammonia (bonded to Hydrogen).

Not even remotely. The sun should follow an almost exactly the same path per latitude, but the path is different at every latitude. At the equator, the sun goes directly overhead on the equinox. The further from the equator you go, the lower the angle the sun rises from the horizon. The path is similar on the opposing latitude, but reversed from south and north horizons.

An interesting side point is that the tropic lines (tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn) are the lines where the sun goes directly overhead on the solstices. Outside of these lines, the sun never gets directly straight up. The opposite are the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Those are the lines where the sun never sets around the summer solstice and never rises around the winter solstice. These lines of latitude move slightly every year to account for the irregular wobble of the earth and slight elliptical orbit.