Hopeling

Yes, quite a lot of times. For example, basically every revolutionary discovery in the history of man.

Edit: Well, in the sense of "data suddenly pouring in from around the globe while scientists deny it", no, not in the real world. It seems to happen sometimes in fiction, where the "scientific" or "logical" character ignores firsthand evidence in favor of what they already "know" (and usually are soon thereafter eaten by zombies, or some similarly gruesome fate). I first read your question as "has the universe ever done something that scientists adamantly claimed it wouldn't", which it definitely has.

The ridiculous impossibility of it is exactly why discovering such a thing would raise serious questions.

In the real world, we usually debunk "supernatural" phenomena via science. In fiction, this means that when the dead are rising from their graves, the biologists stamp their feet and plug their ears and say "That's impossible!" briefly before they get eaten (and similar denials for things in other fields). But really, IRL science opposes "supernatural" phenomena because we have no good evidence of them being real. When people all over the world corroborate that, yes, the dead are rising from their graves in violation of every principle of biology, and you rule out hallucination, you don't say "well that must not be true, because I know biology". At that point, the scientific course of action is to say "Zombies are real, and apparently I don't know biology as well as I thought". Once you're not at immediate risk of being eaten by zombies, you can try to figure out why/how it happened, and if the best explanation turns out to be that Hell was full and all the extra souls had to go back to their old bodies and walk the earth, well, you've now got scientific evidence of Hell and souls, and that becomes part of the realm of science.
Similarly, if you discovered a message coded in the digits of pi (or some physical constant, if you prefer, which avoids the "math is unchangeable" problem entirely), you wouldn't throw it out as obviously false, you'd investigate whether it was plausible for a message of that length to occur randomly in a chain of digits of that length, and you'd be able to get some statistical idea of how likely it was to be just a coincidence. If that likelihood is sufficiently low, the rational, scientific course of action would be to accept that might possibly be a message. And if it is a message, who or what put it there?

This also reminds me of a comic that, for the first few panels, asks "what if Earth isn't the center of the universe... because another planet is?": http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php...&id=2302#comic

This is indeed a fringe case if you're talking about a single character. However, if you're using astrals to jump-start a fresh 50, it becomes an important thing to consider.

I agree with your overall point, I just think you chose really bad examples to illustrate it.

If you can convey the same thing in less words, it is usually better to do so (especially if you want other players to read it). However, your examples haven't just trimmed out extraneous details, they've trimmed out everything until what's left can't even really be called a story. Impervious Hard Man's bio tells you absolutely nothing about the character other than his Invulnerability powerset and that he's a villain, which you can already see if you're /info-ing him without needing to read the bio.

I do agree that the "sweet spot" for a bio, at least in the sense of the ones that I find both interesting and memorable, usually are one paragraph or less.

Astrals can be traded 1:1 for shards at Astral Christy. For the alpha slot, this more efficient than trading for threads, if you're going to be breaking down all your Astrals anyway: a t1 power is 12 shards (12 astrals) or 60 threads (15 astrals) to build from scratch, and a t2 is 20 shards (20 astrals) or 100 threads (25 astrals). If you have a Notice of the Well, it's also way more efficient to trade 8 astrals for shards and build your t3 that way, rather than break the Notice and astrals down for 72 threads, which is far short of what you need for a t3 with the thread recipe.

Well, it was - it's just that, prior to Freedom, everyone was a VIP.

If you return as a Premium, you won't be able to use any Incarnate powers you've earned, but you can still play the character. The powers will just be greyed out. If/when you return to VIP status, your Incarnate powers will function again.

If the entire point of the story was that the villain is not supposed to be beaten, yeah, I'd be okay with that. In fact, there's various precedents for this, where enemies that I know for certain I could defeat simply aren't attackable, or are just impervious to damage (Reichsman), because I'm not supposed to defeat them at that point in the story.

IIRC, it doesn't even attempt to answer why your powers don't work. It just tells you they don't work, and you can fill in your own reason. Your resurrection serum was untested on fast-path Incarnates. Wade's ritual blocked your own spell. The tangled worldlines in the Cimeroran ruins interfere with your time reversal device. He went AFK during the cutscene, got distracted by something else, and your rez prompt timed out before he got back. Whatever you think is a good reason for the power to not work, you can say that's why. So I personally don't feel that not being able to rez him is much of a plot hole here - they specifically addressed it and let us try to rez him, and it didn't work.

They sorta barely addressed the issue in the Red Widow arc, in a much more specific way that seems to run counter to the other things we know about the character, so it's less palatable.

Yes, as is the very idea that our universe is a simulation. The point isn't that they're likely, only that they're possible and we have no way to really rule them out.

...and this is always true, at every point in time, in any conceivable universe?

It could be a sadist running the simulation to lord over the pitiful Sim-beings.
It could be a Boltzmann brain simulation of the universe, which would have had no intent at all, it just randomly fluctuated into being.
It could be the last surviving sentient during heat death, simulating a new universe because its is done.
It could be beings so much more intelligent than us that they consider us like we consider animals, and our simplistic suffering is acceptable or irrelevant to whatever their purpose is.
It could be beings so different than us that they don't even recognize our concepts of suffering or ethics.
Heck, if it's a simulation, what happens over a few millennia to some weird clusters of water molecules on one small ball of iron might not even be noticed because the simulators are busy observing the formation of galaxies over billions of years.
It could be a situation far less exotic than any of these, simply involving someone who doesn't agree with your assessment that it would be pointless for any number of reasons. I'm doing that right now in this thread, so you've got empirical evidence that such viewpoints exist.

"I want to simulate the evolution of a universe, using my perfect Theory of Everything, under X parameters to see if it converges to/differs from the real universe, thereby testing the plausibility of those parameters in the universe's history."
Or just
"I want to simulate the evolution of a universe with wildly different physical laws, to see what happens."
In either case, if it simulates everything down to particles, intelligence might plausibly emerge, whether intended or not. If we ever decide to run a simulation, or if we ARE a simulation, its purpose wouldn't necessarily be to observe the simulated meat-creatures (you could probably get by without simulating the billions of light-years of "uninteresting" space in every direction, if that was all you wanted to do).
Plus, if we're a simulation run by something in another universe which may behave entirely differently, who's to say our idea of the experiment's ethicality would even be applicable?

The lines obviously aren't equal, but you could use that result to claim they contained an equal number of points.

"Important" is just as subjective and vague as "significant". So no, that doesn't get around the problem.

I'm pretty sure I've seen them move, although I can't specifically recall it happening right now. Council Marksmen aren't snipers, they're the minions with the -recharge bullets.

"Significant" is a very vague and subjective term, so until you come up with a clear definition for it that everyone agrees on, you also won't be able to make any clear statements about significance that everyone will agree on.

If you have infinitely many milliliters, or wait an infinitely long time for both to finish the race, yeah, in a sense they are, although cardinality is a mathematical concept, not a physical one, thus it's not a great analogy. We're ONLY talking about what happens AT infinity here, looking at the end as you said. If you want to know what happens at the end, you look at the end, it doesn't matter what happens before the end.

But really, I fear we're getting off-topic talking about cardinality in a thread about the scale of the universe.

If you're comparing a finite number of them, sure, but that isn't what we're talking about when we talk about the cardinality of the entire, infinitely-large set.

This really isn't an isolated result - there are quite a lot of things that behave a certain way at every finite point, and act completely different in the limit at infinity.

Well, "larger" is hard to compare for things that are infinitely large. We can't usefully count how many there are - in both cases the answer is "infinitely many". So we compare them in a way that doesn't require counting them - instead, we pair them up. Imagine you're setting a large table - you know you need a lot of forks and knives, and you need the same number of each, but counting that many of them would take a long time. Instead, you can start putting them in pairs: if you run out of forks, you had more knives; if you run out of knives, you had more forks. If every knife ends up paired with a fork, you must have had the same amount of each. We can say the same when we try to pair up the integers with the perfect squares, or for an even less intuitive example, pairing the integers with the rationals.
Lots of weird things happen when you deal with infinities. Another example is Hilbert's Hotel.

Edit:
Which direction does it not double in, if it's 4x volume?