Get out a quarter, a six-sided die, and a thoroughly shuffled deck of cards. On a piece of paper, write down heads or tails, a number between 1 and 6 and a card. Then flip the coin, roll the die, and randomly pluck a card out of the deck. The probability that you wrote down the correct outcomes for all three of those is 1 in 624, substantially greater than 1 in 1000.

When my dad had bypass surgery, I used calculations like that to calm myself down. My dad had a much... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:32 PM on August 8, 2008 marked best answer

I drove from Chicago to LA last year and took the interstates. For me, the major highlights of the trip were Zion National Park, Las Vegas, and a section of I-70 in Utah that's completely empty for nearly 100 miles, but is the most breathtakingly beautiful landscape I think I've ever seen.

As it happens, my friend and I wrote a travel blog about it, where whoever wasn't driving wrote a post every 100 miles and we uploaded them in batches as we got internet access. May be... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:29 PM on April 27, 2008

I lived in Lakeview the entire time I was a grad student at U of C. On the plus side, everything you could possibly want other than school is plentiful and close by, and the neighborhood is safe and fun. For instance, I lived a block away from the Vic, whose Brew & View was a lot of fun. There are tons of bars in the area (especially as you get closer to Wrigley Field) which keeps the neighborhood buzzing all through the night, and there are plenty of restaurants and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:01 AM on April 7, 2008

I think that all this talk of parsers may be a red herring. I think what you really want is the result of a parser, what is often called an abstract syntax tree --- whether you obtain the abstract syntax tree by parsing a string or by building it up from user clicks in a gui or whatever is irrelevant.

But in any event, to answer your question directly: yes, there is a design pattern that's meant for just this purpose, called the Interpreter Pattern... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 4:36 PM on March 20, 2008 marked best answer

I was going to suggest the Hold Steady's "Stuck Between Stations," but I see ncc1701d already suggested it, so instead I'll just agree with him.M. Ward has lots of stuff everybody likes. Maybe "To Go Home" off of Post-War? Does Regina Spektor even count as non-mainstream music anymore? Whatever, "Fidelity" or "Samson" or "On the Radio" are all great songs.The Weakerthans, in particular "Aside" or maybe... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:18 PM on March 13, 2008

The Google Image Labeler is a game that's used to generate metadata for images.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:59 AM on March 13, 2008

I've always thought M. Ward's "Right in the Head" from Post-War was a very Tarantino song. (Here's a youtube video of him playing the song live to give you an impression, but the album version has more fuzz and funk to it.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:04 AM on March 13, 2008

I came in to recommend Lem. I see people are recommending Solaris; I would also recommend The Cyberiad which is one of my favorite books of any genre, and I think warmer and more accessible than Solaris.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:19 AM on March 4, 2008

I got into Radiohead through Amnesiac and the excellent song-by-song review of it that John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) wrote on his webpage Last Plane to Jakarta. The articles are in the wayback archives here (search for Amnesiac on that page; the series starts on 9/16/2001 and ends on 2/25/2002).
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:10 AM on January 6, 2008

I give short talks about my research with some regularity. I just recently hit on a method that seems to work well for me: write out, like a script, absolutely everything you're going to say. Practice from that. Then, when you give your talk, don't worry about following your script at all (I don't even have it with me during the talk).

The point of this process is to force yourself to consider exactly the one best way to say what you're intending to say on each slide;... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 5:40 PM on October 29, 2007

I enjoyed Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice. It is all about research.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:32 PM on October 23, 2007

I don't understand the question. BibDesk manages bibliography databases --- like, just the raw information about what a citation means --- it doesn't have any notion of specific bibliography formats like MLA or APA or whatnot. If you're preparing a document with LaTeX, another program (bibtex) handles taking a bibliography database and a specific document and making that document's bibliography in whatever style you choose. So I can read your question in two ways and I'm not sure which you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 6:29 PM on October 23, 2007

(Err, "but for the latter, to use (say) MLA style, ...".)
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 6:47 PM on October 23, 2007

I moved Houston to Chicago about 5 years ago, having never lived in the north before. Some observations:
The air gets very dry in the winter. Lotion and humidifiers (or --- tip! --- pans of water set on top of radiators) are necessary. I've heard of a lot of people from the South thinking they have some strange skin disease when really it's just a bad case of dry skin.
If she has a car, she should buy one of those windshield ice-scraper things before... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:37 PM on October 5, 2007

Most of Radiohead's Amnesiac does this for me, but especially "Knives Out."
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 4:05 PM on September 28, 2007

Idiocracy was released in 2006 and is set largely in 2505.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 12:55 PM on September 24, 2007 marked best answer

The major options in your case (which I arbitrarily [and off the top of my head, apologies if I forgot somebody] define to be Chez Scheme, PLT Scheme, Bigloo, Chicken, Gambit, and Scheme 48) will all work on both Mac and Linux without serious issues unless you do obviously non-portable things. They won't be portable from one implementation to the other. This is something that R5RS is notoriously bad about and that R6RS is trying to fix. (I would expect at least Chez, PLT, and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 4:58 PM on August 20, 2007 marked best answer

Ender's Game would be my first suggestion too, it was definitely pivotal multiple people I know. Actually, I came into the thread to recommend it before I saw you'd already thought of it.

Another book I'd recommend highly is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It's a great page-turner that's very much like a more sophisticated Harry Potter.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 2:17 PM on August 16, 2007

Factoid that may be relevant: According to the OED, "denial" as a psychoanalytical term did not exist while Twain was alive (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910 according to Wikipedia --- yes I am aware of the irony of citing Wikipedia as an authority in this context). Here's the OED's entry:

ADDITIONS SERIES 1997

denial, n.

Add: 7. Psychoanal. The suppression (usu. at an unconscious level) of a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 10:42 AM on August 13, 2007

The Thermals, "Top of the Earth," is 58 seconds, and is a great song too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 12:36 PM on August 8, 2007

GuyZero: I agree that it's related to the knapsack problem, but it seems different because items don't have fixed values --- choosing to buy widget A from seller 1 has an impact on how much it's going to cost me to buy widget B from seller 2.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:15 PM on August 3, 2007

I always say $\mathit{stuff} + \mathit{crap}$ for one-off things, or

% --- At the top, or in a separate file:
\newcommand{\stuff}{\mathit{stuff}}
\newcommand{\crap}{\mathit{crap}}

% --- in the text:
$\stuff + \crap$

if it's things I'm going to use a lot. For papers where I define a bunch of my own operators (i.e., all my papers), I define a bunch of LaTeX commands at the top and use... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 10:45 AM on August 2, 2007 marked best answer

The album "The Black Rider" by Tom Waits (actually the music to a musical of the same name) is all about that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 3:57 PM on June 20, 2007

Datapoint: I just recently flew from Chicago to LA with a checked electric guitar in a hard, padded case, and when I got it back the audio jack was broken.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:08 AM on June 19, 2007

I think I heard once that the Magnetic Fields' "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin" was written specifically with un-danceability in mind. Don't quote me on that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:43 PM on June 5, 2007 marked best answer

Looks right to me, though IANAT (I am not a trigonometer).

Also, another more intuitive way of deriving the same formulas you got is to remember that sin(theta) and cos(theta) are defined as the x and y coordinates, respectively, of the point on a circle of radius 1 that intersects with a line coming out of the origin at angle theta, and all you're doing is scaling and recentering that point.

<PEDANTRY... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:52 PM on May 13, 2007

I did almost exactly this same thing a while back; my girlfriend and I went up to Milwaukee for a weekend. We used Priceline and got a pretty good deal on a fancy hotel downtown (I think it was something like $40-50 a night, we stayed two nights), I asked MetaFilter for some suggestions on how to visit the city properly, and we ended up having a whole lot of fun for not much money.

(PS Just as I was dredging that link up, I see that drezdn asked me a question to which I... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2007

In addition to a lot of the suggestions above (especially the Mountain Goats, though I recommend the older albums like Full Force Galesburg or Sweden over the newer, more polished stuff, and here's a youtube for you); also I've been really into M. Ward recently (a youtube or two of him). And The Thermals are fun.

Also, you know about Joanna Newsom, right? Just checking. If you picked Milk-Eyed Mender up and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 6:41 PM on April 10, 2007

Thanks for giving me an idea for new programming project for the next time I teach intro programming!

Anyway, "reversist" and "sheathery" are tied for longest word with this property in the dictionary that comes included on my Mac (apparently Webster's Second International, 1934). It looks like lots of the "prefix words" in these two are pretty obscure. If you remove "sheat" and "rever" from the source dictionary, you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 5:39 PM on March 7, 2007

My program assumes you're only allowed to add to the end of the word, not to the beginning as well, which explains the discrepancy between my and misterbrandt's answers. That seems like a more correct reading to me, but if you go that way, then 'reversis' and 'sheathery' still appear at 9 letters apiece, and if you remove 'rever' and 'sheat' then 'sheathery' still wins (as "at => eat => heat => heath => sheath => sheathe => sheather => sheathery"). If you remove... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:24 PM on March 8, 2007

I was once a Project Manager in IT. I think that the idea was that they would come to me with various random small tasks like "figure out, and then write user documentation for, some new piece of software," or "gather requirements for some new system we want to build," but mostly my job was to keep the chair in my office from running away.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:35 PM on March 5, 2007

M. Ward might be up your alley, and also possibly the Thermals and the Weakerthans. Maybe also Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. (In addition to the many excellent suggestions so far. In particular, everyone who hasn't done so already should go listen to the Mountain Goats before going to bed tonight.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:00 PM on February 25, 2007

From my English PhD-candidate roommate:

"If you like Bukowski, you might like Edward Dorn. If you like Robert Creeley, you might like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Diane Wakoski. If you like Charles Simic, you might like Mark Strand."
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:37 PM on February 8, 2007

You may want to check out the 1995 movie Spin by Brian Springer [google video] assembled out of "off-air" satellite feeds to show how spin-doctors worked. If I remember correctly, it was distributed mostly over the Internet, and a couple years after it was made.

Googling for more info about Spin, I found this page which might help you too.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:25 AM on January 11, 2007

Oh, I should say that both of those above were intended for your #2. For your #1, have you seen the old Steve Martin movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a noir spoof that intercuts scenes from actual film noir?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:28 AM on January 11, 2007

Dostoevsky - Vodka
Graham Greene - Vermouth Cassis
John Dos Passos - Manhattan
James Joyce - Guinness
Dorothy Parker - Gin martini
Homer - Sea-dark wine
(And after that, you can use snot-green wine for Joyce)
Gin Miltonic
The (Tristram) Shandy
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:57 PM on January 4, 2007 marked best answer

I don't know that anyone's done a serious survey of that question, but Project Steve might give some indication.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2006

"One Great City!" by the Weakerthans is about Winnipeg (specifically, hating it).
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:02 AM on December 9, 2006

I third "The Devil and Daniel Johnston." Sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:59 AM on November 29, 2006

Another option is to maintain two different blogs, one of which is for the stuff you don't want to be tracked back to you and one of which is for stuff you wouldn't mind if people knew you wrote. Two blogs is the same amount of effort as one (modulo a little logging out and logging back in) and if you think your subject matter can partition that way it seems like a decent strategy to saying everything you want without pinning it to yourself.

Not that I've ever done anything like that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 6:50 PM on October 28, 2006

Do all of the locations have to have someone assigned to them?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:04 AM on October 21, 2006

If I'm understanding the problem correctly, it may be a minimal weighted bipartite-graph matching problem. If that is the case, then the problem isn't NP-complete. Anyway, the good news is there are algorithms for finding minimal bipartite matchings; the bad news is that you're not likely to be able to implement them as a SQL query.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:34 AM on October 21, 2006

I had a big problem with this for a while with my gmail account — somebody kept trying to change the password (like, hundreds of times) and tried to sign me up for lots of different web sites. I deleted the mail and otherwise ignored it, figuring it was either somebody who was trying to steal my address or someone who didn't realize the address wasn't theirs. It went away eventually, and no harm seems to have been done.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 6:49 AM on October 17, 2006

As long as we're talking about which Mountain Goats songs are and are not appropriate to 'young love,' I've got to agree that most of the suggestions are a bit morbid. 'Commandante' and 'Going to Port Washington' would be great, though. 'Stars fell on Alabama' or 'Going to Georgia,' would also be good songs if and only if you want to be funny. (I disagree that Port Washington is too intense, incidentally. I think that intensity comes from context. It could just as easily be about him asking her... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:36 PM on September 30, 2006

We got it back!

Well, mostly, anyway. What we did was basically combine gramcracker and nickerbocker's points together. The actual book file itself was useless, and there weren't any relevant temporary file still on disk. BUT --- there were were two relevant temporary files that had been deleted. We undeleted those using FreeUndelete that my dad installed onto a USB drive from his computer. One of them contained about the last two-thirds of the book... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:58 PM on September 3, 2006

Ping Pong is nice.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:12 AM on August 9, 2006

I can also recommend Kafka as a wine store. They're used to people coming in looking for bottles of wine to go with dinner at the local BYOB places, and on at least a couple of occasions they were able to steer me towards wines that went well with the food at the restaurant I was going to.
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:58 PM on August 9, 2006

The Chicago Botanic Garden probably qualifies as a "thing that is nice" right around now. The tours run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation tours are also allegedly lots of fun; I can personally vouch for the river cruise (which a lot of folks consider a must-do for visitors) and the Loop train tour (which I didn't think was quite as good, but it's free!).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:20 AM on August 8, 2006

(Ha! I guess that means I should've previewed twice over ...)
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 11:21 AM on August 8, 2006

My Place for Tea is right around the block from me, and I've been there several times. It's a hybrid tea store / cafe that serves a wide variety of teas and tea drinks (hot tea, iced tea, bubble tea, tea smoothies, etc) and the people who run it are very knowledgable and friendly. It's very chill, too. Actually I'd say it meets all your criteria pretty well, as long as the Belmont stop on the brown/red/purple line is close enough to downtown for your tastes. (And they do have free wifi, as it... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 7:58 AM on July 31, 2006 marked best answer