Joe Lieberman
Ronald Reagan
reach across the aisle
Wall Street / Main Street
finger-pointing
9/11
socialised
green
naivety
Bomb Iran
General Petreus
preconditions
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:20 PM on October 8, 2008

pork
reform
flip-flop
surrender
P.O.W.
drill
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:23 PM on October 8, 2008

A money market account is only one [small] step above an FDIC-insured savings or checking account in terms of risk/reward profile. You'll get a slightly higher interest rate at the expense of not being FDIC-insured, but money market failures are extremely rare. This is a fine place to keep money for an emergency account (i.e. 6-12 months of living expenses). A money market account isn't really an "investment" as much as an alternate to a savings or checking account.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:17 PM on October 7, 2008

Hitting the wall is a specific condition related to running out of stored glycogen. This isn't something a normal person will experience unless they're doing a relatively huge amount of aerobic activity (i.e. running 10 miles) - ironically, most people aren't fit enough to get themselves in a state where they're this fatigued. If you do you think you're experiencing symptoms like this without burning at least 1000 Calories, you probably have a very serious medical problem and need to see a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 12:25 PM on October 7, 2008

Google for "triple-black car"
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 3:40 PM on October 5, 2008

Pretty much anything by Andrew W.K. or The Go! Team
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:11 PM on October 5, 2008

You've got a continuum here. On one end is the actuarial tables which are true for large populations, on the other end you have a super sci-fi machine that looks at every atom in his body and figure out exactly what might eventually go wrong. We don't have that machine. Anything other than that machine would need to take into account the effects of the stress of having the most important job in the world while simultaneously having the top health care resources in the country dedicated on the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:11 PM on October 4, 2008

Insurance companies don't calculate premiums for individuals. They calculate them for classes of individuals: Obese smokers age 65-68, thin non-smokers age 70-72, etc. John McCain is in one of those classes, but you're asking us to take in to account much more information than those classes bother to make distinction for.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:19 PM on October 4, 2008

Working people 10-11 hours a day is like keeping the thermostat at 95 F on purpose. Shops that do this are simply broken and there's no good reason to work for them. Find somewhere that actually understands that this is counter-productive and see how you like working there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 9:39 AM on September 30, 2008

This is an anecdote: I also work for one of the largest software companies in the world, have been there for about 4.5 years, and recently spent 4 months in China working on "rotation" program that had me working with the local team there to get them up to speed on software development processes and other technical areas where they were lacking. It was overall a positive experience for me.

Getting over there with the help of my company was... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 6:38 PM on September 29, 2008

This is 80mm. From the same position, this is 200mm.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 9:43 PM on September 27, 2008 marked best answer

Putting your own new strings on a guitar is not difficult at all. A used guitar selling for that little will almost certainly need them. Electronic tuners are fine, but if you're trying to be extra-cheap, a pitch pipe or tuning fork will do about as well.

Check for buzzing on all of the frets on all of the strings (put your finger down behind a fret, pluck the string, listen for buzzing/rattling) - this is out of scope for a beginner to repair themselves, and is really... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:56 PM on September 26, 2008

TheSlate has the best answer so far. Programs run from inside the debugger (F5) will exit immediately upon main finishing; programs run outside the debugger (Ctrl+F5) will show the "Press any key to continue..." message. If you want to run your program in the debugger and not have it exit immediately, put a breakpoint (F9) on the closing } of your main() function
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:40 PM on September 24, 2008

You should be fine. Additionally I believe there's a reward for turning in tax evaders, so...
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:29 PM on September 22, 2008

Here's the IRS page on reporting tax fraud and here's the policy they use to determine your reward. I'm not suggesting this as a "screw your family" measure, or a means of blackmail, but things will seriously go much better for them if they get caught after one year rather than ten - the IRS will charge them fees and interest based on the total amount they evade, and the sooner they get honest again, the smaller those penalties will be. Since they're not listening to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:50 PM on September 22, 2008

The namesake Sioux Falls are in Falls Park and are very recognizable to natives.

The Statue of David (which used to be turned with its ass facing a major street) is now in Fawick Park. It's iconic and also a bit of an in-joke. If you enjoy taking pictures of sculpture, there's a lot scattered around the Augustana College campus (including another Michaelangelo replica, Moses)

Saint Joseph Cathedral is visible from many parts of the city and is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:02 AM on September 21, 2008

Load the application in Reflector. This will show you which assemblies it references. Poking around in to the relevant Form class constructors, you should be able to figure out which forms are using which grids without any problem.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 8:50 AM on September 19, 2008

You might try talking to the people at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. The exhibits there had a lot of historic images.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 6:47 AM on September 19, 2008

The flusher should pay the whole thing. It's solely their fault. The fact that their bad decision happened to involve your apartment is completely irrelevant.

Consider: If you backed in to someone else's car while in your apartment's parking lot, would you expect your roommates to pitch in to pay the car repair bill?
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:11 PM on September 14, 2008

Why not Washington, D.C. ?
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:33 AM on September 13, 2008

You should be able to pull this off with a UNION. I don't have a good schema editor on this machine so you'll have to patch up the syntax as needed:

SELECT SUM(Stat1), SUM(Stat2), SUM(Stat3) FROM

(SELECT Table1.SiteID AS SiteID, SUM(Table1.Stat1) AS Stat1, SUM(Table1.Stat2) AS Stat2, SUM(Table1.Stat3) AS Stat3
FROM Table1
WHERE (Table1.Date >= @From) AND (Table1.Date <> GROUP BY Table1.SiteID
ORDER BY... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:30 AM on September 10, 2008

For #1, this is a case of composition of velocities in special relativity. The collision speed is definitely not 2c - consider that from the reference frame of one proton, it can't observe the other proton going faster than c.

Using the formula from the Wikipedia article and simplifing 99.999% to just 99%, we can take w to be 0.99c, v to be -0.99c (it's moving in the opposite direction), and come up with w' = 1.98 / (1 - (-.9801) / (1^2)) = 99.9949%... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 3:54 AM on September 10, 2008

It's not tenable to live your life under the constant threat of your parents' bad decisions upending your own successful choices. The difference you need to find here is between being supportive and being subservient - ditching your job and husband to help your dad's misguided entrepreneurship is definitely the latter.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:02 AM on September 9, 2008

Have you tried breaking it down during practice? Try singing + left-hand motions only, then singing + right-hand motions only. It's simply not an easy thing to do. I took me years before I was able to sing + play guitar (which is probably easier) at the same time with any reasonable proficiency. "Just practice it a lot" is the first half of the answer, the second half is "for a really long time".
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:42 PM on September 7, 2008 marked best answer

A different camera won't turn you in to Ansel Adams, but 5 years of sensor technology improvements means the newer camera will produce higher-resolution and lower-noise images. What about your pictures don't you like?
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 12:31 AM on September 5, 2008

Previously asked
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:32 PM on September 4, 2008

I use an x10 mini timer/alarm clock along with a sort of absurdly bright CFL bulb for the same effect. With the x10 timer you could have several lights turn on over the course of an hour. It's especially handy if you can wire your regular room lights to it so that you can turn the lights off from bed.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 8:32 PM on September 2, 2008

milkrate got it right. Intrade prices on the periphery are not directly translatable to percentages. You'll see a similar situation on contracts very near 100.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:07 PM on September 1, 2008

Reading about color spaces (HSL / HSV in particular) is a good start to understanding the math behind most operations.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 8:47 PM on August 28, 2008

Perhaps a fungal infection? This sounds close-ish (quasi-NSFW photo in article)
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 8:55 PM on August 20, 2008

The only caveats here are that you can't put all $7500 in to the IRA at once due to contribution limits (so you'll need to stash about half of it somewhere else until the next calendar year rolls around), and obviously you'd be paying back the $500 / year out of pocket rather than out of the IRA. But it sounds like a good plan.

How much better is $7500 up front rather than $500 / year over the same period? A lot. This is a good sort of problem to hone your spreadsheet... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 7:04 PM on August 18, 2008

Taking the highest transmission rate for intercourse (.67%) and multiplying by the length of the GI tract (~393 inches) divided by the (ahem) length usually exposed during intercourse (~6 inches) gives 44%, which is pretty high.

This math is bogus. Using your model, if your GI tract was 1200 inches long, you'd have a 134% chance of getting infected. It also seems unlikely that anything other than the length of the esophagus counts, given the pH of stomach acid.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:26 PM on August 18, 2008

This is a variant on bin packing (see also: packing problem) and is NP-complete, so unless you have some other constraints to simplify the problem, it's generally not solvable by any quick or easy analytic means. Humans tend to be decent at eyeballing these hard optimization problems, so that might be your best bet, though 100 is a lot to manage.

If you want to get started with a stochastic solution, you should begin by defining what you mean by the "best"... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 7:07 AM on August 17, 2008

I did this with a friend under basically identical circumstances; we finished the BC part well ahead of our class's AB class. I ended up getting a 5 on the AB portion and a 3 on the BC portion.

You can just go to your local used bookstore (try ones near a local college for best results) and see if you can find a copy of something that covers the BC material. These things don't change much over the years so you can probably find several books on the cheap and just take... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:33 AM on August 17, 2008

If you can detect someone doing something, it's not "passive". That's the very definition of passive.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:12 AM on August 16, 2008

DS games are about the size of a postage stamp, so it's pretty unlikely there's anything written on the game itself.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:28 AM on August 15, 2008

This is more anecdote than anser, but I've been running my ReadyNAS NV for a couple years now and would recommend it. It's solid; the downside is that you can't just pop out all 4 drives and stick them in your PC (but I'm not sure if anything can do that). I started out with 4 x 400 gb and upgraded to 4 x 750 gb later without any problems. I don't use any of the server functionality on it aside from the rare FTP transfer. Not sure what they've done with their product line lately (they got bought... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:05 AM on August 10, 2008

Assuming a 5.5% mortgage rate, a $7500 loan over 15 years would otherwise cost you about $3,500 in interest. So I guess the question is, do you feel like it's worth it to fill out a few extra forms at tax time for $233 each year? I think you do.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:54 PM on August 7, 2008 marked best answer

Indeed, I even indicated the stupidity of that particular sequence by starting out the question with "I overtrained."
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 4:35 AM on August 5, 2008

Sheesh. You don't have to give anyone anything if you don't want to. A $1.99 card with kind words suffices here.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:08 AM on August 5, 2008

I have personally seen the towel trick work, but I don't know how long it lasted, and it's sure to break again in the future. Probably a bad idea.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 6:15 PM on July 31, 2008 marked best answer

My advice in this previous Ask applies equally well here.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 5:17 PM on July 22, 2008

Recycling my own bits:

Scrabble is much more of a strategy game than a word game. While having a good vocabulary is the base of a solid player, effectively managing the board is the easiest way to improve your play. Here's 6 simple rules that will have you beating your family in no time.

1. Don't open up high-value bonus cells unless you have to
This is the biggest mistake people make. When your play allows your opponent to play one... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 2:42 AM on July 21, 2008

No. That feature is called "Live view" and is only available on newer models (40D, XSi, etc).
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 10:06 PM on July 17, 2008 marked best answer

Even if you're 98% sure that any given person didn't leak the information, if there are 14 people you're down to only a 75% chance of everyone not leaking something.

Hypothetically, the same 'bug' that caused Cat Schwartz's topless photos to be revealed might have caused someone to accidentaly send a screenshot or something that had a chat log in the background revealed in the uncropped thumbnail.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 12:41 AM on July 17, 2008

Lucky you, there's an entire Wikipedia article on it: Philosophical and religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 8:46 AM on July 12, 2008

I've found having a second power adapter is pretty useful - the worst possible scenario with a laptop is taking it with you on a trip only to realize you left the power adapter at home. I keep one in my laptop bag and leave the other at my desk.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 7:20 PM on July 10, 2008

If you convince your friend that her boyfriend is sociopathic/narcissistic, will this encourage her to leave him, or will she feel that now she owes it to him to help him get 'help'?
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 9:43 PM on July 9, 2008

These water recommendations are crazy bananas. I've run > 10 miles without drinking water during the run; you don't need to be suckling a firehose to live while running only a few miles at a time. Drink 10-16 ounces before you go out and then drink however much water you feel like drinking afterwards. It's unlikely your body is lying to you about how thirsty it is.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 7:26 AM on July 3, 2008

Cutting booze out of the equation can be remarkably effective. I took a month off from drinking alcohol and soda; no other dietary or activity changes, and lost ten pounds (which is quite a bit considering I started at 165). Strangely, the weight has stayed off even though I've resumed my bad habits.
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0xFCAF at 1:16 AM on July 2, 2008