The Herald (Scotland) has daily cryptics for free, and even archives going back four months. I love them, even if the clues are a bit UK-centric at times.
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 1:20 PM on July 26, 2008 marked best answer

The Guardian put all its crosswords online here as of September 1. They're... hard.
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 9:21 PM on September 11, 2008

Arxan has a product that does what you're looking for - I think it's called EnforcIT. It obfuscates compiled binaries and inserts self-integrity checks into the code. (Full disclosure: I worked for them briefly a couple years ago.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 9:22 AM on September 11, 2008 marked best answer

Going off of saeculorum's link, it seems like f(x) = e^√x satisfies (i) and (ii).
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 3:11 PM on August 23, 2008 marked best answer

Video.
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 7:46 AM on August 5, 2008

Oh, man, I'm so down for this. I think I will come and represent Troy, NY ("where Henry Hudson turned around"). If anyone else wants a ride over from the Capital District, give me a holler.
posted to MetaTalk by pmdboi at 10:04 PM on March 19, 2008

I'm leaving Troy, NY right about now, so I'll be in Northampton around 3:30 PM. If anyone wants to go bookstore-hopping with me before the big meetup, give me a call at (765) 743-4779.

Looking forward to seeing you all! :)
posted to MetaTalk by pmdboi at 10:28 AM on April 5, 2008

Great meetup! I had a lot of fun. Sorry I had to skip out early (I missed the cake!). Thanks especially to Songdog for pulling the whole thing together.
posted to MetaTalk by pmdboi at 11:44 PM on April 6, 2008

Thank you all for your answers. It seems the consensus is "Yes, unless your landlord's nice." I'm moving to California, so having the apartment until the end of the month won't benefit me too much because it won't make much sense to make multiple trips.

It just struck me as a little arbitrary that I could say "I want to move out on May 4" today, or say "I want to move out on May 31" on April 31, and have to pay the same amount of rent in... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 12:01 PM on April 4, 2008

Hasperat! Straight out of Star Trek.
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 7:48 PM on March 15, 2008

Wolfdog, I had a math professor at Purdue (Bob Zink, if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him) who had several established mannerisms when he was lecturing:When he was nearing the end of a proof: "And now for the coup de grâce — that's when you attack your enemy with a lawn mower." (It makes more sense if you read it out loud.) When summing something together elegantly: "Put them all together and they spell 'mother'..." When a variable named... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 9:18 AM on March 5, 2008

Chicken?
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 11:20 AM on March 3, 2008

"The Way" by Jill Scott. Gets bonus points from me for including the line "Tonight I'm gonna beat the high score."
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 1:08 PM on March 1, 2008

afx114: Here's a tracklist I cobbled together from the filenames in the .torrent file.
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 10:40 AM on February 23, 2008

Through the magic of Flash disassemblers, here are links to all the individual tracks. Have fun!
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 12:25 PM on February 4, 2008

Here's a forum posting with some Esperanto valentines. I particularly like

Rozoj ruĝas, violoj bluas
Nian kunecon mi ege ĝuas

("Roses are red, violets are blue / I really like being with you")

I tried refining your preferred one (is it supposed to be "I like you just the way you are"?) but something like that is too subtle for my "la hundo ŝatas manĝi"-level Esperanto. :)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 10:42 AM on January 30, 2008 marked best answer

(By the way, the preferred convention if you don't have the ability to make the little "ĉ" accents is to put an "x" after the letter, so "manĝi" becomes "mangxi." This helps out Google searches too.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2008

Oh my god. It's even worse than the Hurra Torpedo cover.
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 1:07 PM on January 27, 2008

Is Metafilter the guy who shows up and tells everyone how ugly their outfits are?
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 6:31 PM on January 17, 2008

dirtdirt: A friend of mine put together a page with most of Purdue's webcams a while back. Odds are, if you've been to Purdue, you've been on one of them.
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 10:13 AM on January 16, 2008

Avenger: Heh, I don't think that ad means what you think it means.

I'm wondering about how the birdsong encoding works, actually. There doesn't seem to be any sort of one-to-one correspondence between letters and bird chirps, but words seem to code uniquely into birdsong, and changing one letter in the word (usually) only changes one part of the song. My best guess is that there are several chirps for each letter, and different occurrences of the same letter in one word... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 8:53 AM on January 15, 2008

For a second I thought you were going to link to the video for Doc Gyneco's Caramel (Youtube, QT). Fortunately, this isn't nearly as disturbing.
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 6:25 PM on January 3, 2008

(sorry, Youtube)
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 6:30 PM on January 3, 2008

Suomynona from Mofi has posted his photos of the meetup for your enjoyment. BTW, it was great meeting you all!
posted to MetaTalk by pmdboi at 1:55 AM on December 29, 2007

I'm slightly ashamed to know this, but burnmp3s' explanation was given toward the beginning of the movie Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (by Lauryn Hill's character, IIRC). I'd be interested to know if it predates that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by pmdboi at 2:06 PM on December 7, 2007

jpdoane's point is true in general for compression algorithms — it's impossible to have a single algorithm that compresses all files to a size smaller than the original size. In fact, it's impossible to have a single algorithm that losslessly compresses all files by a single bit.

Suppose you did have such a compression algorithm. Then you could use it to compress all possible files of length, say, n bits (of which there are 2n), to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 8:25 PM on December 4, 2007

agent: The question that will really bake your noodle is whether it's possible for π to contain itself but "half as fast," i.e., π ends up looking something like

3.14159...4371940125293...

Such a number can still be irrational. There might still be some reason why the above is impossible, though, probably having to do with power series. :)
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi at 6:40 AM on December 5, 2007