MetaFilter

I'm pretty sure the minimal set in binary is {1}, so it's pretty unhelpful there.

Actually, no, since 1 is not prime. The minimal set in binary would be {10, 11}.

Turns out it's fairly easy to show that the 26 numbers he gives are the minimal set for primes in base 10.

Clearly, the one-digit primes (2, 3, 5, 7) must be on the list.

Now, consider what two-digit combinations... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by DevilsAdvocate at 4:11 PM on July 10, 2007

You might want to have a look at Obopay, which charges $0.10 a transfer. I can't vouch for it from personal experience, but I do use the related BillMonk service to track bills and rent with my roommate. BillMonk does a bang-up job and I'd expect OboPay to be equally good. Of course, judging from this thread most of the Blue would probably be surprised that BillMonk is even still in business.

Otherwise, I would think you could all sign up for secondary... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Mock Turtle at 5:49 PM on July 7, 2007

I was actually a little surprised that none of the first ten comments contained a coy "Miguel?" Surprised and pleased—I wish he'd drop by a little more often than he does, but it's refreshing that the Era of Migs is long enough past that we can have a let's-talk-about-Metafilter thread like this without a big argument.

I find these sorts of discussions fascinating. I can't recall how my involvement with mefi in my first three years or so evolved, but at... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:43 AM on July 4, 2007

What you're looking for is the multiset coefficient <8 , 5>, which is equal to 792. (Definition is about halfway down that page.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by equalpants at 8:14 PM on July 3, 2007 marked best answer

equalpants has it.

Steven C. Den Beste, it would be 8!/(5!*(8-5)!) = 56, as you say, if duplicates were not allowed. But, (5^8)/(5!) is not even an integer, nor is (8^5)/(5!), which is what I think you had in mind.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by epimorph at 8:44 PM on July 3, 2007

For event calendars, check out
The Mercury
Willamette Week
The O
The O's beer blog.


Also, there's often interesting stuff posted to the Damn Portlanders community on livejournal.
posted to MetaTalk by croutonsupafreak at 11:27 PM on July 2, 2007

Disclaimer: this is obviously a subject I'm passionate about. So please keep that in mind & if you don't want to read it, skip to the next comment. kthx.

Well pax, the main reason I have a different worldview than most Americans is because I decided at an early age that I thought it was a shame Americans don't travel. I firmly believe that this world would be a far kinder and more empathetic place if it was mandatory for all... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by miss lynnster at 4:26 PM on July 1, 2007

That sounds like a portion of The Maze by William Kurelek. I can't find any good scans of the section you seem to be talking about, so I scanned it myself (it's in the old Time/Life Science Library book The Mind) and put it up at my site.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 9:19 AM on July 1, 2007 marked best answer

Thanks, everyone. I have added the essential parts of your comments to a new category, Meta, which puts the page into its 13th edition.

There are also new entries (at the end) in the English and Baltic, Indo-Iranian, Dravidian sections.
posted to MetaFilter by johnwcowan at 8:31 PM on June 25, 2007

(Disclaimer: words of Russian girlfriend.)

The main thing to understand here is that there are two types of Russian people: those who can afford anything (aka New Russians) and those who cannot (people who still live in the Soviet era). I'm not surprised if the New Russians' lifestyle drives up the statistics enough to make Russia appear so expensive.

(Disclaimer #2: this is all based on my own experiences in Moscow. I know little to nothing... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Johnny Assay at 8:26 AM on June 18, 2007

Mmmm... I just made myself a caipirinha.

Caipirinhas are so delicious you have to be careful not to have too many. They also produce the foulest-smelling breath imaginable.

There are two versions - the Carioca caipirinha, hailing from Rio de Janeiro which, typically, requires no effort and the Baiana caipirinha, from Salvador da Bahia, which does.

As you get wonderful limes in the US and the UK (but not wonderful... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MiguelCardoso at 8:32 PM on May 21, 2003

I am a white 24-year-old American guy and just got back from Mexico City in April with my very non-Spanish-speaking mom. My Spanish is probably about as good as yours. We used a copy of the newest Lonely Planet Mexico guidebook from the library and basically everything was correct, and the maps of the city were amazingly good.

Here's a link to some questions I asked about DF.

Now onto yours:

Safety: it's fine.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mdonley at 2:36 PM on June 6, 2007

It's from Sipan, on the north coast of Peru. I think it's an ear plug, and the image is a muscovy duck.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nomis at 5:47 PM on June 3, 2007 marked best answer

(food only)
Bova's in the North End for some late night walking and munching. 24 hour bakery has great bread, nice pastries (try the ricotta pie), and stuffing calzones and sandwiches (no sandwiches between 1 and 6 am). It's a nice, but not too long, walk from the hotel.
There's a lot of fantastic Brazilian and Portuguese food in Inman Square, Cambridge. They both feature lots of seafood. If you're in this area, check out Casa Portugal or Moqueca (but not on Mondays).... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whatzit at 6:27 AM on June 2, 2007

The ones that always work for me don't really require any money at all and it doesn't need to be anything particularly romantic. It just feels wonderful to feel that you're with someone caring and appreciative:

- tell her you love her regularly
- ask & take time to listen to how her day was
- compliment her on how she looks or on anything clever she says
- tell her you missed her
- sms/text her during the day just to... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by claudiadias at 2:06 PM on December 15, 2006

anildash writes "With increasing frequency, though, I find people who are unfamiliar with the site questioning the legitimacy of AskMe, and of the answers therein, because the default green/yellow color scheme doesn't look 'professional'"

We don't want such stupid people.
posted to MetaTalk by peacay at 3:38 PM on March 5, 2007

Those were extraordinary years. I feel grateful and proud to have experienced the 60's in America, to have participated in peace marches, be-ins, happenings, gone to the Filmore East and seen many of the rock and roll greats live, their creating a passionate, vital music which exploded the banal, trite expressions that were pop music of the day.

It hurt when I came back to the usa in the mid-80's after 15 years abroad to find the pioneering done by the hippie movement... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye at 9:14 AM on May 23, 2007

In a way, scientists like Phil Plait have chosen to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their beloved discipline, as well as the progress of human understanding as a whole.

He spends the time and energy he could be devoting to trying to understand the mysteries of the endless and endlessly complex vastness modern astronomy has opened up before us in trying instead to prune back the weedy and corrosive superstitions that constantly spring up around any real science and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jamjam at 2:44 PM on May 17, 2007

Dude, just do it. I don't know what you expect to get out of the answers here which I'm sure will be incredibly well intentioned but just do it. It's life. You are going to make this mistake. And you will make many mistakes. You will hurt your girlfriend. You will hurt yourself. You will hurt girl #2. You might hurt people you didn't even know would be effected by this decision. Why? Why just do it? Because you sound young. And right now, it's all about you. You and your need to get... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by spec80 at 9:52 PM on May 7, 2007

SCDB fails, overcounting by a factor of more than 400.

The answer to the question "How many ways can a group of N people be broken up into K groups" is called a Stirling Number of the Second Kind, S(N,K). It's not as easy to compute as a binomial coefficient, but it's exceedingly well-studied.

Your problem, however, where we insist on all groups having the same size is a problem of "combinatorial designs," and in general... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Wolfdog at 2:34 PM on April 28, 2007

I grew up in NYC in Greenwich Village and the East Village. My parents didn't have much money. But I had a great education - cooperative day care when I was really little so I felt I had many aunts and uncles and sibilings tho I was an only child at the time. Public schools that continued in that spirit (PS 3 and Stuyvesant), and when I went to private schools it was on scholarship.

The landscape of where you grow up deeply affects who you are. I wouldn't have traded... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by zia at 12:56 PM on April 27, 2007

Obvious as well, but Granfalloon?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by kmel at 7:59 PM on April 24, 2007

You can browse the selection of translations of the Lord's Prayer to get an example of what an actual text in different languages and writing systems looks like.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by greatgefilte at 9:25 PM on April 12, 2007

I don't get a whole lot of use out of the in-thread visibile count on favorites either, though my gut says there's been little if any impact on site behavior since that system went live, so I don't see it as much of a negative.

If Matt were to just replace the count with some symbol that intuitively denotes "this has been favorited one or more times; click on me to find out what those are!", it wouldn't break my heart. Might be an interesting experiment, at... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:35 PM on April 9, 2007

The Wikipedia quote mdevore pasted in is problematic in that it operates on the assumption the newspaper article and image ever existed; more specifically, it should probably read that they've never been discovered. I can't give a citation off the top of my head, but I've read a good amount of stuff on his work, and I'm fairly sure nobody's ever come up with any real evidence of them, much less an actual clipping.

It's also worth noting that this is not the only time... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Su at 1:47 AM on March 17, 2007

He's a guy with a radio show that approximates a never ending dinner with your girlfriend's insufferable, conversation dominating father, except there's no pussy in it for you at the end of the night. Or cake for dessert.
posted to MetaFilter by The Straightener at 7:04 PM on March 14, 2007

Lauritsen has aired his arguments several times on the Romanticism listserv, NASSR-L.

Nobody has ever disputed that Percy Shelley helped revise the novel--and we also know that the "ghost story" legend is clearly exaggerated--but the scholars who have actually studied the manuscripts, like Charles Robinson, point out that there's simply no evidence that he wrote it. (Nobody has ever accused P. B. Shelley's own attempts at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by thomas j wise at 5:34 AM on March 14, 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

It seems very common for Western Buddhists (and others) to take their rejection of materialism to mean that one must go from thinking "I'll be happy when I have more" to "I'll be happy when I have less". The fallacy of course is the "I'll be happy when..." anything. Thinking about these objects and whether they are in your possession or not is tying you to them. Leave it. Be happy now.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by methylsalicylate at 9:11 AM on March 6, 2007

I keep not responding to this because I am afraid I won't be able to be properly respectful of some of the opinions in this thread.

Depression is not an existential dilemma. It is not a side effect of atheism. It is a disease. You have it bad. You need help.

To me asking "what is the meaning of all this" is not a philosophical question but is the symptom of depression.
So the answer is: take care of your depression.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mdn at 5:42 PM on March 4, 2007

the tragedy of nerds who like to set shit on fire while they're too dumb to anonymize their email (something most Internet-savvy 12 year olds can do) and eventually, my God, get sent to a low security prison where some people may be mean to them is indeed heartbreaking.

had he been setting Apple Stores on fire, he wouldn't have that many MeFi-appointed defenders, I am afraid.

and I'm looking forward to the day when LAWeekly splashes on its cover... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by matteo at 4:08 AM on March 3, 2007

Invest real effort in genuine friendships.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by utsutsu at 9:47 AM on February 21, 2007

Some Arabic singers you might also enjoy: Warda, Laila Mourad, and Asmahan.

From Turkey, you should check out Bulent Ersoy (even though she was born a man). Nilufer and Ajda Pekkan's earlier music might be to your liking, although they are a little poppier than some of the other singers you mentioned. Also, Linet is more contemporary with more polished production, but her voice is definitely epic.

If you like Ofra Haza, you might enjoy Ahuva... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by ciocarlia at 3:12 PM on February 11, 2007 marked best answer

I'm the same age as jessamyn. At age 11, I was hand-coding (yes, pushing hex into the registers) programs in Assembler - LDA, STA, all that stuff - for the 6502.

And I followed along shortly thereafter. (I have done some editing on that wikipedia article you linked to.) I can still assemble up short 6502 routines in my head.

300: AD 30 C0 A9 20 20 A8 FC 4C 00 03
posted to MetaTalk by kindall at 12:27 AM on February 4, 2007

I want GNE back!!
posted to MetaFilter by TuxHeDoh at 12:36 PM on January 31, 2007

Do not bribe the policemen. Many of us Mexicans would like to live in a corruption free country, and the first step is not to offer bribes.

You respect the law at home, right? So just do the same when you visit Mexico and you will have no problems. If the police pulls you over, just ask for your ticket (you can't pay it right there. That's the same as paying a bribe).

If you are worried about your documents, just show them to the policeman... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by clearlydemon at 7:44 AM on January 26, 2007 marked best answer

I am going to break the rules and extensively self-link in this comment. I actually studied the mathematical properties of Rush Hour fulltime for months, and the results that I published received a fair ammount of attention because of the surprising details.

Here's the main result in a nutshell: Rush Hour is a type of problem comuter scientists call PSPACE-complete. What does this mean? Intuitively, it means that in a perverse way, Rush Hour... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dr.flakenstein at 6:53 AM on January 25, 2007

Yes, you shouldn't ridicule anonymous askme folk. People will still do it anyway.

Yes, they will. And they should be attacked and mocked for it. Because they're assholes.

We don't need a sensitivity seminar on this.

No, we need public shaming. If even one brainless jerk has to pause for a moment before typing HURF DURF BUTTER EATER RICH PERSON SUXX0RS and hitting Post, then it's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 6:15 AM on January 20, 2007

carmina wrote...
Can you do the same for the entire record (2004-2006)?

Yes, here you go.
posted to MetaTalk by tkolar at 5:54 PM on January 4, 2007

Oh and stav, you didn't have a 16th century Archibishop of Glasgow as an ancestor by any strange chance did you?
posted to MetaTalk by peacay at 4:40 AM on December 23, 2006

Galvanic is also electric.

Keep in mind that this is a metaphor. An "electric" experience isn't some fundamental human experience. It's merely an experience (likely a range of experiences differing for each person) which someone compares to electricity, possibly including ideas of lightning, the fizzle-pop of an arc light, the stimulation of the motor nerves (see Galvani), static electricity, mild AC electrocution, 9-volt batteries to the tongue, the magic... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by honest knave at 2:36 PM on December 20, 2006 marked best answer

Am I the only one this drek causes discreet anguish, as I consciously fend off the artificed good feelings and sentiment?

It's not "good feelings and sentiment" here. It's heartbreak and loss and zero self-esteem. It's choosing sides on the playground and picking the scrawny, nerdy kid first. It's an anti-establishment, anti-materialism message in the midst of a season that only exists now to prop up the global economy with wasteful and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dw at 2:26 PM on December 14, 2006

Maybe they make you lonely. (TV and Internet are more "interactive" and I heart they appeal to extroverts stuck at home alone). So maybe try a writing group or art class.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by salvia at 6:48 PM on November 12, 2006

Here's a bit more of an explanation:
Having been called a "sfacim" by my uncles and other relatives more than a few times in my life, I believe your reference might require more elaboration. In its original form, "sfacim" is Neapolitan slang for semen — equivalent to US slang such as spunk or gism. However, it's also widely used as a term of endearment, as in "Hey, sfacim. Come over here and give your grandmother a kiss before I break your face." The... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bcwinters at 7:54 AM on October 29, 2006 marked best answer

What is the most convincing argument you have ever heard, read or devised for the existence of free will in humans? If you can't think of one, can you think of a test for proving its existence?

The presupposition underlying your questions is that the answers to your question should be determined through the application of reason.

To justify that presupposition, you have to presume that human reason is a reliable indicator of... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by gd779 at 10:48 AM on October 25, 2006 marked best answer

"When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there."
posted to MetaFilter by mekanic at 9:18 PM on October 24, 2006

This is rough and probably has some errors. It would be fund if others could refine it.

Troilus and Cressida (from Homer)

Coriolanus

Pericles (the historical Pericles lived around 450BC)

Timon of Athens (lived durning the Peloponnesian War, 431-404BC)

Comedy of Errors (based on a Plautus play. Plautus lived from 254-184BC)

Julius... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by grumblebee at 4:13 PM on October 16, 2006 marked best answer

Oddly enough, today I was wondering back through meta threads in the past and found interesting/funny stuff that I was gonna post to metatalk, but here is as good as any

Reaching 500 members.

A proposal to limit members at 10K.

A meta crash due to a...shoddy power plug!


Matt's pegging of metatalk, which seems really right from now.

Early Askmethread.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Brandon Blatcher at 8:11 PM on October 15, 2006

Get a grip. I don't care if you drink or not. That is your business. Just remember you are still totally responsible for your actions whether you are drunk or not. I quit drinking three years ago and for me it was one of the best things that I have ever done. If you want to quit drinking, there are a lot of people willing to help. Just look in the phone book. If you don't want to quit drinking, at least quit your whining.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by calumet43 at 10:10 PM on October 13, 2006

I am very happy to read these posts. It's not easy to have notoriety and pretty much have accurate conceptions in the public mind. Virtually everything said her about me is accurate.

I never wanted a spotlight or fame. I built computers and handed out schematics. I at first said "no" to starting Apple because I loved my work at HP (Calculators) and could always design on the side.

I have always been an amateur comedian. I had this idea... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by stevewoz at 8:56 AM on October 4, 2006