xkcd

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I think Jaap and Eebster are right to encourage you to think of multiplication and division as happening in two dimensions rather than one. That'll be necessary when you start multiplying and dividing things that aren't numbers: meters, grams, unknown variables, etc. But you asked how to visualize i...

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I think I sometimes pronounce "bull" with no vowel but the "l" too, now that I think about it, if I'm speaking quick and casually and not trying to articulate. If I had to articulate a vowel in "pull", I do think it would more likely be like "put" than like &...

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Now that you mention that /ʊ/ sound, I'm not sure if that /ʌ/ is really how I say "pull" either, though /ʊ/ doesn't sound right to me either. I think I don't actually pronounce any vowel at all, the p just blends seamlessly into the l, the latter functioning like a vowel. I doubt it. Some...

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For example, I think "pull" is a homophone of "pole" and "poll", while she thinks "pull" is a homophone of "pool", and I think she's nuts. You're both nuts. There's a third sound that's not like "pole"/"poll" or "pool"....

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Floor 1255 contains a food court. The food court includes an unremarkable burrito joint, an overpriced pizza parlor, and an excellent doughnut shop. Truly excellent. Maybe the best doughnuts in the world. People come from all over the Skyscraper to buy doughnuts. There may be a minor spacetime anoma...

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Assuming that all five houses are in a row and that "to the left of" means " immediately to the left of": Start with clues 5, 14, and 18. Follow with 3, 11, 20, and 22. (Fill in fifth name.) Next 1+15, 7+17, 10, and 16. Next 9 and 21. (Fill in fifth car.) Then 12 ...

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Thesh wrote:They could use other forms of population control, like having the females spayed, and then live off of carrion.

Isn't spaying kind of a delicate operation for animals without hands to try to perform?

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There has to be an alternative way to view the Circle of Life that I am not seeing. I'm not sure I understand your question, but have you considered the fact that if the carnivores stopped keeping the herbivore population in check, the herbivores would eat all the plants and the system would crash?...

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On current form, more likely they'll just decide [Uranus] isn't a planet at all, because of reasons. It's failed to clear its neighborhood of large objects such as Chiron and Chariklo. I've had a bit of fun pointing out in various forums that Earth is, by the current definition, not a proper "...

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Here's one way to do it with 3 cars. Not maximally efficient or anything (probably this could be done without ever using any of the three cars' full tank capacity), but since I'm confident that it can't be done with 2 cars, this solution is good enough. t0: A is at 0° with 100% fuel, B is at 0° with...

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13 seconds, I should think. My reasoning: Think of each bead as having an arrow on it representing its direction. When beads collide, they swap arrows, but when arrows collide, all they do is swap beads and continue on their merry way. So collisions are irrelevant: each arrow takes at most 13 second...

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The "That's my childhood home. How is that even in your system?" thing totally happened to me the other day. The address in question was twenty years obsolete, and the business in question was one that I definitely didn't start doing business with until years after I began living on my own...

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On current form, more likely they'll just decide [Uranus] isn't a planet at all, because of reasons. To spell out those reasons: 1. It's failed to clear its neighborhood of large objects such as Chiron and Chariklo. (Note that these objects are probably dwarf planets in their own right, in the sens...

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eugen wrote:airliner design has not changed significantly since 1954.

Wasn't the Concorde a major development? It seems to me that "we advanced and then fell back" is not the same as "nothing changed".

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December 17, 1903 - first human airplane flight July 20, 1969 - first people on the moon December 14, 1972 - last people on the moon So, assuming the decline of human civilization takes place at the same rate as its ascension did, we can expect the last human airplane flight to take place on July 1...

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If I'm reading it correctly, this is a straightforward arithmetic problem. Blackbeard's ships make progress at 4 ft/s. (The length of a leg of a right triangle in vector space, whose other leg is the 3 ft/s river and whose hypotenuse is the 5 ft/s ship speed.) So their time to travel 100...

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Then the optimal solution is: Use all N chickens that are available... I like your optimal strategy for reasons you didn't fully explain: While your numbering scheme still requires a minimum of 7 chickens to be able to identify 101 cans (same as the first solution in this thread), the more ...

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Just browsing Wikipedia, it looks to me like Modern Greek is a bit of a mess, at least in the sound-to-spelling direction: /i/ can be spelled η, ι, υ, ει, οι, or υι ... correct orthography requires mastery of formal grammar, e.g. η καλή /i kaˈli/ 'the good one (fem. sing.)' vs. οι καλοί /i kaˈli/ 't...

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Assuming our goals are: 1. Identify all of the safe cans in the shortest possible time. (i.e. We're in "Regular Solution" territory rather than "Smartass Solution" territory.) 2. Kill as few chickens as possible while still achieving objective 1. Then the optimal solution is: Use...

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I couldn't decide how plausible it was by just eyeballing it, so decided to run some numbers to check it out. Let's say that X1 has a 50% prior probability of being true, X2 (which is independent of X1) also has a 50% prior probability of being true, H has a 25% prior probability of being true, I be...

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Isogram "Iso" means same, so shouldn't a word with all different letters be called something like "heterogram"? No, no, a "heterogram" is any word that does not describe its own written form. So "palindrome" is a heterogram, but "isogram" is not a h...

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Today I typed "problem exists between" into Google, and the top autocomplete option was "... leopard and chair".

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Faced with the need to count down "Five… four… three… two… one…" many times (for reasons unnecessary to delve into) If you're the person whose job it is to bleep out celebrities when they use curse words on "live" broadcasts, that's fascinating and totally necessary to delve int...

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Might it be worth noting that the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the prime meridian in 1884, and the paris meridian (which would have been popular on french cartography before this) was about 2 degrees east of the greenwich meridian? The line I'm taking for 0° is labeled "Colure des Equinox...

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I've been a vegetarian for almost 25 years, and am happy with that choice. Vegetarianism is healthier, is better for the environment, and causes less suffering than a standard American diet. But obviously some non-vegetarians have lifestyles that are just as healthy, sustainable, and compassionate a...

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I agree that it's French in both language and appearance. The illustration seems reminiscent of (but not identical to) the star maps created by Ignace-Gaston Pardies in the late 17th century.

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I don't know much about astronomy, but decided to give it a try anyway. The stars seem to be about 2.5° to 3° off from the coordinates they had in 2000. (For example, I think the bright star at 17° on the ecliptic is Zeta Piscium , whose celestial longitude in 2000 was about 19.9°.) Since it takes a...

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Yeah, but since the trick only works on nouns, /ɛɹz/ only ends up scoring about 10, compared to the 20 or so I got out of /siz/.

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Can anyone come up with anything as good or better? How about /siz/? ⋅ sees (perceives visually) ⋅ sees (cathedral sites) ⋅ seas (bodies of water) ⋅ seize (grab) ⋅ seise (take possession, in a legal context) [same etymology as "seize"] &sd...

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Dear prescriptivists: don't ask who the bell tolls for; its for y'all.

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I had been led to believe that the cryptic crossword as featured in UK broadsheets was a uniquely British thing and unknown in the US, which suggests that Randall must be thinking of a slightly different type of "word game". Well, crosswords here in the U.S. do frequently have puns. To gi...

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I think of American cuisine as boring and bland, and so mostly eat "ethnic" foods, but just now I decided to make a perfectly normal American snack: a hot dog with ketchup, mustard, and pickle relish, on a bun. ... Well, I'm vegan, so the "hot dog" wasn't technically a hot dog; m...

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The OED defines "plant" as "A small plant, as distinct from a shrub or a tree", and that's the way I would tend to use it here. A "cactus plant" is a cactus that won't die if you keep it in a flowerpot.

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So if you did bring 1e340J into being somehow, how would you describe the predicted effects? Is it a large small enough number that "collapse to a singularity" or "complete destruction of the universe" are reasonable choices? Or is the number so large as to make even those simpl...

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How much comparatively is 1e+340 joules of energy? Just wondering. Okay, no problem. We just need some big numbers. Here is a page with some big numbers on it. Let's see... The total amount of energy in the universe--if we liberated all of it in a giant matter-antimatter reaction--is about 1e70 jou...

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Almost certainly just a typo. The "4" and "1" keys are adjacent to one another on a standard keypad. If the receipt says you paid $40 and got $33 in change, and the reality is that you paid $10 and got $3 in change, that's a net payment of $7 either way. Unless they're hoping to ...

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jewish_scientist wrote:Anyway, the first link provides a citation, so at least I know where to go. Thank you.

It's not a terribly useful citation; I followed it before I posted. It went to a math book whose author said "Two readers independently sent me this method for drawing an egg."

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Floor 1242 would be "Floor 1234 (approximately)", if only we used Base 10.023273 instead of Base 10. But so far it hasn't had any luck convincing people to switch to this new number system.

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Googled this a bit. Didn't find the answer. I found a page by Robert Dickau, demonstrating the construction in question with a bunch of very nice gifs. Unfortunately he just calls it "an oval or egg shape". I found a Wikipedia page on something called a " tri-oval ", which includ...

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Here's a cropped version of 445 with some dialogue added. See also 222 and 1961.

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