I must of miss-stepped somewhere because I think I proved the answer to Q8 was C, so Q3 and Q4 had to add up to 6, but Q1 says Q3 or Q4 has to be B, and they can't BOTH be B, because of Q2. So I'm stuck! I've done something wrong.
Maybe I'm reading one of these questions wrong? Rats.
Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.
Yeah, while I was "typing" my response to that question, my screen suddenly went completely black... and then luckily just returned to normal a few seconds later.
... or at least I thought it returned to normal...
Having read your comment, I realize all the text on my display is subtlely squashed and blurry in a way that I didn't notice, but is pretty obvious now that I'm looking for it! ><
I suspect the real problem isn't so much hitting "enter" but hitting it directly after the other hand hit "tab". A text field should be able to deal with an enter.
I discovered that SOME combination while mashing would close my tab in Chrome. Fortunately, ctrl-shift-t brought back not just the form, but __saved_responses__. What a pleasant surprise. I wonder if that saving is done by the browser, or by the website (local storage?).
"How many tabs do you keep open on your browser" would be an interesting question, to me, to see the results on. I'm often mystified by the stories of people who keep 50+ tabs open. I've never understood why, but I guess now that I'm considering it, I'm guessing such people must base their workflows around tabs.
I tend to have about 50 or so tabs, per /window/ (it's time for a new one when I can't see the faveicon anymore).
I tend to have about 250-300 tabs open in total. Various things I mean to get back to, reference material for projects that I've paused working on, etc.
In general when it costs you nothing to keep a photocopy of a reference on your desk, the desktop becomes nothing but photocopies of reference materials.
I have no idea how many tabs I have open, because it's a lot more than my browser is able to display. It's not so much that my workflow is based on tabs, but rather my procrastination flow. I encounter something I want to read, open it in a new tab, but then put off reading it until I forget why I wanted to read it.
If you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy:
1) My website Correlated.org (http://www.correlated.org), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years.
2) Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses.
3) Google Correlate (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.
I think my favorite is Google Correlate. I have no idea what the motorola tundra is but it got super popular on 12/21/2008 and then slowly fell out of interest by 2014.
Correlated.org interests me. Scrolling down the front page, it's fun to try and form connections and explain correlations to yourself (probably wrongly).
Here are some of the ones on the front page I was able to think of a possible explanation for (many quite tenuous):
> among those who would be willing to observe a prison execution, 68 percent say they tend to stick to their decisions.
Sticking to your decisions might be a mark of social conservatism. In which case, being willing to observe someone being executed might correlate.
> among those who need corrective lenses to read, 54 percent prefer to play with dominoes as a tile game, rather than by toppling them
If it's myopia causing them to need glasses, well, myopia is apparently caused by not getting outside enough during childhood (and therefore not getting sufficient sunlight).
Perhaps, then, more active people would enjoy toppling dominoes more and have gotten outside more during youth (thus not developing myopia).
> among those who say that longevity runs in their family, only 26 percent like skim milk.
Maybe skim milk is a more recent thing, and people whose longevity 'runs in the family' would be more traditional? I'm really grasping at straws here.
> among those who use anti-dandruff shampoo, 54 percent say they are good Frisbee throwers.
> among those who have recently done something dangerous enough that they had to sign a waiver, 73 percent find Irish accents to be especially attractive
I had two thoughts on this one:
1) Are people more likely to need to sign a waiver in certain countries? In which case, this might be a cultural thing.
2) People who've done dangerous things might be rather adventurous, and think Irish accents somehow symbolise that(??)
> among those who like the taste of honeysuckle nectar, 61 percent say their favorite kind of doughnut doesn't have a hole in it
Is honeysuckle nectar a sweet, fructosey thing? Well, doughnuts without holes often contain fruit jam. So someone who likes sweet, fruity things would be more likely to like both?
> among those who don't like couscous, 54 percent have witnessed an animal being born
People who live in the country are perhaps more likely to have witnessed an animal being born, right? (Though I suppose most people don't live on farms, hmm...) Since couscous is not a traditional foodstuff in the West, perhaps people living in the country, who are likely to be more conservative(?), would be less likely to enjoy couscous?
> among those who think that the only things that really exist are material things, 60 percent would prefer a messy roommate
This makes a certain intuitive sense to me, but I can't quite think of the words. The word 'hedonism' springs to mind, though might not quite be what I'm after.
> among those who find it hard to tolerate oscillating fans, 58 percent do the Electric Slide at wedding receptions
I wonder if this is a generational gap.
> among those who like raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing, 69 percent like candy corn
Like the honeysuckle nectar one, I suspect this is some common taste between the two foods.
The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of.
About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).
I saw a Reddit post once about how Google was releasing Cromcast.
I immediately pictured a device with an HDMI interface that continuously forces your TV to change to that input, turn up the volume, and then repeatedly play short videos from different scenes, of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, yelling "CROM!"
Kinda wish you had waited until after the results were published to mention it. Plenty of people will read the comments first, so by talking about it now you're actively harming the very experiment you're so impressed by.
That only applies to people who saw this on Hacker News; the survey link is on xkcd's front page today, and I imagine there are many xkcd readers who don't come here.
I put yes for this because I've heard the funny sounding slang phrase 'on fleek' (similar to on point) before, but I'm not sure if it actually is an OED word.
You must accept that you will sound like a fool just for using this word. You can use it for anything you want to show satisfaction/approval for. React.js on fleek, eyebrows on fleek, uptime on fleek
You must accept that you will sound like a fool just for using this word. You can use it for anything you want to show satisfaction/approval for. React.js on fleek, eyebrows on fleek, uptime on fleek
You must accept that you will sound like a fool just for using this word. You can use it for anything you want to show satisfaction/approval for. React.js on fleek, eyebrows on fleek, uptime on fleek
Certainly some jargon is typical in spoken environments but rarely necessary in written contexts, just as vice versa. Not that I have any specific proofs on the specific words in the survey, but given at least one example of curious slang ("fleek"), I wouldn't put it past Randall to attempt to find some.
Also, the fun thing about pronounceable neologisms is even if Randall made them up, there's a curious tendency in English at least to actually start using some of them.
I checked them after I'd submitted the survey. The only real words that I hadn't ticked were "regolith" (I was almost sure it was a real word, but I didn't know the meaning of it), "phoropter" (I believed it could be a piece of engineering terminology, but again didn't know the meaning) and "peristeronic" and "apricity" (I would have given better than evens that these were made up).
I'm not sure if it has been removed from most dictionaries, but
apricity is commonly accepted as "The warmth felt from sunlight". Wiktionary lists it as obsolete though.
Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.
Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.
I would argue as a descriptivist that revergent is a legit English word - something that was previously divergent that is now tending towards convergence.
I don't know why, but I was able to recognize the non-words instantly (with one exception) even though I didn't know the meaning of every single "real" one. (Peristeronic, etc.)
As a non-native speaker, this was a hard question to be honest on. I recognize the word "rife", I can use it in a sentence, but _do I know what it means_?
I wondered the same (also a non-native speaker), but I figured if I can use the word correctly (to my knowledge) in a sentence, it means I know what it means. Even if I can't succinctly describe its meaning in English or Dutch. That's a job for dictionary-editors :-)
The problem with "rife" is that it's mainly used in the context of "rife with", where it means something like "full of". Then it gets confusing because it's not really correct to say "rife" means "full". Or, "rife means full changing with to of", which is just word salad.
But there wasn't a quotation mark. I considered starting with the words "type", "five", "random", and "words" - but I realized that that wasn't very random at all (very very low entropy.) So I truly came up with extremely random words.
well technically I should have used a random process that had an equal chance of selecting those words as well. But since humans are so bad at coming up with random things, I started with gibberish sounds and then found unusual words to match them.
right - thanks for the link, I haven't been on the xkcd site in a while (really need to catch up ;-) )
I do think the downvoting is uncalled for though, after all, it's not like the questions weren't pointless, and you could reasonably call Randall Munroe a statistician of sorts..
I mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are:
1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles.
or
2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2.
(And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).
My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?
Hey, definitely a nerd. For fun he finds code races in Redis/Bayeux server failover. Also he fights in clubs, bashing his friends with sticks. And designs card/board games.
I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent ("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ..."). That's pretty cool.
I do that just because I'm too lazy to match my socks, or I only have a few clean socks left and none of them match. I can't honestly say I've ever thought about it from a 'what would someone else think?' perspective before reading your comment. Heh, maybe people think I'm colorblind and are just too polite to ask, or nobody notices.
I can't say I notice other peoples socks either now that I think about it.
>I have to match socks between several different styles
Do I understand correctly that you throw all your socks into a drawer/container, and when you need a pair, you go and have to find two matching ones?
This may be cultural (or even familial) thing, but I always curl two socks up into a ball so that they stay together. When I need a pair, I just take one ball, uncurl it, and voila.
but if you curl them after drying, you have a much smaller pool to find the pair from, the just washed socks (which will be the socks you use the most anyway). So it's faster that way, than to mix them all up and only then match.
My wife has about twenty pairs of socks, and no more than a few of the pairs are the same variety. It's like some masochistic combinatorics problem every single time I fold socks. My kid and I literally were playing "sock go fish" a few times to get him to help (except ... I was more interested in the pairing, rather than taking turns. Doh.)
Laundry-folding happiness is increased significantly when I don't have to play "Find-the-mate" every time I pick up a sock (which applies to my kids' socks as well, since they are all patterned, but thankfully my son likes wearing party-colored socks, so I only need to match on shape).
I have two "vintages" of socks -- the old ones that I hate, and the newer ones that I prefer, roughly equally divided. I would donate + re-buy if I had more than two flavors of socks.
I pretend I am a computer doing a matching problem. I have a buffer of unmatched socks that I compare each sock as I pull it out of the pile, and if unmatched I add to the buffer. Kinda fun.
Yes, I pair them after washing, and curl them after drying. Putting them together makes searching O(n) instead of O(n^2) if you have a particular style in mind.
Of course, homogeneity makes this even faster, but you lose the benefit of choice, variability and fashionableness. Quid pro quo.
I think his point was that if you're seeking out all the pairs when you curl them together, you're still spending unnecessary time and effort matching socks, just ahead of time instead of in the moment when you need socks
I'd suggest Darn Tough wool socks. Buy two of them per season if you want. They are guaranteed for life. No, they really are. Return them, and they send you new ones. My wife has returned them twice. I'm still on my first pair and I run and go backpacking. They are awesome. Plus, wool is one of the best materials for not stinking (anti-bacterial) so you don't even have to wash them (every time) if you leave them out to dry.
I do the buying all the same thing for the new, but I don't throw out the old. They go into reserve for when nothing else is clean. I keep them in a separate drawer.
I don't do it on the same basis, but I do have decay batches like that.
I'll buy a bunch of undergarments that are frequently used so that there's a whole generation. When I feel a need based on function I buy a new generation. If the old generation still has some service life it becomes 'houseware' (the 'holy' stuff worn only about the house).
Socks usually get culled completely once they have a hole of any size (evicted from the generation), while new generations tend to happen when parts wear too thin for comfort in shoes.
I don't do it that often, but that is my preferred way of doing it. Eliminates the problem of having 7 socks with no matches. Eliminates the need to pair them when doing laundry or when getting dressed. And generally all my socks wear out within a couple of months of each other anyway.
For those of you who are tired of matching socks after laundry but don't want to wear the same black socks all the time, I solved this issue by buying very colourful socks. Each pair is very different to the other pairs, so when it's time to pair them up, it's instantly obvious which socks belong to a pair.
People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more "random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e. numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37, 39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way) isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.
Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people will choose[0].
Evens are out; so are small multiples. A multiple of three might end in 3, 9 or 7. A multiple of 7 may end in 1. So a "conservative mental arithmetic sieve" that wants to make sure one's picking a prime number will coalesce around 29 or 37.
I saw a list once of what makes each number from 1 to 100 special. One of them was the most random number (I think 37). Another one was the least special (63 perhaps?).
One of mine was 69 -- genuinely at random. (Well, semi-genuinely. I picked a randomish number, counted that many places through pi, and took two digits. I wasted some time memorizing lots of digits of pi when I was in high school; it would be a shame not to put that to some use.)
As we had to pick /two/ numbers, and eventually the set will be released, I don't want to get too close to identifying my self based on these numbers.
I chose two numbers that had some (basic) meaning to me and quickly came to mind. They were not related in any way to the month or day in month of any birthdays.
Yeah, I don't ever adjust a thermostat set by someone else. If there's a thermostat to set, I'm always happy with whatever anyone has set it to. if there isn't, there's nothing to set. There should be a choice "I never adjuust a thermostat."
Fun anecdote. I took a cryptography exam, where the question was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:", followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on. It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess. On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message". Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.
For anyone curious, it looks like this would be what he was shown, assuming spaces omitted and all lower case:
"aaaaabccddddeeeeeeeffggggghiiiilllmnnnoooooooppprrrrrrssssssssstttwwy"
As far as I know, it's not possible to record respondents' IP addresses with Google Surveys, so I think that one's out. I suppose you could make rough inferences based on the food, weather, and snow questions.
That's probably a trap question, to let you filter out people who aren't paying attention. Similarly, in the 'recognize words' section, I'm fairly sure some of those words aren't real and so you could increase data quality by throwing out anyone who claims to recognize fake words.
I thought about it for a while, and then it occurred to me, that there are actually many ways one could possibly understand that -- thus replying e.g.:
- cat
- "cat"
- 'cat'
- panther (not exactly a cat, but kinda -- that's why it was in quotes, no?)
- [one could type "cat" in one's terminal]
- "Whiskers", etc. (i.e. name of one's cat)
then, one could make a typo (thus e.g. "ca" or "catt"), or finally something more or less totally random, given that it's an open question (thus e.g. "no", or "How are you?", or whatever).
So, not that stupid a question I thought initially :)
Or as an alternative theory, Randall Munroe wants to know if it's OK to tell everyone when he throws away all his socks and buys a bunch of identical ones.
I have a google form like this for Couchsurfers who wish to stay a few nights in my apartment. I believe my questions might be little bit more on the insane side though.
I am tempted to go public with the form but right now, I enjoy the novelty. I also barely have the time to keep up with the requests.
Sample portion:
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
In life, there are no right answers. But this is a test so you better choose wisely.
Question 1. Right now, do you want to ask the apartment tenant something along the lines of: “Are you serious?" ?
A. Yes.
B. Are you serious?
75% of applicants choose B. And it all goes downhill from there.
280 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498
> 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Chuckle...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation)
> On a scale of 1 to 10, what's your favorite candy?
I originally heard it on a "Senseless Survey" radio segment.
I must of miss-stepped somewhere because I think I proved the answer to Q8 was C, so Q3 and Q4 had to add up to 6, but Q1 says Q3 or Q4 has to be B, and they can't BOTH be B, because of Q2. So I'm stuck! I've done something wrong.
Maybe I'm reading one of these questions wrong? Rats.
edit: oooooops, C is 2 away from E.
... or at least I thought it returned to normal...
Having read your comment, I realize all the text on my display is subtlely squashed and blurry in a way that I didn't notice, but is pretty obvious now that I'm looking for it! ><
I tend to have about 250-300 tabs open in total. Various things I mean to get back to, reference material for projects that I've paused working on, etc.
In general when it costs you nothing to keep a photocopy of a reference on your desk, the desktop becomes nothing but photocopies of reference materials.
I'm back up to 89 tabs now, after having recently cleaned it up a bit.
1) My website Correlated.org (http://www.correlated.org), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years.
2) Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses.
3) Google Correlate (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.
http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing
Here are some of the ones on the front page I was able to think of a possible explanation for (many quite tenuous):
> among those who would be willing to observe a prison execution, 68 percent say they tend to stick to their decisions.
Sticking to your decisions might be a mark of social conservatism. In which case, being willing to observe someone being executed might correlate.
> among those who need corrective lenses to read, 54 percent prefer to play with dominoes as a tile game, rather than by toppling them
If it's myopia causing them to need glasses, well, myopia is apparently caused by not getting outside enough during childhood (and therefore not getting sufficient sunlight).
Perhaps, then, more active people would enjoy toppling dominoes more and have gotten outside more during youth (thus not developing myopia).
> among those who say that longevity runs in their family, only 26 percent like skim milk.
Maybe skim milk is a more recent thing, and people whose longevity 'runs in the family' would be more traditional? I'm really grasping at straws here.
> among those who use anti-dandruff shampoo, 54 percent say they are good Frisbee throwers.
Apparently dandruff can be caused by greasy skin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandruff#Causes) - is this more likely in more active people(?)
> among those who have recently done something dangerous enough that they had to sign a waiver, 73 percent find Irish accents to be especially attractive
I had two thoughts on this one:
1) Are people more likely to need to sign a waiver in certain countries? In which case, this might be a cultural thing.
2) People who've done dangerous things might be rather adventurous, and think Irish accents somehow symbolise that(??)
> among those who like the taste of honeysuckle nectar, 61 percent say their favorite kind of doughnut doesn't have a hole in it
Is honeysuckle nectar a sweet, fructosey thing? Well, doughnuts without holes often contain fruit jam. So someone who likes sweet, fruity things would be more likely to like both?
> among those who don't like couscous, 54 percent have witnessed an animal being born
People who live in the country are perhaps more likely to have witnessed an animal being born, right? (Though I suppose most people don't live on farms, hmm...) Since couscous is not a traditional foodstuff in the West, perhaps people living in the country, who are likely to be more conservative(?), would be less likely to enjoy couscous?
> among those who think that the only things that really exist are material things, 60 percent would prefer a messy roommate
This makes a certain intuitive sense to me, but I can't quite think of the words. The word 'hedonism' springs to mind, though might not quite be what I'm after.
> among those who find it hard to tolerate oscillating fans, 58 percent do the Electric Slide at wedding receptions
I wonder if this is a generational gap.
> among those who like raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing, 69 percent like candy corn
Like the honeysuckle nectar one, I suspect this is some common taste between the two foods.
The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of.
About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).
He addressed that in the heading text: "This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people"
Does this not have its own word in British English? Even given their international cuisine?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08
I immediately pictured a device with an HDMI interface that continuously forces your TV to change to that input, turn up the volume, and then repeatedly play short videos from different scenes, of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, yelling "CROM!"
[[dramatic chord]]
Also, the fun thing about pronounceable neologisms is even if Randall made them up, there's a curious tendency in English at least to actually start using some of them.
* Phoropter * Tribution * Slickle * Cadine * Fination * Apricity * Revergent * Unitory * Trephony
These are not words. They are not highly specific jargon either. They are just made up nonsense.
Seems you're right about the rest.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apricity
Slickle is clearly onomatopoeia for something I probably don't want to know what.
Cadine is a name (which is certainly a type of word): http://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-cadine-891835.htm
Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.
Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.
"Revergent" gets a definition here[1] as "a mutation that precisely restores a mutant DNA sequence to a WT DNA sequence".
[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slickle [1] http://www.flashcardmachine.com/questions-set-2.html
Well, at least I don't feel so bad about not recognizing more than half of those words.
Perhaps a remnant of my spelling-bee days.
balletomane? zimocca? scacchite?
http://spellingbee.com/public/results/2015/round_results/spe...
I can't remember what I clicked.
The problem with "rife" is that it's mainly used in the context of "rife with", where it means something like "full of". Then it gets confusing because it's not really correct to say "rife" means "full". Or, "rife means full changing with to of", which is just word salad.
> Type five random words
five random words
I do think the downvoting is uncalled for though, after all, it's not like the questions weren't pointless, and you could reasonably call Randall Munroe a statistician of sorts..
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...
1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles.
or
2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2.
(And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).
I can't say I notice other peoples socks either now that I think about it.
This may be cultural (or even familial) thing, but I always curl two socks up into a ball so that they stay together. When I need a pair, I just take one ball, uncurl it, and voila.
If you have many different styles, you need to go hunt around and find matches. Curl or not just delays the matching problem, it does not solve it.
Having all the socks be the same makes matching an O(1) problem.
Laundry-folding happiness is increased significantly when I don't have to play "Find-the-mate" every time I pick up a sock (which applies to my kids' socks as well, since they are all patterned, but thankfully my son likes wearing party-colored socks, so I only need to match on shape).
I have two "vintages" of socks -- the old ones that I hate, and the newer ones that I prefer, roughly equally divided. I would donate + re-buy if I had more than two flavors of socks.
Of course, homogeneity makes this even faster, but you lose the benefit of choice, variability and fashionableness. Quid pro quo.
Why not do a O(1) Pair folloed by an O(1) Search.
Finally, my graduate-level algorithms class comes in handy in real life.
I'll buy a bunch of undergarments that are frequently used so that there's a whole generation. When I feel a need based on function I buy a new generation. If the old generation still has some service life it becomes 'houseware' (the 'holy' stuff worn only about the house).
Socks usually get culled completely once they have a hole of any size (evicted from the generation), while new generations tend to happen when parts wear too thin for comfort in shoes.
Only having one type of sock pair * $n_pairs in rotation makes laundry super simple.
Also a few bright flashy coloured ones, for fun.
I wonder how many of that will not be 42 :D
People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more "random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e. numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37, 39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way) isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.
Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people will choose[0].
[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html
Second was 51. Clearly the primest looking of the non-primes under 100?
23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71 73,79,83,89,97
Evens are out; so are small multiples. A multiple of three might end in 3, 9 or 7. A multiple of 7 may end in 1. So a "conservative mental arithmetic sieve" that wants to make sure one's picking a prime number will coalesce around 29 or 37.
Myself, I picked 11 and 17.
I saw a list once of what makes each number from 1 to 100 special. One of them was the most random number (I think 37). Another one was the least special (63 perhaps?).
I chose two numbers that had some (basic) meaning to me and quickly came to mind. They were not related in any way to the month or day in month of any birthdays.
How about less intense? At the office I bring a sweater in the summer and so sometimes strip to my undershirt in the winter....
I'm not clever.
yes, I am that lazy
Except that's no longer random.
• gender
• age (since they just straight up ask for it)
• rough geo data (if the survey records IP geo information, so assume they are doing that)
• economic status
• rough tech literacy level
- cat
- "cat"
- 'cat'
- panther (not exactly a cat, but kinda -- that's why it was in quotes, no?)
- [one could type "cat" in one's terminal]
- "Whiskers", etc. (i.e. name of one's cat)
then, one could make a typo (thus e.g. "ca" or "catt"), or finally something more or less totally random, given that it's an open question (thus e.g. "no", or "How are you?", or whatever).
So, not that stupid a question I thought initially :)
- Cat
- Cat.
Turns out something in Google Forms uses UCS-2 internally, so it rejected my whole survey.
EDIT: I guess Arc isn't very good at this either.
Google love Java to bits, and it's UCS-2ish.
Sample portion:
75% of applicants choose B. And it all goes downhill from there.Should really have a "none" option.