Yes, thanks awfully, Klaus.

I don't envy you what you had to go through to fix this. I've had similar experiences, (although at fathoms below your level, god wot). Still, I know how you want to scream after hours of hair pulling.

Thanks also to George for his guidance. 🙂

@George-K oh sorry, I thought Elongate was one of the earlier mini-scandals about share fixing

Futile is the word that comes to mind.

Good cooking takes time.

Sound logic.

@brenda said in The Russians did it indeed:

Bots don't post frog pics or freshly baked bread pics. They also don't spell Minnesoooooota with enough o's.

Maybe @brenda is a bot of Hobart’s?

Very wordy. I like my answer better

SOLUTION: Let's try some smaller numbers and see what happens. Obviously if the house is all men or all women, the sex of the last person beamed up will be determined. If there are equal numbers of men and women, then by symmetry, the probability that the last person beamed up is a woman would be 1/2. So the simplest interesting case is, say, one man and two women.

In that case, if the man is beamed up first (probability: 1/3), the last person beamed up will be a woman. Suppose a woman is beamed up first; if she is followed by a man (who is then beamed back down), we are down to the symmetric case where the probability of ending with a woman is 1/2. Finally, if a second woman follows the first (probability 2/3 x 1/2 = 1/3), the man will be last to be beamed up. Putting the cases together, we get probability 1/2 that the last person beamed up is a woman. Is it possible that 1/2 is the answer no matter how many men and women are present, as long as there's at least one of each?

Looking more closely at the above analysis, it seems that the sex of the last person beamed up is determined by the next-to-last saucer — the one that reduces the house to one sex. To see why this is so, it is useful to imagine that the Xylofonian acquisition process operates the following way: Each time a flying saucer arrives, the current inhabitants of the house arrange themselves in a uniformly random permutation, from which they are beamed up left to right.

For example, if the inhabitants at one saucer's arrival consist of males Amit and Boris and females Carol, Dina and Esme, and they arrange themselves "Dina, Esme, Boris, Carol, Amit," then the saucer will beam up Dina, Esme, and Boris, then will beam Boris back down again, and take off with just the females Dina and Esme. The remaining folks, Boris, Amit, and Carol, will now re-permute themselves in anticipation of the next saucer's arrival.

We see that a saucer will be the next to last just when the permutation it encounters consists of all men followed by all women, or all women followed by all men. But no matter how many of each sex are in the house at this point, these two events are equally likely! Why? Because if we simply reverse the order of a such a permutation, we go from all-men-then-all-women to all-women-then-all-men, and vice versa.

There's just one more observation to make: If both men and women are present initially, then one saucer will never do, thus there always will be a next-to-last saucer. When that comes — even though we do not know in advance which saucer it will be — it is equally likely to depart with the rest of the men, or the rest of the women.

@taiwan_girl said in Moving the computer:

More computer power in your phone than on the moon module.

Milimeter for milimeter and gram for gram, we will continue to have more powerful computers on Earth than in outerspace, for the simple reason that without the protection of the Earth‘s magnetic field and the atmosphere, electronics would be subjected to much stronger radiation from the Sun and other sources in outer space. So any computer we send up into outer space will necessarily use integrated circuits with much larger feature sizes and extra shielding to better survive the stronger radiation in outer space.

With a club.

Is a herring still a fish if it has no ears?

INteresting!!

Agreed.

Kirov however was never made into an unperson. In fact he was posthumously lionized as a hero who was a victim of Trotskyist conspirators. Arguably, Stalin used his murder in 1934 to initiate the show trials and later blood purges of the Great Terror in ‘37 and ‘38.

@Horace said in Somebody, anybody, please help:

@Doctor-Phibes said in Somebody, anybody, please help:

Nobody in government gets paid particularly well.

Well that's not even close to true, when you factor in pensions and job security and a near complete insulation from market forces such as an expectation that you do your job well.

Well, it's mediocre pay and great benefits if you want to be picky.

Meh. George could do that.

@Axtremus said in The case against an off-ramp:

I agree with him for the most part.

I am not sure about his claim that Russians will simply go along (or pretend to go along) with whatever fake reality Putin foist onto them via state controlled media. Would anyone more familiar with the Russian mindset than I kindly comment on this point? ( @Renauda ?)

For most part I would agree - especially outside the two big cities Moscow and St. Petersburg. Over time though it may erode owing to dead bodies, wounded and economic hardship. Depends how Putin’s this war continues.

Despite his presentations on pop culture TV critical of contemporary North American demagoguery and populism, Snyder is no slouch on Russian and Ukrainian history. His book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , an a highly regarded historical monograph.

I was wondering how guys get testicular torsion....

Ever thought about sending the boy to a religious school?

He is Jewish, you know...