Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 4:06 pm

So my preferred media player is usually VLC but for osme odd reason since a recent update, all the sound has started comic out as really scratchy and bass filled. My equalizer is disabled and my computer's sound isn't set for bass or any special effects (levels, environment, etc..)

Windows media player plays the file perfectly well and I can stream music/video fine without any problem but VLC keeps doing this. Any idea how I can fix this? I even tried a rollback to the last version.

I can always move over to MPC or winamp but I've gotten really used to VLC.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 4:42 pm

Sushi has some pretty strict health regulations on it. Stuff needs to be shipped quickly and kept frozen.

Additionally, people are totally willing to pay that much for sushi, so it sells for that much.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 6:09 pm

Maxus wrote:I'd assume region also has an affect on the price (beyond cost-of-living differences).

If you live by the ocean, it's probably lower. If you live by some big fishing place, it's probably lower.

Sushi in Rio de Janeiro's is about 80% more expensive (and of a generally lower quality) than sushi in São Paulo (the city), which is landlocked. The cost of living in SP is usually higher than here, but they get a better deal on delicious japanese food.

Then again, São Paulo has more ethnic japanese living on it than most cities in Japan [citation needed], so there must be scale costs involved here.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 9:17 pm

Joomla! it is. I'll also try to pitch DokuWiki next time someone requests for wiki functionality to be implemented in the current EDM solution.

"Can you add a dictionary in the EDM system?"

"...whatever for?"

"It'd be more convenient to have everything in a single window."

"...Look. Why don't you, instead of requesting a new tab in the EDMS, just open a new tab or window in the browser you use to access the EDMS?"

"It'd be more convenient to have everything in a single window."

"...whyyyyy..."

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 4:07 am

The AROD people responded to me. By my estimate, the Cosmic Snake has about 12,000 scales total. That said, the overwhelming majority of these are the tiny dorsal scales, which make up small demi-planes and the like. Major planes run along the bottom, as ventral scales and subcaudal scales. There are 225 medium-large ventral scales, 90 maximum-size subcaudal scale, and a single anal scale which is about the size of a ventral scale. Which means that one of these places is literally the plane on the snake's anus. That's got to be a fun place to be.

That's pretty huge, but then that's assuming we use the green python. What if we instead take the pygmy python? It's still a python and therefore still awesome, but much smaller, plus it has dark spots on a brown surface. Those dark spots could be significant somehow. The pygmy python gives us the slightly smaller count of 205 medium-large ventral scales, 35 pairs of subcaudal scales (maybe they form linked worlds), and the largest scale by far is now the anal scale, so...Great. The number of tiny demi-plane scales clocks in at just over 6,000. Boy do snakes have a lot of scales.

Looking at the smallest snakes in the database, one of them clocks in at less than 2,000 scales total and "only" about 125 large ventral scales, with a total of about 40 medium-small scales.

All of these are producing results that mean there are at least a hundred large, important planes in addition to small demi-planes so numerous they may as well be unnumbered. Not sure how I feel about that.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 5:27 am

Baator: The Anal Plane

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 9:24 am

Nah, Carceri.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 1:08 pm

I think the question is, what does the snake eat, and thus what is the nature of its poop? That plane could be a font of undifferentiated power, or where everything that's lost in space and time winds up (so many odd socks).

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 3:11 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:Nah, Carceri.

So the Cosmic Snake is anal-retentive?

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 7:27 pm

Maxus wrote:Okay, someone explain the Game of Thrones Red Wedding to me.

I'm the designated Nerd Who Knows in my group of friends/associates, and it was evidently making people throw up when the TV episode aired, and everyone assumes I read everything with the fantasy label (hint, I don't, but I hear about stuff) and I just -know- I'll be asked about it. I'd like to have some coherent answer rather than "I'onno."

Could someone do me a solid?

While the raw details have been given already, it's kind of important to understand what this means for the plot.

Robb Stark was never a protagonist in the books and didn't have any POV chapters that I recall. While the slaughter of his entire army is quite traumatic and unexpected, it merely sets the stage for Arya and Bran, who are major protagonists, to step up.

A Storm of Swords was written with five-year time-skip in mind to age up the younger Starks so that they could kick ass in The Winds of Winter. Unfortunately, when GRRM was writing the flashback scenes from The Winds of Winter he got a little carried away and ended up with two books worth of material, which were published as A Feast for Crows an A Dance with Dragons. This is also why those books are almost universally derided as the worst in the series.

The producers of A Game of Thrones intentionally made the characters slightly older to avoid this problem.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jun 09, 2013 3:37 am

So for whatever reason, firefox has decided it wants to go slow as dirt, and not load youtube, and to misload facebook and twitter and a few other incidental websites.

Google Chrome happens to work just fine.

I tried updating Firefox, but it did nothing to help.

Anyone have any idea how to fix it?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Jun 09, 2013 5:15 am

Maxus wrote:So for whatever reason, firefox has decided it wants to go slow as dirt, and not load youtube, and to misload facebook and twitter and a few other incidental websites.

Google Chrome happens to work just fine.

I tried updating Firefox, but it did nothing to help.

Anyone have any idea how to fix it?

I occasionally uninstall/nuke firefox off my computer and redo everything for what sounds like a similar problem. A little extreme, but hey - it works. I've made attempts to google up solutions before, and nothing I've tried beyond full purge has done me any good. Though, I'd give a half-hearted crack at google a shot before you listen to me, just to see if you find the solution I've missed (and if you do, please let me know).

If you do want to go the nuke route, I'd recommend backing up/exporting your favorites first because losing those is a bitch (bookmarks > show all bookmarks > import and backup > backup).

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Jun 09, 2013 7:18 am

You may just need to update flash, but probably not. You may also have some shitty setting in a firewall that's blocking firefox but not chrome, but also not likely.

So cache and prefs are all that continue between versions (and bookmarks, addons, ...). Clear your cache, exit firefox and nuke the prefs.js or whatever it's called under your system to reset them. If that doesn't work, uninstall your addons (restarting and checking after each) until it does.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Sun Jun 09, 2013 11:55 pm

Alternatively, just use the fast browser and don't bother with Firefox.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Jun 10, 2013 2:06 am

...You Lost Me wrote:Alternatively, just use the fast browser and don't bother with Firefox.

I'll admit that my experience with Chrome is limited, but as far as I can tell it is minimalist to the point of lacking functionality. As soon as you open it, you get the immediate vibe it was designed for a tablet instead of a desktop. But I am on a fucking desktop. I have the screenspace, so hiding and cutting features to save me from clutter does nothing but hide and cut features I could be using. Thanks for saving me from useful software, Chrome.

Amazing example of how shitty Chrome is: IE and Firefox both have persistent bookmark sidebars and Chrome does not. Let's say your webcomic reading is nested four folders deep (my favorites base folder)>(webcomics)>(genre)>(status/update schedule). Not my personal setup, but not that unreasonable. With a persistent bookmark sidebar, you navigate that folder hierarchy once, and then you can click open the bookmark, read it, right click the bookmark and update the URL to the latest page you've read (use it like an actual bookmark), and then repeat for the next bookmark and so on, without ever having to navigate the folder hierarchy again.

On chrome, you will navigate the folder hierarchy for every webcomic you want to open and every bookmark URL you want to modify. That is fucking terrible. I would switch to IE before I switched to Chrome, because at least IE has managed to grasp that functionality is something people find useful in their software.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Jun 10, 2013 2:21 am

I suppose I could work with Chrome, but Firefox is what I'm used to. And DSM's right--the lack of a button to hit for my favorites is very, very grating.

I just re-installed flash, uninstalled Firefox, so now I guess I need to restart the computer in a minute.

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Jun 10, 2013 2:37 am

It was so hard resisting this until after people gave more helpful advice.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 3:34 pm

I've noticed something odd about various weather sites/apps that allow you to check the weather by day or expand the view to hour-by-hour. One odd thing I can't wrap my head around is what those percentages of rain/snow mean on any given time frame.

Let's say I check it, and they report a 50% chance of rain for the day. Then I go to hour-by-hour, and it says something like "cloudy for the next two hours, and 50% each hour going forward for the next ten hours".

Now, if I picture a 50% chance of rain every hour for ten hours, to me, that means the chance of not having any rain for those ten hours is 0.5^10, or 1/1024. So, I'd expect the daily report to have over a 99.9% chance of rain, but it doesn't. It says 50%.

A coworker suggested that maybe it has to do with area. So, over that hour, you expect 50% of the reported area to see rain. That would work out if you assumed storms don't travel, but they do.

So what the hell is this? As near as I can tell, it's some sort of stupid weather jargon that meteorologists who haven't passed Stats 101 use.

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:02 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Now, if I picture a 50% chance of rain every hour for ten hours, to me, that means the chance of not having any rain for those ten hours is 0.5^10, or 1/1024. So, I'd expect the daily report to have over a 99.9% chance of rain, but it doesn't. It says 50%.

You can only multiply independent probabilities together that way. Coin flips, die rolls, stuff like that. But it turns out that whether it rains at 11 is very closely tied to whether it rains at 12, and they're not giving you the conditional probabilities.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:49 pm

Whatever wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:Now, if I picture a 50% chance of rain every hour for ten hours, to me, that means the chance of not having any rain for those ten hours is 0.5^10, or 1/1024. So, I'd expect the daily report to have over a 99.9% chance of rain, but it doesn't. It says 50%.
You can only multiply independent probabilities together that way. Coin flips, die rolls, stuff like that. But it turns out that whether it rains at 11 is very closely tied to whether it rains at 12, and they're not giving you the conditional probabilities.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Is the idea that there would be a 50% chance that spans that entire ten-hour period, and they just show it hour-by-hour?

That makes more sense, if I'm reading that right.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 6:05 pm

Independent probabilities are different from dependent probabilities.

Coin flips are independent. The result you get on Coin Flip 1 has no bearing on the result you get on Coin Flip 2. Therefore, the probability of getting heads on both coin flips is P(CF1 is Heads) * P(CF2 is Heads) = 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4.

Other probabilities are dependent. The probability that it will rain at 12 is different depending on whether or not it's raining at 11. So the probability that it's raining at both 11 and 12 isn't just P(Raining at 11) * P(Raining at 12). It's P(Raining at 11) * P(Raining at 12, given that it rained at 11). Since the probabilities are dependent, P(Raining at 12) is different from P(Raining at 12, given that it rained at 11).

Meteorologists are just reporting P(Raining at 12).

Therefore, no, the probability that you get no rain the entire span is NOT the product of 1 - P(Raining at X).

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:28 pm

Thanks, guys.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:48 pm

Here's an example: you flip a coin to decide whether to drive to your friend's house. You are 50% likely to go there. Your car is also 50% likely to go there. But the probability of you going there AND your car going there is 50%, not 25%

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Mon Jun 17, 2013 10:25 pm

fectin wrote:Here's an example: you flip a coin to decide whether to drive to your friend's house. You are 50% likely to go there. Your car is also 50% likely to go there. But the probability of you going there AND your car going there is 50%, not 25%

Also, the probability of you going provided your car goes is 100%, and vice versa. That's conditional probability.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Jun 18, 2013 1:08 pm

Yeah, now that I think about it, while I have seen it start and stop raining multiple times in a day, it doesn't happen that often, and almost never five times a day.