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8:00 PM
I'm pretty sure Google lies about search result numbers, btw.
 
(Favourite in the sence of how the word can be used or also just by the sound=)
 
@flawr We're about 8,372km apart as the crow flies.
 
Haha, I just like that expression, because in german it is just Luftlinie literally air-line. (Just realizing=)
 
I think a closer equivalent in English might be beeline (it just doesn't sound as good in many places).
 
Why beeline?
 
8:05 PM
It's better than C-line
 
Bees fly in a straight line from the flower(s) they got nectar from back to the hive, and they do so without haste. So they make a beeline to the hive.
 
The bees over here do not fly that straight.
 
It's a shorter scale term. As the crow flies is intended more for long distances.
 
Yeah, here too
 
@flawr Neither do crows :P
 
8:05 PM
Perhaps they are drunk?
 
Probably one of those instances where the meaning changed over time.
 
I do not know about crows, just about Gwääggi (swiss german=)
 
So that's what they're brewing in the hives
Must be honey bourbon
 
That sounds delicuous!
 
It's okay. A little too sweet for my tastes.
 
8:07 PM
Does this actually exist?
 
Yes!
 
....I thought about that, and I'm fairly sure that honey actually cannot ferment. Interesting. I wonder why.
 
I thought honey actually has antibacterial properties?
 
It does
But there's mead, which is made of honey
 
Yeast is a fungus, though.
 
8:08 PM
Oh, I am Jon Snow when it comes to biology.
 
I guess you can ferment honey
Mead (/ˈmiːd/; archaic and dialectal "medd"; from Old English "meodu") is an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops. (Hops act as a preservative and produce a bitter, beer-like flavor.) The alcoholic content of mead may range from about 8% ABV to more than 20%. The defining characteristic of mead is that the majority of the beverage's fermentable sugar is derived from honey. It may be still, carbonated, or naturally sparkling; and it may be dry, semi-sweet, or sweet. Mead is known from many sources of ancient history...
 
I made mead once. It was an interesting project, but totally not worth the smell.
 
Haha
I've made beer. Long, messy process.
 
Huh, apparently you can ferment honey. Interesting.
 
I think you can ferment just about anything with sugar in it.
 
8:10 PM
raids kitchen for sugary things to ferment
 
I why didn't I remember, there is Met (=Mead) at every medieval feast here.
 
Yeah, that's why I was a little confused, because honey is mostly sugar.
 
@Geobits A sugar jar=) How about chocolate?
 
@flawr If you have medieval feasts there it sounds like you might be a bit behind the times. :P
 
But I don't think it would ferment on its own, whereas fruits will (a.k.a. rot). I think it'd more likely just dry up over a long period of time.
 
8:11 PM
Perhaps feast was the wrong expression?
 
@flawr Most chocolate is already fermented IIRC. The jar probably not. Unless it's sugar glass.
 
Confirmed
Chocolate /ˈtʃɒkᵊlət/ is a typically sweet, usually brown, food preparation of Theobroma cacao seeds, roasted and ground, often flavored, as with vanilla. It is made in the form of a liquid, paste, or in a block, or used as a flavoring ingredient in other sweet foods. Cacao has been cultivated by many cultures for at least three millennia in Mesoamerica. The earliest evidence of use traces to the Mokaya (Mexico and Guatemala), with evidence of chocolate beverages dating back to 1900 BC. In fact, the majority of Mesoamerican people made chocolate beverages, including the Maya and Aztecs, who made...
> The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste and must be fermented to develop the flavor.
 
So why is there no alcohol?
I thought fermented = alcohol?
 
> After fermentation, the beans are dried, cleaned, and roasted.
So any alcohol that was produced as part of the fermentation process is probably cleaned away
 
Most bread is fermented, too, but I've rarely gotten drunk from eating a sandwich.
 
8:15 PM
Sometimes I get drunk while eating a sandwich
But it's not because of the sandwich AFAIK
 
@Geobits "Rarely". So it has happened?
 
@BetaDecay The most common vowel in English is ə
 
Whiskey sandwich.
 
Maybe. I'm not sure I'd remember if it did. Hedging my bets here.
 
@flawr So does sugar, in the right concentration. It will kill bacteria by osmosis.
 
8:16 PM
@PeterTaylor Is among upside down vowels only?
 
Vowel sound, not vowel letter.
 
oh
 
@PeterTaylor You could also make a bullet out of sugar and kill bacteria by deformation or so.
 
Make a bullet out of sugar and kill bacteria by taking it out back and shooting it?
 
For those who do not get the reference and for those who just like xkcd: xkcd.com/1217
 
8:18 PM
haha that's a good one. I did not get the reference at first.
 
I'm thinking a sugar bullet might not work out well. Feels similar to the ice bullet thing.
 
Ice bullets?
 
At the least it should shoot sugary powder/mess out of the barrel, I guess.
 
Probably depends on range. At point blank you might not lose it all to ablation.
Although you might need to make it a sabot round.
 
That's cheating :P
 
8:20 PM
Wouldn't it be possible to make a shot gun round that shoots powdered sugar?
 
I suppose so
But it might need the heat from the pellets inside the shell to break the shell
(just guessing)
 
I think you're more likely to end up with your barrel having a fine coat of some caramely substance.
 
0
Q: Numbers for Letters

Zach GatesThere exists a very simple cipher that replaces a letter with it's position in the alphabet. For example, abc would become 1 2 3 in an affine cipher. The Challenge Create a program that can take an input of any combination of characters, and output a space-separated string of integers -26 throu...

 
That'd be a pain to clean.
 
8:24 PM
But when thinking about that: One could make one like a hot glue gun?
 
@Rainbolt hey so about that clock thing... ugh what is wrong with our state
 
Where to start....? ;)
 
@Doorknob ?
 
@Doorknob On the plus side, Obama invited him to the White House.
 
@AlexA. Kid brings homemade clock to school, arrested as terrorist. Something like that.
 
8:27 PM
uh wat
 
@AlexA. Have you not seen... like every single news outlet for the past ~12 hours
 
@AlexA. Yeah, it's unbelievable. There are kids nowadays who know what clocks are??!
3
 
That's the thing on my phone's lockscreen, right?
 
8:29 PM
@Geobits, exactly.
 
I never felt so old as when I had to explain to my kid that the thing on the nightstand in the hotel room was a phone.
 
> ...it looks like a bomb...
I think most people have no idea what a bomb would look like. Me included.
 
@flawr Something like this
 
@Geobits Your kid didn't know that was a phone? D:
I mean people in my class not knowing what the dial tone was made me sad for my generation but...
 
@PeterTaylor I've been wearing a bomb all day long 0.o
=)
I just did some research: You'd need between 140° - 160°C for making caramell and a (my) hotglue gun apparently heats up to about 170°C. I have to try it=)
 
8:37 PM
Caramel gun?
@Doorknob No, I haven't :/
@El'endiaStarman Thanks for the link. I am thoroughly disturbed.
 
@AlexA. Just need to think of a way to get the sugar in there.
I could use a metal pipe of the diameter of those glue rods...
 
Normally you load a hot glue gun with a solid stick of glue and the heat liquifies it, right?
 
and something to push the sugar throu the pipe.
 
You'll have to pack the sugar really hard
 
Yeah, I do not think this is possible.
 
8:40 PM
I thought there were other things in caramel than just sugar though
 
Caramell is per se just melted sugar?
 
Yes.
You can add butter to make fudge or toffee.
 
But if you mean the candy there is usually some cream or butter.
I always wondered what fudge is but never tried to find out. It seems it is something seet, let's look it up=)
 
fun fact: proving that P=NP gives us a concrete algorithm we can run that solves every NP problem in P
 
@orlp Is making fudge NP or P?
 
8:44 PM
@flawr neither, it's O(SO) + D(ELICIOUS)
 
Fudge is a type of Western confectionery, which is usually soft, sweet, and rich. It is made by mixing sugar, butter and milk, heating it to the soft-ball stage at 240 °F (116 °C), and then beating the mixture while it cools so that it acquires a smooth, creamy consistency. The product is sold in a variety of flavors. Fruits, nuts, and candies are sometimes added. == Origins == American-style fudge (containing chocolate) is found in a letter written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She wrote that her schoolmate's cousin made fudge in Baltimore...
> ... then beating the mixture ...
 
I didn't realize that there was such a thing as fudge without chocolate :O
 
Do I have to understand this like beating with a baseball bat?
 
It's not strictly necessary to beat it. I've used this recipe successfully in the past.
 
@PeterTaylor Thanks!
A reason more to buy a microwave.
 
My comment is as far as I can go without spending a while digging into references. I've come across PEGs vaguely before, but I've never studied them properly.
 
@BetaDecay Sure, why would he? He was six, and had never seen phones with cords for either handset or wall.
 
Get him a rotary dial phone for his birthday
 
@orlp Does the proof actually have to be constructive?
 
9:02 PM
@El'endiaStarman that's the beauty
@El'endiaStarman any proof leads to a constructive proof
 
@orlp How interesting. Explain? (A little background: I took an Intro to Algorithms class a few years ago, and learned why a solution in P for any NP problem means that every NP problem has a solution in P. I'm also a mathematician, so I know of multiple proofs of existence that are not constructive proofs.)
 
0
Q: Print a character

RK.The title says it all: Make a program to print an ASCII character of your choosing. The output must be only 1 character. Trailing newline is fine. Try to be creative! DON'T Output to STDERR / workaround STDERR (i.e. 2>&1) Use a standard loophole Scoring Your score is Bytes - Bonuses. Lowes...

 
@El'endiaStarman Correction: a solution in P for any NP-complete problem.
 
@PeterTaylor Yes. I was abbreviating a bit.
 
@El'endiaStarman the explanation is actually fairly simple
let's say you have a problem p for which you can detect it's solution in P time
if P = NP there exists a Turing machine that solves p in polynomial time
 
9:10 PM
Woooah! 5k rep.
 
enumerate all Turing machines - say that the Turing machine that solves p is Turing machine q
 
@Mauris Congrats!
 
then - and this is the crucial step - run every Turing machine with enumeration N < 1 for 1 step
then run every Turing machine with enumeration N < 2 for 1 step
etc...
 
Thanks!
 
9:13 PM
while it might take incredibly long, this diagonalization of the Turing machines eventually will run any Turing machine for any amount of steps needed
even if the Turing machines that come before the one you're interested in do not halt
 
Yeah. You are guaranteed to find a solution for p in finite time. Cool.
 
@El'endiaStarman the crucial part is that finding q does not depend on input n
so while it's an ungodly amount of useless computation you're doing
it's still O(1)
 
Honestly, I don't deserve it. I feel like I just write the easy-to-golf thingies and ignore everything else. ;.;
I'm mostly good at finding the right tools for the job. And then sometimes I write Haskell.
 
@El'endiaStarman to be fair, the mere existence of the diagonalization over Turing machines bothers me
 
Oh, I think I get it. If P = NP is true, then the constructive proof exists and can be found sooner or later. In theory.
 
9:17 PM
@El'endiaStarman no
@El'endiaStarman if P = NP my above construction is the algorithm to solve p
 
ahhhh
It's just a stupidly inefficient algorithm. BUT still polynomial. Okay!
 
@El'endiaStarman the reason the diagonalization bothers me is because this goes beyond P = NP
in general, when the predicate of a solution is O(something), the above construction will be an algorithm that is O(something * best_algo_that_exists)
and O(something * best_algo_that_exists) might be (substantially) lower than O(best_algo_known)
 
9:33 PM
@orlp: So, your issue is that not only does this construction give you an algorithm in P, it gives you the best one? (More or less?)
 
@El'endiaStarman it gives you the best one within a factor of the predicate
 
interesting
 
@El'endiaStarman instead of bruteforcing over the input space you're actually brute forcing over the solver space :D
and the solver space does not become bigger as n does
 
That's pretty clever.
Well, that's because the solver space is infinite, but the diagonalization ensures that a valid solver will be found in finite time.
 
@El'endiaStarman You're a mathematician? In which field?
 
9:49 PM
@Zgarb I wouldn't say that I've specialized in any field. I tend to gravitate towards recreational and/or discrete mathematics though.
I sample a lot of stuff across a great variety of fields.
 
Ok cool. I'm in discrete math and theoretical computer science, currently trying to learn about probability.
 
My past experience with probability is that I've tended to have a good intuition and be good at it, and yet it's not particularly interesting to me.
 
Probability is probably pretty cool.
 
B)
Actually it's fun.
 
9:58 PM
On a different note, some of you guys might like these blog posts I wrote recently: Jaw Tracking Part 0: Introduction and Setup and Part 1: Blob Detection Algorithms.
 
That does look interesting.
 
10:11 PM
@El'endiaStarman the jaw tracking might be interesting for a friend
he plays piano in a wheelchair (can't move his legs), and has been looking for a way to use the pedal
 
Huh, interesting. There will definitely be a lot of applications of LED tracking in general.
 
 
1 hour later…
11:13 PM
(╯ಠ_ಠ)╯︵ ┻━┻
 
11:48 PM
-1
Q: RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) Calculator (Python)

Python GuyMake the shortest fully-functional Reverse Polish Notation calculator you can in Python. (I could do it in one line, about 730 characters :D)

 
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