@Asaf: Quick! There's an A-of-C question on the front page! :)

runs quickly to the front page!

Hm. There's too much category talk in that question for me.

And it's late.

I guess I'll be going to sleep now. Cheerio.

deleted

@tb Removing a message is more effective, since right now I can access the history and see what you wrote in that message :P

Also, it is not needed, since if x not in A then at some point it will have f_k(x)=1

@Asaf: yeah, but I can't :) my browser doesn't let me (or I'm not quick enough)

Interesting.

@robjohn: iOS 5 is out. I'm gonna stay up and upgrade :D

that popup shows up only for a fraction of a second

have fun :)

Of course.

@AsafKaragila I probably won't :-)

Are you going to upgrade your iTunes at least?

the last major upgrade was a disaster, so I would wait a few weeks, at least until 5.1 is out

You guys are bumming me out.

Fine. I'll update only iTunes for now.

never trust a .0 version

I always have this fluke when upgrade the kernel. I give it a couple of days until very minor recompiled versions appear, and usually the day after I upgrade and reboot there's a new version too.

@tb I agree. When I worked at Apple, I was expected to use the latest versions as a frontline user.

Now I wait and watch.

@AsafKaragila: I see that Mike Spivey came up with a combinatoric proof of the identity . Impressive.

when I upgraded to 4.0 it was incredible: all the audio files just doubled up in size. and my good old 3G never was as fast as it was before

I only have movies on my iPhone. Music goes on my iPod.

iPod plugs into better sound systems, like my car. iPhone has a better screen.

I never had an iPod. I always had my good old DiscMan with me until it went kaput, then I thought, I might as well give in and try out these "new" MP3s.

@robjohn ?

Yeah. It uses another favorite of mine, inclusion-exclusion.

I used to have a DiscMan, then a MiniDisc, then a DiscMan with mp3 support, then an mp3 player which died in an unfortunate accident when someone stepped on my jacket in some party (the jacket was on the floor and I was asleep somewhere...)

I spent the next few years without music, which was nice I have to admit.

Music keeps me sane while I am driving.

I don't have a driver's license.

Then you won't go insane while driving without music :-o

Plus, I am already insane :-D

Ack. My dog is staring at me in a very uncomfortable way. I need to take her for a walk.

You enjoy, I'm gonna hit the hay soon.

Seeing how I won't be upgrading my iOS any time soon. :P

Dream of large women... (Princess Bride)

I am about 1/10th of Andre the Giant.

And I don't see you as Robin Hood in tights any time soon.

@robjohn: enjoy your walk, have a nice day, @Asaf, I'll call it a day. See you around!

@anon: That NSA comment made me spit coffee. Thanks for the laugh!

Alternatively I was going to quote Will Hunting, but decided to go simpler. D'you hear about the Thomas Drake / Thinthread fiasco?

@Gortaur That time I said it in dollars. I redid it in Euros so t.b. wouldn't have to do the arithmetic... ;)

@anon: Could you refresh me? After breaking DES and those cracked DVDs RIAA was going mad over, I'm not up to date with crypto "scandals"...

Whoops, sorry it was AACS...

Drake was a researcher in NSA, he devised a system called thinthread to filter through the crapillion bytes of information they get and target potential threats. It was cheap and had built-in features to protect civil liberties. They instead opted to go for a competing system that was inefficient and basically spied on Americans without restriction. He first tried to bring it to attention to legit gov overseeing outlets but no bones, so he anonymously leaked *un*classified info to journalists.

fast forward a bit and the DOJ tried to slap Espionage on him, hung it over his head for years in the courts and at the last second admitted they had 0 case and he got off with a misdemeanor or something trivial

(so basically harassment for whistleblowing, to take a partisan but imo accurate summary)

Ech. Well ethics gets bent a lot for espionage...

Really I think it was ultimately just to send a message that if you leak shit you'll get hammered, ethics or no ethics.

But the NSA itself I pretty neutral towards

*I'm

Sure. Look at Assange's happy life, for instance...

(Tiny tip: you can edit your replies within a limited time period by pressing the up arrow... ;) )

Or Manning. (Assange as a person is difficult to sympathize with, but he's brilliant)

too lazy to edit :)

I know Assange is an ass, but he did provide a service. That's a bit redeeming I reckon.

@anon Now that I think about it, I've never seen a whistleblower that still managed an easy life after their fateful decision.

par for the course I suppose.

Ellsberg got off eventually because of prosecution errors of some sort, but during the controversy he was in deep

I heard they raided his psychologists office and intended to steal dirt on him (even fetish stuff lol)

Eh, I'm betting he still has to look over his shoulder even today... that's not an enviable situation.

anyway, anonymous leakers if they're careful don't get consequences, so that's a plus with modern technology

true

Tor helps.

I haven't used that in awhile, I never got round to looking at the plausibility of traffic getting sniffed

The only snag is that way too many sites today have Ajax and Flash, and Tor doesn't account for that.

as long as you do one-time off-location type things on the network (and spoof mac etc) you wont get caught

also, every browser has a sort of signature with all of the tiny details which is amenable to 'fingerprinting' if one isn't careful...

Oh yeah, that too. I forgot that...

try it out: panopticlick.eff.org

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at my uniqueness result; I did way too many tweaks... :D

I'm fussy that way.

Mine's also unique, but I have other browsers for other occasions..

On the other hand, for a few situations, I've done "use an internet cafe far away from where you live"...

or some wifi in a random neighborhood, I've done that before. (I think it's technically illegal when it's secure wifi...)

(of course, I needed to check that they weren't using the same ISP I have... :D )

lol

hello all

sup

Hi rob.

just got back from doing some chores and walking the dog

anon, your approach might work; there are too many access points named linksys in not a few nearby locations... :D

seeing if I can answer some questions badly and get more downvotes.

anything interesting happen here recently?

I have pants on.

oh, I don't think you were here for that conversation, nvm then...

I was.

=)) That seriously was a TMI bit there, dude. :D

and thank heavens.

meh

@J.M.: regarding a conversation yesterday.

@rob: which?

but taken out of context, it would be TMI

a conversation regarding dress code for MSE

check the starred and therell be a link, eh

Gee, I get stuck at work, and I both get a huge backlog of questions and chat replies... :D

math.SE really is taking off; back then I can skip a day, and I can still go through all the stuff I missed in 20, 30 minutes tops.

The chat has been chatty.

though I don't think we'll ever reach the same level as SO. Questions there get entombed in minutes.

Are there more people there?

@robjohn I know, right? Now if this baby supported Mathjax, then we're all set for lectures...

Sure. There are more programmers than mathematicians and math enthusiasts... :D

I really wish they would move Mathjax here.

that would be awesome. J.M. I didn't mention this before, but even 4chan has mathjax for tex markup, which really surprised me.

welcome back yunone!

Is it really hard to add that here?

I don't know. Maybe we should bug meta.SO ...

@anon: I'm sort of convinced moot had a fit of temporary insanity... :D

It's rendered locally, so it shouldn't be a drain on the server, but it might cause the chat to lag locally.

Does your computer start to really lag when editing an answer of any decent length?

Hmm, yeah, I think I see what you mean. Everytime a new reply pops up, the renders trigger anew. That can be a mess for a rapid-fire lecture.

Maybe we should elect to make a statement about it exactly once a day, and "petitionize" it by getting people to star them. Eventually we'll have a backlog of starred "give us mathjax!" comments and they might do something...

Does someone else actually read the starred things?

They look kinda prominent on the right panel, so I would think they'd at least be noticed.

Hey @robjohn, thanks for your help in answering my question earlier.

I look them over occasionally

@robjohn Seen this? :D

@yunone all I did was confound Asaf. I think he found a way around my concerns.

Nonetheless it led to a fixed up proof, so that's good.

Good then :-)

@JM interesting. I hadn't seen it.

If it still goes slow for you, maybe you can bump that thread...

On my part, it's not terribly slow, but my CPU activity does spike when I'm editing...

At this point I just write up questions and answers in a .txt file and copy and paste.

each character causes a redraw, and so the characters appear very slowly. Only rarely do multiple characters render at once. I have to edit off line and paste it in.

I thought maybe there was something wiggy with the browser's cache, so I restarted the browser, and it was still annoying.

@yunone that is about the only way I can do a long answer.

It's really too bad, back when they didn't have the instant render, I don't recall any problems.

Yeah, I think I'd prefer a "render" button I could press to a "render after every character you change"

Feature request time!

But I doubt it would be acted upon.

@JM yeah, and that would fix the problem where rendering freezes until I refresh the screen

Actually, I think somebody already asked for it in meta a while back. I just can't seem to find the thread...

Even turning the rendering off still seems to render, but in the background where you can't see.

It may save the blitting time, but not the background calculation time.

I do the "edit offline" bit now, (SciTE's nice), but I sometimes forget and I feel the effort spent is wasted when I'm typing any of array, align, cases, and those matrix bits...

I'm at \begin{ and in the midst of typing out entries, and all that rendering is for naught up until I type \end{

I preview stuff on the Online LaTeX Equation Editor

I used it back when I couldn't remember everything :) I still use it when I forget syntax.

I usually type \begin{...} \end{...} first so that the rendering is done immediately

Hmm, I suppose I could change my habits... :)

also \left[\right]

etc

That way, I don't lose track of how many things I need to close

Oh yeah, doubly so when I use align for splitting equations. I'm in the midst of inserting \right. and it renders uselessly until I finish with \left.

@robjohn I guess you're right. What I had been doing was maintain a counter in my head that increments with [, (, \left and decrements with their matches...

If I didn't hit 0, I know I goofed.

that's too much for me, especially in complex stuff

Yeah, I think your way's better. I should try practicing it... :D

I get lost after 1, 2, ... what's next?

I seem to be out of drinking water... I'm stepping out for a while and be back later...

I will go pick up some dinner then, too. My wife is coming home late and so it will be take out.

It's easier to coordinate take out when people are arriving at odd times.

hey, anyone here?

sorta

Hi @anon -- thanks for all your help, btw!

np

I'm wondering if I should move my last question to mathoverflow...

hmm, I didn't even see it. its only got 11 views so you should probably wait

is there a general rule-of-thumb about that...

2 days

allright, makes sense...

i'm not even sure that the answer to it exists... but if it does, someone ought to know it, right? :)

I didn't look it over much but MO should be able to handle it, though it's slower over there

and MS can surprise people sometimes..

well, MS has been very helpful

btw, i really liked your solution to that integral i posted... so... um... pretty. neat trick of taking the limit of the derivative with respect to one of the parameters

something that's never been taught to my by any of my calculus profs...

True, it's a special calc trick, doesn't always get discussed in standard classes

I wouldn't have even tried to solve that question if Ragib didn't post the final answer in the comments. That's what made me realize I could do it.

yeah... i saw that and didn't know what to do with it until I saw your answer

@Bull: I'd actually give it a week tops. There are people who pop up only every other day...

...and once you do post at MO, please link up both questions; people there then won't have to rail at you...

thanks for your help, @JM -- i'll see what happens on MS first. If noone has any idea by the time the weekend rolls around, i'll post the question to MO. And I'll definitely link both questions...

do you think it's wise to post a bounty after two days on MS?

It's kosher, sure. :)

well, let's see what happens... hopefully there is someone out here that has ran into the same problem before and would be able to help

anyway, i'm going to bed

See you. :)

no late-night math for me -- brain hurts

Okay, I've finally managed to read the entire transcript for yesterday. Apparently Asaf has a Pavlovian response to AC questions... :D

Hmm, I think we can circumvent the TeX-less problem...

You can click the "upload..." button, then input http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex? with the TeX-pression you want appended, and then fire away...

good point

Of course, we can't do inline stuff with this...

Anybody heard of the manga called "Liar Game"? Completely one-dimensional characters, but it's about game theory and I really liked it. It's online for free.

What sense of "one-dimensional" are we talking? Stereotypes?

Cliches?

Cardboard cut-out personalities that never change

oh, I didn't realize in a math chat I might be a bit ambiguous calling the characters "completely one-dimensional"...

I know, I'd call the characters in "Lineland" one-dimensional, but they have interesting features... :D

@JM what is Pavlovian?

@Gortaur: You've heard of Ivan Pavlov?

and his dogs?

the one who loved dogs so much?

lmao

Ah, I don't know about "love"... :)

sure, at the secondary school every teacher called us Pavlov's dogs

* rings bell *

but anyway: he did tests on the phenomenon of the conditioned response. :)

aha

quite successfully

To elaborate on anon's last bit: whenever he fed his dogs he rang a bell

later, when he rang bells even without having food on hand, the dogs still salivated.

@JM: I knew this story well - just didn't know that you meant this Pavlov

maybe there is Polish mathematician )

:D Okay, just making sure...

I mean Asaf literally jumps at the mention of AC...

))

Axiom of Choice

ah, sorry, questions

...now that it been brought up: "Does Ivan Pavlov ring a bell to you?" is somewhat funny...

yeah, I thought about it after anon's comment

in Russian we does not have an idiom about a ring, so it's an unknown combination

I meant, about a bell ))

@robjohn Jack S. wrote two bookmarklets with which you can turn on and of MathJaX rendering manually. Maybe they help, I'm extremely happy with them.

@yunone: see above.

@JM that was my suggestion a few days ago

@tb I will take a look

@JM he did indeed jump when someone mentioned an AC question on the front page.

@tb: those bookmarklets work nicely!

@robjohn: glad to hear that! This instant rendering still bugs me since I don't understand what it's really good for: the fraction of time in which my MathJaX or LaTeX source is compilable without errors is quite small compared to the time where it isn't...

The way I enter it, it is usually renderable, but I still hate the lag.

I no longer fear entering long answers :-)

That's great :)

@rob: Must've missed it... :o

At least it gets LaTeX here.

and won't slow things down

@t.b.: Jack's scripts look neat. I've only seen them now; apparently that was around the time of one of my breaks..

@rob: yeah...

I am using Jack's bookmarks. They work great.

@Asaf: It may be a good thing that you didn't upgrade... zdnet.com/blog/btl/…

Hah.

This is why I wait a bit.

t.b.'s "gaming" comment from a few hours ago got me thinking... and it turns out ol' Jeff has covered it...

That bit about the content in most forums is atrociously true

They don't know what they need, but they know what they want.

Yay! I'm going to be in San Francisco from the 28th of October to the 4th of November. Stuff I shouldn't miss?

Your flight.

=))

@JacopoNotarstefano what's going on in SF?

@robjohn: I'm reading about that upgrade bug. It's actually the servers that crashed not allowing some verification process to be completed.

Aha. So once the servers are back up, it might be okay to upgrade. I will still wait for a while.

@AsafKaragila: ah! Touché.

@robjohn: I'm going to be attending the Startup School, then visiting some local startups

Apparently there was this huge rush on the servers.

@Asaf: to be expected on a first day.

Yeah.

@Jacopo: do they help people create startup companies?

Startup School?? That sounds mighty unmathematical!

Yes, there are some lectures and (mostly) opportunities to network. I know, Asaf, I know.

Startup School: suppose we have the empty business...

Then consider the business built around the empty business...

It could be mathematical :-)

latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?$$E_n$$

latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?E_N

latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?En - 1/2

You don't use the $$ on codecogs.

came from this link http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\sum_{k=1}^\infty\frac{1}{k^2}

@Asaf: it seems like LaTeX-preview is now enabled in the suggested edit previews... But... Now you can't see the source anymore :s (at least I couldn't figure out how) Doesn't make the situation much better, I think.

latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\sum_{k=1}^\infty\frac{1}{k^2}

I'm getting annoyed that imgur doesn't accept svg

@anon: a?

(trying to use Wikipedia images in my posts, end up having to prntscrn, paste to paint, edit and save, reupload)

latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\sum_{k=1}^\infty\frac{1}{k^2} would it work?

icic, svg is the image format?

@Gortaur: click "upload" instead of pasting the url

yes, svg is the format oftentimes

viola!

@anon: but most of the time you have .png available as well, no? Can you link to an example?

thanks

@anon: that's weird, I agree - I don't remember last time I used prntscr-paint path

@t.b. Crap, I keep forgetting WP most of the time has png available too

that would make the task slightly less annoying :)

sometimes I remember, sometimes I don't.

also, is it just me or does \mathbf{\omega} look exactly like plain old \omega?

on my laptop they are the same

maybe, I have no enough pixels to see the difference

@anon: use \boldsymbol\omega

@t.b. sweet, thanks

ah, I guess bf doesn't work for greek letters

@tb: does boldsymbol works for latin letters in the same way as mathbf?

@gortaur: nope: $\boldsymbol x$ gives a bold and italic letter, while $\mathbf{x}$ gives a bold letter

ok, thanks a lot. btw, did you change your gravatar?

no, I haven't entered an email address in my bio, so my gravatar depends on my IP address. My provider changes it every 12 hours or so, hence I'm looking differently from time to time :)

I like the current one, looks green :)

yeah, it's nice. there were a few I'd have liked to keep, but the bio field doesn't accept the neither the MD5-hash nor an ip-address...

you could always copy the gravatar and upload it explicitly, of course

aha, I did it with my current one - it randomly appeared when I didn't have e-mail in bio

true. but then i'd have to open a gravatar account if I understand correctly

I thought, you have a wordpress one

you can use it for gravatar login

why would you think so? I'm no blogger and don't intend to become one in the near future. I'm using OpenID. But I'd still need to create an account I'd have no use for otherwise.

I would think so because a lot of people here with rep>10k use to have wp account, so statistically it was more logical to assume that you do have such an account

I quite like this chameleonic behavior, btw.

) that's why you changed your nick?

no, I was trying to reduce PageRanks ranking of my SE user profile... that is, people should find my real stuff when googling for my name

I've got it, the same reason for me, though there are not as many people googling my real name I guess

I don't think that many people Google me either, and there's not much to find...

did you play warcraft, btw, or another inspiration for your nick?

no, I don't play MMO RPG

sorry, just a second

@anon: are you on a UNIX-like system?

If so, the Imagemagick suite has "convert"

nope, windows

Well. I think I have waited long enough.

Time to high five my iOS.

@tb when I was young I read Silmarillion and liked that guy, so I've started using that nick and never had an idea to change it. Do you play?

Man. I just flagged a +7 (cw) answer as "not an answer", and it is seriously not a real answer. A joke at most.

A bad joke.

which one?

Something about prime numbers uses in the industry.

nope. I didn't make it through Silmarillion either...

@tb sorry, didn't understand you

No, I don't play RPGs. And I only read about 150 pages of Silmarillion, the Genealogy didn't seem to stop and wasn't too interesting to me. What did Gortaur do?

@Asaf: but why did you protect that thread?

just playing tricks with guys from Numenor. at least, he was the most smart in that book and quite charismatic for me in Lord of the Rings, I really regretted that he lost - but what can you do: the law of genre

Well, I wanted to use some protection. Also, now when I think about it, the user had 104 reputation anyway... :P

I guess it does not need any protection.

Asaf: I don't think so either. Nothing earth-shattering, to be able to protect, isn't it?

@tb and I also haven't read the whole Silmarillion - just the chapters which appeared interesting (more or less). it was surprising to find there something but the Genealogy, you're right

No, it's not as awesome as mod. tools, or stuff like that.

@tb w.r.t. google search - if I search you by your full name it still gives a link to your MSE profile (4th result)

I get it as 8th result or so.

@Gortaur: I know I know. That damn search engine is too clever! It was on the second page, but now it's up front again...

first page anyway. I guess, google need some time to reindex

@tb even like this. it's a pitty

I will remember this story and never use my name if I have a small doubt I will regret about it

Well, it's not sooo bad, I don't really regret it, but it's slightly annoying. Anyway, there are too many guys having my name, and that's not me (funnier if you read German)

@tb Too bad, I would have asked you to make me a tattoo :-P

unfortunately, I don't

@tb now I have some information how do you look like

Man, upgrading iOS through a virtual box is a pain in the ass.

It keeps disconnecting the USB, and it just sits there until I remember to wonder why it didn't finish yet.

ha, do you know how to upgrade an android phone?

Nope.

Nor I care, as neither myself nor my girlfriend has it.

you should turn it off, press <- button, and while keeping it pressed, plug in USB in the phone

I would imagine, however, that there's a direct linux interface for that.

and it's hard to plug in usb even with two hands

I can assure you that whatever requires some sort of mounting is a pain in the ass on my box.

But that's life using SLiM and awesome.

good luck with the update, I'll go take a look on some dreams

Thanks. It's nearly finished.

Huhu, done.

@Gortaur As I said, that's not me.

@tb I know. more precisely, how you don't look like

Oh crap...

that is also an information about your look, isn't it

It forgot all the wifi nets.

@AsafKaragila I knew

when you told 'nearly finished' I had an idea to ask you to spit 3 times

Oh good. I can just hit restore and get all the info back.

Phew.

but maybe that superstition does not work for you

I am not a superstitious man.

even with black cats?

I love black cats.

stairways?

To heaven?

and meteorits?

Just nice to watch.

the last one is very bad (and fast) luck

Which last one?

hmmm, meteor?

one Russian merchant saw it in near Tungus - and you know, that was a bad luck indeed

anyway, my mind now is twisted enough to see dreams, see ya

Heh.

Night.

hereabouts one says that you should cross the fingers and wish something whenever you see a falling star. But don't tell anyone, else it won't be fulfilled. See ya, @Gortaur 'night

I only ask for things that happened already.

bleh, so annoying. this guy wrote a week ago "Why don't you put your solution as an answer? I'd like to maintain my 100% accept rate : )" so I work out a full answer, no response, nothing. And his rate is down to 82%

And I'm done!

done what? updating?

Yes.

congrats, good luck!

OH CRAP.

I hate that!!!

They deleted all my music again.

you can upload it over night, can't you?

Of course.

At least the applications are being restored from backup now.

I just hate "re-selecting" the stuff I want.