Heebie is correct but wrong in the application. Don't waste gas circling the neighborhood. Maybe find a playground if you don't want to sit in the car with impatient kids.
Heebie is incorrect but correct in the application. One should always spend a little gas to circle the neighborhood before a party. Use the time to: scope out potential escape routes, throw eggs at parked cars, and generally make a nuisance of oneself. Impatient kids should be left in the car during the party, as punishment.
I knew a French woman who talked about a man who was so perfectly punctual that he always showed up 5 minutes after the stated time. On the actual time would have been considered early.
Agree with BG's friend: 5 - 10 minutes after the stated time is right.
You can show a bit early if you really need to take a crap.
If anyone arrives early to one of our parties, that's great because they're the icebreaker! But if we're still setting up we may draft them to help. No biggie either way.
What ever happened to being fashionably late?
You are correct, Jammies is wrong. BAM.
All agreed: circle until party time. 5 minutes late is preferred. Unless you're close enough friends to see the last minute shitstorm and help.
I once started a date off on entirely the wrong foot by showing up 10 minutes early. It left a strong impression, and I try not to do that now.
As a host, I don't think there's much difference between 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after the stated start time - either end is likely to have frantic running around.
12.2 That is often true, but the allocation of blame would be different. If the guests showed up 10 minutes early and we were running around trying to get things ready, we would probably be (mildly) annoyed with the guests. If they arrived 10 minutes late, and we still weren't ready, we would blame each other.
12: How many dates are you going on these days?
Wow, I knew all of your mothers failed you because you spend too much time here but I didn't realize to the extent. I feel bad for all of the guests at your parties.
Hey, your daughter wants some jelly toast.
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Stupid n00b question: I kinda want to buy [mylastname].com. Some guy in Korea owns it. The registration expires at the end of the year. Should I just buy it from him? Are there potential pitfalls? Seems fairly straightforward.
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The host knows people can't perfectly time, but the average host will also operate on the assumption that the mean of arrival times will be at least somewhat late, and the distribution right-skewed, so exactly on time is the earliest polite time to arrive.
Jammies is correct. The rest of you should take off your elbow gloves and stop curtsying.
This was an episode of Judge John Hodgman.
17: It is unlikely that the domain registration will actually expire at the end of the year. It will probably get renewed, and, if not, the registrar will hold onto it for about six weeks after that to try to convince the owner to renew, and, as soon as it gets released back on to the market - as in, within seconds - it will get snapped up by a script that re-registers the domain name and points it to a website filled with lame ads.
They will hold onto it for another six-weeks (six weeks is the grace period that they can get away with without paying for the domain), and when it gets released, it will go to someone else doing the same thing, for a few cycles. So, you can't really predict when it will be available again - it probably won't be. If you want it, you need to buy it from the owner.
Agree with BG's friend: 5 - 10 minutes after the stated time is right.
And once everyone has internalized this, including the hosts, it will become 15-20 minutes after the stated time.
Single guy arrives early, helps get the bonfire set up or whatever. Married guy with little kids holds back, so the hosts can finish up their last minute prep without having to entertain. Interesting to see how some of the fellas have made the change and some haven't.
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I'm grading while the kids nap, and I'm TERRIBLY TERRIBLY bored, and none of you are helping. Not a one!
Why do we have so many flies in our house right now? It was never a problem until recently.
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They like jelly on toast?
I'm doing my best here to entertain. And yes, also procrastinating.
27: Hi heebie! There was a "babies and booze" pre-commencement party next door. I am half-lit at 1:40. So that's fun!
Hosts are young couple with kids, get there early to either help or to accustom them to the idea that shit happens and they had better learn to improvise and just fucking well cope with the unplanned. If they can't cope with someone at the door a few minutes early they might as well off themselves right then.
Others? If planning on helping, coordinate with them, otherwise on time to ten minutes late.
Ideally, you'd be a few minutes "late". But in your case, I'd ring the bell and apologize, explaining that you slightly mistimed it because you weren't familiar with the drive. Which is true!
German folk wisdom has the correct answer to this one: "Zu früh ist auch unpünktlich." (Roughly: "Too early is as bad as too late.")
Actually, 33 doesn't say or even imply that too early is as bad as too late; it just says that too early is also a form of not being punctual. It also doesn't help answer the question of what constitutes being "too early". Is five minutes early too early?
It is my opinion that people should arrive at the stated time and this "five minutes after the stated time" is idiocy and decadence.
"this 'five minutes after the stated time' business"
I am at this moment anxious because my chair is throwing a party and everyone with a car says they're driving over an hour late. I am not the hour-late kind of person. I could walk, but it's like 40 minutes on foot. I will be patient, dammit.
Is everyone but you someone with a car?
I think everyone but me has a car, yes. So if I went on time it would just be me and the chair. But I could help get the grill going, put some of these marinating veggies on skewers, etc.
35: it doesn't say it (which is why I indicated that the translation is rough), but it most certainly does imply it. The phrase is commonly used in exactly the circumstances heebie describes.
So if I went on time it would just be me and the chair.
Just like going to the bathroom.
27
I'm grading while the kids nap, and I'm TERRIBLY TERRIBLY bored, and none of you are helping. Not a one!
I recently saw a cute math puzzle in the MIT alumni journal. Is there a decimal integer for which if you take the last digit and move it to the front you get a number twice as large? So for example 214 doesn't work because 421 is not 2*214.
44
Make that a positive decimal integer.
Our alumni journal is mostly about new buildings, old teachers, and who died.
The first number you'll hit that works is 18 digits long.
The new password security rules are too hard.
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So what do we all think of Kitty Pryde?
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Not only is the first solution at 18 digits, but there are multiple solutions with 18 digits.
Discrete math continues to be deeply counterintuitive for me.
If you ask for three times the number, you need 28 digits. At first it was only clear to me that you need no more than 28 digits, but Fermat's little theorem clears things up a bit.
I'm confused by "positive decimal integer." I thought the integers were just defined to be the natural numbers plus the negatives of the non-zero natural numbers. Hence, no decimals.
It occurs to one that the late (chuckle) Douglas Adams had Dirk Gently announce himself with "Pray God I am not too soon!"
54: I think "decimal" just means that it's being expressed in base 10.
I think he was just trying to keep things in base ten when he said decimal.
Decimal here just means written in base 10.
Listen you icebox-state pwner, watch it.
I don't know what decimal means, but in re: 49, I know the actual version of the person that young woman is trying to be. And she has much better taste in music. Although mad props (or whatever the kids have only recently quit saying) for the Yeastie Girls shirt. "And. it's your. Turn. Now. SO YOU SUCK!"
Although Kitty Pryde, the comic book character, was far and away the best character in Excalibur. Written with a depth and solidity that belied her mutant abilities.
Written with a depth and solidity that belied her mutant abilities.
I see what you did there.
I just remembered I should be doing homework for that online Machine Learning class. Funny how utterly irrelevant "deadlines" for "classes" are actually effective for forcing me to tinker with things (like, in this case, learning a bit about Matlab).
49: Better than Dazzler, not as good as Jean Grey.
lambentcactus.com used to be registered to a comedian named Lambint Cactus, who re-directed it to his own site, lambintcactus.com, in case of spelling errors. I was forced to purchase lambentcactus.org. But! One day his registration started to expire an I, as the proud owner of lambentcactus.org began to receive all manner of inducements from domain name vultures who promised to snatch up lambentcactus.com as soon as it became available. One of them had a name-your-price option, and I put in $25. I promptly received an errors message that only bids of $100 or more would be accepted. So I figured I'd let it go. A coupe weeks later I got an offer from the same company to buy lambentcactus.com for $25. That's what I wanted to do in the first place, so I bought it.
That would be a better story if your pseud was "Pen Island."
65: Which class? I was following a Caltech machine learning course, but I got tired of looking things up about perceptrons.
69: It's a Stanford class that's on coursera.org. The assignments so far are about linear and logistic regression and are a little trivial, but at least I have to learn to use Matlab to do them. The latest lectures they've posted are about neural networks, but I haven't watched them yet. I think SVMs are next up after that.
I like the coursera concept, but I can't figure out how it could work for a class that doesn't involve programming assignments, since it's hard to automatically grade anything else.
Have you guys received the memo detailing new masturbation restrictions re: Donald "Duck" Dunn?
27 -
Why flies at this time, I cannot say.
But when the kids wake up, you can put the extension hose and the wand extensions on the vacuum cleaner and make the flies disappear while standing at a distance. Kids of a certain age (and other people who really hate houseflies) find this a satisfying pastime. And once learned, it's a fine solution to the "help help there's a roach/spider/moth/bee/wasp/ugly bug in the house" helplessness suffered by so many of the averse.
Flies at this time like a banana, flies at this fruit like an arrow.
53: Suppose you had a 3-digit solution where the three digit number CAB was twice ABC. Then you could express this as an equation:
100C + 10A + B = 2(100A + 10B + C) = 200A + 20B + 2C. After simplifying, you get 98C=190A + 19B. Since 19 is a factor of the right hand side, it must also be a factor of the left hand side. But 19 is not a factor of 98, nor can it be a factor of C, which is a single digit. So there are no solutions with three digits. Extending this to n digits, you will get a bunch of stuff, all multiples of 19, on the right hand side, so the only possible solutions are those where the left-hand coefficient (after simplification) is a multiple of 19. Which is to say that 10^(n-1)-2 must be a multiple of 19, since that is what the left hand coefficient will be. The first n for which this is true is n=18, 10^17-2=99,999,999,999,999,998=19*5,263,157,894,736,842. So it looks like the solutions are of the form where the moving digit is k, and k times that quotient is a 17-digit number that represents the rest of the digits. So for example, when k=2, 2*5,263,157,894,736,842=10,526,315,789,473,684, so the corresponding solution is: 2*105,263,157,894,736,842=210,526,315,789,473,684, which is the smallest solution. Similar solutions should exist for k=3 to 9.
If they're Indian, for the love of God, go somewhere else and hang out and don't show up until it's a half hour late.