Monday, September 26, 2005

9/26/05 Ten Worst Tech Products Ever

CNet.com lists its Top Ten Worst Tech Products Ever. Furby made the list. I kinda liked Furby.

What's in a label? MSN explores the meaning behind food labels. Free Range? "Free-range—on eggs, chicken and beef; defined by the USDA only for poultry, not eggs or beef. Label implies that the bird spent its days freely roaming the countryside, when legally it means only that the bird was given access to the outside for as little as five minutes each day, and not that it actually did go out."

My dad sends a link to Chat Abbreviations. I would've guessed he wouldn't know all about these, BWTHDIK.

The 2005 Rock Paper Scissors World Championships are right around the corner. Are you curious what kind of RPS player you are? I thought you might be. Also, check out Team Czech Republic.

A few great minds are working on the answer to yesterday's poker problem. Everyone I've spoken to has agreed that the total number of unique flops are 22,100. That is calculated as 52 C 3. So, in a 52 card deck, the equation is (52*51*50)/(3!). So, 22,100 flops. The reason you divide by six is a flop of 2 of clubs, Queen of hearts and 10 of spades can come off 6 ways:

2c, Qh, 10s
2c, 10s, Qh
Qh, 10s, 2c
Qh, 2c, 10s
10s, 2c, Qh
10s, Qh, 2c

Part 2 of the question - How many flops would you need to see in order to see all 22,100 combinations? This guy I work with wrote a little program - He set up a random number generator for all number between 1 and 22,100. Each iteration, the program would check if at least one number had never appeared. If so, it would iterate again. This continued until iteration number 302,604. We'll do more trials tomorrow, I'm sure. Still no formula, but we're making progress.

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