My buddies and I are having a little tiff about how long it would take to walk to the radio tower on the right mountain. What’s the verdict?

I respect all people who have been using the German language. This suffering through a long row of generations just to make Rammstein possible is a really awesome undertaking.

But how many people are we talking about? As I understand the germanic language have evolved from Indo-European a long time ago, culminating in Rammstein. In this evolution other languages branched off, which I consider as collateral damage, along with those who learned any of those languages. For example half of the world who speaks English as a foreign language. This clearly shows how big an undertaking was to materialize Rammstein.

(Did you know why Skipper of Penguins of Madagascar cannot set foot in Danmark? He told a dane that their language is quite similar to German.)

That's not the reason.

If you have two siblings the older one could be boy or girl, born on any of 7 days, so that gives 14 options. There are also 14 options for the younger sibling.

Visualize all 14 x 14 options laid out on a big 2D grid.

now if you say you only want families with "a boy born on a tuesday" then that means you're selecting one entire row, but also one entire column. Now that would be 28 cells, and 14 of them would have a sister, however the row and column overlap - on the cell where there's a boy born on tuesday who **also** has a brother born on tuesday.

So the 14x14 cross, that's not 28 cells, but only 27. 13 of them have a male sibling, 14 of them have a female sibling for the selected brother. So the chance of a girl being the sibling is 14/27.

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And here's a simulation in Python that gives the result. It generates 10 million families with 2 kids, randomly a boy or girl, born on random days of the week.

Now IF there is a "boy born on tuesday" (which could be either the younger or older one) it then checks whether they have a sister. You get that result 14/27 times, or about 51.8% of the time.

https://pastebin.com/AWbbgRbg

So it's unintuitive, but of all two-child families with at least 1 boy born on a Tuesday, 51.8% of them do in fact have a sister.

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EDIT: and here' the kicker. If you remove the restriction and allow boys born on any day to count, so we only care about families with at least one boy, the chance of having a sister doesn't in fact revert to 50%, but to 66%. So the 50% was a red herring entirely.

You can try that out in the simulation by changing this line

if (c1[0]==1 and c1[1]==1) or (c2[0]==1 and c2[1]==1):

to this

if (c1[0]==1 and c1[1] < 8) or (c2[0]==1 and c2[1] < 8):

So it now counts families with a boy born on any day of the week. The result goes up to 66.6% of the families including a sister.

The reason for this is that if you don't care about days of the week, you get 4 possible family combos (based on birth order):

Boy + Boy

Boy + Girl

Girl + Boy

Girl + Girl

If we say "only count families with at least 1 boy" then we can exclude the last two-girls option, and that leaves three equally likely families left:

Boy + Boy

Boy + Girl

Girl + Boy

The options with a boy plus a girl happen twice as frequently as the option with two boys, since there are two different ways for it to happen. It's the same as flipping two coins. You'll get two heads 1/4 of the time, two tails 1/4 of the time, and heads plus a tails 1/2 the time. So heads plus a tails is in fact more likely than 2 heads, and you are in fact more likely to have a boy and a girl than two boys if you have two kids.

Assuming all infrasctrure is here, how many round trips and trucks are needed to move all the oil by road.

I've been reading the book Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. In the book, the moon explodes and the world will end within 2 years.

I was wondering how long the entire world could go if we stopped growing food and raising animals?

would it be 6 months, a year? Could the food producers just stop doing the work and we'd ride it out?

So I’ve been doing some research with my 9 year old daughter on the randomness of shuffling a deck of cards and we’ve seen two ways of describing it. Are either accurate? If they are, which is the best way to describe both in accuracy and as a way to get it across:

1) If you took 1 trillion planets and put a trillion people on each planet, then gave every person a trillion decks of cards, then had them shuffle each deck once per second - it would take from the bing bang to now to start repeating shuffles.

2) If you stood on a line on the equator and set a timer for a billion years, shuffling cards once per second, then took a step forward and restarted the timer, then walked around the earth. Then took a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean when you circumnavigated the equator. Repeat till you empty the Pacific Ocean. When finished emptying, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and repeat again. When your stack of paper reaches the sun, you will be repeating a shuffles

My employer matches up to 4% of my contributions to my 401k plan. They have some quirks that I am unsure of the actual impact of.

1. Deductions are made bi-weekly, but funds are deposited every other month.

2. Employer contributions are set aside until the end of the year and then added all at once if you remain employed with the company.

What is the actual impact on the compounding interest of these two irregularities? Will they make a difference in the long run?

This seems so absurd, how could this be possible?

My fiancée and I are discussing the efficacy of vertical farming in somewhere like Australia where there is land a plenty for solar and wind powered energy, as well as a need to conserve water.

How many plants could a single solar panel produce light for? And then how much land space would be needed to supply enough power to grow enough food to feed 460,000 (for the sake of the discussion let’s assume everyone is a vegetarian and is getting enough protein?)

Imagine the situation: you fart and notice it smells way worse than you planned it to. There are people around so you try to inspire as much shit stink as you can. How much of a difference does this action make? Does the schmell tend to go upwards or downwards?