#nerd sniping

[sudo-trans--pony]

With a sufficiently bright enough light and lucky timing, could a camera take a picture in a room the instant it's light sources turn off and capture only bounce lighting? You can simulate no primary emission in Blender but surely this is possible.

And also, how bright would that light need to be to have a reliable enough delay for us to consistently have a circuit turn it off and take the photo consistently?

[yesterdays-xkcd]

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

Nerd Sniping [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Black Hat is sitting on a chair, Cueball is standing next to him. Across the street, another Guy is coming from a building walking towards the pedestrian crossing across from Black Hat.] Black Hat: There's a certain type of brain that's easily disabled. Black Hat: If you show it an interesting problem, it involuntarily drops everything else to work on it.

[The Guy across the street is about to enter a crosswalk, which is seen from right behind Black Hat in his chair, holding onto the sign, which is still pointing down. Cueball is looking on.] Black Hat: This has led me to invent a new sport: Nerd Sniping. Black Hat: See that physicist crossing the road?

[Black Hat lifts up the sign when the physicist is in the middle of the street, halfway across the pedestrian crossing.] Black Hat: Hey!

[A close-up of Black Hat's sign is shown in a frameless panel. There is text above and below an image of a four-by-five grid of nodes with resistors (shown as wiggly lines) between every node and also continuing away from the 16 outer nodes. A total of 5 columns with 5 and 4 rows with 6 resistors for a total of 20 nodes and 49 resistors. Two nodes, a knight's move apart, are marked with red circles in the 3rd row 2nd column and the 2nd row 4th column.] Sign: On this infinite grid of ideal one-ohm resistors, Sign: what's the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes?

[The Physicist has stopped pondering the questions, a hand to his chin.] Physicist: It's... Hmm. Interesting. Maybe if you start with... No, wait. Hmm... You could—

[In another frameless panel, a ten-wheeled truck is zooming past from the right, apparently going through the spot where the physicist just stood.] Truck: Foooom

[Cueball looks down on Black Hat, who looks back up from his chair at the curb, again holding the sign down. He lifts one hand up while replying.] Cueball: I will have no part in this. Black Hat: C'mon, make a sign. It's fun! Physicists are two points, mathematicians three.

[mrcatfishing]

Magic the Gathering Quiz: These four cards have something in common, and there's only one other magic card that shares that quality with the rest of them. What makes these cards special, and what card completes the set?

[bisquid]

This is extremely cruel

[curiosamathematica]

Nerd sniping, by XKCD.

It could be that the author was inspired by a story from John H. Conway. According to Conway, Coxeter once nearly succeeded in murdering him. The murder weapon was a mathematical problem! Coxeter once came to Cambridge, gave a lecture, and ended with an open question in group theory. Conway left the lecture room thinking. Suddenly the idea hit him—while in the middle of the road. Conway stopped and a large truck ran into him, bruising him considerably. He limped back to the lecture room after the accident and joked that Coxeter had calculated the difficulty of the problem so precisely that he would get the solution just in the middle of the road. Eventually, Conway’s solution became a joint paper, and ever since, he’s called that theorem the murder weapon.

[agrlsname]

Have you heard of the concept nerd sniping? When you participate in a conversation and don’t pay attention to your surroundings at all, but then someone across the room says a word that has to do with your nerd interests, like “violin” if you’re a musician, and you immediately loose track of what you’re doing and can’t help but trying to hear what they’re talking about. The nerd sniping phenomenon makes it very frustrating being friends with a true nerd, but anyway. I just got nerd sniped with the word “elephant”. Wow, new levels of obsession.

[nyansequitur]

I recently got hit by an S tier nerd sniping image. I spent a good hour on it before giving up and googling it to find out it's an unsolved problem of mathematics.

it's got similar vibes to the Collatz conjecture where it seems so simple on the surface and it seems pretty apparently solvable.

[compiler-specific]

are there enough atoms in the universe to make enough RAM to require a 1024 bit address space? what's the highest value of n such that 2 to the power of n bits is the number needed to address the most RAM that could possibly be built in the observable universe?