Things you don't need to know...

This is my message number 3000.

pibbur who, given this nice round number oppf posts, wonders if he should stop posting now, ... for a while ... eh ... Probably not (unless there are lots of protests)
 
Dr. Pibbur? or if he's dieting...
Diet Dr. Pibbur
 
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I think it would be a shame if the Pibbur stopped posting on the basis of arbitrary numerology.
 
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the_moon_and_the_great_wall.png


pibbur who can't see most things visible from space where he resides
 
Look out for the fluff!
Over the last five to 10 million years, the Solar System has been moving through the lower density region of interstellar gas of the Local Bubble. As a result, Earth and its lifeforms have avoided dangerous flows of cosmic radiation and gas. Astronomers, however, have discovered a denser cloud of interstellar gas about 25 ly (7.7 pc) in diameter called the "Local Fluff" (or "Local Interstellar Cloud") that is moving towards the Solar System. Stretched out towards Constellation Cygnus, the stellar winds of young stars in a star-forming region of the Scorpius-Centaurus Association near the Aquila Rift (a high-density molecular cloud) have been blowing the Local Fluff so that its denser parts may reach Sol's heliosphere in around 50,000 years (Straizys et al, 2003).

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/chimney.htm
 
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A thing you don't need to know : The official variations of Euro currencies : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/8/80/Euro-Kursmünzen1999-2017.png

More here : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromünzen

Current German special 2 Euro backsides : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Euromünzen#2-Euro-Gedenkmünzen

Right now I'm looking for where this Spanish coin depicting Don Quijote comes from … I need to buy that book …
Edit : Found it ! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanische_Euromünzen#2-Euro-Gedenkmünzen

Another, better list, sorted per year : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Euro-Gedenkmünzen
 
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Not sure if this is the right thread, but…yeah…you really don't need to know the following thing:

Cliffhanger productions founder is skeptical about diesel promises of german car industry. ^^

Really nothing newsworthy, but it was somewhat fun to see Jan Wagner of Cliffhanger productions in "ZDF Heutejournal" (27.12.2017) in German TV as random dude who wants to buy a car. ^^
Was thinking like "…wait…don't I know this guy?" ^^
Wagner.JPG
 
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@DrThuis
@pibbur who;
@crpgnut;

regarding the three children census problem from GG's thread
actual spoiler
So I looked it up and although there are multiple answers, the accepted solution lies in the two solutions that add up to 14. Once the home owner says the oldest child has the measles the census taker is able to use that to eliminate one of the duplicates.

Ok, it took me awhile to realize that the census taker knows the number on the gate. We do not, and my confusion was only using the answers I knew, and not the fact that the census taker has a known value I do not.
 
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Now here is a Christmas jumper worth having!

d3a4c70710341b16c681b87f576a3517.jpg
 
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Congratulations to the ozzies for pwning England in some sort of cricket event.

Ashes, huh?

pibbur who, given the unimportance (?) of this, has already forgotten what he just wrote. Ashes, huh? Ashes?
 
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Not too long ago, in a galaxy not too far away, you could buy mcnuggets in three different packages with 6, 9 or 20 of said delicacies. Which was fine if you wanted 6 nuggets, or 9. Or 12 or 15 …But what if you wanted 7, or 8 or 11? Well, unless you threw away (or ate) a couple of the things, you were out of luck.

Which of course raises the very interesting question: What is the largest number of nuggets you cannot get, buying complete mcnugget packages and not discard/eat a single nugget? The answer is 43.

Let's see how we know that.

First, let's prove that you can't get 43.
  1. Any combination of 9- and 6-packs must be divisible by 3. 43 is not.
  2. Buying a 20 pack does not help, because 43-20=23 which is also not divisible by 3.
  3. Buying 2 20-packs leaves 3, which is divisible by 3, but there's no 3-package.

Second let's show that 43 is the largest such number. We observe:
  1. 44=4*6 + 20
  2. 45=5*9
  3. 46=2*20+6
  4. 47=20+3*9
  5. 48=8*6
  6. 49=2*20+9
Any number larger than 49 can be achieved by adding a multiple of 6 to one of the above mentioned numbers.

QED.

This is the socalled McNugget number, which is special case of the Frobenius number, which is the largest amount of something you can get using a set of fixed size "packages" (also coins and things like that).

Next question: Will there always be a largest unobtainable number. The answer is no. Just replace the nine-pack with say a 10-pack. Then you can't get any odd-number of nuggets.

pibbur who comes in only 1 package size.
 
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https://www.ualberta.ca/science/science-news/2018/january/ai-used-to-decipher-ancient-manuscript

The mysterious text in the 15th century Voynich manuscript has plagued historians and cryptographers since its discovery in the 19th century. This ancient mystery made its way to the artificial intelligence community, where computing science professor Greg Kondrak was keen to lend his expertise in natural language processing to the search.

Kondrak and his graduate student Bradley Hauer set out to use computers for decoding the ambiguities in human language using the Voynich manuscript as a case study. Their first step was to address the language of origin, which is exquisitely enciphered on hundreds of delicate vellum pages with accompanying illustrations.

Kondrak and Hauer used samples of 400 different languages from the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” to systematically identify the language. The scientists initially hypothesized that the Voynich manuscript was written in Arabic. After running their algorithms, it turned out that the most likely language was Hebrew.

You don't need to know that till today I believed so called Voynich manuscript is nothing but a fraud created to earn some cash, although it's vivid detail suggests too much work for making just an "encoded book" fake.
 
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