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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Lower Bound on the Length of the Shortest Superpermutation aka “The Haruhi Problem” by Anonymous

    Video explaining the problem and solution

    tl;dr if you have the numbers 1 and 2 you can make two permutations with them: 12 and 21. You can also make a “Superpermutation” with something like 1221 which is a sequence that contains all permutations of 1 and 2. A shorter sequence would be 121 or 212. Finding the shortest sequence that contains all permutations of any given set of numbers was an unsolved math problem. Someone posted on 4chan’s anime board asking for the most efficient way to watch every permutation of “the endless 8”, which are 8 nearly identical epsiodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Anime nerds pride themselves on watching these episodes over and over. Someone posted a sequence with a math proof for why it is the shortest. In essence, they posted the shortest superpermutation for a set of 8. The method can be used on any sized set and doesn’t just apply to sets of 8.












  • I was a funeral director in Ontario, Canada. The law here is that the contract you sign with the crematorium will have a cremation number which will be stamped into a metal disk and that disk will be placed with the remains. After cremation, the disk will be in the cremated remains. People who receive the cremated remains can check that the number on the disk matches the number on the contract they signed.

    This system stops honest mistakes but nothing stops people from intentionally swapping disks. Say a funeral home worker is filling urns with a batch of cremated remains they recieved from the crematorium. They accidentally put remains A into the urn for family B and remains B into the urn for family A. The worker should swap the remains…but swaping the disks is easier. Most people I’ve worked with would do the right thing but the system still relies on people being honest.






  • I almost had never seen people mocking smokers for example or even people who are addicted to drugs, while it’s normalized to mock fat people

    I feel this is because things like smoking, drinking, and drug use are all immediately recognized as addictions people can struggle to overcome, but the same isn’t true for over eating. Even anorexia is clearly thought of as an eating disorder, but do obese people have an eating disorder? I’d say they do. I think the only reason it’s not thought of as a disorder is because it’s so common.