Recent content by gnome

Still alive & well. I've inspected the strainers at every faucet and showerhead and found nothing but a little of the usual grit here and there. Also checked all toilet tanks & found nothing concerning. So I have a new hypothesis which I will assume true unless something arises to prove...

Unfortunately I discovered it shortly before going away for the weekend. I was reluctant to leave it lying around and disposed of it in the trash. But later this week I will remove and check all the faucet aerators and see if I can flush any more of this stuff out of any of the pipes. I'll...

OK, probably not extraterrestrial, but it did pique your interest. :) After my dishwasher recently stopped working I learned that it has a small filter/strainer located just before the water inlet valve so I disconnected the water supply and found this slimy wormlike mass completely clogging...

I wouldn't worry too much yet. I started a thread yesterday (in Materials & Chem. Eng.) on "removing a screw". PF's "artificially intelligent" search engine offered these as "Similar threads" (I especially like the third one): http://www.geocities.com/velocide/similar.png

The main problem, as I see it, is where will you put the infinite-length tape?

OK, thanks, that's a helpful analogy. Applying simple geometry to it convinces me that even though the individual links expand in all directions, the distances between their centers increases sufficiently so that the inside diameter of the circle expands by the same ratio. Then apparently...

No, they don't seem to be stainless. They're 5/16, 18tpi, 3/4 in. flathead screws, marked with letters 'Y' 'D' on the head. And the loctite was supposed to be the non-permanent type, but who knows what they used in the factory. So, ignoring the screws for the moment, you're saying that the...

OK, not the usual kind of question posed here, but not entirely off-topic either. Last weekend I was trying to remove a couple of socket cap screws (recessed hexagonal drive) that were installed with lok-tite (thanks to the lawyers). After multiple applications of heat from a propane torch...

Thanks, that's good to know. But then, what I quoted above seems to be an abuse of that notation. T is clearly a parameter, but wouldn't you consider t_k (elapsed time) a variable?

I don't know what you mean by P(a), P(b), P(ab), etc. I'm talking about the probability that an event a will occur within a specified amount of time x, the probability that event b will occur within that amount of time, and the probability that either event (don't care which) will occur within...

Running helps to clear the cobwebs. It's not the joint probability I'm looking for; that would be the probability that both an A-train and a B-train arrive by time x. I guess the probability I want may be called P_{a \cup \, b}(x). But here's what occurred to me. The probability that any...

Suppose I have several exponentially distributed random variables, each of them representing the probability that some particular event occurs within some amount of time. I can't seem to come up with any intuition as to how to combine those density functions (or distribution functions) to...

Given this statement "T^k_{s,i} is exponentially distributed, and the parameter \alpha in the distribution of T^k_{s,i} depends only on the maximum expected surplus S^k_{s,i} of seller i on the length T of the trading period, and on t_k, the time elapsed in the trading period. We write this...

I just remembered that this m is always a positive integer so (1-m) is 0 or negative. The key to this must be here... http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NegativeBinomialSeries.html"

The next-to-last step in the proof on pg 1 of this article http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0006-3444%28194511%2933%3A3%3C222%3AOAMOEF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Whttp://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0006-3444%28194511%2933%3A3%3C222%3AOAMOEF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W makes this substitution \sum_{r=0}^\infty...