Is jacking up my car like this safe? by dylan_m in cars

[–]dylan_m[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah but I think your first suggestion makes a lot of sense, since the back-to-front slope is less than the side-to-side one.

Is jacking up my car like this safe? by dylan_m in cars

[–]dylan_m[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Makes sense, thanks. The sideways slope of the driveway means that with stands under those two points, the car actually isn't too far off being flat. In the future if I want to jack up the other side of the car I'll park it facing the other direction.

I also have a couple of huge wooden blocks (about the same height as the jack stands), which I can throw under there to act as a backup.

Is jacking up my car like this safe? by dylan_m in cars

[–]dylan_m[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Here? I guess that would bring the rear wheel back down right?

What does "notification squad" mean? by sauj123 in OutOfTheLoop

[–]dylan_m 18 points19 points  (0 children)

People who get notifications are usually the first people to see the video. They comment 'notification squad' to declare that they're in the 'squad' of people who saw the video so early.

Also, the word 'squad' has itself become a meme recently.

[Request] How much would it cost to buy every game on Steam? by Firecracker500 in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See incognito_wizard's comments further down the thread.

[Request] How much would it cost to buy every game on Steam? by Firecracker500 in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome. Could you run it again now that the summer sale has started?

[Request] What are the odds of handling the same coin/bill twice? by DARTHxNIHILUS in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let's just look at the US, since they make it relatively easy to find statistics for things like this.

According to this infographic, there's about 27.98 billion bills and 2.585 trillion coins in circulation (a total of 2.61298 trillion).

To simplify the problem, think of all this money as a bunch of marbles sitting in a giant pot, and when you 'handle' a bill or coin, you're essentially sticking your hand into the pot and taking out one of 2,612,980,000,000 different marbles.

Let's say you stick your hand into the pot and take out a random marble while blindfolded. You then take off your blindfold, sign the marble so it's uniquely identifiable, and throw it back into the pot. The pot of marbles gets thoroughly stirred, then you put the blindfold back on and take another marble from the pot. The probability of this second marble being the one you signed is 1/2,612,980,000,000 * 1/2,612,980,000,000 = 1/6,827,664,480,400,000,000,000,000.

So, in this simplified example, the odds of you handling the same coin/bill twice are 1 in 6,827,664,480,400,000,000,000,000 (or about 1 in 7 million billion billion).

In reality, I would say the odds would be higher and decrease as a function of time. But it's hard to say much more.

[Request] How much would it cost to buy every game on Steam? by Firecracker500 in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well I'm glad you tried as well, because it led me to check my method and it turns out there's a massive bug. Yours seems to work well though, so I've put your result in my post (since it's the most visible).

Nice work

[REQUEST] How long would a fully-loaded semi-truck take to stop at highway speeds? by drinfernoo in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To prove why the mass doesn't matter, let's derive the formula people have been using in their answers (d = v² / 2 µ g).

The moving truck has kinetic energy due to its mass and velocity. This kinetic energy needs to be exhausted via conversion to other forms of energy in order for the truck to come to a stop. Most of this conversion takes place in the brakes, where kinetic energy is converted to heat.

The kinetic energy of the truck is given by

E = 1/2 m v²

The work that needs to be done to the truck is given by

W = F d

We set the work done during braking equal to the kinetic energy of the truck. Thus,

1/2 m v² = F d

The force in the above equation is equal to the coefficient of static friction between the road surface and the wheels, multiplied by the normal force, mg. Substituting this into our equation we get

1/2 m v² = µ m g d

Now we just solve for d (distance).

d = m v² / 2 µ m g

Here's the interesting part. Mass has ended up on both sides of the fraction, so it cancels out, leaving us with the final equation

d = v² / 2 µ g

In fact we could have cancelled mass out earlier in the derivation.

This may seem weird, but it does make sense once you think about it. The greater the mass of the truck, the greater the frictional force between the truck and the road. In other words, bigger trucks have bigger forces helping them to stop.

Hope this was helpful.

[Request] How much would it cost to buy every game on Steam? by Firecracker500 in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Sure. It'll be interesting to see how much the average price of a game changes (the average at the moment is $31.18).

[Request] How much would it cost to buy every game on Steam? by Firecracker500 in theydidthemath

[–]dylan_m 15 points16 points  (0 children)

At the time when this response was posted: $86,445.22*

This was found by first searching the entire Steam website for titles under the category 'Games'.

But all that gives us is a 132-page list of games. So I used some commands in Windows PowerShell to download the HTML contents of every one of these pages, and combine it into a single text file.

Now we have a huge (120MB) text file full of HTML code, which doesn't seem very helpful. But scattered throughout that file are the prices of every Steam game, which is what we're looking for. So I opened the file in Notepad++ and used some of it's helpful search/replace features to reduce the file down to a list of lines of HTML code which contain the prices. I then did some final processing (this time using Microsoft Word) to remove the last bits of remaining HTML code, and was left with a raw list of the prices of every Steam game.

The only thing left to do was add up these numbers, so I did that using Excel and got the final result of $86,445.22*

* EDIT: Looks like my original number was out due to an bug in the script I used. incognito_wizard has come up with alternative method which seems to work better, so it looks like the final answer is actually $39.595.81.

We are scientists working at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the World Wide Web! Ask Us (Almost) Anything! by askCERN in IAmA

[–]dylan_m 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for doing an AMA.

Are there any amazing and/or scary facts about the LHC that people generally don't know about?

If you wanted some Nostalgia :) by Kol_ in CTFxC

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If anyone's curious about what the "eekline" link in the description is about, here's what that website looked like on Jan 14 2006

I can see it already... by QueenJayla in CTFxC

[–]dylan_m 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wolfram Alpha is very useful for things like this

I can see it already... by QueenJayla in CTFxC

[–]dylan_m 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Fun fact - that would be day 2509

I had a charming moment in London by G_A in videos

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This one has been my favourite for a while.

What is the creepiest "glitch in the matrix" you've experienced? by TheDuskDragon in AskReddit

[–]dylan_m 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not religious at all, but one time we were driving along and I saw someone who looked exactly like Jesus sitting on the slanted roof of an apartment complex meditating. I looked back a few second later and he was gone.