Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

He really is that stupid.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

We still have time to mess this up!

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

You cannot shame the shameless.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / I Could Use Your Help with Drawing the Raffle Winners

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  10. 10.

    WaterGirl

    I should have said one number to a customer!

    Let’s have a couple more numbers, please

  12. 12.

    WaterGirl

    Okay, we have our 7 numbers.

    Lots of sevens in the answers.  Power of suggestion since I asked for 7 numbers?

    Now I will go see which BJ peeps match up with those numbers.

    Be right back.

  15. 15.

    dlw32b

    FYI, you could bring up Excel or google sheets and insert

    =randbetween(20,155)

    and do that for 7 cells.

  16. 16.

    WaterGirl

    @dlw32b: I used randarray to assign ID numbers to each raffle tickets.

    Then I moved a copy of the spreadsheet to Dropbox where it will have a date-time stamp from before I asked for numbers from you guys.

    Then I asked for winning numbers.

    Transparency, bitches! :-)

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    Matching numbers with nyms.

    27
    lowtechcyclist
    STAR EARRINGS

    37
    KRK

    77
    GBinChicago

    151
    Mr. Bemused Senior

    16
    no one

    138
    lowtechcyclist again!  (sorry, only one prize to a customer)

    59
    Mr. Bemused Senior again!  (sorry, only one prize to a customer)

    39
    Z.

  20. 20.

    lowtechcyclist

    I’ve occasionally used coin flips as a random number generator.

    Say you need an integer between 0 and 255. 256 = 2^8, so you’ll need 8 coin flips per number. (You can flip 8 coins, or one coin 8 times, or whatever.)

    Have heads =1, tails = 0, and record your string of 8 ones and zeros. That gives you the binary expression for a number from 0 to 255. If you flipped THHHTTHT, that’s 0*128 + 1*64 + 1+32 + 1*16 +0*8 + 0*4 + 1*2 + 0*1 = 114. Repeat until you’ve got enough numbers.

    Here, you’re looking for numbers between 20 and 155; just throw out any numbers you get that aren’t in that range, and keep going until you have the desired number of numbers in that range. It won’t change the fact that (assuming an honest coin) every number in that range has equal likelihood of coming up.

  23. 23.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Math Guy:

    They’re all imaginary.

    Even the real numbers. How’s that for paradoxical? ;-)

    ETA: A friend of mine in grad school studied the surreal numbers. I can’t remember if I ever learned how they were defined, but it’s always gladdened my heart to know that there was such a thing.

  24. 24.

    WaterGirl

    @lowtechcyclist: You were #27!

    Do I recall correctly that you previous won a quilt and were going to go for earrings if you won?

    You were also #138.  Have you considered buying lottery tickets?

    You get first pick of the prizes.  What prize would you like, good sir?

    #1 quilt

    #2 star earrings

    #3 hammered copper

  28. 28.

    sxjames

    For truly random numbers go to random.org.  you can ask for one or several and they are truly random.

  29. 29.

    WaterGirl

    @Mr. Bemused Senior: Still nice to be a winner! :-)

    Although technically you weren’t one of the top 3, and there are only 3 prizes.

    But not everyone has a place for a quilt, so we may go down the line a bit.  That’s why I asked for 7 numbers for 3 prizes.

  30. 30.

    lowtechcyclist

    @WaterGirl: ​

    Do I recall correctly that you previous won a quilt and were going to go for earrings if you won?

    You were also #138. Have you considered buying lottery tickets?

    You get first pick of the prizes. What prize would you like, good sir?

    You remember correctly! I will go with #2, the star earrings. My wife’s birthday isn’t for three months, and I already have her present! Hooray!!

    I’ve always regarded buying lottery tickets as a tax on people who don’t understand basic probability, but maybe I ought to throw a few bucks into that pot too!

  48. 48.

    WaterGirl

    @different-church-lady: Once I got close to 40 years old, I stopped using base 10 to figure out my age.  Each year, I would choose the base that gave me the preferred ago.

    If someone asked how old I was I would give my age in the preferred base.  Was it might fault if they assumed that I was speaking in Base 10?

    I think not!

  57. 57.

    WaterGirl

    Just heard back from KRK, who is thrilled to have the quilt!

    So the hammered copper earrings remain.

    I will get in touch with GBinChicago about the final prize.

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