What is the null probability of a given combination of suits?

In Max Shinn's post about optimally shuffling cards, he describes looking at the "joint distribution of these frequencies compared to a null distribution." What does that mean? Two possible interpretations: 1. We compute a single suit-related number from the hand. We use the "null distribution&

Alts

Alts are a fun idea. On Twitter and Discord people sometimes have multiple accounts. Often there's two: One is their "real face" and another is that other one. The "real face" gets used for "mundane" things—if people can see who I

How to shuffle cards well when you never shuffle cards

I play board and card games rarely—maybe four days a year in a very heavy year. This is about the most I've ever played board games. I played a little more in college, but not by a huge margin, and before that I played even less. I

It is sometimes good to say obvious things

It is sometimes good to say obvious things. Saying obvious things gives other people the chance to agree and create common knowledge or a shared experience. It can even be good to say obvious trivial things. I'm reminded of a dialog someone shared: "Say, Pooh, why aren&

You could have invented PEM encoding

I saw the phrase "Certificate only, PEM encoded" in an e-mail about an SSL certificate and assumed PEM must be some complicated cryptography standard. No. It's literally two lines of ASCII wrapping a base64 literal: -----BEGIN {something}-----, followed by an arbitrary number of base64 literal