Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with buckets

A Strange Bucket

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:39:58 -0800

I have a bucket containing N marbles: M white marbles and N-M black marbles. I need to grab a handful of marbles (n) and figure out the probability of having picked up m white marbles. At first, I thought I could use the hypergeometric distribution. But there's a complication, namely that the white marbles are not equally distributed in my bucket.

In other words, if my handful of marbles contains one white marble, I'm more likely to have picked up one or more additional white marbles in my hand, and this probability is different depending on how many white marbles I may have picked up.

Is there a good approach to modeling or simulating this kind of situation?

I haz bukkits. Alert lolrus.

BitterOldPunk — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:52:20 -0800

What to do with 150+ plastic buckets? I'm cleaning up my mom's house. She's somewhat of a hoarder and a cat person, and so we've got empty cat litter containers stacked to the rafters. They're all shapes and sizes, but most of them are the yellow buckets which held 38 lbs of litter.

If I can't figure out a use for them, I'll just recycle them.

All ideas welcome, from practical to whimsical (and yes, I've already considered building a fort out of them. That'd be awesome.).

Help me find recordings of street percussionists.

fake — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:10:40 -0800

You know what is f***ing awesome? Street drummers. ESPECIALLY this one. Do you know what I want? Their albums. Do good quality recordings of these drummers exist? Do they have MP3s that I can download somewhere? Do one of you, perhaps, have a CD, and I can Paypal you 10$ to drop in the guy's bucket?

I've already stripped the audio from the linked youtube posts, but the quality sucks, and I would like to have more.