Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with count

Count the pumping events

Xhris — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:43:17 -0800

I need to count how many times a sump pump runs in a given period. The sump pump pumps water out of a hole on the ground, it is activated by a float switch - so generally speaking it pumps the same amount of water out each time it runs (the volume of water from the top 'on' level to the lower 'off' level). I want to know how much water is being pumped per week/month/whatever. I figure that since the pumping amount is (approx) the same each activation, if I knew how many times to runs (and it's about 4-6 times per day) I can work out the total pumped amount.

Is there a sensor or method you can suggest to do this?
Or to measure the pumped water volume directly maybe?

I'm on a tight budget, so I've been thinking of 'no-cost' solutions like balancing something on the pipe (which vibrates alot) or listening for the sound with a laptop set to record, but I hoping the hive mind can come up with a brilliant idea for me.

Thanks.

ExcelFilter: Between Day 1 and Day 90, I had how many of which?

SansPoint — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:09:05 -0800

How can I count certain things in a range of cells in Excel that fall between two dates? I've got an Excel workbook that keeps track of every thing I produce at my job. (What the things are is irrelevant.) The date it's created in in Column A. In Column F there are criteria to determine which type of thing is is (two specific ones). I would like to count the number of each that fall between two dates, i.e. between, say 9/01/2009 and 11/30/2009.

For the life of me, I can't figger it out.

I've tried wrapping my head around dynamic ranges, but all I can see for doing that is OFFSET(), which would be great if all the date ranges had the same amount of rows, but they don't. Besides, I add new rows to this thing regularly, as each new thingie is generated. So, having, say, the last 30 of these counted does not help.

Google searching has given me info about how to count for the last x of a certain range, where x is days, weeks, months, etc. Doesn't help.

Oh, and I *really* would not like to have to go into VBA scripting for this.

So, uh, help?

Why can't I count the Fs?

doublehappy — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:52:25 -0800

I have lots of questions about an email FW: I have received many, many times. How many times does the letter F appear in the following sentence?

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

This is ridiculous. There are 6. Even when I know there are 6, I struggle to recount them. The email suggests that only the super-intelligent will count 6, and the rest of us are idiots. I am of, perhaps, slightly above average intelligence, at best, so this may be true.

Being of only slightly above average intelligence, I have lots of questions. Why? Why does our (forgive the simplification, for I don't know how brains work) language brain override our shape recognition brain? (When did language become more important to survival than shape recognition? Are they in fact the same thing?) Wouldn't this also mean that the more intelligent you are, the less Fs you will count, (if we accept language skills are a good measure of intelligence). I take it that this obviously doesn't work in languages where the pronunciation of F and V differs from English, among others (a couple of google searches suggest that the brain perceives'of' as 'ov'). The text is often presented with non-standard line breaks, and I haven't seen this online with different sentences. Is this a phenomenon that can be seen in other texts, or is specific to this particular sentence? Does this phenomenon have a name?

What is the best way to pluralise letters? It seems common to use an apostrophe, and according to a lecturer I had four years ago, this is okay with decades, for example, the 1980's, but it just feels wrong next to a single letter. It's a proper noun, right? So the pluralisation should just be a simple 's'.

Is language even the best tool to talk about language? (See how I accidentally used the word 'talk' in there, presupposing that the only way to have discourse about language is to use language? What's that, post-structuralism?) It seems strange to me that we would, as a species, have reached the best form of communication so early in our existence. Is language the killer app for Humans, alongside thought? (Are they the same thing in some ways?) You can talk about dancing, but you can't dance about it. You can think about talking, and you can talk about thinking.

Sorry - got a bit carried away there... I'll settle for an answer to 'Why can't I identify the Fs in 'OF'?

allergy cat

cameronfromedinburgh — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:36:52 -0800

Do cats get hayfever?

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn around...and then what?

librarylis — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:10:03 -0800

What's your version of Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear Turn Around? Miss Susie had a steamboat? Cinderella dressed in yella? I am doing a short presentation on children's jump rope rhymes and count-out games. I've noticed that a lot of these have regional variations.

Some rhymes I've come across frequently include Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear Turn Around, Cinderella dressed in yella (made a mistake and kissed a fella), Bubble gum bubble gum in a dish, Not last night but the night before (24 robbers), Miss Mary Mack, etc. Variations on these and other rhymes definitely welcome!

I am aware of: this previous AskMe as well as this one, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Brian Sutton-Smith, and a whole bunch of scholarly articles.

What's your variation? I'm looking for any type of jump rope rhyme, any type of counting rhyme (playground, not classroom), that sort of thing. It would help if you would explain what region you learned the rhyme in.

Generating a Tag Cloud From Really Large Text Files

dbarefoot — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:13:59 -0800

I want to generate tag clouds for really large text files (the largest is 85 MB). No online service that I've found will support a file this big. Any suggestions? I grabbed the a copy of each of the websites of the four national, major Canadian political parties. I want to generate tag clouds for each party, showing the terms they use most often on their sites.

I had a sysadmin friend of mine (I'm so not a programmer) use some regular expression magic to merge each site into a single file. Thus, I have four very large text files. I considered things like Wordle or Many Eyes, but they have a much smaller maximum file size than I need. What should I do?

One alternative: get my friend or somebody to produce a list of words for each site and the number of times they appear. Then I create a small file with the right number of each of, say, the top 100 words, and use Wordle on that. Any better suggestions? Or, you know, help?

How to count the number of times a string appears in a database field.

Wild_Eep — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:30:03 -0800

SQL Filter: What query can I use to count the number of times a word appears in a text field? I've got this table with ~500 records. The records have a specific text field that I'm interested in. Before I start a fairly involved find-and-replace project, I want to know:

a. how many records will need to have the find-and-replace function performed (I think I've got this one, using the 'LIKE' operator)

and

b. for a given record, how many instances of the find-and-replace operation will need to happen?

For example, if I were changing the word 'cat' to the word 'dog', I'd want to know how many times the word 'cat' appeared in a given field for each record.

I know I could query the db and parse the results with PHP, but I was looking for a solution I could run from the mysql 'command line'.

How to use counting formulas in Excel?

Lilou — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:19:27 -0800

I need help with counting formulas in Excel! I run a customer service department for a furniture company, our furniture sells in a number of shops across the UK. I have to provide reports for what sort of trends there are for the problems that our customers experience.

My knowledge of Excel is unfortunately limited. I keep records for the individual service requests in Microsoft Access and export the database table into Excel to do my reports. So far, I have set up various charts and stuff, using formulas that link back to the source data imported from Access. The idea is to set all the charts and tables up so that automatically calculate each time I import an updated version of the database. However, there is one more table I want to set up but it is leaving me stuck.

Right, I don't have an image to show so you will have to use the powers of imagination! Starting at A1 (with no column headers) there are 2 columns of data with each row within representing a single service request record. The first column is the name of the store where the furniture was bought and the second column is for the fault classification e.g. Missing Part, Ordered Incorrectly, Broken Frame etc. Next to the 2 data columns I have created a table with all the types of fault classification along the top (26 in all!) and down the side are all the names of the stores. I need to input formulas to count how many times each store receives a complaint on each fault classification.

I apologise if I am not making sense, I can give more detail if needed.

Please help! I've gotta get back in the office first thing tomorrow and finish it.

Strike 4! No wait, ball 5! Err...

phaded — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:48:50 -0800

BaseballFilter: If a batter has a full count and then fouls off the next few pitches, do those pitches go as a ball or a strike in the pitcher's pitch count for the game?

Counting challenge in Excel

underwater — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 08:25:26 -0800

Excel question: I can't figure out how to count what I want to count... I'm trying to set up a spreadsheet that will tell me two things: first, the number of consecutive days I've accomplished a goal (ending today), and second, the longest run of consecutive days I've done something So, for the row:

x x x o o o o o o o o x x x o o o o o

I want the output "5" to represent the number of consecutive days I've achieved my goal to date and the output "8" to represent my longest run. But, I don't see how I can use countif because I must select the whole row and I don't want to count the earlier o's, just specific ones.

I am using conditional formatting so I cannot use blank cells to represent completed or uncompleted--I must use values to do this.

Excel gurus, please help!

How do I do a global wordcount in MT?

Marquis — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:22:12 -0800

How do I get a global wordcount for every post made on my MT 2.66 blog? MT Wordcount only seems to have tags for obtaining the number of words in each entry. I want to know the big number that is the total sum for all (558) entries on the blog.

Apparently MTWordStats used to do this, but the plugin's no longer available.

Thanks!

How do I combine the play count of iTunes and my iPod?

thewiseacre — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:10:14 -0800

I want to keep an accurate play count of my songs in iTunes: to do this, I want the play count to reflect not only what I play on iTunes at my computer but also on my iPod. Is it possible to have the iPod update the play count on iTunes when I connect it to the computer? Is there any way to make a smart playlist of most frequently played tracks that inludes BOTH iTunes and the iPod? Or am I stuck with independent counts? Ultimately, I'd like to be able to update these combined playcounts to Audioscrobbler.

Also: I'm on OSX 10.4.x and I don't sync with the iPod (I have more tracks on my computer than will fit on my iPod.)

Death Counts

aburd — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:55:03 -0800

When discussing the Iraq war, pro-war people often state that things would be worse under Saddam. This seems to imply that more people would have died under Saddam than as a result of the invasion/occupation thus far. I want to dispute these types of statements but honestly I don't know if it is true or not. I haven't seen any real firm figure on how many people died under Saddam and at what rate he killed people. I know that the folks at Iraqbodycount.net keep a running count of those who died as a direct result of the Iraq war. Have any credible comparisons been done between the numbers of deaths we have caused and the numbers he usually caused? If so, what were the results?

What is a word?

yellowcandy — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:11:04 -0800

WordFilter: I'm using Microsoft Word as my word processing software for a very, very large project (my PhD). I have a strict limit of 100,000 words to follow, and although it seems as if that's a lot, I'm feeling the pinch right about now. The issue I'm having is that I get conflicting reports when I do a word count, using 2 different methods... Using Word's own counting algorithm, I get a significantly higher count than I do when I do an Alt-Enter on the document in Win 2K Pro. At first, I thought that Word's count might be better, but then I read this explanation from Microsoft that seems to indicate that discrete characters, line header numbers, and the like might be counted as words.

So what contributes to the differences in the counts? Is one more accurate than the other? I'm hoping the Win 2K count is more precise, as it gives me a little more wiggle room, but I'm prepared for the answer either way. Also, does the Win 2K method account for footnotes and endnotes? I assume it does, as those are still words within the document, although at this point, anything might be true!