Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with spoiler

Spoiler Alert

Tube — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:24:51 -0800

What is the origin of the term "Spoiler Alert". I don't ever remember reading a movie or book review from the 1970's or 1980's that began with the term "spoiler alert" or "spoiler ahead". It's possible that they were there all along, and that I just didn't notice them, but I seem to have first encountered the term in the late 1990's.

I also wonder if this is a term that originated on the Internet rather than in conventional print, as it seems to me to have coincided with the growth of the Internet.

When did this term become almost universally used?

Yeah, but why.

517 — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:34:58 -0800

Eastern Promise plot explanation. (spoilers) At what point and why does Semyon decide to kill Nikolai?

I stepped out briefly and missed something in the film. I saw the scene where Semyon is standing on the loading dock and asked if the Chechens knew what his son looked like but I'm assuming there is a little bit more set up that I missed.

Help me solve this Douglas Coupland puzzle.

oxonium — Sat, 27 May 2006 18:54:14 -0800

I am reading Douglas Coupland's new book (JPod) and I'm always a little frustrated by him. He seems to get the general vibe of nerds but is horribly off on details sometimes (in the first 50 pages, he makes reference to a "56k floppy disk"), which is agonizing. Anyway, he posits a math problem (I don't think this counts as a spoiler, I'll even omit the context and just pose the problem with page number, but if you really don't want to see anything about the book, don't read on, I guess.) "Anyway, send me an email or even phone me. It's area code 604, and the number itself is a seven-digit prime which, when squared, is two digits short of being a factorial." p.50, hardcover edition.

Not having had much call to deal with primes in the last five years or so, I went to mathematica. Apparently the 78,499th through 664,579th primes are seven-digit, so no love there. So I went to a factorial table. Factorials of course, quickly grow many zeroes in their tails. This is a problem since the square of any number with trailing zeroes is nonintegral if it has an odd number of trailing zeroes and is a power of ten, if it has an even nonzero number of trailing zeroes.

Since any seven-digit number squared is 13-14 digits, I figured I'd look at ones with 13-15 digits in their non-trailing zeroes. That way I could drop all the zeroes as a redundant digit, plus one. I included 21! because its least significant non-trailing zero digits are redundant.

18! = 6402373705728000
19! = 121645100408832000
20! = 2432902008176640000
21! = 51090942171709440000

None of these is the square of a prime.

Ideas?

Question number 14675

Zed_Lopez — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:14:37 -0800

Britons of AskMe: question about the end of The Office Season 1 [spoiler inside]

Question number 10737

Mars Saxman — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 09:58:38 -0800

What is going on in the last chapter of Gibson & Sterling's "The Difference Engine"? The story makes sense until just about the last paragraph of the second-to-last chapter, but the closing series of vignettes, titled "Modus: The Images Tabled", flies right over my head.