northernhick

Let's suppose that I'm looking for a result that has a 3.5 percent chance of occurring on any given attempt - so, for the sake of illustration, I'm rolling a D20 and D10 together, hoping to get a 20 on the D20, and a 7 or less on the D10.

Calculating the probability of getting zero target results out of a fixed number of rolls is easy, as is the inverse probability of getting one or more.

But what if I want to know the probability of getting a different specific number? If I'm rolling the dice 168 times, what are the specific odds of getting the target result 6 times? 10 times? How do I calculate that?

I have a cat, almost 10 years old, who in the last week or so has developed strange neck spasms. Basically, out of nowhere, his neck swings violently to the right, pretty much all the way around (unless there's an obstacle in the way). It's not a natural movement - his head swings in a way that suggests it's 'being swung', rather than him just wanting to look around. I'm pretty sure it's involuntary.

The first time I noticed it, he was lying on my lap, and he just whacked my leg with the side of his head. Since then, I've noticed it increasingly while he's upright - usually when he's lying down and relaxed (but, being a cat and all, that's pretty well 'most of the time'). He's hit quite a few objects doing it. When he's on my lap, it kind of freaks him out and he tries to run for a second. But it's just one at a time, and then he's good for a while. (I couldn't really estimate how often it happens, but I haven't noticed them any more frequently than a couple times in an hour.)

I've never seen him do anything like this before, and I'm wondering if it's anything to be concerned about.

By way of background, I'm at a modest level of fitness - I often do a bit of running or casual exercise, though running any sort of distance is pretty intense, and it's quite ordinary for my heart rate to enter the range of 90-100% of maximum while running.

However, I pulled my calf a few weeks ago, so haven't really been exercising since, until this evening when I tried playing badminton...which *can* involve very heavy exertion, but this evening didn't. I was still trying to take it easy on my calf, which meant that I wasn't really doing a lot of the usual anaerobics associated with the sport. In fact, it was a pretty relaxed pace overall.

Then, after playing for a while, my heart rate, for no apparent reason, suddenly increased to an extremely high level - I would estimate that it reached or exceeded my 'maximum' heart rate. There was no pain, no difficulty breathing (I wasn't even winded), and the only real discomfort was the pounding sensation itself, which was more intense than I usually experience even during high-intensity cardio workouts. I took a break for a few minutes and it returned to normal.

I guess I'm wondering how worried I should be. I've never experienced anything like this before, and it's a bit unnerving. What might have caused it? Is it likely to recur? Could it be a symptom of a more serious condition?

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*****

This is the error message my gf is getting when trying to sign into her hotmail. Her iPad can't access her hotmail, she can't access it on her laptop in either Chrome or IE, and got the same error message on Firefox on my PC (immediately after I successfully logged into my own hotmail account).

I've seen a number of people querying this error message on this or other sites, but it seems that many of them were having issues specific to a browser or plugin, and I'm reasonably certain that's not what's going on here. The message suggests that it could be a server-end issue, but I'd hate to try waiting it out only to find that it's a local problem of some sort that we need to fix ourselves. Is it possible that there's some action on our end that could resolve it? If this is a server-end issue, would this usually resolve itself, and how long would we expect it to take?

A couple days ago, my partner and I booked our flights for a Hawaiian vacation in December; we're flying out of Toronto (Pearson International Airport) to Honolulu via United/Continental, with a connection in San Francisco. When we originally booked it, the connection time was well over an hour, which I (despite having relatively little travel experience) was comfortable with.

Now, we've noticed that the itinerary has changed, with the time from arrival at SFO to departure therefrom being 40 minutes. I've never been to SFO before, and don't know much about it...I'm guessing (hoping) that the two flights will be at the same terminal, but we're a bit paranoid about it, and our travel companions are reluctant to book the same flight now.

As a note, I'm relatively unconcerned about the international component of our arrival at SFO: In my experience, flying out of Pearson to the U.S., we pass through U.S. customs before boarding, so I don't expect that we'll need to go through customs in San Francisco.

My gf moved into an apartment last summer with cable included in the rent. The landlady said that she had all the channels, but only about a dozen channels seemed to work with her brand new LG LCD television (30 inches or so). If we plug in other numbers manually, we only get static. We kind of figured that a digital cable box would be necessary to get the rest of the channels (digital cable is pretty much par for the course in our area), but we don't watch enough TV to have bothered with it.

When I moved in, I brought my 40 inch Samsung LCD television, also purchased new last summer, and we moved her TV into the bedroom. Her TV still gets the same dozen channels, yet mine can receive the whole spectrum of regular cable channels (i.e. a hundred or so). My TV connects directly to the same cable jack that hers was with before, and doesn't go through any other ancillary devices to get there.

So the question is, What gives? Why, with two relatively new LCD televisions, does mine receive all the channels we're supposed to get, while hers doesn't?

I have two cats. One is a five-year-old intact male (the black cat); the other is two and a half years old, a fixed male (the grey cat). They are both wonderfully gentle cats. When we first got the grey cat as a kitten, we didn't have to go through any of the usual protocols of separating them. Aside from the occasional playful or accidental scratch, they've never hurt anyone, and seldom even hissed under any circumstances.

A few weeks ago, our black cat started having strange episodes of aggression toward our grey cat. He gets really upset, with this guttural growling/whining. My significant other has noticed some excess drooling (/foaming). The grey cat responds as can be expected, taking a defensive posture and hissing. Eventually, a fight will ensue, and the black cat will attack me when I intervene. I've taken some significant bites.

It's very episodic. Aside from the fact that the grey one remains a little edgy for a while, things can get back to normal with surprising speed. This morning, I got involved before a fight started, picked up the grey one and tried to shoo the black cat out of the room to shut the door. He attacked my leg. I took a quick shower to clean out the injury, and by the time that I was done, he was completely back to normal (aside from crying a bit about being left alone...completely normal for him).

I don't know what to think. The thought 'rabies' has crossed my mind with some concern. They're both indoor cats (they only get outside onto our fifth floor balcony) so transmission is pretty unlikely. Moreover, my understanding is that once rabies becomes symptomic, it quickly becomes severe and fatal soon thereafter, whereas the first episode was close to a month ago.

Besides, the aggression seems focused towards our other cat, which makes me wonder if its some territoriality thing. We had the grey one fixed this spring due to some spraying issues.

Any thoughts? Has anyone had experiences with this sort of thing before? How can it be corrected?