At 09:19 AM 2003-07-13 -0700, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:

On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 05:24  AM, Nikholas F. Toledo Zu wrote:

She sniffed the air:  there it was, the nine distinct meats that
made up the Jumping Buddha Wall, each individual flavor seeping into 
each other, making eighty-one distinct flavors.

I haven't read the first 11 chapters so I can't comment on the story, 
but as an ex-physicist I can comment on the math. :-)

The correct number of distinct combinations of one or two meats is 45 
(9!2 + 9!1). If you are counting the number of distinct combinations of 
between one and nine meats, then the correct answer (if I did the math 
right) is 529 (9!9 + 9!8 + ..., or 530 if you include the Zen option of 
no flavor at all). All this assumes that meat A plus meat B tastes the 
same as meat B plus meat A. My tongue is commutative, and I think that 
holds for most people.

Weird to hear that, since I'm a math major and I taught math last year.
This is actually a back-handed reference to the movie that I took all
of the God of Cookery references from.  This exact phrase is used, where
the nine meats make up 81 distinct flavors, which I also thought was 
weird, for the same reason, but I didn't want to find out exactly how
many there are.  Although I do think it should be 2 to the ninth power, 
or 512 flavors, including the non-flavor.  ^_^

Oh, you didn't care about that? Umm, never mind, then.

Actually, I do.  And I'm glad someone's read through at least the first
few paragraphs.

Switch

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