A DegreeInfo Contest ! ! !

No, it doesn't. However, there is an alternative -- California is also pretty relaxed about alcohol home delivery. You can order a delivery of Narragansett to a California address via Beerjobber.com.

 

Kizmet: Here's what I would do. You start with the 100 and then recognize that every pair of numbers from the opposite ends of the string equals another 100 (99+1, 98+2, 97+3, etc.) Then you just need to count the pairs and see what's left alone (that would be that pesky 50).

John: That's the second best way. What little Gauss did was note that 1+100=101 2+99=101 3+98=101 and so on, thus 50 x 101, which is a cinch to do in your head.

 

Contest prizes:

The beer: I am grateful, but I don't drink beer. How about diet Vernors? How about instead I buy my own sixpack at BevMo and Kizmet puts $3 in the poor box at church or the Salvation Army pot or something.

The Starbucks card: Yes, I'd be glad to have that.

The damn University of Phoenix baseball cap: Instead of graciously presenting it to myself, howsabout I autograph it and mail it to Randell1234, who expressed interest. Tell me where.

The contest itself: I used to grow annoyed at how few people entered my contests . . . and now, with Google, it is almost impossible to create a hard one. I thought yours was a good one, Kizmet. And I am staggered by the answer. Can you tell about how many separate individuals are represented in those 1,500, since surely some people try more than once.

Here's where you can see a picture of the hat. The tee shirt is not available; I need to wear is a lot over the next six weeks:
Hat - Home

 

Kizmet: I'm guessing that your California alcohol superstore doesn't sell Narragansett Lager.

John: No . . . but it is delivered in California and about 35 other states by Beerjobber.com - Online Beer Store | Buy Beer Online | Craft Beer Shopping and Delivery. After reading their website, I think I need to get some for my Cape Cod-raised son-in-law. Or maybe my Boston-born wife. Hey, cancel my Vernors request, I'll take the Narragansset.

 

Actually, I'll step in with some data that probably nobody but me knows, because I do the backend database maintenance.

So Kizmet indicates that 1500 is the number of banned members. Of those, probably way less than 100 are legitimate members banned for misbehavior. The other 1450 or whatever are banned as spammers.

BUT...

That number is actually way low, because the last time I looked, we were getting roughly 300 fraudulent registration attempts every day over the past two years. About 90% of those are caught by our very aggressive (and, unfortunately sometimes too aggressive) automated spammer detection and directly rejected from even being able to register. The remaining ones get through and are often detected and banned before they've even posted. Of the few remaining ones who post, the spam messages stay up, on average, less than an hour before one of the mod team removes them (often due to the diligent reporting by our members, which we really appreciate.)

But... before we installed the automated spammer detection, we had literally thousands of fake registrations by actual spammers and bots creating accounts. So at one point, I went through and wholesale deleted something like 6,000 fraudulent registrations (and, unfortunately, accidentally a handful of legitimate ones, including some longtime posters, by mistake.)

So while 1500 is the number of banned accounts currently showing, there are another 6,000 or so that were banned and then deleted some years ago. Those no longer have any record in the database so, of course, they don't show up anywhere.

 

I will send it and I will take it!

 

Because it works.