Out of Line

Ok so I have a confession to make. I really like watching informercials. Some people see one of these 30 minutes to 2 hour commercial marathons and keep on moving but I love to watch them. Are there other people like this?

Some of my favourite ones include Ronco's Showtime Rotisserie, "set it and forget it", or who can forget the Magic Bullet system or the incredible Bowflex at home complete workout system. I mean these informercials talk about products that save you time, energy, clean your air, make your abs and ass look better, better skin, better everything. They promise so much and for three, make that two always easy payments of something something 99 it can all be yours.

How come the payments are so easy? Like are there hard payments I don't know about? I seriously think when I graduate I'm gonna get half of the stuff I see on tv just to see if what they say is true, plus you can always return it and keep the gift they give to you just for trying it out! Can I really cut through a boot with this knife? Can I make brocolli soup with cream that fast from scratch? Can I really do a 5 pound roast in 20 minutes and use the solid flavour injector to stuff the meat with more vegetables and random stuff? Well I'll be able to do all that and more really soon...

Plus the lines in the informercials are priceless. Like for the Ionic breeze, this girl turns on the normal air filter machines, that obviously cost 10 times more and uses 20 times more energy, and starts shouting to show the thing is so loud compared to the ionic breeze. The hosts always have these sidekicks too that never know anything about the product, are always impressed at whatever the main guy says and always want the guy to lower the price or throw in more cooking knifes into the deal. And then there are the audience members that say how whatever product they are showing has made their life so much better and so efficient, don't you wanna be just like them?

Informercials are way better than anything you can find on the Shopping Channel. I don't really believe the counters they have on TSC, I mean selling over 3 hundred 2000 dollar computers, common.

So the next time you see an infomerical check it out, its always cool to see one you've already seen because then you aren't gonna get hung up on the suspense.

Mariachi song for Mama Cata 

Proposed Problem

If anyone can get a good answer to this I'll take you to lunch or something.

Given n randomly chosen bit strings of size n, what is the probability that one can arrange them in an nxn matrix and get a 0 diagonal. (bit strings mean alphabet is {0,1}, so n elements in {0,1}^n randomly chosen).

So for example n=3.

{(001),(010),(110)} Can be re-arranged to :

010
001
110

{(111),(010),(001)} Cannot be re-arranged!

Its random, so you can get same one twice the domain is (2^n)^n.

If something looks wrong here let me know.

Alright...