I believe that any attempt at sampling would produce a result that is sort of good enough for some people and completely off-base for others. Let's pick some of the questions (and/or puzzles and/or problems) that have been answered, as you suggest. Then what about all the stuff that's not in the form of questions/puzzles/problems? Will people join and get annoyed about the off-topic replies? What counts as off-topic anyway? I might think it's irrelevant, and another member will (rightly) say that the "off-topic" stuff is even more valuable than the original (in his mind). Maybe we could curate the sample to try to keep it up to date, but that makes work (and I think you're trying to avoid making work for anyone and everyone, not just Rich and the new users). A lot of the people viewing a sampling of math-fun will be pretty smart people, I dare say smart enough to figure out what I just said about sampling bias. So they'll have to join the list anyway, see if they like it and un-join later. On 6/22/12, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:

Yes, that is the default option.

But joining requires your "application" (= e-mail address, essentially) being vetted by Rich.

I thought that having a small sample of the archives would save some time and energy.

--Dan

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