All well and good. But not if it’s gonna interfere with “Dancing with the Stars.”
A nation has to have priorities. And ours, in the age of media-driven Presidencies, are ordered just so: 1) “Dancing with the Stars” 2) Presidential announcement 9 days after the fact explaining why we are engaging in “kinetic force actions” in Libya after having conferred with the UN and the Arab League (rather than Congress), seeding the rhetorical grounds for a move to transnational foreign policy. 3) SportsCenter / sneaking a smoke
Of course, I could be wrong about number 2.
(thanks to Dave O’C)
I think the phrase is: You wash my back and I’ll wash yours.
This isn’t a prime time war. It’s an info-commercial war. Lucky it wasn’t on at 2:30am.
But we elected a half-black guy. That’s exceptional! No, really — all my totebagger friends said so!
The beer summit seems to have set the tone for President Obama’s administration.
Did someone mention prime?
I’m quite sure last evening’s speech was naught but a diversion to keep our focus off how badly the little man has FAILED in his NCAA bracketing schmacketing. March maddness indeed!
Eat me.
How could you not understand that ANYTHING the Lightgiver doeth is not divinely(re: Bill Ayers) inspired?
You morons with working brains! You really piss me off!….
Here’s some American exceptionalism.
Geez…
link
Warp speed, Scotty!
“and can solve up to 200 numbers of Pi.”
No, he has π memorized to 200 digits.
I long ago decided 23 significant digits was enough for all practical purposes and stopped at 3.1415926535897932384626…. This kid kept going long past where it could matter.
That assumes he found a source that has the value of pi listed out to or beyond 200 digits. If not, then he may very well have solved it independently.
I stopped at the last digit that would display on an 8-digit pocket calculator when I pressed the pi button: 3.1415926 — 23 digits is just plain silly.   ;-p
Ummmm, pie…
“23 digits is just plain silly”
To be fair, the kid is studying advanced astrophysics at Princeton, so it might be helpful to memorize as many as possible. ;-)
Meh, 3.14 is more than sufficient. Any more is a waste (especially if you’re using a computer). People should be really really really afraid of how much fudge factor is used in the computation of, well, everything.
But to get back to the main topic. Who got voted off in Dancing with the stars? That single fact is vastly more important than hearing Obama say “let me be clear” one more friggin time.
Pi is so mainstream. I’ve memorized all sorts of the lesser known irrational numbers but you guys have probably never heard of them.
/hipster mathematician
You mean like the national debt?
The national debt is technically an absurd number, I think, McG.
(I just spent a couple minutes trying to figure out a way to express it as a ratio between integers, btw. Winner!)
Ahhh… Pi is like tits.
… impossible to stop thinking about once you first start?
More than 5 digits full is wasted…
I’ve always gone with the two hands rule. What’s that in digits?
A stomach ache.
Of course, then there’s this:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2011/03/29/nbcs-maceda-after-obama-speech-gaddafi-likely-feeling-lot-better
So–in our non-war, in which we are (not) supporting “rebels” who may or may not include Al Queda, and which is (not) pursued because Europe needs Libyan oil but is really about a humanitarian concern for folks who don’t like getting killed by their dictator but in a place that has no apparent immedicate American interest and which has no ability to threaten us directly, President Obama tells us that the “dicatotor” has lost his “legitimacy to rule” (really?? what happened, did he run out of bullets?) but that we are not interested in “regime change” but will only know that we’ve “won” when said dictator is living the high life in some undisclosed resort house in Italy without any possibility of being punished for crimes against humanity.
Good one. Yeah. Bush was an idiot and a crazy man for going after Saddam Hussein.
Wait. What?
Wait, you mean Khadaffi had LEGITIMACY to start with?
Heh.
Heh, heh, heh.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
Thanks man, I haven’t laughed that hard in ages…
I’ve had it memorized out to about 22 digits since I was 12 or so. That’s way more than is necessary. For a few months, I had 30 digits, but the last 8 have fled my long-term memory banks. Plus, I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.
3 digits is woefully insufficient for any kind of precision work, but as has been noted: there are always computers.
That don’t always have pi accessible. Unless you’ve got a C compiler and know which math header to include and know what the variable is called. Then you do. But it’s best to use the double-precision version, just in case you’re counting microradians.
Not that it matters, but pi is a transcendental number. Yes, this necessarly means it is an irrational number. But absurd or imaginary? Not so much.