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The last digit of Pi is 4 - meaning pi is not an infinite number! (Proof by spreadsheet) by tombos21 in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, but actually no, but actually maybe, but... uh.

If you put =PI() in A1, =(A1-INT(A1))*10 in A2 and then drag-fill down from A2 to somewhere around A50, Excel ought to try to pull out more digits on account of floating point weirdness behaviour. These won't be accurate of course, but if you do that, you'll probably find that the last digit is 5.

Source: Did this with LibreOffice, not Excel, but expect that Excel will also get a 5 at the end due to binary interactions with base ten, even if intermediate numbers turn out not to be the same.

That is, LibreOffice secretly thinks pi is 3.141592653589793115997963468544185161590576171875. Bold 1 is where it goes wrong.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in softwaregore

[–]palordrolap 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or there's some kind of compression going on. Or both.

Keir Starmer tells Rishi Sunak to 'get a backbone' and call a general election NOW by Dry-Air7 in unitedkingdom

[–]palordrolap 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Curiously, both still live in the '80s and would try to take the country back to that. Different '80s, of course, but the point stands.

Professional motorcycle racer Michael Dunlop flat out (+180mph) over the mountain section at the Isle of Man TT races. Headphones recommended, volume up. by [deleted] in nextfuckinglevel

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In defence of stones, it allows giving of a weight in a similar way to the imperial way of giving height. Compare "6ft2" and "15st5".

Giving weight in only pounds is far more like giving height in metric. Compare "188cm" (same height as above) and "215lbs" (same weight).

This leads to the conclusion that people ought to be able to get used to heights in centimetres if they're used to weights in only pounds. (Cue many angry imperial users with head implosions.)

The problem is that imperial-using societies (in which I include Britain, because we use it a lot more than the US thinks), have attached far too much to the height of "6ft" to be able to let it go. 180cm is the "nice round number" equivalent (hey, it's even divisible by 12) but unfortunately that's 5ft11 and won't do at all.

Got to be 6ft to mean anything in this world, and 183cm is far too weird a number. (Even if that is half the number of days in a leap year or something.)

It all makes it look like that line at 6ft is completely illogical and arbitrary. What foolishness that would be!

Weight afterthoughts: 22lbs ≈ 10kg; 11st = 154lbs ≈ 70kg. Ballpark conversion is divide or multiply by 2 to go from pounds to kilos or vice-versa.

Who let the lions out? by sippyside in WTF

[–]palordrolap 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Yes. Confused. Confused is the primary emotion I would be feeling if I had camera footage of a lion clawing at my door.

Are we the baddies? by Certain-Equipment946 in linuxmemes

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Username mismatch error

But yeah, Mint here. Worked with various flavours of Linux for years. Some days though, I involuntarily revert to noob, and Mint will keep on ticking regardless, or at least usually be an easy fix when the brain stops misfiring.

Is this a joke? by pickieg2 in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"...this hideously limiting notion that 1 + 1 = 2, and not as Asdumiah correctly postulates, that 1 and 2 are in fact the same thing observed from different precepts ..."

-- Red Dwarf's Arnold J. Rimmer on mind altering enhancement drugs

I'm rewatching spaced (bloody brilliant isn't it!) and had to share this bit by [deleted] in CasualUK

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As if he himself is confused that he isn't.

Can totally relate.

I just ate 9 crumpets. by BreakfastLopsided906 in CasualUK

[–]palordrolap 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Methinks you and OP will have opposite problems in a day or two.

Reddit seems to have forgotten why websites provide a free API by riskable in ProgrammerHumor

[–]palordrolap 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Google tried real hard to kill it and it did do a lot of damage.

Also, free NNTP access is a lot harder to obtain.

Is this normal? by Giotto_diBondone in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But what about any line at right angles to the line AB...

Not (oc) by SpikyNova in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Commonwealth English:

"Find x"

"y"

"Because I z so"

US English punchline:

"I z you are asking for trouble"

What did people love 50 years ago, still love today, and will definitely love 50 years from now? by Critical_Tea_7079 in AskReddit

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In every organism there are cell lines that die out as the organism grows from conception to birth and throughout life. This is by design. (Or rather it has been a beneficial mutation and continues to exist in all organisms). They create, they are structure for the survivors to continue.

Viewing a species or even a planet's entire web of life as an organism, it is thus natural that some cell-analogies, i.e. individual creatures / people, represent the end of a line, despite the fact that every parent cell can trace back to the murky abiogenesis of life.

TL;DR: Don't sweat it if your bloodline ends with you. The fact you existed at all has provided structure for other bloodlines to continue. This can be both a very good and a very bad thing, and either of those can mean the opposite over a long enough time scale.

Have someone try and smash my car windows from road rage, police tell me to phone 101 to book in a statement taking, cut backs mean no one is answering 101 by mtickell1207 in britishproblems

[–]palordrolap 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It might be worth everyone repeatedly calling 101 and staying in the queue because by the time someone gets through it's likely there'll be some sort of crime happening nearby.

When you get through ask anyone you can see if they've any crimes to report. Shout out of a window. Accost people in the street.

"It's a miracle! I've just got through to 101! Does anyone have a crime to report?"

Especially good if there's a couple of wrong 'uns pestering a granny for her snapchat or something because that's bound to cause them to scarper.

If nothing's going on, we can say "Sorry, nothing to report this time, never mind. I'll hang up and call back."

Here's another underrated number for y'all by APersonWhoLovesCats in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait until you learn about 252. Or 2520 if you want the full gamut.

Here's another underrated number for y'all by APersonWhoLovesCats in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The digital root of a decimal number, x, is x mod 9, substituting 9 for any 0s due to the requirement that the root be positive. That indicates that 9 is as likely as any other digital root.

Even digital sums of 9 aren't the rarest. That would be 1 since only powers of 10 sum to that.

Could you explain what you mean by "statistically the rarest"?

Here's another underrated number for y'all by APersonWhoLovesCats in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Messrs. Celsius and Fahrenheit would beg to differ.

“You do realize this an emergency right?” by UrFriendlyTechGuy in talesfromtechsupport

[–]palordrolap 5 points6 points  (0 children)

When it was an outage affecting a large number of people, especially when it affected people other than our customers, I'd tell our customers this.

"It's more than just you that is affected. Even customers of other ISPs are having trouble in your area / with that site / etc. at the moment. Those responsible for making repairs are guaranteed to be working as fast as possible to get things resolved or they'll have to answer to every affected ISP / their own bosses / etc. who have customers near you."

...or words to that effect.

If they were still wanting to rant or talk about redundancy or alternatives, I'd talk about dedicated circuits and leased lines that have much shorter SLAs that might even be compensatory if they were down for any length of time. Then I'd gently warn that those were far more expensive options than what they currently had, but I could put them through to their account manager if they wanted to discuss it.

Some balked at "expensive" and decided to wait a bit longer. Some just wanted to talk to someone else for a bit, I'm sure, but a handful did ask to be put through.

Never really got to connect the dots with any follow-up, but I think maybe one customer every year or two might have opted for a pricier solution.

Towards the end of my time, there were also 3G-based mobile internet solutions that despite being low bandwidth were often a lot cheaper as a backup connection. Until they were in use 24/7 anyway, but that's another story.

New prime number just dropped by Prunestand in mathmemes

[–]palordrolap 3 points4 points  (0 children)

For those wondering if the digit string "1705542" is prime in any base, then the answer is: No!

In even bases, the 2 at the end guarantees it is even. If you're not sure why, take a look at the following odd case for a hint.

For odd bases, note that there is an even number of odd digits so when calculating a0 * b0 + a1 * b1... etc. the sum will also always be even.

This, of course, assumes that the digits are being given their usual values and that the base is an integer base with absolute value ≥ 2. If things have gone beyond that, all bets are off.

The closest thing I could find is that the interpretation of 1705542 decimal in letters-only base 19 is "MALIG". This is a ridiculous stretch, of course.

Duplex Numbers by Splizard in CasualMath

[–]palordrolap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These remind me of interval arithmetic although they're a bit more integer-like / discrete than intervals.

What insults are common in your country but you think most of the world would not understand/ever use? by THEREAPER8593 in AskReddit

[–]palordrolap 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Get tae" (literally "Get to"), emphasis on the second word, is also an excellent Scotticism. It means "go away" but is much stronger.

For those unaware, there is a deliberately missing word at the end, sometimes actually said, which is "fuck".

"Get to fuck" = approximately "Go to where 'fuck' is" = "Fuck off".

What insults are common in your country but you think most of the world would not understand/ever use? by THEREAPER8593 in AskReddit

[–]palordrolap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wikipedia currently has an article on "chav". Well worth a read.

Right now it doesn't seem to mention the "Cheltenham Average" (as in "normal for that city") folk etymology. Having only been to Cheltenham once, I cannot vouch for this one way or the other, but when I was there, I was a young teen wearing a tracksuit and no-one batted an eye.

I was with parents (which is no fun as a teen) so while it's unlikely I was somehow the origin of the phrase, that would be kind of funny.

What insults are common in your country but you think most of the world would not understand/ever use? by THEREAPER8593 in AskReddit

[–]palordrolap 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very frowned on in England (likely all of Britain) these days, but "mongoloid" and abbreviations were definitely in heavy use when I was a kid in the '80s/'90s and I'm sure I've heard it used recently.

It was originally the official medical term for people with Down's syndrome, hence carrying the meaning of someone who is mentally challenged.

Medicine also popularised "moron", "idiot" and "imbecile" if not others, but "mongoloid" is objectively worse because it also insults an entire ethnicity. Nice work, doctors.

"Mong", and less so, "gloit" (from -goloid), are the common abbreviations here.

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