Facts On Pi

This is NO flesh wound

As a big fan of old westerns and film noir, the black and white detective thrillers of the thirties, forties and fifties, it’s always amazed me how somebody gets shot with a bullet like a .45 caliber. The wounded guy sucks it up and asks: “is it bad, Joe?”  Joe looks at it, sticks a rag on it and says: “Nah, it’s only a flesh wound .” And, together, they get the bad guy. Another case in point was when Magnum P.I. was shot with the equivalent of an elephant gun in the last scene before the finale. This bullets created caverns rivaling Carlsbad. But ol’ MAGNUM is playing Beach Volleyball and has NO scar tissue at the wound site during the finale. It’s a miracle worthy of endless repetition at Lourdes.

Invariably some nitwit will speak the hackneyed, unconscionable words: “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” No, in the case of gunshot wounds, what doesn’t kill you creates a serious wound and leaves you hopelessly, permanently scarred for life. This is axiomatic of this type of injury. It’s a truth you can’t soften with rhetorical bullspit hyperbole.

I wish somebody would tell Barack Obama and the members of the Congressional Dimwit Pit these facts. Maybe they’ll figure it out now that our International Financial Leadership role has taken a hit dead-center mass with a Reality Round.

But, Obama issues his boiler plate platitudes about “we’ve always been and always will be a Triple-A country.” That’s correct. That’s true. That’s an extant fact because of AMERICA’S leadership on the world stage. It’s a leadership role we find missing in Obama’s stage weary, costume-like rolled up sleeves.

America’s growing weary of Teleprompter clichés and bromides losing their structural integrity because they’re as hollow as the echo of past calls for hope and change. America’s changed under Obama’s lackluster attempts at leadership and none of that change is good. The economy sucks. America’s prestige in the world community is lower than it’s ever been and the leader of the free world is a joke without a punch line.

Obama blames Congress. Well, he finally got something right. But his posturing as a great political leader shows there really is little substance to the man. He’s a cardboard cut-out of what some wanted because it suited their ego structures of being overwhelmingly liberal in having elected the “first” of anything. There’s more to leadership than prompter-parroting other people’s theories and using Labor Union enforcers to accumulate an audience appearing greater than it is in reality.

Memorizing Pi – World Records and Techniques | Math Fail

1540 – 1610: 35 Digits determined done by German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen used a geometric method (just like Archimedes did) proud of his calculation that took a great part of his life he had the digits engraved on his tombstone 1949: 2, 037 digits computed (John von Neumann et al.) 1973: Over one million digits computed 1989: One billion digits computed (Chudnovsky brothers) 2010: 2.7 trillion digits computed (F. Bellard) In the near future: Almost all of them computed? July 5, 1981: Rajan Mahadevan recited 31,811 digits of pi He discovered his exceptional ability to memorize numbers at the age of 4 during a party hosted by his family During the party, Rajan wandered to a parking lot and committed the license plate numbers of every guest’s car for recitation later A quote: “I am not good at remembering words – words confuse my system of memorizing. Numbers, I have no problems at all. I put away huge numbers in something similar to a computer file and I can recall them even after decades.” Record Holders*: Hideaki Tomoyori November 20th, 2005: Chao Lu recited 67,890 decimal places of pi Took him 24 hours 4 minutes to recite (with no breaks) Took him 1 year to memorize 100,000 digits (he made a mistake at the 67,891th digit when going for the record) He is the current (official) record holder In 2006, Akira Haraguchi, a retired Japanese engineer, claimed to have recited 100,000 decimal places. This, however, has yet to be verified by Guinness World Records. Unofficial: Andriy Slyusarchuk June 17th, 2009: A. Slyusarchuk claims to have 30 million digits memorized The digits are printed in 20 volumes of text He is a neurosurgeon, medical doctor and professor He was able to recite randomly selected sequences from within the first 30 million places of pi Reciting 30 million digits of pi at one digit a second would take 347 days (nonstop) No officially documented attempt to debunk his claims has been successful as of yet Why memorize pi? To beat Grace! Classic Memory Techniques – The Major System Major System : Convert numbers into sounds.

Logic-based program synthesis and transformation, 16th international symposium, LOPSTR 2006, Venice, Italy, July 12-14, 2006 : revised selected papers

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