rdfs:comment
| - A quick way to show that a character is a genius is to have him recite pi to an absurd number of places. Pi, with its endless parade of decimal digits, has both mystique and geek cred - it has its own day, it's splashed across mugs and T-shirts, calculating 1-10 millions of digits of π is a very common way of testing your CPU's power, and it's honored by movies and songs. Most of us never memorize it past a few places, so anyone who can fire off a hundred surely must be a genius, right? Examples of Mouthful of Pi include:
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abstract
| - A quick way to show that a character is a genius is to have him recite pi to an absurd number of places. Pi, with its endless parade of decimal digits, has both mystique and geek cred - it has its own day, it's splashed across mugs and T-shirts, calculating 1-10 millions of digits of π is a very common way of testing your CPU's power, and it's honored by movies and songs. Most of us never memorize it past a few places, so anyone who can fire off a hundred surely must be a genius, right? For the record, odds are that your computer "knows" pi to the nearest multiple of 2^-62, about 2.168 * 10^-19, so about eighteen reliable digits. Ditto for e. You can compute it much more precisely, but you'll need to make your own storage. The truth is, only a handful of digits are needed for most applications- only 11 decimal places are needed to calculate the circumference of the Earth to a millimeter, while only 39 are needed to find the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe to a precision of a hydrogen atom. There's not much point in memorizing a hundred places other than to show off. For reference, here's a handy guide. Perhaps the reason Reed Richards Is Useless is because he spends his time memorizing numbers he'll never use. It's also a common attribute of the Absent-Minded Professor and the TV Genius, as the contrast is a wonderful thing to show or rant about. Inversely, a quick way to show that a character is stupid is have him not know what pi is at all: "Apple or cherry?" Examples of Mouthful of Pi include:
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