If you are going to play “52-factorial” seriously… pack a lunch.
Via TwistedSifter
You’ve played “52-Pickup.” Now play “52-Factorial”
Next post: Strange Daze
Previous post: Meanwhile in Finland
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Comments on this entry are closed.
…it buggers the imagination… (aplogies to Mrs. Malaprop)
IIRC, my old HP-41CV would only return a numerical result up to about 47! due to memory limitations. When doing permutations and combinations calcs, we often had to reduce the numerator and denominator before plugging the rest into the calculator to get the final result. That was only sensible and kept us from being lazy. Good times!
I was in first grade when I first encountered the amazingly complicated math problem of 1+1=2 written by the teacher on the blackboard. Me, being an avid reader even at that age (if you count picture books as avid reading) stared at that equation and thought ‘I will NEVER understand this!’. Well, at 67 years of age, my fear of math has not abated one bit. This 52 factorial thing has just confirmed that math really isn’t my thing. And I am in awe of people who are math wizards!
Can I get the guy in that video to come over and balance my checkbook?
@Auntie
“Can I get the guy in that video to come over and balance my checkbook?”
The kids snicker: “Did you hear that? That Boomer lady still uses a checkbook.”
My dear azlibertarian, thanks for the laugh. Yet when I send them checks my kids don’t snicker. And I’ll bet that when their parents send them checks, other kids don’t snicker either – and they get real busy signing the endorsements in that supposedly obsolete cursive.
Yeah, our (adult) kids like receiving dollars from mom and dad, but their preferred method is a transfer straight into their accounts…like God Almighty Hisself had looked over their plight and dropped a benevolence into their lives. Reminds me of the soon-to-be-a-cancer-on-our-financial-lives that is what they’re calling a “Digital Dollar”. Watch out for that one.
Mrs. azlib and I pay our bills twice a month and each time we do, we reconcile and balance the checkbook to the penny. It has taken me more years than I should admit, but I have finally convinced my beautiful bride that when we run across that occasional 5 cent error, that it is perfectly ok to simply make the correction in the register rather than hunt through each entry to see exactly which transaction was entered in error. The value of your time is worth more than the correction. Dunno if my kids have ever balanced their checkbooks. They wonder why put in the effort at all…just accept the bank’s figure and move on.
At the rate at which our dollar is devaluing, they might have a point.
Dear AZ,
Once you understand that the dollar is the new dime it all follows.
Oh, I understand. I understand that this does not end well for any of us..not at all. The Federal Reserve is rapidly becoming what we used to joke about….Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R