If you are going to play “52-factorial” seriously… pack a lunch.
Via TwistedSifter
You’ve played “52-Pickup.” Now play “52-Factorial”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
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.
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
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…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