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Happy pi day!

Speaking of it: don't know if Ox watched the tv-show 'Tomtesteron' on sunday (2 weeks ago) where the presenter his goal was to get smarter (or something, didn't see the start of it).

Bottomline: he went to a guy who learned him a couple of tricks, which resulted in him being able to learn pi 100 digits behind the komma. Which is a pretty cool thing if you ask me. And a nice way to impress/surprise people. And pick up chicks. Ow wait ... .

It was cool to see anyway.

I didn't see it, actually (my TV has been broken for almost a year now), but I was at a family event and almost everyone was talking about it. It's actually not that hard, though, and I've seen it before performed by Derren Brown who's a master at this. Of course I'm not saying we'll do it in a second or something, but if you're somewhat intelligent and have the time to drill it, you can learn incredibly long sequences of numbers and words using mnemonic techniques.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

Here's an (imho) even cooler Derren Brown trick btw...where he takes on chess masters in a game of simultaneous chess.

Is that the one where he basically just mirrored the chess masters' strategies against one another? (too lazy to click. )

Indeed. He mirrors the moves of the 8 strongest players and beats the 9th one (the weakest player). He also predicts the last position of the kings or something (can't remember exactly) which he doesn't reveal how he does it, though.

Windows Chess against the computer is a cunt. 1 victory and 19 ragequits on the lowest difficulty.

I know, i think that's the beauty of this.

Today i heard that one of my pupils made a bet with their math teacher, and indeed he put the 100 digits on the blackboard. Now she's buying all of them an ice cream.

Sad part of this story is that the student who learned the numbers is failing the majority of his math (and physics) tests and exam this far. Clearly he's not stupid, but he still has a rather big chance to fail his year!

@derf: you just suck at chess

Haha, every school has pupils like that right. Guys who everbody knows are smart enough to pass with ease if they even bothered to try, but either don't pass or have trouble doing so. I find it a difficult issue. On the one hand, you don't want to let people pass unless they do well enough in school (I mean, high school isn't exactly a challenging level for an above averagely intelligent person), on the other you can ask yourself what the added value for this person's life is to have them hang out at the high school for a while longer when they clearly aren't going to be studying subjects X or Y at uni or college, or aren't going to be taking up higher studies at all. The problem is that at 15-17 you're (imho) usually too young to really understand the stakes, so unless your parents somewhat push you in the right direction there's a very real chance that you end up throwing a lot of thigns away and only realize that 5-10 years down the line.

I graduated high school without any real problems and finished uni, but I still would have done a lot of things differently now. So I can imagine it's even more frustrating for someone who doesn't have that.