Tuesday, October 03, 2006

One minute binary

I've discovered that I have no trouble at all with reading through and memorising 270 binary digits in exactly one minute and six seconds. Getting it down to under a minute seems to be more of a challenge. The current record is 240, so technically I could do 250, or for that matter 241, but I prefer to do binaries in multiples of 30, because it's somehow less confusing that way. And doing eight thirties and a ten would take as long as doing nine thirties. Still, with a bit of practice I can probably do it. Or make a sufficiently impressive attempt that I don't get laughed out of the Mathematikum.

I've been attempting to do my homework from college, but it involves reading sixteen pages of horrifically tedious nonsense about financial strategy and the theories advanced by Modigliani and Miller in 1961 regarding dividend policy and the hypothesis of dividend irrelevance. Why couldn't it have been Victor Vroom and his theories? I can always remember those, because he had such a silly name and I automatically imagine him as having had a motorised unicycle instead of legs (and, for less obvious reasons, a hairy chest, big beard and tendency to wear fewer clothes than is generally considered decent). He fights crime with his assistants Porter and Lawler in a way that illustrates a lesson every week about motivation and cognitive theory.

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