1y ago

Whoops

79 comments

8388409 = 2^23 - 199
I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I'm still none the wiser as to why.
199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you're going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?
Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?
WHY DO I CARE
- Are you Ramanujam reborn or a nerd who put every number they found on wolfram alpha?
  
  In a place for programmer humour, you've got to expect there's at least one person who knows their powers of two. (Though I am missing a few these days).
  As for considering me to be Ramanujan reborn, if there's any of Srinivasa in here, he's not been given a full deck to work with this time around and that's not very karmic of whichever deity or deities sent him back.
  
  I know up to like 2^{16 or maybe 2}17 while sufficiently caffeinated. Memorizing up to, or beyond, 2^23 is nerd award worthy.
  
  I know that 2^20 is something more that a million because is the maximum number of rows excel can handle.
  
  For me it's: 2^{1 to 2}16 (I remember the 8-bit era), a hazy gap and then 2^{24 (the marketing for 24 bit colour in the 90s had 16777216 plastered all over it). Then it's being uncomfortably lost up to 2}31 and 2^{32, which I usually recognise when I see them (hello `INT_MAX` and `UINT_MAX`), but I don't know their digits well enough to repeat. 2}64 is similar. All others are incredibly vague or unknown.
  2^{23 as half of 2}24 and having a lot of 8s in it seems to have put it into the "recognisable" category for me, even if it's in that hazy gap.
  So I grabbed a calculator to confirm.
  
  Ramanujan reborn - the main protagonist from the Wheel of Maths books.

79 comments