Monday, March 09, 2009

Honestly, I'm amazed Mark still comes within 50 feet of me at school

I think I am probably one of the biggest geeks I know.

This week is MEA testing for Mark's class. (Kira's were last week.) One of the things that happens is that parents volunteer to send in snacks or drinks. Well, I volunteered to send in snacks *and* drinks for Mark's class. I chose Thursday, which is the only all-math day. Yes, I deliberately chose my day for snacks based on when they were doing math.

WORSE! I have now made up little snack-packs, each containing a small Gatorade, a Nature Valley granola bar and a trail mix pak. I put them into little brown-paper bags, and on each one I have stapled a slip of paper with a weird math trivia item on it. (ex. The billionth digit of pi is 9) I've made a little bag up for each kid plus the teacher.

Mark has just shaken his head and rolled his eyes at my geekiness. He did request that I drop off the snacks before school so no one would know who sent them.

Um, hate to break it to you, babe, but I'm pretty sure they'll alllllllllllll know. mk

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For any of my fellow-geeks, here are the trivia items I used:

*National Pi Day is March 14 at 1:59 (3/14 1:59)

*The largest prime number is 13,395 digits long;
More than the number of atoms in the universe.

*The billionth digit of pi is 9.

*If you add up the numbers 1-100 consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc)
the total is 5050.

*111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,876,654,321

*There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.

*2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end in 2 or 5.

*'FOUR' is the only number in the English language that is spelled with the same number of letters as the number itself.

*The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.

*The largest number in the English language with a word naming it is a googolplex, which is 1010^100 , which would be written
as 1 followed by a googol of zeroes.

*The fear of numbers is called arithmophobia or numerophobia.
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is fear of the number 666.
Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.

*If you keep removing a digit from the right hand end of the prime number 73,939,133, each of the remaining numbers is also prime. It's the largest number known with this property.

*In the English language "forty" is the only number that has all its letters in alphabetical order.

*To multiply 10,112,359,550,561,797,752,808,988,764,044,943,820,224,719 by 9 you just move the 9 at the very end up to the front.
It's the only number that does this.

And in a perfect example of what a math geek I am, I had a very hard time putting * in front of each fact, because that is the computer symbol used for multiplication. Yes. Geek. I know.

5 comments:

Capt. Brenda said...

You are a rockin' math geek! One of your trivia things reminds me of a game/puzzle we do on the schooner called "Four is the magic number".

You have a person pick any number. Lets say they pick 18.

You then say:

18 is 8.
8 is 5.
5 is 4.
And 4 is the magic number.

Or, let's say they say 112.

You say:

112 is 16
16 is 7
7 is 5
5 is 4
and 4 is the magic number.

and so on...

Get it?

markira said...

So obviously 'and' doesn't count. :D

Anonymous said...

I love that you did that.

He may act embarrassed - but I bet deep inside he really loves that you go the extra step.

Anonymous said...

Love it...and where's my complimentary snack pack?

(ro)

markira said...

OK, now I'm freaking all out that I am not giving them enough food. Mark said today they had a veritable feast: apples, oranges, Smartfood, a box of saltines, pretzel sticks, three kinds of cheese, and two different flavors of gatorade.

Mark says what I've done is not enough food.

Spazzing here.