We wish they were that cool, the inventors of the modern mile were more concerned about land measurements. A square mile is 640 acres. Which neatly can be cut into quarters 3 times. 160, 40, 10.
I think the way to formally prove this is to find the difference between the Fibonacci approximation and the usual conversion, and then to find whether that series is convergent or not. Someone who has taken the appropriate pre-calculus or calculus course could actually carry it out :P
However, I got curious about graphing it for distances “small enough” like from Earth to the sun (150 million km). Turns out, there’s always an error, but the error doesn’t seem to be growing. In other words, except for the first few terms, the Fibonacci approximation works!
This graph grabs each “Fibonacci mile” and converts it to kilometers either with the usual conversion or the Fibonacci-approximation conversion. I also plotted a straight line to see if the points deviated.
The ratio of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence is approximately the golden ratio phi = ~1.618. This approximation gets more accurate as the sequence advances. One mile is ~1.609km. So technically for large enough numbers of miles, you will be off by about half a percent.
Baker’s ratios make my family think I’m a much better baker than I am.
Basic risen bread (a “60% hydration bread” ): 100 parts by weight of flour, 60-70 parts liquid, 3 parts salt, 2 parts yeast. Use grams and scale it up by 5 (500g flour), use water or beer for the liquid, knead, let rise for an hour or so, shape, rest for 30min, then bake at 400F for about an hour or until the inside is around 190-200F, and LET IT COOL to sub-120F before you cut in. Or if you’re feeling fancy, use scalded and cooled milk, add 5-10 parts sugar, and swap out 10-20 parts of the liquid for melted but not hot butter - and you get a nice rich bread, half way to a brioche. Or go to 70-75 parts liquid, including some olive oil, and kneed for a long time, and you got a solid pizza dough.
Quick breads: 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid (including sugar), 1 part beaten egg, 1 part fat (oil or melted butter). This gives you a jumping if point for banana breads, pancakes, muffins, and scones. Add or withhold a little liquid to get the consistency you want for how you’re cooking it.
I once chose Paradise By The Dashboard Light for karaoke and that was the only time I’ve ever done karaoke because I’m still embarrassed ten years later at how awful a choice it was. Great song, terrible for karaoke.
For the rubix cube one, besides showing off, it’s also fun to learn how to solve it and practicing to get faster and faster at solving it. It’s worth it.
My problem is everything makes sense until the last face. The algorithms seem too abstract at that point; it is memorizing a thing vs intuiting a thing.
Not necessarily the part for calculating the day of the week for any arbitrary day centuries ago, that’s just a useless party trick, but for the current year so you don’t need to pull out your phone to check. Knowing that 1/3 (or 1/4 on a leap year), the last day of February, 3/14, 4/4, 5/9, 6/6, 7/11, 8/8, 9/5, 10/10, 11/7, and 12/12 are all the same day of the week, that this year they’re all Tuesdays, and next year they’re all Thursdays, is mostly easy to remember and very frequently useful.
I always just used the knuckle trick for counting. The ones that have 31 days are at the top of the knuckle and the 30 (or 28/9) day months are in between the knuckles.
Learn some alphabets of foreign languages. Russian is fun because some of the characters looks like English letters but have completely different sounds. Korean is also cool because it looks crazy complex but it’s actually extremely simple.
For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.
Bob and Doug Mackenzie thought me to roughly convert C to F by taking the temperature in Celsius, doubling it and then adding 30. It gets you in the ballpark.
This is wrong? Taking 20°C as an example. Following this formula gives 48°F when it should be 68. Could you perhaps be supposed to add 32 instead of 12?
I have this thing about astronomy. Kind of a perspective thing of our place in the cosmos. I try to remember all the distances of planets from the sun and distances of moons from their planets. Also the diameters of solar objects. There’s other factoids I try to remember about neighboring solar systems and galactic bodies. For example I remember the black hole at the center our galaxy is called Sagitarius A and its mass is 4M suns. The black hole at the center Andromeda our closest major galaxy at 2.5M light years is 25M suns. The black hole at the center M87, the closest active galaxy at 50M light years is 4B suns. I didn’t look that stuff up so tell me if I didn’t get it right.
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