Re: Prog Challenge

On 3/8/2024 1:56 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 21:25:16 -0600, Physfitfreak wrote:
 

(method of nines)

 Ah, nines.  When I was in elementary school I got pretty good with the
Trachtenberg system. I would check the answer by casting out the nines.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casting_out_nines
 That really pissed off my teachers.  "Show your work!"

Hehe :)
Very interesting. So much stuff that can be done with 9s :) All quite useful. Most of them I have had no encounter with.
I didn't encounter the above "method of nines" until the need for it came up in grad school.
At one of my jobs, a printing clerk astonished me with calculating large multiplications in his mind, very fast. I kept asking him how he did it, and he always only smiled at me :) Every time we were bored we would begin a race getting the result of some multiplication in mind. Every single time he won of course. It was fun.
Strange that I remembered him after decades. He was a diehard southerner, still in war with "Yankees" and craving for lynching Blacks and jews :) His number one worry in the world was the loss of the pure White race. It was really on his mind every day. I didn't help that either, cause I always joked with him, "You're an endangered species", and he felt the truth of it very deeply :-)
I don't know about right now, but Texas back then had a good portion of its people just about like how he was. Same world view, and very concerned and worried. And fiercely anti-Yankee. I mean just as if it was still 1865. The moment news of Twin Towers coming down hit the TV, you could see all these pickup trucks driving in the streets carrying large flags of the Confederates, for days. They were so much hoping that their militia had done that. A few days later they all got so depressed and silent, finding out it was a Palestinian-related issue, having nothing to do with the South. I sensed and saw all that very closely! South got very depressed by the news of it, and the rest of the USA got very relieved! Cause they, too, first thought it was the militia.
No idea how things are now, though.
Bad diversion here, but was worth it, cause he was actually a heck of a guy and deserved to be mentioned at least this much. Very patriotic in a Southern way. You guys up there don't know what I'm talking about.
Indians have many ways of calculating arithmetic operations. It must be something that's stressed in their schools. I even have a little book by an Indian woman that teaches many methods of calculating fast. I used to know the most useful ones among it but I've forgotten it all now.
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