Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

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One in a million people will unknowingly live exactly a whole number of kilometres (door to door) from work, accurate to the nearest millimetre.

I found it best to read with the internet handy, so I could zip on and find out more whenever it interested me. Most real-world salami-slicing scams seem to use amounts greater than fractions of a penny but still operate below the threshold where people will notice and complain. In many of the stories here you might find yourself feeling rather smug – but as they say in the classics, ‘pride comes before a fall’ and ‘there but for the grace of God go I…’ It is really worth while keeping those little quotes in mind here. His point isn’t to point and laugh, but rather to explain that any system based on the assumption that no one would be damn stupid enough to make that particular mistake has been designed to fail.Pero se enrolla en demasía en asuntos que se me escapan (quede claro que yo soy de letras) consiguiendo con ello que mi mente se escabulla hacia algún otro lugar, lejos de las páginas. Also, it's numbered backwards, which made it tricky to track my process through it here, since Goodreads won't let you update to Page 141 when you started on Page 316. I can't grasp the last in any personal sense, but this helps me keep some perspective when dealing with large numbers. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was nicknamed Galloping Gertie and it collapsed four months after being built. Sometimes the addition of a little bit more mass is all it takes to change the mathematics of how a structure behaves.

If you want something unlikely to occur, you simply need the patience to create enough opportunities to allow it to happen. The area looks as safe as safe can be … until you check the LAPD’s online map of reported crime locations. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. It isn’t exactly a compliment, but it almost always implies a fondness for the person being spoken about. We want to find a villain in every disaster, but often they were well meaning people who were working at the edge of our knowledge or it was a committee failure.With his delightful conversational style, honed in his stand-up maths shows, it feels as if Parker is a friend down the pub, relating the story of some technical disaster driven by maths and computing, or regaling us with a numerical cock-up. Sometimes the punchline will come and then he will explain that the punchline was actually only one of the things that needed to go wrong for the whole thing to come crashing down. The next shock is that a lot of the diagrams supposed to be showing a team working like a well-oiled machine use a mechanism which would be permanently seized in place. El libro recopila cientos de pequeñas historias, intentando darles una cierta continuidad y agrupándolas por capítulos, pero podríamos decir que este es un libro casi aleatorio porque para describir todo su contenido necesitaríamos casi casi reescribir de nuevo el libro; no hay una buena manera de resumirlo. You can get upset about these things, but 2-d representations of 3-d phenomena are, well, you know, 2-d.