Number lookup website and watches

[jack]

1. If I get annoyed by wearing something round my wrist, but would like a watch, are there any suggestions? Be retro and get a fob watch? At least I can do "spectacles testacles[1] wallet and watch[2]" crossing-myself[3]s then.

2. I seem to recall a website which did a reverse lookup on arbitrary numbers. So, would take a decimal[4], and say "pi^2" or "foo's constant" or "simple integral of expression". Did I imagine this? I can't find it.

3. How should I have titled this? Something about clock arithmetic[5]?

[1] Nuns on the Run is a good contender for "Film that should have been really awful, but was actually very funny." Though I think the ultimate winner was Pirates of the Caribean (potentially vulnerable to Pirates II).

[2] For the record, it's left then right, though the eastern orthodox do it the other way, and I can't believe any God most people worship would mind so long as it's sincere.

[3] Is there a word that means that? That looks clumsy?

[4] That is, a number typically specified to a largish but finite degree of precision. Not necessarily in base 10. Though it would be.

[5] I assumed everyone had heard of it, but teaching modular arithmatic made me realise apparently not. Clock arithmetic is like "11+2=1" and "12=0".

Comments

[mair_in_grenderich]

friend of mine wears his watch around his ankle and says it's a good place for it.

I used to have one that dangled around my neck, on a sort of plastic string - tendency to catch in things meant the flimsy chain things were a bad idea.

2. I think google would do the first two ...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Eh? Does he spend the day crosslegged or what?

2. It doesn't seem to. That is, it knows pi^2 is 9.8696044, but not that 9.8696044 is pi^2 afaict.

[mair_in_grenderich]

nooo. maybe it has a clear face.

oh, I see. but surely an arbitrary number could be many things?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmm? What? Wouldn't it always be covered by trouser, too far away to see, and at the wrong angle?

Yes, it could, which is one thing that made me think I may have imagined it. But regardless of what you can prove, most of the time, if someone has such a number, they will want the answer from the most used equation or whatever.

[mair_in_grenderich]

covered by trouser he lifts up his trouser to look at his watch
too far away to see maybe it has a clear face
at the wrong angle doesn't seem to be

I guess, but how would you work that out? what if there are two good equations leading to the same number?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

Well, as I say, maybe I did imagine this. Presumably you'd actually have to have a big database of common polynomials of common constants? I can't think of any way of narrowing things down.

[simont]

Well, then there's no reason you couldn't print both. A search engine isn't required to return exactly one hit.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I was more scared of getting infinitely many answers with no good ordering than two. I still can't work out how much that would happen.

Intuitively, almost anyone dealing with 1.41421 will mean sqrt(2), or at worst two different interesting numbers will be coincidently close, but it doesn't feel right.

[mair_in_grenderich]

yeah, but what if I input something like 4 ?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There are already plenty of sites that do what's famous about this integer, you could easily incorporate one of those. Though from this PoV, 4 is probably as explained as it's going to be.

The bit that may or may not exist it decimal numbers.