What do you mean there are people who can recite the digits of pi out to thousands of decimal places? Who has that kind of free time? Worse, what about the roomful of people who sat around to observe? They were so impressed by the feat that they felt compelled to watch? Alright, I don't know their reasoning.
What I'm thinking, though, is that if you're impressed by some feat of memory or calculation, innovation or creative thinking, you should strive to accomplish your own. Those people who put on a show of remembering and reciting something they heard thirty years ago, while playing eight simultaneous chess games and solving calculus problems in their head aren't freaks. They're simply focused and practiced at performing particular skills.
Did you know that homo sapiens is the weakest mammal in the world? I'm not saying you couldn't overpower your kid's gerbil. What I mean is that we have the lowest muscle to mass ratio of the mammal world. So how have we been able to push all the other critters around for so long? The answer is the same as I tell my kid when he asks for a new computer. "You've got that thing on top of your neck."
Yeah, I'm talking to you. You've read this far so don't try to deny it. You have a brain and we both know it. The biggest, baddest supercomputers still take up huge rooms and run on megawatts of power just to be able to perform at a fraction of the capacity of that thing on top of your neck. With its 100 billion neurons and quadrillion synapses, your brain is estimated to have potential processing power equivalent to 100 petaflops (1015 floating point operations/second). That’s a lot. On top of that, it's portable, self-cooling and runs on about 20 watts of power. Your body is its robot slave.
Your brain is as big and bad as you want it to be. With focus and application, you can do those things you always wanted to do. If not, you're not using the equipment right. Be creative. Go write that book you've been putting off writing. I'm not saying it won't be hard. That's where the practice part comes in, because after you write you'll be rewriting. That's OK, though. Work is the price of excellence. Don't get stressed chasing perfection. That's the mirage in the distance. Leave it out there for the next sucker.
Instead of stringing together a bunch of numbers in repetition of an infinitely long bunch of digits that's already been figured out, you're going to use your personal organic supercomputer to arrange twenty-six letters into a unique pattern one million letters long that will be so amazing people will voluntarily read it again. They might even go see the movie version. No matter what Hollywood does to it, it has to be better than the movie version of pi. What were those guys thinking? Talk about not using the equipment right.
Any questions?
Don't live wanting. Don't die wondering.
Phoenix
nice :)
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