Coffee Klatch

On July 2, 2005, BBC News announced that a Japanese mental health counselor broke a very interesting world record. Visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4644103.stm for the original story.

A Japanese mental health counsellor has broken the world record for reciting pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, from memory.

Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number’s first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese.

He had to stop three hours into his recital after losing his place, and had to start from the beginning.

Pi is an infinite decimal whose numbers never repeat in a pattern.

Mr Haraguchi, from Chiba, east of Tokyo, took several hours reciting the numbers, finishing in the early hours of Saturday.

“I thank you all for your support,” he told reporters and onlookers at the public hall in Tokyo.

He hopes to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records to replace his fellow countryman Hiroyuki Goto, who managed to recite 42,195 numbers as a 21-year-old student in 1995.

Mr Haraguchi had already recited the ratio up to about 54,000 digits last September, but was forced to drop the challenge when the facility hosting the event closed for the night.

So far, pi has been calculated to 1.24 trillion decimal places with the aid of a supercomputer.

Conventionally, 3.14159 is used as pi.

Pi is known for turning up in all sorts of scientific equations, including those describing the DNA double helix, a rainbow, ripples spreading from where a raindrop fell into water, waves, navigation and more.

You may have heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. It where you try to connect any actor/actress to Kevin Bacon by movies shared in common with other people. Example: Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Ed Asner, who as in JFK with Kevin Bacon, so Elvis has a “Bacon Number” of 2.

Anyway, I’ve found that I frequently have a common actor in movies that I watch or rent. Example: I recently watched two movies with Ian McDiarmid in them (and they WEREN’T Star Wars related): Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Sleepy Hollow. Then this morning I watched Mars Attacks!, which was produced by Tim Burton, just like Sleepy Hollow, and both of them had music by Danny Elfman to boot.

(The first time I recognized this phenomenon happening was when I watched two movies that I had just gotten on eBay (The Impostors and The Haunting) and realized that Lili Taylor was in both of them. Lili Taylor is a very cool and talented actress. Not gorgeous or supermodel type, but very genuine, very real, and can portray all kinds of emotions very believably. Anyway, this was the first time I’d noticed this happening, but since then, I catch it going on all the time. I watch two movies the same weekend, and (for whatever reason) there’s a common person in both or directing both. Maybe it’s subliminal, or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it sure is interesting.)

So this morning I was watching Mars Attacks, which I’ve only seen like once, and throughout the opening credits I got more and more amazed at the cast! Check it out: Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Tom Jones, Jim Brown, Jack Black, Pam Grier, and Natalie Portman. Pretty amazing that so many big names (old and new) would be involved in a silly Martian movie. Although I must admit it was quite enjoyable watching so many of these people get killed or worse by Martians. I watched them disintegrate Jack Black and Michael J. Fox, and watched them exchange the heads of Sarah Jessica Parker and her chihuahua. THAT was great! And of course the whole silly movie had to end with Tom Jones singing “It’s Not Unusual” while squirrels and birds and deer danced.

Note: If Martians ever do come to Earth and start annihilating everyone, all you have to do is play Slim Whitman yodelling his rendition of “Indian Love Call.” (”When I’m calling you-oooo-oooo… Will you answer too-oooo-oooo?”) Another side note in the Movie Connections phenomenon: Sarah Jessica Parker used this same song in Dudley Do-Right three years later, only this time it summoned Dudley rather than exploding his brain.