Two Seven-Year Olds Discuss Maths

On the bus last night, coming back from London, I overheard a long conversation about numbers being held between two boys, whose age I estimated at around seven. They were discussing numbers, big numbers.

Of the two boys, one of them was the self-proclaimed number expert. He saw it as his role to inform the other. He was telling him about all the big numbers. Like:

a thousand, a million, a killion, a dillion, a zillion, a killion

You’ve already said that one, said the quieter friend

yeah, bazillion, zamillion…

what’s the biggest number you can get?

a killion, yeah, I think it’s that.

but I could have like 5 killion

Yeah, maybe it’s not a killion, yeah?

For a while they tried to figure out what the biggest number was, but they eventually gave up, without agreement on which is the unsurpassable king of the numbers.

A Question for the Non-Scots

I have a quick question for those of you that aren’t Scottish:

When I was around 10 years old, I had a teacher named Mrs McSporran. Anyone find that funny?

I never thought anything of it at the time but now after three years in England, it seems pretty funny to me. I mean, Mrs McSporran! She might as well have been called Kilts McHaggis!

A Competition

I was at a 2-day training course last week. We were in teams for the duration, and they kept score of who was doing best. My team came out on top. We won £20 of Amazon vouchers each and I’m willing to split the bounty with you.

£10 (= $20 = €12.50) to spend at Amazon then for the first person who can tell me who this is:

Oh, and by the way, before any of you go looking for a reverse image search engine that just lets you plonk in the image and gives you the answer, I already checked up on that. Only one computer has ever been able to reliably carry this out, and it’s the hilariously camp Batcomputer:

Sunshine

If you’ve not already heard it, I want to draw your attention to Azadeh’s song Sunshine. No adjectives required…

Ena

In Kracow I went out for a night at the dancing with Dave and a fine young American fellow of the name of Nick. During the course of the night I met a lovely girl called Ena. We hit it off and we set a rendezvous for 2pm the next day, at the Bell Tower, and there was some mention of trombones that I remember. Ena set the location. The next day, wanting to be sure I got the right place, I googled the bell tower and kracow to see if it was the place I thought. The photos confirmed what I thought, and at the allotted hour, off I went. I waited and waited at the tower (next to a sign of a saxophone, which I figured accounted for the trombone), but no-one showed. In the end Dave came by and we went off for a beer, me feeling a little miserable in a brand new T shirt (that I had not bought specially for occasion, oh no).

It was only later that I found out from Nick that I waited in the wrong place, so Ena likely felt as bad about the whole thing as I did.

So if you know a civil engineer, recently graduated from Cork Uni, living in London going by the name of Ena (or a phoneme thereof), tell her I waited in the wrong place.