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I once met a guy who said he could count anything instantly. I had to test his claim. "This is my ranch, and over there's my cattle. How many are there?" He lo
by sowbug 10y ago
I once met a guy who said he could count anything instantly. I had to test his claim. "This is my ranch, and over there's my cattle. How many are there?"
He looked over, paused for the briefest moment, and then said, "I see 742 cows."
Astonished, I exclaimed, "That's exactly right! Mind sharing your secret?"
He leaned in a bit and proudly explained. "It's simple, really. I count the number of legs and divide by four."
- rexreed 10y agoI don't get it - is counting the # of legs less work than counting the # of cows? It would seem to be 4x the work, or am I being dense?
- ColinWright 10y agoIt's a well-known "joke", and it clearly plays off the idea of this article wherein calculating 52! is, genuinely, done by calculating 54! then dividing by a correction factor.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- a_c_s 10y agoThat's exactly the joke - that he's doing something that's 4x more work than just counting the cows directly.