There’s a very old t-shirt joke on this:
There are 10 kinds of mathemeticians… those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Correction: In fact, 7 is 7 in any base [del]equal to or[/del] higher than base seven.
Oh yeah, in base 7, it would be 10.
All your base are belong… never mind.
Cut out the “equal to or…”. In base seven, seven is 10.
Actually, 7 is a meaningless grapheme in base 7.
Ha! That line from Petey is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing the “unpardonable sin” post above.
Hmm… I count myself as a math geek, but there are times when it makes sense to round pi to one significant digit, and that comic would seem to demonstrate one. 
Yeah, it’s an analog watch. The difference between 9 and 9.0048 is going to be hard to spot.
“There are three kinds of people - those who can count, and those who can’t.”
Regards,
Shodan
That’s what she said.
There are two kinds of people; those can finish sentences and
I for one will enjoy telling people it’s -7:00 when the time arrives. Not sure why they dropped the ball there.
Every base is base 10.
There are 10 kinds of people: Those who know binary, those who don’t, and those who never expect these damned ternary jokes.
BigT, how do you get the negative sign?
Not a valid nitpick…because the text before you said “base 2” and “binary” … and your hex and octal is computer programmer specific… not quite the same as “nerd”. And you failed to mention ascii (where its ‘o’) , mysql “socket error” and somethings “tunnel failed” and …
Especially since it implies the range of the blast front is 100 light years. That is such a suspiciously round number that we’d be justified in thinking it has zero significant digits, and only the exponent is relevant. 10 million cubic light years would be an appropriate estimate.
Did she believe you?
Not from 111[sub]2[/sub]. It’s the other solution to 66 - x[sup]2[/sup] + x = 10.
It simplifies to -x[sup]2[/sup] + x + 56 = 0, which becomes (x+7)(x-8) = 0. The watch only acknowledges x=8 as the solution, which I thought was weird.
Though, to be fair, I cheated, as my brain was mush at that point. I just knew that a quadratic would have two answers, and wondered what the other one was. So I used an autosolver.
A number which is explicitly quoted in the comic a week earlier. And, notably, quoted by the character who isn’t a nigh-omniscient supercomputer. Which certainly lends credence to a very low precision in the stated number.
In context, though, Petey’s beratement makes sense. The “list of crimes” to which “rounding pi to 3” is being added also includes over 15 billion charges of attempted murder, and Petey finds it useful to remind the other character of that.