I mentioned in the previous post that I watched 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night and got nerd-sniped by the mention of Lagrange points at the beginning. I got nerd-sniped again in a scene describing a password.
The instructions are
Put in nine nines, take the square root and press the integer.
I looked up the line just now to get it right. When I was watching the movie I thought the instructions said to take the integers, i.e. ignore the decimal point. I wondered at the time why not just say take the square root of 10.
Let’s look at the numbers.
bc -l >>> sqrt(999999999) 31622.77658587240501519419 >>> sqrt(10) 3.16227766016837933199
If the calculator displays up to eight digits, or rounds to nine digits, the digits in the two results are the same.
However, the intention was to press a key that takes the integer part, and so the password would be
⌊√999999999⌋ = 31622