Good question. This site started out as a place for me to bitch about my job. And bitch I did. As the years have gone by, the site has changed into something hard to explain.

Well if you have seen the movie Full Metal Jacket you would know the answer is steers and queers.

Yep. Back on November 28th 1998 I got shit canned because of this little old website. They let me go because I wasn’t happy. The real reason was that the front desk manager at the time didn’t like that I knew more than him. That and the fact I posted his password to the computer system we use on this site.

Short answer first? Spider is me. Long answer? Well that’s complicated. This and this is me. This one, well that’s a secret.

Well Sergei Fedorov is/was the penname for a guy that worked at the hotel. We were friends now and then. That being said Sergei is not the Sergei Fedorov. Just in case there is any confusion. Sergei’s greatest hits can be found here.

I really don’t know who Secretive is. I can guess. But that answer leads to me saying no comment. You can read about Secretive here.

Ok it started out as (maybe?) a little bitsy itsy insult. Really though it ended up my way of saying I have met some pretty cool ladies. Really.

It’s a term from the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer. A movie about chess. The correct spelling is actually “patzer,” and it’s a derogatory name for a weak player. And I borrowed the term potzer from the Kevin Smith movie Chasing Amy.

42.

There is a method called the binary search method that will find the square root of any number N. You’ll need a calculator to do this method.

The first step is to pick a value you know to be too small the be the square root of Pi. Call this value S (for small guess). The next step is to pick a value you know to be too large to be the square root of Pi. Call this value L (for large value).

Then since Pi = 3.14159…. we’ll say S = 1, and L = 2.

S = 1
L = 2

Then find S^2 and L^2 (S and L squared):

S^2 = 1
L^2 = 4

Which of these values is farther away from Pi? S^2 is farther away from Pi then L^2, so replace S with the average of S and L. Now we have:

S = 1.5
L = 2

Continue the process:

S^2 = 2.25
L^2 = 4

Replace the small value again since its square is farther away.

S = 1.75
L = 2

Goes to:

S^2 = 3.0625
L^2 = 4

Replace the large value now:

S = 1.75
L = 1.875

Goes to:

S^2 = 3.0625
L^2 = 3.515625

Replace the large value again:

S = 1.75
L = 1.8125

Goes to:

S^2 = 3.0625
L^2 = 3.28515625

At which point we know to replace the large value again since its square is farther away then the small value’s square.

So

S = 1.75
L = 1.78125

At this point we know the square root of Pi lies between 1.75 and 1.78125. Continuing this process we can get finer and finer bounds for the value of the square root of Pi. After a while we will see that the square root of Pi equals 1.77245…. Since Pi is irrational we can never get an exact answer and we have to settle for an approximation.