78 x 23?

So over on digg the other day, there was a popular post that simply had the title, What is 78×23? Apparently, it was an attempt at deep thinking.

Not to me though. I just figured it was someone who accidentally resized their xterm 2 columns smaller and one line shorter, and didn’t bother reading the story.

Turns out, it wasn’t even as interesting as that, since the answer was just a math problem (1794). Oh well.

This post will amuse perhaps 0.0001% and confuse and annoy perhaps 99.9999% (hey, that’s 6 nines!) of my loyal blog readers, for the following reasons:

• it references digg.com, an extremely nerdy website
• it requires knowing what an xterm is
• it assumes that you know that the standard size of an xterm is 80×24 (columns by lines)
• my humorous parenthetical remark is a reference to the well-known computing concept of 5 nines
• the real punchline is a math answer

To my friends and readers: feel lucky that you get to experience the world as a normal person.