The new magic number

Miller's famous study on the ubiquity of 7 in short term memory aside, I have my own candidate for a magic number:

1/√ 2

The decimal equivalent is approximately .707, which is a kind of cool looking number (it's approximate because the square root of 2 is irrational, another cool aspect). But its real significance is that if you square it you get 0.5 or ½.



OK, why the math today? I'm trying to figure out how to cut my work in half. Why? Because if I get laid off I will hire myself out as a documentation consultant with my specialty being that I can reduce documentation by half. Hey, in a bad economy, sell hamburger and beer.

So here's my radical (pun intended for my mathy geek friends) approach:

1. Look across the breadth of what's being produced and reduce it by 30%. A 30% reduction is not that hard to find.
2. Look at the depth of what's left and reduce it by 30%.

The net result is that you're left with half of what you started with (actually a little less because of rounding).

Gotta run and get a copyright or a patent or something on this.