stop thinking, max, just feel. use your intuition. it's the only way to get into the flow. what did you think of hamlet?
it's been a month. you haven't taken a single break.
have you met the new fish my niece bought me? i named her icarus. after you. my renegade pupil. you fly too high, you'll get burned.
the more i see you, the more i see myself thirty years ago. my greatest pupil. published at 16, ph.d. at 20.
but life isn't just mathematics. i spent forty years looking for patterns in pi, i found nothing.
i found things, but not a pattern.
your mainframe?
what happened?
you have a printout?
the picks, the number?
what was the number it spit out?
how many?
what was it, a hundred and fifty, a thousand, two hundred sixteen!? how many?
 i dealt with some bugs back in my pi days. i was wondering if it was similar to one i ran into.
have you met archimedes. the one with the black spot. you see?
remember archimedes of syracuse? the king asks archimedes to determine if a present he's received was actually solid gold. unsolved problem at the time. it tortures the great greek mathematician for weeks. insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns on his bed for nights on end. finally, his equally exhausted wife, she's forced to share a bed with this genius, convinces him to take a bath, to relax. while stepping into the tub he observes the bathwater rise as he enters. displacement. a way to determine volume. and thus, a way to determine density, weight over volume. and thus, archimedes solves the problem. he screams "eureka!"greek for "i found it!"and is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's castle to report his discovery. now, what's the moral of the story.
wrong. the point of the story is the wife. listen to your wife, she will give you perspective. meaning, you need a break, max, you have to take a bath, otherwise you'll get nowhere. there will be no order, only chaos. go home and take a bath.
max?
relax, it's early.
now, what's up?
excuse me?
oh, you mean the bug. i found it working on pi.
what's this all about, max?
religious jews?
really? what's it mean to them?
it's just a coincidence.
yesterday's stock picks?
hmmm.
max, it's a bug.
come with me.
listen to me. the ancient japanese considered the go board to be a microcosm of the universe. although when it is empty it appears to be simple and ordered, in fact, the possibilities of game play are endless. they say that no two go games have ever been alike. just like snowflakes. so, the go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. that is the truth of our world, max. it can't be easily summed up with math. there is no simple pattern.
so?
that is insanity, max.
hold on, you have to slow down. you're losing it, you have to take a breath. listen to yourself. you're connecting a computer bug i had, a computer bug you might have had, and some religious hogwash. if you want to find the number two sixteen in the world, you'll be able to pull it out of anywhere. two hundred and sixteen steps from your street comer to your front door. two hundred and sixteen seconds you spend riding on the elevator. when your mind becomes obsessed with anything, it will filter everything else out and find examples of that thing everywhere. three hundred and twenty, four hundred and fifty, twenty-three. whatever! you've chosen two sixteen and you'll find it everywhere in nature. but max, as soon as you discard scientific rigor, you are no longer a mathematician. you become a numerologist. what you need to do is take a break from your research. you need it. you deserve it here's a hundred dollars, i want you to take it. if ,you won't take it, borrow it. either way, take a break. spend it however you like as long as it falls in the category of vacation. real world stuff, okay. no math.
just try it. in a week you'll laugh about this. c'mon, max. think about it!
you're early. i was just studying our.  what did you do to yourself?
i thought you were going to take a break.
you have it?
okay, sit down.
i gave up before i pinpointed it. but my guess is that certain problems cause computers to get stuck in a particular loop. the loop leads to meltdown, but right before they crash they.  they become "aware" of their own structure. the computer has a sense of its own silicon nature and it prints out its ingredients.
in some ways. i guess.
no, max, it's only a nasty bug.
a door in front of a cliff. you're driving yourself over the edge. you need to stop.
the bug doesn't only destroy computers.
look what it did to your computer. look what it's doing to you.
it's killing you. leave it unknown.
max, i got burnt.
it caused my stroke.
max, there's more than math! there's a whole world.
max, it's death!
get out! max, get out!
out!