sylvar

A pun on a mailing list recently reminded me that I used to have a bizarrely geeky hobby: calculating and memorizing the cube root of 704. (All that remains familiar to me is "8.895920362...", and I could only have remembered "8.8959" if you asked me this morning.)

This was in the days before I had access to good computers, so I figured out that much by adding the digit 5 to the last known value, then cubing it and seeing if I got more or less than 704. Actually, I got 8.8959 from Anna to the Infinite Power, a movie I saw many times on HBO as a kid. That's also where I got the idea for this hobby, since I suspected that wasn't really the cube root of 704, checked it with a calculator, and was delighted to find that the movie was wrong and I was right.

That movie had a disproportionate effect on me. Although the plot probably seems a bit hokey now, I found it very plausible. (I, too, was a young genius aware that there was something a bit odd about me.)

And I vividly remember the song "Reverie", which seems to have been created for the film. A shame, really -- I wish it had been a longer piece that I could finally have the pleasure of hearing. The theme from Schindler's List is similar, and -- at the risk of spoilers for a rather obscure movie -- that's an interesting coincidence.