2.61 The Trylon & Perisphere

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61. Acre Ache

They breakfast in their room at the Carlyle. Kimura reads the World's Fair data out loud: … the symbols of the fabulous Fair are the Trylon and Perisphere ….  . He stops, picks up 

a magnifying glass and inspects the postal stamp commemorating  the 1939 World's Fair: the Trylon, a tall sleek pointed pyramid of white with a futuristic ramp-link to the Perisphere and continues reading … is the design of American Architect Wallace K. Harrison. It symbolizes the Fair’s main theme – the wonderful future of the new decade.  It is located in Flushing Queens New York, occupying over twelve-hundred acres … .

   Ali, doing a naked breakfast interrupts: “Can it Kim!  Boresville times three!” She takes a drink of her coffee.  “Acres? All I get when I think ‘acres’ is an ache. You’re a genius, Kim, so give out – whut’s wit’ ake-ahs?”

   Kimura loves to explain. He contemplates his dream doll’s momentary masquerade as Goya’s Naked Maja.

“Ali-san, you are right! ‘Acre’ is hard to imagine. It is surface area, best related to a square but not a square. But reduce it to an image of a square and you get a picture. So allow me to show you? Take the twelve-hundred acres? Divide by six-hundred forty. It gives one point eight seven five. Now imagine the square root of one point eight seven five? One point four is a close approximation. That gives you the side of a 1200-acre area in miles. So the World’s Fair can be pictured as nearly a one-and-a-half mile square."
   "Now use one acre for the example." He scribbles on hotel memo: “One acre divided by six forty, and square rooted gives zero point zero three nine five mile, which you can convert non metric American measurement into feet by multiplying five-thousand, two-hundred eighty and it gives you two-hundred eight and a half feet. So one acre can be imagined as a square of land slightly more than two-hundred feet on a side.”

   “Ali grabs his memo and flings it to the floor: “Your method stinks. I mean, who can root numbers. We need some kind a computer like no one’s invented yet.”

   He stoops to pick it up while patiently explaining. “But Ali-san, almost everyone knows single digit square roots, like the square root of one is one, and the square root of two is one point four one four, and for three, one point seven three two.” 

   “Yeah, Washington’s birthday!”

   “And since it is not necessary to be highly accurate, you can round off the decimal numbers, as I just did, making the calculation easy to do in the head. So twelve-hundred divided by six forty is close enough to twelve-hundred divided by six-hundred which is an easy answer two, and the square root of two, as we all know is one point four one four, which rounded to one point four gives the answer I got by my pencil calculation.”

   Ali jumps up and plops down on his lap, making sure her lithe little ass comes down atop his rapidly erecting penis right into her cleavage.  
   “Oh, my big brilliant bugger! Now why not a quickie before we say Farewell for the Fair?
To read next, click 2.62 The German Question of 1939