I like doing a little magic trick when I have to guesstimate base 10 logarithm of a number by looking at its length. It feels like I'm doing something wrong and yet it works.

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This one should be roughly 39.1. It has 39 digits after the 1, 1.39 cubed is closer to 2 than 4, and 2 has a natural logarithm 0.3 so 1.39 should have a natural logarithm of roughly 0.1.

idk why would it feel wrong tho? when the logarithm is greater than zero, the integer part of it is how long it is minus one.

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's less about math itself feeling wrong and more about doing a string operation to get a math result

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago

Ah, okay, I got it. I love doing string operations to get math results tho, especially when programming.

I could use logarithms... or I could len(str(n))-1