Article 36577 of sci.math:
Newsgroups: sci.math
From: hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil (Dan Hoey)
Subject: Re: Irrationalism
Sender: usenet@ra.nrl.navy.mil
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 1994 17:45:30 GMT

mark@freenet.uwm.edu (Mark Hopkins) says:

>Give me any indication or formula that will allow me to compute the
>Nth decimal for any non-rational on any machine for any N at all
>without exceeding the capacity of that machine...

John Baez told you how this may not work if the number is rational.
But as long as you can provide N--as a decimal number, say--it's easy
to exhibit such an irrational.  For instance, we may take the
irrational number 0.1234567891111111111222222222233... whose Nth digit
is the leading digit of N.  You don't even need to look at all of N to
figure out what the N'th digit is.  I wouldn't be surprised if someone
could tell me what the N'th digit is where N is floor(1.5^(10^10000)).
But probably not where N is floor(1.5^(10^10000)) with its digits in
reverse order.

Unlike John, though, I probably won't respond to this guy's next post
even if he includes the answer.  Anyone who can't tell the difference
between C!=- <=> U!=| and NP=Co-NP is just a little too irrational for
me.

Dan Hoey
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil