FIGURE 1-5

If you keep going the overhangs accumulate like this.

for the 51 cards you push. (No point pushing the very bottom one.) This comes out to a shade less than 2.25940659073334. So you have a total overhang of more than two and a quarter card lengths! (See Figure 1-6.)

FIGURE 1-6

I was a college student when I learned this. It was summer vacation and I was prepping for the next semester’s work, trying to get ahead of the game. To help pay my way through college I used to spend summer vacations as a laborer on construction sites, work that was not heavily unionized at the time in England. The day after I found out about this thing with the cards I was left on my own to do some clean-up work in an indoor area where hundreds of large, square, fibrous ceiling tiles were stacked. I spent a happy couple of hours with those tiles, trying to get a two and a quarter tile overhang from 52 of them. When the foreman came round and found me deep in contemplation of a great wobbling tower of ceiling tiles, I suppose