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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

An old Soviet joke.

Professor in a math class calls out a student to draw a circle on the blackboard. The student makes a perfect one; the Platonic ideal of a circle in one swift, generous motion. The professor is impressed and inquiries, how come?

- See, all I did in my two years of military service was operating a meat grinder.

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There are actually people who can quickly draw really good circles.

Here's a video of Alexander Overwijk, who has won the World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship numerous times, drawing a circle [1].

Here's Michael Clauss, who ended a streak of 9 consecutive Overwijk wins [2].

Here's some footage of the first World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship in 2007, showing several different contestents [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhfZUZiwSE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NgVbEhe44

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1J5ANnq0T8

“Giotto used the perfect circle to demonstrate the level of artistry he earned” http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/ sometimes it is attributed to Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci

Even if you didn't mention it was a Soviet joke, I'd know it was Russian.

I don't get the joke haha, can someone explain it?

A manual meat grinder [0] is operated by running a hand crank that moves in a circular motion. The implication is that after two years of having done only this one job, the motion is instilled in the hand such that they can now draw perfect circles. The Soviet army was infamous for both its cruelty and the pointless repetitive errands the conscripts would have to do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_grinder

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