I'm having some trouble in my pygame application that I'm making. There are buttons in the menu that change how fast my simulation runs (by changing `speed` in `clock.tick(speed*10)`). This, however, also slows down the rate that the menu buttons respond. If I ingame set `speed` anywhere lower than 0.5 the speed and play/pause buttons take up to five seconds to register a click. So I tried creating my own way to work around this:

```
speed = 1 # defined previously ingame

timeSlow = 0
timeSlowGoal = 0

while True: # game loop

    if speed < 1:

        timeSlowGoal = reciprocal(speed) # well here's my problem

    else:
        timeSlowGoal = -1

    if timeSlowGoal != -1:

        if timeSlow >= timeSlowGoal:
            timeSlow = 0
            # more code that actually does stuff

        else:
            timeSlow += 1
            # doesn't match, try again

```

In python, there are tricks like `int()`,`string()`, and `float()` to change a variable. Of course, `reciprocal()` doesn't work. Is there some sort of function like these that gets the reciprocal of a number, (which in this case is always a decimal) or do I need to just do some fancy math to get it?

(of course if all of this is unnecessary and you have a better solution to my first problem let me know)

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**EDIT:** Okay, there is a very simple solution to this that I overlooked. 1/n is **always** the reciprocal of n. There's no need for a reciprocal() function because it's so simple. That's what I get for forgetting elementary school math.