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Have not worn pants in like 50 days now
(31 May 2020 at 22:48) |
So! What happened this month? Again I spent the whole thing inside, only leaving the house for a daily run (not going near any people). Weather's been great, and working at home is making it logistically easy to do like an hour of running every afternoon. So I am getting a ripped summer bod as a project and a way to keep from getting depressed or whatever. The minor Strava segments around town continue to be a good challenge because I can often be competitive for the top spots, which is also good because they just made all the segment stuff paid-only, except for the top 10. I've done some longer runs too, though not to complete the Pac Tom project; I'm worried about being in some situation where I run ten miles out to get one missing dead-end but I can't do it safely because of some block party or something (this is already really awkward when it happens, so the additional death/irresponsibility angle puts me over the edge). So instead I have been doing some trips to neighboring towns outside of Pittsburgh. It's a very weird experience (or weird that it is weird?) on these runs to feel lost, since it's been over a decade of feeling like I know at least the main streets of the entire city. I must admit I'm flirting a little bit with the idea of doing some sort of Pac Project beyond the city limits, but I need to figure out what the appropriate scope/rules would be?
My computer discovered another prime number; this one much more impressive than the last. It's
118568 × 53112069 + 1
which is 2,175,248 digits long and the 70th largest prime known to human-kind. Wow! It is also the largest "base-5" prime (here referring to the 5x term; of course it is prime in any base) known, period. This one is big enough to get a fairly rote official announcement by PrimeGrid. You can see that I was the "double-checker"; each number gets tested by two different computers and the other guy gets the main credit because his finished first. (In fact it's a fluke that I ran this at all—for now I've switched my computer over to Rosetta@Home to help in some small way to look for Coronavirus treatments. I only had PrimeGrid running as "backfill" while I was manually migrating Rosetta from http to https!?) Anyway, primes gonna get bigger and there are infinitely many of them, but one cool thing about this one is that it actually makes some progress towards proving the "Sierpiński base 5 conjecture." A Sierpiński (base b) number is a number k such that k × bn + 1 is composite (not prime) for all n. The conjecture is that 159986 is the smallest even Sierpiński base 5 number; to prove this, we need to find prime numbers of the form k × 5n + 1 for a set of values k < 159986, which proves that they are not Sierpiński (base 5). With this prime, we know that 118568 is not Sierpiński base 5, eliminating 1 of the 31 remaining candidates. Sierpiński is also the guy who invented the Triforce.
Somewhat hard to find the energy to grind through the last stages of some longer-term projects, but I've been starting up new ones and watering some old long-neglected ones. I finally fixed some long-standing issues in my sorta crazy custom web programming language "Aphasia", which I wrote in college, partially rewrote in grad school, and which still powers a lot of my websites (including this one). It is relaxing to address some of those bugs or delete stupid crap from when I didn't know what I was doing (even more than now). Speaking of things that will still haunt me a decade from now, I added more features and support for humidity sensing in my custom distributed temperature monitoring thing, including hooking it up to automatically control my broken attic fan (but the fan is still broken so it's just telling me that my attic is humid and hot, no duh). Started a new secret project which was initially just going to be a toy for my Thursday drinking group but is now becoming some kind of weird technology.
In games, I did finally win Nuclear Throne; thank you for the encouragement. I've been testing my friend Jim's puzzle game The Cubedex of Brass and Wood and have been enjoying trying to solve/break those puzzles and as an excuse to keep my automated theorem proving skills up to date. |  |
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"Sierpiński is also the guy who invented the Triforce."
Brilliant! |
There is a new largest base-5 prime in town!
102818 * 5^3440382 - 1
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