Thursday, June 18, 2009

I'm a Fucking Slug

So I get a comment from someone I did not know about before, and he is oddly a runner, mathematician and computer geek. Don't know about the music and gardening and Barbies ;)

And I go to his blog and find out that a new Mersenne prime number has been discovered. Read all about it here.

Fun fact: I have a poster in my home office of 2**(6,972,593) - 1. Yes that's right--it's a big, huge prime number, and the poster has all the digits on it (all 2,000,000+). Perhaps it serves to remind me that we are just small parts of a large universe, or maybe just the beauty of numbers.

A lot of people think of pets as the perfect foil for giving and receiving unconditional love. While I don't think numbers can do that for you, in and of themselves they can be very beautiful things. Why else the obsession with the measurement of time, training to shave seconds (numbers) off a finishing time, recording all sorts of training details (mostly numerically oriented) into a log for what, posterity?

Sometimes I stare at my training spreadsheet and just take it for what it is--a bit of artistic output that nonetheless is serving as my guidepost for a period of time.

There are times when a person has hurt me that I've wanted to tell them, "But if you would just realize the beautfy of everything around you, including the numbers, you wouldn't act this way," and I believe it's true. Yesterday while running, I stopped to watch a robin eating fruit off a Cornelian Cherry bush/tree, and all at once I saw the symmetry (numbers) of the branches, the shape (spherical) of the berries and the random act (robin) of receiving bounty from them. There is math all around us, and it's one of the things (order) that can help calm me in times of trouble. Math and colors. Colors make the math more beautiful, although black and white numbers are just fine, too.

Math is completely and utterly logical. Numbers don't lie--only humans that seek to twist the meaning of numbers. If I say TWO to you, does it mean anything? What do you think of when you hear the number 2? Ha ha, "number 2" for one, probably. I think "the only even prime number." I think 2 people, connected, which is the best way that I function socially.

13. Coming up in just about 5 weeks.

2 comments:

Lee Ryan said...

Glad you enjoyed the post c-head!! :-)

BeaconOfLife said...

Sheila, don't lose that number - you don't wanna call nobody else. Send it off in a letter to yourself.