prime numbers

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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I’ll have my blogs ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new-year’s gift

Hello, good morning, and welcome to the last Thursday of 2018.

I had three consecutive days off work this week, the longest such stretch in quite some time that didn’t involve sad family events.  To the surprise of no one, I did not get any writing done over those three days—no new work on Unanimity, and no editing on Penal Colony.

Because of this, there’s not much for me to say today.  I have, except on the three aforementioned days off, continued to make good progress.  In Unanimity, I’ve reached the final confrontation that will resolve the outcome of the book, but its development involves some flashbacks, for reasons of dramatic tension.  I think this will work well, but in the end, readers must judge for themselves.  In any case, there’s a great deal of work to do before the book will be ready for anyone but me to read and judge.  Such is the way of things.

I hope you all have a wonderful time on New Year’s Eve and a relatively painless recovery on New Year’s Day.  When next we meet here, it will be 2019.  I have a silly, semi-fun dread of the coming year, since in much of the Stephen King multiverse, the number 19 is one of terrible omen.  Of course, I don’t actually subscribe to any form of numerology, unless one counts my true and deep love (occasionally unrequited) of mathematics itself.  It’s just fun to imagine what might happen if that number really were a harbinger of evil.

The fact that I find such thoughts fun is probably why I tend to sneak “horror” into most of what I write, intentionally or not.

I first clearly recognized this about myself in high school, when I wrote my first full-length novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  This was a sort of cross-over fantasy/sci-fi adventure novel involving multiple universes, in which beings of godlike power used magic and/or ultra-high technology to battle for the fate of our universe and ultimately all the other realms of the multiverse.  The story’s ultimate villain, the Talberod, had obliterated whole galaxies to demonstrate his power, but he nevertheless had a code of honor and a strong moral sense.  In contrast, the hero was more than willing to lie and cheat to win.  These are far from new twists, of course, but I felt pretty proud of them as a high school student.  Alas, that novel is lost to time and bitter circumstance, though one day I may seek to recreate it.

In any case, during the larger course of that story, I inserted little interludes detailing smaller-scale levels of the invasion, including a series in which a demonic being called Chrayd, for personal enjoyment, preys on numerous random humans from our world (before finally being killed by a lucky and courageous one of those same humans, whom Chrayd “salutes” even as he dies).  These latter sequences amounted to mini horror stories in the middle of my larger epic, though I only recognized them as such after the fact.  They were also the parts of the novel that were the most fun to write and—I suspect—were the most gripping to read.

Similarly, on those rare occasions when I’ve written Harry Potter fanfics, they’ve tended to turn out in rather…well, let’s just say that Harry has done some very dark, bad things.

We use the tools that we are given.

And that’s about it for now.  As usual, it’s more than I expected to write.  This is another gift or tool given to me.  I can’t really claim any credit for it, and it’s occasionally frustrating (for readers even more than for me, I suspect), but whataya gonna do?

Again, I wish you the best of all possible new years.  19 may be a number of ill-omen in the Stephen King universe, and it is certainly a prime number…but 2019 is not prime.  Let us then therefore give honor to the beloved goddess of irony by turning 2019 into a prime year in every other sense.

TTFN