Wednesday, January 04, 2006

mathematical immortality

Looks like Missouri University have found the next largest Mersenne prime.

"The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a
Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th
power minus 1."

I called them last week with the number 17, but they said they were looking for something a little larger. Guess they weren't kidding.
[[[update 01-05-06: n.b. 17 is not a Mersenne prime.]]]

Also, I have just beaten Final Fantasy VII.
The victory is bittersweet. My heart swells with pride to know that I, Corwin, have defeated the evil Sephiroth and saved the planet from a horrible destruction. But what shall I do now? For what goal shall I focus my attentions and near limitless power? Will there ever be a more worthy adversary than the god-like Sephiroth? Truth be told, I leveled up pretty intensely before the final battle and that poor shmuck only took two attacks before dropping like an inebriated freshman. He was all "I'm going to cast my Supernova Summon and do 5,000 points of damage." and I was all "I eat Supernovae for breakfast, you ninny." and then he was all "Oh, crap." and I was all Omnislash!!!! slice, whack, skewer, chop, slash, THWACK. And down he fell like the aforementioned underclassman. Long live the fighters!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, my daily dose of Peter-ness. It's a beautiful world. I tell ya, this whole blog thing is possibly the second-best way to keep in touch. Luckily blog-flirting hasn't developed effectively enough (in my humble opinion) to totally elimate the need for phone and personal contact.

Anonymous said...

PS. What time zone have you set your date&time stamp at? My comment says I posted it at 6:30am, which I most certainly did not.

sprocketplug said...

Good call, jen. I was wondering about that myself. Hopefully it is corrected. The list of time zones was longer than my leg, but I think America/Eastern means eastern time zone.

I'll think of a way to start flirting with you via blogs, have no fear.

Alex said...

Is such academic talk allowed on blogs? All this Mersenne prime business and I'm ready to call it a day.....:-) Although, come to think of it, I think my genius daughter was trying to make the Mersenne prime known to me last week via baby sign language, so I better brush up on my mathematical skills...
Or maybe I better go to something constsructive with my approx. 23 minutes while she sleeps instead of procrastinating by reading blogs...:-) Toodles.

Katie

Alex said...

Sounds like a bunch of people who missed the important part of your post! I can't believe you actually omnislashed the most powerful villian of all times. Thank you so much for saving the world from certain doom. It's too bad we can't integrate video games in to blog. You should snap a few screen shots to post! We should also start playing games together online. What are you playing these days?

Oh and your picuture looks like you're taking a wizz on the beach. Nice work

Alex