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Nominations are now open for the Sixth Annual Weblog Awards (the Bloggies).
Anyone can nominate their favorite blog(s). There’s a number of categories. The weblog-of-the-year prize is $20.06. Plus fame and praise.
I’m just sayin’.
In other news, researchers at Central Missouri State University have discovered the largest prime number so far, clocking in at 9.1 million digits. It’s 230402457-1. If anyone finds a 10-million-digit prime it’s worth $100,000 in prize money. Plus fame and praise.
I thought that would get a mention around here. <ahem> (The measure of my envy of your being able to get superscriptish HTML working on this site is possibly a large prime, but nowhere near that large.)
Just adding that you can get your own copy of the 9,152,052-digit text file! And the fairly-official info, with links to useful places, is at www.mersenne.org
Can I recommend my own weblog to those struggling for a third submission for "best kept secret" or "humor?" Thanks.
http://www.chickensoup4thedamned.com/frames.html
Well, that's quite a bit larger than the prime number my computer has been working on the past year for GIMPS.
Still, having put some months into it so far, I want to know whether 228025029-1 is prime. (The odds being no, very probably not.)
Distributed computing for prime numbers is cool stuff.
Epacris: You can do it pretty easily with CSS, by just decreasing the size of the text, making it position:relative, and scooting it up a little.
Oops, should have read more carefully and seen that the superscript HTML wasn't working.
That should have been 2 to the power of 28025029, minus one.
228025029-1 is almost certainly not prime. :-)
I had the poster of an earlier, smaller Mersenne prime on the wall of my office. Along with a magnifying glass-- so it looked like a gray field from a normal distance and a lotta little numbers from close up through the glass. One could verify that the last digit was not 0,2,4,5,6, or 8.
I haven't gotten the posters of more recent primes-- the newer posters are significantly more expensive. Also, it dawned on me, eventually, that the binary form of the prime (a series of 28025029 ones) is more informative.
Since this thread has taken a turn toward maths, there's a question I have to ask...
Where the heck is Jonathan vos Post?
There were plenty of times when a thread's subject was definitely within his field of expertise, but he never posted anything. I do hope this doesn't mean something bad happened to him.
Epacris: Yeah, usually sites have much greater restrictions on comment HTML than on actual posts.
Er, sorry, I meant Janni. My apologies.
There's the 'in-line' form of exponents, where the power is either ^ or ** (depending on what computer language you like to think in).
Instead of 28025029 1's, may I suggest 1 followed by 7006257 F's?
It soothes the hexadecimal beast within me.
A question merging the Bloggies portion with the more-number-related part of the thread: If the Bloggies (NTBCW the Logies = Oz TV awards) are for blogs published during 2005, why is the prize 2006 cents instead of 2005 ones?
J Crowley: Thanks for the advice on superscript, which I'll tuck away to try on my own online places, but as others grok(k)ed, the comment HTML restrictions are tighter. Next time I might remember the 'online' protocol.
You'd think there might be some way to color-code digits in large displays, but perhaps there isn't a set of ten hues that remain distinct from one another under conditions of incomplete color vision, bad lighting, gradual photobleaching, and who knows what-all.
I have a really big prime number right here, but the margin-script HTML has too small a buffer to hold it.
Currently #15.
Soon to be invisible spam above this post. Mike's margin-script HTML buffer could no longer contain it.
Why won't it go away?
In the version of Cinderella that I first heard, the wicked stepmother casts a bowl of beans and peas into the ashes of the fireplace, and tells Cinderella that she can go to the ball if she picks them all out in time (she lies, of course). Cinderella uses a rhyme to summon the birds of the air to come and help her in this task.
In that spirit, I summon someone to clean up this thread, and use the following cantrip:
Vowels to the left
Consonants to the right
Soon we'll be bereft
Of spam and then, good night.
I knew I shouldn't have shaken hands with Midas.
(OK, really, I'm blushing. But I should work on the scansion. All good cantrips scan.)
abi... Catnip scan? Oh, 'cantrip'.... Nevermind.
Serge @21:
Catnip scan?
The TSA plans to introduce this as a supplementary security step for selected passengers (a substantial number of ML posters will probably fit the profile). It'll be just after the ritual fluid and gel purge and just before the metal detectors.
Don't resist. It's for your own security, and we don't want the terrorists to win.
abi @ 22... It'll be just after the ritual fluid and gel purge
Goodness. Is that what Pamela Anderson goes thru every time she flies?
abi, does that mean that they have classified information indicating terrorists were planning to make catnip-based explosives? Or were they going to smuggle aboard a bunch of cats, feed them the catnip, and let them loose in the cockpit?
ethan,
It means they've been leaving the sniffer dogs alone in rooms with logged-on computers.
As they say in Scotland, gonnae nae dae that.
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