This late-evening marauder comes as close to being "orange" (especially in the tail) as one might deem possible. Close inspection suggests that the effect might just be a whitened mixture of "brown". A search finds that the descriptive word for it is "erythrism". This particular raccoon paced our back- and side-yards for a half-hour or so before finally climbing the fence into a neighbour's yard. This included ventures onto the back deck and peering into the kitchen door. When I went out in order to scare it away, it was somewhat unconcerned by my approach — perhaps even attracted to it — as though it was tame. This leads me to suppose that it might be suffering from distemper.
Friday, May 19, 2023
Agent orange
This late-evening marauder comes as close to being "orange" (especially in the tail) as one might deem possible. Close inspection suggests that the effect might just be a whitened mixture of "brown". A search finds that the descriptive word for it is "erythrism". This particular raccoon paced our back- and side-yards for a half-hour or so before finally climbing the fence into a neighbour's yard. This included ventures onto the back deck and peering into the kitchen door. When I went out in order to scare it away, it was somewhat unconcerned by my approach — perhaps even attracted to it — as though it was tame. This leads me to suppose that it might be suffering from distemper.
Friday, May 12, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (ryanp)
Tuesday, May 09, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (ramp-up)
This is an update to my previous "retry" post, wherein I announced a new million-digit Leyland prime search attempt. Today I finished ramping up the search from the initial 12 processes on 3 computers (covering 20% of the search space) to 57 processes on 18 computers (covering about 70% of the search space). My search last year had the same 18 machines doing 108 processes but I subsequently discovered that this overloading of processes was highly inefficient and detrimental to the effort. My current 57 processes should all be done (roughly) in early November and I can assign the remaining 30% of the search space — process by process, as they come due — at that time.
Thursday, April 27, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (retry)
After my last disappointing attempt, I have started again today on a new search. Initially, I will commit twelve processes (on my fastest three computers) to about 20% of the search space, with a completion date of late October. I'm hoping for better luck this time around.
Thursday, April 06, 2023
Bucket list #3
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1300 Weston Road |
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10-piece 'original' bucket; large fries, cole slaw, potato salad: $41.80, which included a $3 charge to guarantee 7 'white-meat' pieces, but I got only 6 (plus a drumstick and 3 wings) |
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
All around my hat
It has been a long time since we were all excited by the aperiodic tilings of Penrose's kites and darts. There was even a version using images of chickens:
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Penrose chickens |
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Brad Klee: headliner |
Monday, March 13, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (lghu)
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (start of a new run)
Five days ago I started a new run of testing candidates for the property of being a million-digit Leyland prime. The million-digit part is relatively easy; the primality testing, not so much. My last run required nine months, not counting the month it took to sieve. I'm not pushing it for now. Of the 59364 candidates in this run, I'm only doing 9000 on my three iMacs. This should be done in July. My Mac minis are testing much smaller Leyland numbers (currently ~386750 digits) for primality and I'll keep that going until I exhaust my current crop of sieved numbers in that range. Only then will I divert them to help in the million-digit hunt.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Small-string final non-appearance coincidences in base-ten powers of two
If we look at OEIS A094776, one sees the beginnings of sequences that apply the inherent concept to strings of more than one digit. Keith Lynch suggested the idea (tongue-in-cheek, I thought) on MathFun a few days ago and Maximilian Hasler actually worked out the numbers for strings 10 to 18. I decided to chart a more comprehensive listing...
My results: sorted by strings and sorted by powers of two. There are "coincidences" where two or more strings share the same power of two as their final non-appearance exponent (for example, the two 71s in A094776 for digits 5 and 7). I'll list those here after brief summaries of each n-digit result:
1-digit strings
{71,5}
{71,7}
...
range: 119.5 ± 48.5
average: 1026/10
...
{153,3}
{168,2}
string coincidence
71: {5,7}
2-digit strings
{1300,91}
{1416,07}
...
range: 2399.5 ± 1099.5
average: 215386/100
...
{3493,28}
{3499,95}
string coincidence
2146: {33,48}
3-digit strings
{20589,141}
{20729,713}
...
range: 37290.5 ± 16701.5
average: 28860154/1000
...
{51375,552}
{53992,661}
string coincidences
22044: {024,275}
24486: {404,675}
25305: {410,947}
25440: {317,604}
25668: {442,815}
25704: {123,766}
25980: {096,868}
26046: {378,588}
26136: {422,677}
26316: {227,929}
26477: {152,690}
26695: {085,256}
26792: {048,732}
27003: {737,974}
27121: {545,932}
27479: {183,687}
28196: {300,554}
28252: {116,641}
28270: {099,575}
28317: {578,656}
28425: {287,392}
28532: {171,910}
28609: {017,919}
28784: {033,719}
28850: {164,647}
28891: {346,505}
29173: {648,787}
29705: {668,997}
29711: {335,799}
29976: {665,995}
30977: {131,395}
32637: {076,426}
33550: {555,796}
33607: {582,598}
33631: {117,735}
39571: {021,622}
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Fenestron
The loud sound of a helicopter just before 10:30 p.m. last night got me to look out the window and, because of the unusual appearance of the tail, run to get my camera and take a photo from the front porch. The aircraft disappeared behind the apartment buildings on Weston Rd. — seemingly landing (in the vicinity of Weston's UP Express train station; I'm going to guess at the Toronto Paramedic Services lot). Coincidentally, a UP Express service alert appeared one-and-a-half hours later.
Friday, February 03, 2023
Lake effect
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click to enlarge |
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click to enlarge |
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
A million-digit Leyland prime (end of run)
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manual distribution worksheet for 59536 primality tests |
What have I discovered? Of Leyland numbers with at least one million decimal digits, but fewer than one million one hundred decimal digits, there is only one prime. That prime was discovered by Gabor Levai long before I got to it. I saved all of my primality-test output where the 59536 entries are listed smallest to largest. If you want to see the one prime, search for "PRP".
The execution times vary wildly (due to processor circumstances) with an average of 9.45 hours per test. That would work out to 64 years if I hadn't been able to multi-process. I know now how to keep the execution times to 6 hours or less per test but that means running fewer processes per machine. Still, I might be able to shave a couple of months off the total time required for the next run.
Thursday, January 12, 2023
A digit-spine sequence
Éric Angelini presented a proposal for three "digit-spine" sequences on his blog here, as well as to the MathFun community. I decided to take on the first one:
s = 1, 10, 2, 0, 3, 26, 9, 119, 532, 4, 6, 896, 118, 34, 15, ...
p = 2, 11, 2, 2, 3, 23, 7, 113, 523, 3, 5, 887, 113, 31, 13, ...
d = 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 3, 2, 6, 9, 1, 1, 9, 5, 3, 2, ...