Little free library

Ross and Laurie (beside Denison Park at Lippincott) have set up this very nice "little free library" box in a corner of their place. I should be able to donate a few books from my own mostly-reference library. Not everyone thinks that these things are a good idea.

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.

Update: Two days later it was on its way to be euthanized...

A million-digit Leyland prime (ryanp)

Ryan Propper ("ryanp" on Mersenne forum) had not contributed any Leyland primes prior to Wednesday, when he proclaimed this 1433792-digit integer to be a PRP. Then yesterday, he added another (at a mere 582101 digits) that had a small y [L(x,y) defines a Leyland integer as x^y+y^x, x≥y; here y=2]. The current top-five Leyland prime leaderboard now sports three million-digit Leyland primes (the first column is the number of digits):

1433792    (300102,59935)   Ryan Propper   May 2023

1000175    (218767,37314)   Gabor Levai    Mar 2023

1000027    (211185,54364)   Gabor Levai    May 2022

 582101   (1933695,2)       Ryan Propper   May 2023

 506429    (107890,49423)   Miklos Levai   Feb 2022

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.