We have a winner

I wrote my first blog entry here on 31 December 2010. On 18 January 2011, I wondered how long it would take to get my first comment. That comment came today! Total elapsed time: 451 days, 13 hours, 50 minutes.

Grammatical Tautology.

I’ll prove the word that I’ve made my theme,
Is that that may be doubled without blame ;
And that that that, thus trebled, I may use,
And that that THAT that critics may abuse,
May be correct. Farther—the dons to bother—
Five THATs may closely follow one another !
For be it known that we may safely write
Or say, that that THAT that that man wrote was right :
Nay, e’en, that that THAT that THAT that followed ;
And that that THAT (that that THAT that began)
Repeated seven times is right !—Deny’t who can.

Scientific American: New York, November 28, 1846.

cf. That.

Plocondragobbleiferous.

In a descriptive article, now going the rounds, the following high flown sentence occurs : “Through the mountain gorges stray the sullen bear and tawny moose, while the beautiful deer feeds along the solitary waters, and the treacherous panther screams in the tangled thicket.”

Scientific American: New York, November 6, 1846.

Old jokes

... Being already old when they were published 165+ years ago! I endeavoured to make the transcription very accurate, so if you detect typos you might want to check the original pdfs to verify that these are indeed sics. I did number the jokes (there are 63 altogether) so that any particular one may be referenced thereby. Some of the humour may well escape the average person at first reading. Some of it may even escape a more concerted effort at understanding. Some of it is no longer funny.

iBooks

I had a scare later in the day as my iBooks app began crashing repeatedly at startup. There are a number of forums on the 'net dealing with the issue and, sadly, Apple has been unable to fix things in the good long while that folk have been complaining about it. I was afraid to delete (and replace) the app because I thought that that might delete my 3246 pdfs as well, but that turned out not to be so.

iPad

As suggested here on February 15, my new Apple TV and iPad arrived on Wednesday (five weeks after my suggestion), 47 minutes apart: Apple had promised differing arrival dates and the items were shipped separately (using different carriers). Catherine and I were on our way home from Long Point at the time, so John (and Alice) did the receiving honours.

The iPad was remarkably easy to set up: I had envisioned some networking issues since my primary home network is ethernet and the iPad is WiFi, but that was not to be. More difficult proved to be the transfer of my 3246 Scientific American Weekly pdfs to it (it took a full night and day) but by last night it was good to go. Remarkably, iBooks won't keep the visual-bookshelf in alphabetical order (the list-display does) which suggests the developers never imagined someone keeping thousands of documents on the tablet.

I'm having fun exploring the apps. They are all free so far but that will change soon enough. Curious about my iPad's navigational ability, I made (using Trails Lite) a drunkard's around-the-block walk: Apparently I have crowd-sourced WiFi positioning only, not true GPS.

Happy trails to you

One of my current preoccupations is the extension of an idea that Eric Angelini mentioned to Sequence Fanatics eleven days ago. I wondered what would happen if we allowed the "digit trail" of a negative number to be the negatives of that number's digits. For starting numbers greater than ten, this had the resulting sequence oscillate between negative and positive territory, with each "run" taking another shot at hitting zero. The number of steps needed to get to the first zero is A208059. I subsequently extended the concept to other bases. Eric did a nice job of summarizing (in French) all of this.

Apple TV

No, not the television that Apple will introduce later this year but the 720p digital media receiver that I purchased, four weeks ago, along with a fifth-generation AirPort Extreme transmitter. The idea was to allow my new television access to the many movies and TV shows I'd amassed on my computer, without the painfully-slow process of putting them on those USB flash (thumb) drives that I acquired back then. (In retrospect, I shouldn't have bought those two extra 128GB ones.)

The problem was that the seven-and-a-half-year-old wireless card in my eight-and-a-half-year-old Power Mac G5 (Dual 2GHz) wasn't up to speed and, as a result, I was encountering fatal errors watching my movies. Thankfully, the Apple-TV receiver remembered where I left off, but it was annoying at best and unwatchable at worst.

So, yesterday, I purchased a 100-foot ethernet cable (75-foot was all I needed, but Tiger Direct didn't have 'em) to bridge the gap between the diametrically-opposite corners of our main floor. I then spent the better part of half a day (until the wee hours of this morning) configuring my Local Area Network so that the Apple TV and Catherine's iMac (upstairs) were getting internet while my chesswanks.com domain was still pointing to my computer. It shouldn't have been that difficult.

Apple TV will likely get updated next month, which is fine: I'm all in. And I will surely complement my now-enhanced LAN with an iPad 3!

A061205 quintuples, anyone?

One month ago, Franklin T. Adams-Watters asked about numbers that occur more than twice in A061205. The result was A203924, to which, yesterday, I added a link to my augmented table of 21313 terms. The majority of these are the third and fourth terms of A061205 quadruples: 101556 being the smallest, appearing at positions 156, 273, 372, and 651. There are 10554 quadruples in my less-than-ten-million position search-range, so these account for 21108 of the entries. The remaining 205 are taken from 67 A061205 triples, 24 sextuples, and 7 octuples.

A solution may be said to be "trivial" if all of its position numbers end in zero. (A non-trivial solution allows for an infinite number of trivial ones by multiplying all of its position numbers by the same power of ten.) After looking at the 40 non-trivial A061205 triples in my table, I conjectured that an odd-tuple exists if the product of a number multiplied by its reversal is either the square of a palindrome or, less frequently, the square of ten times a palindrome.

This insight allowed me to create a table of A061205 triples well beyond my original search range and held out the hope of finding a quintuple, if ever the palindrome could be got at in more than one way. Alas, my program is still considerably brute-force-ish: It searches for a palindrome in the square root of a number multiplied by its reversal. It might well be more efficient doing this the other way 'round.

Saving grace

I (finally) got my big-screen TV last week. I had hoped to have an over-the-air antenna attached to it so that I could watch HD without having to engage my evil Rogers cable. But it was not to be. I tried attaching one of my hard-drive docks to the USB port on the TV but it didn't recognize it. So today I bought a 64GB Lexar flash drive from FutureShop and it saw that just fine: The saving grace! It worked so well that I just ordered two more (128GB each) flash drives from Amazon. The second movie I watched was Lola rennt (1998), at a paltry 368 lines of resolution — but at least the subtitle file had been finely honed by yours truly. The picture shows a scene from the first movie that I watched.