Man versus nature

two men with leaf blowers (across the street, last Thursday)

same driveway (left) this morning

Doctor in the Tardis

After a decade-long hiatus of not seeing my family doctor, on September 27 I had my first appointment with a new doctor. After taking down some of my personal information we agreed to my doing a blood test and an Ontario Health fecal immunochemical test. In an October 13 phone appointment, he relayed the bad news: My cholesterol was high, which when combined with my family history of stroke (my father had one) suggested medication. When I indicated reticence to go on meds he allowed me a three-month reprieve of diet and exercise followed by a retest. To add insult to injury, the fecal test proved abnormal, inviting a colonoscopy. I suggested that the result was a false positive based on contamination with hemorrhoidal bleeding.

So I spent a month researching the matter and, this afternoon, saw him in order to share my findings. I decided ahead of time not to get into the family-history-of-stroke matter which I saw as confirmation bias on his part (he didn't even know at what age my father had the stroke). The diet-and-exercise bit is of course something to be suggested regardless (as it is generally worthwhile), not as a designed-to-fail antidote to statins. I wasn't going to get into that either as it evidenced a desire to get me on meds and I didn't want to be confrontational. At any rate, the matter was moot as I had found sources that suggested (in the absence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc.) that I had no need to be on meds.

First, I presented Dr. Ian Neeland's (22 Dec 2020) podcast quotation of "10 years on a statin with low LDL cholesterol might decrease your risk [of heart attack, stroke, etc.] by 20 percent" as being (for me) a negligible benefit. Next, I presented Robert M. Kaplan's (3 Apr 2019) opinion piece on preventing heart disease, starting with some absolute risk-of-dying meta-analysis statistics and concluding with "... observations on people over the age of 70 do not show any statistically significant statin-related reductions in deaths from any cause."

Throughout most of the session my doctor seemed overly defensive, mildly angry perhaps. He interrupted me several times, explained that he was following guidelines, and cautioned me on cherry-picking data. He closed the door to the hallway at one point. Much more was said but I choose here to be brief.

I had run out of my 15 minutes and I hadn't yet dealt with the fecal test. I asked for a couple more minutes. I explained my false-positive belief, suggested that it didn't matter anyways because I had "a very low long-term risk of colorectal cancer" based on a (19 Sep 2013) study on long-term colorectal-cancer incidence and mortality. I finished with Michael Bretthauer's "gold-standard trial" that had colonoscopies cutting cancer risk by only a fifth with no significant reduction in colon cancer mortality. How do you like them apples cherries?

New Jersey

Rogue Amoeba has updated their Audio Hijack to version 4.3 and I had been meaning to upgrade my 3.7 app for a while now. Tipping the scale was a "transcribe" block that I thought might prove interesting in attempting the lyrics to Dave Van Ronk's Garden State Stomp. There were two available options for the transcription: high accuracy which, in spite of the lengthy time that it took, proved abysmal, and low resources which, utilizing an AI-based Large Language Module, was just as bad, only with added nonsense.

Places per line are 4/4/12 (times 4 = 80). Lyrics/spelling as per the video:

Allamuchy, Hacklebarney, Rockaway, Piscataway.
Ho-Ho-Kus, Secaucus, Lower Squankum, Fair Play.
Wanamassa, Succasunna, Manumuskin, Plumbsock, Bivalve, Buckshutem,
  Turkey Foot, Macanippuck, Jugtown, Febletown, Nummytown, Rahway.

Wickatunk, Manunka Chunk, Mantua, Mizpah.
Manasquan, Raritan, Matawan, Totowa.
Whippany, Parsippany, Penny Pot, Hackensack, Batsto, Nesco,
  Metedeconk, Peapack, Loch Arbour, Egg Harbor, Swinesburg, Caviar.

Cheesequake, Boy Scout Lake, Moonachie, Tenafly.
Netcong, Watchung, Pluckemin, Mount Misery.
Bardonia, Ironia, Colonia, Weehawken, Manahawkin, Mantoloking,
  Mahalala, Pennsauken, Dutchtown*, Ironbound, Frelinghuysen, Lodi.

Hardscrabble, Double Trouble, Picatinny, Montague.
Muckshaw Pond, Ockanickon, Espanong, Ocean View.
Navesink, Shabakunk, Ongs Hat, Jumbo, Wortendyke, Water Witch,
  Blue Ball, Ringoes, Matchaponix, Delawanna, Wawayanda, Timbuctoo.

* which Van Ronk seems to pronounce Ducktown.

Bucket list #2

My original five-piece bucket list is here with #3 here.

2. China Town (Their online ordering system stopped working a few years ago.)

1790 Jane Street @ John Street

The picture is Google street view (July 2023). I did eventually find another website ordering system for them but I was reluctant to use it in case it was a scam. Researching the website provider (MealKeyway), I decided finally that it was ok.

3 large Beef Fried Rice (no onion) $22.47; Sweet & Sour Chicken Balls $11.99; Fried Mixed Vegetables (no onion) $9.99; there's a $40 minimum food-only order; tax $5.78; delivery $4.99; tip $3.00; rounding -$0.02: total $58.20

Pretty much the way I remembered it, although I used to get BBQ chicken wings as well. I hadn't before used a no-onion option on the mixed vegetables. They replaced it with more broccoli which (unfortunately) was excessively salty. I guess the florets/buds retain a lot of the briny broth. I can run them under the faucet in the leftover reheats.

Leaving

a tree shedding its leaves in the breeze

AD one billion

Éric Angelini's latest offering is based on the absolute differences (AD, be they odd or even) of an integer sequence's adjacent digits determining the sequence's new numbers. After Giorgos Kalogeropoulos posted one million terms, I struggled to better his (apparently Mathematica) result to five million terms before realizing that my one-at-a-time AppendTo approach was not the best tool for this game.

Starting with 315 terms of the sequence (s) we generate — in twelve steps — over one billion terms by repetitively determining the adjacent-digits sequence, creating therefrom an absolute differences sequence, and applying a sign change to those differences that are even. Prepend zero, Accumulate, add 10.

Table[d=Flatten[IntegerDigits[s]]; c=Abs[Most[d]-Rest[d]]; f=Prepend[Table[If[OddQ[c[[i]]],c[[i]],-c[[i]]], {i,Length[c]}], 0]; s=Accumulate[f]+10; Length[s], {12}]

{577, 1181, 2719, 6976, 19556, 57525, 203635, 791890, 3733165, 21270116, 140287834, 1002951921}

That's it! Truncate the final 1002951921 terms to 10^9 terms, take every tenth integer (Mathematica has trouble enough plotting 100 million points), and graph:

click to enlarge

Recycling

This is the sixth recycling bin put out for city collection containing mostly old journals and magazines. It was precipitated (literally) by the roof leak that meandered through an upstairs slanted ceiling closet I was using as storage space. Even though I am holding back on my most prized collections, I think it likely that I will contribute another six bins before I am done. Here's a photo of some of the "paper" that has (mostly) already gone:

Air show

Looking southeast from my back deck, I'm guessing these are the U.S. Navy Blue Angels.

A million-digit Leyland prime (encore)

Hot on the heels of my million-digit Leyland prime find, I have come across another one:

197180^119151+1*119151^197180 is 3-PRP!

This one was a little unexpected because it is so close in size to my other one, a mere five decimal digits less. The current top-five Leyland prime leaderboard now looks like this (the first column is the number of digits):

1717671  (1343238,19)      Ryan Propper    May 2023

1433792   (300102,59935)   Ryan Propper    May 2023

1268947  (1139148,13)      Ryan Propper    Jul 2023

1000910   (191319,170462)  Hans Havermann  Jul 2023

1000905   (197180,119151)  Hans Havermann  Aug 2023

833719/265381

Based on the simple continued fraction of π, its convergents (rational approximations) are: 3/1, 22/7, 333/106, 355/113, 103993/33102, 104348/33215, 208341/66317, 312689/99532, 833719/265381, 1146408/364913, ...

Prime numerators are at position 1, 5, 9, ... Prime denominators are at position 2, 4, 9, ... The ninth convergent therefore has both prime numerator and prime denominator, noted ~2003 in the OEIS. It seems unlikely that we will ever see another such.

I thought it might be useful to have here a listing of the positions of prime numerators (p/) and prime denominators (/p) so as to better assess the rarity of their confluence:

1/
/2
/4
5/
9/
/9
11/
16/
/33
87/
230/
334/
594/
/595
840/
853/
/1127
1149/
/2003
2726/
/3611
3788/
/4356
/6926
7442/
8751/
/25333
/27652
/32395
/37722
42038/
/114199
143753/
...