Moving On

Nothing is permanent. I've persevered with this Geocities Blog for some time now but the blogging tools are so awful that I can't persevere any longer. I've moved this blog to a new address at:

www.sean-reeves.blogspot.com

I'll return this address to its original personal website status in the near future. It functioned well as a website but disastrously as a blog. I can't complain too loudly as it's not costing me any money but it has cost me quite some a lot of time and a lot of frustration.

Thursday November 23, 2006 - 04:43pm (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

More on 23

I finally have my java applets working again on the home page that opens when I launch any of my browsers. I'd accidentally deleted them while tinkering with the HTML code but now they're back. There are only two of them but they are important to me. One of them calculates the number of days that I've been "earthbound" as I call it. Previously I had a spreadsheet doing that job and I had embedded it in my web page. It worked fine but it slowed the loading of the page considerably, because Excel had to be launched as well. The other one is a prime number calculator. It allows you to input any number and receive the prime factors as output, or a message that the number is prime. I had already tested my new CDMA number using this applet and found it was prime. However, I'd never tested my GSM number which is 81513001949. It turns out the number not prime but it is divisible by 23! So it keeps popping up everywhere, that mysterious number 23.

I was pleased to receive a comment on my previous blog entry from John Verbyla in Adelaide. As a fellow mathematician, he'll appreciate the following. If we select people at random and place them in a room, what is the minimum number of people required in the room if the probability of two people sharing a common birthday is to exceed 50%? Well, it turns out to be 23 people (the probability is 50.7%). There is a most interesting article in Wikipedia about 23, the reference is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(number) and reading it I discovered that there is a movie due for release in February 2007 called "The Number 23". It stars Jim Carrey and Virgina Madsen. In this movie, Jim Carrey plays a character called Walter Sparrow who becomes fixated with the number 23 and the role it plays in his life. There is a type of person, known as a 23rdian, "who constantly witnesses the number 23 in high concentration". Apparently "numerous people have claimed to see '23's everywhere (the 23 curse) prior to enormous success and fruitfulness". I could easily start a spin-off blog based on the number 23. However, I've been composing this blog entry for 23 minutes so I'd better stop. It's time for "makan malam" or evening meal.

Sunday November 19, 2006 - 02:56am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 1

The Number 23

Well, it's almost time for Tara and Ali's birthdays and once again I'm prompted to ponder the deep significance of this number.  The screenshot that I've taken is from richardphillips.org.uk/number/Num23.htm and is only one of many web pages discussing this number. Another interesting 23 site is http://fusionanomaly.net/23.html. It was this site that I learnt that 23 is the first prime number whose digits themselves are prime and whose digits also add to a prime number. I also learnt that in Japanese, "ni" means "2" and "san" means "3", so Nissan = 23. On average, the 23rd wave crashing on the shore is twice as large as normal. Human sperm cells and ova of course have 23 chromosomes, which combine to give the human total of 46 chromosomes. I could go on and on but there is a strong case for 23 being the most interesting number in the universe. At least, my birth year digits add up to 23 (1 + 9 + 4 + 9 = 23), maybe that qualifies me for associate membership in the 23 club.

Friday November 17, 2006 - 12:10am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 1

Hard Copy

It's not often I buy a hard copy of something nowadays but a visit to a basement bookstore at Pondok Indah resulted in the purchase of a book on prime numbers. It was just sitting on the shelf looking at me, and I felt compelled to buy it. It's actually arranged in the form of a dictionary. I did discover a mistake on page 5 of the introduction in which, shockingly, 57 is listed as a prime number but ignoring that, the actual content is very comprehensive.

It occurred to me that I need to get a bit more organised in my cyberworld because currently the personal and professional blogs, photoalbums, briefcases, RSS feeds, wikispaces, calendars, web pages and so on that I have to keep track of are getting a little out of hand. I need to try to define the exact purpose of each particular cybertool and I need a coordinating centre on the Internet where all these different tools are listed. So that might be the first place to start.

Saturday November 11, 2006 - 08:21pm (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 1

Prime Telephony

I've been laid low by a virus this past week and so has Sabina. We're still both affected. I'm talking about a physical virus of course. Fortunately, I've been unaffected by a computer virus for quite some time now. When I said 'laid low' I meant Sabina really. I should have laid low but instead dutifully went to work as programmed by my habit patterns. Fortunately, the week was a short one (only three days) but another teacher, whom I share a small staff-room with, failed to show up at all. Presumably, she was ill as well but made the sensible decision to recuperate at home. Ah well, old habits die hard or you finally die hard and the old habits die along with you.

The really interesting news of the week however, was that my new CDMA telephone number from Fren is a prime number. I deliberately chose a number ending in the digit 1 hoping that the number might turn out to be prime and it did. Proudly, I can say that 8881334401 is prime. This number, residing as it does on a SIM card, sits inside a PCMCIA card that I can slot into my laptop and use to connect to the Internet at a quite reasonable speed of 256 Kbps. I guess I didn't really need this technological accessory as I have already have Internet connectivity at home and at school but I saw another teacher at school using it and it was a simple case of techno-envy.

Saturday November 4, 2006 - 12:04am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

Prime Plethora

It seems that I'm in the midst of a plethora of prime numbers. After my 21001 prime day, I'm now (Saturday) at 21013 which is the second part of the prime number pair 21011 (Thursday). There is a further prime pair coming up with 21017 (Wednesday) and 21019 (Friday). Two consecutive prime number pairs are not common this far along the "number line".  According to my theory, such a concentration of prime days should lead to a build up of psychic energy that can later be released in the form of decisive action of one form or another. Obviously, any effects will not be large scale as only days and not weeks or years are involved.

The only obvious manifestation of this build-up of psychic energy that I've noticed is a strong desire to turn my back on Microsoft products and look to open source software for all my computing needs. I've been looking at the price of the forthcoming Vista operating system and the demands it places on the computer's hardware resources. What held be back before was that I need to be able to connect to the school's fileserver which is running Windows Server 2003. It seems that with the recent release of Linux XP 2006 connection to the fileserver will be possible. If that proves to be the case then I'll make the transition in the near future, as I imagine many other computer users will also do.

So the potential energy is building within me for a sea change just as profound as when I abandoned the Macintosh operating system in the early 90's and moved on to MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 shortly afterwards. I'm going to start hunting for a copy of this new Linux offering and I hope that I'm not disappointed.

Saturday October 14, 2006 - 09:09am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

Gravity

Ain't that the truth. Gravity is indeed a crime as anyone who has felt its effects for 57 years can attest. The graphic is a detail from a year 10 student's collage and she is meaning to say "graffiti is such a crime". The reason for the appearance of word "gravity" in its place is because the two words sound almost identical in Indonesian. Several students made this mistake and it took me a while to work out why this was happening but finally the penny dropped.

Thursday October 12, 2006 - 05:28am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

Happy Birthday

Sabina' s birthday was celebrated last Friday night. Earlier, Desy and Nenny took her to Bintaro Plaza to buy some new clothes. She's wearing one of her new outfits in the photograph. At four years of age, she is now midway between the prime years of three and five. The occurrence of these prime pairs of years is very important in regulating the rhythm of our lives. The adult years in which this pattern of prime-composite-prime occur always mark a period of consolidation in which we gather our energies in preparation for important decisions that change the course of our lives. In childhood and adolescence, the consolidation manifests in the achievement of development milestones.

Of course, these prime pairs become increasingly less frequent as we get older. Within a span of one century and ignoring 2-3 which is a special case, the prime pairs (forming a prime-composite-prime triad) are:

3-5, 5-7, 11-13, 17-19, 29-31, 41-43, 59-61 and 71-73

These triads a very much like islands in our lives where we pause to gather strength before swimming on to the next island. The single primes (separated from other primes by two or more composites) are like bouys where we can also pause and catch our breath, but not for as long. Of course such thinking may appear fanciful but Carl Jung, whom I greatly admire, "felt that number might be the primary archetype of order ... the most basic building blocks of either psyche or matter are the integers."  This is not the place to go into Jungian psychology but it is nonetheless encouraging to get such support from the "big fella".

Monday October 9, 2006 - 05:30am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

Four and so much more

As is the way of the world, there are people who have just turned 21,000 days old (me) and others who are just about to turn four years old (Sabina). So it goes. Sabina is of course a Libran whose solar position in the zodiac is diametrically opposite mine. Her Sun is in 12 degrees of Libra and mine is 12 degrees of Aries. It would seem then that in some strange way we complement each other.

I'm reminded of the lyrics of a Neil Young song:

Old man look at my life, I'm a lot like you were

Old man look at my life, twenty four and there's so much more

Although in Sabina's case, it would be "four and much, much more".  Well, we'll have a little celebration tomorrow around 6 o'clock.

Thursday October 5, 2006 - 06:56am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments:

Above Ground

I watched "The World's Fastest Indian" on the day I turned 21000 and something that Anthony Hopkins said in the film tickled my fancy. He said "Everyday spent above ground is a good day". I got to thinking about the origin of that quote and it led me to a poet by the name of Gretna Wilkinson who reputedly used the expression when she spoke to an audience of about 60 people in a poetry presentation for Women's History Month at 7:00 p.m. in the Alumni Auditorium in Kutztown, Pennsylvania on March 23rd 2004. Whether she heard the phrase from someone else or just made it up, I don't know. This is the only reference that a Google search throws up.

It also led me to some of her poetry. She has this one about "old greys" that I can identify with and it certainly has an unusual title. This and another poem can be found at:

 http://users.tellurian.com/wisewomensweb/wilkinson.html

Here is the poem (it was written in 1996):

IMMIGRANT GRAND PARENT LEAVES FORGET-ME-NOTE IN ABANDONED ROCKING CHAIR

New Land

new rules for the nuclear family

But how to figure out

that not every name with nuclear

might destruct?

How to figure that out

plus high rise taxes

juvenile druggies

and daylight savings time?

How to understand

why here

old greys are sent off to silently disappear

with some of the children's time

forever dulling the shade of all their

tomorrows?

How to keep from pining

for the good days in the old country

when even unwanted greys

are carried to term

and respected

Like high standing historic landmarks

pointing the way to entire libraries

and irreplaceable storehouses

of counsel?

Here, when an old grey leaves

no warning chimes toll

so the children and theirs

never get to find out

how much they are deprived

Someone should warn the present

that the future may clarify itself

if the system sees

that old greys always come

with an expiration date.

Copyright © 1996 by Gretna Wilkinson. All rights reserved.

Tuesday October 3, 2006 - 04:58am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

21 again

The counter tells the story. For 20998 days, I've been Earthbound and in two days time I will have been here 21000 days or 3000 weeks. I'm counting the day that I was born as the first day. It was a Sunday and this anniversary will fall on a Sunday too of course, Sunday October 1st.

The total for the next day, 21001, is a prime number and the following Sunday will be number 3001. This number is also prime. I think about prime numbers a lot. I'm currently working on a theory that our prime numbered years exert a powerful and little understood rhythm on our lives. Current thinking divides our life into decades (our twenties, thirties etc.) or broad phases (childhood, adolescence etc.) and there's nothing wrong with that. Those divisions are valid enough but there's something deeper going on and the prime numbers hold the key to that.

Pythagoras would have understood what I'm on about. To quote from the Wikipedia "Pythagoras and his students believed that everything was related to mathematics and, through mathematics, everything could be predicted and measured in rhythmic patterns or cycles." Forget about the theorem of Pythagoras. That's all that is remembered of him in a dry modern mathematics that has largely lost its soul.

Friday September 29, 2006 - 04:57am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

Equinox

The equinox hath cometh. Here is a photo taken of me with Sabina. We play a game together sometimes and that's what we're doing here. It's quite a cruel game really. She spreads her hair over my bald head and I pretend to be surprised that I have suddenly sprouted hair. After I enjoy the sensation of having a full head of hair once again, she then pulls her hair away and I pretend to be surprised that I'm suddenly bereft of hair again. It's a game that seems to give her endless amusement and as you can see by the expression on my face, I enjoy the game as well.

Saturday September 23, 2006 - 06:11am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0

New Morning

Well, I gave up on Blogger because I couldn't get any of my photographs to show up. Once upon a time I could but not anymore. Blogger suggested that you could publish your blog to an external location so I had a look at Yahoo where I have a website that I rarely use. I noticed that there was a blogging tool available and as I started using it,  I was gently reminded that I already had a blog on 360 degrees or whatever it's called. With that I was away and here I am back on my old website with a brand new blog. The photograph went up without any problems. It's one that appeals to my sense of humour.

Monday September 18, 2006 - 05:43am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 1