So I was sitting on a conference call a week ago and waving my telescopic
back scratcher around like a knight from a King Arthur movie. Had the
conference call been about medieval history or the life cycle of a page to a
squire to a knight, I might have been more at home. Instead, I felt like a
knight on some fool's errand running at the castle but never getting any
closer. At some point, I began running the rod back and forth across my desk
when I realized it was making an arc. If there were a larger circle, the
section would have been one-quarter of the entire circle. Where the back
scratcher stopped at the top was, let's say, north, and the other endpoint was
east.
I laid the back scratcher about midway between the two points at what you
could call north-northeast. This one line split the sector into two.
Okay, now let's split the two halves into halves themselves. How many
lines is that? The original one plus two more: three. I split the
quarters into eighths. Seven lines. Slicing the segment of the circle into
sixteenths yielded 15 lines.
This surely is a known number series, I thought, as I sat up straight in my
office chair to reposition my headset so I could still hear the system
discussion. It wasn't that interesting a system discussion, partly because
we were already thirty minutes into the meeting, and I had contributed
nothing. We weren't even talking about the data interfaces affecting my
work, so why was I included on the call?
This surely is a known number series, this 1, 3, 7, 15 series. Online I
found the pattern:
- 1 x 1 +1 = 2
- 1 x 2 + 1 = 3
- 3 x 2 + 1 = 7
- 7 x 2 + 1 = 15
- 15 x 2 + 1 = 31
- 31 x 2 + 1 = 63
- 63 x 2 + 1 = 127
And so on
It's the first number multiplied by 2 and then increased by 1, resulting in
a second number. The number of lines is also one less than the number
of segments:
- 1 line results in 2 halves
- 3 lines result in 4 quarters
- 7 lines result in 8 eights
- 15 lines result in 16 sixteenths
- 31 lines result in 32 thirty-seconds
- 63 lines result in 64 sixty-fourths
- 127 lines result in 128 one-hundred twenty-eights
And so on
Nothing about this is earth-shattering in any way, but it's something to do
during a Friday afternoon three o'clock meeting. A meeting, I should add
that forty-five minutes after it started, my only contribution has been to
dutifully remain silent.
I recently caught a program on PBS called Ancient Roads From Christ to Constantine, originally from 2015. The show was fine but - gosh darn
it - I could have sworn its theme music borrowed a riff or two from
DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Ancient Roads, thankfully, had none of
the campy acting seen in Commandments (temple granaries are still full, damn
it).
I had another odd dream a few nights ago. I was at a recording session with
the alt-rock band The Chauvinisticks!, a group covering songs
with female names in the title or chorus. The catch was they rewrote and
retitled the songs with the male equivalent of the name (or something close
to it). I showed up during an argument about two names - Rudy and Rueben
- and which would be used for The Rolling Stones's "Ruby Tuesday" and "Ruby
Soho" by Rancid. The name Rudy fits both, though "Rueben Soho" has an
interesting ring to it. I'm not sure why anyone would bother re-recording
these in the first place, and Dori Prange may not be too keen on the latter.
Does anyone else have dumb dreams?
The city finally fixed the leaky water pipe a couple weeks ago. My
condolences to the now-homeless mosquitoes and small vermin forced to go
elsewhere after living in the marshlands in front of the four houses for nearly a
month and a half.
I'm looking forward to Iumiumium being named a chemical element. What? It's a cool name.
No comments:
Post a Comment