Following Up

One of last week’s puzzles was to make this equation work, using standard arithmetic signs

3 1 3 6 = 8

We got some pretty imaginative solutions. Here they are, with a couple of extras thrown in. There’s probably a bunch more lurking in the shadows:

Prime of my Life

Just had a birthday. “How old are you?” I’m asked (being of the age where people have no shame about inquiring. “The product of the only two rhyming primes,” I say. Got it?

Belphegor’s Prime

Speaking of primes, I wrote about this elsewhere, but it’s so cool, worthy of a reprise. Math teacher Clifford Pickering named a prime number after Belphegor, a local god of the Moab people. (He’s Beelphegor or Baal Peor in the Old Testament.) According to Wikipedia, the dude had a reputation for “seducing people by suggesting to them ingenious inventions that will make them rich.” (My sort of god!) Here’s the number:

1000000000000066600000000000001

Note that it reads the same forward and backwards (see “Yreka Bakery” from last week) and contains 666, the “Number of the Beast,” sitting between twin sequences of “unlucky 13” zeros. (Unlucky probably because Judas was the 13th participant at the Last Supper.) Actually, the Number of the Beast is 616.

Sabine, my Hero

Writing is what keeps me sane. I’m not sure whether that’s a career advantage in high-energy physics today.—Sabine Hossenfelder

If you have any interest in high-energy physics — Higgs Particle, dark energy, string theory, Einstein’s mistakes, supersymmetry, Theory of Everything — do check out Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog “Backreaction” (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/) along with her many YouTube videos. She’s smart, funny and controversial. Her 2018 book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is causing tidal waves among physicists, since it throws cold water on the last several decades of the community’s effort to understand the universe. In a nutshell, she claims physicists’ belief that the best theories are “beautiful” has become dogma, causing them to lose scientific objectivity.

PIN Code of the World

How to sum up the world? According to the late Hans Rosling (Factfulness), the current PIN code of our planet is 1114, which expresses, in very round numbers, where we all live. That is, currently it looks like this:

1 billion —> Americas
1 billion —> Europe
1 billion —> Africa
4 billion —> Asia

Extrapolating from current trends, it will be 1145 in 2100, thus:

1 billion —> Americas
1 billion —> Europe
4 billion —> Africa
5 billion —> Asia

Finally…

Linguist Dan Everett studied the Pirahã tribe deep in the Amazon basin, and was struck by their inability — or unwillingness — to pay attention to the past or the future. He writes in his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, “The Pirahãs simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.”

Sounds so easy.