Comments on: Abandoned blog post ideas, pt. 1

By: Abandoned blog post ideas, part 2 | Cyde Weys Musings

Abandoned blog post ideas, part 2 | Cyde Weys Musings — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:30:34 +0000

[...] my wildly successful blog post on abandoned blog ideas, part 1 (at least in terms of cleaning up my WordPress post drafts, anyway), I figure it’s time for [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:45:16 +0000

I would like to see the pseudo-science idea developed a bit more. It´s a very interesting subject.
Regarding super tools, I never travel without my Swiss army knife. It was expensive when I bought it in Geneva but it certainly was money well spent.
It’s common practice here for people to eat in the office. (In my country that´s just considered bad manners or the privilege of the unsociable office twat…) Suffice to say that the desks and floors end up with a reasonable amount of breadcrumbs. No matter what, on most days the office is clean and the crumbs gone. Now, when you stay in the office until late, have you ever noticed how careless the cleaners are when they vacuum? Sure enough, I wonder why they only put bug traps near the coffee machine… eheheheh

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:29:28 +0000

Finding the largest prime is to mathematics as sending humans to other worlds is to space travel. It doesn’t necessarily accomplish much in itself, but the knock-on effects are enormous. In particular, whole new classes of algorithms have been developed for efficiently discovering primes, and they are useful in other applications — like, say, public-key cryptography, the most common algorithms of which start off with “Generate two huge primes …”

In addition, the Seventeen or Bust project has some interesting ramifications regarding covering sets. Mathematicians suspect that 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number (the covering set issue being the largest bit of evidence), but they haven’t quite developed the proof for it yet. The purpose of the project is to computationally prove that 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number. Once that’s out of the way, mathematicians will be able to focus a bit more on proving why it is the smallest one, because they’ll have the comforting knowledge of knowing that it’s correct.

By: William (green)

William (green) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:19:50 +0000

But I don't see any reason to be computing large primes. What does that do for us? Folding@Home at least has a pretty visible purpose. I don't think my laptop's processor has enough cooling to be able to run at 100% constantly, so I'm not running any distributing computing stuff on it at least until I have a backup portable. Hell, it's my main machine right now. 1.6GHz Celeron, man. Little pity here? Also, I took a look at the canal picture, and it seems a little washed out, so I hit it with some Curves and I got this. Irfanview can do something similar, and it makes most pictures look better. I won't make any claims to being an expert when it comes to photography, but I'd recommend running an auto-level or auto-curves tool on just about any picture you take. Generally, what'll happen is you get a perceived increase in dynamic range due to midtones having an enhanced range.