Showing posts with label postachio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postachio. Show all posts

Monday, 25 May 2015

Life Days

Well my Postachio blog ended abruptly when the creator decided to monetize it. No free option was available. It was pay up or you'll lose access to it. Bastard, let's hope he ends up bankrupt. The original Evernote posts are still there however, so nothing was lost. I continued posting to Evernote but only on prime days as before. Lately however, I've begun making use of Twitter on a daily basis and that is working out well. I've not been posting to Evernote at all since it seems somewhat redundant but I should make a special effort to do so on prime days when there can be quite a lot of information about the number and it is impossible to fit into a tweet.

The daily exercise of tweeting about the number of days I've been alive adds fresh mathematical insights from time to time. The most important recently was day 24156 when I learned that numbers of the form 4^a*(8b+7) where a and b are integers cannot be written as the sum of three squares. This is known as the Legendre three square theorem. In the case of 24156, a=1 and b=754. Of course, some numbers can be written as the sum of two squares and all numbers can be written as the sum of four squares.

Technology-wise, I've just written my first Java program on OS X using the JDK (Java Development Kit) and NetBeans IDE. Here is the link to the web page that I used. I also learned how to create an encrypted disk image (dmg) file using Disk Utility. A little earlier I installed Mahara, an e-portfolio system, on my laptop using Bitnami that sets up the server and database for you in the same way that MAMP does for Moodle. Here is the Bitnami link.

Friday, 3 October 2014

Reconnecting

I just looked at my previous post, made over a year ago now. I'd forgotten all about my integer equations based on the number of days I'd been alive. Today is day number 23924 and sure enough: $$(2-3) = -9 +(2 \times 4)$$For most of the previous year, I kept a daily blog going at voodooguru.postach.io generated from within a notebook in Evernote. Most the information for each day's number was taken from either WolframAlpha or the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. During my break in Jakarta I stopped completely; however, I've now resumed but am only tracking my prime days. I needed a break. My next prime day is Wednesday October 8th when I'll be 23929 days old.

23934 by the way is equal to 2 x 2 x 5981 so today my life can be divided exactly into four equal parts each of about 16.375 years duration. So the sequence is 16.375, 32.75, 49.125 and 62.5 (minus a day for each quarter because I'm about four days away from the 62.5 milestone). So sometime in May 1998 I was exactly 75% of my current age.