Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 23:42:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Numbers [Resent to not use Unicode or HTML]
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Eric Jablow <ejablow at cox.net> wrote:
> They're even in the Bible!

What's the smallest positive integer that isn't in the Bible?

It's not an easy search, since numbers are mostly in the form of
words, not decimal digits.

> And, John Horton Conway has named certain integers evil and others
> odious, ...

Why did he choose those names for them?

> The evil numbers are the nonnegative integers with an even number of
> 1s in their binary expansion.

These make a very nice self-similar pattern, which I independently
discovered many years ago.  It's also the pattern of parity bits on
a punched paper tape when you type each character successively.

I remember once being stuck with a terminal where the parity bit
was stuck on, but the computer would only accept even parity.
Fortunately, the system wasn't case sensitive, and I knew that
whenever an uppercase ASCII letter is even parity, the lowercase
equivalent is odd parity, and vice versa, so I could use the keyboard
by choosing the case with the correct parity for each letter.  It
looked odd, but it worked.

> It forms sequence A001969 in Sloane's on-line encyclopedia.

For those who don't know:  http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
is a search engine just for sequences of numbers.  I had occasion
to use it just a couple days ago.  On rasff we were talking about chord
keyboards.  It had occurred to me that you can type a lot more than 1024
different characters with a ten-key keyboard, if the *order* in which
the keys are pressed is relevant.  I worked out how many different
characters you can type with N keys for each N.  I got 1, 4, 15, 64,
325, 1956, 13,699, 109,600 986,409, and 9,864,100.  (For instance with
2 keys, A and B, you can press just A, or just B, or A while holding
down B, or B while holding down A, hence you can represent any of 4
different characters.)  When I plugged that into that search engine,
it promptly found A007526, and told me all about it, including easier
ways to calculate it.

There has also recently been a rasff discussion about Bible
literalism.  There is at least one creationist Jew:  New York fan Zev
Sero.  Someone objected that the miraculous moving Well of Miriam that
kept the 2 million Israelites well watered during their forty years
in the desert would have had to have had the volume of Niagara.  That
popped my sense-of-scale bogometer, so I promptly posted a correction.
As did several others.  It's not often I *defend* creationism, but
fair's fair.  Two million isn't all that many people.  A fire hose
would suffice.