Prime numbers

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Partner and I share a mystical feeling about numbers. We like playing games with them, and matching them up, and making them make sense. I think both of us are convinced that there’s no such thing as a “random” number; when we watch the Rhode Island Lottery drawing in the evening, we both call out numbers in advance, as if somehow we can break the code.

 

 

And maybe someday we will.

 

 

Partner is especially taken with the Fibonacci series: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, et cetera. If you don’t see the pattern, here it is: start with zero and one, then add each pair of numbers in succession. 0 + 1 = 1. 1 + 1 = 2. 1 + 2 = 3. 2 + 3 = 5. And so forth.

 

 

You’d think that this is just a meaningless pattern, except that it’s everywhere in nature. It shows up in snail shells and the centers of sunflowers. It shows up in natural cycles. See how simple and elegant it is?:

 

 

 

 

I myself prefer prime numbers. There is something brave and tribal and mysterious about them. Mathematicians have bashed their brains against them for centuries, trying to figure out their pattern and their frequency. Every so often, someone computes the (new) “largest” prime number; it doesn’t look like there’s really a largest one, though.

 

 

And then there are the twinned primes, that follow the pattern x / x+2: 11 and 13, 29 and 31, 137 and 139. Mathematicians have proved, more or less, that there is no limit to these. They become scarcer as the numbers get bigger, but there will never be a “largest” set of twinned primes.

 

 

How about “emirp” primes? They’re prime forward and backward. 13 backward is 31. 17 backward is 71.

 

 

There are Fermat primes, and Mersenne primes, and relative primes. I love them all.

 

 

When I go to the health club, I try always to find a locker with a prime number; it’s a sad day when I have to settle for an even number (other than 2), or some sodden multiple like 51 or 57.

 

 

One of my favorite writers, Ursula LeGuin, created a whole civilization, on a planet of the star Tau Ceti, which includes mathematics as part of its religious life, and where they “chant the primes.”

 

 

Tell me how to get there, and I’ll go.

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Finding out what the yellow flowers are called

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I walk to work most days. Some days I walk all the way, which takes about thirty minutes. Most days I ride the Providence trolley with Partner; I get off on Wickenden Street, which is about a fifteen-minute walk from my office.

 

 

I walk past a florist, and a used-record store, and a couple of restaurants and bars, and a hardware store, and two coffeeshops, and a pizzeria, and an art-supply store.

 

 

Then I walk through a field of flowers.

 

 

I-195 used to run through the center of Providence. They rerouted it a few years ago. All of the former interstate-highway space is now a green boggy wilderness, full of weeds and flowers. (Rhode Island is largely swampland, so there’s a lot of squashy reedy ground reasserting itself too; geese are returning in large numbers, and those geese are mean.)

 

 

In the green space, there are yellow flowers, and white flowers, and yellow, and purple. I recognize some of them: carpet bugle, and butter-and-eggs, and milkweed, and even Jimson weed. There’s chicory, and vetch, and mullein. 

 

 

But there are a few I don’t know.

 

 

Some are yellow, on long spindly stalks. Some are small purple flowers on short stalks. Some are white, and small, and subtle.

 

 

Hm.

 

There’s an Ursula LeGuin short story called “The Day Before The Revolution.” It’s about an old woman, Laia, who has inspired a revolution, but is now too old to care about it: all she can think about is her own past, and her dead husband, and the moments of joy in her life.

 

 

At the end of the story, she goes upstairs to her room to rest, and probably to die. On the way,  she looks out the window at a field of yellow flowers, the same flowers in which she lay down with her husband for the first time. And the last line is: “Eighty-five years, and she never had time to find out what the yellow flowers were called.”

 

 

I understand this.

 

 

I want to find out what the yellow flowers in the green field are called, before it's too late.

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Cascadian Literature 101: Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin is our greatest living Cascadian author.

 

 

She has written “fantasy” and “science fiction” (whatever those terms mean). She has written essays, and “straight fiction” (whatever that means), and poetry.

 

She creates whole new cultures, based on entirely different assumptions than the ones we're used to. She plays games with political systems. (“The Left Hand of Darkness” creates a planet with a feudal hierarchy alongside a drab vaguely-Soviet bureaucracy. “The Dispossessed” features one planet with lots of different Earthlike governments – capitalism, pseudo-communism, etc. – and another with an anarchist government. If you've ever wondered what it might look like if the anarchists take over, read “The Dispossessed.”)

 

She uses a backstory for some of her novels, that goes like this: A million or so years ago, a humanoid culture colonized Earthlike planets all over the galaxy. Then, for some reason, they withdrew. Then, a million years later, they come back sheepishly: Look! We're your relatives! And you have cousins all over the place!

 

 

But we all evolved, hm, differently.

 

Some of us evolved hermaphroditically.

 

 

Some of us have cultures in which sex is completely open.

 

Some of us have religions in which numbers are an expression of the divine.

 

My favorite of her books is “Always Coming Home.” It is, in the author's words, “a story about some people who might be going to have lived a long time from now in Northern California.” It's sweet and strange and very solemn, and it feels very real. They have some technology, lots of folklore, and a deeply soulful lifestyle. Le Guin gives us their recipes and their holiday celebrations and their beliefs. And she ends with this plaintive refrain:

 

From the beginning, from the beginning,

We are your children.

 

 

Go read her, kids.

 

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Hail Cascadia

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The Japan earthquake made me wonder if the Pacific Northwest coast is/was okay, so I checked the Daily Astorian and the Oregonian online. I grew up out there, and I still have fond (if cold and foggy) memories of those long sandy beaches in Washington and Oregon.

 

 

There was little or no tsunami damage in the Northwest, as it turns out. But reading those papers made me nostalgic for the dark rainy hillsides of my childhood. I used to pretend that the Northwest was its own country, not part of the United States but a sort of dim anarchic zone, lost in the swirling Cascade fog.

 

 

I'm not alone in this. Ernest Callenbach, back in the lawless 1970s, wrote a novel called “Ecotopia,” in which Washington, Oregon, and northern California break off to form a rebel republic, based on gender equality, ecological awareness, and fierce independence.

 

 

Yes, I know. But still.

 

 

There are actually lots of people who enjoy pretending the same thing. They have given their new nation a name: “Cascadia.” They have a flag, and maps, and bumper stickers, and even stamps! I especially love the geoduck stamp. (Geoducks, as you can see above, are giant alien-looking Northwest clams. The word is pronounced “gooeyduck.” My great-aunt Julia was famous in the family for sitting on the the beach with a rifle, waiting for the geoducks to fly over.)

 

 

Julia was a genuine Cascadian.

 

 

We have our national authors too. Callenbach is one of them, I suppose, though frankly I've never been able to plough my way entirely through “Ecotopia.” There's Ken Kesey, most especially for writing “Sometimes A Great Notion”; Betty MacDonald, who deserves a whole blog entry to herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist / essayist / short-story writer, ditto; and Sherman Alexie, member of the Spokane Tribe (well, Spokane's a bit east of the mountains, but Alexie's a crazy Cascadian all right).

 

 

Some Cascadians have set up a Sasquatch Militia. Others are trying to protect the rare tree octopus.

 

 

From the grizzled loggers of the North Cascades, to the sunburnt huckleberry pickers on the slopes of Mount Adams, to the ultra-cool hipsters of Portland and Seattle (not to mention the expatriates like me), we are a nation of (mostly) amiable lunatics.

 

 

And no matter how far we roam, we can still hear the geoduck quacking in our hearts.

 

 

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