Entries this day: gymnastics_crunch primes

gymnastics crunch

Wednesday 21 October 1998

Yesterday was big fun at gymnastics.

I've stopped practicing my round off back flips, and toned them down to round off back handsprings.

Why? So I can do round off back handspring back flip, of course! I've got to lower the angle/height/energy etc to get the back flip down to a back handspring. I've also got to overcome my fear of bonking my head on back handsprings! (That means I'll need to quit bonking my head by having my arms too far apart, and *that* means I'll need to continue stretching my shoulders so my arms can easily block my weight)

Last night, BB (one of the coaches) would help spot me on the back handsprings.. Actually it was more of a psychological spot because he didn't actually help me over; he just stood beside me in case I crashed. I would do a round off, stop, and then do a back handspring, with the goal of getting the stop to be shorter and shorter: stop - stp - st - s -

I became pretty confident at them (the confidence waxes and wanes) and only boinked my head a tiny bit once. I even got the stop to be only a stp

Near the end of the hour, I zipped over to the runway trampoline where Eric was trying some front flip half twist thing. We alternated passes on the trampoline, and I did my fun backflip, backflip, backflip, backflip, backflip with twist onto mat trick. I get a teeny bit dizzy for a second after doing that!

Then I was all, "I think I'll do a 1 and 3/4 front flip."

The first one was nice. {boingy} (flip fli) (land on back) Perfect.

The second one was not as good. {boingy} (flip fl) (land on head; hear a bit of a crunch in the neck) Ow.

BB was all, "Rob. No. Don't be trying that one again."

I told him I woulda stopped anyway even without him saying so.

"Good, because that was pretty spooky."

"Well, at least it's near Halloween!"

I went home and stayed up chatting with Jen over ICQ till damn 2am.

This morning my neck is a bit sore, with slightly limited movement; I think I shall call my chiropractor now.

primes

21 October 1998

After chatting with Jen last night, I shut down Windows and booted my linux partition. After a bit of playing, I found the following interesting numbers (among many many others) on my screen:

666667
888887
987659
1000003
1001003
1234577
1357901
1444441
1777771
3333331
1777777777
214783647

"So?" you may ask.

Back you may press.

What are those numbers?

They are all prime numbers. Like 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, ... they can only be evenly divided by 1 and themselves.

Really?

Well, I don't know, but I trust the linux executable to know what it's doing.

214783647 was the largest number I could start it counting from. Any number larger than that to start and it would respond with "Ouch."

However, I piped the output through less and came up with 1777777777 as prime. Cool.

I let it run all night and the largest prime it found was 4294967291.
Nice.