OReilly Primes

O’Reilly Primes Before you ask where my blog title (The McGann Factor) came from, Ill just come right out and tell you: Ben made me choose it. But Ive grown to really like it, for a few reasons. Certainly, it is a swiping of the nomenclature of a certain telecasters forum. Now I dont care much for that telecasters politics, but within that nomenclature you can a couple nerdy things that I like. First, the word factor, which is something I like to do to numbers. You could not imagine my joy when earlier this summer I realized that my nine-digit social security number is prime. I dont quite recall how the topic came up, but as we were talking, I was applying various divisibility tests. I wasnt certain, though, until I got to a factoring program, since I didnt know the divisibility tests for larger primes (if you can factor nine-digit composite numbers in your head and Im not talking about easy ones like 10^8 or 2^27 here you should totally list that as a talent on your application). Number theory is fun stuff. If you havent read a biography of mathematician Paul Erdos, Id recommend that as fun end-of-summer reading. Second, the obscured telecasters name is OReilly, which is also the name of the publisher of every good nerds favorite programming books. The other day, I was thinking back fondly to the days when OReillys Programming Perl was one of my best friends. You may or may not know that the OReilly books are noted for their friendly animal mascots; for example, my Perl books mascot was a camel, and Javas mascot is a tiger. This got me thinking that the various OReilly animals would make a great component to a Mystery Hunt puzzle. I brought this up to one of my housemates, Josh, who was on the winning 2003 Mystery Hunt team, and thus got to write Mystery Hunt 2004. His reply was, We did have an OReilly puzzle, dude. I was suddenly reminded that yes, in fact, there was an OReilly puzzle of sorts, and it was one of the coolest aspects of this past years Hunt. Josh, through connections still unknown to me, had been able to slip a cluephrase into the Perl Cookbook, Second Edition before it went t o press. The penultimate step of the puzzle gave you an ISBN (for the Perl Cookbook) and page number, which sent my teammates scouring the libraries for a copy of this new book. We were all in awe of Joshs ability to slip in the clue months beforehand. I feel bad for going off on a large Mystery Hunt tangent without talking in depth about it, but thats a topic for another entry. Until then, my friends, keep factoring those large numbers, and never lose sight of whats truly important (such as the Mystery Hunt). Current music: Alice In Chains, I Stay Away (old school grunge) Post Tagged #Mystery Hunt