Friday, April 11, 2008

2 more miles this morning, so 4 for April, 63.5 for 2008 (that's 36.5 miles remaining for the next Slurpee, hmph (also since 12oz Slurpees are 30g carbs, they are always legitimate snacks)). I don't know why but the somewhat-symmetry of 63,5 and 36.5 attracts my attention, even though it's meaningless unless you really need to know numbers' relation to 99. 64 and 36 would actually be much more meaningful as it's sum of squares and thus a right triangle. Maybe I paid too much attention in geometry. Yesterday I found myself wondering if I could remember if there were any special properties or rules of numbers that break down to unique prime numbers instead of repeated ones (i.e., 70 is 7x5x2 but 12 is 3x2x2). Couldn't remember any, but I couldn't get it out of my head for at least 15 minutes. I think my wife is now even more afraid of passing along my genes to unsuspecting heirs.

While walking this morning, I encountered a few articles (yeah I read on the walking track - it's an excellent use of the time) that reminded me why I subscribe to Science News despite a lot of fairly boring, technical articles. First was this article explaining that the memory-clearing process that results in Alzheimer's brain plaques is 10 times more active in young adults than in advanced Alzheimer's patients. This suggests the problem isn't that this activity starts/increases in older people, but doesn't slow down to match the rest of the brain's slowing processes. For some reason I connected this to the claim that continued learning should help stave off Alzheimer's and wondered if that's just keeping the intake processes more active to match the not-as-slow destructive processes. This fascinates me, as this is probably my biggest fear about getting older. That story was immediately followed by an article on why tape tears when you try to pull it off something, and then a story on tracking people's cell phones to determine that we still use animals' predatory travel patterns, which is fun for Big Brother implications as well as leading to questions of how different our civilization and all of its infrastructure is from animals in the wild. It's this kind of mix that keeps me interested, and shows how science is more useful than those physics labs where we discovered that our high school's equipment couldn't really measure gravity.

I learned something this morning - namely that monthly bus passes have their expiration printed on the back. That's why the back of my ticket had yesterday printed in vivid purple, as I discovered while trying to board said bus. Fortunately I had a dollar in change in my car, and only had to wait half an hour for the next one. Not my best mass transit day.
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