I’ve been talking lately about coincidences, and that has gotten my mind wandering back to some of my all time favorites. I don’t ascribe any metaphysical meaning to them – as Tony pointed out the other day, we conveniently ignore life’s vastly larger number of non-coincidences – but a good coincidence sure is entertaining.<\/p>\n
For example, I remember the year, when I was a teenager, that the ages of our entire family – my parents, my older brother, myself and my younger sister – were all prime numbers. We were, respectively: 47, 41, 19, 17 and 11. What’s even more fun than the fact itself is my memory of how completely delighted everyone in the family was to discover this little factoid.<\/p>\n
At the time my Mom was pregnant with my soon-to-be youngest sister, so of course there was much debate over the dinner table about whether we could count the age of our forthcoming family member as -1. And if so, whether -1 is really a prime number (it fits the definition, being divisible only by itself and 1, which would make -1 the only negative prime – if<\/i> you’re allowed to count negatives).<\/p>\n
I’m not sure what any of this means, but one thing is clear: I was obviously born into the right family. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been talking lately about coincidences, and that has gotten my mind wandering back to some of my all time favorites. I don’t ascribe any metaphysical meaning to them – as Tony pointed out the other day, we conveniently ignore life’s vastly larger number of non-coincidences – but a good coincidence sure is entertaining. For … Continue reading “Prime time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}