Advice to the president

Not from me but I endorse it (no matter who is president):

Read The Origin of Species and understand evolution.
This is an excerpt by Jack Horner in Discover Magazine.


Lincoln read Euclid's Elements. He did this not to widen his knowledge of Geometry but sharpen his logical thinking skills. Of course, I'm sure he learned some geometry too.

Work on Primes-a work in Progress

No. No headway yet. Hard work and persistance is the key; and, of course, it's fun.

As Edison said: I did not fail 2000 time (approx.) to create a lightbulb, I learned 1,999 ways not to create one.

Primes

Among several of my mathematics research projects, I am, like most mathematicians, venturing in to the world of Prime Numbers.

For those not in the know, Prime Numbers are those that are divisible by only the number 1 and the number itself. For example, 17 is only (evenly) divisible by 1 and 17.

The long standing problem is a "formula" for predicting primes. There isn't one (yet).

Since Primes are the building blocks of all other natural numbers (every number is the product of prime numbers), I see them as important.
As an example, the number 15 is the product of 3 and 5, both prime.
The number 26 is the product of 13 and 2 - both prime .
and so on for all Natural numbers.

Oh No...Politics is creeping in to my blog

I do not want politics on my blog but I have to say, regarding Obama's plan of extra taxes for those over $250,000 and "Spread the wealth", the following:

Spreading the wealth is a socialist idea. Although many countries employ socialism, it does not work very well. Ask yourself, "who is going to spread their wealth to you anyway? and who is doing the spreading?

The $250,000 idea is ridiculous. In some states that's a lot of money, in others, it's the bare necessity. How is he reconciling this fact?

Well, that's my two cents worth (am I taxed on two cents?). I'm not telling who I am voting for because, as always, their are positives and negatives. We seem to always have to choose "the lesser of two evils". But I do see one as much less capable of "evil."

We really need a third party for checks and balances (that our government is so proud of) and to offer a 3rd party perspective. Maybe this 3rd party would take the best of both parties.

Evolution Conundrum

Evolution to me is just plain obvious. However, there is an oddity that keeps me thinking. Humans do not manufacture vitamin C. We have to get it or die of scurvy. Most animals manufacture it in their bodies. But focusing on just humans I would think that we would have evolved to create our own vitamin C. In other words, during the process of evolving, I would think that the group that could not manufacture vitamin C would have die out in favour of those who could manufacture it. So this begs a couple of questions. Has the mutation to create vitamin C just never occured in humans so it never became a factor in the evolutionary process? Or maybe at one time we did manufacture vitamin C and evolved out of it as vitamin C bearing foods became abundant and other evolutionary survival traits became more important.

Maybe this is what happened to the Neandertals. Maybe they all died of scurvy in the end while the cro-magnon was able to gather the necessary foods to survive.