Firstly, there is this little nugget from my page-a-day calendar:
"‘Amicable numbers’ are any pair of numbers for which each is the sum of all of the divisors of the other-they are said to have been discovered by Pythagoras. The smallest pair of such numbers is 220 & 284: the divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 (the sum of which is 284); and the divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142 (the sum of which is 220). In 1636, Pierre de Fermat showed that 17296 & 18416 were also amicable. Two years later, René Descartes proved 9363584 & 9437056. Other amicable pairs (as they are also known) include: 1184 & 1210, 2620 & 2924, 5020 & 5564, 6232 & 6368, 10744 & 10856, 12285 & 14595, 63020 & 76084. In total, there are thought to be 236 amicable pairs below 108."
I'm not sure why we need to know whether a number is amicable or not, but what a fun concept that is! Math people are, as I have already mentioned, a subset of humanity that I don't understand so well most of the time, but just occasionally I get glimpses of a clean, shiny, orderly universe over in mathland, one where numbers are more playful somehow and less threatening, and I kind of wish I lived there. (A math person would, of course, say that I DO live there, since obviously this universe still has delights such as the Mandelbrot Set. I would have to agree with that - my body does inhabit a physical universe where these things are true - but I don't LIVE there in the same way that math people live there.)
Besides, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician in his other, Charles-Dodgson life. He wrote a little series of word problems that were so charming they fired my imagination and I wanted to try and solve them right away - alas, my eight-year-old brain was inadequate to the task.
Something else that delights me is this essay at the Kenyon Review on rejection letters. I have never been a writer and so I've never experienced the dubious pleasure of receiving any of these, but I enjoy this essay immensely. If I am ever the editor of anything, I want to do any rejections I may have the unappealing duty of making with even a tiny bit of the panache the author describes.
Taking a short break from other required reading (self- or school-imposed) to read Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air. As with most first novels there is occasional awkwardness, and his later books may significantly improve on the first one...but my main thought for this one is "Wow, that's an amazingly dense setting! I wish the characters had the same degree of richness." Ah well. An adventurey romp, all the same.
Oh, one more: Check out these decorated phones that are apparently All The Rage in Japan. Apparently the 3D style is more popular in Kansai. Hmm.
Blogs With Books
Take the iPhone. I love the way it looks, yet some people still insist on putting horrible gaudy cases on it that make it look cheap and tacky. Ironically, the very worst case I've seen was one by some designer person that brand whores go for... can't remember if it was Ralph Lauren or something else - I don't give enough of a damn about "fashion" to care enough to look it up :) Either way, it was horrendous. It had an embossed leather outer - fair enough - but inside... oh, inside... it had vomit green and purple stripes. Blech.