[QUOTE=Tony Reix;326381]

For now, I'm home, waiting for last medecine exams, since I had a (TRANSIENT !!) cerebral vascular accident 3 weeks ago. For now, they found no explanation... since my 54 years body is in perfect shape, the body of a sportman they said.

[/QUOTE]

Is there an epidemic around here? CVA, Shingles, Lymphoma, .......????

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;326555]Is there an epidemic around here? CVA, Shingles, Lymphoma, .......????[/QUOTE]It's beginning to look like it.

Just gone 3am here and I can't sleep for the discomfort.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;326529]But that is at best an average property having zilch (or very nearly zilch) to do with the magnitude of any given new prime found.[/QUOTE]

True, but pretty irrelevant to what I was saying. If George was calling it a "heads" because the ratio of exponents was less than the average, he is playing with a weighted coin. The probability of finding the next exponent with a ratio less than average is 1-1/e, about 63%. The probability of getting eight heads in a row is therefore (1-1/e)[SUP]8[/SUP], or about 2.5%. On the other hand, if by "heads", he means discovered before we would have expected a 50% chance of finding it, the probability of getting eight heads in a row is only about 0.4%, a good deal more remarkable. I am guessing he will explain what he meant once he announces the new prime.

[QUOTE=Prime95;325895]If it is prime, it does not change davideddy's estimate of the time to the next prime one bit. (Well, technically it does change it a very, very, very tiny bit because one more exponent has changed from status unknown to status known).

A 7-10 year drought is not out of the question. I sure hope not.[/QUOTE]
Grateful as I am for the endorsement, the logic (as you implied in "Predict M48") was both valid and spoke for itself.

Here's to another prime before we all shuffle off our mortal coils:smile:

Cheers
D

[QUOTE=xilman;326597]It's beginning to look like it.

Just gone 3am here and I can't sleep for the discomfort.[/QUOTE]
A pox on both your houses?

[URL="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/14450.html"]A plaque on both their houses[/URL]!

(23&25 Brook Street, Westminster, London)

[QUOTE=philmoore;326103]Could someone explain the twin paradox to me again?[/QUOTE]
Acceleration

[QUOTE=davieddy;326604]Grateful as I am for the endorsement, the logic (as you implied in "Predict M48") was both valid and spoke for itself.

Here's to another prime before we all shuffle off our mortal coils:smile:

Cheers
D[/QUOTE]

Hopefully in my case it will be at least 5, and if all goes well, 10 or more :razz:

[QUOTE=Dubslow;326611]Hopefully in my case it will be at least 5, and if all goes well, 10 or more :razz:[/QUOTE]
I hope you are referring to primes rather than years
:smile:

[QUOTE=Dubslow;326611]Hopefully in my case it will be at least 5, and if all goes well, 10 or more :razz:[/QUOTE]

I'm 30, and I fully expect to live long enough to see GIMPS handing out and receiving completed 100-million-digit LL assignments with regularity. I expect to see GIMPS claim the next EFF prize.

I would not even be surprised if I introduced my grandchildren to number theory by showing them an announcement of the first successfully completed billion-digit LL test on a wafer-thin, hand-held device capable of sustaining an exaflop while playing the latest hit by Justin Bieber III.

In all seriousness, consider that Colquitt and Welsh discovered M110503 25 years ago. We're now verifying a prime with an exponent likely in the 50-60 million range. So the size of a "testable" candidate has increased roughly 500-fold in 25 years. It only needs to increase 60-fold from here in order to feasibly run billion-digit tests. Even with Moore's Law slowing down (and is it really?), 60-fold over another 25 years doesn't seem like too farfetched a goal.

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;326555]Is there an epidemic around here? CVA, Shingles, Lymphoma, .......????[/QUOTE]

...Posterior Vitreous Detachment. Apparently, once we are over 50, and almost certainly by 80, the "goo" (vitreous) inside of our eyeballs literally shrinks, contracts, and peels from the retina on the back wall of the eyeball. At the same time, the little gooey gelatin ring that serves as an O-ring-like flange around the optic nerve where it connects to the retina, comes loose and freely floats in the watery remnants of the vitreous goo. (This is the most pleasant thing to think about in the world, right?)

So all of these optical shenanigans carry an initial risk that the goo will pull just hard enough on the retina to tear away a small divot of retinal tissue, which can cause blindness in a matter of 24-48 hours if it is not attended to by an ophthalmologist. Some folks even get the prize of total retinal detachment. After a sequence of eye exams (and the pleasure of eye dilation) over the next 6-8 weeks, if there are no tears or detachments, the process is deemed to have occurred safely. The only problem is that it often induces large quantities of eye floaters (you know the little circles, dots, hairs, etc. you see when you look at the sky or a white screen, etc.) and that gooey o-ring (known as a Weiss Ring floater) will create a huge shadow in the field of vision as well as play all sorts of refractory tricks with lighting, to the point of making one feel as though they are catching lightning flashes in their peripheral vision.

Anyway, this lovely little (and heretofore unknown to any of our family) process began in my mother's left eye right after her 59th birthday last July. Started out as what she described as a "raisin" or "jelly bean" shaped region that obscured her central vision from the left eye. (At first, this scared me, thinking about macular degeneration.) Then, by late September, she had a weird floating dot stuck right in her center field of vision. The eye doctor found it to be something like a strand of vitreous goo that was still attached to the fovea (the prime real estate of the eye; it provides our finest central vision). In October, it peeled off, and her vision was back to normal...for a week.

Next, she was sitting in the bathroom one night, only to look up and see a giant lit, spinning circle cast on the bathroom wall. She described it as the size of an LP record, or a giant Windows Vista spinning progress circle. The ophthalmologist confirmed that to be the Weiss ring from the optic nerve. In the three months since, it has gotten smaller and broken apart somewhat, but she still gets flashes of light and ugly floaters in that one eye. We've heard that it should go away completely in the next few months, but having something like that in her vision has terribly depressed and frightened my poor mother. It doesn't help matters that everyone preaches about how common all of this is, yet every one of her contemporaries that she has spoken to says that they have never heard of or experienced it.

Apparently, the process happens to nearsighted people a little sooner in life, and in the case of folks with severe myopia, it can happen as early as age 5. Interesting fact: it is not known what purpose the goo in an eyeball serves other than keeping it round. Some people go as far as having the goo removed (the word for the day, kids, is "vitrectomy") and dear Mom threatens to have it done, until I warn her of the side effects of having the inside of an eyeball cut up and vacuumed out...

So, is anyone here losing their eyeball goo? Anyone have floater issues? I've had them as long as I can remember, though they do not upset me nearly as much as they do my mother. :sad: