Real Time
More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium-and the decades leading up to it-has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.

something positive - a webcomic with chocolate sprinkles

Comic Book Resources - COLUMN by Mark Millar, 8/30/02

A baby-sitter two nights in a row is close to impossible in our family so I stuck on my old copy of The Matrix as a poor sub for a night out. It was the first time Gill had ever seen it and she actually managed to ruin it for me completely by pointing out a major plot hurdle the next two films really better explain. We’re all living in The Matrix, right? We’re all slaves to the robotic parasites who use our bodies as batteries while they distract us with our nice, glamorous lives in what we perceive to be the real world, right? Neo is The One who’s going to free us from these evil robot masters and help us all wake up and reclaim our planet, right? So far, so good, but the world we reclaim is a post-nuclear nightmare, brother! No sun, no fun, no food, no nice clothes, no new comics every Wednesday or Thursday. Imagine everything and everyone you know suddenly switching off as you open your eyes in your little special effects pod and Lawrence bloody Fishburne is standing there with a nuclear winter blowing behind him, telling us he’s saved humanity.

Thanks a lot, Morpheus, you big, fucking twat.

In fact, researchers have found evidence of a linkage between quantum mechanics and something called the Riemann function, a mathematical relationship deeply connected to the distribution of primes. Maybe the
particles of the number system are somehow intertwined with the particles of matter and energy.

… 98,711, 98,713, 98,717, 98,729, 98,731, 98,737, 98,773 … The
counter keeps ticking off primes. Those, like 98,711 and 98,713 or 98,729 and 98,731, which are just two places apart (the closest two primes can be), are called twin primes. They pop up with amazing regularity, and mathematicians believe that there is an infinity of them.

The mysteries abound. While killing time during a boring lecture (or so the legend goes), the 20th-century mathematician Stanislaw Ulam discovered his �Ulam spiral��: Build a grid of numbers starting with 1 at the center, moving up a square for 2 and then coiling counterclockwise. The primes inexplicably tend to line up along diagonals. Plot thousands of numbers this way, representing each with a tiny dot, and the diagonals crisscross like some tenuous crystalline structure, a scaffolding behind the stars in the numerical skies.

Maybe this is what the autistic twins in Oliver Sacks� �The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat�� saw with their inner eyes. Sacks wrote of how he observed the brothers one day at a state mental hospital as they sat in apparent rapture exchanging six-figure primes that they seemed to pull from their heads.

The next day the doctor returned and offered them an eight-figure prime to play with. Once they overcame their astonishment, the twins were off, generating 10-digit primes. Sacks� list did not go any higher so he was unable to check their work as they went on to spout seemingly impenetrable numbers as long as 20 digits. If only he had had the Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena algorithm.

Could the twins have been born with the neurological equivalent? Sacks speculated in his book that they were equipped with a �Pythagorean sensibility,�� a special feeling for numbers, �a direct cognition � like angels.��

The gift, if that is what it was, turned out to be exceedingly delicate.
Ten years later the two were separated and put in halfway houses. Though they learned important grooming skills and how to ride buses, Sacks reported, the ability to commune with numbers was apparently gone. They had become as clueless as the rest of us.

(FROM HERE TO INFINITY: AN OBSESSION WITH THE JOY OF PRIMES, By GEORGE JOHNSON, c.2002 New York Times News Service)