I'm starting to believe in those Apatow movies about nerds suddenly becoming popular without having to shed their nerdiness: A dude name Paul Slocum—who I'm picturing looks exactly like Michael Cera of SuperBad/Juno/Nick & Nora fame—hooked a crappy old amp to his little laptop, told the laptop to continuously calculate the digits of the magical constant pi, digits that run to infinity to the right of the decimal point, and turned those digits into synth commands for surprisingly danceable house music.

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I knew there was a reason I didn't become a mathematician! Researchers in the US have discovered a new prime number (that's a number that can only be divided by itself and one, in case you forgot). It has a cool 13-million digits in it, and required the processing power of 75 laptops running XP to work out.

The number is way too long to write out, but can be notated as 2 to the power of 43,112,609 minus 1. Two seperate networks of computers have verified the number.

Even stranger than the fact people spend their time looking for Prime numbers is the fact that the researchers stand to win a $US100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a prime number with more than 10 million digits. I mean, why not, right? 100K for getting 75 computers to do some long division for you?

Actually now I'm wishing I was a mathematician. Damn.

[SMH]