Here is an article about a new record in the ubiquitous prime number search. That's fine, but the newspaper article defined a prime number in the following manner:
A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 - 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.
Comment 1: Kill me now.
Comment 2: OK, so there was likely a missing portion of the sentence and they meant to use the listed numbers as examples. However, the does not excuse the fact that the article lists 1 as a prime number! (Grrrrrr.....)
Comment 3: Kill me now.
[Added on 1/5: I misparsed the sentence. Please ignore this entry, for I am stupid. Lanth correctly points out that the - is separating the thoughts, so the only fault I can find is that the sentence structure is suboptimal for tired people like me to read and parse correctly. This is a trivial fault rather than my thought that they were including 1 as a prime number. I'm going to go learn how to read carefully now.]
1 day ago
4 comments:
41 is a prime number, right?
As in 41-38.
The 'Horns hooked 'em.
Happy New Year.
I intend to post an entry on that. I haven't had a chance.
I come from a family of 5 with 4 UCLA alums and me (the black sheep), so I was very happy with the result. As the saying goes, their favorite team is UCLA and whoever is playing USC. My cousin pointed out that I could reject that whole thing and not be against USC, but it's cool to dis USC and they're in downtown LA, so why not.
I'll put a separate post for this later because it still merits one.
I'm not sure what's wrong with that sentence. It doesn't list 1 as a prime number (it lists "2, 3, 5, 7, and so on"), and it's pretty clear that the numbers listed after the dash are examples. I mean, I suppose there are people out there that now think that a prime number is divisible only by itself and "1-2", but they're prolly not the article's target audience anyway.
Granted, the definition isn't perfect--the way the examples are listed, one could be almost forgiven for assuming 9 is prime. And it doesn't explicitly exclude 1 from prime-numberness. Still, that's the standard prime number definition, and it does work fine for most people.
Ooh, or I could have just misparsed the sentence entirely. You're right.
I'll have to change the title of the entry.
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