561

Christmas break reading included Those Fascinating Numbers by Jean-Marie De Konnick. The plot is simply one to the Skewes number.



Many of the concepts are simply beyond me due to my own lack of grounding in number theory. I was, however, introduced to Fermat's Little Theorem and became interested in the Carmichael numbers. The smallest Carmichael number, however, is 561. An attempt, however, to calculate the number 2 ⁵⁶⁰ on a calculator, let alone any other base, caused smoke to come out of my calculator. An error message was all I could achieve.

Still desiring to see if indeed 561 divided evenly into ((2^560)-1), I decided to throw the equation at WolframAlpha. I entered ((2^560)-1)/561 and WolframAlpha dutifully returned 6727205748344993497756781784292814422311802531936613954324788413985069808185648577693630526163384612373383912710808992691213163333199273854833216134461133767645980975 and no remainder. Little wonder my calculator failed to get that right. 166 digits. Impressive.

That result being rather messy, I went ahead and used the modulo definition of the Fermat's Little Theorem to obtain a "prettier" result. Entering (2^560) mod 561 yielded a result of one.

Along the way I also came to appreciate WolframAlpha's ability to report prime factors and, even better, all divisors. Thus factor 13665960 yields the 10 prime factors, 7 distinct, and all 384 divisors. Working out the number of divisors by hand is simply error prone beyond n = 100.

Why would one ever again do any mathematics without WolframAlpha? What is the benefit to the drill and kill working out of equations? Mathematicians tend to say, "But if they do not do it by hand, they will not understand it." OK, so before you get to drive a car from Miami to Chicago, you need to walk the route first so you can understand it. Why not let the computer handle the drudgery, and use tools like WolframAlpha to explore mathematics in ways that simply were not previously possible?

Of course, then every mathematics student would have to have a laptop and a wireless Internet connection. But why not? Who is ever going to try to calculate 2^560 by hand? Yet by the same token, why worry about hand factoring quadratics? Both are drudgery, the former is simply more so. Move beyond drudgery and make mathematics the exciting exploration of terra nova that it can be.

PreDigital: A trip to Wone

Preparing for a trip down from Kolonia to Wone, Henry sharpens knives. This particular trip took place fall 1992. Every possible weekend the family would pack up and go out to Wone, the original family home.

Arrival and unpacking usually occurred at the house of Mayerico Salvador, which is located at Frederico Salvador's place in Wone-Luak, Kitti, on Pohnpei.

Frederico's home was apparently originally constructed as a nahs and later walled in.

Inside everyone shared a single commons area for sleeping. One really was a member of the family, and not simply a guest. More than anything else, the Salvador family and Wone caused me to decide to stay and work on Pohnpei.

Weekend days in Wone were spent working - cutting grass the old fashioned way. With a machete and elbow grease.

Meals were often prepared in the nahs by Mayerico's home.

Maria Salvador on the hunt. I pity the fool who cut down her apple tree.

Bath time in Wone was also play time in the swimming pool. Laundry, however, was hard work and done by hand.

There was always time for a pick-up game of baseball. This is the idyllic childhood of dreams - a close knit family that spends quantity time together. Children know that there is no such thing as quality time, only quantity time. Florida may have the magic kingdom, but all the bells and whistles of an American childhood does not amount to hill of stale beans against the magic of a childhood in Wone. Children grow up knowing they are loved, having a sense of pride in their culture, a sense of place in their society, and a respect for elders. These days in Wone were what I was remembering when in 1998 I visited Guam for the first time.

Kosraean Christmas 2010

A few photos from the Christmas marching in the Kosrae Congregational Church!

Sunday school led the marching groups.

Mwet mactuh.

Star line for the youth group.

Senny's group, from the back line of the choir.

Senny's uniform for the women.

Marching was followed by an all-church dinner. Praise the Lord and pass the fried chicken!

The Placebo Effect

One of the difficulties with ethnobotanical traditional medicines is that they sometimes seem to be more effective when used within their cultural contexts and traditional cultures than in sterile laboratory environments. The impact of placebo effects has long been an issue in ethnobotany. Dr. Ted Katpchuk of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts found that the placebo effect holds even when the patients know that they are being given a placebo. As Kaptchuk noted, "This wasn't supposed to happen, it really threw us off."

The finding by Kaptchuk and his fellow researchers, it seems to me, has a huge potential impact in understanding traditional medicines and in my ethnobotany course. Integrative, holistic medicine has shown the that a positive personal healer-patient relationship at the heart of successful integrated medicine such as at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel in New York.

Here my family doctor is a member of my family, literally. He and my children share a common ancestor and the families can still trace the connections. Rather than seeing this as a conflict of interest, as some in the medical profession in the west might conceive, I see this as a benefit. I know he knows us and cares about us.

I am left wondering as whether the same is true of a large HMO operation. The above study argues that large teams of anonymous doctors dispensing curative medicines might not be the most effective treatment regime. Sure, I live where we do not have the medical facilities of a New York City. But for the routine illnesses of life, I may be living in the medically more advanced place. I believe my doctor can cure me, and that is apparently a big plus.

Maybe the placebo effect is something to be openly embraced. Some traditional plant medicines work because they are chemically efficacious, some traditional  plant medicines work because the patient believes it works. Embrace both instances as being effective: a patient is healed.

As NPR noted, placebos have a lot to recommend them. Placebo has an absence of known side effects, can safely be taken by pregnant women, children, the elderly, and has no know interactions with other non-placebo drugs.

And while I have at my disposal and use traditional medicines, I also know when to go integrative. I will still take Ciproflaxcin for bacterial dysentery that does not go away after a month. 

PreDigital Images

Underneath the television are photo albums that are more pulled off the shelf by babies than adults. The pictures are turning tones of reds and yellows by turn. The negatives are long lost. Photos, their meanings, and ways to conserve both have haunted me since at least 1978.

Since 1998 I have settled on the Internet as being the most promising technological solution going forward, although the web may yet prove to be the ultimate glass slide. 

I first utilized CompuServe as that was how Pohnpei was first connected digitally to the outside world. The very first connectivity, circa 1995, was only through CompuServe. By late 1996 the nation was connected directly to the Internet. As CompuServe was pay-as-you-go, I began to move my material to GeoCities.

By 1999, when the college deployed a web presence, material began to populate the college server. The new "glass slide" format issue was where to store pictures that would be around in the future. Three servers in four years did not seem like even a quasi-permanent solution.

By 2008 the college server was clearly equally problematic. A college policy of simply wiping out a faculty member's folder when they passed away or resigned inveighed against the long term retention for which I was looking. I now have what amounts to a two-pronged approach where I blog via Google and also share via the social media site FaceBook.

Google Blogger stores images on Picasa, while FaceBook retains their own storage capacities.

I knew that at some point I was likely to want to go back and scan print images, but in 2010 I was spurred on by the effort of a professor who was scanning hundreds of slides from the mid-1970s and sharing them via FaceBook. For the predigital images, the social media site will remain the larger collection.

The blog, however, will permit me to post some while telling a story.

Kisin ohlen Pohnpei

A full day for the day little man.

Mid-afternoon included an impromptu meet-up with a lovely young serepein. Unfortunately the ohl was a tad shy.

An afternoon nap - and a fine smile.

An evening out with the boys at market.

Good friends together at market. Mitsuo "Nahnsou" Daniel.

Another denizen of the market working on opening his chips.

Deisleen.

A new baton.

And by the end of the evening, a newly adopted substitute mother. Feliciana "Likoen" Spencer.

Of information, knowledge, copyright, piracy, and privacy

The young man looked at the RipStik sadly. His older brother had sent the stik as a birthday present. Try though he did, his attempts to stay upright and on the board had all met with instant failure. With no further thought I walked over.

"What hand do you write with?" I asked. He looked puzzled, but held up his right hand. I moved him over to the left side of the board. I told him to use his left foot on the front platform to bring the board up to level while keeping his right foot at the torsion bar. He looked ahead, ready to go. I corrected him.

"Do not look ahead. Stare only at the back platform, stare only at the word RipStik. Lift your right foot with a gentle push back and in a single motion plant that foot directly on the word RipStik. Once your foot is planted, then and only then turn your attention to what is in front of you."

He was up instantly and stayed on for a good three meters. He went off the board, but he landed on his feet with  his face lit up by his smile.

Visiting an old friend this evening he noted that his son had given him an iPad, but that he lacked much of the basic knowledge of the interface. He was flicking the surface too quickly. I showed him to use slower, more deliberate finger motions to enlarge and reduce the screen.

I share knowledge, information, almost reflexively and without thought of compensation or ownership. I wrote my own course text books and posted them on line under a Creative Commons 3.0 -by license. I am hardly alone in this, sites such as Flatworld Knowledge and FlexBooks provide access to open text books. I share knowledge on an almost continuous basis, and engender learning.

The advent of the winter break provided an opportunity for me to finish reading a book I first picked up from the library in late October, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. The book has had me thinking about copyright, intellectual property, and the ownership of knowledge for the past two months.

I now see the open source movement in the light of a much richer and longer history than I ever appreciated. That book has given me a vastly deeper understanding of the importance of the decisions of the Internet Policy Task Force in regards copyright and the Internet. I share the view of Creative Commons on this issue. I am not enamored of copyright, intellectual property, nor patents.

I gather that the possibility exists that some of my wife's genes, or at least the proteins for which they code, have been patented as the result of a study of the genetics of the people of her island. I am fairly certain that having a company effectively own portions of her DNA is against her culture. In any case, I certainly object to her DNA being someone else's intellectual property. She could not comprehend the consent form that a trusted elder told her to sign, so she followed her tradition and did as she was told.

As a user of Ubuntu, Mozilla FireFox, Oracle OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and other open source packages, I am a user of open source software. I do run beta versions and when I see a bug, check to ensure that the bug has been filed, filing if the bug is unreported - which is exceedingly rare.

Maybe not unlike Norbert Wiener and Stewart Brand, I see information as a flow, a process, a collection of ideas that once let loose from the brain are no longer able to be owned. Information is inherently free - even before electronic media made the cost of reproduction virtually zero. Telling the young boy where to put his foot on the RipStik, the words from my mouth, did not require the purchase of raw materials, created no cost to me.

If information is free, why am I being paid? I rather suppose that I am paid to engender learning. I am a learning consultant. The information is free, but some need assistance in obtaining that information. I did not build the edifice that is modern education, but I suppose - lacking any other particular skills - that were I to have lived 3000 years ago I would have hung out in the marketplace dispensing knowledge in exchange for food or patronage. I am fortunate that education is now a social construct replete with remuneration and fringe benefits.

This being the Fall of WikiLeaks, the idea that all information should be freely and transparently available is being philosophically challenged. Coupled with the changes in FaceBook's privacy policy which impacted some 500 million denizens of the planet earth and Mark Zuckerberg's apparent philosophy that nothing should be private, this is a challenging season for advocates of complete transparency, unfettered freedom of information, and the unimpeded flow of ideas.

Sure, I can sit comfortably on my island rock and expound on the virtues of a world  where open and transparent communication are benefits to society. Where having a democratic nation say one thing in private and another in public is some form of betrayal of the foundation of a participative democracy where citizens are supposed to have all the information necessary to making informed decisions. Where a lack of transparency about the reliability of intelligence sources may have helped lead the United States into one of the wars in the middle east, is one possible example.

On the other hand, Michael LaBossiere argues the necessity of national secrets if a greater good is being served. Obviously there is a short term benefit from secrecy, but what would happen if a nation said the exact same things publicly and privately? Would the nation necessarily collapse?

For an information freeist, how far does transparency extend? To be an information freedom fighter do I need to put live feed Internet cameras in my bedroom? No culture of which I am aware publicly condones the public display of the act of procreation. Every where I have lived, doing the wild thing in the middle of the road is cause for disapprobation at the very least, if not arrest. Even the one year old in the house crawls into a corner to hide when he feels the need to fill his pamper - and he is clearly not versed in privacy theory.

I am left unsure of exactly where the line exists between freedom of information and privacy. That a line exists, of that I am certain. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I know when something is a true invasion of my privacy when I see it. I just see that line as being a fairly small circle, with the bulk of everything else outside that circle. Hence I blog my life and FaceBook with my "friends". All the world's a stage, and I am indeed an idiot strutting and fretting upon that stage.

Graduation College of Micronesia-FSM

The theme of the 52nd commencement exercises at the Palikir Pohnpei campus of the College of Micronesia-FSM was themed, "The journey to success has just begun."

The president began by noting the college had 152 graduates system-wide, with 120 here on Pohnpei. Six of those 120 were graduating with a partnership baccalaureate degree from the University of Guam, with two of those graduates being among the top five education major graduates in the UOG system.

The president also noted that eight Micronesian faculty/staff were working towards higher degrees under the college staff development plan.

Professor Susan Moses gave a final, final examination testing the students from the podium in her commencement address on the college's institutional learning outcomes. Assessment permeates the college in all that the college does.

Jasmine and Laura

Valedictorian Jasmine Mendiola thanked her family for their support throughout her years in school, and gave special thanks to friends and family alike during this past term when she lost her mother. She then noted that a special poem kept her going when she "fell" down. She then read the poem "The Race." by D. H. (Dee) Groberg,  I suppose there must have been dry eyes in the house the third time the boy fell, but I could not count myself among them.

Jennifer and Dean Anthony.

Alida and Anna Belle

Christmas Concert

All dressed up for the evening Christmas concert!

Singing on the line... long shot in a dark gym

Go tell it on the mountain in the round...

A tank built from a hand sanitizer bottle, three corks, a bottle cap, and a pen cap.

Seen on the way home from the garbage dump.

Got milk?

When I heard that there was a meeting on The Master Plan, I showed up expecting maybe a Sith Lord would explain how we would conquer the known universe. Needless to say, I was a tad disappointed when I discovered otherwise.

Support local businesses on Pohnpei

This morning all locally owned and operated store owners and employee closed their doors and marched on capitol hill to make known their disagreement with a recently passed alteration of the foreign investment laws on Pohnpei. While the particulars of the change are not entirely clear to this author, the event was a demonstration of democracy in action. A people aggrieved showed up en mass at their legislature to petition for redress. History in the making.

Taking the lead marching up main street.

Employees on the march in support of small, locally owned and operated businesses. Part of the core of Pohnpei's small island identity. A people place, a family place.

Virtually every locally owned and operated store along main street was shut door. According to one owner, this was the first time they had seen the local businesses so unified.

No business was forced to close, and some smaller operations chose to remain open.

The legislature met and was filled beyond capacity. I was informed that the vote last week was 12 to 7 in favor of the amended foreign investment act. The seven who voted against felt strongly that the new legislation endangered locally owned and operated businesses, and the business owners clearly agreed.

No CNN, no security forces. A very calm and peaceful atmosphere prevailed. There were placards and signs, and some slogans shouted, but nothing more exuberant than that. Free speech and democracy in action.

The new state capitol looms in the background of the following photo.

For my partner, this was his first time to join in a civil action, to march with like-minded and kindred spirits. He remained awake as long as he could, finally falling asleep when a cheer rose from inside the legislature.