<<The possibility of LGM is "sexy" in a pop-culture kind of way. Prime numbers are only "sexy" to a handful of people.>> Nerds vs. pop culture? Simple. Bill Gates is, oh, about a kazillion times wealthier than Michael Jordan. Yet few people have posters of Bill Gates hung up in their rooms. Speaking of kazillions.... <<Perhaps if I'm feeling up to it, I'll find which book I read this example in. It probably doesn't bear mentioning that I read this stuff in a book on the odds of abiogenesis occurring. :) So just ignore that aspect. Probably in Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" or Sproul's "Not a Chance">> Yeah, the psuedomathematical kooks like to bring up huge numbers based on crud arguments. By the way, a common estimate for the number of elementary particles in the universe is 2^83. I remember noting this in my Extended Essay: "If the modulo M[N] operation is not performed at every cycle of computing S[K], the estimated number of elementary particles in the observable universe soon becomes insufficient to store the value of S (http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/faq-mers)." Had it been a less serious paper, I would have thrown in my usual reference to The Hard Drive of the Gods, the one that uses every elementary particle in the universe to store a byte. By the way, my Extended Essay titled "Mersenne Primes: Development through History, Ongoing Work, and a New Conjecture" is still at http://homepages.go.com/~joekorovin/Mersenne.html (or Mersenne.zip for the .DOC file - capitalization is important!) Stephan T. Lavavej _________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
