-98,899,977

If I was a maths teacher or Carol Vorderman, I might be able to tell you some interesting facts about these numbers, how they might be the square root of pi, or the cosine of a triangle the size of the Eiffel Tower.

But I am not a maths teacher, or Carol Vorderman. I can't even remember what a cosine is - the only time I have ever needed to was for doing maths homework at school.

I used to be quite good at maths when I was a kid. I didn't enjoy it, but I was good at it. I even did my maths GCSE a year early and got an A grade. Naive youth that I was, I figured this meant I could now have a well deserved year off from the chore of maths lessons. But no, my prize was in fact to have a whole extra year of even harder maths lessons.

Its no wonder I gave up on it, along with the majority of my fellow classmates. The truth of this finally dawned on our maths teacher the day he discovered that the entire class had copied their homework off of one kid with glasses. He found this out because that kid had got it wrong, and he went round the whole classroom following a chain of confessions as he asked each child who he had copied from.

I sometimes wonder what that teacher was thinking at the time, discovering that his brightest students, the top of the whole school who had taken their exam a year early, actually hated his subject to such an extent that they instigated a homework mutiny. He was so stunned that he didn't even punish us.

Needless to say I didn't do so well on my subsequent higher maths exam, and didn't bother following it any further. I've always been fascinated by numbers and the thruths they unlock about the world around us, but its definitely a spectator sport for me.

I think I will leave it to Carol Vorderman to uncover the secrets of the universe.

00 00000

I think my calculator really has lost the plot now - this doesn't even resemble a number, unless you are using an abacus of course. Perhaps that is the answer, it has regressed into an earlier stage in its evolution...

My brother suggested that aliens might be trying to communicate with me through my calculator. Ridiculous though the idea sounds, the fact is that if aliens were to attempt communication with us, they would most probably do so using numbers.

The pure logic of numbers and the language of mathematics is something that should be familiar and universal for any intelligent life-form, if we judge intelligence by our own technological standard. And in a basic way all language is mathematical, in that it simulates reality in order to transfer information from one mind to another. We use words to recode objects into symbols, these are strung into grammatical formulas and are then decoded by other people.

For example the phrase "I need a cup of tea" could be expressed in mathematical terms thus:
me + tea = good
me - tea = bad
therefore:
tea = good

Of course it doesn't explain what good and bad means, you might need a separate formula to explain that. But it illustrates how this world can be divided into mathematics, even when described using speech, and earth scientists have been broadcasting mathematical messages to the stars in the hope that they will be recieved and made sense of.

So, have aliens travelled the vast distance through interstellar space to creep into my room at night and type weird gibberish on my calculator? I seriously doubt that somehow, but then I couldnt easily explain to an alien why I would pour hot water on a bag of leaves, add some juice squeezed from a cow and pour it into a hole in my face.

Intelligence moves in mysterious ways...

ERROR

After yesterday's brush with infinity it seems appropriate to start this morning off with a zero. This would be a state of normality for most calculators, poised in readiness for mathematical action. But the Error symbol implies forethought on my calculator's part, some previous computation that did not compute.

There is nothing in its memory to suggest what might have confused it so, only the blank stare of the zero. Zero itself is an interesting concept, almost purely hypothetical in nature - in reality something either exists or it doesn't.

To say there is zero amount of something, say elephants in my pocket for example, is not simply a measure of an object's quantity, but of its position in space and time. Those elephants won't magically appear out of thin air, so they must be out there somewhere. Just not in my pocket at this particular moment in time. If the elephants weren't out there ready to invade my trousers then the question of how many are (or are not) in my pockets is meaningless.

Since nothing ever miraculously appears from nothingness it follows that there is no such thing as zero - if something isn't here then it will be somewhere else. If it isn't anywhere else then it doesn't exist and you can't assign a quantity to something that is non-existant, surely...

I can see now how such contemplation can only end in confusion. I'll just have to assume these were the shapes of my calculator's thoughts last night - I'm getting my own error-messages just thinking about it.

99999999

Ok, here it is - the biggest number it is possible to fit on an eight digit screen. My calculator has travelled to the very edge of its flat world and looked down into the depths of oblivion. This is the mental barrier it can never cross, bigger numbers just don't exist.

Should it ever stray into the madness beyond its screen it reserves the space below the 'M' for an 'E' for Error symbol, and many mornings I see both of these on its display.

Today's number is something of a favourite of my calculator, or perhaps a recurring nightmare - I've seen it quite a few times over the years. I have to admit I've had dreams myself that have been so mentally unsettling that I have woken with my own error message: usually a strangled shout that is supposed to scare away whatever monsters are plaguing me but comes out as a nightmarish zombie groan.

The human brain has its boundaries of imagination, more typically involving traumatic experiences, but I wonder if there are other limits to our mental perception, worlds we are not capable of contemplating. Multi-dimensional space and that kind of weirdness. Numbers that are too high for us to count to.

Some of us push pretty hard into the mathematical darkness that shapes everything we see and everything we can't, but for the majority of people that wall is a lot closer than quantum mechanics - even working out the most basic sums has me reaching for my calculator. In that respect its laughing at me, from its eight digit universe.

19,999,800

A brief web-search for my calculator's latest dream, along with the usual cascade of gibberish numbers that populate cyberspace, brought me this quote from some Independent article in relation to British Telecom's answering service:
"Along with 19,999,800 other disappointed people, I soon tasted the bitterness of failure and frustration..."
I can sympathise.

My search also threw up an interesting coincidence: 19999800 happens to be the OCLC (online computer library center) number for a book called "Dream Chasers". No idea what its about, but the title is strangely apt, given the subject of this blog.

I suspect a lot of this blog will be built upon coincidence, mainly because the numbers themselves tend to hold very little meaning on their own. The internet serves as a primordial soup of information from which connections may readily form.

My calculator, on the other hand, is connected to nothing in this world, apart from my own fingers - and even those it declines the use of for its nightly adventures. I can't even imagine a scenario where I would require all eight digits of its display for any of my calculations. The world I deal with rarely travels further than a few figures either side of the decimal point.

Nineteen million nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand eight hundred? The stuff of dreams...

99998989

After a couple of days holiday from dreamland, my calculator returned with this big fat figure. No punctuation, just a stream of high digits - only a thousand-odd short of the largest number it is capable of expressing. So much to say, so little screen...

So where has it been these last two days? Probably like me, it sometimes has to wait for the inspiration to strike. I can hardly ever remember any of my dreams, although I recall diving underwater last night to catch a sinking ship and drag it to the surface - I remember thinking at the time that this was pretty far-fetched, but hey.

Unlike life, you rarely chose your journey when you sleep. This may be our brain's way of testing our ability to cope with unpredictable situations, although its more likely just random nonsense that spills out of our memory, and our mind fills in the gaps by weaving a story around it.

Scientists would like to think that dreaming serves some kind of purpose, that we give ourselves virtual scenarios to battle with, so that we might be better at coping with real life threats. People love to assign purpose to the unexplainable - its a human instinct. Every consequence has a cause, every event is a part of a story. We percieve the world as a sequence of events - our brains organise this into stories with beginnings, middles and ends, to make sense of the unfamiliar world we are thrust into at birth. In a way we are anthropomorphising the universe: its not just a collection of stars and dust - it has a life story, which science is currently spending the most part of its budget attempting to recount. Like us, it was born, is getting on with its life, and will eventually die in some way or another.

Religions are born out of our need to explain our origins. There will probably be an evolutionary reason for this trait, but the fact remains that we are designed to read meanings and purpose into everything around us, and this extends to the dream world. So are we rehearsing threatening situations when we sleep, or are our brains just dredging up random rubbish and tying it together with surreal storylines?

If anything I would say dreams are our way of exercising our ability to convert random information into meaningful reality. Either that or they are a by-product of some other process in the organisation of our memories, a web woven from the firing of dormant synapses.

Or in the case of my calculator, the play of dust dancing over its sleeping microchips.

0.0000006

The sixth day of documenting the thoughts of my calculator, and number number six is itself a six, preceded by six zeros. And another zero. Ok so thats seven zeros really, but there is a decimal point after the first one.

I was twisting the facts to fit a pattern there, something that numbers inspire in all of us. Our brains seem pre-programmed to read meaning into randomness, and thats probably a subject I will come back to another time. Or several other times if I start running out of things to say in this blog, which is quite likely I guess - numbers may be infinite but my attention span certainly isn't.

Talking of infinite numbers, thats a pretty small one on my calculator screen this morning. I used to imagine that you could keep adding zeros behind the decimal point into eternity, continually zooming into the microscopic like some kind of fractal, but as I understand it there may be limits to how low you can go. In reality I mean - on paper you could keep writing zeros until the universe fades away, but in the real world we seem to have reached a brick wall in terms of how small you can divide things.

In the laboratory that limit would be defined by the size of the stuff that atoms are made of. A helium atom is about 10^-10 metres wide, and one of the quarks that make up the atom would be a hundred millionth of that size. I can't be bothered to type all the zeros of that number, but it is definitely a lot smaller than my calculator's dream last night.

So what would 0.0000006 represent in terms of size? A quick search on the internet reveals that the wavelength of visible light is about 0.0000006 metres. And funnily enough visible light is exactly what my solar-powered calculator eats to survive, so there you have it - dreaming about food. Poor thing was just feeling hungry.

-9.9879997

Another day, another number spewed from my malfunctioning calculator's subconscious. Negative again today - I think maybe it just likes exercising that little minus symbol on its display, in the same way our dreams sometimes seem to be experiments in stretching our experience beyond the normal. I only ever use my calculator to work out how much to charge people for work, so the day I end up with a negative figure will be a sad one.

Continuing from my ramblings yesterday about negative numbers, I remembered a current theory that the big bang at the birth of the universe supposedly created an equal amount of matter and antimatter, and that both sides immediately cancelled each other out. The mystery remains then, as to why we were left with a load of matter afterwards.

Scientists are still trying to work that one out. Funny how that particular gap in our knowledge doesn't seem to get much media attention, I mean the fact that science has proved we shouldn't exist - I'd have thought that would be one to sort out in a hurry...

But that fact that we do exist means we don't have to worry about it for now, much in the same way that we don't have to worry about the oil running out, because its still there at the moment. I expect that the great credit-card company in the sky will return one day to charge us for all that matter we borrowed at the start of the universe, hopefully thats a debt we can pass on to our descendents.

-166,665.8

Unusual number today: minus one hundred and sixty six thousand six hundred and sixty five point eight, an adventure deep into negative territory.

The concept of minus numbers in mathematics has been around since 100BC according to wikipedia, but I'd be willing to bet the idea of owning negative possessions goes back to the dawn of civilisation. When people first began living their lives in terms longer than day to day subsistance, people would no doubt find themselves borrowing against crops that would not be harvested for months to come. And this is pretty much the main reason negative numbers exist - to account for how much debt we are all in.

Much as we all hate debt, its a fine illustration of one of the most important developments in human cognitive evolution: the ablity to build future versions of reality inside our heads and borrow money from them.

So, do negative numbers not exist beyond human mental constructs and the ramblings of senile calculators? The only natural negatives I can think of (that don't arise from our own habit of sticking zero in the wrong place) occur in the relative charges of particals: matter and anti-matter. Every positive partical has its negative or anti-matter equivalent. There's no difference between them, you could have whole galaxies, planets and people happily living on them, all made out of anti-matter. But should you ever bump into your anti-matter twin, for god's sake don't bump into them - the explosion resulting from me colliding with anti-Cyriak would be the equivalent of a 1,680 megaton thermonuclear bomb.

90,000,000

Checking the memory of my calculator this morning revealed last night's dream: ninety million - a nice round number, complete with the commas in the right places (which it doesn't always bother with).

So what can we say about this number? There are nintey million people in Vietnam, says google... I seriously doubt that the population is that precise - you can't be with a number that will be constantly changing.

Its interesting that the majority of search results for such a high figure involve either a number of people or a quantity of money.

"Ninety million people survive on less than $75 a year"
"Ninety million Americans battle chronic illness every day."
"Ninety million dollar investment in Ethiopian tea."
"Ninety Million Brazilians Can't Be Wrong"

The world of human interest it seems is goverened by its resources, the most abundant being people, and (consequently) the most scarce being money. Scarce in the sense that there is never enough of it, despite the many millions of dollars flying here and there funding Hollywood films and Ethiopian beverages.

The recognised religion of those nintey million people in Vietnam is Confucianism, so what did Confucius have to say on the subject of money?

"Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven."

Are these the matters that my calculator is ruminating upon in its sleep? Probably not - like any other brain it is drawn magnetically to the big round numbers...

0.0004

At some point in the history of my calculator's evolution it developed a primitive memory, thus the blue buttons at the top were formed:

M+ adds to the memory
M- subtracts from the memory
RM displays whats in the memory
CM clears the memory

This morning I was greeted with the familiar little "M" which signifies a dream stored in its memory - today's number is amusingly precise: 0.0004

So what could this possibly mean, what issue has been playing on my calculators mind? There are websites for interpreting dreams, but they tend to deal mainly with whole numbers, not specific decimals. According to one site:

"Four denotes stability, physical limitations, hard labor and earthly things, as in the four corners of the earth. It also stands for materialistic matters. You get things done."

So I'm guessing my calculator feels that its only getting a fraction of the things done that it is capable of - well thats probably true for all of us, especially my calculator which I hardly ever use. In fact its probably through sheer bordom that it decided to start communicating with me in the first place.

Sorry old chap...


As an interesting by-note, rotating the screen gives us this:

..howling at the moon perhaps?

The dreaming calculator

If the human brain is like a large, complex calculator, so then a calculator is much like a very simple brain. The major difference between the two, other than scale, is that the human brain remains active when not in use, defragging its memories or whatever it does while we dream. The calculator is traditionally switched off to save the batteries.

This is my calculator. It has been switched on now since the mid eighties - in effect it has been conscious for more than 20 years. It is one of the early solar-panel powered calculators, it comes in a wallet which you are meant to close when not in use, denying it sunlight and supposedly preserving its sanity. However, I have left it on all this time, its only respite being the darkness of night.

Then one morning I happened to notice a strange string of numbers across its screen that I didn't remember typing. There were 3 possiblities:
1. I was sleep-calculating
2. Someone was breaking in to my flat to do their maths homework
3. My calcualtor had been dreaming

Each morning after that my calculator would greet me with a seemingly random numerical message. Occasionally there would be an additional dream-fragment stored in its memory. The numbers never appear to have any meaning, so I have largely ignored it until now. But this morning I was met with what appeared to be a pair of blank staring eyes on its screen, and I took this as a sign that I should start documenting the dreams of my calculator.

Here then is a record of these dreams, if I can be bothered to update this blog...