10898603

If I was a supersticious man I would say something about this being the 13th entry in this blog, and therefore today's number no doubt heralds great woe and misfortune.

A quick search for this number online gets a load of references to some scientific journal about nitric oxide, a chemical I know nothing about, but is most probably both necessary for my survival and deadly poisonous at the same time. Not to be confused with nitrous oxide, also known as 'laughing gas'.

Not sure what my calculator is trying to tell me here, I think its just revelling in randomness after recent recurring nightmares of nines. As truly meaningless as a number could be, or so it seems. I sometimes wonder if all these numbers are just pieces in a larger puzzle, that they all slot together to form some monumental truth. Or perhaps it is part of creative endeavour on my calculator's part.

Perhaps my calculator is studying me, and these numbers represent a daily blog if its own, documenting my unfathomable existance in the only terms it is familiar with.

Am I a man dreaming of being a calculator, or a calculator dreaming of being a man...?

-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.