20th
Looney Tunes, Prime Numbers, and Sleeplessness
There’s usually 2 or 3 nights a month when I’ll wake up at like 3:00 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep.
It sucks.
I’m used to it. I don’t sleep well anyway. I mean, every night I pop awake around a half a dozen times, usually to see what time it is or to locate where I’m at, then back to sleep right away. But those random nights when I can’t get back to sleep are pretty tough on me.
You ever watch Looney Tunes when you were a kid? I got a DVD boxset of them for Christmas a couple years ago. Popped a disc in and sat there with my brother Adam watching them.
Pretty scary to discover how much and how many of the scripts to those cartoons seemed to be hardwired to our brains. We were predicting (with stunning accuracy) quotes of cartoons we hadn’t seen in 20-25 years.
And pretty messed up watching them as an adult—they of course are vividly violent and full of racial profiling (the British were caricatured as overly effeminate; Italians were typically portrayed as shady criminals and/or in the mafia; Germans were warmongers; and then Asians, African Americans, and Native Americans got the worst of the “vintage” racist caricatures—and even in some cases were referred to by names and with words we’d never use or hear today).
Makes me wonder what sort of deviant cultural conditioning and social trauma was I exposed to as a kid.
Anyway, one of the things I remember about those cartoons is the images of people counting sheep to try and fall asleep. That never works for me. I’ve found something else that I’m trying.
I recently finished reading jPod by Douglas Coupland. I love that guy’s novels. He somehow finds a way to weave some of the most fascinating trivia into the storyline. One such bit of treasured literary slight-of-hand was tangentially mentioning that all even numbers can be made by adding two prime numbers (I seriously love prime numbers, they’re my favorite).
I found myself trying to prove that theory wrong on the first unintended all-nighter I suffered after reading that. For me, it was like the reverse of counting sheep. Hoping to fall asleep by doing simple addition in the quiet of my mind just kept me up.
The next day I hit an old friend up on facebook to verify whether or not this was true. Got word from my buddy Jeremy Strayer, math professor at Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, that yep, it’s true.
Dr. Stray-Dog wrote, “this is the famous Goldbach Conjecture. It’s probably true, but no one can prove it (yet). People have used computers to verify that it’s true for all even numbers less than 400,000,000,000,000,000.”
What in the friggi’n world? I don’t even know how to say 400,000,000,000,000,000—is it “four hundred bajillion-gazillion?”
Anyway, at the rate I’m testing this, I’m guessing it will only take me 17 more years of 2-3 sleepless nights a month to prove it.
Hope I get the prize. I just hope the prize isn’t another Looney Tunes boxset.
