Day 779, Week 111 (W minus 0)

What does day 779 mean to me?

It means a number of things, some of them about the number, some about the reasons for doing this.

Let's start with the number.  Apparently 779 is a highly cototient number, that is a number which has more solutions to the below equation than any preceding highly cototient number except 1.*

x - phi(x) = k

That is for where phi is Euler's totient function and where k is our number or any of the other highly cototient numbers lower than our number.

Other things of interest about the number 779 is that it is divisible only by itself, by 1, and by the two prime numbers 19 and 41.**  This collection of numbers could be used to illustrate the basics of RSA public key encryption, which is essentially the process of creating a public key from two primes and another number relatively prime to our original numbers.

Moving on from the number.

What has been daily, and continuous, for 779 days will become weekly and continuous.  That doesn't rule out additional days in between where some silliness occurs to me.  This blog started as an exercise in a number of things, amongst others it was about whether I could maintain motivation to do a task regularly, it was about generating ideas, about being able to discard ideas without becoming precious about them, and about extinguishing concerns about how my writing might be judged.  The process has been pretty effective at helping achieve those aims, but it has also become a restriction in that ideas can't be developed further due to a desire to hit the deadline (however arbitrary or self-imposed).

The potential downside to this is that the general silliness might be lost if I start thinking in terms of producing more considered content, so I'll try and keep it light even when being a pompous arse.***†

Here is a Photoshopped image of a PDF document with some text about encryption, perhaps there has been a hidden message in these blogs.****

* More information here.
** You may not necessarily find it as interesting.
*** The intention was to be generally silly, if that hasn't come across then...

† Being a pompous arse can be an asset when working in IT, not so much elsewhere...
**** There has.

For official/internal use only:
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