Day 123 - That poor horse

My last EPIC post attracted some EPIC comments, so without further ado, let's get to it.

Haniff:

Thanks for your interesting comment! I don't think we've ever met, but I appreciate your readership. It warms the cockles of my heart to know that an actual internet person reads my blog.

About the primes thing - you're absolutely right, and it is by no means intended as any sort of convincing argument or proof, more as heuristic ramblings on why primes might crop up (though they do so disguised as the zeta function). I thought it was interesting about the taxis, etc - obviously, in this case, my rough remarks wouldn't apply to the taxis themselves, but perhaps to some factor determining their distribution (i.e. the preference of the drivers, or something). The 'objects' I spoke about can be anything, or any property, with some suitable 'force' and 'group' relation defined appropriately.
Or, if you think I'm chatting baloney, chuck it out with the rest of the processed meats. They contain unhealthy amounts of salt, you know.

Dimension thing - thanks for mentioning Charles Hinton. I've never heard of him, and after a brief dose of Wikipedia, I need to read his books. Again, my ramblings were primarily heuristic (goshdarnit, I love that word). My point was really that we can't exactly visualise a 4D cube, but we can quite easily imagine such a thing, taking into account non-visual factors.
Although, since I'm finding it hard to picture infinitely many coloured cubes, I need to modify that 'quite easily'. I'll get back to you after I read some Charles Hinton.

String theory sounds crazy, and I know almost nothing about it. I shy away from physics and applied mathematics, mostly because it scares me, and I can't do it. Apparently it's no longer the hot new theory among theoretical physicists, however. I can't remember what is.

I agree that mathematics can't answer everything, nor should it want to. Any discipline thinking it can answer everything is just asking for trouble. That's why, in mathematics, they generally pick a smaller problem they think they can solve. Then a smaller one, that they actually can solve. And so on.

Pointing to a creator...I'm not so sure, at least not how the mysteries of mathematics come into it. Then you have to go into the metaphysics of mathematics, and what kind of status the propositions really have, and so on. One big medieval mess, as Merlin would say.

Can of infinite worms in infinite universes? Great metaphor, if a bit demanding on the clean up afterwards. Yeah, I agree we'll never fully understand them. Some famous mathematician said something similar, but much better than I could.

Julia:

You missed out, but I still love you.

Harry:

Sadly, I have met you in real life, and was already aware that you read my blog, so the thrill of seeing your comment was dampened slightly. Next time, please adopt some cunning pseudonym, so that my life can abound with artificial mysteries once more.

Yes, I am a genius.

Thanks for the interesting occurrences of primes. I'd heard about the cicada thing before, and in that case, the primality is pretty important since, as you said, it reduces the risk of coinciding with predator cycles. I think other animals with similar sorts of cycles also tend to it in prime numbers...some sort of Australian frog, if I recall.
Discrete phenomena wise, primes themselves probably don't occur much more often, except in odd cases like that one, where primality is important. They do, however, occur surprisingly often in quantum physics (at least, in their zeta function disguise) - at least, so I have been led to believe, and why would they try to mislead me?
Primes in biology, I share your scepticism, but I would also love to be proved wrong. If everything ran on primes, my gut feeling tells me things would work out better. This bears further research, when I am less tired.

The dimension thing - I wasn't really thinking about physics use of higher dimensions at the time, pretty much just higher dimensional polyhedra. It might let me down when it comes to paths, etc - and certainly, intuition there is a lot harder than intuition in three dimensions, but I still suspect it to be achievable.
Even if there is space of four dimensions, or however many you feel like, it's not the space that we perceive visually, and hence we can't hope to visualise it...visually. Our intuition/imagination techniques, are more powerful than simple visual visualisation, so we're not so restricted as this would suggest.

Your question put to Mr Haniff, I am also interested in, and I eagerly await his comment reply.

Yes, I do see primes in my cereal. They scare the living bejeesus out of me.