Thursday, February 04, 2016
It's Power Day!
The newer city buses have a useful internal reader board that holds date and time, next stop, next connection. Though the system is modern, the display panel itself is old-fashioned. 5 x 8 LED dots, just like the earliest calculator displays. This forces the characters and icons to be unusually simple, in forms that are familiar to the PacMan generation but absurdly strange to the iPhone generation.
Simplicity can open the imagination, in the same way that radio opens your visual system while TV closes it.
This morning the date showed 2/4/16 in a squared-off way. Normally this wouldn't suggest anything besides the date, but the squaredness made me see 2^4=16 momentarily.
Hey! Today is a POWER DAY. This month to the today'th power is this year.
How many such combinations exist, leaving aside the trivial 1 combos? Not many, and most are in Feb. After the base OR the exponent gets over 2, the available combos are mighty sparse.
2/2/04, 2/3/09, 2/4/16, 2/5/32, 2/6/64.
3/2/09, 3/3/27, 3/4/81.
4/2/16, 4/3/64.
5/2/25.
6/2/36.
7/2/49.
8/2/64.
9/2/81.
And that's all, I think.
Celebrate POWER DAY while you can!
¶ 9:14 AM 
