• Location: Nuevo Rancho Lake
• Mood: amused
• Music: the_child muttering as she builds a cardboard robot

[personal] The magic of numbers

Taxes are done but not filed. I had to send in an extension instead. Utterly by accident I discovered the SSN on my form 1098, Mortgage Interest Reporting, was incorrect. It's mine, but with a typo. Which means the IRS will not recognize that as my deduction, and my return will not match their own recordkeeping. Fixing this involves getting a new social security card (my old one has been gone for years) because the lender will not fix their own typo without substantial documentation from me. And I can't get a corrected 1098 from them to the IRS until all is fixed. And so it goes. Moral of the story: actually read every box of those darned things.

In other news, I think I boggled lasirenadolce yesterday. We were talking about numbers, and I commented how some numbers felt 'right' to me, and others felt 'wrong.' I tend to favor even numbers, and most primes make me slightly uncomfortable. Numbers with a high number of divisors are more pleasing to me, so 12 is nice than 14.

On me elucidating this information, she looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

It then occurred to me that the difference between squares increments successively by 2. I'd never noticed this before, and became briefly fascinated with the idea. To wit:

12 = 1		1
22 = 4	4 - 1 =	3
32 = 9	9 - 4 =	5
42 = 16	16 - 9 =	7
52 = 25	25 - 16 =	9
62 = 36	36 - 25 =	11

I'm sure this is an utterly well known mathematical concept familiar to all, but it had never been drawn to my attention. I thought it was cool.

Score is now lasirenadolce, 2; my mind, 0.