Just read a puzzling fact in Le Monde science leaflet: someone at the “Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search” (GIMPS) just found a prime number with 17 million digits and…it is the 48th prime number of the form 2p-1. Which just means it is an odd number. How odd a remark!!! And how wrong. In fact, the short news item meant that this is a Mersenne number, of the form 2p-1! Another victim of a hasty cut&paste, I presume…
Archive for cut and paste
odd prime numbers
Posted in Books with tags cut and paste, Le Monde, Mersenne numbers, prime numbers, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search on February 9, 2013 by xi'anR-ecap [-16]
Posted in Books, R, University life with tags Acrobat, cut and paste, Og, pdf, R, R-bloggers, typos, UTF-8 on March 27, 2011 by xi'an
This morning, I noticed that none of my R related posts had appeared on R-bloggers for the past fortnight… After investigating, this was caused by…cut-and-paste! Indeed, when advertising about the special issue of TOMACS Arnaud Doucet and I edit about Monte Carlo methods in Statistics, I copied the main parts from the pdf announcement, straight out of Acrobat, and the word “field” was used, involving a ligature between the f and the i that did not get copied in proper UTF-8:
error on line 434 at column 330: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0x0C 0×65 0x6C 0×64
So here are the entries in the ‘Og for the past 16 days that could have been of interest for R-bloggers readers:
