It's still finals, so I'm still working on my papers. For the first day in a while, I got to sleep in so I stayed in bed until 10:30. After breakfast, I set up camp on my bed and got some research and writing done on my sports paper. I've done just over 6 pages on it so far, but the bad news is that we found out today that it's supposed to be 10 pages, not 8 like we all thought. People aren't very happy about this, myself included. After lunch, I napped for an hour and then went to the riad. While there, I began to work on my paper about Leaving Tangier, which luckily did not have its length changed from 8 to 10 pages today, too. As of writing this post before bed, I am 4 pages into that one and 6 pages into the other. That means 10 of 18 pages down and the remaining pages all have quotes, ideas, and paragraph snippets just waiting to be expanded. This has been a very relaxed finals period so far and I'm happy with my progress. I am hoping to finish both papers tomorrow so that I can do all the proof-reading on Monday and hand them both in Monday night. Not much else happened today, but Amanda graduated from high school yesterday, so congratulations on that, sister!
To keep things interesting, I will talk about the number 64, the number of days I have been in Morocco. I will now do a stream of consciousness discourse about the number 64 and relate it back to itself. 64 is a square number, the product of 8 and itself. Broken down into prime factorization, it is 2^6, so it can represented in binary (base 2 numbering system) as the number 1,000,000. Binary code is used to represent bit strings. Bit strings are used in computers. One of the first and most popular mainstream home computers was the Commodore 64. Commodore 64 was also one of the first game consoles. Game consoles. Nintendo 64 was released by Nintendo in 1996 and one of the first gaming consoles to feature 3-D graphics. Video games. Board games. Chess. 64 is also the total number of squares on a chess board and the number of disks in the myth of the Towers of Hanoi.
A Shakespearean aside: For those who do not know what the towers of Hanoi is, it is a simple game where there are three pegs and a set of disks of descending size. All the disks must be moved from one post to another post with the conditions that no disk can be below a disk bigger than itself, that only one disk may be moved at a time, and that only the top disk can be removed from any given post. The game is pretty simple because you just have to recognize the pattern, and once you have, you can win any game in the optimal number of moves with any number of disks. The smallest number of moves for any given number of disks is 2^n - 1, where n is the number of disks. A Towers of Hanoi solver is an assignment in most lower level computer science classes. In the myth, there are 64 golden disks that Brahmin monks in India must move. However, they are wasting their lives doing this because it will take them 2^64 - 1 moves to do so, which is over 18 quintillion moves. The moral of the story is that if faced with the choice of becoming a Brahmin monk, you should run the other way because you do not have 585 billion years to spare.
To bring us back to 64-ology though and using India as a segway, there are 64 positions listed in the Kama Sutra. Sex leads to children. Children play with crayons, and there are 64 crayons in the Crayola 64 pack. As a child, I played with crayons in the 90's. The 90's. 90's rap. Old rappers always rap about their low-riding 64 Chevy Impalas. Rappers. Musicians. Rock music. The Beatles have a song called "When I'm Sixty-Four." The Beatles are a four man group. 4 squared is 16, but if you cube it, it's 64. And thus we find ourselves back where we started at the not-so-simple number of 64. Hopefully, you learned something or another on this journey.
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