I totally want to call this number
The number is 214-748-3647, and as it turns out it's somewhere in Texas. What's so special about that number? Well, it's got a little story.
As many of you know, me and my fellow student programmers here at Marist are working on some e-commerce type thing. As one would expect, there are stores in the database for this project, and those stores have phone numbers. Inexplicably, all the phone numbers are the aforementioned number. We figured it was an import error from the original "database" we were given, which was an Excel spreadsheet. Turns out we were wrong.
I finally forced Matt to put in the Edit Store page we've been talking about doing for so long now, and he went to test it but encountered some weird issues. The three of us started testing, and it came down to the fact that if you tried to change the last digit of the phone number from a 7 to an 8 it would not change (or error out), but if you changed it to a 5 the change would stick. Confusion abounded.
We figured it out though, when I realized that it's a 32-bit integer. Turns out that our strange phone number is exactly 2^31 - 1. Mystery solved.
As many of you know, me and my fellow student programmers here at Marist are working on some e-commerce type thing. As one would expect, there are stores in the database for this project, and those stores have phone numbers. Inexplicably, all the phone numbers are the aforementioned number. We figured it was an import error from the original "database" we were given, which was an Excel spreadsheet. Turns out we were wrong.
I finally forced Matt to put in the Edit Store page we've been talking about doing for so long now, and he went to test it but encountered some weird issues. The three of us started testing, and it came down to the fact that if you tried to change the last digit of the phone number from a 7 to an 8 it would not change (or error out), but if you changed it to a 5 the change would stick. Confusion abounded.
We figured it out though, when I realized that it's a 32-bit integer. Turns out that our strange phone number is exactly 2^31 - 1. Mystery solved.
posted by SomeJerk at 3:25 PM
7 Comments:
sweeeeet
Porkchop googled the phone number. Looks like a lot of people have the same problem but don't even realize it.
Same thing happen to me and googled the number
It's also prime.
Weird, this post is over a year old and it still gets the occasional comment.
That's sweet though, that it's prime. I'd never thought to check.
For a long time (well, until 1536 anyway), mathematicians thought that numbers of the form (2^p-1) were prime whenever p was prime. That turns out to be true for for many small values of p: 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31. (But not when p=11). The mathematics gets interesting...
Yea, stuff with prime numbers always gets interesting. Primes also seem to be the area in math that has the most things that look like they're going to work but then it all falls apart.
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