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Leaving Y2K far behind now that Y64 is here

I would never try to rewrite a Beatles song, but last week I had a reason to slightly modify one.

You see, I had a birthday last week, so I started asking people, “Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, Now that I’m 64?”

It’s funny. When I was younger, I looked at the year 2000 as being waaaay off in the future. I mean, I would be all of 41 by the time we got there.

By then we would all be using rocket cars to get from Point A to Point B. Computers would be able to fit in the palm of your hand (OK, they basically got that one right) and you would be able to use them to call up any piece of information without question.

Turns out, using a computer to call up information doesn’t always guarantee accuracy. There is poor information online, whether accidental or deliberate, and it’s up to each of us to make sure we have a way of verifying ‘facts’ before we start spreading them to other people.

That’s probably one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed math and numbers. There’s no argument, no grey areas when it comes to calculations.

If your teacher asks you what seven times nine is, it won’t do any good to say, “Oh, low high fifties, low sixties, somewhere in there.”

No, you will be expected to say the answer is 63, and there are no two ways about it.

Anytime I see numbers, I start to look for odd or interesting things about them. Like my new age of 64. It’s the lowest number which is both a square (eight squared) and a cube (four cubed), not counting the trivial case of one.

Sixty-four also happens to be the number of squares on a chessboard or, as some people call it, a checkerboard. The strange thing is that while in chess all 64 squares on the board can be in play, in checkers, only 32 of them are.

If you want to spend a few hours (or days) working on something on a chessboard, try figuring out a way for a knight to start on any square and make legal moves so it visits every other square on the board once. It can be done, but it takes quite a while, since that means there are 63 moves to make.

Me, since I’ve turned 64, I don’t feel like doing puzzles like that which take a fair bit of time. After all, that “long-distant” year of 2000 from my youth is now 23 years in the rearview mirror – and getting further away all the time.

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