This is a list of my runs with distances 10,000 m (6.214 miles) or greater.  Currently, there are 24 entries in the main table, 18 of which are outdoor runs and the other 6 were conducted on treadmills.  Additionally, there are 2 probable entries whose distances have not been measured using Google Earth or a GPS device yet.  These probable entries would be moved to the main table once they are proven to be at least 10,000 m long.  The grey-colored zeroes at the end of the distances are non-significant digits.  For example, 10,200 m has 3 siginficant digits.

Main table

Probable entries

Bruegger's bakery has been selling Bottomless Mug Club memberships each year since 2004. By paying an one-time Bottomless Mug Club membership fee, one can receive free coffee, hot chocolate, tea, or soda until the end of the membership year. In 2010, I joined Bottomless Mug Club for the first time. In order to keep track of my membership usage status and my beverage drinking habits, I constructed a summary table for my membership usage as shown below.

Summary table

Notes:

1. For the convenience of calculation, the prices in the following table does not include state tax.
2. Additional benefits of Bottomless Mug Club such as special discounts for certain types of bagels are not included in the "accumulative money saved" column of the table.
3. All volumes are rounded to the nearest 0.1 liters, therefore the sums of individual volumes might not match the row or column totals.
4. One liter is approximately 0.2642 gallons.

How I decided to join Bottomless Mug Club

Bruegger's started selling the 2010 Bottomless Mug Club membership on October 28, 2009. At Stadium Village store, the membership fee was $129.00 plus tax. Originally, I hesitated about whether to join the club, as I was not sure whether I would drink coffee sufficiently often to profit from the membership. Nevertheless, after my first visits to Bruegger's on January 23 and 24, 2010, I felt that the bagels and coffee there taste good to me. Furthermore, its location is on my way from my apartment to Ford Hall (the location of Statistics Department, University of Minnesota,) which is convenient to me. Thus I decided to become a member on January 25, 2010, just days prior to the deadline of purchasing the membership, which was January 31.

The remainder of January 2010

During the first week of my membership (January 25—31), I tried several kinds of beverages, including 4 cups of coffee, 5 cups of hot chocolate, and a cup of tea. My favorite drink was hot chocolate so that I drank it much more often than any type of coffee or tea over there. Sometimes, I visited Bruegger's for a cup of beverage on my way to classes, and visited Bruegger's again for another beverage on my way back to my apatment after classes.

February 2010

During the first two weeks of February, I continued to enjoy a lot of hot chocolate every day. On February 6, I tried to mix chocolate with coffee at Bruegger's for the first time. The mixture of hot chocolate and coffee tasted good, too. In the second half of February, I started to reduce the amount of hot chocolate intake for dieting purpose. Instead, I drank coffee with low-fat milk more often. In February, I almost completed the milestone of visiting Bruegger's every day in a month. Unfortunately, on February 27 I slept through the afternoon and therefore did not have a chance to visit Bruegger's that day. Although February 2010 only has 28 days, I drank as much as 22.2 liters of beverage during that month, which is almost 0.8 liters per day in average.

March 2010

On March 7, the accumulative value of the beverages I consumed reached $129.36, exceeding the cost of the annual membership fee $129.00, which means that I made the correct choice of becoming a Bottomless Mug Club member. On March 17, the accumulative number of cups of coffee I have consumed, 40, surpassed the number of cups of hot chocolate I have consumed, 39. On March 24, I drank my 100th cup of beverage since joining Bottomless Mug Club. And on Marach 28, I received an expresso drink for free — which is not normally possible as a Bottomless Mug Club member — as the store ran out of brew coffee. In March, I finally completed the milestone that I did not achieve in February — visiting Bruegger's a month in a row.

April 2010

In April, I drank coffee more often than previous months as my workload became more intensive. It was typical for me to drink more than one cup of coffee a day. On April 12 I almost lost my membership card during my wallet loss incident. Luckily, my wallet was found by Metro Transit and returned to me. As of April 16, the accumulative volume of beverages I have consumed reached 58 liters. If the density of 1 g/cm³ is assumed, then the beverages I have consumed would weigh 58 kilograms in total, which is greater than my weight on that day. On April 19, Bruegger's started offering iced coffee for the first time this year. On that day, I consumed my first cup of Bruegger's iced coffee, which happens to be my 150th cup of Bruegger's beverage. By the end of April, I realized that I drank 16.9 liters of coffee in the entire month or about 563 mL per day. Maybe I should cut down my coffee consumption and try to drink some more tea instead.

May 2010

After consuming too much caffeine in April, I decided to cut down my caffeine intake by switching to House Decaf (with no caffeine) and tea instead of regular coffee more often. During the first few days of May, most beverages I drank at Bruegger's are either House Decaf or tea. However, as my final exam on May 15 and Ph.D. qualifying exam on June 1 were approaching, my demand of caffeine increased again. The total amount of coffee I consumed during May 2010 was 15.9 liters, which is 1 liter less than that of the previous month. Despite being half a cup less, my hot cocoa consumption in terms of volume in May 2010 was the same as that in April 2010, that is because sometimes I chose medium cups instead of small cups. As of tea, I drank 11 cups this month, exceeding my previous high of 8 cups (February 2010.)

June 2010

In the morning of June 1, I brought a medium cup of coffee to the morning session qualifying exam. For the afternoon session, I purchased a cup of coffee from a deli near the location of the exam, as I did not have time to return to Bruegger's to pick up another drink. That cup of coffee was not included in the summary table above.

The spring of 2010 was my 6th pollen season experienced in North America and my 1st one in Minnesota.  My first allergic symptoms occurred in late February just after the snow stopped and reached the peak around mid-April.

February 28, 2010 cold

The snow in Minneapolis, Minnesota stopped unusually early in late February, and the weather became warm pretty soon. When I woke up around noon on February 28, I felt throat pain; later that day, I started to have sputum. It seemed that I caught my first cold of the year. Luckily, I received much rest in the afternoons of March 1 and 2 as I only had classes in the mornings. My peak temperature was 36.9 degrees Celsius (98.3 degrees Fahrenheit) which occurred in the early afternoon of March 2. I fell down on a piece of remaining ice in the evening of March 2 on my way back to my apartment, obviously unrelated to my cold. On March 3—5, I wore a surgery mask to classes to prevent infections to others. As of the evening of March 5, I had recovered and was playing badminton with my friends.

Sneezing and eye itchy in late March–early May 2010

Since late March, I have sneezed more often than usual. And in the meanwhile, I sometimes feel eye itchy. These phenomena are most obvious when I am inside buildings with carpets. My most frequent sneezing so far this spring occurred on the early morning hours of April 15. From 1 am to 5 am, I sneezed about 43 times, which is more than 10 times per hour. The pollen index had exceeded 10.0 (out of 12.0) for the following few days. And I nosebled quite a few times between early April and early May.

Dizziness on May 23–24, 2010

The weather in May has been changing so fast. On the evening of May 7, it was so cold and wet that trace amount of snowfall occurred. But on May 23 and 24, the high temperatures broke the records for those two days, respectively, especially on May 24, the high temperatures was 34 degrees Celsius (93 or 94 degrees Fahrenheit.) On the late evening of May 23, I felt dizzy just after I started eating dinner, so I turned on air conditioner and went to bed. Similar symptoms emerged when I woke up on May 24 as well.

External links

• Pollen.com, a website which offers free 4-day local pollen index forecast on a 0.0–to–12.0 scale.

The spring of 2009 was my 5th pollen season experienced in North America. Compared to 2008, my allergic symptoms due to pollen were mild, except that I caught a cold with dizziness during the spring break.

March 24, 2009 cold

In 2009, I enjoyed a 14-day spring break because the schedules of my Winter Quarter finals were early. During the first half of my spring break, I took a trip to San Diego. Nevertheless, after I returned to Stanford, cold symptoms started occurring to me. When I woke up in the early morning of March 26, I felt intensive dizziness. The dizziness was so strong that I could not balance even when lying in bed. Later that day, my friend drove me to Vaden Health Center to see a doctor, and Vaden Health Center gave me several different drugs, including one for runny nose, one for coughing, one for motion sickness, and so on. For the next few days, I spent most of the time resting in bed because I was not able to walk very long (more than a mile or so) without overbalancing. The drug I ran out first was the one for motion sickness, and on March 28 I purchased more motion sickness drug. As of April 2010, I still kept a box of motion sickness drug in my backpack in case of sudden motion sickness. On the morning of March 30, I failed to perceive the magnitude 4.3 earthquake occurred near San Jose because I could not distinguish my dizziness from the shaking caused by the earthquake. However, on that afternoon I was already able to take Caltrain myself. As of April 5, I was able to run a mile in 8 minutes 19 seconds.

August 13, 2009 sneezing and runny nose

Although it was caused by dust instead of pollen, I hereby mention this cold here for completeness purpose. On the days before I left Taiwan for Minnesota, I started to sneeze due to my allergy to the dust generated during the luggage packing process. My sneezing and runny nose symptoms continued into August 15 in Los Angeles International Airport, California and August 16—17 in Phoenix, Arizona. I felt better by the time I entered Minnesota on August 19.

The spring of 2008 was my 4th pollen season experienced in North America. During this season, allergic symptoms occurred to me quite actively. In fact, I caught 3 colds during the 3-month period from March 15, 2009 to June 14, 2009, which tied my previous record occurred during September 29, 1999 — December 28, 2009.

March 15, 2008 cold

March 12 — 21, 2008, the last 10 days of Winter Quarter 2008, was a busy time to me. I had 3 take home finals to do during this period, which are for Applied Statistics, Set Theory, and Differential Geometry. After started working on my finals for about three days, I started to feel more and more sleepy, and I slept as much as 10 hours per day. On March 15, I started coughing and feeling throat pain, and it turned out that I caught a cold. Luckily, the Chinese traditional medicine I took kept my symptoms moderate without making me more sleepy. In the mean while, I drank much lemonade made from powders purchased at Long's to reduce my throat pain. After I finished my last final on March 22, I spent much time resting during the spring break, and I gradually recovered from cold.

April 2008 sneezings and nosebleedings

After I recovered from cold in late March, my sneezings continued into April, as the pollen index were high most of the time. On April 4th, I started to wear surgery mask to reduce my sneezings. I had a few nosebleedings in April as well. My friend reminded me that I was more likely to nosebleed in spring than in other season. Through the Chi-Square test, I reached a similar conclusion that it is significant that I nosebleed in April more often than in other months.

May 5, 2008 cold

During the day of May 5, 2008, I felt exhausted quite a few times during the day. And on the next evening, I started to cough, and my temperature reached 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Besides taking medicine, I drank some more lemonade. This time I recovered quite soon, as I felt okay when I participated Project Peace Crane a couple weeks later.

June 9, 2008 cold

My third cold of the season occurred on June 9 when I was working on my senior honors thesis. I coughed quite often this time, sometimes even when I was sleeping. Especially on the evening of June 13, two days before my graduation, I only slept for an hour due to my coughing and work. On the graduation eve, I managed to sleep some more, but my sleeping quality was still somewhat affected. That was why I looked tired during my graduation on June 15. I recovered from my cold a few days later.

September 18—19, 2008 sneezings

On September 18, the day after I returned to Stanford from summer break, the weather was quite wet. I sneezed over 100 times on that day, especially when I was indoor, as carpets caused my allergy to become more significant. The effect continued into September 19, when I also sneezed more than 20 times.

On April 12, 2010, I lost my wallet when I got off a bus.  I blocked my lost check card shortly after the incident to avoid fraudulent use.  By the morning of April 13, 2010, the wallet had been found and delivered to Metro Transit Lost and Found, and I picked up my wallet later that day.

Cause

After participating a weekly small group bible study, I took the Metro Transit bus #16 (vehicle number 3268) back to my apartment. When I boarded the bus at Anderson Hall stop at 9:05 pm, I took my wallet out of my pocket in order to have my U-Pass scanned. However, after scanning the U-Pass, I failed to put back my wallet properly into my pocket. As a result, when I got off the bus at 900 Washington Av SE at 9:13 pm, I left my wallet on the seat. It was not until the bus was accelerating did I remind that my wallet was still on the bus.

Items lost with the wallet

Cards

• Apartment key card
• Bruegger's Bottomless Mug Club card (exp. 12/31/10)
• Check card
• Goldy's Gameroom bowling pass (exp. 5/12/10)
• Tea Garden Specialtea Card
• University of Minnesota ID card
• U-Pass

Other items

• Cash not exceeding $50
• Keyring with 5 keys
• Some useless receipts

My initial responses

After I realized that my wallet was lost, I called Metro Transit. However, since I called during its non-business hour, no one answered the phone. Then I walked to the bank to obtain its phone number in order to block my lost check card. Nevertheless, the department I called was not the correct one, and again no one answered the phone due to its non-business hour. Next I visited University of Minnesota Police Department to seek for help. A police officer told me the phone number of Metro Transit Police Department. While the Metro Transit Police Department was also at its non-business hour, I left a message to its answering machine. My first disposals were not quite successful.

Follow-up

I thus came to Coffman Memorial Union to ask for help. As I expected, the help desks were already closed. It was about 9:50 pm. I went to the computer cluster to update my Facebook and East Villagers statuses to indicate that my wallet is lost. My roommate then came to Coffman to pick me up and drove me back to our apartment. At around 11 pm, I finally found the appropriate phone number of the bank to report my lost check card. My check card is then deactivatd.

Recovery

In the morning of April 13, I called Metro Transit Lost and Found. A representative asked me the bus route on which the wallet was lost, my name, and the items in my wallet. She told me the wallet was found and kept there. After class that morning, I went to Metro Transit Lost and Found at 570 N 5th St, Minneapolis to pick up my wallet. It was intact and nothing seems to be missing. The paper money were even sorted by denomination. Later that afternoon, I went to the bank to apply for a replacement check card, as the original one is no longer active.

See also (pages not yet created)

• October 20, 2007 debit card loss incident

• December 17, 2005 cell phone loss incident

• November 11, 2004 and April 8, 2005 student ID loss incidents

• June 28, 2004 cell phone loss incident

• December 27, 2003 student ID loss incident

• July 9, 2003 arm bracelet disintegration incident

• June 15, 2003 wallet loss incident

• November 3, 1995 student ID loss incident

• April 8, 1995 and July 4, 1995 backpack loss incidents

On December 22 when I chatted with my friend about Rubik's cube, my friend told me that he has a spheral puzzle which is similar to Rubik's cube. On December 28, he lent me this puzzle and asked me whether I can solve it.

This puzzle is called "Masterball", and some photos of it can be found at http://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/master.htm. In this puzzle, a painted sphere is cut into 4 slices, and each slice is further divided into 8 pieces. There are 32 pieces in total. These pieces can be permuted through rotating a slice by multiples of 45 degrees or rotating along a great circle passing the two poles by 180 degrees.

On December 29, I attempted to solve this puzzle. At first, many pieces of the puzzle are on the wrong slices: Several pieces of slice 1 (the top slice) are on slice 4 (the bottom slice,) and vice versa; several pieces of slice 2 are on slice 3, and vice versa. Since the 8 pieces of slice 4 have yellow backgrounds while all other pieces have blue backgrounds, I began my solve by moving all the yellow pieces to the correct slice. It is not too hard to have up to 5 yellow pieces appear at consecutive locations of slice 4, however, to move the last 3 yellow pieces to slice 4 is more tricky. To move the 6th (or 7th, 8th, respectively) yellow piece from slice 1 to slice 4, I need to perform a half-turn along a great circle to send 1 (or 2, 3, respectively) yellow pieces from slice 4 to slice 1 and make them adjacent to another yellow piece on slice 1, then perform suitable rotations on slices 1 and 4 and perform another half-turn to send these 2 (or 3, 4, respectively) yellow pieces back from slice to slice 4 and make them adjacent to the 4 unmoved consecutive yellow piece. Since the pieces on slice 1 cannot be permuted to slices 2 and 3, as I moved all yellow pieces to slice 4, the pieces of slice 1 are also on their correct slice.

The next step is to permute the pieces on slices 1 and 4 to their correct locations. After trying a few possibilities, I found out an algorithm which can swap a pair of adjacent pieces on slice 1 and a pair of adjacent pieces of slice 4, without disturbing slices 2 and 3. By repeatedly applying this algorithm, I permuted the pieces of slice 4 into their correct order. Since the algorithm requires to swap 2 pairs of pieces on different slices at the same time, it is not possible to use this algorithm to permute the pieces of slice 1 into their correct order without disturbing the pieces of slice 4. In order to minimize the impace on slice 4 while I worked on slice 1, I picked 2 consecutive pieces of slice 4 and kept on swapped them when I was fixing the order of the pieces of slice 1. (Note: If the pair of consecutive pieces on slice 4 being swapped were in the wrong order when slice 1 is solved, then I would have to do 6 swappings to move one of these 2 pieces to the other side of the other piece without crossing the other piece, in order to fix the parity of slice 4. This scenario did not occur during my solve.)

After I solved slices 1 and 4, I solve slices 2 and 3 in the same way by interchanging the roles of slices 1, 4 and slices 2, 3. During this stage, I made a mistake so that I disturbed a few pieces of slices 2 and 3. Luckily, I fixed this mistake pretty soon. Although the correct patterns of slices 2 and 3 are not as obvious as that of slices 1 and 4, I found out them eventually. It took me approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes to solve the puzzle.

Note 1: This list is still under construction. Some distances are still being measured using Google Earth.
Note 2: This list includes outdoor runs only (i.e. does not include treadmill runs.) Entries shown in bold type are official contests.

In October 2009, the click-donation website The Breast Cancer Site sponsored the 7th Annual Pink Ribbon Challenge.  During the challenge, each click worths double as much as usual, and the goal of this challenge is to raise 500 mammograms.  Ordinarily, it takes about 38,460 clicks to raise a mamogram, but in October 2009 it only took 19,230 clicks to raise a mammogram.

Thanks to the users' industrious clicking, The Breast Cancer Site received 7,829,123 clicks in October 2009, which is approximately 2.92 clicks per second.  The monthly total of nearly 7.83 million clicks is the highest since May 2009.  These clicks funded 407.1 mammograms.

While it is a pity that only 81% of the goal is reached by the end of the challenge, The Breast Cancer Site is still open for clicking as usual.  Please continue to support The Breast Cancer Site by clicking daily.  You can sign up for reminder messages on its website.  Furthermore, The Breast Cancer Site has announced that a new challenge is starting soon.  Please help out enthusiastically and widely forward the message.

Jefferson Nickels

Westward Journey Nickel Series

Lincoln Wheat Cents

Lincoln Memorial Cents

2009 Lincoln Bicentennial One Cent Program

Notes:

1. The count began on September 22, 2005.
2. A pair of socks is considered as two items.
3. For convenient purpose, the May term of University of Minnesota is considered part of the summer semester here.

In this blog, I introduces Fermat numbers and their factorizations. I use various HTML tags in this blog to see which of them are working.

What Are Fermat Numbers?

Fermat numbers are numbers of the form 2²ⁿ+1, which are sometimes denoted as F_n. The first few Fermat numbers are
F₀=3, F₁=5, F₂=17, F₃=257,F₄=65,537, and F₅=4,294,967,297.
It has been proven that if F_n is a Fermat prime then an F_n-gon can be constructed by ruler and compass.

Current Status of Small Fermat Numbers

The Fermat numbers F₀ through F₄ are prime. The next 7 Fermat numbers, F₅ through F₁₁, are composite and have been completely factored, e.g. F₅ = 641 * 6,700,417.

The Fermat numbers F₁₂, F₁₃, F₁₄, F₁₅, ..., and F₂₉ have been proven to be composite through Pepin test, however, their factorizations are incomplete. Especially, three of them do not have any known prime factors. They are:

1. F₁₄
2. F₂₀
3. F₂₂

Fermat numbers in this range can be tested by through ECM factorization using the program Prime95 offered by GIMPS. However, according to this page, F₂₈ and F₂₉ are so huge that no elliptic curves have been run for them. It takes about 4,700 curves with the bound B1 = 3,000,000 to find a factor with 40 digits or less. For a Fermat number around F₁₉, each curve with this B1 bound can take several hours on a personal computer.

Larger Fermat Numbers

The numbers of digits in Fermats numbers increase exponentially. Many large Fermat numbers are too large to find factors through ECM factorization or test their primalities through Pepin test, and therefore their statuses remain unknown. For example,

[t]he smallest undecided Fermat number is now F33

(quoted from the MM₆₁ project.)

Trial Division

To deal with Fermat numbers beyond F₂₉, the only option is trial division. By the fact that prime factors of F_n can only be of the form k * 2^m + 1 where k & m are positive integers such that m > n+1, prime factors with thousands or even millions of digits (if we count the prime factors of Generalized Fermat numbers) have been found. While trial factoring is sometimes successful, it is not guaranteed that all prime factors can be found, as some factors might have very large k. For example, the following prime factor of F₃₆, which is of the form k * 2^m + 1 with k = 5 & m = 39, was found as early as 1886 by Seelhoff.2,748,779,069,441

Among World's Largest Known Primes

There are names for very large primes:

Titanic prime:

A prime with 1,000 or more digits.

Gigantic prime:

A prime with 10,000 or more digits.

Megaprime:

A prime with 1,000,000 or more digits.

Bevaprime:

A prime with 1,000,000,000 or more digits.

According to http://www.prothsearch.net/fermat.html, 50+ out of the 260+ 270+ known prime factors of Fermat numbers are gigantic primes. The largest three of them are:

• 3 * 2^2,478,785 + 1 (divides F_2,478,782; the 41st largest known prime)
• 7 * 2^2,167,800 + 1 (divides F_2,167,797; the 55th largest known prime)
• 3 * 2^2,145,353 + 1 (divides F_2,145,351; the 56th largest known prime)

The data above are as of May 11, 2009, 18:20 UTC.

On April 9, 2009, my brother came to stay with me for his Easter Break.  He contributed me several coins that I have not yet collected.

The first two are cents, and their versions are 1956-D and 1996, respectively.  The former one is the 5th oldest coin I have collected so far and also the 5th wheat cent (produced from 1909 to 1958 inclusive) I have obtained.  For the 1996 cent, although it is not very old, it was minted in Philadelphia so that my chance of obtaining one of them is lower than that of obtaining a 1996-D cent (minted in Denver; I collected one shortly after I started coin collecting 2007.)

Another one is a 1969 dime, which is the 44th oldest coin and also the 6th oldest dime I have collected.  Although it is not the oldest dime I have collected, it is the rarest dime I have collected so far.  Its mintage figure was only 145,790,000, while the mintage figure of 1967 dime, the most common version of dime, is more than 2.2 billion.

The other one is a 2006-P Nebraska state quarter, which is my 89th state quarter collected so far.   My collection of state quarters from the years 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2006 are now complete, and I need only 11 more P mint mark state quarters to complete my collection: one from each of the years 1999, 2002, and 2003, three from 2007, and (unfortunately) all five from 2008.