Mersense?

Sat up all night trying to figure out why anyone would be interested in looking for the world's largest prime number. I couldn't come up with anything except the old "because it's there" cop-out. The "And then I woke up" narrative trick translated to the physics lab.

This failure of imagination, I thought to myself bleakly, is just the sort of thing that indicates I will never be famus. Surely there must always be chalkboard erasers to clap and sine waves to wave back at? Cars to wash (I have one), babies to burp (ditto), indigenous languages to save, biodiversity to protect, better deoderants to invent, skating rink roofs that won't fall down to design, etc.

Apparently not.

As it turns out, Mersennes are rare and beautiful, and this is primarily why super smart people hunt them--they're the albino tigers of the math world. They are so beautiful, in fact, that certain professors use them as a lure, a provocative gesture, to incite students to the mad act of becoming engineers or mathematicians.

Surely the glamour would be enough.

What this goes to show is that there are strange worlds of obsession and desire all around us. Odd passions are crackling in the air. I'm going to try to remember this as I go about my suburban day of cooking, cleaning, writing about foreign exchange trading, playing pirates, and putting the now-empty garbage cans back where they belong.

What do the garbagemen obsess about?

And why have I never wondered about that before?