Beyond Euclid #217

Hello from Beyond Euclid 217. Hope your week was good. Mine was a little different — my dad flew in from Turkey, and we spent a good chunk of the week out in the backyard workshop together. Building things, fixing things, not saying much. That kind of time is hard to come by and I don’t take it lightly.

This issue has a 599-digit number made almost entirely of nines that turns out to be prime. William Benson’s 1868 color cube, which maps the entire spectrum onto a three-dimensional grid. A serious academic paper calculating exactly how many lies Pinocchio can tell before his neck snaps. Sweden bringing back physical textbooks. A small Irish town that quietly convinced 70% of parents to delay smartphones — and it worked. A zipper video I watched twice. A Georgian billionaire who shipped 200 ancient trees to his garden. Google’s AI getting one in ten answers wrong, which sounds fine until you do the math. Among other things.

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