Happy Birthday to the Navy!

10/13/2015

This is a photo of the USS Constitution - She is the oldest ship in the Navy.

Today is the 240^th Navy Birthday.  Of their 240 years of service, I was part of it for 20 of those years.  Anyways, today they begin their 241^st year of service to the American people.  241 happens to be an interesting number.

241 241 is an amenable, arithmetic, deficient, equidigital, Hogben, lucky, odd, odious, pernicious, polite, prime, Proth, square-free and Ulam number. 241 is a centered 16-gonal number, and a centered 24-gonal number.  241 is also a concentric square number, and a concentric dodecagonal numbers. 241 is a plaindrome in base 11, base 13, base 14 and base 15.  It is a nialpdrome in base 3, base 15 and base 16.  And, it is a zygodrome in base 15. 241 is a member of the Tribonacci sequence that begins with the number 3, 1, and 3. 241, together with 239 form a twin prime pair.  The sum of the digits of 241 is a prime number.  241 is the concatenation of two primes: 2 and 41.  241 is also an additive prime, an even-ish prime, a Ramanujan prime, an unsafe prime, a weak prime, and a zeroless prime.  The multiplicative digital root of 241 is 8. 241 is the hypotenuse of a primitive Pythagorean triple: 2412 = 1202 + 2092. 241 is the sum of the first 41 decimal digits of pi.  The string 241 occurs at position 1707 (counting from the first digit after the decimal point).  The string 241 occurs 200,146 times in the first 200 million digits of pi. 241 is the smallest prime p such that p plus the reversal of p equals a palindromic prime: 241 + 142 = 383.  241 can also be expressed as the sum of an integer and its reverse: 241 = 170 + 071. 241 can be expressed as the sum of two squares: 152 + 42.  It can also be expressed as the difference of two squares: 1212 – 1202. CCXLI is 241 written in Roman numerals.  σμαʹ is 241 written in Greek.  רמא is 241 written in Hebrew.  二百四十一 is 241 written in Chinese. 241 is a palindromic and undulating number when written in base 12: 18112.  It is a palindromic number and a repunit number when written in base 15: 11115. 241 is found in 5,520 of the integer sequences cataloged by the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (www.OEIS.org) according to a search conducted on 9/26/2015.  (I decide not to try to list them all.) The radioisotope americium-241 is used in many smoke detectors.

Their 241^st year should be a good year.

Several people have asked me why I joined the Navy, so I always tell them the truth.  I was in need of a job, some money and an education so I decided to go talk to the Army recruiters.  They told me a lot about life in the army, but it sounded like a lot of work to me.  So I thought I’d go see the Marine Corps recruiters.  They even showed me a movie about the Marine Corps, but it looked like a lot of work and a lot of polishing.  So my next stop was the Air Force recruiters.  They showed me pictures of Air Force bases with golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and movie theaters.  As I was about to sign up I thought I should go see the Navy recruiters, even though I thought I would be back in the Air Force office soon.  So I went down the hall to the Navy recruiting office.  The door was locked, the lights were off, and there was a hand written sign on the door that said “Gone Fishing”.  And I thought to myself, “That’s the service for me!”

David