Indeed, I had read about this thing on cicadas before! It makes sense, in my opinion, that animals and even simpler organisms, such as viruses, "use" prime numbers. It's not that they know what they're doing, but from trial and error, nature repeatedly finds picking prime numbers convenient for some tasks, because the existance of sub-cycles in some processes may be "undesirable", that is, produce negative effects. Just like some times, it's better for something to be even than odd (say, the number of legs in an animal), sometimes it's better for a number to be prime than non-prime and this goes beyond our understanding of the fact.
A deeper thought on that:
There is a discussion on whether the human mind created mathematics or mathematics have to be the way they are so that the human mind is the way it is. I believe this is a specific case of the debate on whether the so called "anthropic principle" is a valid argument in support for some ideas. In general, I'd say it is, but one must understand that, a double-implication ("if and only if") in logics is much stronger than a simple implication, because the order of causality (i.e.: the direction of the arrow of time) becomes irrelevant. When our own nature becomes part of a double implication, it makes more sense to understand not that we cause the other part or that we are caused by it, but rather, that both us and that other part form a single thing. In programming, a double implication is typically understood as
equivalence. So, how about "we
are mathematics"?
dodicat wrote:What are colour vectors?
I mean, a colour, when you divide it in red, green and blue becomes a triplet. Colour as perceived by human eyes is tridimensional, so to define a specific colour, we need three coordinates and what we have is a 3D vector. Yep, maybe I like math too much XD. But what I wanted to say is I shortened the vectors, like, I made their length shorter, that is, I made them more similar by making them darker, because if they were more different between themselves, they also were too bright, so even though I needed different colours for contrast, I didn't want so much contrast with the background.