perfect number

I went over to Chi's last night, intending to study. Though some was done, we of course got sidetracked and ended up watching Big Brother (again) and playing poker (again); I won. As we were watching, it really does seem to me that they (or some at least) were just acting out for the cameras. No doubt producers are happy about that. Though you do come to understand how some people are, and natural personalities do show out eventually, there still is an element of putting on a mask - and so I pondered how much of an affect the outside has on them. Either consciously or sub-consciously, they all know cameras are everywhere; microphones record their every breath. And people are watching them. So I wondered, what would happened once Big Brother for example, came to its 137th series, they've come to their yet-another-houseload level, and there's no more hype, no more glamour, and hardly anyone is watching them? Would they act out the same with that knowledge? Or to take it a step further, what if cameras were placed around the house as they are now, surveillancing continued as it is, but the tapes and recordings destroyed afterwards (and they had knowledge of this of course)? Would that make any difference at all? Is it any different from not watching at all, a normal household of people?

I mentioned before how I had the coincidence with a friend's name. Well, another one has just come along. Last Sunday, I had a barbecue (or sorts) at my place, and Jim, Pete and Chi came around. As they entered, they were in the grasp of their conversation which was around random trivia questions they were posing for each other. At this point, Pete (whose turn it was to be quiz master) mentioned Perfect Numbers - something which I had perhaps heard of in the past (in my long forgotten maths days), but really something which I did not encounter everyday (A perfect number is one where its factors sum up to itself). Then, one day later, as I was reading through my current book, which goes about explaining various words used in science and where they originated from, lo and behold, I came across the explanation of Perfect Numbers. Once again, I was forced to question the chance of encountering an uncommon concept, which I'm not sure I've actually even ever heard before, pop up twice so close temporally. And once again, all I can say is that there can be many factors or excuses, like perhaps I had heard of Perfect Numbers before, but had just forgotten it (unlikely, as I tend to remember simple concepts of interest like that), or that there was a high likelyhood of finding it in a book about scientific vocabulary, or that perhaps I had had a glimpse of the heading on a random opening of the book beforehand, and noticed when Pete mentioned it, rung a bell in my head, picked up on it and asked him to explain more. Well.... shit happens.

Btw, the first 5 perfect numbers, out of curiousity, are 6, 28, 496, 8128, and 33,550,336. At the time of printing, my book says that the 21st on was worked out in 1971, it's twenty-one thousand and three digits long.