one-upmanship on Bill Gates and the factored primes

Music history lesson:

[Background: In a Fresh Air interview from 5/11/99 (rebroadcast on
4/28),
Steve Reich was lecturing on how the Greeks notated music with hand
gestures, and said: "This was a common way of notating music within
cultures prior to our system of notation, which, by the way, evolved
from
the human hand. There are five lines on the staff because there are
five
fingers on your hand." To which Terry Gross (no slouch herself on
musical
matters) said disbelievingly "I didn't know that!" Steve Reich, giving
no
ground: "Yeah, well, you know, live and learn."
-psl]
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Quoth _The Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music_:
STAFF (stave). Five parallel horizontal lines, upon and between
which musical notes are written, thus indicating their relative
pitch and, in connection with a clef, their absolute notation (see
under //notation//). The invention of the staff is attributed to
Guido of Arezzo (c. 995-1050), who recommended the use of three or
four lines, denoting f a c' or d f a c'. Even before him,
rudimentary staffs of two lines, a red one for f and a yellow one
for c', were used. The four-line staff was generally accepted, and
is retained to this day for the notation of Gregorian chant.
Five-line staffs, for polyphonic music, were used as early as 1200.
In the 16th century staffs of up to seven and eight lines were
employed for keyboard music, particularly for the lower staff (left
hand) which otherwise would require numerous ledger lines.
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well, this makes sense, when we consider the evolutionary development of
the
human hand. the early staves were only four and three lines (as little
as
two), because humans only had two, three, and four fingers back then.
the
hand then evolved to include up to seven and eight fingers, but was
happening so quickly, that the roman catholic church thought it demonic,
and
began cutting off people's "excess" fingers (excess determined, in good
roman catholic tradition, by a democratic vote). this of course was the

true intention of the inquisition.
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