Dave

A number is said to be perfect if it equals the sum of its divisors: 6 is divisible by 1, 2, and 3, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

St. Augustine wrote, “Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created all things in six days; rather the converse is true; God created all things in six days because this number is perfect, and it would have been perfect even if the work of the six days did not exist.”

Perfect numbers are rare. No one knows whether an infinite quantity exist, and no one knows whether any of them are odd. The early Greeks knew the first four, and in the ensuing two millennia we’ve uncovered only 44 more. But they have one thing in common — they reveal a curious harmony when expressed in base 2:

Mixed news everyone!

1. First and the most important: thank you everybody for your donations. We now have enough to secure our servers for the next two months or so. You can donate using Flattr or using bitcoins: 1JMYDeTaJHvfL6stbvwNdbY8zVqWfEnucU.

2. We’ve got an incredible amount of emails during last three weeks. There’ve been several days when all three of us were busy mostly dealing with user requests. If you believe that The Old Reader is missing something (and it surely is), please go to our Uservoice page, browse the issues (most likely, someone has already created your suggestion), and vote for the ones you like. Also you can see what’s already planned there. And please, check our Status page or subscribe to our Twitter account — we are updating these two on current issues.

We only have that much time during the day to spare on this project, and we would prefer to spend it making The Old Reader more reliable or implementing new features, not removing duplicate feature requests or explaining how to create a folder.

We are focused on making everything work for the vast number of users and feeds, for now this is our top priority.

(image by ProlificPen)

3. We could really use some help on the Ruby on Rails front. If you have experience engineering medium-size websites, and you’d like to become a part of our small team, please, drop us a line to hello@theoldreader.com. If you have any other suggestions about how you can help us, feel free to email us as well. Or just spread the word, that’d be much appreciated.

We can’t pay you a huge pile of money, but we still have something interesting to offer.

4. Cool graphs, no?