I think the thing I love most about this is that is, like so much involving prime numbers and factorization, an extremely powerful brand of catnip for amateur crank mathematicians such as myself. You can _kind of see_ the patterns there! There are the barest hints of a _lot_ of subtle structure. The secret must be within our grasp!

I mean, does this not look _just like_ the 3x+1 problem, turned on its head? Almost? Maybe?

And yet.... and yet....

C. S. Lewis once described The Occult as a series of nested snares, symbols for symbols for symbols without ultimate referent, a machine purpose-built to be an intellectual rat hole, seducing and confusing the inquisitive mind, snaring the most inquisitive of minds that much more effectively.

But, in a very Lovecraftian way, there are things that we can find right here in nature fully capable of that, of having the shape of the occult - or rather, a true shape, aped badly by the occult.