Pages

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Numbers can be playful (the "Twosday" post)

It’s “Twosday” – the Tuesday of all the twos. The 22nd of February 2022, which can be written as 22.2.22. It can also be written as the palindrome 22. 02.2022. It even works if you write it the American way as 2.22.22.

If I had more wherewithal about me I would have posted this at 2.22pm. But sometimes work gets in the way of fun like blogging about weird numbers.

I do like playful numbers, though, and I like playing with numbers. That’s partly why I have done a Christmas Card Audit every year, or keep tabs on the amount of leaflets we receive at election times. Last week I went to see my doctor to discuss my flowmeter readings that I’m doing daily to analyse my lung function. The doctor asked if I minded doing another two weeks’ worth of readings. I said I didn’t mind at all. I love collecting data.

I realise this is an unusual trait – cataloguing mundane things in life. Cathy and I have a little notebook we use to keep score whenever we play Yahtzee. Over the past 10 years we have recorded hundreds of games in there. We have different tactical approaches to playing Yahtzee and one day I plan to analyse the data to see if there is any advantage to one strategy over another. I doubt there will be much of a difference at the end of the data trail.

I know other people share this focus. The aforementioned Christmas Card Audits are easily the posts on my blog that people engage with the most. I sometimes blog about my football stats – there is a whole app dedicated to supporting people like me who like to record which football matches they attend. And I have my own supplementary data projects too, like my ongoing ‘Book of Days’ project.

The obsession with numbers is part of the reason I really like baseball too. The baseball cards that I collect are full of statistics and I admire the way different designers attempt to spice up the data and display it a bit differently. And sometimes the cards trigger other number-related connections as well. Two new cards arrived in the post today, all the way from Rhode Island in the USA. That brace increased my total of cards featuring Tony Gwynn to a significant number that triggered instant recognition – 1066!


All I need to do now is make a reference to conquering my collecting goals and this blog post is complete!

1 comment:

  1. Given your post, you may be interested in this: I took sermon notes for nearly ten years, with the goal to try and find out which books, verses, etc. were most referenced and which ones were most ignored. Though I never did end up doing that analysis, and now I never will.

    But it did mean as a lay preacher I tried to talk about books and verses that I thought were less covered by others, which led me to some interesting places (for example - I'm the only person I ever heard talk about Lamentations, and everyone who heard I was going to speak on it said "Why do you want to talk about Lamentations?" But I think it has some great poetry, and works way better if you engage it as it is - a poetic response to a traumatic and unexpected event - rather than trying to spiritualise it or wring false comfort from it).

    ReplyDelete