- The sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.
- ANTITRINITARIANIST contains all 24 arrangements of the letters I, N, R, and T.
- The Empire State Building has its own zip code.
- 63945 = 63 × (-9 + 45)
- “Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most!” — Charles Lindbergh
Trivia
Confirmed
In 1964, two students at California’s Pomona College hypothesized that the number 47 appears with unusual frequency in the world. They began to amass examples, starting a campus tradition that continues to this day:
- The Declaration of Independence consists of 47 sentences.
- The New Testament credits Jesus with 47 miracles.
- Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata is named after Beethoven’s Opus 47.
- Pancho Villa was killed by a barrage of 47 bullets.
- The Pythagorean Theorem is Proposition 47 of Euclid’s Elements.
- The tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are located 47 degrees apart.
- Cesar proclaimed “Veni, vidi, vici” in 47 B.C.
Now the hypothesis has produced its own reality: Pomona graduate Joe Menosky became a writer for Star Trek and helped to build a universe where 47 appears oddly often:
- The Enterprise stops at Sub-Space Relay Station 47, a character shrinks to 47 centimeters, and the crew discovers element 247.
- On Voyager, the emergency medical holographic channel is 47.
- On Star Trek: Generations, Scotty beams up 47 El-Aurians before their ship is destroyed.
- According to the 2009 film, the Enterprise was built in Sector 47 of the Riverside Shipyards, and Nero’s ship, the Narada, is said to have destroyed 47 Klingon ships.
Trek producer Brannon Braga has confirmed that Voyager‘s Harry Kim lives in Apartment 4-G because G is the seventh letter in the alphabet.
Small World
Europe overlaps North America.
Reykjavík, Iceland (21°56’W), lies slightly west of Shannon Island (18°30’W) in eastern Greenland.
Trivium
Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro are the only actors to win Oscars playing the same character. Brando won Best Actor for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, and De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for the same role in The Godfather Part II in 1974.
See Too Much Talent.
Nothing in Common
SOUTH DAKOTA shares no letters with its capital, PIERRE. It’s the only such state.
Trivium
PENNSYLVANIA is the only state name typed with all eight fingers.
Phone Sects
WELL-EXPRESSED is dialed using only the odd numbers on a telephone keypad.
NONCOMMUNICATING uses only even numbers.
Surely this means something.
Misc
- EPISCOPAL is an anagram of PEPSI COLA.
- Only a perfect square has an odd number of divisors.
- “Makes no sense makes no sense” makes no sense.
- The grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol include working oil rigs.
- “Time is the only critic without ambition.” — John Steinbeck
Misc
- Georgia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939.
- Wilt Chamberlain never fouled out of a game.
- 3864 = 3 × (-8 + 64)
- What’s the opposite of “not in”?
- Alaska has a longer coastline than all other U.S. states combined.
- “To do nothing is also a good remedy.” — Hippocrates
Stork Fatigue
When Silvia Morello de Palma was seven months pregnant, she flew to Antarctica to join her husband, the commander of Argentina’s Esperanza research base.
When their son, Emilio Marcos Palma, was born safely on Jan. 7, 1978, he became the world’s southernmost birth — and the only person in recorded history to be the firstborn on a continent.