Article for 2008 Feb 28

2008

2008 Feb

Feb 28 Thu “FLIES”

For some fierce-some reason I cannot remember today’s events. So here’s some facts about the date, like there is an Australian parrot commonly known as the “twenty-eight”: its call is (apparently) ‘wen’y-eight.

Lowly 28 is a “perfect” number - its factors (except itself) add up to itself. 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28. 8128 is another number with this property. The sum of the first five prime numbers is twenty-eight: 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 = 28.

It is also the number of days in a lunar month, approximately. Saturn also takes about 28 Earth-years to orbit the Sun.

Eight and twenty is also a “happy” number: its digital root (sum of its digits repeated) is one. 2 + 8 = 10, 1 + 0 = 1. The number of dominoes in a standard pack is, yes, 28.

“Sing a song of sixpence” (the nursery rhyme) features 28 characters: four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pie, one king counting money, one queen eating bread and honey, one maid hanging out the washing, and another blackbird biting the maid’s nose off. (If you think the twenty-fifth blackbird was actually in Verse 1’s pie, making 27 characters altogether, there is a longer version in which a wren sticks the nose back on with snuff: a twenty-eighth character.)