2018-08-08 08:08:08

Thoughts

This post may be the luckiest on Rubenerd thus far. Which renders my spilling of this takeaway coffee that much more amusing! Here are the most facts I could think of about eight within an 88 second window, with time after to clean up spelling and formatting:

  • Why was seven afraid of eight? Because eight nine ten… damn it, I always mess this up.

  • There are eight digits between zero and eight, inclusive. Think about it! Maybe not too much.

  • Eight has five letters. Seems silly.

  • I’ve seen more lucky numberplates in Sydney full of eights than Singapore. Likely due to it being easier to buy vanity ones here, but still culturally fascinating.

  • Oxygen has the atomic number 8. This is delightful given its most abundent allotrope is dioxygen, so the numeral 8 looks like a chemical diagram for it, of sorts. I used to be able to recite the Periodic Table to Titanium; my dad could go much futher.

  • Remember those Web 1.0 alarmist memes that dihydrogen monoxide was toxic? You shouldn’t have eight it.

  • By the time this gets posted, it’ll almost certainly be after the aformentioned time. Whoops. At least I started writing it at that second.

  • Numerology is a fun, if otherwise pointless, distraction. As eight is also a number, this means it appears from time to time.

The most I did a decade ago for 2008-08-08 was rant on about phone connections, two days late. Eight is divisible by eight to get four, which is decidedly unlucky. I feel Daft Punk wrote a song about this.

Author bio and support

Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

The site is powered by Hugo, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS on OrionVM, everyone’s favourite bespoke cloud infrastructure provider.

If you found this post helpful or entertaining, you can shout me a coffee or send a comment. Thanks ☺️.