08.08.08 — August 8, 2008 (1 Comment)

Tags: inspiration, random

Seven used to be the luckiest number. At least that’s the impression I had until recent developments. On numerous occasions I have heard people say ‘lucky seven’ when making references to favorable outcomes. But this year things have become a little different. The Chinese consider eight to be a lucky number and have gone great lengths to prove it. According to this Wikipedia article, Chinese believe that eight is lucky as it sounds like ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’ (in their language of course). I guess you know why Beijing officials want to start Olympics on this date at 8.08pm, specifically; neat.

On the other hand, today’s date (2008-08-08) has a nice vibe to it too. You can’t simply ignore the reiterating arrangement in numbers. I guess this happened last year too; but a month and a day earlier (2007.07.07). If you go to the Wikipedia article on number eight, you’ll see there are many facts on this number. I was awestruck to see how many interesting and equally important things have associations to this symmetrical numeral. Just for the sake of completing this post I thought I’ll post the most interesting 8 things on 8 according to the same Wikipedia article mentioned above.

• Eight is the atomic number of Oxygen.
• The maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell is eight.
• In the human adult dentition there are 8 teeth in each quadrant. The 8th tooth is the so called the wisdom tooth.
• There are eight notes in an octatonic scale.
• A byte is eight bits.
• An Eighth is a common measurement of Marijuana, meaning an eighth of an ounce.
• Eight is symbolic for lesbian sexual relations.
• In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path; In Islam, eight Angels carry The Holy Throne of Allah in heavens; In Hinduism, eight is the number of wealth and abundance; In Christianity, eight is the number of Beatitudes.

Image courtesy: Duncan. See 8 on Flickr.