Near the end of any year every magazine, newspaper, and website come outs with their own top ten list for something. Some even one-up each other by having top 100 lists. For example, the top 10 movies of the year, or the top 100 games of all time.
I admit that I might be a little late on releasing my own top ten list for the year. This post has been bouncing around my head for a while, but two things have happened that caused me to get off my duff and write it.
The first is that I have bought a few albums from MC Frontalot lately, and have been really enjoying them. He has a song titled "I hate your blog." You can listen to it for free here. I really hate those stupid Top N articles magazines, blogs, etc put out at the end of the year. This song inspired me to think up the idea of having my own top ten list.
The second motivator is that I was hanging around with Leon and told him of my idea. He thought it was funny, and encouraged me to finally post it.
My top ten list.
Top Ten Numbers
1. Zero : Zero is important to us. It is paired with 1 to make binary, and without binary you would be reading this on hand made paper tacked to the front door of the local church.
2. One : The first natural number. This number existed before zero. Also, 1 is the loneliest number.
3. Infinity : Not all infinities are the same size. There are whole branches of math that wouldn’t exist without the concept of infinity.
4. Two : Without two we couldn’t have powers of two, which is important for binary to work. I also seem to always see numbers that are the power of two all around me. It is kind of like that move 23 with Jim Carey. Another number I see a lot is 12:34. I see this on clocks all the time. I like it because the numbers are in sequence, and that makes it a calm number for me, instead of all of the chaotic random numbers the rest of the times during the are made of.
5. 3.1415 : Pi. The ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. Again, a lot of math wouldn’t work without this invention.
6. 42 : 'nuff said.
7. 1701 : As in NCC-1701. As in James T. Kirk, Spock, and Kahn.
8. 360 : Both degrees of a circle, and the name of my favorite gaming machine. Yay!
9. 1.6180339887498948482 : The golden ratio. This is seen all through nature, and leads to beautiful, graceful designs.
10. 9.86 : If you tack on m/sec^2 you get the local acceleration due to gravity on Earth. This one time in college we were finding g through experimentation, and no matter what we did the local value for g in this one corner of the lab was always lower than everywhere else. We would reproduce the experiment in another part of the lab and we would get the right result. Go back to the "weird" corner and get the result again. I am sure that will become a plot point in a Dan Brown novel. Gravity. Its not just a good idea, its the law.