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Three numbers.

Two of them feature in Lost. I’ve not watched any of the new series. Yet.

4 is the smallest number of colours sufficient to colour all planar maps. It is also the smallest composite number.

0 is the additive identity. It also sparked philosophical debate amongst the Greeks a long time ago (the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, apparently) but then they also found the time to wonder if 1 was a number so best pay them no attention.

8 is the largest cube in the Fibonacci sequence. 8 is the base of the octal number system, without which you wouldn’t be reading this (a byte is 8 bits ya know).

Neither 4, 0 or 8 are Prime numbers.

4, 0, and 8 are all natural numbers in the base ten system. That’s decimal to you and I.

The Book of Numbers is the fourth of the books of the Pentateuch, a record of the numbering of the people in the wilderness of Sinai, and of their numbering afterwards on the plain of Moab. Now known as plain old ‘Numbers’ (Of Issachar; Nethaneel the son of Zuar and all that jazz).

North American area code 408 is a state of California telephone area code which covers Los Gatos, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and San Jose.

408-1 = 407 = 43 + 03 + 73 (grasping? who’s grasping!)

And 4:08 am is the time that I awoke this morning. And the morning before that. AND the morning before that.

I’m presuming that something, somewhere, is turning itself on at this time… a new noise in the background that is enough to wake me from my slumber. I’ve yet to find out what though. Still, it does mean I learn a lot of nonsense about numbers.

Well, it was either that or watching the Big Brother housemates sleeping…