Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day (also known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day) because the armistice that ended World War I was signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (in 1918). However, tomorrow’s date even has the 11th year! Ron Gordon’s hobby is drawing attention to “calendar holidays,” meaning days that are notable because of their date numbers. He held contests in honor of Odd Day and Square Root Day. Now he’s doing the same for 11-11-11, the date he calls “Ones Upon a Day.” The pun in the name is also the theme for the contest:

The contest: Write the best (short) story or poem. It must start with “Ones Upon a Day”. Have fun, be creative and clever, and maybe you’ll be one of our winners!

Prizes: We’re giving away the date in dollars ($1,111.11) to be divided among the best 11+11+11 entries. We won’t make you rich, but you can always brag about how “Ones Upon a Day” you won a contest!

Get all the details at his Ones Upon A Day website. Link

When we were very young, we learned how to place things in order: first second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Some of us went on to decorate cakes that wished children a Happy Birthday with their age specified as an ordinal number. But occasionally, the numeric abbreviation for an ordinal gets messed up. Cake Wrecks has eight, count ‘em, eight cakes with the ordinals 1th, 2th, and 3th. Link

Odd Day is coming Saturday, 7/9/11. Three consecutive odd numbers make up the date only six times in a century. After 7/9/11, only two days remain in this parade of Odd Days which began with 1/3/5. The previous stretch of dates like this started with 1/3/1905—13 months after the Wright Brothers’ flight.

We’ve established a contest and are offering the date in dollars ($791.1) to be shared by the winners. Prizes will be distributed to those who involve the most people in the Oddest Parade of Odd Characters, write the best Odd Ode, or create the best Odd Celebrations.

I was one of the winners of a similar contest Gordon held to promote Square Root Day. Happy Odd Day! Link

In this stop-motion animation made with yarn, everyone is born with a number indicating their supposed potential. The kid born with a zero has a long way to go to catch up. Can nothing ever be something? Produced by Australians Christopher and Christine Kezelos. -via Laughing Squid

Here is something that none of us probably think about. If the language you speak does not accommodate words for certain areas of human culture it may change the way you see the world. In one interesting example a language that had no number words made it hard for its speakers to count accurately.

Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe “one X” a different word for “two Xs” and yet another word for “three Xs,” the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean “around one,” “some” and “many.”

Link

The Comedian of the Keyboard, also known as The Unmelancholy Dane, exited the earthly stage December 23rd, 2000. Victor Borge, the irrepressible musical humorist, didn’t quite make it into the true third millennium, but he lived almost 92 very full years and performed more than a 100 nights a year right up until the spotlight winked out.

Borge left the world a triple legacy. Born in Copenhagen to a family of musicians, Borge became a fine pianist and conductor. Too, he was that rare comedian who never used foul language and never made fun of anyone. “The smile is the shortest distance between two people,” he observed. Most astonishingly, he became a genius in his second language — English, which he learned by spending day after day in movie theaters.

Many years ago, Victor Borge created the game of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, he reasoned, why shouldn’t language go up too? In English, there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, such as “wonder” (one), “before” (four) and “decorate” (eight). If we inflate each sound by one number, we come up with a string of puns — “twoder,” “befive” and “decornine.”

Here is a story based on Borge’s idea. This tale invites you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated wonder — oops, make that “twoder” and to remember the linguistically pyrotechnic genius of The Clown Prince of Denmark.

JACK AND THE TWODERFUL BEANS

Twice upon a time there lived a boy named Jack in the twoderful land of Califivenia. Two day Jack, a double-minded lad, decided three go fifth three seek his fivetune.

After making sure that Jack nine a sandwich and drank some Eight-Up, his mother elevenderly said, “Threedeloo, threedeloo. Try three be back by next Threesday.” Then she cheered, “Three, five, seven, nine. Who do we apprecinine? Jack, Jack, yay!”

Jack set fifth and soon met a man wearing a four-piece suit and a threepee. Fifthrightly Jack asked the man, “I’m a Califivenian. Are you two three?”

“Cerelevenly,” replied the man, offiving the high six. “Anytwo five elevennis?”

“Not threeday,” answered Jack inelevently. “But can you help me three locnine my fivetune?”

“Sure,” said the man. “Let me sell you these twoderful beans.”

Jack’s inthreeition told him that the man was a three-faced triple-crosser. Elevensely Jack shouted, “I’m not behind the nine ball. I’m a college gradunine, and I know what rights our fivefathers crenined in the Constithreetion. Now let’s get down three baseven about these beans.”

The man tripled over with laughter. “Now hold on a third,” he responded. “There’s no need three make such a three-do about these beans. If you twot, I’ll give them three you.”

Well, there’s no need three elabornine on the rest of the tale. Jack oned in on the giant and two the battle for the golden eggs. His mother and he lived happily fivever after — and so on, and so on, and so fifth.

(YouTube link)

© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

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This article is republished with permission from the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

So when her young son came home from school and said that his teacher told the class that it was impossible to count to a million, she took action. After all, it was 1968. First you get kids thinking they can’t count ridiculously high for no reason, then you have kids getting ridiculously high for no reason, then you have the collapse of Western Society.

Well, Marva Drew wasn’t going to stand for it. She was going to show the world that you COULD count from one to one million. But Guinness World Records usually likes some sort of proof, and “I promise I thought them all in my head” wasn’t going to fly with those eggheads. So, like anyone else in the 1960s on a mission, Marva sat down at her typewriter and began typing. She typed for the next SIX YEARS. The result was almost 2,500 pages full of numbers.

Link | Photo by Flickr user mpclemens used under Creative Commons license

January 2, 2010 is a palindrome, at least in countries that write the date in the mm/dd/yyyy form. Personally, I’ve been writing the date without initial zeros, like 12-3-9, but that’s just me. Who notices such things? Professor Aziz Inan of the University of Portland, who teaches electrical engineering but loves math puzzles.

A native of Istanbul, Inan creates math puzzles in his spare time. So it was a big day when he looked closely at his own name and saw a pattern. His first and last names are both vowel-consonant-vowel-same consonant — and, if you write the names in all caps, switch the vowels and turn one set of consonants 90 degrees, both names are the same.

“I jumped in my chair,” he said of the day two years ago when the connection hit him. “My parents had no idea.”

The next palindromic date will be November 2, 2011. Link -via J-Walk Blog

Love, love, love this "cat by the numbers" ad, illustrated by Guillermo Valencia for the pet food manufacturer Whiskas. I think I’ve just spotted my cat doing #10!

This number [represented by the symbol at left] is also known as the golden section and is commonly accepted as an expression that describes the perfect proportions in architecture or anatomy. In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is a mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887.

Of course, not all of them are this serious, but they are fascinating. Link -via the Presurfer