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Thirty Seven

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Does anyone else have this experience - The "old" pre-mobile phone style sites that were written without any "mobile experience" in mind are actually the most pleasant and easy to use on a phone (with just some extra zoom needed sometimes) while the mobile version of countless sites are actually the worst? Ironic isn't it.

I mean, HTML was originally invented as an interchange format so that the client could adapt it back into whatever form was suitable.

Not really, the constant zooming is pretty awkward. I know this is the wrong opinion to have on HN, but at least having the content scale to the viewport appropriately is a much nicer experience.

Don’t get me wrong either, this is still a much much better mobile experience than popover garbage and JS dynamic wank.

Agree. The website is not usable with one thumb on mobile.

Maybe language models will bring back the concept of a “user agent”. One could imagine feeding a GPT the source for this page and receiving mobile-friendly source as output.

I’m looking forward to the day where the AI screens all markup rendered in my browser. (Let’s not think of how power inefficient this would be…)

That's certainly one way to add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

I really don’t have this experience. I’d say these old-school sites are _not the worst_, and that _some_ mobile version of some websites manage to do worse. But it’s not a particularly pleasant experience, no

This site is perfectly usable on mobile, without even trying to be "mobile first"-garbage.

It's in part because old displays had a screen resolution 640x480 or 800x600 back in the 90's, only a little more than phone displays (375x667 for something like an iphone SE, but at higher pixel densities).

Since the 90's, desktops went to 1024, 1920 / HD is mainstream now, and 3840 / 4K is on the rise for desktop.

I wish I could, on mobile Firefox, force the viewport or at least easily change it.

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Probably posted because of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98

Which not only links to this website, but also explains the topic in detail. Can highly recommend the channel anyway — especially for the HN crowd.

One or two years ago I've written a small blog post about the number 37.

Yesterday the traffic on that page exploded. I am sure it's related to the Veritasium movie.

This video of Veritasium just came out yesterday. Coincidences !? I THINK NOT XD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98

A ~20 minute video on a particular number cropping up all over the place and not one mention of the frequency illusion / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon feels at least a little bit disingenuous.

I don't doubt that it crops up a lot when people are asked for a random number between 1 and 100 (especially if, as per the video, you ignore 1, 2, 7, 42, 69, 73, and 77, and sometimes 99 and 100), but it's pretty disappointing for a big channel based around science like Veritasium to not even mention that if you became obsessed with and went hunting for special properties of a different number between 1 and 100 you'd almost certainly find them.

"The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO FIVE. The Law of Fives is never wrong. In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: 'I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.'" - Principia Discordia, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia#THE_LAW_OF...

It's not the first time Veritasium's scientific credentials could be questioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

WHATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT?

I had the same reaction!

Small world

A "factoid" is not a "small fact", it is "something that looks like a fact" (cf. 'android' or 'humanoid'). A better word for this kind of small fact would be "factlet".

The other definition of "factoid" (OED's "brief or trivial piece of information, esp. any of a list of such items presented together") is literally the only usage I have encountered for the word in the past 40 years.

Or simply "fact".

Unfortunately, language is fluid and changing. You can try to hang on by your fingernails, or you can go with the flow.

Or fight back! Sometimes successfully. Popular usage is not immune to deliberate attempts to change (or freeze) the language. Prescriptivism is thus a subset of descriptivism.

You factist!

Your entitled to you're own opinion. So if the majority use the language in the wrong way, language itself is the problem?

asteroid - something that looks like a star, rule checks out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/37_(number)

Also, while fooling around with my calculator in school, years ago, I had noticed this pattern:

37 x 3 = 111

37 x 6 = 222

37 x 9 = 333

and so on.

I tried it again just now, all the way up to 37 x 51.

It works perfectly upto 37 x 27 = 999

After that the pattern changes somewhat, but still seems to have some sort of regularity to it.

Also, not 37, but close:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Nine_Steps

That was a novel I enjoyed reading around the same time, in college.

he took two too many steps

Ha ha, clever :)

At that point you’re really just exploring the integer multiples of 111, where it’s perhaps not surprising to find patterns in base 10, since 111 is 10^0+10^1+10^2, and two digit integers you multiply it by are going to be of the form A10^0+B10^1, so the resulting numbers are all going to be A10^0+(A+B)10^1+(A+B)10^2+B10^3. When A+B < 10, that’s going to form a pleasing pattern as you increment through As and Bs.

The pattern should actually be fine up to 37*54 = (37*3)*18 = 1998; it breaks at 37*57 because that’s (37*3)*19 and 1+9 isn’t less than 10.

Similarly interesting patterns will crop up when multiplying 1111 or 11111 by integers - and similarly in other bases as well (identically, in fact - multiples of 0x111 include 0x1221, 0x1332, etc)

So this sort of reduces to ‘I guess It’s funny that 111 is 37*3’.. but on some level, that’s just how numbers work. Every number has a prime factorization. 1111’s prime factors are 11 and 101. 0x111’s prime factors are 0x3, 0x7 and 0xD; 111’s just happen to be 3 and 37.

That said… it turns out 37 crops up as a prime factor of 111, 111111, 111111111, 111111111111… so there’s something a little more going on here…

Although even that is really just because each of those numbers is 111* a number of the form 1001…001001001 - 1000^0+1000^1+…+1000^n

The fact you have to lay it out like you did kind of points towards the pattern being the result of prime factorization not being as evident as you seem to think it is lol

It’s neat that every third multiple of 37 forms a pattern. It’s just not significant.

Every 271st multiple of 41 also forms a nice pattern:

But that somehow doesn’t seem as interesting.

Apologies if I came off as dismissive here - was not my intent at all - there’s obviously tons of fascinating little patterns to dig into here.

Like, factorizing numbers of the form 111…111 is a whole thing…

If there’s a composite number of digits in the number, then you can always factor it into a smaller 11…11 number, and a number consisting of 1s separated by repeating 0s - a 100…00100…001 type number.

And you can do the same to that number if it has a composite number of 1s in it (turns out the 1111 case is just a ‘number with a bunch of ones separated by sequences of no zeroes’).

To be concrete:

   111111111111 (12 1s)
   = 111 * 1001001001 (3 1s, 4 1s)
   = 111 * 1001 * 1000001 (3 1s, 2 1s, 2 1s)

   Or

   = 1111 * 100010001 (4 1s, 3 1s)
   = 11 * 101 * 100010001 (2 1s, 2 1s, 3 1s)

And it’s not a coincidence that the numbers of ones in those factors match the prime factors of 12.

So numbers in this form tend to have factors like 11, 101, and 111… and of course that means they tend to have 37 as a factor as a result. Like, in the above example, it means 100010001 must have 37 as a factor too.

Lot of weird patterns to be found in here, for sure.

Wow, that's one slightly complex sentence. I did a double-take at first, then had to scan the sentence a second time, to figure out what it meant, because of the consecutive, multiple clauses in it.

Such a number of puns not intended originally, but noticed and italicized ;)

Okay, will confess, I added one or two puns after the fact, to enhance the result, like the "one" and "complex" at the top, and the words in this sentence.

Interesting, thanks.

>That said… it turns out 37 crops up as a prime factor of 111, 111111, 111111111, 111111111111… so there’s something a little more going on here…

There sure is. Paging Ramanujan ... :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

37 × 14 = 518

As the other commenter pointed out, it's just multiples of 111. You can find all sorts of patterns playing around with a calculator, I particularly like this one:

    1² = 1
    11² = 121
    111² = 12321
    1111² = 1234321
    ...
    111111111² = 12345678987654321

It works in other number bases too, and once you figure out the math it no longer seems that surprising.

> 1111² = 1234321 ...

Yes, I remember seeing that, though only up to 4 levels or so.

Right, I don't think the number base has much to do with it. These are just properties of numbers. The individual cases may vary per base, that's all.

Mankind constantly analyzes radio waves from outer space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since this analysis started, almost all of the signal sources have been identified. 37 signals, however, remain unexplained.

https://37signals.com/37

The 37 number comes from a single 1993 paper on a search programme for extraterrestrial hydrogen line beacons. Unless you believe that nothing has happened in radioastronomy for the past 31 years, there is no reason that this number remains 37 today. This page is either clueless or firmly tongue-in-cheek.

There is something nice and pure about this site. It is probably just coincidence and random that the number 37 is seen around. Likely something along the lines of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

However none of that matters. What matters is the site is there for all of us to enjoy. It made me smile and I appreciate that.

Folks that are Star Trek geeks are probably familiar with the number 47, which has a storied history, with claims about how it's is, in fact, the most likely to occur random number, etc. etc, coming out from a society at Pomona College http://47.net/47society/

The Star Trek link is because Trek writer Joe Menosky is a Pomona graduate, and started to include references to the number 47 (and the reverse, 74) in his scripts, starting in TNG season 4, and it started to take off amongst the staff. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Memory_Alpha:Projects/4...

The bits of it in TNG were fine. It became rampant and cringey in Voyager.

Definitely. Occasional verbal references were fine, I appreciated more the subtle little visual references in LCARs interfaces etc more that in dialogue.

In the number guessing trick popularised by David Blaine 37 is the most probable answer. 13, I think, is the second probable, which is interestingly 50 minus 37.

https://www.cs4fn.org/mathemagic/streetmagic.php

I’ve seen reference that people tend to bias towards odd numbers for “random” numbers. I wouldn’t be surprised if we consider prime numbers to “be even more randomer”.

Not planning to spiral off into real research to see if odd bias is a real thing or apocrypha, but these were interesting:

https://uxdesign.cc/odd-vs-even-number-psychology-6307047bf5...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/acow6y/ask...

7 is definitely a favorite at least.

> I’ve seen reference that people tend to bias towards odd numbers for “random” numbers.

I can see the logic behind that, but for the trick in question it’s not like they have a choice (emphasis added):

> Ask your friend to quickly think of a two-digit number between 1 and 100, both digits odd and both digits different from each other.

One thing they don’t mention on the page is that after all the constraints, only a fifth of the original hundred are valid choices: 13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, 39, 51, 53, 57, 59, 71, 73, 75, 79, 91, 93, 95, 97. So while on the surface it may seem like you’re guessing one number out of a hundred, you’re guessing one out of twenty.

37 always reminds me of the movie Clerks.

In a row?

Don't forget 23:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma

The creator of the page discussed here did so while working at NCSA on the Mosaic web browser. All you young people can ask ChatGPT what that is. And by the way, at the time he knew very well, tyvm, all the meanings of the word "factoid".

Context: new veritasium video about this

Added Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98

52 and a half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pomQy5JkRAw

To add to the list of coincidences of this popping up now, I will turn 37 this year!

Reminds me of the proof that every number is interesting; it's a fun one to discuss with the kids.

It is a fun proof! I'm trying to understand why it's not actually valid; is the idea similar to the sorites paradox?

It is valid, it is just that the resulting definition of "interesting" is itself uninteresting. The value of a distinguishing function is its ability to split its inputs into various buckets. In this case the "interesting" is just the identity function again; you put in "the set of all numbers" and you get back out "the set of all numbers". While you can create super convoluted function descriptions that map to the identity function, they're really all the same.

To a first approximation, at least. As is always the case in math, you can always split finer, and the field of math readers of HN are most familiar with, computation, you can have visible differences in the performance of one identity function versus another. But broadly speaking from a "conventional" mathematical perspective, they're all the same and uninteresting.

If you also want to get all mathy, the argument does depend on the set of numbers being ordered. It breaks down on numbers that aren't, so, for instance, the proof nominally proves that all integers are interesting (since orders on those exist) but it is invalid on real numbers, complex numbers, and a lot of other things that lack orderings, because there is no first "uninteresting real number".

    Every number’s sacred  
    Every number’s great  
    When a number’s wasted …   
    Nope, won’t eventuate

    ...God needs ev'ry number
    To enumerate!

nice, maybe every number should have it's own similar page

42 is an obvious choice. Picked at random while gazing through the garden window, so claimed the author, be we all know the truth; there are 42 young tableaux of size 3x3, which represent some of the fundamentals of the universe and everything

lol

> nice, maybe every number should have it's own similar page

Exactly, I feel the same. There is a saying that goes "If you look close enough you start making connections in random coincidences" or something.

Holy Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod! I love looking at this site!

It's no 47, but...

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