Thirty Seven

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 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

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.

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">

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

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

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.

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.

I had the same reaction!

WHATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT?

Small world

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.

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

Or simply "fact".

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

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

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.

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

37 × 14 = 518

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.

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

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”.

In a row?

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

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

> 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.