5, 7, 501 - A brand new number !!!

Channel No.5 - the biggest selling and most well known perfume brand ever. No.5 dates back to 1920 when "Coco" Channel was tasked with selecting a new fragrance. She had a major affinity with the number 5 and when presented with a selection of 10 glass vials, each with a different fragrance, she choose vial 5 simply because it was her favourite number. She had a habit of presenting her new fashion collections on the 5th day of May (the 5th month) and in keeping with that proposed the the new pefume be also named No. 5. There is a bottle of Channel No.5 sold every 30 seconds.

7 UP . The name of the 'inventor' of 7Up doesn't roll off the tongue easily - Charles Leiper Grigg. Back in the 1920's, this American, worked on developing  soft drinks and flavours for a number of different companies. He developed a drink called 'Howdy' and setup his own company and continued to try and test with a lot of focus on 'lemon and lime flavours'. He eventually came up with "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas" in 1929. But that name didn't have a very good sales ring to it an the story goes that the 7 UP name was selected after having had 6 unsuccesful suggestions and he just settled on the next one up - 7. Another suggestion is that the bottle was 7oz in size and the bubbles went up. Or that it has 7 flavours (their slogan from 2008). It's all a bit of legend really as the real origin of the name is not really known.
The 7Up company was sold in 1978 to Philip Morris, merged with Dr. Pepper in 1988 and then bought over by Cadbury Schweppes in 1995

Levi 501's - We have all had a pair at some stage of the most famous jeans in the world. The brand started way back around 1873 and interestingly were 'invented' not by the man in the brand, Levi Strauss, but by a customer of his  Jacob Davis. Jacob came up with the idea of putting rivets in working trousers to prevent easy ripping. He didn't have the money to pay the patent but Levi Strauss did. They became partners but somehow the Levi name dominated.
Where did the 501 come from? Well, it was nothing more than a lot number allocated to consignments - not a clever branding idea or any clever reference to the jeans themsleves. Somehow it stuck !

0 and 1 - Bits and Bytes

Q - How many bits in a byte ? Read on ..

Computers look like they understand numbers and letters as we know them and type them in but that is not the way computers work. Instead every character it sees is coverted into a combination of just 2 numbers and they are 0 and 1. Some of you may recall from your school days that expressing numbers in just 0 and 1 only is binary code (bi=2).

Our number system uses the 10 numbers 0-9 and is known in maths terms as the decimal system.  Binary, by comparison, uses just 2 numbers 0 and 1 and every number and letter as we know it can be expressed in 0's and 1's. This works perfectly in computers because at their core computers work by a series electronic signals or pulses and only understand 2 instructions - 'on' and 'off'.  Off = 0 and On =1. That's taken some of the mystery out of it !

Without getting into the mathematics of creating binary number let's just look at how the numbers 0-10 look like, expressed in computer binary code:
 

No	In Binary
0	00000000
1	00000001
2	00000010
3	00000011
4	00000100
5	00000101
6	00000110
7	00000111
8	00001000
9	00001001
10	00001010

Likewise for letters - A is expressed as 01000001 for example (see more ) . If you would like to see how a computer sees your name just type it in this text to binary convertor

18 - Voting to Golf to Horses, Pete Wingfield (?) and Vinnie Jones

Q - What's the age of majority in the Isle of Man ? 14, 16, 18 or 21? Read on ....

At 18 we are regarded as being on the threshold of adulthood and is the voting age in many countries - USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, in fact almost all European and Western countries. It is the 'age of majority' that also means we can serve on a jury, open our own bank account, buy alcohol and 'officially' view movies rated 18+. But despite being able to vote at 18 it doesn't automatically follow that one can stand for election - that can be 21 in many countries.
Not all countries have 18 as the 'age of majority'. It is as low as 14 in Albania, American Samoa and The Isle of Man while it is at a high of 21 in some Middle East states like UAE, Egypt and Bahrain as well as Cameroon and Singapore.

A golf course has 18 holes

Australian Rules Football Teams have 18 players

In horseracing the name of a horse cannot exceed 18 letters. Yes there are rules and regulations about the naming of race horses - more

In music there are a number of songs with 18 in the title or lyrics. In 1975 Pete Wingfield had a 'one hit wonder' in the UK and USA with a song called "18 With A Bullet". Just to show that nothing is what it seems the 18 in the title refers to a music chart position and bullet was a term used at the time to describe a song that was selling well and rising up the charts.  Not a classic song but here it is ...

The song did make a return in 1998 when it featured on the soundtrack of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels starring the footballer turned actor Vinnie Jones. The film coincidentally was rated 18+