12 - Earth, Moon and Stars

Q - According to the Christmas Carol what did my true love give to me on the 12th day?  Read on..

12....
....Now there's a number with an endless list ..... it arises in all avenues of everyday life... in religion, law, time, movies, technology ... it mainfests itself everywhere...our lives are, in fact, governed by the number 12
Consider:

12 to start with ....

• 12 Hours in the day
• 12 Months in a Year
• 12 Signs of the Zodiac
• 12 Inches in a foot
• 12 Units make a dozen
• 12 People on a jury
• 12 Days of Christmas
• 12 Tribes of Israel
• 12 Apostles
• 12 Sons of Jacob (in the Bible)
• 12 Olympian Gods in Greek mythology who resided on Mount Olympus
• 12 The number of function (F) keys on a computer keyboard

...12 to end ...

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