Scholtes-Blog

Category: Numbers

  • Twenty-Nine

    Twenty-Nine

    The moon orbits the earth once every 29.5 days. That is why there are about 29 days between full moons. About once a month, the moon’s phase shifts from full to waning to new to waxing and back again. In fact, that’s where the word “month” comes from, from an Old English word mena, meaning “moon.” What’s also…

  • Twenty-Eight

    Twenty-Eight

    28 is a perfect number. In mathematics, a perfect number is a number that is equal to the sum of all of its factors. Think back to your arithmetic days: what are the factors of 28? 1, 2, 4, 7, 14 That’s right. And if you add them all together? 1 + 2 + 4…

  • Twenty-Seven (Guest Post)

    Twenty-Seven (Guest Post)

    This entry in the “Numbers” series was written by guest writer Pete Barry. Pete is the screenwriter of the upcoming film Marian. He is also an award-winning playwright, as well as the other half of the non-award-winning film studio “Pinewood Men.”  Follow his upcoming comedy podcast Mission: Rejected on Twitter and Instagram at @missionrejected. Thanks for giving me the day…

  • Twenty-Six

    Twenty-Six

    Ever hear of gematria? Gematria is a method of assigning numerical value to a Hebrew name, word, or phrase based on its letters. The way it works: each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is assigned a number, as follows: aleph = 1 bet = 2 gimel = 3 And so on. Once you reach 9,…

  • Twenty-Five

    Twenty-Five

    I started collecting coins around 1998. I was a very casual collector, and I still am. Every now and then, I go through the bowl of loose change we keep in our house, and look through every coin to see if there’s one I don’t yet have. I keep them all in Whitman Coin Folders.…

  • Twenty-Four

    Twenty-Four

    Shall we sing a song of sixpence? Have you a pocket full of rye? No matter, there are four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Yes, somebody put 24 birds in a freaking pie. And despite the fact that they’ve been baked in said pie, what happens next? The pie is opened, and the birds begin to sing.…

  • Twenty-Three

    Twenty-Three

    The Flatiron Building is at 23rd Street and Fifth Ave. in New York City. It’s shaped like a triangle, because Broadway cuts through that block at an acute angle. This sets up wind currents all around the building, which can sometimes lead to downdrafts and updrafts. Back at the turn of the 20th century, when…

  • Twenty-Two

    Twenty-Two

    Cervantes wrote a book called Don Quixote. I tried reading it once (in translation), but I couldn’t get far into it. Yet I know all about who Don Quixote was. A man who tilted at windmills. He thought they were giants, but fought the windmills. He had dreams and delusions that he was someone outstanding, and…

  • Twenty-One

    Twenty-One

    In the United States, twenty-one is the gate. The gate that blocks access to the most coveted substance in modern society: alcohol. In the United States, twenty-one symbolizes that gate in at least two ways. There’s the obvious one: you need to be twenty-one years old in order to legally drink. And there’s also the twenty-first amendment to the…

  • Twenty

    Twenty

    This is yet another story from my own life, but despite the way the last few posts have been going, it’s not from when I was twenty. No, I was twenty-five when this happened. When my wife Heather and I were dating, we used to play Twenty Questions a lot. You know, the game where one person…