181 - I'm a nerdy dren, am I? 🐎
Hey there, !
Sorry for those who thought that I had called them out personally to all of my followers last week! A few of you got in touch; it's just a coding thing with the emails :D Lovely to hear from you all, as always, though.
Seeing as this is 181, I thought I would share some facts about PALINDROMES because I'm a nerd and I remember weird facts about palindromes.
(Yes, we're at that level of content now...)
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A palindrome is a word, phrase, or sequence of letters / numbers that can be read the same way backwards and forwards
- e.g. Kayak, Racecar, Taco cat, or "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama"
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People tried writing books that were a whole palindrome! - Satire Veritas
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Weird but wonderful poem written by Demetri Martin that was a full palindrome, written for his fractal geometry class - Fractal Geometry
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All the numbers from 11, 11^2, 11^3, 11^4... are palindromes with the form:
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11
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121
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12321
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1234321
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123454321
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... and so forth, and are called Demlo numbers (which are more formally defined in mathematics as a particular type of sequence - OEIS A002477)
- As an aside, the OEIS is the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - which means if you can think of a particular sequence of numbers, it's probably already here! If you have a lazy Sunday, try and pop in a few sequences of numbers to search for, and it'll find something :D
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A Belphegor number (OEIS 232449) is a palindromic number of the form 1(0...)666(0...)1. So, 16661, 1066601, 100666001 etc. - these are named after the demon Belphegor who was one of the seven princes of Hell. Delightfully devilish, Seymour...
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Palindromic dates happen differently across the world depending on system, but there are lots of them; we had one just last year:
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2/2/22 (which technically should be 02/02/2022, but like I said, it depends on the system)
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Using the simple version, our next palindromic date would be 4/2/24, or in the more complicated version we'll have to wait til 03/02/2030 for our next one
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Our last palindromic date in this century will be 29/02/2092...if any of us live that long! (also it's a leap day - spookily cool)
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Haydn wrote a Symphony (No. 47 in G) which was nicknamed 'The Palindrome' because part of the music is written identically, but reversed to make it a palindrome.
Chat soon :)
P.S. Dren is not a word, I know, but I wanted to make it a palindromic title.
P.P.S I have found out that 'dren' is a Polish word for drain. So...yeah. I guess that works?
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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John Wick: Chapter 4 - I loved it. It was so long (3 hours) but it was fantastic. So much love put into the action choreography, freakin' LOVED the Asian representation (Hiroyuki Sanada, Donnie Yen, Rina Sawayama) as well as a FANTASTIC performance from Bill Skarsgard. Keanu killed it (literally), but in this movie definitely had some issues with being a bit too invincible through it all. Still, if you liked any of the previous ones, it's a MAJOR recommend :D
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Steam Up - new boardgame just dropped that's based on YUM CHA it's so cute, it's so lovely - it's absolutely a labor of love and there are so many things RIGHT about this. The gameplay is super simple, but the tactility of the pieces (they look like the real dumplings!) and the fact you can spin a Lazy Susan and there's so many explanations in the book about what is important about Chinese culture, and how they've adapted it into a game - it's perfection. It was Kickstarter'd but I think is getting a retail release - pick it up if you see it!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski - Bartosz does it again with a fantastic long-form piece about how a bicycle works. This was the same guy who broke down how a Mechanical Watch works - just an extremely great explainer dude.
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doors I touched today - I should do this one day - such a weird idea for a dude to document every single door he touched (not much to do in the 90s I guess...) but also weirdly interesting? Some people just like doing stuff because they can (ref. this newsletter).
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LOL verifier - did you actually LOL? Or did you just type it out but had absolutely no change in expression or actually find it funny? Here's a little project someone made to stop yourself from actually typing 'lol' unless you actually laughed out loud.