Sparrow Ostas
Densmore
October 31, 2013
2nd Block Section Summaries: Pages 14 – 32
Do A Number:
This phrase relates to the sport of boxing. Coaches inform their boxer to hit the opponent x amount of times, which can be any number

Three Sheets to the Wind:
This phrase means “extremely drunk.” This phrase comes from ropes, which all have a different function. The math involved is “sheet” ropes, which control the horizontal movement of the sails. If three sails are loose, then the sailors are extremely drunk.

The Third Degree:
This phrase means that when people got interrogated for their past crimes, they got highly searched (third degree). This phrase includes the math were the members of an old ritual of Freemasonry, which were graded by degrees.

The Fourth Estate:
This phrase means the social ranks of the 1789 Estates-General. The first where the clergy, than the nobles, and finally the bourgeoisie (the wealthiest). But the Fourth Estate was the most influential on ordinary French people – newspapers and reporters.

Fourth Wall:
This phrase is a “wall” that separates a theatrical performance from the audience. But now this term is applies when a character “breaks” the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly.

Five by Five:
This phrase is a term for a NATO radio speak system. Signals are rated by one – five (five being the clearest and most understood signal). It is usually used to indicate that something is understood.

Fifth Columnist:
This phrase originally comes from 1936, Spanish Civil War. Apparently, Nationalist General Emilio Mola claimed that he was going to take over Madrid with the help of the “fifth columnist” of other nationalist sympathizers. His plan was ruined but from then on, the term gained popularity.

Take the Fifth:
This phrase is referred to when you refuse to answer a question where the truth would embarrass you. For the rest of the section, it tells us about the 5th amendment to the US Constitution.

Deep Six:
This phrase means when you are trying to get rid of something in a secretive way. Supposedly, this term comes from earlier centuries, when if anything 36 feet, 11mm under water would not be recovered. Also it mentions a burial at sea.

At Sixes and Sevens:
This phrase refers to confusion or chaos of a person. This phrase comes from a dice game, called hazard, which is when French people place bets, in which five and six are considered the riskiest. When six and five, were translated to English, it was misinterpreted for six and seven.

Seventh Heaven:
This phrase refers at the very height of ecstasy. This comes from religious ideas of heaven are subdivided into seven levels. The seventh level is the highest one, where God has his throne.

One over the Eight:
This phrase refers to someone who is over the threshold of drunkenness. It comes from British military slang, where eight pints of beer was all a man could drink before getting drunk. But drinking “one over the eight”, now would be inadvisable.

Cloud Nine:
This phrase refers to being extremely happy due to love or substance abuse. This comes from the U.S. National Weather Service’s system, which classifies cloud formations. Nine is the highest (reaching up to 40,000 feet)

The Whole Nine Yards:
This phrase means that you is giving your best effort or using all your resources. People are uncertain about the origin but people say it comes from World War 2 when American bombers used 9-yard belts of machine gun ammunition. But another theory is that cement trucks have a capacity of 9 cubic yards.

Police Radio Codes:
This phrase means when police officers communicate by radios by using codes. Charles L. Hopper, invented a system to simplify it with numeric codes. He proposed the 10-code which is eventually dropped. There are many “10-codes” which police officers can understand. Also there are codes that officers can recognize. 10-codes are highly varied throughout states and police forces which made 10-codes be retired.

Dixie:
This phrase is a name for the American Deep South – South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. There states believed in slavery and created the Confederate States of America. The song “Dixie” recall memories of the old South. But the term may be derived from the Mason-Dixon line, which divided free and slave states. The south became known as Dixieland or simply Dixie.

Nineteen to the Dozen:
This phrase refers to talking very fast or being highly energetic. No one knows why this term is used.

23 Skidoo:
This phrase refers to taking the opportunity to leave quickly or being socially or physically compelled to do so. This took place in the US in the 1920s, but “skidoo” is certainly the corruption of “skeddle”, and “23” is unclear. An amusing theory refers to the 23rd street in New York City. When wind blowed down the street it would wreak havoc on women’s skirts making them billow in an unseemly manner. Policemen would “23 skidoo” to voyeurs who hoped to glimpse an ankle. 23 could also mean go away with you.

Forty-Niners:
This phrase refers to thousands of Forty-Niners (as in 1849-ers), that went to Sierra Nevada in 1848 of hoping to find gold. Most people did not find gold but made California the most glamorous state.

77:
This phrase refers to the Swedish term during the World War 2, that guards at the border of neutral Sweden to distinguish native Sweds and others.

86:
This phrase refers to getting rid of, which comes from American restaurants when they were out of stock. Its origin is from section 86 of New York State Liquor Code.

187:
This phrase refers to criminal act of homicide. 187 has become an American slang for murder, especially in major cities. This spread to gangs in the 1990s and songs referred to 187.

411:
This phrase is a telephone number used for dictionary assistance in US and parts of Canada. It is related to 911.

410:
This phrase is a code for marijuana in everyday situations. 420 is an illicit activity code. This comes from when high school students meet at 4:20 pm to smoke. In 2003, California State Senate Bill, clarifies that politically liberal state’s law on medical use of the drug.
November 8, 2013
Numbers in Fiction:
00000:
This is a mysterious number at the heart of Gravity’s Rainbow. This book includes religion, math, quantum physics, conspiracy theories, and pop culture from the 1940s.

Pi: Faith in Chaos:
Max Cohen, a mathematical genius, is obsessed with mathematical patterns and the digits of pi. The film also includes the Golden Spiral, and Kabbalistic gematria.

The Prisoner:
The Prisoner is a popular British TV series in the 1960s. The main character is a former secret agent that is confined in a surreal village and is given the name Number Six.
Se7en:
Se7en is a film in 1995 that stars Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt. They are after a serial killer that kills people that are seen to be committing the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Seven Samurai:
A Japanese film, about seven samurai, brought together to help a village defend bandits. This film has a lot of violence, and was very influential across the nation, and many heroes.

007:
This number is assigned to James Bond, a British secret agent. “00” indicates that Bond is one of the few agents that has a license to kill and the number “7” is mystical and lucky.

8 Mile:
This is a 2002 film starring Eminem, a young man, who lives in Detroit and tries to become a rapper, which has its various racial and class divisions. This film got its name from the 8 Mile Road, one of the major roads in Detroit. This road has always been a road that separates the white from the black.

81/2:
This is a 1963 autobiographical film by the Italian director, Federico Fellini. It follows a struggling director who suffers from a creative block in the middle of making a film and retreats into his memories and dreams. This tittle comes from the number of films Fellini had directed before this one- six full-length films and two short films, plus a film he codirected (counted as a half).

Up to 11:
This is a classic line in the film, this is Spinal Top. A guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off his guitars and amplifiers. This phrase has come to refer simply to taking things to a slightly absurd extremes. Amplifiers have been created that can go “up to 11”.

12 Monkeys:
This film starts Bruce Willis as an inmate of a dystopian prison in a post-apocalyptic future, who is sent back in time to stop the disaster. He meets a mental patient, who is Brad Pitt. No one knows why Gilliam, the director, choose the number 12.

21 Grams:
A 2003 film that follows interweaving plot lines around a fatal soul accident. A human soul weighs about 0.75 ounces, a figure that has more weight as a religious and cultural idea than any sort of scientific data. This number was found by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in Massachusetts in 1907. His experiments were unscientific. His sample size only included six patients.

Catch-22:
This phrase has come to mean a no-win situation created by a circular logic, in a novel by Joseph Heller. This book is set among the U.S. Air Force pilots of the Righting 256th Squadron. This phrase also means that anyone who would fly missions at all must be insane. The choice of 22 is a complex and convoluted story.

The 25th Hour:
A film in 2002 directed by Spike Lee is about a convicted drug dealer and his last day of freedom before going to prison.

The Thirty-Nine Steps:
This is a spy book by John Buchan about a conspiracy to plunge Europe into war and steal British military secrets. Thirty-nine steps often refers to a meeting point, or a mysterious sign. The book title often comes from his daughter counting 39 steps.

42:
The meaning of life, the Universe, and Everything, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. Adams is believed to have chosen the number entirely at random.

The 47 Ronin:
Japan’s best known folk tale – is about 47 samurai whose master, Asano, assaulted an official, Kira Yoshinaka and sentenced to commit honor suicide. The 47 samurai become ronin without a master. They were compelled to avenge Asano.

Hawaii Five-O:
An American cop show, named for the fiftieth state of the Union.

Room 101:
This is the room where dissenters are tortured with their greatest fear in George Orwell’s 1984. George worked for the BBC and is thought to have numbered the room after a hated conference room on the first floor of BBC Broadcasting House.

Les 400 Coups:
Similar to “the third degree”, this phrase means 400 blows. It is the first of the series in which a young boy is harshly judged by society.

Fahrenheit 451:
A Ray Bradbury novel, about a future where all books are burned, is named for the temperature at which paper burns (about 233 Celsius, 451 Fahrenheit).

24601:
A prisoner number in Les Miserables, and has been since used for fictional prisoners. Victor Hugo used this number because it was the date of his conception – 24 June 1801.

November 15, 2013
Numbers in Culture:
1.618 – The Golden Number:
The Golden Number or Ratio has been given great importance in art and design for almost two thousand years but also has mathematical interest too. The Golden Number’s main contribution to aesthetics comes in the form of the Golden Rectangle. The Golden Rectangle is where one side is x times longer than the other. The Golden Rectangle originated in Ancient Egypt, and is important to proportions. The Golden Number is defined by the ratio of two different positive constants. The relationship also extends to geometry as well. The corners of the Golden Rectangle can be joined to form a Golden Spiral.

078-05-1120:
During the 1900s American was still recovering from the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was making the New Deal and including many new programs that may help out America. One of the main programs was Social Security. To help the people understand how it worked, they used an example of someone, which was Mrs. Hilda Whitcher. But people started claiming this number as their own.

The Indiana Pi Bill:
This bill was proposed by Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, an amateur mathematician who was obsessed with squaring the circle. He kept on insisting that he could find the area of a circle by using a straightedge and a set of compasses to construct a square of the same area as the circle and by finding the area of the square one could find the area of a circle. Goodwin thought that pi equaled 3.2 and let Indiana school system use his wrong thesis of copyright.

Numbers Games:
Number games are illegal lotteries that were popular among America’s urban poor from the 1850s to the 1950s. Players would choose three or four numbers between 0 and 999.People thought that in the future you were bound to win eventually, so it was called a “policy”. Number games were popular in black communities and in Harlem. Number games had a great influence throughout the 1900s and the mobs and the racial issues between the whites and the blacks.

Why Buses come in threes:
Bunching is known as buses to lag behind scheduled timetables. Bus companies have invested a lot of money and effort in attempts to alleviate it, and advances in communications technology mean that the worst bunching can now be more easily spotted. A problem is mostly in mathematical in nature and is difficult to eradicate completely. Buses have to work within a much larger organic system of traffic, where they may be forced to keep moving.

555:
This phrase means when television shows make up a fake number but it actually turns out to be a real number. For example, when the hit 867-5309, a song by Tommy Tutone’s, was released, everybody called that number and eventually a plumbing company adopted that number. A Patch of Blue, (1965), established a fake phone number – 555-2638, and from then, multiple other movies used the same number. 555 was chosen because it’s the same number repeatedly and maybe because there was no English place names that combined the letters J, K and L. 555 is only used for fictional use, which was determined by the North American Numbering Plan.

Numbers Stations:
Radio transmissions are broadcasted all other the world, and are usually consisted of long list of numbers that are unspoken. Numbers stations are linked to spying, which was determined by a British DTI spokesman. It is difficult to trace radio listeners and most numbers stations usually broadcast hundreds miles away. Most numbers stations do not get in any trouble but there was a couple that were.

The 23 Enigma:
The number 23 occurs in multiple situations and has great importance in a lot of things. For example, a human has 23 chromosomes, the Earth tilts on an axis of 23.5 degrees, and in the movie, Number 23, Jim Carry is obsessed with the number 23. Some people believe that the number 23 has mystical powers, it originated in ancient text, but also has been released in many novels.

419 Scams:
419 scammers are from Nigeria, they are trying to get money and they need your help, and in return you will get some money, but first off you have to pay some money for bank details. This phrase got its name from after section 419 of the Nigerian penal code. 419 scammers are known as “yahoo boys” who spend hours in Internet cafes. Many yahoo boys are affiliated with gangs.

The Piraha Tribe:
Piraha people live on the banks of the Maiciriver in northwestern Brazil and only number in a few hundred. They do not have no contact with the rest of the world since they were discovered by Brazilian explorerers. Their language is quite simple, which extends to numbers, which include one, two and many. They do not do will with high numbers.

The 10 Percent Myth:
This is a myth which means that humans only use 10 percent of their brain and not the 90 other percent of it. This idea is untrue and scientifically invalid. This phrase has its origins in mainstream science, particularly phrenology. Phrenology is a Victorian pseudoscience that held that brain structure and hence could be determined by measuring the shape of the skull. Another origin is misinterpretation of glial cells. The earliest and best known origin was in a 1944 advertisement for the Pelman Institute, in which millions grew up knowing they only used ten percent of their brain. Most people do underuse their brain.
November 22, 2013
Numbers in Mythology and Religion: