Seven used to be the luckiest number. At least that’s the impression I had until recent developments. On numerous occasions I have heard people say ‘lucky seven’ when making references to favorable outcomes. But this year things have become a little different. The Chinese consider eight to be a lucky number and have gone great lengths to prove it. According to this Wikipedia article, Chinese believe that eight is lucky as it sounds like ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’ (in their language of course). I guess you know why Beijing officials want to start Olympics on this date at 8.08pm specifically; neat.

On the other hand, today’s date (2008-08-08) has a nice vibe to it too. You can’t simply ignore the reiterating arrangement in numbers. I guess this happened last year too; but a month and a day earlier (2007.07.07). If you go to the Wikipedia article on number eight, you’ll see there are many facts on this number. I was awestruck to see how many interesting and equally important things have associations to this symmetrical numeral. Just for the sake of completing this post I thought I’ll post the most interesting 8 things on 8 according to the same Wikipedia article mentioned above.

• Eight is the atomic number of Oxygen.
• The maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell is eight.
• In the human adult dentition there are 8 teeth in each quadrant. The 8th tooth is the so called the wisdom tooth.
• There are eight notes in an octatonic scale.
• A byte is eight bits.
• An Eighth is a common measurement of Marijuana, meaning an eighth of an ounce.
• Eight is symbolic for lesbian sexual relations.
• In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path; In Islam, eight Angels carry The Holy Throne of Allah in heavens; In Hinduism, eight is the number of wealth and abundance; In Christianity, eight is the number of Beatitudes.

Image courtesy: Duncan. See 8 on Flickr.

We love long weekends. I thought as my new year note this time I’ll post all the long weekends (imposed to Sri Lanka of course). Some of them are convertibles by adding a leave to the list yourself. Hence the list goes:

Long weekends in 2008 for Sri Lanka

January
12 – 15 (14 Mon Leave): 4 days*
19 – 22 (21 Mon Leave): 4 days*

February
2 – 4: 3 day

March
20 – 23: 4 days

May
17 – 20: 4 days

October
11 – 14 (13 Mon Leave): 4 days*

December
12 – 14: 3 days

* – take leave yourself on the day mentioned within brackets to convert to a long weekend

But why 404? Doesn’t its odd symmetry and appearance make you wonder? Doesn’t it bare the characteristics of a hidden story behind the code? Perhaps there is; or perhaps it could have been just inadvertently coined. I Googled to find out.

According to Room 404 website, the number was named after a room at CERN, where the concepts of the WWW (or Internet in this regard) were originally made. The central database was situated in an office on the fourth floor at CERN which was numbered as Room 404. A request for a file was sent to this room and an operator manually located the file and sent it to the person over the network. If the file could not be located then the request was given the response: “Room 404: file not found”. Read the full story at Room 404 for the fulfillment of inspiration. Sounds convincing isn’t it?

However the 404 Research Lab website page on the History of 404 disagree with the Room 404 story with a quote from someone who has actually been to CERN. According to the quote, there is no Room 404 in CERN – it simply doesn’t exist, and certainly hasn’t been preserved as “the place where the web began”. Awe, disappointing indeed!

As much as the story of Room 404 at CERN sounded persuasive, its integrity is doubtful as it cannot be confirmed. Nevertheless many websites have come up with pretty alternatives to the boring 404 status message. Area 404 has a list of some of the best 404 web pages on the Internet. Even if there is no behind the code story, the inspiration of artists is worth mentioning.