Humans have existed for tens of thousands of years, and have been able to count, at least to some extent, for (probably) most of that time. So with all that experience, particularly once writing was invented in various places and experiences could be widely shared, it’s natural to expect that people would gradually converge on some aspects of the universe that are reliably true.
Take numbers, for example. There have been so many people dealing with so many circumstances that connections between outcomes and numbers must be well known, even if their causes aren’t fully understood. In other words, by now, it must be clear which numbers are lucky.
And it is clear! As everybody knows, 7 is an auspicious number. Except when it’s 3. Or 11. And of course in many parts of Asia it’s 8. You can trace some of the connections between numbers considered lucky in different cultures and their mythologies, but you’re still left wondering which came first, the numbers or the myths. Maybe it’s better to look at the effects of lucky numbers. You know, like Toyota.
Toyota Motors became an independent company on August 28, 1937. The whole enterprise had been founded by Sakichi Toyoda in 1924 when he started a company to manufacture an automatic loom he had invented. The company did pretty well, and in 1933 the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works started to build cars.
The cars were selling pretty well by 1937, and it seemed like a good idea to spin out that operation as its own company. It was still a family-run company, and the obvious choice was to call it something like the “Toyoda Car Company” — after all, the loom company carried the family name Toyoda.
But in the Japanese katakana writing system, there was something special about Toyota that Toyoda lacked — writing Toyota took exactly 8 brush strokes — and 8 was a lucky number! so they went with Toyota.
On a later August 28 — in 1993 — NASA had some luck with the number 243. That was the day the Galileo space probe made its flyby of 243 Ida, an asteroid. To everyone’s surprise, 243 Ida turned out to have a moon. It was the first “asteroid moon” ever discovered.
The asteroid 243 Ida was discovered and named in 1884 by Johann Palisa. He got the name Ida from Greek mythology; Ida was a nymph. But there is also a Mount Ida — actually there are seven Mount Idas — but in ancient Greece there were only two. One is in what’s now Turkey, and the other is in Crete. Legend said that the one in Crete was the home of the Dactyls, a race of magical men who were metalworkers, and had taught humans about numbers. Anyway, when a moon was discovered orbiting 243 Ida, it was named Dactyl.
If the Dactyls really taught humans about numbers, one of their best pupils was Pythagoras. He was real, not mythical, and is the guy behind the Pythagorean theorem, among other things. One of those other things is numerology. Pythagoras came up with a method of assigning numbers to letters, and meanings to those numbers, so that if you convert the letters in your name to numbers and add them up, you get your name number. That’s supposed to tell you something about your personality, traits, and destiny.
It’s slightly complicated, but the name number of 243 Ida (assuming the numbers 243 just stay numbers; Pythagoras wasn’t clear about a situation like that) is 5, and the one for its moon Dactyl is 2. It just so happens that 2 indicates “a partner” that is “cooperative” and “diplomatic.” Sort of like a moon cooperating with the planetoid it orbits, right? And 5 indicates “versatility” and “changeable.” I guess you could say that an irregularly-shaped asteroid that’s about 40 miles long and about 12 miles wide is pretty changeable as it tumbles around in space.
See how well this stuff works? I mean, just think about it; who would ever have bought a Toyoda Corolla or Prius?
