Skip to main content

Unlucky number 13?

I was walking past a row of houses yesterday which, unusually, were numbered sequentially, because there was no 'other side of the street.' This made it blatantly obvious that the numbering went 11,12,14,15... there was no number 13. I gather this is fairly common now, but I'm not sure why. The house I lived in until age 11 was number 13 (Birch Road, to be precise) and a good time was had by all. As far as I'm aware it is still there and hasn't been struck by lightning.

If superstition really is so important to house buyers, I'm surprised builders get away with the gap. The composer Gustav Mahler famously didn't have a symphony labelled number 9 as he thought this was doomed to be his last symphony - so he went from the eighth to the tenth (admittedly via a piece that had the word 'symphonie' in its title)... and promptly died before he could finish it. There's a distinct suspicion that house number 14 is really number 13 when 13 is missing.

In air travel, where there's more fear, and hence more active superstition, there are examples where an effort has been made to avoid the '14 is really 13' trap. When Terminal 4 at Heathrow was built, it was constructed with gates 12 and 14 at opposite ends of the terminal. This numbering system was undertaken on purpose, so it's not obvious that there is no gate 13.

There are lots of reasons suggested for triskaidekaphobia (the fear of 13), with many ancient associations suggested - but the chances are it's a collection of historical coincidences. Clustering as was described in this post. Whatever the reason, we're stuck with it. There's lots of evidence that 13 is no different from any other number (take a look at the lottery statistics) - but human beings will always seek patterns to such an extent that they see them where they don't exist.

I'm with the bakers whose dozen of 13 was never considered unlucky, but rather as something positive. Why worry about a number, when there's plenty else in the world to get worked up about?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope