Our Friend: The Twelve!

As I’m sure you’re all aware, today is a pretty unique day.  Anyone who has ever “made a wish” when the clock read 11:11 is in for a real treat.  A little after noon today, when us working stiffs are enjoying our lunches and our college friends are just starting to wake up, we’ll be able to look at the clock and experience 12:12 on 12/12/12.

Anyone old enough to read this is unlikely to still be around the next time something like this occurs; it will not happen again for another 88 years, 19 days, 12 hours and 48 minutes (at 1:01 on January 1st, 2101).

In honor of this otherwise ordinary Wednesday, here are some fun facts about our good friend, the number twelve!

• 12th Man is a football term made popular by Texas A&M and embraced by other professional teams such as the Seattle Seahawks .  The 12th Man refers to the impact that the support of the home crowd can have on the game.
  • The history of the 12th Man at Texas A&M stems from a 1922 game where a fan was asked to suit up for the game when the team was low on reserves.  Since then, the #12 jersey has been reserved for a walk-on player who represents this tradition.

• Atomic number of Magnesium, the 4th most common element on Earth that makes up 13% of our planet’s mass.
• Number of studio albums released by The Beatles.
• Largest number in the English language that can be spoken in just one syllable.
• ’12 – A leap year in every calendar year (1812, 1912, 2012, etc.).
• Number of ribs in the human body.
• Number of “drummers drumming” in the classic Christmas song.
• 12 is one of only two sublime numbers.  For all the math/number theory nerds out there, a sublime number is a positive integer that can be divided into a perfect number of positive integers (including itself) and whose positive divisors also add up to another perfect number.  Super nerdy I admit…but the point is that it is only 1 of 2.  The only other sublime number is:

(2¹²⁶)(2⁶¹ − 1)(2³¹ − 1)(2¹⁹ − 1)(2⁷ − 1)(2⁵ − 1)(2³ − 1)

• Retired jersey number of baseball greats Wade Boggs (Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays) & Roberto Alomar (Toronto Blue Jays), football legends Joe Namath (New York  Jets) and Jim Kelly (Buffalo Bills), and NBA star John Stockton (Utah Jazz).
• Twelve, the name of the shapeshifting character with the ability to mimic an opponents moves, from one of the greatest video game franchises of all time: Street Fighter.
  

  Street Fighter: One of the truly great accomplishments of our generation

• Number of frames in a bowling game; 12 strikes in a row gives the bowler a score of 300, a perfect game.
• Number of citizens that traditionally serve on the jury of a criminal case.  Henry Fonda portrayed the unforgettable Juror #8 in the iconic 1957 film, Twelve Angry Men.
• Number of pence in a shilling.
• Number of Knights at King Arthur’s Round Table.
• 1812 – Napoleon authorizes the use of Mesures usuelles, the basis of the Metric System(Feb. 12), Louisiana joins the United States as the 18th state (Apr. 30), and the first volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is published (Dec. 20)
  • 1812 also brought the births of Charles Dickens (Feb. 7) and Robert Browning (May 7) and the deaths of Sacagawea (Dec. 20).
• 1912 – Republic of China is formed (Jan. 1), Girl Scouts are founded by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Georgia (Mar. 12), and the Titanic sinks in the Atlantic Ocean (Apr. 15)
  • Notable births include Jackson Pollock (Jan. 28), Eva Braun (Feb. 6), and Gene Kelly (Aug. 23)
  • Notable deaths include Clara Barton (Apr. 12) and Isidor Straus, owner of Macy’s (Apr. 15)
• 2012 – Brett writes the greatest blog post ever written (Dec. 12)
  • 2012 also saw the deaths of Whitney Houston (Feb. 11), Davy Jones (Feb. 29), Dick Clark (Apr. 18), Ray Bradbury (Jun. 5), Rodney King (Jun. 17), Ernest Borgnine (Jul. 8), Gore Vidal (Jul. 31), Neil Armstrong (Aug. 25), and Michael Clark Duncan (Sep. 3)

Got any other fun facts about our friend, the number twelve? Drop them into the comments!