The Growlery - May the 4s be with you

10:16 pm July 15th, 2008




			The Growlery - May the 4s be with you In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

forthright


	May the 4s be with you
	Amateur (and professional) numerologists take note! Apparently, gas stations around the United States are running out of a vital commodity: the numeral 4. With gas prices in most parts of the US now higher than $4.00 a gallon for the first time, this essential grapheme is in shorter supply than the fossil fuels whose price it indicates, leading to chaos ... CHAOS ... well, okay, to hand-made numerals written on paper. It all sounds like a parody from The Onion or a similar site, although the usual targets are vowels, not numerals: Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia Vowel mining set to peak in 2012 'Wheel of Fortune' contestants hit hard as vowel prices skyrocket But this is no parody (even if it is a fairly lighthearted piece). As a professional numbers guy, and someone interested in writing and literacy in contemporary society, this is fascinating to me. I hadn't thought about it before, but of course a gas station would need more 9s, and more of whatever the dollar amount is per gallon, but numeral packages come with equal numbers of each digit, creating a 'numeral gap' until more numerals can be rounded up and marshalled for the cause. In Canada, a lot of stations switched from plastic numbers to electronic numerals around the time that gas prices hit $1.00 a litre, a level they hit first in 2005 during and after Hurricane Katrina, but during that time you could find paper 1s stuck up all over the place. There the problem was not a lack of the appropriate numeral, but a sort of mini-Y2K problem, with not enough digit spaces for the price. The principle may be different, but the workaround was the same. Okay, so this is not exactly the most important consequence of higher gas prices - not even the numerically most significant. You definitely do see a cultural shock surrounding a new digit at the start of a price (after all, this is one of the reasons why prices end in .99, to avoid reaching the next dollar value). By now Canadians are more or less accustomed to gas over $1.00, and certainly Americans will adjust to $4.00 gas quickly enough - they had better, since $5.00 is just around the corner. It would be interesting to know whether a particular dollar value will correlate with a sudden shift (or rather, an increased rate of change) in consumer behaviour. Alas, probably not. But won't anyone think of those poor unused excess 3s? Tags: language, numerals

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	Comments

	From: atalanta	Date: July 16th, 2008 02:28 am (UTC)		(Link)
	speaking of 4

http://ianqui.blogspot.com/2008/07/feist-now-adapted-for-sesame-street.html

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	From: owldaughter	Date: July 16th, 2008 11:43 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: speaking of 4

You beat me to it!

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	From: glenniebun	Date: July 16th, 2008 02:32 am (UTC)		(Link)

That's actually somewhat surprising. Many gas stations were woefully unprepared to mark $3.00+ gas in the wake of Katrina--some resorting to hand-written threes on sheets of scrap-paper taped up onto the huge signs--and I thought they'd be better prepared for fours. The stations around here certainly seemed better prepared when the fours came in some months ago.

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	From: abstractrx	Date: July 16th, 2008 02:50 am (UTC)		(Link)

I'm not worried about the number three, though. It will still be kept busy by religion, menage novels, and the users of the holy hand grenade.

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	From: circuit_four	Date: July 16th, 2008 03:30 am (UTC)		(Link)

You're not the only one who finds this interesting. OK, maybe not the most pressing issue, but it's total Freakonomics territory -- petty things that bring important but invisible things to light.

Like here's a silly notion that might be up your alley: what's the net cost or benefit each year, in dollars, of using the Hindu-Arabic system as opposed to something else? Which would be more expensive to society at large, a base 2 system or a base 16 system? Which technologies would changes these relative costs?

And that puts me in mind of, say, the revolution in Japanese and Chinese computing accessibility that came from graphical user interfaces. How much do our symbols cost?

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	From: lpetrazickis	Date: July 16th, 2008 06:37 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Base 2 would be very expensive because of the amount of space it uses up. Base 16 has exactly the same benefits but fits in a lot less space. There's a 1:1 relationship between 1 hex digit and 4 bits.

0 = 0000 = 0
1 = 0001 = 1
2 = 0010 = 2
3 = 0011 = 3
4 = 0100 = 4
5 = 0101 = 5
6 = 0110 = 6
7 = 0111 = 7
8 = 1000 = 8
9 = 1001 = 9
A = 1010 = 10
B = 1011 = 11
C = 1100 = 12
D = 1101 = 13
E = 1110 = 14
F = 1111 = 15

As far as ink is concerned, binary uses up the most of any system. Decimal is more compact, and hex is more compact still.

In terms of mental arithmetic, I couldn't say which would be easier.

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	From: circuit_four	Date: July 16th, 2008 06:41 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Ah, but that assumes Hindu-Arabic numerals, ones and zeroes as we know them! A purely binary system, that was the exclusive numerical system in a society, could be written much more efficiently -- with dots, bars, or the like. A simple numeration system of black and white vertical lines for instance, like a UPC code, could be made *very* compact. Meanwhile, decimal presumably requires larger and more distinct text, because ten different but similar-looking numbers require more detail to recognize!

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	From: haggisthesecond	Date: July 16th, 2008 06:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

That is really interesting!

When I was a child, I had a real anxiety about what would happen when gas prices went over $1/L--because I could see that all the gas station signs only had room for 3 plastic digits and I didn't know how they would accommodate another.

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	From: gnomi	Date: July 16th, 2008 12:28 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I've actually seen this phenomenon locally (I live in the Boston, MA, area). One station I saw in my recent travels around had no numeral in the "dollars" position, having just a blank there and the cents-beyond-the-$4 listed on the sign, the implication being that they know we know it's $4+.

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	From: iterum	Date: July 16th, 2008 01:33 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I'd noticed lots of hand-lettered fours on gas stations in eastern Maine (in between all the "for sale" signs on the houses lining route 1), but haven't seen them elsewhere.

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	From: elspeth47	Date: July 18th, 2008 02:54 am (UTC)		(Link)
	gas prices

while I hate filling my car with gas, high prices are beneficial to me -- my husband is a consulting geologist in the petroleum industry and he is BUSY. We are hoping this will let us restore our retirement savings which were decimated when the industry slumped about 10 years ago.

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From: (Anonymous)	Date: July 27th, 2008 06:50 am (UTC)		(Link)
Benford's law here?

I wonder if this is connected to Benford's law...see wikipedia.

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	From: forthright	Date: July 28th, 2008 08:17 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: Benford's law here?

I don't think so - if so, 1 would always be more necessary than 2, wouldn't it? In this case, 3 is now far less necessary than before - few gas prices contain 3s. I suppose the argument could be made that over a long span (30 years) more 1s have been needed than 3s or 4s, but then, that still wouldn't produce a distribution like Benford's law would suggest, because it would matter how long a particular numeral was at the 'head' of gas prices, which is not predictable.

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