## 08-08-08

August 8, 2008

Today is a rather special day in the Western calendar: the day on which we needn’t remember whether the dating convention is day-month-year, or month-day-year, or year-month-day.  Today we write them in any order we wish, and all is well.

To celebrate, I list a few interesting properties of the number 8. It is:

• the smallest number of the form $p^3$, where $p$ is prime.
• the sixth Fibonacci number.
• the number of bits in a byte.
• the number of furlongs in a mile.
• the number of known Stern Primes.
• the number of legs on arachnids.
• the number of distinct gluons mediating the strong nuclear force.
• according to some, the number of planets in our solar system.
• in medieval cosmology, the number of celestial spheres between us and the Primum Mobile.
• the atomic number of oxygen.
• the maximum number of electrons in the L shell of an atom.
• the number of Beatitudes.
• the number of notes in an octave.
• the number of maids-a-milking given by my true love.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for some of these.)