Interesting Facts

Still around... no sign of Vinny yet. I thought I'd take this time to tell you some interesting things I've learned this week.

• Only 5% of babies are born on their due date.
  
• Most first babies are born late. (Damn!)
  
• Before a baby is born, its head drops into the mother's pelvis. This can occur anywhere between several weeks to just before the baby is born. As of my last doctor's appointment, he had not dropped yet.
  
• If I push on my swollen ankle with my finger, it makes a depression that doesn't immediately go away -- kind of like those Swedish memory-foam mattresses they advertise on TV.
  
• The super-duper computer doesn't like it if you try to open more than 128 files at once. Doing so causes your job to crash. In addition (something I figured out a few weeks ago), if your job requires more time than you requested, and the super-duper computer cuts it off, this results in a segfault and core dump. It took me a week to figure this out and after confirming with a colleague, this is indeed a "feature" of this machine (where "feature" really means "error"). They should really tell you these things so you don't spend a week trying to track them down.
  
• Facts about North American telephone area codes:
  
  
  
  • Telephone area codes used to be of the following format: xyz, where x is between 2 and 9, y is either 0 or 1, and z is 1-9 if y is 0, or 2-9 otherwise. In the case of y = 0, the area code was supposed to cover an entire state, whereas if it was a 1, the area code was supposed to cover only a city or part of a state.
    
  • Area codes with the fewest clicks on a rotary phone were assigned to the biggest cities. Thus, Chicago was 312 (6 clicks -- just add up the digits), while Hawaii was given 808 (26 clicks -- the 0 is really ten clicks).
    
  • From 1962 to 1981, only two new area codes were added to the system.
    
  • The proliferation of fax machines and cell phones resulted in the need to abandon this system, which is why today a telephone area code is of the form xyz = [2-9][0-9][0-9]. There are some reserved exchanges that cannot be used for area codes, such as x11, and the numbers 8yy (y= [2-5]) are reserved for future toll-free expansion.
    
  • There are still some area codes left, but not as many as we would like. There are various plans for increasing the number of available telephone numbers, including adding an extra digit to distinguish between United States and Canadian area codes.
    
  • If you're a numbers junkie like me, and you want to read more about the telephone number system, I got all this information from Wikipedia's articles about the North American Numbering Plan.