Why are people so goddamn obsessed with numbers. It doesn’t matter what it is, but people will hone in on it.

How big’s your TV? What year is your car? How many sexual partners have you had? How many terabytes of storage space do you have and how many gigabytes of porn?

Then there’s numbers around time and time frames. Everybody knows when it’s time to get off work, or when their 16th, 18th, or 21st birthdays are. Men will dread 40 and doctor’s get excited to sick things in you when that number pops up. Then there’s the 13th of the month, no body notices most of the time but when it happens to fall on the 6th day of the week…

Muslims pray five times a day and get excited about the 6th day of the week, Adventists and Jews are hung up on the 7th, while Mormons in Utah won’t let you buy booze on the 1st. Good Christians go to church every 7 days and the bad ones go twice a year.

Adventists and other literalists believe that a magical guy took 6 days and made the Earth and all that is in it and maybe even the entire universe 6000 – 10,000 years ago, even though by that time the Egyptians had already been enjoying beer for as many as 4000 years.

Which eventually get’s us to an old crazy man on an Greek island who really liked numbers, whether it’s the two witnesses, four horsemen, seven trumpets, or 666 (or was it 616?), or the 144,000.

The proud, religious, and superstitious aren’t the only one’s who are obsessed with numbers. Scientists use them to understand life, the universe, and everything, accountants use them to take care of the finances while production managers use them to ensure the adequate quantity is being produced at a reasonable cost. The big difference between the professional use of numbers when compared to the superstitious use of numbers is that one group is merely quantifying reality, while the other is batshit crazy.