h a l f b a k e r yMy hatstand runneth over
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Why Friday the 7th? If we're going to be silly with our thirteens, why not make Friday the 6th special, that way those who want their lives ruled by arbitrary and cyclic numerological coincidences, can have a day when they can relax in the full knowledge that nothing can go wrong in their personal lives on account of the coincidence of two periodic cycles, exactly one week before they have a day of terror brought on by a completely different coincidence of two arbitrarily chosen periodic cycles. Hooray! |
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Actually, if we could inculcate a general superstition that all Fridays are alternately bad luck and good luck, such that those susceptible superstition have a much shorter frequency on which to deal with the stress or elation that comes with impending bad or good luck, depending. Not sure how we'd do that, and that is the problem. |
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We could make it hourly - Odd hours providing good luck, and even ones dishing out bad (Greenwich being the standard, or Zulu luck point, adjusting for British Summer Luck) and the roller-coaster of fortune should be complete. |
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Yes. Perhaps we could layer these luck-time links, too, so that a dedicated superstitious would be able to chart the percentage of luckification of each day, in a redlined calendrical biorhythms style. This allows for days of peak luck, where the superstitious can stride optimistically from their hovels feeling that the world will land in their lap, and trough luck, where the day is ruined even before it begins, due to the wearingness of the horrible foreboding and, of course, all the shades of luck in between. |
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Or we could conceal all knowledge of the calendar from the general populace so that they would have to resort to talking about the future in terms like: "I'll meet up with you in 57 days then". Knowledge of the calendar would be confined to a high priesthood of numerologists and astrologers. If, on a certain day you felt particularly lucky or unlucky, you might bow down before them and ask whether it was Friday 13th or not. They would of course refuse to tell you. |
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This is stupid. EVERYONE knows that the truly lucky day is THURSDAY 7th. |
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The Law of Conservation of Luck would suggest there must be something to balance out Friday 13th. It could be though that all the quanta of luck are concentrated on one, supremely lucky, individual. |
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//luckification// - calum
that's why I love the halfbakery. right there. |
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I rather like the idea of producing a luck map, showing, somewhat like a weather-map might, areas (in red and blue) of good and bad luck. Highly complex fronts might form at locations such as race-tracks and casinos, where luck flips wildly and rapidly between good to bad within very small and tightly defined boundaries, before floating off over the country, dissipating into general swathes of pleasing or displeasing probabilities. |
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Is there a scientific method for measuring luck? |
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Yeah, it's called the bell curve. |
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//Is there a scientific method for measuring luck?// There is, but it's so complicated that almost noone can do the calculations. Best to leave such things to the experts (astrologists and numerologists). |
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If luck is geographical in nature, then it must be quite granular. For every stroke of good luck at a poker table, there is bad luck at the same table. If it were measured by chips in a simple heads up example, the good and bad are equal and opposite, so clearly luck is newtonian in nature. I would like to see a map, but I suspect it's temporal. Have a well balanced non-heptaphobic bun. |
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//I would like to see a map, but I suspect it's temporal.// It would have to be both temporal, and geographic - like the weather. In addition, there ought to be a means by which it attaches, and potentially reacts to individuals. |
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In addition, there's the determination of what is and isn't good or bad luck. A person might lose at a poker table, but during the walk home (because he can no longer afford the cab fare) he might run into the girl of his dreams. Alternately, he might win, and in his enthusiasm, he later stubs his toe on a tableleg, leading to complication with an ingrown toenail which eventally causes his foot to be amputated. |
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I agree, but those scenarios transcend individual luck events and speak to the larger, all-encompassing coincidence force commonly referred to as karma. |
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Karma's just revenge without the satisfaction. |
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I don't think that the mapping of the luck-based scenario you outline would necessarily have to be netted off, [zen], particularly as it is neither temporally nor geographically static. I think that the logical product conclusion of all this is a chunky black rubbery plastic wrist watch with a large colour display (and perhaps 1980s casio calculator watch style-buttons) which would provide the wearer with a shifting map of his immediate and not-so immediate surroundings, showing him the pulsing and fading of luckzones ahead, allowing him to plot the maximally lucky route home. Cracks show up black, obviously. |
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No, [zen_tom], you've got it all backwards.
Odd numbers are the evil, unlucky ones.
Just look at them! Especially 3. You can
never trust 3. |
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I always thought that the devil is six, the devil is six, the devil is six. |
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“And if the Devil is six, then God is seven! Then God is seven! Then God is seven!” |
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[zentom] And there will be a Luck Channel, and Luck forecasting as a career. People will complain about the inaccuracies of the prophets. |
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