(05-15-2017 01:28 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  Is 18 the magic number? This entire question reveals the borderline autism people in this forum suffer, needing to force symmetry into asymmetric order. There is nothing new in this obsession, and it is ancient applying even to the order of heaven.

In the ancient days the focus on magic numbers on irregular systems centered around the calendar. There was a concept of the perfect calendar, referred to as the perfect Mesopotamian calendar. 365 days plus the occasional leap day to keep the seasons from getting awry led to the composition of various calendars. One such divided the year into 4 sets of 3 months with 30 days in each, with a "leap" day for each solstice, 91 days in each 3 month set, every 1st month of each quarter started on the same day. The 365th was either dispensed with or was a non counting day (I think they actually had a leap week every 5 to 6 years to keep the week and month starting on the same day).

I mention this because such a "perfect" calendar, as must be held in the heavens, makes an appearance in the book of revelation, where 42 months are referred to as 1260 days; all those unseemly extra days vanishing. It of course is a Matrix like dreamscape, just as 18 team conferences with (I guess) Notre Dame being that unseemly 65th.

The real calendar was the one the Romans tinkered with, building on the existing structure and just making the damn thing work with extra days on some months, and February bring irregular. Ever practical and working with the structure as it exists. This Roman effort survives to this day, the perfect calendars all never held.

Conferences are irregular and messy in organization because they are part of the real world. Beauty is not in artificial symmetry, but in the ranging and overlapping fractal world, with patterns of unpredictable randomness. Only madmen demand perfect order. Or those of us with borderline autism.

Until somebody builds a border wall, some of us will keep finding a way to cross it.