Complex Numbers

Very Superstitious

Looks like it’s my turn to host your final Summer Sprint of June This week, we’ll be exploring my home island: the Big Island of Hawaii!

I’ll be taking you to visit several special places over the next few days, but before we go, there’s one major rule you should know: “Take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints.” It is a well-known legend that anyone who removes lava rock from the island will be cursed by the guardian goddess, Pele. All manner of ailments and misfortune has befallen those who’ve taken sacred lava rocks off the island, often so disruptive to their lives that they’ve been led to mail their theft back to the island in an attempt to placate the goddess.

In your entry today, write about superstitions, legends, and curses. Are there any legends in your culture that you take to heart? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in Pele’s Curse?




New York City is home to well over 8 million people. This sprawling metropolis - the Platonic ideal of "metropolis" - concentrates that many people into just over 300 square miles, or, if you insist, a bit less than 800 km².

That's a lot of people. And the diversity is stunning - it's the world, concentrated. One particular neighborhood in Queens - called Flushing - is dominated by people of Chinese origin. I mean, everyone knows about Chinatown in Manhattan. Entire movies have been made about the place. It's world-famous. But no one seems to know or care about Flushing, the end of the 7 line, a stop on the LIRR, a few square blocks that might as well be Beijing.

I mention this because Flushing is one of the cheapest places to stay in NYC. While a hotel room in Manhattan could cost upwards of $200 in the off-season, rates in Flushing are pretty close to what you'd find in, say, Paducah, KY. I know this because I've stayed in Paducah, too. And with its proximity to the NYC subway system, one can be in Manhattan in less than an hour. It's also very close to La Guardia airport and the place where the Mets lose. Anyway, point is, all of the hotels in Flushing are owned by people of Chinese origin, and none of them have a fourth floor.

Anyone familiar with Chinese culture will find this unsurprising. As I understand it, the number "four" in Mandarin or Cantonese is very similar to the word "death." I'm no expert in Chinese languages, but this is what I've been told. Consequently, "four" is considered bad luck, so the floors are numbered 1.. 2... 3... 5... like some Monty Python skit.

It's tempting to scoff at this cultural oddity, but hold on a minute - New York is also home to world-famous skyscrapers, buildings containing dozens of floors. And most of them, built and owned and maintained by people of European ancestry, skip the 13th floor.

So, basically, shut up.

The Western superstition surrounding the number 13 is ancient and well-known, though stories of its origin are uncertain. Personally, I think it harks back to the Mesopotamian culture that pretty much kick-started Western civilization. Sumer basically invented civilization, which can be defined as "the art and science of living in cities," and they also had a great influence on how we count. But they positively sucked at fractions, so they used a numbering system that minimized the need for anything that isn't an integer. We still count time in the Sumerian way, with a base-60 division of time. Hours are base-12, while hours themselves are divided into 60 minutes of 60 seconds each. 13 is just out of bounds; it's a prime number with no integer divisors, and it freaked the Sumerians right out.

Hell, the fact that we have special names for "11" and "12" is evidence that we aren't as base-10 as we like to think we are. In a world that made sense, those numbers would be like "oneteen" and "twoteen" or some such. Thirteen is the first "teen" number in English, betraying its origin.

Not as interesting as the association of a certain number with death, perhaps, but the result is the same: an abiding superstition embedded in the entire cultural zeitgeist.

I've gone on about all this because 1) I attended a beer festival earlier, and am still a bit drunk; and 2) it speaks to the very human need for superstition. There are cultural superstitions, and individual ones. For instance, when I gamble, I always wear a Hawaiian shirt. I suppose these days the proper term is Aloha shirt, but mine are actually made in Hawai'i, not Taiwan or Hong Kong. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Point is, if I lose, I switch to a different Hawaiian shirt. It doesn't "work" or "not work;" it's just my thing.

There's no logical reason for this, or for most superstitions for that matter. Hell, I live with several cats, including a black one. Her name is Robin, and she's a good kitty. She crosses my path several times a day, and yet, I don't feel especially unlucky.

What's important is that we acknowledge and try to be understanding of the superstitions of cultures that are not our own. Not because bad things will happen, but just out of courtesy. So yeah, don't take lava rocks from Hawai'i. That culture has suffered enough, what with all the haole invading their islands, despite all the care they took to avoid pissing off Pele. We can't say we're entirely rational; how can we judge another culture's irrationality?

I guess what I'm saying is:

Shaka, brah.