Block Chop 48: the big four eight...

Wow, today is my 100^th blog post: it’s official!  But only the 48^th of the daily ones, so not really a cause for celebration.  Forty-eight, forty eight, what’s the significance, four tea ate, 4t8, 48.  Buddhism?  Wasn’t it 48 days that Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath the boughs of the boddhi tree meditating before he attained enlightenment? Or was it 49?  Or are historians and theologians in disagreement about the details and the tenuous evidence.

Must I resort to the great source of unreliable information?  Wikipedia, do your thang.  Drat, it turns out the number 48 is pretty boring.  Apparently it is a semi perfect number; no idea what that means.  It’s also a highly composite number, and a highly totient number.  Never in my life have I ever heard or read the word totient before.  It sounds quite cute, but it’s actually not – proof: k is an integer that has more solutions to the equation φ(x) = k than any integer below it (where φ is Euler’s totient function).  See, not cute; just nonsense.  And it’s an arc-cotangent irreducible number... amazing.

That’s all well and good for the mathematicians among us, but doesn’t help me in this morning’s quest for cosmic significance.  Wikipedia also tells us that there were 48 Jewish prophets, and 48 ways of acquiring knowledge of the Torah. Cadmium, nestled on the table of elements between silver and indium, boasts the magic atomic number 48.  Cadmium is in batteries and Cadmium Red paint.  Many threads of this conundrum are being pulled together; I sense an impending convergence or conspiracy.

JS Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier is also known as The Forty-eight, because it comprises 48 pieces, preludes and fugues in each major and minor key.  Well tempered indeed!

Then there is 48 the dialling code for Poland, the 48 contiguous states of the US, and not to mention the Eddie Murphy film 48Hrs.  What could it all mean?  Before we look upon the significance there is one final clue that must not be overlooked; the mysterious disappearing U...  ‘Four’ strangely become ‘forty’.  Where does the ‘u’ go?  U is the chemical symbol for uranium, and also indicates that a film is suitable for all ages.

Let’s look at all the elements.  We have possibly Buddha but probably not; weird number this and weird number that; prophets and ways of acquiring knowledge; Bach and his nicely tuned piano; Poland, most of the USA, and all of Eddie Murphy; and finally the letter u, the 21^st of the English alphabet.  What does this tell us; what could it possibly mean? 

Like all great conspiracies it needs to invoke the vastness of history, and imply a link to the past via a contemporary clandestine power.  Ancient myth should be revealed as gripping truth.  A crackpot way outside credible academia should be recast as a maverick who interprets evidence in new ways that our limited science cannot fathom.  It should turn out that we have been manipulated and lied to all these years in order to hide what essentially unites us all.  They are only concerned for their own survival, and the lives of others are merely pawns in their global chess game.

Oh no, I’ve said too much.  They are coming for me; I hear them knocking next-door.  They will surely find me soon.  I look out the window and see planes flying above, doubtlessly scouting for my location, tracking my IP address and reading my DNA from space.  I am happy to be martyred so that the truth may out.  I have provided all the clues; follow them where they inevitably lead.  Once this blog is posted it will be cached by the search engines, and mirrored throughout the world.  The evidence will be out, and they can’t hide the truth any longer.  Thanks to me, the only one who can lift the veil and see their true face. They’re here, at the window, gosh!