The Saturday List #512 - Ten reasons why 512 is a magical number

 When I realised what the number in this series of blogs was, I was immediately reminded of my 37 year career in IT. I'm going to go a bit  nerdy on you all today, but 512 is one of those significant numbers in the world of legacy data processing. Although I am dyslexic, I am pretty good at maths. I once got 96% in my O Level mock at FCHS. I was accused of cheating and copying the work of Simon Stebbings, who was sitting in front of me. I had a simple refutation to this heinious charge. How could I have possibly cheated and copied his work, if I got a higher mark. My maths teacher, Mr Small (no not the Mr Man) hated me, but he couldn't refute the logic. In actual fact, I had cheated slightly. Myself and Simon finished at the same time. He then held his paper up to check his answers. I could see them and I realised I'd got one wrong! The funny thing was, so had he, hence the cheating accusation. We both had the same wrong answer (which I copied from him). When this was queried, I simply said "great minds think alike". 

When I started working in IT, I soon realised it was important to learn what key numbers are. The computers I worked on, worked in Octal (Base 8) and Hexadecimal (base 16). A lot of the time, I worked in support, which was all about fixing systems when they went wrong. I'd say 90% of the problems, were caused by systems adding numbers together that were bigger than the space available for the answer, which caused a crash. Numbers that are to a power of 2 were the point at which this happened, so understanding this was an absolute key. 

When I went to Orange Hill, I did an A level in Maths. Our teacher was a certain Mr Rackyliffe. He was brilliant. He took the time to explain to me that if you wanted to succeed in maths, you should learn to enjoy 'doing sums' and see equation solving as simply doing a big, really interesting puzzle. Sadly, he left after a couple of terms, and his replacement was rather uninspiring. These days, I don't get out of bed until I've done the Soduko puzzles in the paper. Strictly speaking, they are not maths but I find the patterns fascinating. 

Anyway, here are ten interesting things about the number 512. 

Power of Two: 512 is equal to 2⁹ (2 raised to the 9th power).
Cube of 8: It is the cube of 8 (8 × 8 × 8 = 512).
Digit Sum: The sum of its digits (5 + 1 + 2) is 8, which is the cube root of 512.
Palindromic Bases: It is a palindrome when written in base 7 (1331₇) and base 15 (242₁₅).
Divisors: It has 10 divisors in total (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and 512).
Disk Sectors: 512 bytes is a traditional and standard size for a single computer disk sector.
Kibibytes: It is exacty half of a kibibyte (1,024 bytes).
VGA Graphics: 512 (2 × 256) is the highest number of glyphs that a VGA character generator can use simultaneously.
Binary Scaling: It represents a classic milestone in binary doubling (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512).
512 is the telephone area code for Austin Texas:  Austin is famous for North America's largest urban bat colony, housing about 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats from March through October at the Congress Avenue Bridge. You may wonder what this fact has to do with my career in IT? Well one of my first jobs was constructing Mini Bat detectors for Queen Mary College. I've taken an interest in Bat colonys ever since.