Daily catch-up: More interesting numbers and other Top 10s

Plus electoral reform; Jess Phillips for leader; the lessons of Iraq; and further reading

Thanks to Joe Sarling ‏for this addition to my collection of Genuine Shop Names. This is in Mechelen, Belgium.

• My Top Ten in the Sunday magazine was Interesting Numbers. Of course, there are more. Barry Smith likes 999,999 "because one more makes a million". He also likes ½. "Because ½ plus ½ equals 1. But ½ times ½ equals ¼. How can something times something make something smaller? That doesn't even add up."

He adds:

Musically, 13 really is unlucky because the 13th Floor Elevators, though brilliant IMHO, never had a hit. Janis Joplin, who was going to be their lead singer, joined the 27 club. And Roky Erickson, who was their singer until he went bonkers on acid and made albums about zombies, went bonkers on acid and made albums about zombies. Also, equally brilliant Big Star and Laura Nyro's most renowned records were called 13 and Eli and the 13th Confession respectively, and they were similarly doomed.

Several people, including Mike Martin and Craig McDonald suggested the Hardy-Ramanujan number, 1729, which is the smallest sum of two cubes in two different ways (1+1728; 729+1000). It is the subject of an anecdote about interesting numbers that I think defeats itself because using 1 as a cube is cheating.

Michael Jones nominated 2: "It's so odd it's the only even prime." And Tim Mickleburgh suggested 9¾, the number of the platform from where Harry Potter catches a train.

Best of all though was a nomination from Sean Nee, who has written a book about interesting numbers called Tweets Equal Google Squared. The title is taken from the number of possible different arrangements of 140 characters, which is a googol squared, that is a 1 followed by 200 zeroes. And no, I don't know how many unicode special characters or emojis are included in the calculation – buy the book to find out. He nominates 37 and says:

The least interesting thing about it is that is the most most likely number people will come up with when asked to pick a random number between 0 and 100. More interesting is that it is the intersection of zero and infinity.

If you have a roulette wheel with an infinite number of slots and you are allowed an infinite number of spins, there is a 37 per cent chance (100/e) that your number will come up.

• Nominations are invited for the following Top 10s under construction: Sieges; Backronyms; British Political Eponyms; New Rhyming Slang; Words You Think Come From One Language That Come From Another. Thank you.

• Chuka Umunna and Jonathan Reynolds renewed their appeal for proportional representation yesterday. I'm opposed to it because it gives disproportionate power to small parties. Tony Blair was right in his New Statesman article in 1987 that it is a diversion from what Labour needs to do to win. As John Lloyd's deputy at the New Statesman, I typed up the article from Blair's handwritten copy. Here it is, converted from WordStar by HABit WordStar Converter.

• Great interview with Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, by Owen Jones. For Labour to fail to do everything possible to get elected is "colluding with the Tories", she says. "If I thought that me being leader of the Labour Party would help more people like the Labour Party then yeah I would do that, absolutely."

• David Blair has a good article about the lessons Tony Blair has learnt from Iraq:

Blair once believed that justice must always come before stability. But after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, he has now changed his mind. He still believes that Putin is wrong because unpopular dictators will eventually be overthrown in any event. As he told the committee: “However much we may want to deal with these people, the populations of the countries are not going to put up with it."

But Blair now accepts that removing dictators through revolutionary upheaval - or, implicitly, by Western intervention - is too risky. “If you can get evolutionary change, then get it,” he told the committee. “Evolution is better than revolution.” If he has drawn any lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, then this is it.

• Anti-politics is a paper tiger: Janan Ganesh is good, as usual.

• And this is excellent from Terence Blacker on why people write, and the difference between writing for money and blogging.

• And finally, thanks Moose Allain ‏for this:

"I've just joined Oversharers Anonymous."