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22, 38, 54, 26, 42, 58, 30, 46, 62

Happy 2010!

Any guesses on the meaning of the sequence of numbers in the title (it is a bit arbitrary)? Leave them in the comments. No prizes but smug self-satisfaction.

5 Responses to “22, 38, 54, 26, 42, 58, 30, 46, 62”

  1. Avatar SomeBeans

    I’ve got as far as working out that the difference between consecutive terms is 16 on the rising and 28 on the falling.

    28 is the length of the lunar month.

    Reply
  2. Avatar Rock Hyrax

    The first day of the year was (as you said) a binary number. Convert to decimal and you get 22.

    Today is 3 days onwards so lets make three triples. Today is the 4th, so add 4 to get the first numbers of the second and third triples and 26 and 30. 2^4 is 16, so add 16 twice to the first number of each triple to get all nine numbers.

    And I doubt that sort of argument will convince anyone any more than it did my boss ten years ago…

    Reply
  3. Avatar Peter Rowlett

    @SomeBeans: Well spotted, but these are coincidental patterns.

    @Rock Hyrax: On the right lines…

    In fact, @Ben_Nuttall on Twitter got it: “Easy! They’re the decimal equivalents of the 9 instances in 2010 when the date will be in binary form – 1st, 10th & 11th!

    16 is caused by 01abcd->10abcd and 10abcd->11abcd being increases of 16. -28 is caused by reversing the two operations above (to give -32) then performing a similar change on the middle digits, giving an increase of 4.

    Reply
  4. Avatar Vincent

    When converted to binary, they can be split into day, month and year (2 digit)

    010110 1 Jan 2010
    100110 10 Jan 2010
    110110 11 Jan 2010
    011010 1 Oct 2010
    101010 10 Oct 2010
    111010 11 Oct 2010
    011110 1 Nov 2010
    101110 10 Nov 2010
    111110 11 Nov 2010

    Those are the only dates in 2010 where the day and month are only 1’s or 0’s.

    Credit to my friend Justin (justinlee.sg)

    Reply

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