FIFTEEN LOOKS PECULIAR

One of the things that I have always accepted is the inherent visual excitement of numbers. Which, as it turns out, not everyone can quite grasp. Numbers have colour, shape appeal, and an inherent quantifying beauty. Why, for instance, do the combinations 143 and 153 evoke so much? Largely because of the colour combinations: silverish grey, deep raspberry pink, and a bright near-lemon yellow, versus grey, a vibrantly mature forest green, and that yellow.

Plus four (solid, of a solid and modernistic construction) and five (playful, yet elegant). And count: One less than twelve times twelve or six times twenty four, as opposed to noticeably more than three (!) times fifty.

243 and 247 are beautiful also. Seven is a pale but intense blue.

Counting a cash register presents a kaleidoscope.

Fifty is very nice. Sort of symmetrical.


Some are more fixed than others.

It changes over time.


If you have colours for your numbers, they are not the same as mine, and your aesthetic response will be different also. But if you entirely lack those associations, there may be something wrong with your mind. And I have to wonder how your math and spelling are, because nothing looks right.


243. It's beautiful.


Remarkably, even though I read Chinese, these graphic constructs do not possess mental hues. Probably because while I learned counting and the alphabet while still young and malleable, I did not assay ideographs till several years later. Some of them do have iridescent ghosts -- for the most part when they are yanked from a sentence and the outlined emptiness briefly glows -- but largely, no.



Eight and nine.
Pleasing.


741




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