6174
Self-taught Indian mathematician D.R. Kaprekar (1905-1986) discovered this curious result in 1955. Take any four-digit number with at least two distinct digits, write the digits first in descending, then in ascending order, and subtract one from the other. Repeat with the resulting number, and again if necessary. Within seven iterations, you’ll always arrive at 6174. For example, start with 8991: 9981 – 1899 = 8082; 8820 – 0288 = 8532; 8532 – 2358 = 6174. (7641 – 1467 = 6174).
Elephants are Red
Isn’t it odd that the right wing is associated with the color red, as in “red states,” when once “red” meant Soviet Communist? (Similarly, the leftist British Labor Party is the red party, while right-wing Conservatives are blue.) In the U.S., red and blue have only recently been adopted. For election night coverage, the networks used to arrive at a formula for assigning colors to political parties so that there would be no perception of favoritism in their color coding. Since 1976, the color of the incumbent party has alternated, and because of this system, Democrats were assigned the color red and Republicans blue five out of six times between 1976 and 1996. But 2000 and 2004 had blue for Democrats and red for Republicans, and this has now stuck with the red state vs. blue state distinction.
V for Geese
Canada Geese (“honkers”) usually fly in a V formation, with the lead bird always female. She creates a turbulent wave that assists the birds behind. The farther back you are in the formation, the less energy you need in the flight, since you benefit from a bit of extra lift from the air flow off the wing of the previous bird. Lead birds rotate to avoid exhaustion. Cranes also fly in V formations.
Whence “Cancer?”
With my lymphoma now in remission, thanks to chemotherapy, I wondered about the word “cancer,” both the disease and the constellation. The constellation’s easy: Its faint stars form an inverted V, kindasorta resembling a crab. (Presumably the same mythical crab that attacked Heracles.) The disease connection seems to have started around 400 BC, when “Father of Medicine” Hippocrates named the hard tumors of what we now know to be cancerous cells “karkinos,” Greek for crab. Why? Perhaps — etymologists can’t be sure — because malignant tumors are typically rock-hard, like the shell of a crab. Nearly five hundred years later, Greco-Roman philosopher Celsus translated “karkinos” into the Latin “cancer,” the word we now use for hundreds of different forms of the crabby disease.
Yreka Bakery
… is no more, having gone out of business in the early 2000s. The lovely palindromic name originated in the 1880s, making the most of the unusual name for Siskyou’s county seat. In his autobiography, Mark Twain claimed that Yreka was named by accident: A bakeshop in the original gold-seekers camp of Thompson’s Dry Diggings had a newly painted canvas sign that was stretched to dry in such a way that the word BAKERY, all but the B, showed through the back in reverse. Someone new to the area read it as YREKA, assumed this was what the settlement was called, and the name stuck. But Mark Twain was as good a leg-puller as anyone. In truth, the name for Mt. Shasta is wáik’a (white mountain) in the Shasta language, transliterated first as Wyreka, with the W dropped later. For what it’s worth, there’s an Elite Tile in San Francisco and Lion Oil in El Dorado, Arkansas, neither palindrom is quite as colorful as the now non-existent bakery.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) has high hopes for 2026. A guy can dream, can’t he?
This article appears in Free Food!.