We living creatures are the mud that gets to sit up and look around at all the other mud. And then we lay back down again. Lucky us; lucky mud.
– Kurt Vonnegut
 Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Credit: Vidiot |
Eleven is an unbalanced number, a prime number we cannot count to on our hands; yet, there is a fractal-like nature to 11, a number whose first digit represents the second digit to the power of 10. The same holds true for single digit numbers multiplied by 11, such as 22, 33, 44… 99. We use a base-10 number system because we have 10 digits on our hands, a society using base-11 would need one extra digit on one hand. They would be asymmetrical beings.
 Kurt Vonnegut Credit: mike dialect |
Such a society, as implausible as it sounds, would fit perfectly in Kurt Vonnegut’s SF universe. In his book Galapagos human survivors of an apocalypse stranded on the island evolve flippers and become aquatic, in Slapstick mutant siblings become super-geniuses through incest (hi ho), in Timequake a temporal hiccup forces everyone to relive the last decade over again exactly as it happened before, in The Sirens of Titan all of human history is the result of alien race’s manipulations to produce a replacement part for a stranded robot, and in Slaughterhouse-Five a WWII soldier becomes unstuck in time, traveling back and forth to points throughout his life, including a point where he is an exhibit in an alien zoo. Vonnegut indisputably wrote science fiction, but took issue with being categorized as such. Still, he praised the genre for bridging the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures:
But listen–about the editors and anthologists and publishers who keep the science-fiction field separate and alive: they are uniformly brilliant and sensitive and well-informed. They are among the precious few Americans in whose minds C.P. Snow’s two cultures sweetly intertwine. They publish so much bad stuff because good stuff is hard to find, and because they feel it is their duty to encourage any writer, no matter how frightful, who has guts enough to include technology in the human equation. Good for them. They want buxom images of the new reality.
Born on 11/11/1922 or 19221111, I’d like to suggest “Powers of Eleven Day” to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s legacy. This coincides perfectly with the fact that 11/11 is also Veterans Day, as Kurt Vonnegut was a WWII veteran who survived the Bombing of Dresden as a POW, and the fact that Veterans Day takes place on the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I, which occured at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.
Fun facts about 11:
 Centered Decagonal Numbers |
 M-Theory |
 Undecagon |
 11-cell hendecachoron |
From School House Rock The Good Eleven by Bob Dorough:
Powers of eleven (via quadibloc) 2 121 3 1331 4 14641 5 161051 6 1771561 7 19487171 8 214358881 9 2357947691 10 2 5937424601 11 28 5311670611 12 313 8428376721 13 3452 2712143931 14 37974 9833583241 15 417724 8169415651 16 4594972 9863572161 17 50544702 8499293771 18 555991731 3492231481 19 6115909044 8414546291 20 6 7274999493 2560009201 21 74 0024994425 8160101211 22 814 0274938683 9761113321 23 8954 3024325523 7372246531 24 98497 3267580761 1094711841 25 1083470 5943388372 2041830251 26 11918176 5377272094 2460132761 27 131099941 9149993036 7061460371 28 1442099361 0649923403 7676064081 29 1 5863092971 7149157441 4436704891 30 17 4494022688 8640731855 8803753801 31 191 9434249577 5048050414 6841291811 32 2111 3776745352 5528554561 5254209921 33 23225 1544198878 0814100176 7796309131 34 255476 6986187658 8955101944 5759400441 35 2810243 6848064247 8506121390 3353404851 36 30912680 5328706726 3567335293 6887453361 37 340039485 8615773989 9240688230 5761986971 38 3740434344 4773513889 1647570536 3381856681
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