From Tedium, January 2:
The number 26, which gets back-burnered compared to numbers with neater divisibility, is an essential digit. And you’re gonna be hearing all about it in 2026.
Today in Tedium: In 2017, Google corporate parent Alphabet founded a holding company called XXVI Holdings, named for the number of letters in the alphabet. (26, for those playing at home.) The goal of the company was to better separate the different companies from one another—meaning that, in a corporate sense, Google is distinct, from, say, Waymo. The ultimate end-user-facing result of this subtle change is that, if you receive a 1099 tax form for revenue received from a Google-owned platform, you’re likely getting it from this seemingly obscure company. But, here’s the spoiler alert: It’s actually from the most common company in the world. It sort of points out the prevalence of 26 as a number in our lives. While Google is the clean, front-facing version of this giant company that is all over you phone (even if you’re an iPhone user), it’s the number 26 doing the dirty work. The number 26 is behind the scenes, but in 2026, it’s gonna be everywhere. And, as today’s Tedium highlights, everyone is going to be holding XXVI this year. — Ernie @ Tedium“For obvious reasons, tₒ shall be called ‘doomsday,’ since it is on that date, t = tₒ, that N goes to infinity and that the clever population annihilates itself.”
— A passage from “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” an article published by Heinz von Foerster in 1960. Unlike most predictions about the end of the world, von Foerster, considered a key early figure in cybernetics, made his prediction in Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (He and his colleagues also developed an equation for it, which one guesses his doomsday-predicting peers did not.) One silver lining, per von Foerster? We have control over the outcome. “Since today man’s environment becomes less and less influenced by ‘natural forces’ and is more and more defined by social forces determined by man, he himself can take control over his fate in this matter, as well as he has done in almost all areas of life where the activity of the individual has influenced his own kind,” he writes. Optimistic stuff....
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