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Sillinesses In what order would you naturally list the four suits of a pack of cards? The best-known order I'm aware of is bridge order (alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical, depending on whether you're listing least to most valuable or vice versa); but bridge order has always struck me as inelegant because with two suits of each colour one really ought to alternate them. (Not least because if you plan to use the suit order in an actual hand of cards, you want to be able to see the suit boundaries easily.) My favourite order has always been HCDS, simply because it was the order used in a card trick described in a Johnny Ball book I read when I was a nipper, and I think I subconsciously assumed at the time that if there was a canonical suit ordering he would naturally have used it. HCDS does alternate colours, of course. But I've never noticed anyone else naturally using that order, so I slowly came to the conclusion that there probably wasn't a well known canonical order after all. Yesterday a silly idea occurred to me: I used Google to search for all 24 suit orders as double-quoted strings, in turn, and compared the hit counts. Unsurprisingly, the biggest result was that the two directions of bridge order (CDHS and SHDC) between them had over twice as many hits as all the other 22 searches put together. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that out of the eight orders which alternate suits, my old friend HCDS came top (although not by very much). While I'm posting silly and inconsequential things, a fun thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. You know those price signs you get in supermarkets which advertise (for example) 1.5kg of flour for 41p, and then say ‘(27p per kg)’ so you don't have to work out the overall value for money yourself? It occurred to me that it would be fun to apply that to the clothes section: imagine a pair of shoes, and a price tag saying ‘£35.00 (£17.50 per shoe)’. Or better still, trousers: ‘(£11.00 per leg)’. It wouldn't do to be swindled by pack prices :-) |