Gear change
6
The number
What do Volkswagen South Africa, the world’s shortest man,
A Streetcar Named Desire, 539 sandcastles, a song credited for its
contribution to rock ‘n roll and Steven Seagal have in common?
The number 60!
By Netanja van der Westhuizen
Back in time
As a key to measuring time, the number sixty
features in a big way in our lives. But did you
know that these measurements stem from the
sexagesimal numeral system, which was
based on the number 60? The ancient
Sumerians, who developed this system
around 2000 BC, passed it onto the
Babylonians and we still use it today
– albeit in a modified form.
The Sumerians and Babylonians were not
alone though. The Chinese sexagenary cycle
even relies on 60. It encompasses a cycle of 60
terms for recording days or years, and appears
in the first Chinese written texts from the late
second millennium BC. Today, the cycle is
used for astrology and fortune telling.
63 ca
rtwhee
ls in 60
second
s ked 206 pizzas ba
in 60 minutes What can you do in 60 seconds?
•
You may think that you can’t achieve
•
a lot in just 60 seconds. Tell that to the
•
Guinness World Record holders who have
•
managed to:
• Complete 63 cartwheels
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Eat 12 marshmallows
Toss 117 pancakes
Perform 120 skips on stilts (!)
Do 76 high fives in sixty seconds
If you have 60 minutes to spare, you may
be inspired by the Guinness World Record
holders who told 549 jokes, did a bicycle
wheelie for more than 13km, moonwalked
5.7km, made 206 pizzas and built 539
sandcastles in an hour.
60
g, in
n, St
sicia
u
m
y
year
ndar
Lege 60 this
d
e
turn
The Chinese sexagenar
y cycle of 60 is used in astrology Happy birthday to you too!
Celebs like Sting, Phil Collins, Jane Seymour, Chris Rea, John Mellencamp, Tommy
Hilfiger, Steven Seagal and Robin Williams all turn 60 this year. Locally, Patricia de Lille,
Sipho Hotstix Mabuse and artist, Willem Boshoff were also born in 1951.
Volkswagen 33
Lifestyle and everything else
The number 60 is also more than just the speed limit on public roads in urban areas:
• Sixty years of marriage counts as a diamond wedding anniversary.
• Sixty is the maximum number of marbles in Chinese Checkers.
• The 60m sprint is a track and field event, usually held indoors. Maurice Green currently
holds the record at a super fast 6.39 seconds.
• Dart players will know that 60 (treble-twenty) is the highest score that can be achieved
with one dart.
• Miss Sixty is an über trendy international fashion brand which made a name for itself with
denims designed specifically for women.
• The number also made it to the small and big screen in 60 Minutes, an investigative
60 is th
e highe
st score
achieve
d by on
e dart A honeycomb’s
outer angles are
60° Thinking mathematically
When it comes to maths and science, 60 seems to be one handy number. Here are some
interesting facts:
• Sixty is the 30th even number.
• In a leap year, 29 February is the 60th day of the year.
• In geometry, it is also the number of seconds in a minute and the number of minutes
in a degree.
• Talking about degrees, a snowflake has six main arms that are 60 degrees apart, and a
honeycomb is a hexagon with outer angles of 60 degrees.
• Sixty palindromic dates will occur in the dd-mm-yyyy format in our millennium. A
palindrome is a sequence of units that are the same whether you read them backward
or forward, e.g. 11/02/2011.
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television show, Sixty Minute Man, a
television drama, 60 Minute Makeover,
a décor show and the movie Gone in
60 Seconds, starring Nicolas Cage and
Angelina Jolie.
• Sixty has also featured in the title of
songs like Razorlight’s ‘60 Thompson’,
Elton John’s classic ‘Sixty Years On’ and
the Dominoes ‘Sixty Minute Man’. The
latter has been celebrated as a recording
that helped to shape rock and roll.
No tall tale
The world’s shortest
man is almost
60cm tall!
Sixty years ago
• Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’, Johnnie Ray and The Four Lads’ ‘Cry’, Mario Lanza’s
‘Be My Love’ and Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-a My House’ provided a soundtrack to
the year’s most memorable events. Kwela music was also becoming popular, and the world
was taking note.
• US DJ Alan Freed started using the term ‘rock and roll’ when playing the ‘new’ music that
was becoming the rage.
• Locally, listeners were tuned into Springbok Radio, the first commercial radio station in
South Africa, which celebrated its first birthday in 1951.
• Tennessee Williams’s adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire premiered 60 years ago,
becoming a critical and box-office smash.
• Now classic films, like An American in Paris (with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron), and the
musical The King and I were also released.
• Cry, The Beloved Country, a film
adaptation of the novel by our very
own Alan Paton also hit the big screen,
starring Sydney Poitier.
• The Dennis the Menace comic strip first
appeared and JD Salinger’s The Catcher
in the Rye and C. S. Lewis’ novel, Prince
Caspian were some of the popular books
published in 1951.
• The launch of Drum magazine made
African history.
rolled The first Beetle
n line tio
uc
off the prod
o ag
s
ar
ye
60
in SA
Drum magazine launched in 1951 °
re 60
e’s
wflak
A sno
ms a
six ar
apart
Other notable moments in 1951:
• Max Theiler, a South African born virologist, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology/
Medicine for developing the yellow fever vaccine.
• The Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercial computer was delivered to the
University of Manchester in the UK. Arguably, the world’s oldest ‘video game’, a chess
programme, was written for this computer, also in 1951.
• Harry Truman, the US president at the time, declared an official end to the war with
Germany.
• Libya became the first African country to gain independence.
A diamond wedding anniversary
marks 60 years of marriage Sources: Wikipedia.com, ScientificAmerican.
com, Wisdomportal.com, Archimedes-lab.org,
Guinnessworldrecords.com, Springbokradio.com,
SAhistory.org.za
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