Twenty three is the first primary number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to prime numbers. According to the seventeenth century scholar Archbishop Ussher the world was created on October 23rd, 4004 BC. The end of the world, if we are to believe the Mayans, will be December 23rd, 2012. Julius Caesar was reportedly stabbed twenty three times by his assassins, which is the same amount of letters in the Latin alphabet and also the date in April on which our greatest literary canon, William Shakespeare, was born and died. If I was to tell you that it takes twenty three seconds for the blood to circulate around the body; that the axis of Planet Earth is 23.5 degrees and that computers communicate in 2³ bits (bytes) would you start to become a little suspicious? Maybe not. Some of you more illuminated readers will already have noticed that this article appears on page 23 of this magazine. Is this fate – the work of higher forces – or can it be simply explained away as the result of a particularly astute editorial team?
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