ISO 8601

I am genuinely interested in numbers, and specs. I must be the strange person in other people’s mind, but I am just so excited to see things like numbers. For example:

1. CVC 22651

When travelling in California, I really love the CVC 22651 printed on the TOW AWAY plate, and traced to the following document: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22651.htm

2. ISO 8601

The smart guys want to solve a problem of how to represent date across the world (both west and east and both computer or human). So they invented something like:

2012-08-20T13:09:16+08:00

and they call it ISO 8601 format.

3. RFC 2616

Maybe one of the most important RFC. It uses just 4 digits to express that. If you are curious, it is:

Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.1

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

The RFC has been there for 30 years, so I was pretty shocked to know there did exist an RFC 1: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0001

4. 200030

This is pretty simple: the post code of the area I am moving around. I love the idea of postal code, but the way it is presented in China is not so up-to-date. The postal code of US seems more interesting, for example, 94301, or Singapore, where they assign a post code for every building.

5. Other random numbers

The more universal numbers are most interesting for me. For example, the ISBN numbers (isbn:0375420827 for the Art of travel), the mobile phone numbers (13916146826 for me), or even PNR.

Why I am so interested in these numbers? I am still puzzled and don’t have an answer. Maybe that is the inborn instinct of an engineer?