10 June: 10

On the 10th day of the month, ten things you might not know about the number 10.

1. 10 is the most commonly used base for numbers, possibly because humans have ten fingers.
2. A collection of ten things is called a decade. The word is most often used in reference to years.
3. The word “decimate”, often used to mean to completely destroy something, actually means to reduce something by a tenth. It originates from Roman times when a punishment for cowardice was to kill one in ten men in a cohort, and a kind of retribution was to kill one in ten men in a village, causing a labour shortage.
4. 10 is the atomic number of neon.
5. 10 is often used as the highest number in a rating – “one a scale of one to ten…” hence “a perfect 10”. 10 was the title of a 1979 film starring Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews and Bo Derek, about a man infatuated with a younger woman, to whom he gave the rating 11 out of 10.
6. There are 10 provinces in Canada and 10 regions in Ghana.
7. Ten Downing Street is the official residence of the UK Prime Minister and is often referred to simply as “Number Ten”. It also gives rise to a bingo calling for the number, referring to it as a “den” – “Maggie’s Den”, “Tony’s Den”, or, at time of writing, “Boris’s Den”.
8. A tetractys is a triangular figure with 10 points – 4 on the bottom row, 3 on the next, then 2 and one at the top. In mathematics it represents 10 as a triangular number. It has also been used as a mystical symbol, in particular by a 6^th century cult which worshipped Pythagoras and his ideas. They used it as the basis for a prayer known as The Mystic Tetrad. In everyday life you may have come across a tectractys as the arrangement of the pins in ten pin bowling, the balls in ten ball pool or the “Christmas Tree” formation in Football.
9. In the Bible, there are ten commandments, ten plagues inflicted on Egypt, and the parable of the ten virgins. The practice of tithing, that is paying a tenth of one’s income to the church also originates here.
10. Ten codes are codes used in radio transmissions, by the police or CB radio enthusiasts to replace common phases in plain speech. Basically 10 followed by another number. The best known ones are probably “10-4” meaning acknowledged or understood, as in “Let them truckers roll, 10-4” from CW McCall’s hit Convoy, which depicts truckers communicating with each other over the radio. 10-20 is “What is your location?” or “Where are you?” sometimes expressed as “What’s your 20?” Some of the others are: 10-1 – poor signal; 10-10 – out of service; 10-13 – adverse weather conditions; and 10-23 – “Have arrived at the scene”.

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Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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