Numbers exert a strong gravitational pull on superstition, as everyone knows. Some buildings skip a 13th floor. The Chinese don’t like the number 4 because it sounds too much like their word for ‘death’. They also consider the number 250 to be an insult, because in Mandarin it’s pronounced the same as ‘imbecile’. Christians don’t care for 666, which John the Apostle said was ‘the number of the beast’, aka the Antichrist. In Afghanistan, the number 39 means ‘dead cow’, but also ‘pimp’—hey, don’t look at me, look at Afghanistan. If you walk 10,000 steps a day you will live