Triskaidekaphobia: Fear of the Number 13

Former President Joseph Estrada was known for his fear of the number 13. He is the only person I know that has an irrational fear of this number. What I find interesting about this is that, he was the 13th president of the Philippines. And many are aware of the tragedy that he went through during his political reign. Was being the 13th President a sign of his career downfall? Or that was just a plain coincidence? Hmmm….

Did You Know…

• The fear of number 13 is called triskaidekaphobia and it was derived from treiskaideka, the Greek word for thirteen and phobia.
• There were thirteen people at Christ's Last Supper before his captivity, it is recorder that Christ was crucified on Friday.
• Routine mission to the moon goes drastically wrong on Apollo 13.
• Some hotels skip number thirteen when numbering rooms.
• In Formula 1, there is no car with the number 13.

Are You A Facebook User?

Here in the Philippines, the most popular social network is Friendster. I think I don’t have to elaborate further about this as I’m pretty sure that you’re one of us (Friendster user), too, right? Anyway, in the US, (not necessarily US) or in other countries, most of the people there are using Facebook aside from MySpace to get in touch with their families and friends, as well as, meet other people online.

Did You Know…

Facebook was originally named TheFaceBook and it was developed by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. The first use of the FaceBook was on the Harvard campus and it was limited only to Harvard students. Soon the FaceBook spread like wild fire around the other major U.S. Universities. Mark Zuckerberg dropped the Harvard and pursued his facebook dream to become one of the 4th most-trafficked websites in the world with more than 90 million active users.

The FaceBook website is built on PHP-MySQL technology and it is probably the most popular PHP website ever built. Interesting fact is that the facebook.com domain was purchased for $200,000 and FaceBook has more than 24 million photos uploaded daily.