Do you like numbers?

I do. I think numbers are wonderful; because they provide one of the best frameworks for doing mathematics, an endeavour that is close to my heart*; because they themselves are the prototypical example of a purely imaginary construct which nevertheless models the world remarkably well; because they are rigid, structured, and ordered, but from them spring complexity of such dizzying and breath-taking scope that you cannot help but be awed by it.

More simply, though, I like numbers because I enjoy trivia, and numbers are the source of some easily memorable but often-amusing titbits. Did you know, for instance, that ?  Depending on random chance, I may or may not know that fact as well, because it's randomly generated every time you load this page - go ahead, hit F5 and try it!

The internet magic comes from the following source. An API (or Application Programming Interface) is, simply speaking, a way for different programs or services to talk to one another. So, for instance, the Facebook app on your phone uses the Facebook API to talk to the Facebook servers, and fetch information about who's sleeping with whom.  The good folks over at numbersapi.com spent their time in a FAR more productive pursuit, allowing number-nerds like me to fetch random number-based trivia from pretty much anywhere.

This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I've cobbled together a Twitterbot that tweets random number-based trivia every so often, and will reply to enquiries about numbers with appropriate facts. It deals best with simple, digit-encoded, no-comma representations, but can handle commas, sometimes, and even reasonably sane English-language representations of numbers (though I make no promises!)**. It's at twitter.com/I_Like_Numbers. Please, test away, and let me know it does anything very obviously bad, insane, or wrong. Threatening to stab you would qualify.

(And yes, it does give the "right" answer for 42, but since it's picked at random, you may not get it first time :) )

*Indeed, there's an argument to be made that anything on which you can do mathematics is a number, or is constructed from them - but that's a discussion for another day.

**If you know what a non-natural number is, you should also know enough to know that coding to provide facts for them would be both tedious and (apologies, I didn't even see this one coming) pointless.