Isaac Newton spent an unconscionable amount of time, by our standards, messing about with astrology and numerology
One of the aspects of character encoding and standardization that seems to have an unholy fascination for people is its numerical aspect. It starts with the catalog number for 10646, which was deliberately jiggered to incorporate the number 646, which is the catalog number for the 7-bit standards. It continues with the desire to see certain characters are specific code locations (for example the byte order mark) and continues with the never-ending stream of (re-)encoding forms.
It's just human nature, I guess.
A./
