August 2nd, the 214th day of the year 2007, with only 151 days remaining . 151 is one of five palindrome primes in the 100-199 range, 101, 131, 151, and 181.

214 is twice 107 which is both a twin prime and a sexy prime, and of course veterans are all familiar with the form DD214 (freedom) and August 2nd is the first day the US Government committed the "Sin of David" by enumerating the people. The first US census began on this day in 1790.

The string 214 first appears in the decimal expansion of Pi beginning at the 102nd decimal place.

It is also the day Lazare Carnot died, 1823. I was just writing about the "geometry of position" as the early study of topology and projective geometry was called, and that is the title of Carnot's greatest work in math (he was also a politician, he is called the "organizer of victory" in the French Revolutionary wars, and he did some important work in energy of inelastic collisions) Carnot's book also offered some insight into the idea of the geometric meaning of negative solutions to algebraic equations... Bill Hickok died on this day too, 1876, shot in the back while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, in the Dakota territory. The hand he held, two pair, aces and eights, is now called a dead-man's hand. If I did the arithmetic right, there are 1584 distinct hands with a pair of aces and a pair of eights and something else, so the probability you draw one is only about .0006 in any five card hand... of course if you have played over 1640 hands of poker, you are at that 50/50 point,,,,, might not want to sit with your back to the door as Wild Bill did.

Bill's murderer was "the coward Jack McCall" as Wild Bill's historians have dubbed him, although in real life he was known as "crooked nose" Jack McCall. Jack was tried twice for the murder. The first time was by a ad hoc court of miners (deadwood was in Indian territory so justice had its own rich flavor there). Jack claimed he killed Bill to avenge the death of his two brothers that Bill had killed a few years previously. As a result he was found not guilty. This lead one newspaper from the area to report, "Should it ever be our misfortune to kill a man, ... we would simply ask that our trial may take place in some of the mining camps of these hills"

As it turns out, Jack's crooked nose may have been growing that day, since he actually had been raised in Kentucky with three sisters, and had no brothers. Eventually his bragging about the event led to a second trial in Yankton (honest) where he was found guilty, and hanged, making him the first person executed in the Dakota territory.

The real reason for Hickok's murder may have been an act of generosity. It appears that on the evening before the murder, Hickok had cleaned Jack's bankroll and flipped him "money for breakfast."

And of course, this was the day the famous 1937 Marijuana tax went into effect. $1 a year for anyone who uses or trades in the product.... honest.... NO, REALLY, I'm not fooling.