Threes speak

Here are a few common threes expressions.

Plumb, level, square

“Third time’s the charm”

Fat, dumb and happy

“Woulda, coulda, shoulda”

Father, son and holy ghost

Faith, hope and charity

“Friends, Romans, Countrymen”  

“Liberty, equality, fraternity”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”

“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” 

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

“pretty good, not bad, I can’t complain”—John Prine from “Pretty Good”

“send lawyers, guns and money”—Warren Zevon from “Lawyers, Guns and Money”

“Exuberance, Raw Power and Punctuality”—This Is Spinal Tap

“The never ending battle for truth, Justice and the American way”

"faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound"—Superman

Swifter, higher, stronger

On your mark, get set, go

They create an appealing pattern and rhythm.  There are many more.

From the book, Threes

The Triple Crown

Baseball has a Triple Crown, which is awarded when one player in either the American League or the National League (or in some rare cases all of Major League Baseball) has the highest batting average, the most home runs and the most runs batted in during a single season.  Before Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown in 2012, Carl Yastremski was the last player to do it 45 years earlier while playing for the Boston Red Sox.  Only 14 players have achieved the feat.  Pitchers also have a triple crown for most wins, best earned run average and most strikeouts in a single season.  Winning the pitching Triple Crown has occurred more often.  Grover Cleveland Alexander did it three times. 

Horseracing has its own Triple Crown, and so does professional surfing, making, then, three Triple Crown awards, including baseball. 

from Threes, Chapter 10, “Threes in Sports and Games”  

The Tipping Point has Three Factors

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference contends the Tipping Point is determined by three factors.  The first, the Law of the Few, identifies three agents of change who are responsible for moving to and across The Tipping Point.  These change agents are connectors or those individuals who are skilled at networking; mavens or those to whom others go for information, and salesmen or those with charisma and personality to persuade others.  The second is the Stickiness Factor, which is determined by the content of the message and how it resonates in a society.  Gladwell’s third factor in reaching the Tipping Point is the Power of Context.  Context is a critical part of any communication that seeks to educate or persuade.  It relies on the local conditions and circumstances for its power. 

from Threes, Chapter 5, “Threes in Psychology and Sociology”  

The Three Domain System

I have noticed more lightening bugs in the evening air than I can remember seeing.  June bugs are out, and cicadas are on the way.  The abundance of life is, I find, always remarkable.  

“Life, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts.  The Linnaean system of classification, with a prescriptive hierarchy of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom, ultimately lumps everything alive into one of three giant groups known as domains.” 

Eukaryotes are the most familiar domain, though perhaps not the most important to the Earth’s overall biosphere.  Eukaryotes include all animals, plants, fungi and many single-celled creatures, all of which are grouped together because they have complex cell nuclei divided into linear chromosomes. 

Then there are the bacteria—familiar as agents of disease, but actually ecologically crucial.  Some feed on dead organic matter.  Some oxidize minerals.  And some photosynthesize, providing a significant fraction (around a quarter) of the world’s oxygen.  Bacteria, rather than having complex nuclei, carry their genes on simple rings of DNA which float inside their cells.          

The third domain of life, the archaea, look, under a microscope, like bacteria.  For that reason, their distinctiveness was recognized only in the 1970s.  Their biochemistry, however, is very different from that of bacteria (they are, for example, the only organisms that give off methane as a waste product), and their separate history seems to stretch back billions of years.      

The Three Domain System was developed by Carl Woese following the identification of archaea as a third domain to classify organisms.  Until the late 1960's when Woese made his discovery, organisms had been classified according to a six kingdom system. Genetic sequencing has given researchers a whole new way of analyzing relationships among organisms and classes.  The current system, the three domain system, combines organisms primarily based on differences in ribosomal RNA structure.  Ribosomal RNA is a molecular building block for ribosomes.  Ribosomes serve to “create” proteins from amino acids.  With Woese’s modern taxonomy in use, organisms are now classified into three domains and six kingdoms that capture the entire web of life in one organic system.

from Threes, Chapter 3, “Threes in Science”