when the numbers work out

[adelaidesean]

Room number in Denver = 2305 = my birthday + all sorts of Robert Anton Wilson references

Visitor badge at NORAD = 66 = one digit short of the Beast + first two digits of my postal address + last two digits of my mobile number

I don't know why stuff like this pleases me so much. I mean, I know it doesn't signify anything real, but still I feel a kind of glee. Could it be a wiring problem? Or is it found art for maths nerds?

(The street address of my home is 3 to the 3rd power = the number of books I have in print as of today.)

Comments

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

In university my student number was 854540 which made the following equation: (17=9+8)x5. This pleased me, ans still does, and I'm not a maths nerd....

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

(17=9+8)x5

You might have to step me through this one. Or is one of those operators wrong?

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

85 divided by 5 = 17
45 divided by 5 = 9
40 divided by 5=8

17 = 8 + 9

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Bravo! That really is cool. And its *so* close to being a palindrome too.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

It occured to me in cataloguing class. Cataloguing class was *REALLY* boring.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I can't begin to imagine. More boring than Accounting I (which I endured in 1987)?

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Possibly. cataloguing is interesting when doing it, but the theory is deadly....

Mind you, Accounting would have killed me.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Accounting, I suspect, is the exact reverse.

I actually did quite well at it. All those numbers--so many possibilities...

[phillberrie.livejournal.com]

I loved the comment about found art :-) and it need not apply only to numbers with external references as I have a similar problem appreciation with 'naturally' occurring palindromes both numerical and textual.

Of the coincidences, I feel the last one is the most disturbing. One would think that this might be hinting that its time to move further up the street ...

23 skidoo.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ha! Indeed. :-) How often do texual palindromes appear in the wild? I'll be looking out for them now...

Next year I expect to celebrate my 30th novel in print at the same time as my 20th anniversary of considering myself a writer and my 10th year since going full-time. It's a shame 2009 doesn't really add up to anything, apart from that. (Or does it?)

[phillberrie.livejournal.com]

2009 doesn't need to add up to anything - literally - as zero is the next number in your descending sequence.

Mind you, if you follow my line of thought, thinking about the number after zero becomes kinda scary.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Good point. Maybe the sequence will bounce back when it hits the X axis.

[tocsin.livejournal.com]

I love s**t like this!

Um. I can't cite any examples of pleasing numbers in my life at the moment though.

Another thing I like to do is acronymise phrases, sentences... What's acronymise, you ask? It's the act of making acronyms, of course. I rarely [never?] get any interesting results from of this activity. I just do it.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! These things should never have a use. There's a whole bunch of word-play in The Changeling that reveals how I spent much of childhood, shuffling consonants and vowels all over the place for the sheer hell of it. I was immensely relieved when my first readers revealed this to be normal behaviour, not the extreme nerdiness I had always imagined it to be.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Whoa. That is just too cool!

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

66 is the last two digits of my birth year.

In fact my birth date is full of 6's(and a 2, 1 and a 9). A friend missed out on being born in the same year on the 6/6/66, and had to do with 7/6/66, which doesn't have the same ring to it.

If I say my birthdate too fast, I have a lisp.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Maybe your friend was born on 6/6/66 as recorded by another time zone? Maybe even at 6.00!

My name has three double-Ls and two double-Us, a fact I've always found secretly amusing. (God, it's all coming out now!)

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

She was born in Australia. If she'd been born in the USA at the equivalent time, she would have been born on 6/6/66.

If you name has three double-Ls and two double-Us, what the hell is your middle name?

You can spell my first name six different ways.....

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

what the hell is your middle name?

Llewellyn. Now you know all my secrets.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Llewellyn was a great Welsh hero. Stood up to the English. It's a good name to have.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the digits in my birth year (1967) add up to my birth day (23), the digits of which add up to my birth month (5), which I also think is kinda neat.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

That is neat.

[chrisbarnes.livejournal.com]

The street address of my home is 3 to the 3rd power = the number of books I have in print as of today.

So when you publish another book, you'll have to move? :-)

I still dimly remember a moment of mathematical revelation when about 3 or 4 years old, when I was playing around with arithmetic and realised that a number could be multiplied with itself to make a new number. I felt like I'd seen through a crack in the world and glimpsed its internal workings.

Hmmm, you've got me thinking about numbers and addresses now... my apartment number, when divided into my street number = a third number whose digits add up to my apartment number.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

I ain't moving for nothing. So I guess I have to cancel those contracts and stop writing. :-)

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Nooooooo!