Seal of Pas

Gerry Quinn · 28 Oct 2011, 15:07 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:07:20 +0100
Subject: (urth) Seal of Pas
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W17A419E8EF0B42F4E4843CCFD30 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W17A419E8EF0B42F4E4843CCFD30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E88D3E82FDBA4F87AB682AD83F3534A9@Rover>



From: Lee Berman 

> > > Gerry Quinn: Bah, it?s just a credit card type number.  The only point is it has low entropy, 
> > > but it doesn?t encode anything.  Stop thinking everything is overloaded with significance
 
> > Marc Aramini: After messing with it for a while, it very well might be something of that sort.

> I don't think failure to solve is good enough evidence to dismiss this mystery. Not this one. The 
> numbers are given to us right in the text in a unique arrangement and Silk makes the sign of addition 
> over them. Where else does Wolfe do something like this? How could it not be significant?  

How could they *not* be in a unique arrangement?  And Silk would have done the same regardless of the numbers.

>From a naturalistic perspective, the numbers shouldn?t have any significance that we would understand in the story: they should encode the contents and/or date of storage, serial numbers etc.   Random numbers would not look realistic in such a context, so Wolfe doesn?t use them ? he uses numbers that look compatible with such a meaning.

If they have a deeper significance, it is a game that Wolfe is playing with his readers, and he hasn?t set it up very well.  

- Gerry Quinn


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