Seventeen

Jerry Friedman · 27 Mar 2002, 21:57 · from urth-v0203.mbox · original

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: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Seventeen
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 13:57:36 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0203-490 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0203/490.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>=20
> I recently found out that another SF writer is enamored of the number
> seventeen: apparently most of Steven Brust's novels have 17 chapters
> (starting with the first Dragaera novel, which features a society with
> 17 "Houses").

For what looks like the full story on Brust and 17, see=20
<http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/seventeen.html>.

> So what is it about 17 that Wolfe and Brust (and others?) might latch on
> to it?  That it is prime?  Fondness for magazines like Sassy and YM?

In college, I took a course in mathematical logic from Paul Benacerraf.
Whenever he did a numerical example in his lucid and interesting
lectures, he would say something like, "Take an arbitrary number--
seventeen, for instance."  Finally a student asked him why it was
always 17, and he gave a parodic proof that 17 is the most arbitrary
number.  So it shows up in all kinds of strange places.

By the way, I like Steven Brust's sf a lot, even though it's not much
like Wolfe's.

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards=C2=AE
http://movies.yahoo.com/

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net