(urth) Seal of Pas

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
> 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.

It has been a while, but wasn't there just one sequence of numbers
which made up a Seal of Pas? If the sequence doesn't change, then none
of those 3 suggestions would work (serial numbers which don't change
are not useful; it's unlikely that every single chamber would have
been sealed at the same time (especially since a datestamp that big
ought to be accurate down to really small units like nanoseconds) or
would have the same contents).

The Seal is a little frustrating; I had tried looking at it as ASCII
and, I think, an EBCDIC, but nothing popped out.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net/Suzanne%20Delage