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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=severiansola@hotmail.com
href="mailto:severiansola@hotmail.com">Lee Berman</A> </DIV></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV>> > > Gerry Quinn: Bah, it’s just a credit card type number.
The only point is it has low entropy, <BR>> > > but it doesn’t encode
anything. Stop thinking everything is overloaded with
significance<BR> <BR>> > Marc Aramini: After messing with it for a
while, it very well might be something of that sort.<BR><BR>> I don't think
failure to solve is good enough evidence to dismiss this mystery. Not this one.
The <BR>> numbers are given to us right in the text in a unique arrangement
and Silk makes the sign of addition <BR>> over them. Where else does Wolfe do
something like this? How could it not be significant? </DIV>
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<DIV>How could they *not* be in a unique arrangement? And Silk would have
done the same regardless of the numbers.</DIV>
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<DIV>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.</DIV>
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<DIV>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. </DIV>
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<DIV>- Gerry Quinn</DIV>
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