Re: Fantasy Cliche: Perfect Rationalists

"Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> appears to have caused the following
letters to be typed in news:deq5ld$eti$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> Karl Johanson <karljohanson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Karl Johanson <karljohanson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> What would be an obvious sign of divine activity?
>
>>> Clear unambiguous messages in the digits of pi. No non-deity has
>>> write access to that number.
>
>> : ) Once you come up with a system of 'decoding' the messages, then
>> every possible message should be in the digits.
>
> I was thinking of Carl Sagan's novel _Contact_, in which it's
> discovered that, fairly close to the beginning of the base-11
> expansion of pi, there's a region of nothing but zeros and ones,
> a regions whose size is a square number, and when those digits
> are arranged in a square, they form an image of a circle.
>
> Yes, I'm aware that the vast majority of real numbers, probably
> including pi, contain, not just the full ASCII text of that novel,
> but also the full DVD encoding of the movie. But not especially
> near their beginning.

Including anything, such as a nonexistent cut of the movie in which Jodie
Foster flashes her breasts, crosses her eyes, and shouts "Booga booga!" in
James Earl Jones' voice.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Take THAT, Daniel Lin, Mark Sadek, James Lin & Christopher Chung!

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Fantasy Cliche: Perfect Rationalists
    ... >> every possible message should be in the digits. ... > are arranged in a square, they form an image of a circle. ... even as I've only seen the movie ... > including pi, contain, not just the full ASCII text of that novel, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.fandom)
  • Re: Hello There?
    ... to base b if each sequence d_1,...,d_k of base-b digits appears ... a little surprising if the decimal expansion didn't contain the message ... The fanciful idea of the novel has it, of course, that certain kinds ...
    (sci.logic)
  • Re: Hello There?
    ... > And didn't Carl Sagan write a bizarre ... > novel in which a circle encoded into ... > the digits of pi was proof of the ...
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  • Re: Fantasy Cliche: Perfect Rationalists
    ... >> Clear unambiguous messages in the digits of pi. ... I was thinking of Carl Sagan's novel _Contact_, ... are arranged in a square, they form an image of a circle. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.fandom)
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