Arithmancy (was Undecidability (was reasoning))

[psychic_serpent <psychic_serpent@yahoo.com>]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Tim Regan <timregan at m...>" 
<timregan at m...> wrote:
> There was also a lovely thread of arithmancy and related arts 
> running through an audio book I just finished, Umberto 
> Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" (impossible to read - easy to listen 
> to ;-) The main character is convinced he's decoded a secret 
> document from The Knights Templars when his wife, far more 
> effectively, deconstructs the document as a medieval shopping list!
 
Actually, there's a miscalculation in Foucault's Pendulum which 
effectively makes the entire exercise pointless.  Something having 
to do with the Knight's Templar happened in 1344 (don't ask me what--
I read this ages ago) and something happened in 1944, six-hundred 
years later.  The people sniffing out the conspiracy theory figured 
out that the real "big" happening is/was supposed to occur in the 
year 2000, which would wind up being 666 years after the seminal 
event in 1344.  (It frankly doesn't matter what any of these events 
is/was.)  

The only problem with this theory is that the year 2000 is not 666 
years after 1344.  It is 656 years after.  The year 2010 is 666 
years after 1344.  (So the characters' assertion that 2000 is the 
beginning of the new millenium is not the only mathematical error, 
although it is the most prominent one.)  Eco had a little OBO (off 
by one) problem when adding 666 to 1344 (or subtracting 666 from 
2000, depending on what his process was).  It's a fairly common 
error, but it really made me wonder whether book editors are so 
completely right-brained (as in JKR's editors, for instance) that 
they are completely incapable of recognizing mathematical errors 
when they occur.  I loved Eco's "Name of the Rose," which was a 
lovely mystery and an homage to Sherlock Holmes, but now I'm afraid 
to look at it again, for I might find on closer inspection that 
there are miscalculations of some sort in that one, too...

--Barb

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