TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

What? Numerologists aren't scientists?

By TigerHawk at 9/09/2009 07:20:00 AM

Sometimes newspapers explain things to their readers that makes me wonder about my fellow man. From an amusing article about the manifold curiousities that attend today's date, 09/09/09 (emphasis added):

Modern numerologists - who operate outside the realm of real science - believe that mystical significance or vibrations can be assigned to each numeral one through nine, and different combinations of the digits produce tangible results in life depending on their application.

Damn journalists. I suppose next they're going to claim that palm-reading is bullshit.

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5 Comments:

By Anonymous, at Wed Sep 09, 08:54:00 AM:

Cue the Beatles:

Number 9, Number 9, Number 9

Turn me on, dead man

Link, over

By Georg Felis, at Wed Sep 09, 09:15:00 AM:

Was that article on the same page of the paper as the Astrology readings?

By Dawnfire82, at Wed Sep 09, 10:32:00 AM:

If you want to spend a few interesting hours lost in Wikipedia, look into the use of numerology in the texts of ancient religions, including the Torah. Ancient Hebrew used letters to represent numbers (a bit like the Romans) and there is an entire numerological theory system tied to the language.

I don't have time to look it up right this second, but it works something like this: the numbers associated with "man" added to the numbers associated with "woman" equal the numbers associated with "child." The numbers associated with the word "love" equal the numbers of one of the words for "God." And so forth.

When you've cut your teeth on that, you can move on to the Atbash ciphers and other hidden codes. Apparently, there are words in the Torah that are deliberately misspelled; so that when a certain cipher is applied to them they spell an intended second word correctly.

Numerology and cryptography. Fun stuff. And listed on your blog underneath a post about the NSA on 9/9/09.

Coincidence?

Yeah.

By Aegon01, at Wed Sep 09, 06:50:00 PM:

I think I remember The Littlebrook School making a big deal out of the fact that it was 09/09/99 when I visited.

By joated, at Thu Sep 10, 05:34:00 AM:

Let us not forget phrenology!