Seek and Ye Shall Find:
On the Mystical Properties
of the Number 162
On this date in history:
May 22, 1942: Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski is born in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., to Wanda Kaczynski and her husband Theodore R. Kaczynski, a sausage maker. His mother brings him up reading Scientific American.
From the June 2003 Scientific American:
“Seek and ye shall find.” – Michael Shermer
From my note Mark of April 25, 2003: “Tell me of runes to grave — A. E. Housman, quoted by G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician’s Apology “Here, as examples, are one rune and one bastion…. (illustrations: the Dagaz rune and the Nike bastion of the Acropolis)…. Neither the rune nor the bastion discussed has any apparent connection with the number 162… But seek and ye shall find.” |
Here is a connection to runes:
Mayer, R.M., “Runenstudien,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 21 (1896): pp. 162 – 184.
Here is a connection to Athenian bastions from a UN article on Communist educational theorist Dimitri Glinos:
“Educational problems cannot be scientifically solved by theory and reason alone….” (D. Glinos (1882-1943), Dead but not Buried, Athens, Athina, 1925, p. 162)
“Schools are…. not the first but the last bastion to be taken by… reform….”
“…the University of Athens, a bastion of conservatism and counter-reform….”
I offer the above with tongue in cheek as a demonstration that mystical numerology may have a certain heuristic value overlooked by fanatics of the religion of Scientism such as Shermer.
For a more serious discussion of runes at the Acropolis, see the photo on page 16 of the May 15, 2003, New York Review of Books, illustrating the article “Athens in Wartime,” by Brady Kiesling.