Friday, March 09, 2007

333 is Attractive

I’ve had my snack of stick pretzels and water. My hair is dirty (I’ll wash it tomorrow.) I’m wearing an orange t-shirt and black shorts to bed (very Halloween colors.)

I placed a BN order, among other things, I ordered the hot new Rhonda Byrne book The Secret. I ordered it and didn’t even see her on Oprah. So there. Supposedly The Secret is based of the principle of attraction. People who put out good thoughts, receive back from the Universe. Something like that. I’ll let you know more after it arrives and I’ve read it.
I looked it up on the Internet and apparently some people are calling this thing “cultish.” It doesn’t sound like the definition of a cult. What’s wrong with putting out positive energy? Seeing the glass half full. Looking on the bright side of life. Being happy with the green grass on your own side of the fence. Letting a smile be your umbrella.
I guess I’d rather pay for a book like that, than pay money to a TV preacher who threatens that God will call him home if he doesn’t raise X number of dollars by such-and-such a date. Don’t the evangelicals preach that if you give them, say, one thousand dollars that the Lord will repay you sevenfold? Or is it seven times seventy? I get my sevens mixed up.

Isn’t seven a magical number? Asians think the number eight is lucky.

We discussed this awhile back:


Daniel Paul Tammet is a British autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematics problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy.
Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synesthesia, but Tammet is unique in how specific and detailed his mental imagery of numbers is. He claims that in his mind each number, up to 10,000, has its own unique shape and feel, and he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite and "see" results of calculations as landscapes in his mind. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful.
Tammet holds the European record for memorizing and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. This sponsored charity challenge was held in aid of the National Society for Epilepsy (NSE) on “Pi Day,” 14 March 2004 at the Museum of the History of Science,Oxford, UK. The NSE was chosen to benefit from this event because of Daniel's experience with epilepsy as a young child. Professor Allan Snyder at the Australian National University said of Tammet: “Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the ‘Rosetta Stone.’”

6 comments:

Bert Bananas said...

"What’s wrong with putting out positive energy, seeing the glass half full, looking on the bright side of life, being happy with the green grass on your own side of the fence, letting a smile be your umbrella."

Nothing. Good for you for coming from the Dark Side to the Sex Side!

nagual4a said...

60 Minutes just did a story on that Pi guy. I seem to recall he also "smells colors" and sees numbers as if they are paintings...

Anonymous said...

My math teacher often described me as an idiot tramp, is this the same thing?

Anonymous said...

My math teacher often described me as an idiot tramp, is this the same thing?

Roger said...

Let us know what you think of The Secret. It sounds interesting.

In these times, anything that might free individuals is lumped in with "cults."

R

Anonymous said...

Gee, putting forth positive energy sounds vaguely Buddist and Karmic and well common sensical--you need to pay the 20 bucks to use common sense?

Roger, self-help books are rarely about freeing individuals, but rather conforming them into something--you want freeing read the real philosophies and not the Oprah crap.