Journal Entries
Rumours about Satan's whereabouts (666)
Posted Jun 14, 2000
So that nice fellow John back then in Patmos had some interesting times in that cave. He said something along the lines of the number of the beast, that is 666, and that is derived from the arithmetical values of the letters.
Well, in ancient Greece, letters had numerical values, alpha to theta (A to O^H-)1 to 9 (with an extra letter inserted for 6), iota to pi 10 to 80 (plus an extra for 90), rho 100 etc. That means that any name with a letter after chi (X) was not doomed (?) to be the Antichrist (N.B. not the Antechrist).
Anyway. This is the computer age. The end is nigh. Letters have numerical values all over the world. Let's talk ASCII.
Take the name "BILL GATES" as a *random* example. Take an ASCII table, add the letter numerical values: 66+74+... The result is 663 (you can safely ignore the space). Improvise a little, this very person is William Gates the 3rd, so add the number 3 to 663, and, wow, 666.
You can try the same in your own codepages (I am afraid Unicode encoding would allow only very short names though).
Should I make this into a Guide Entry? 
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Latest reply: Jun 14, 2000
TZOTZIOY
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