Ancient culture rambling..Follow

Fixified.

There's an amusing bit in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum where one of the main characters related the height, width, volume, et al of a newspaper booth to the size of the earth, distance to the sun and all sorts of other cosmic "mystic" things. Of course, given that Umberto Eco was the Dan Brown of his day and people walked away from his fictional novels thinking they unlocked the secrets of the Rosicruscians, I'm sure someone now thinks that newspaper booths are the work of the ancient Babylonians.

They're not!!?

FU[b][/b]CK!

He threw open the shutters dramatically and pointed. At the corner of the narrow street and the broad avenue, stood a little wooden kiosk, where, presumably, lottery tickets were sold.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I invite you to go and measure that kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters -- in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words, to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle. The sum of the heights of the two front corners and the two rear corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10H8, which is the formula for naphthalene."

"Fantastic," I said. "You did all these measurements?"

"No," Aglie said. "They were done on another kiosk, by a certain Jean-Pierre Adam. But I would assume that all lottery kiosks have more or less the same dimensions. With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get the number 1314, date of the execution of Jacques de Molay -- a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes devotion to the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? Multiply nine by one hundred and forty six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, by three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14, and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year in which Attalus I, king of Pergamon, joined the anti-Macedonian League. You see?"

-- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum