[Some more ideas to knock around for the holidays]

[first, there's this...]

I found you guys by a rather convoluted, if not entirely random path. I immediately set off in search of 47s, starting with the movie we were watching, *The Shadow*. Sure enough! Alec Baldwin, the title character, has a 47 name. His given name has 4 letters, his family name, 7 letters. Then I realized that my own name (Erin Leonard) follows the same pattern! Incidentally, so does the name Jeff Daniels. I'm sure that many other people, celebrities or no, have such names. I suggest we organize a wholesale search.

Still searching, Erin

Another one!--Bill Clinton

[and]

I have only browsed the number 47 sites for about two hours and I have not come upon one of my favorite connections to the number 47.

Roswell

As an X-file fan we all know 1947 was the year we made contact.

Is the number 47 an another proof of alien involvment with humans?

Mark

[and finally]

on poltergeist the legacy tv show last night...a woman looks at the clock, it is 10:34. then she has a flashback and wakes up on the floor having passed out...the time is 2:47

[A letter from a believer/web surfer]

(Dear 47 people,)

I'm a Pomona Grad (class of 76), and my software consulting business is
47 Software, Inc. I teach computer science at University of
Wisconsin-River Falls and the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul MN,
where I preach the gospel of 47 along with object-oriented design, etc.

Thus, my domain name: "47.com".

You are probably also a Pomona alum. I know of 47 Tec, a game s/w
company in the Bay Area of California. I also know stories about how
Star Trek's current offerings are "pollinated" with the 47 concept: Joe
Menosky, another Pomona alum, is responsible for this.

My software lawyer mentioned the following historical note: the Irish
Republican Army, in its early days, would commit acts of "terrorism" and
leave behind "47" scrawled on a wall, which is a reference to the Great
Potato Famine of 1847. The Pomona College math department introduced me
to the concept of 47 (specifically, Dr. Don Bentley), but I wonder if its
true origins might be with the IRA.

47 Forever!!!

-Eric V. Level
President, 47 Software, Inc.
Stillwater, MN

Guy Lohman writes:

First of all, 47 is not a RANDOM number. It happens to be a prime number!
And if it were random, it wouldn't be so pervasive. So puleeeze don't
call it random!

Secondly, a contribution: According to my old Astrology er Astronomy
text, "An Introduction to Astronomy", by Baker and Fredrick (D. Van
Nostrand Co., Inc., and you can imagine how old it is!) on p. 182,
the "Great Sunspot Group" of April 7, 1947 (yes, that's 4/7/47) was
the largest sunspot group ever recorded. More galactic evidence...

[Guy-- We know that 47 is not technically a "random" number, but the word
"random" serves us well to explain the feeling that 47 gives us.]

Folks-

Today's New York Times reports that in 1993 (the last year for
which data is available), Americans ate 47 pounds of chicken
on average.

These just in from assorted sources...

The CN Tower in Toronto is 447m high, equiv to 147 floors.
It is 47m higher than the Eiffel Tower.
I was just there, I went to Niagara Falls as well, i got to the
edge of the falls at 10:47 (there's a clocktower close by).
On the way out there by bagage receipt slip has 11:47 as the checkin
time. I was working on some equipment up there, it had been reconfigured
before I got there, there's an index value used internally, before I
got there is was set at 545, the first look I took it was set at 547
(it's key to machine operation).

I got back home, first time I went out in the car I parked next to
License Plate ending in 47, bought a coffee etc, change came to $6.47.

So it's been intense and seems to be increasing, for me anyway.
Anyone got any ideas, I'm into discussing it some as well as just
reporting incidents. My theory so far is that we (on this list) are
hitting some specific mental-state that either triggers or is triggered
(is there a difference :-) by the 47s. Similar to the workings of the
I-Ching maybe?

[and]

47s I've seen on TV recently:

A Ford Escort commercial featured a car with the license plate: BLR 347

In the TV movie "Pandora's Clock", one license plate read: 4758KI

(Do we see a pattern here?)

In the movie "Love Affair", the flying time for the Los Angeles leg of
the New York to Sydney flight was 13 hours and 47 minutes.

Also, there's a 47 on one of the license plates seen on the wall in the
background of Caroline's apartment in "Caroline in the City"

[and]

Okay, so I asked a friend of mine to explain a computer programming
concept to me and he said:

"...you could say char a = 47."

I had to do a double take. I later asked him why he chose 47 and he
wasn't sure, except that there was something on his fridge from AG-47
Design and he figured it was from that. Weird.

[end transmission]

Subject: New Here, But With A Sighting

Hello all! I recently found the 47 Society and thought it was rather
interesting that a number should be appearing so often. So, I read a little
of the info on the homepage and decided to subscribe to the mailing list.
I didn't think much about it until just last night while grading homeworks
for the class I TA. There I was, writing down how they should have worked
out one of the problems, when all of a sudden I realized that the answer
was (you guessed it) 47 and then 47 Society immediately came to mind. So,
there's my first sighting of a 47, and only a little while after learning
about it from the web! How about that, huh? 8) That's all for now!
--
. . . . -- James Marshall (CAS) . .
,. -- )-- , , . -- )-- , marshall@astro.umd.edu ., .
' ' http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall
"Equations are living things." .

Do these two things seem unrelated?

They used to be.

Tax Measure 47 in Oregon passed by 47,000 votes.

The world's tiger population is in serious danger of extinction, with the
total population estimated at between 4,400 and 7,700 individuals.

In the same issue of *The Nation* (November 4, 1996) one finds the following
two items:

In a piece by moviemaker Michael Moore: "As I write this I am
sitting in the Mall of America in Minneapolis, No.27 on my forty-seven-city
tour across the country on behalf of my first book, *Downsize This! Random
Threats From and Unarmed American.*

A few pages later, in an advertisement for the magazine itself:
"Smile! You're about to make the future brighter...for friends and
colleagues by giving them a full year of *The Nation* for the holidays: 47
provocative, progressive weekly antidotes to the right-wing ravings they'll
be getting everywhere else." And on the order card below: "Please send 47
issues of *The Nation* to the following people..."

In Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Psycho", immediately before the
famous shower scene, the ill-fated woman, "Marian Crane",
calculates her haul from the robbery she has just made.
Back up 30 seconds from the shower scene and watch her
write:
$40,000
- 700
-------
39,300

She then rips up the paper, flushes it down the toilet and
steps into the shower.

Check out the picture on:
http://subway.k2nesoft.com/index.html
It is of 4 #7 trains of the NYC Subway!