With the publication of my book imminent, I can now reveal for the first time, exclusively to readers of McCabism, that the book contains the clues to buried treasure, estimated by De Beers at a million dollars. If the reader numbers all the words in the book, and then takes the first letter of the prime-numbered words, the resulting string of letters can be transformed by a single mathematical operation into the instructions for finding the buried treasure. The rest I leave up to you. May the best man, or woman, win!
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Million-dollar treasure hunt!
With the publication of my book imminent, I can now reveal for the first time, exclusively to readers of McCabism, that the book contains the clues to buried treasure, estimated by De Beers at a million dollars. If the reader numbers all the words in the book, and then takes the first letter of the prime-numbered words, the resulting string of letters can be transformed by a single mathematical operation into the instructions for finding the buried treasure. The rest I leave up to you. May the best man, or woman, win!
Easy-peasy. Can't wait.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, Gordon. At £95 a ticket it's still a hell of a punt.
ReplyDeleteHey, that's not the spirit of Istanbul 2005, is it? Steve G. would buy one.
ReplyDeleteI'm not very ood at sums. Give us a clue.
ReplyDeleteI've a feeling just before the letters of my post disappeared into the void that the 'good' in good at sums didn't quite come out right. Then again perhaps it did.
ReplyDeleteThere's a clue on p79.
ReplyDeleteI've a strange disability regarding the reading of p79s.
ReplyDeleteOK I see there's no clue shortcoming. As a quick sell, could you sum up the book ub one snappy sentence paying particular attention to its entertainment aspects?
ReplyDeleteThis is from the Preface:
ReplyDeleteAs a philosophy of physics student in the 1990s, I approached particle physics with a desire to understand the types of thing which exist at the most fundamental physical level. Already converted to structural realism, I sought to understand the mathematical structures used to represent elementary particles. What I found, in the physics textbooks, were some structures, but also a turgid and confusing array of calculational recipes; in the mathematical texts, meanwhile, I found structures such as fibre bundles and gauge connections, but often presented in frustrating abstraction from the realities of theoretical particle physics. Although Andrzej Derdzinski's 1992 monograph, Geometry of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, expounded the structure of the first-quantized standard model, Derdzinski's work was difficult for a non-mathematician to grasp, and given that it promoted an unusual approach, it was often difficult to see the relationship between the structures in Derdzinski's book, and the things which particle physicists write about. The current work has therefore grown from my own exasperated failure, in the 1990s, to understand the mathematical structure of particle physics.
I actually seem to understand the language which is something and the intent of the book seems laudatory and clear. As for entertaining, I hope you have broken up what could be pretty heavy reading with things like, "I know this is kind of off the topic but I heard a very funny story today...."
ReplyDeleteIt's funnier than Russell Brand.
ReplyDelete