>>- any graphics emerging on a VDU depend very much on the horizontal resolution. Change it by one digit (or pixel) and your image gets skewed; change it sufficiently and you get nothing recognizable.
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>I agree. Although it is nearly 2 decades since I read the book - and that's how I remember it. I thought the same thing then, and as I wrote it just now. I just like the palimpset idea of a "divine" geometric design inside a number.

I don't like it. Someone out there will take it seriously. It's the same business as described in "Foucault's pendulum", where an imaginary conspiracy attracts enough followers to become real.

>This business wasn't in the film, btw.

I too have read the book first, then saw the movie much later - sufficiently later to forget where the differences were. The movie was nice, actually, the feeling was even better than in the book, going from the radio amateurs to a botched government project to a stubborn private project to that wonderful beach.

>BTW, another cool concept in the book, that wasn't in the film: The main protagonist is a scientist, empirical woman, and she's arguing a point of scientific fact against this religious guy's faith stance. They're in a museum, and he gets her to stand in the the same plane as a huge pendulum, and brings the weight up to within a few inches of her face and lets it go. On its return she flinches out of the way. He berrates her for denying the scientist's knowledge that the pendulum can't get to her, as it can only reach slightly lower than the start. She retorts with something like "Yes but that was millions of years of instinct battling with a few thousand years of intellect". I liked that.

So did I. That's a proper scientific quip.