For reasons I’m not even certain of myself, I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s new book I am a Strange Loop. I read about it in Wired and just had to have it, even though it is very unusual for me to have to have a book like that. I mean, I even pre-ordered it at Amazon — a very unusual thing for me to do. Maybe it’s that Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “zany, in-depth, and utterly brilliant investigation of self-reference in art and mathematics” had such a big effect on me through Val. Anyway …

I’m nearly half-way through Strange Loop which is full of all kinds of mathematical twistiness that Hofstadter is using to show me how self-reference can have intriguing and powerful consequences — from the Fibonacci Series to that useful and persistent illusion I call my self. He is introducing me to the Euclid’s proof of the infinitude of primes, Gödel numbering and the interesting number paradox. Eventually all this will help me understand how “I am a mirage that percieves iteslf.”

It’s no surprise then, that I am thinking in a more mathish way than usual. And maybe that’s why I just sat down yesterday and typed “47″ into the Google search box … that, and the fact that my mirage is 47-years-old today.

And, it turns out that 47 is a very interesting number … 47 is the 15th prime; the atomic number of silver is 47; Euclid’s proposition 47 is the Pythagorean Theory. There’s a sort of cult of 47 sighters who have made the idea that 47 is the most prevalent random number — and so is perhaps something more than random — a gen-u-ine meme of the internets. (Despite naysaysers.) Who knew?

In my own episode of 47 serendipity, just after my google search fo 47, I set out for the toxic waste drop off point to offload my dangerous paint rags. The route took me over the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which is CA-47.

Phone shot through the windshield. Bonus wierdness: It is raining from Hurricane Dean!