Rev 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 616."
Fourth century fragment from the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

It's been known since early last century that some early versions of the John's Gospel have the famous Number of the Beast represented as 616 rather than the more conventional 666.

The Greeks wrote numbers with letters from their alphabet so the sequence χιϚ (Chi Iota Stigma) in the text fragment shown above represents the number 600 + 10 + 6 or 616.

α

Alpha

1

ι

Iota

10

ρ

Rho

100

β

Beta

2

κ

Kappa

20

σ / ς

Sigma

200

γ

Gamma

3

λ

Lamda

30

τ

Tau

300

δ

Delta

4

μ

Mu

40

υ

Upsilon

400

ε

Epsilon

5

ν

Nu

50

φ

Phi

500

Ϛ

Stigma

6

ξ

Xi

60

χ

Chi

600

ζ

Zeta

7

ο

Omicron

70

ψ

Psi

700

η

Eta

8

π

Pi

80

ω

Omega

800

θ

Theta

9

G

Koppa

90

Ϡ

Sampi

900

The Greeks used a number system which assigned separate letters for 1,2,3... etc. 10, 20, 30... etc. and 100, 200, 300... etc. While vastly simpler and more elegant than Roman Numerals, for numbers above a thousand, the system became very cumbersome to work with. It would take the Hindus and the invention of zero before a true place-notation number system could allow numbers to easily grow without limits.

This alternative formulation for the Number of the Beast as 616 is very ancient and is attested to by St Irenaeus of Lyon who, writing (in Greek) in the middle of the second century AD, attributed it to scribal error:

Such, then, being the state of the case, and this number being found in all the most approved and ancient copies, and those men who saw John face to face bearing their testimony [to it]; while reason also leads us to conclude that the number of the name of the beast, [if reckoned] according to the Greek mode of calculation by the [value of] the letters contained in it, will amount to six hundred and sixty and six; that is, the number of tens shall be equal to that of the hundreds, and the number of hundreds equal to that of the units (for that number which [expresses] the digit six being adhered to throughout, indicates the recapitulations of that apostasy, taken in its full extent, which occurred at the beginning, during the intermediate periods, and which shall take place at the end),

—I do not know how it is that some have erred following the ordinary mode of speech, and have vitiated the middle number in the name, deducting the amount of fifty from it, so that instead of six decads they will have it that there is but one. Others then received this reading without examination; some in their simplicity, and upon their own responsibility, making use of this number expressing one decad; while some, in their inexperience, have ventured to seek out a name which should contain the erroneous and spurious number.

The standard form therefore according to Irenaeus was χξϚ (Chi Xi Stigma) or 600 + 60 + 6 = 666 and any other version is in error. The purpose of this number was to enable the faithful to recognise the Antichrist when he finally emerged and it was given in a numeric rather than literal form because even the very name of the Antichrist was an abomination and as such not worthy of mention in the holy book. Irenaeus explains that the number is derived from a common Greek practice of calculating numbers from names known as Isopsephy (or Gematria in Hebrew*). The usual way was to convert the letters of the person's name into numbers and then simply add them together. By this method, for example, the Greek rendering of Jesus, Ιησούς, adds up to 888**.

A popular, though unproven, explanation for there being two versions of the number is that it represents both Greek and Latin versions of the name of Emperor Nero, a well known persecutor of the early Christians. The logic behind this is that Nero's Greek name is Neron Kesar which when rendered into Hebrew (where the vowels are dropped and read from right to left) it becomes rsq nwrn (ברןנ פקר) — this adds up to 666. On the other hand his more familiar Latin name Nero Caesar is rendered as rsq wrn (ברן פקר) which adds up to 616.

Maybe. But there are other possible explanations as well, for example, there are apparently two different spellings of the word "beast" in Hebrew which also produce the numbers 666 and 616.

Modern geeks (as opposed to ancient Greeks) will immediately recognise this trick of turning a names into numbers as a form of hash function which is a standard software technique for speeding up text comparisons (amongst other things). Comparing words letter by letter is more time consuming than first converting them to numbers — by hashing them — and then comparing the numbers. Only once a numeric match has been found are the words then compared letter by letter.

Methods for hashing vary with the nature of the data to be hashed but the most efficient ones try to reduce the number of words that calculate to the same number. This is known as avoiding "collisions" and on this score the old Greek method fails miserably because countless names will hash to the number 666. Irenaeus himself had a go at speculating on a few candidate names of the Beast (including the "Latins" i.e. the Romans) by didn't come to any firm conclusions.

Speaking algorithmically, a far better approach would have been to use a longer number and use a secure hashing algorithm such as the sort developed for use in digital signatures and password repositories. In case you think I'm being just a little unfair here in expecting the ancients to have been savvy with the best crypto techniques, let me just just remind you that we are talking about the word of God here, okay? Is perfection really too much to ask?

Anyway, a secure algorithm would have led to an almost completely unambiguous*** identification of the Antichrist and this surely would be a handy thing even in this day and age. For example, I'm fairly certain that I'm not the Antichrist — despite having expressed some fairly anti-Christian sentiments from time to time — but it would be a good thing to know for sure.

* Hebrew and Greek alphabets have a common origin in Phoenicia (Lebanon). Go here for a nifty demonstration of how these and other alphabets evolved.

** Jesus = 888 - Which, as we all know, means "prosper, prosper, prosper" in Chinese numerology. Imagine what progress those crafty Jesuit missionaries in China might have made with that knowledge.

*** Unfortunately even these methods are not invulnerable to attack as proven with the recent compromise of the industry standard SHA-1 secure hashing algorithm (itself a sure sign of the coming End Times).

UPDATE: Of course I should have known that old Fred Engels would have had it all worked out a hundred and twenty years ago.

Was the Amazon basin a pristine wilderness in pre-Columbian times or was it home to advanced societies in any way comparable with civilisations of the Andes or Mexico? Judging by the material conditions of the hunting and gathering tribes that live in the rainforest today and if we consider the poor suitability of rainforest soil for agriculture, the answer would seem to be a resounding "no".

And yet we have stories, eye-witness accounts dating back to the earliest years of the Conquest which describe a densely populated Amazon with villages and towns packed closely together along much of its length. A very different place even to the one we see today.

Francisco de Orellana, one of the original Conquistadors, was in charge of the first European expedition down the Amazon river. His story is remarkable not least because it was a completely accidental voyage of discovery. He and 60 men had been separated from another expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro who had been in search of cinnamon in the jungles of Ecuador. Their boat had been carried downstream by the swift current of the Napo river which turned out to be a major tributary of the Amazon. Seven months later their boat arrived at the Atlantic coast, more than 6,000 kilometres away from where they started out.


Orellana and most of his crew managed to make it back to safety and they brought with them fantasic tales of the sights they had seen on this river. Orellana described the Amazon as a busy waterway which had on both sides of the river populous towns with elaborate temples, plazas and fortresses. As his chronicler, Fray Gaspar de Carvajal relates it:

...we tarried so long in this land of Machiparo's which is 80 leagues in extent, all speaking one language and densely populated with towns and villages with scarcely more than a crossbow shot between them. Some of the towns extended for five leagues without any separation between the houses, quite a wonderful thing to see [a league is about 5.5 kilometres].

I suppose I was distressed enough when I found out that, when viewed from space, the Earth was in fact branded with copyright messages for Google — presumably these are intended to warn off any other sentient extraterrestrial A.I.'s that might get ideas.

But now I realise that the Googleplex has gone a step further in defending its terrestrial sandpit by deploying a grid of low-orbit robot sentinels (BETA) which are presumably packed with enough firepower to make any turf war an uneconomic and mutually destructive proposition.

I only hope that in the era of cyber-brinkmanship we can trust our massively-parallel-architectured overlord will stand by his/her/its promise to not be evil.

Cosmic radiation is prevented from entering our solar system by a structure known as the heliosphere, a protective shell formed from the continuous streaming of solar winds from our sun which pushes back against the pressure of interstellar space (and you thought space was a vacuum). The outer surface of this shell is known as the heliopause where the velocity of the solar wind drops to zero and this is technically what marks the edge of the solar system. The inner surface of this shell is known as the termination shock where the solar wind velocity drops to below supersonic levels.

Exploring the heliosphere at the edge of our solar system was the last remaining mission of the venerable Voyager I and II spacecraft. On the 17th of December 2004, after more than 27 years in space and having traveled an unprecedented distance of 14.5 billion kilometres from the Earth, Voyager I finally crossed the terminal shock. Suddenly the beams of charged particles detected by Voyager changed direction and stopped fluctuating. Also the magnetic field increased in strength and new radio sources were detected. From these changes in the spacecraft's environment, it was clear that Voyager I was now passing through the Sun's protective shell and on it way out of the solar system.

But just as scientists were readying the champagne for celebrations to mark this final stage in the journey of the first man-made object ever to enter interstellar space, news came through that the spacecraft had gone missing. Both of them, both Voyager I and Voyager II had suddenly and inexplicably vanished without a trace.

After that followed a frantic search. NASA scientists scrambled to study all the available data in a desperate effort to find some sign of the spacecraft.

But so far they have come up with nothing, not even the faintest indication of hope. All they found was empty space — a blank in the budget spreadsheet precisely at the point where the spacecraft were last seen.

UPDATE: This article from April gives more background to these astonishingly short sighted budget cuts (the Voyager program only costs NASA around $5 million per year). Yet another in a long line of examples of the Bush administration's retreat from science and science education. Fortunately it seems that there are plenty of privately funded faith-based initiatives that are ready to fill the breech.

— Scientific American. September 1847
Pre-doctored image here