Dark Ocean Hotel

[Mary Krimmel]

At 09:33 PM 9/10/03 +0100, you {Mike Weaver] wrote:

[Dark Ocean Hotel has 2048 rooms.]

>Which would give 1024 rooms per plane which is the number of bytes in a 
>kilobyte being 2 to the power of 10.
>
>To paraphrase Terrance - why?

Why not? But 1024 rooms pile nicely into a rectangular wing 2 to the power 
of n stories high with 2 to the power of (10-n) rooms per story. For 
instance, the wing could be 16 stories high with 64 rooms on each story, or 
32 stories with 32 rooms on each story, etc.

Zoyd's room, though below the top floor, is hundreds of feet above sea 
level, and the ground floor of the hotel is unlikely to be very far above 
sea level. (Or is it? I'm not familiar with hotels on Waikiki Beach, but 
the usual picture seems to be of a wide but very flat expanse of sand.)

Still, sound travels about 1000 feet a second, so even if the hotel is 64 
stories high, Zoyd should have heard the clank of the beer can sooner than 
seconds after the impact on the surfboard directly below.

So Pynchon, or Zoyd, didn't practice enough on judging seconds in the Boy 
Scout days - which surely Zoyd didn't experience. Could the hotel even be 
128 stories high?

Mary Krimmel