off topic:
Executive Producer Damon Lindelof tells about the numbers (23)
From Luv: How did you come up with the specific numbers for Hurley?
Well, that is a big secret, and we are not going to reveal it. I think there is a lot of interest in what the numbers mean and how we came up with them. But what's amazing to me is that we think we're being very clever and hiding those numbers all over the show, prior to the "Numbers" episode, and already I know there are Web pages that have gone up that bust us on every single one that we've ever hid, and they find ones that we didn't even intentionally hide, ones that are in sort of the production design of the show. The only number was always sort of a key number was 23, and anybody who knows anything about Robert Anton Wilson or any of his writing can read into that what they will. That's an important number in terms of the scheme of the show.
http://thelostnumbers.blogspot.com/
Robert Anton Wilson: Well, 23 is a part of the cosmic code. It's connected with so many synchronicities and weird coincidences that it must mean something, I just haven't figured out yet what it means! In several of my books, including the Illuminatus trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, I have given examples of a tremendous number of coincidences connected with 23. Take today as an example, April 23: this is the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, April 23, 1556 and his death, April 23, 1616. Also April 23, 1616, the same time Shakespeare died in England, Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, died in Spain. April 23, 1014 is when Brian Boru died, he was the first high king of Ireland to be a political as well as religious leader. He unified all Ireland and drove the Danes out, and on April 23, 1014 he was killed by one of the Danes after the battle of Clontarf, where he defeated the Danes for the final time, and liberated Ireland from foreign rule. August 23, 1170 is when the Normans came in, and Ireland has been under foreign rule again, in whole or in part, ever since. On Aug. 23, 1920 James Joyce was discussing coincidences with a friend in a Paris bar when he suddenly saw a giant black rat and fainted dead away. So that ties Joyce together with the invasion of Ireland, and Shakespeare, and Brian Boru. All of this is in (James Joyce's) Finnigan's Wake, by the way.
http://www.nii.net/~obie/1988_interview.htm