[koanarc]

Cool. Slightly off-topic, re: John Conway -- Some tangential wiki-ing led me to (what I think is) the even more interesting Look-and-say sequence & Conway's cosmological theorem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-and-say_sequence

I'm not sure how far the atomic element analogy can be extended, but on its face it seems a little mind-blowing.

[defen]

Conway comes up with the best names for things... Doomsday algorithm, monstrous moonshine, Game of Life, surreal numbers, cosmological theorem, etc.