From: Ray Dickenson <editor.nul>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 23:07:25 +0100
Fwd Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 07:31:55 -0400
Subject: Re: Bible Code II - Dickenson


>From: Eleanor White <eleanor.nul>
>To: ufoupdates.nul
>Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:43:41 -0400
>Subject: Re: Bible Code II - White

>Has anyone on the List every actually tried out the software
>used to extract the Bible codes? The reason I ask is that...
>we find that so-called refutations of information themselves
>can be bogus.

Hello Eleanor

Yes, I agree that many a headline "refutation" when analyzed is
merely a 'scientist' abusing his position / qualifications to
demand that the status quo be maintained. Like "it is... because
I say so!"

In this case we're dealing with "hard statistics" of large
numbers (which I personally find to be counter-intuitive anyway).

Boiling down paper from Brendan McKay and Friends:

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html

and without the pure statistical part, it seems that we're
looking at four factors

1) genuineness of TEXT (including spelling choices)
2) choice of area of TEXT
3) validity of ALGORITHMS (routines run on text)
4) tightness of ALGORITHMS

If all are decided blind, in advance, and then a "decode" is
run: then the results are 'significant' to whatever degree. But,
as Brendan makes clear, if any are tweaked (in any way) to
"improve" a second run: then those second results are _not_
significant.

And a major thrust of Brendan's paper (but by no means all of
its strength) is that it seems _all_ those factors had to be
repeatedly tweaked at different times to get near the published
"revealings".

[BTW that's why mDNA back-tracing sometimes seems a little flaky
- the algorithms have to be tweaked, like Relativity math, to get
sensible results]

Brendan has added a reference to Bible Code II but haven't had
chance to read it yet (ISP collapse today so sorry for delay).

BTW again - Terry W. Colvin just sent in a fortean note that
"Brendan was winner of the Australian Skeptics Eureka Prize for
Critical Thinking in 2003 ($10,000)" - but don't let that
influence our thinking.


Cheers
Ray D


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