🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01bcb7e3$ca6c84e0$4c34b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:

>with the Bible Codes and used some programs to check it out first hand.  If
>you want to know the facts, read the article "Equidistant Letter Sequences
>in the Book of Genesis" by Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg, in Statistical
>Science magazine (vol. 9, no. 3), August 1994.  In my opinion and, much
>more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you cannot
>predict the future with the Bible Codes.  But that doesn't mean that the
>Bible Codes aren't real.  They are real and have been objectively
>demonstrated under peer review.

>In any text, even random combinations of letters, you can select every Nth
>letter from the text and here and there find actual words.  The point is
>that in any other text other than the original Hebrew of the Bible, the
>words you find will fit what would be expected from statistical analysis of
>the frequency of the letters.  In other words, you find random words
>scattered at random intervals.  Any 'meaningful' word pairings, for
>instance, occur only as frequently as you would expect from a random sample
>of text with the same letter distribution.  However, study of the original
>Hebrew Bible text shows something quite different.  The frequencies of
>certain kinds of word pairings have been demonstrated to be far, far above
>any random expectation.  Not a little bit more, but thousands of TIMES
>more!  There has been petty squabbling about how the word pairings were
>selected and tested, but in fact, it doesn't really matter, because no
>other text has been shown to have this property to any degree at all,
>except for text where patterns were coded on purpose.  

Were the control texts also in Hebrew? There is a lot less difference
in letter frequency in Hebrew than there is in, say, English. Add in
Hebrew's non-written vowels and it turns out that nearly any random
combination of letters is a word.

Frequent word pairings can be the result of certain formulaic
phrases. Was this controlled for?

Bogus science is usualy the result of lack of proper controls and
analysis of the experiment.

There's a lot of smoke around the so-called Bible codes that could use
some clearing. 

-dh
-- 
Don Hosek           dho...@quixote.com    Quixote Digital Typography
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