🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01bcbfa4$86539e60$4334b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:

[Replying to others]

>You apparently haven't studied the original article in Statistical Review. 

[Balance of irrelevant material deleted]

It appears that the poster belongs to the school of thought that if
he posts irrelevant expostulations with sufficient frequency, he can
prove his point by the sheer weight of the posts.

For the purposes of most readers, reference to the article in
Statistical Review is unnecessary. The authors of that article made
several fundamental errors which could not have been known by the peer
reviewers, because their expertise was not to be found in the requisite
areas. While the statistics may be reliable as presented, the
conclusions do not have to be. The editor of the journal was quite open
in presenting the material as a lightweight matter for amusement and
speculation. He probably did not know the extent to which 
fundamentalists and other religious fanatics might be inclined to
"canonize" the article.

The authors of the article base their conclusions on the notion that
there is a fixed text of the Hebrew Bible which can be relied upon for
such purposes. While the Hebrew text is, in fact, very reliable, any
student of the textual transmission knows that it is not reliable
enough for the tests proposed. In addition, if the test is meant to
show something about the "original" text, it cannot, as that text is
known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to have been subject to a relatively
fluid spelling convention for many centuries prior to the final form of
the Masoretic text.

In addition to this critical point, Brendan McKay is in the process
of publishing, and has made his research freely available, a 
refutation of the other saliant point of the article, namely that
such codes are sui generis. Rather, similar such "codes" can be
found in *any* text of sufficient length.

In other words, the whole long-winded nonsense is simily a lengthy
demonstration of the infamous statistical point that if given a long
enough time, a monkey would produce the works of Shakespeare by banging
on a typewriter. Drosnin, of course, is laughing all the way to the
bank.
-- 
-----------------------
Jack F. Love
Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree