Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot

[Mark Perakh <perakh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re: Dennis' remark on the Bible code: The paper on the so-called Bible code was
printed in 94 in Statistical Science which is published by Institute of Mathematical
Statistics. The editor (at that time R. Kass) supplied a comment saying essentially
that the referees could not identify the flaws in the work of the three authors
(Rips, Witztum, Rosenberg) so maybe some readers would be willing to invest time to
find those flaws. Indeed, in May issue of 99 a paper by McKay et al was published in
the same journal, completely demolishing the statistical procedure of Rips et al,
and the same Kass supplied a comment saying that the puzzle has been successfully
solved.  Of course, the endless torrent of alleged discoveries of new codes in the
Bible continues without signs of abating. Well, a Russian proverb is that fools are
neither sown nor harvested, by themselves them grow. I still keep on my site papers
showing the silliness of the code business, including a translation from Russian of
my paper printed in Moscow this year. Cheers, Mark.

Dennis wrote:

>         On the original topic.  The totally cracked solutions
> for the Phaistos Disk were often proposed by people who
> were otherwise bright.  So many people simply know
> what's so obvious to us - if you have little enough
> material (with the VMs, just select a few pages) and
> have a system with enough knobs to twist, you can read
> anything into anything.
>
>         The only thing I found puzzling about the "Bible Code"
> books is why the journal of the American Mathematics
> Society would ever publish something like that.  I
> remember one of the editors saying something like, "We
> try to publish things that different groups of our
> readers will find amusing [sic(k)]."  A real bastion of
> integrity for the purest of the sciences!
>
> Dennis
>
> Bruce Grant wrote:
> >
> > > I'm all for working on Extraterrrestrial communication, but let's finish the
> > > Voynich first.
> > > Jim Comegys, Madera
> >
> > I think it may turn out to be the other way around.
> >
> > Bruce



Dennis wrote:

>         On the original topic.  The totally cracked solutions
> for the Phaistos Disk were often proposed by people who
> were otherwise bright.  So many people simply know
> what's so obvious to us - if you have little enough
> material (with the VMs, just select a few pages) and
> have a system with enough knobs to twist, you can read
> anything into anything.
>
>         The only thing I found puzzling about the "Bible Code"
> books is why the journal of the American Mathematics
> Society would ever publish something like that.  I
> remember one of the editors saying something like, "We
> try to publish things that different groups of our
> readers will find amusing [sic(k)]."  A real bastion of
> integrity for the purest of the sciences!
>
> Dennis
>
> Bruce Grant wrote:
> >
> > > I'm all for working on Extraterrrestrial communication, but let's finish the
> > > Voynich first.
> > > Jim Comegys, Madera
> >
> > I think it may turn out to be the other way around.
> >
> > Bruce