The very human desire to find pattern in random data – meaning in a cold, unmeaning world – is alive and well. The pop media have decided it’s time to recycle the not-particularly-urban myth – straight from the pages of ‘Puzzler‘ Magazine, in fact – of premonitory codes ‘hidden’ in foundation texts like the bible. So I’m happy to note that most of the top hits at Google for “bible code” are links to sceptics’ sites. Since I’m hardly the first to point out that you can produce these amazingly predictive strings from almost any text, provided it’s long enough, I’m writing this mainly to improve the Google pagerank of this excellent analysis.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.