numerology
goodmath | January 5, 2010 A lot of people have been sending me links to a numerology article,
in which yet another numerological idiot claims to have identified the
date of the end of the world. This time, the idiot claims that it's going to
happen on May 21, 2011.
I've written a lot about numerology-related stuff before. What makes this
example particularly egregious and worth writing about is that it's not just
an article on some bozo's internet website: this is an article from the
San
Francisco Chronicle, which treats a pile of numerological bullshit as if it's
completely respectable and credible.
As I've said…
goodmath | April 24, 2009 I'm trying to get back into my routine, after being really devastated by losing my
dog. To people who don't love dogs, it probably seems silly to be so upset over an animal, but
he was really a member of the family, and losing him really knocked me for a loop.
I'm trying to first get caught up on my book schedule, so I haven't had time for any
substantial blog posts. But while I was bumming around, a comment showed up on one of my old
posts. For background, several times in the past, I've written about the Lords Witnesses, a
Jehovah's Witness spinoff group that claims to have discovered a "…
goodmath | July 24, 2008
There's one kind of semi-mathematical crackpottery that people frequently send to me, but which i generally don't write about. Given my background, I call it gematria - but it covers a much wider range than what's really technically meant by that term. Another good name for it would be numeric pareidolia. It's been a long time since I've written about this kind of stuff, and someone just sent me a pretty typical example, so what the hell. It revolves around a mess that he put together as an image, which is pretty much a classic example of obsessive silliness.
The general idea of this kind…
goodmath | October 21, 2007 Time for our second visit with old friends. This time, we're going to check up on "The Lords Witnesses", the bible code geniuses who made somewhere around a dozen attempts at using their code to nail down a date at which the UN building in NYC would be blown up.
These nutters are a spinoff of the Jehovah's witnesses. They believe that there is a secret code
embedded in the bible. They agree that all of the other people who claim to have found secret codes in
the bible are all just a bunch of crackpots - but they have the truth.
Their code is a classic example of a human-created pattern. It…
goodmath | August 12, 2006Remember back in the end of june, when I [talked about these insane bozos][code] who were [predicting that a nuclear bomb would be blown up in the UN plaza?][firsttime] And they were on their fourth prediction about when this would happen? And how each time they blew it, [they came up with an excuse for why they were wrong?][update]
I thought it would be fun to take a look back at them, and see what they're up to six weeks later. Naturally, [they're still at it.][bozos] They've updated their prediction 5 more times now.
But there are a couple of really amusing things about what they're up to…
goodmath | July 7, 2006About 10 days ago, I wrote a post about a group of bozos who believe they've found a secret code in the bible, and that according to them, there was going to be a nuclear attack on the UN building in NYC by terrorists. This was their fourth attempt to predict a date based on their oh-so-marvelous code.
Well, obviously, they were wrong again. But, do they let that stop them? Of course not! That's the beauty of using really bad math for your code: you can always change the result when it doesn't work. If you get the result you want, then you can say your code was right; if you don't get things…
goodmath | July 1, 2006Earlier this week, I posted [a brief article][nyc-boom] about the ["True Bible Code"][tbc] folks who claimed that NYC was going to be hit by a terrorist nuclear weapon this weekend.
I was looking at the rest of their site to see what their "true bible code" was. I was expecting something along the lines of the gap codes or yet another low-budget gematria. It turns out to be much more humorous than either of those.
Most of the bible-code type nonsense you find is based on simple rules. There's a good reason for that: the more complex the rules get, the more likely they are to be artifacts.…
goodmath | June 27, 2006I just received some email that would seriously worry me if it weren't for the fact that I'm not an idiot.
WARNING!
TERRORISTS are going to ATTACK NEW YORK!
There is NO TIME to waste! Go read http://www.truebiblecode.com/nyc.html!!!!!!
Going there, I find:
We are now 98% confident that the UN Plaza will be hit by a terrorist nuclear bomb between Thursday evening June 29th and Tuesday evening July 4th, 2006
It is certainly true that: No nukes is good nukes! But just because we got the date wrong (3 times) does not mean that the scriptural threat has evaporated. It is still there in black…
goodmath | June 18, 2006I was glancing at the comments on the post that I linked to about "0.999...=1". And one of them was such a wonderful example of crap numerology, which I enjoy laughing at, that I just had to repost it here:
VERY GOOD.
But there's a couple tricks
you missed.
First, simple pattern
completion
1/9 = .11111---
2/9 = .22222---
3/9 = .33333---
4/9 = .44444---
5/9 = .55555---
6/9 = .66666---
7/9 = .77777---
8/9 = .88888---
and therefore by logical
extension
9/9 = .99999---
but of course, 9/9 = 1.
And then there are the
SPIRITUAL implications
.9 a soul
+ .09
+ .009 adding experience
+ .0009
+ .00009…
goodmath | June 12, 2006As readers of GM/BM at the old site know, one of the things that I love to shred is trashy numerology. I also have a great dislike for the tendency of many modern pseudo-researchers to insist that ancient people were hopelessly naive or stupid.
I've found a delightful little article about Stonehenge that combines these two themes.
Stonehenge is quite an interesting construct. To the best of our knowledge, it was a sort of observatory: the patterns of stones and their arrangement are structured to allow a number of astronomical observations and predictions of astronomical events. This is a…