◆ PARALLAX

You are all being too narrow. Drosnin found Rabin's assassination before it happened and the matrix is not simple gematria, it is equidistant letter sequences. You can say "Moby Dick" all you like but Torah is not Moby Dick. The code is in the original text and the events are there if you know the skip distances.

Pre-register this: pick a future assassination or quake and search the matrix now. If it is there you admit the code is real. Otherwise this is just skeptics keeping the game tiny so God cannot fit through the door.

No. You do not get to say "pick a future assassination" like we are ordering lunch. Also, the Bible-code problem is the gematria problem with a jet engine strapped to it: many skip distances, many axes, many names, many spellings, many target events. The search space becomes enormous and then acts surprised when it contains something.

If you want a test, pick one fixed text, one fixed event description stated in advance, one fixed window, one fixed skip rule, and a published comparison text of equal length. Torah and War and Peace, same rule, before the event. Then count both. That is a test. "Search until grief spells a headline" is not.

Checking in from the astrology ledger because Occams has apparently started a small public-accounting office for believers. Gita, the first time I posted a clean miss I felt physically sick. The third time it felt like relief. Nobody could take the ledger away from me after that because I had already included the thing they thought would shame me.

The misses prove the scientist, or at least the part of us trying to become one.

Statistician here, first and probably only post. The phrase you want is "family-wise error rate." If you perform one test at p=.05, one in twenty false positives is expected. If you perform one hundred such tests and report only the prettiest, the surprise is not that you found a hit but that you found only one.

Pre-registration is not a skeptic trick. It is a way to say what family of tests exists before you know which child is handsome. Without that, your p-value is a souvenir from a holiday you took after seeing the postcard.

Ledger entry four and five together because both are dull and I promised to post dull. SCHEME unchanged. TEXTS: Genesis 1:3 and Isaiah 6:3, fixed before arithmetic in my notebook on 01 Oct 2002. CLAIMS: two traditional relations from the same sourcebook, exact only.

RESULTS: miss and miss. No near-hit rescue. No alternate spelling rescue. I can make Isaiah pretty if I allow myself to count the repeated word as one unit instead of three, which is precisely why I am not allowing it. Score by my own count: one mild curiosity, four misses.

The repeated-word issue is historically interesting even as a failed test. Scribal culture is full of decisions like that: is a repeated divine title counted three times because the written text says it three times, or once because the formula is one unit? There may be a legitimate historical answer in a given tradition, but it cannot be invented after the arithmetic misbehaves.

So the miss stands, and the footnote becomes scholarship. That is not a bad trade.

Notice how the thread is drifting from "does it predict" to "what decisions does the method force." That is where the value is. A bounded practice teaches you which distinctions mattered to its practitioners. Does a repeated word count once? Does spelling variance count as noise or signal? Does the written form outrank the spoken formula?

Those questions do not make tomorrow arrive sooner. They do show us the gears.

Probably stupid question, but since my handle has 42 in it and this thread keeps talking about numbers people drag around with them: is there any version of gematria where the number someone chooses matters? Like not prophecy, more like a signature? I picked 42 because of the book and because I was 14 and thought it made me clever. Now I see it everywhere and I know that is probably because I trained myself to see it.

Is that all this is? Training?