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FluidMoShun wrote: Watched this a few days ago. Definitely the most interesting documentary I've seen. Its about fractal geometry, examples of which can be found in nature (shorelines, trees, vegetables), and are patterns generated from chaos.. coincidentally also the type of patterns you see when tripping. Does anyone know of other movies or books about this stuff?

christophera wrote:

FluidMoShun wrote: Does anyone know of other movies or books about this stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8m85p7GsU

and if you wanna go way down the rabbit hole, check out dan winter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-syFMSjcJIo

firky wrote:

FluidMoShun wrote: Watched this a few days ago. Definitely the most interesting documentary I've seen. Its about fractal geometry, examples of which can be found in nature (shorelines, trees, vegetables), and are patterns generated from chaos.. coincidentally also the type of patterns you see when tripping. Does anyone know of other movies or books about this stuff?

Pi?

murky21 wrote:

firky wrote:

FluidMoShun wrote: Watched this a few days ago. Definitely the most interesting documentary I've seen. Its about fractal geometry, examples of which can be found in nature (shorelines, trees, vegetables), and are patterns generated from chaos.. coincidentally also the type of patterns you see when tripping. Does anyone know of other movies or books about this stuff?

Pi?

ye watch Pi, my favourite film of all time by some way..

christophera wrote:

murky21 wrote:

firky wrote:

FluidMoShun wrote: Watched this a few days ago. Definitely the most interesting documentary I've seen. Its about fractal geometry, examples of which can be found in nature (shorelines, trees, vegetables), and are patterns generated from chaos.. coincidentally also the type of patterns you see when tripping. Does anyone know of other movies or books about this stuff?

Pi?

ye watch Pi, my favourite film of all time by some way..

yes this book is highly controversial. yes there are a lot of people who swear it's a hoax. because if it's not a hoax then reality is way weirder than people want to accept yet.
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Code-Michae ... 184&sr=8-1

A christian friend of mine challenged me to read this book. Apparently, he thought I would run straight to church upon completing it. Well, I skipped over the boring parts (which was most of it) and went straight to Drosnin's amazing discovery. I knew there was something wrong with Drosnin's code, but not being a mathematician or statistician, I was unable to quite put my finger on it. It seemed to me as if the people using the code were manipulating it to yield the results they wanted. Like a street hustler would in a shell game.

So, I used the same computer technology that "enabled" Drosnin to discover the extant of the "prophetic" powers of his code to find rational antidotes to this obvious hogwash. I got on the world wide web and found several good and rational refutations of Drosnin. Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California was the nicest and most generous of Drosnin's opponents.

Despite the fact that Drosnin has claimed that mathematicians have verified that he is onto something he cannot name one. I then tried to prove his point for him and found nothing to support this claim. To the contrary, what I found was mathematicians who said that it is no surprise that the Hebrew Bible spells words when you use a rather rudimentary and common encryption technique known as the "equal letter skip" It works like so: you start at the letter skip a fixed number of letters until you spell a word. Start with the first occurance of the letter "t" (rather the hebrew equivilant) in genesis, skip 49 letters and you come to an "o", skip another 49 letters and you come up with the letter t another 49 and you get h. Marvel of marvels you have the Hebrew word for Torah spelled out in the Hebrew bible. Suprising? Not really. In fact, it is to be expected. Just as mathematical probability says that if you flip a coin enough times, you are going to get 3 heads in a row, or 4 tails in a row. It just isn't surprising or even interesting: when you are allowed to pick the number of letters you can skip and you search through all of the thousands of verses of the Bible for pronouncable words, you are far MORE likely to find words, by several orders of magnitude, than you are to NOT find words.

The paragraph above is paraphrased from Devlin's interview on NPR the year after The Bible Code came out. According to Devlin, the odds are "extremely high" that Drosnin would find apparent messages in the OT, just as he and other mathematicians found the exact same messages imbedded in Moby Dick and War and Peace. An engineer friend of mine (you may be aware that engineers have to take math and stats classes ad nauseum) said that the only way that this would be a newsworthy event is if they DIDN'T find pronouncable words and phrases in the Torah. In that case, they would have beaten astronomical odds.

Drosnin wrecked his credibility by challenging skeptics to find seemingly prophetic words in other works of literature, and they did. Moby Dick revealed all of the same things, and other things that the Bible did not. They used Drosnin's software on an issue of the Wall Street Journal in which the word "Torah" appeared over 15,000 times. They also ran the Old Testament through Drosnin's software and found that the Bible states that the "CODE IS BUNK" and "DROSNIN FRAUD". The Hebrew Torah also yeilded "DARWIN WAS RIGHT" (my personal favorite).

The final nail was hammered into the coffin of Drosnin's credibilty when he appeared on NPR saying that he didn't even believe in God, but rather believed that extraterrestrial aliens put the encoded predictions and prophecies in the Hebrew Bible.