The SkepDic Code

Dr. Carroll,

As I read The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on The Bible Code I began to wonder, what if there is a Skeptic's Code hidden in the Dictionary? What if that code is so subtle and hard to detect that even the author, Robert T. Carroll (RTC or "Bobby the Bright") , doesn't know it is there? What would the code say? Who could be real author influencing RTC from behind the scenes?

I decided that the content of the hidden messages would depend on who the hidden author was so I started to look and here are some of the results I got.

Author: God

Maybe its just as the authors of The Bible Code say, perhaps God speaks to us in mysterious ways, in hidden codes we can't find without a computer. It's pretty easy to imagine that God could influence Moses 3500 years ago while he was writing the Pentateuch, but would God influence a crusty old atheist during the writing of The Skeptics Dictionary? Would God even want to?

If God did influence RTC I think He would throw a little bit of irony into His message and through hidden codes have the arch-atheist RTC say "JESUS DIED on the CROSS for my SINS".

On the Celestine Prophecy page at an offset of 343 and a step of 79 in a 13x28 matrix I found exactly those words. The Celestine Prophecy page is only 3755 characters long, so to find these four words together is pretty remarkable:

rabletodisCov lguideandbasi ersthecelesti htsaiDtobeand Sohasaudiotap worldisemeRgi onsciousnessh ndentspiritua appeningalrea tioNsandenerg tellgoodpeOpl hcoincIdences sttuneintoyou edinanancient formatIonofso versethemySte efoundinrelig nuscriptisful doweknowthisJ ndrestlEsSnEs fliestoburStf illeddoyoUthi ythemanuScrip ogrowdramatic continueuntil ificlevelofsu ttosaytheseve 950snoboDysee

He would probably also want RTC to proclaim that "JESUS ROSE and He LIVES".

I found that in the Myers-Briggs page at an offset of 2000 with a step of 213 in a little 18x13 matrix:

rinesfatheRwaSonth cewassodifferentfr attheymightwOrkinv ellingofextravErti tions303jungalSocl orldfromwithinandi isticsyoucanproVEa rtainpenchantacert rjustaslittle304Ju thetwoextremEsofIn eusedinpSychologic lsyoUthatthereisso SathinkingorintelL

Author: The Dead

What if James Van Praagh is right? Could RTC be channeling messages for a dead person? What if someone really important is communicating with us through RTC? What if it's one of western culture's most important influences? What if it's Elvis? What would he say? Would he say "Elvis rules rock and roll"? I think so.

I looked in the Acupuncture entry (where else would a druggie, comfortable with needles, put his messages?) and using an offset of 692 and a step of 103 I found that "ELVIS RULES ROCK and ROLL" in a 56x17 character matrix:

saRetobeinsertedforspecificeffectsacupuncturehasbeenprac aretwirledheatedorevenstimulatedwithweakelectricalcurren erhowitisdonescientificresearchcanneverdemonstratethatun iveagainstanydiseasechiisdefinedasbeingundetectablebythe lacUpunctureiscalledauriculotherapyorearacupunctureitisa ntiatedbeliefthattheearisthemapofthebodilyorgansforexamp dbystickinganeedleintoacertainpointontheearthatissuppose tionsaboutapartofthebodybeinganorganmapareheLdbythosewho lexoLogythefootisthemapofthebodystapLepunctureavariation hopingtodosuchthingsashelppeOplestopsmokingtraditionalch ologybiochemistrynutRitionanatomyoranyoftheKnownmechanis rybloodcirculationnervefunctionortheexistenceofhormoneso bEtweEnthemeridiansusedintraditionalchinesemediCineandth thenationaLcouncilagainsthealthfraudncahfclaimsthatofthe sociationnotoneisdeVotedtoacupunctureorothertraditiOnalc thatsomewherebetween10and15mIllionamericansspendapproxim depresSionaidsallergiesasthmaarthritiSbladderandkidneypR

The odds against those words appearing in this matrix is more than ten million to one.

Not only that, but in the same Acupuncture file I found "BLUE SUEDE SHOES" in a tiny 40x17 matrix at an offset of 3830 and a step of 317

enationalinstitutesofhealthinBethesdamdh gmaticfallacyitisarguedthatacupuncturEwo hepasttwentyyearshaSfailedtoDemonstratet laceboeffectandtHerEgressivefaLlacyjustb muchofthesUppOrtforacupunctureisanecdota tStickingnEedlesintothebodymayhavesomebe imulateSthebodysproductionofnatUralpaink easuremententirelysubjectivebuttradition alchangesintheirlivesatoncetherebymaking onycontrolstudiesusingobjectivemEasureme

The odds against those words appearing in this matrix is more than a million to one.

Author: Science

Perhaps RTC is correct and as he says in his Introduction that it's all about "REALITY, LOGIC and MATH" (my paraphrase). Well I looked for that as well and I found reality in a 20x28 matrix with an offset of 629 and a step of 107 in, you guessed it, the entry on Atheism:

Ydifferentkindsofath lofThemsuchapersonmi notbelIeveintheexist ristianisLamicgodjci entialpersonAlcreato oatheismbaruchdEspin butesManyjewsandchRi alimmortalitythomash thatgodmusttherefore allhimselfanatheiste foretheycannotbethei fectbeingswouldnotbe shusisabsurdtobeperf manbehAviorsomehaver eisselfcontradictory beansweredanotherari ilbecausegodisnotall otdenytheexistenceof ialtomostchristiansC yconsiderthescrIptur onethatThisGodexists rentlyfOrthesamereas tiaLpersonalcreatorr beliefinanultimategr hingandwhyeverything ritsthatarenotlimite lorreligiousexperien enordoatHeistsdenyth

The probability of finding these words in a matrix this small is so miniscule that I don't trust the result I got when I did the calculation. Its even smaller than any of the others, do the math yourself and check it out.

I guess science wins out in the end.

Conclusion

I guess that what they say is true, a million monkeys typing for a million years will produce the works of Shakespeare (baring keyboards wearing out and how do you get those monkeys to sit still?). So I guess one skeptic typing for ten years is bound to stumble on some words of truth here or there, even if they are hard to find.

Tim Boettcher

Methodology

Downloaded The Skeptic's Dictionary using Webstripper (available at http://webstripper.net/) on June 20 at 16:13 GMT.
Got rid of all the subdirectories (comments, essays, refuge etc).
Created and ran a program (HTMLToText.pl) to strip the html files of all the html tags, spaces, punctuation etc. and convert the remaining text to all uppercase.
Generated a list of interesting words to look for.
Created a program (FindPhrase.pl) to search through all of the text files for the list of interesting words and create a file containing the positions of the words and the skips between the characters in the words. The output from the program looks like this:
__File__ c:/SkepDicCode/data\acupunc.txt 8524 ELVIS 5 1929 112 ELVIS 5 7772 -1080 . . . RULES 5 141 966 RULES 5 694 413 RULES 5 1513 916 . . . BLUE 4 3676 -445 1462 BLUE 4 3859 -366 952 . . . SUEDE 5 5416 -308 SHOES 5 4483 314 SHOES 5 5152 442 . . . ROCK 4 2395 -210 . . .
Once I'd located all of the words I was interested in I needed to find the best matrix that the words would fit into. I didn't want to have really huge matrices that would be hard to view using html. I created a program (BestResult.pl) to search through the results of the previous step and try to find a matrix that would match all of the words in a phrase that I gave to the program.
The BestResult program output the name of the file it found the phrase in, the starting position of the matrix, the line step, number of columns and number of rows in the matrix. For each word in the phrase it output a line with the word, the starting position of the word and the skip between the letters of the word. The output looks like this:
__File__ c:/SkepDicCode/data\acupunc.txt 692 103 56 17 __Word__ ELVIS 1929 112 __Word__ RULES 694 413 __Word__ ROCK 2395 -210 __Word__ ROLL 1742 -95
This program has a parameter that tells it to ignore the uninteresting cases where the distance between letters in a boring 1, that is words that are plainly displayed in the text. This made finding the phrases together a little bit more difficult, but I think the resulting matrices are more interesting. It also meant that I couldn't use the word "SKEPTIC", which ironically only appears in plain text.
The matrix needed to be formatted for a web page. I created OutputMatrix.pl to take the input from the previous step and in conjunction with the text file create an html matrix. You can see these matrices above.
To create the analysis for the odds of the words appearing in the matrices I created a program, Analysis.pl that more or less uses the methodology derived by Dave Thomas with John Geohegan's assistance at http://www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm.

I was surprised that the step that finds the words (FindPhrase) was relatively trivial to write, especially when following the tip given to Dave Thomas by Brendan McKay at http://www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm:

You focus on those letters of the text that match the first letter of the desired hidden word, and then find letters matching the second letter of the desired word. For each two-letter pair, check the location of the third letter in the pattern; if it matches your desired word, keep going, otherwise move on to the next pair.

On the other hand, creating the matrices was much more challenging and I'm sure there must be an easier way to do it.

Anyone who would like to correspond to me on my methodology please contact me at: My.SkepDic.CodeATrecursor.net
(Help fight SPAM! Please replace the AT with an @ ).

Tim Boettcher