Friday, November 21, 2003
Due to being busy last night I videod the Horizon program on the Bible Code. It was a fairly awful program really, I think the debunkers did a pretty good job of showing that for every secret message you could find in the Talmud there was an equally valid message encoded into Moby Dick but the program didn't really want to accept that. A much more interesting program might have been to look at cryptology, to ask WHY we can 'find' messages in the Bible or Moby Dick but the Horizon production team seem desperate to find a 'human interest' angle to hide their stories on, as though without that no-one would want to watch. Last week's episode was basically Is Britain about to freeze to death? So, they present a controversial thesis, give some time to those that refute it, then finish off with a fudge that says "We can't prove this conclusively one way or another". And the same again this week, when experiments to show once and for all that the Bible Code was just random chance selectively picked from seemed to be going the sceptics way the believers claimed their methodology was faulty and the program ended with "Well, maybe the prediction that the world will end in 2006 is true, who knows?" This was the angle, the Bible Code predicts Global Thermonuclear War in three years time, so the program is proceeding from a bias towards this being true, yet we know how large a part chance has to play in the creation of our universe and it's amazing how thousands of years ago people managed to encode information into the Bible yet we can only find it today with computers. The huge unanswered question was "Why would they do this?"
Moving on to other grievences, The Guardian have published STAND's complaint about the Government fiddling public responses to try and claim public backing for ID Cards. I got a very quick reply from my MP to the fax I sent asking him to try and find out more about the Home Office's attitude, to which he replies "I am afraid I am not in a position to go behind the conclusions of the Home Office summary" which could mean he couldn't be bothered to ask, misunderstood my fax as asking him to work it out himself or that the Home Office wouldn't tell him the answer. Touchingly he says three times in the letter that he does not favour compulsory ID Cards. Elsewhere, New Scientist publishes an article that claims that biometric systems are not good enough to do what David Blunkett wants them to do.
Moving on to other grievences, The Guardian have published STAND's complaint about the Government fiddling public responses to try and claim public backing for ID Cards. I got a very quick reply from my MP to the fax I sent asking him to try and find out more about the Home Office's attitude, to which he replies "I am afraid I am not in a position to go behind the conclusions of the Home Office summary" which could mean he couldn't be bothered to ask, misunderstood my fax as asking him to work it out himself or that the Home Office wouldn't tell him the answer. Touchingly he says three times in the letter that he does not favour compulsory ID Cards. Elsewhere, New Scientist publishes an article that claims that biometric systems are not good enough to do what David Blunkett wants them to do.
