Rhaedas

<geek>
I don't think it was touched on much in the movie, but the premise was that, as advanced and old as the aliens were who sent us the plans to make this wormhole traveling machine, the subway system itself, and the circle hidden in Pi, were in place long before they matured as a species. I think it was more of a play on Clarke's saying, that a technology sufficiently advanced will look like magic to a lesser civilization. So what if they created the universe, their god status is only in our perspective.
</geek>

gagster

No, not really. Consider this irrational number:
.10110111011110111110111111...

Lots of possible combinations will never show up in it.


Greg

Roller

The way I see it, the media is representing this as literal history. I remember seeing Lee Strobel on TV talking about how this is huge evangelical opportunity

Although, there was a show "The Last Days of Christ" last Friday, if I remember correctly. I've seen Crossan and Paula Frederiksen among others, talking about the historicity of the trial (Sanhedrin would not meet at night, ruthless Pilate would never allow mob to influence his decisions....) I was pretty satisfied with the show.

SLD

No. You haven't defined an irrational number. An irrational number is something such as Pi, e, Square Root of 2, Square Root of 7, etc. Even if you did define one in base 2, then still all possible combinations show up, just in base 2.

SLD

Amaleq13

I agree. They did a pretty good job of pointing out the more obvious historical inaccuracies.

Crossan, however, has to stop telling his barber he wants the "Spock look".

Sven

Of course .10110111011110111110111111... is an irrational number. Any number which can not be written as a fraction is irrational by definition. If you think that the above is not irrational, please provide the corresponding fraction. As an aside, gagster nowhere claimed that this number is in base 2. A real number doesn't "need" to exploit all digits from 0 to 9 to be a real number.

I see I have to retract my earlier statement that I agree with you that a circle would inevitable show up in pi, only provided one searches long enough. The number above is a good counter to the claim that every sequence of numbers will eventually show up in any irrational number.

Dean Anderson

You're missing the point.

'Contact' has always been marketed as science fiction. No-one has claimed that it is science fact.

This 'Passion' film, on the other hand, is being lauded as an accurate portrayal of history - which is a joke for people who either know the Biblical accounts in detail or who know Mel Gibson's ideas of 'historical accuracy in filmmaking'.

Unfortunately there are those gullible people who will believe the 'historical' hype and there are those immoral people who will do their best to maintain this claim of historicity in order to swell the ranks (and coffers) of their churches.

SLD

I said he has not "defined" an irrational number. The dot dot dot means nothing. But I will concede a point here. One can indeed define an irrational number in such a way that the decimal expansion does not contain all possible combination of digits. But the point about Pi and other similar, not predefined, irrational numbers is that they have infinite decimal expansions such that they can never be defined as a fraction. As such, they should ultimately contain all completely possible sequences of digits - including what ellie found - the circle with the line in it. IIRC, she found it at some digit out to 10^26 or so. To me that seems kind of "early" in the sequence to be finding hidden messages, but hey it's still a good story, and no proof of god.

Here's a math quiz for everyone (and boy we're getting off topic) how far into the decimal expansion of Pi should one expect to find the ASCII phrase: "Jesus is God"? What's the probablity that you will find it before: "SLD is God"?

SLD

Julian

Since "SLD is God" is shorter than "Jesus is God" it much more likely that SLD is god than Jebus. For this purpose we can assume that the numbers of Pi are essentially a random number generator, albeit not a very good one. Since "Jesus is God" has 12 characters in it which would convert to 24 digits if we use ASCII (we could use a straight letter counting scheme which would make finding it more likely) and that means that there is a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance of encountering "Jesus is God" in Pi. Whereas "SLD is God" is a mere 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is assuming ASCII and all uppercase. I am too lazy to calculate the probabilities using a simple letter numbering scheme but it would, as stated, be much more likely.

Too much time on his hands,
Julian

JoeWallack

JW:
Here is the link to Hutton Gibson's recent interview:
http://www.speakyourpiece.net/gibson.pdf

Here's an excerpt (it was extremely difficult to pick one as all of Gibson's assertions sound the same):

Steve Feuerstein:
"What do the Jews aim to achieve?"

Gibson:
"I don’t know what their (the Jews) agenda is except that it’s all about control. They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine and make one world religion and one world government."


JW:
Without the name identification you'd think it was something Goebbels wrote. If I understand Gibson correctly he thinks "The Jews" had the power to create the Soviet Union, orchestrate both World Wars and get the US into the Wars while controlling all the money in the world before, during and after the wars but for some unexplained reason are currently powerless to prevent one person from presenting a major motion picture showing that "The Jews" killed God. Apparently "The Jews" have done such a great job secretly controlling the world that their greatest accomplishment is keeping how they do this secret from themselves but readily available to the people they control like Gibson.

After seeing the movie "Conspiracy Theory" I wondered why the hell Gibson did it. Seemed like more of a Steve Guttenberg like project. As Gibson continues to refuse to criticize his father's views, now I know why.


Joseph

"You've been de-Caiphus-nated" - Daniel Glover

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