Monday, February 13, 2017

The Skeptics Dictionary-Skepdic.com

Slow day with no new post from Nadalicious. So I trot out something I came across a couple of days ago.


Hard to believe that someone other than me doesn't give a lot of credibility to numerology, isn't it? Here's a whole dictionary of topics that someone has taken a lot of time to debunk. Numerology gets a whole chapter. I use the word debunk not because this is new info that does the debunking. The topics, like gematria, don't have a shred of validity. Rather they recap some key points to hopefully put to bed topics that we really shouldn't have to argue about. So, I use debunk to make a debunk beds pun.


There's a nice bit about Pi and a remarkable run of even numbered digits that occurs very early on. When you compare this to a coin flip with heads being an odd number and tails being an even number, or vice versa if that suits you, it seems strange that this famous non repeating decimal would have this run of consecutive odd digits. The point is that a similar consecutive run does not happen until much, much later. You can't just end the story at that first run and draw a meaningful conclusion out of it. Gamblers' Fallacy territory. Your typical gematria fan WILL stop at that first run and say that it means something (usually insane.)


For additional support there's a bit about someone having a magic number that the Skepdic author links to. It's how the decimals of fractions with a denominator of 7 repeat, just in a different order depending on the numerator. My own darting around with numbers would make a numerologist think that 37 is a special number. Take any two digit number. Repeat it twice more to make a six digit number (62 becomes 626262). Any six digit number derived this way is evenly divisible by 37. Nothing magical about it. It's simply a matter of 3x37=111.


So, if you approach the subject if gematria with the skepticism, even total disregard, that it deserves, you can find that real numbers with real real math don't repeat in nature without some underlying explanation. That's why we are constantly assaulted by gematrified two and three digit numbers. I've never seen them use more than four. You'll never see something come out to exactly 9112001, just 911. Should they get around to reporting yesterday's evacuation around the Oroville Dam in California it won't be exactly the number of evacuees. They'll stop at the news report that says it's about 188,000 and use 188.


And they can't resist the temptation to get creative from there even though the manufacturing of the connection to 188 gets so convoluted that it is laughable. Shannen Doherty was in the movie Blood Lake about killer lampreys and she costarred with someone who made two guest appearances on Beverly Hills 90210 who was born on the July something which is close to the 188th day of the year and Oroville is close to San Francisco where charmed was filmed and when you use gematria on Alyssa Milano's bra size you get 188 and my Uncle Barney went fishing in the Great Lakes on August 18th which have lampreys and South Park has an episode where a dam bursts and it was season whatever, blah blah blah fucking blah. Shut up and get back to the interesting part about Alyssa's tits already.


Sorry for the math. Hope the Alyssa boobs thing makes up for it.

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