Computers Expose Shocking Truth!
Thanks entirely to the power of computing, we now know that the Bible is not a spiritual or moral guide but actually a tool for fortune-telling, a kind of divine deck of tarot cards. That's what the best-selling book The Bible Code tells us.The book recounts the discoveries of a team of researchers who used a supercomputer to convert the 304,805 Hebrew letters of the Old Testament into a humongous Word Search puzzle and found all kinds of hidden messages in there. For example, the book claims the Bible foretold the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, because his name intersected with the phrase "will assassinate" after the computer geniuses rearranged the letters.
So it turns out that the billions of people who have looked to the Bible for spiritual instruction or inspiration have been missing the point: the Bible is merely a series of contrived strings of words with the real purpose of passing along clues about future events.
This is the biggest news since the discovery that playing the extended dance mix of Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True" backwards revealed the ending to The Crying Game (which had not even been written at the time). And this stunning Biblical discovery was made possible by a combination of powerful silicon and brilliant programming.
Of course, some critics argue that computers are now so smart that they could find amazing hidden messages in any document if the system were programmed to look in the right ways. For example, the Bible researchers didn't let the computer work on its own. They asked it to look for key letter combinations, such as "Rabin." If the computer didn't find anything, then the researchers asked the computer to reorganize the rows and columns of letters. They did this over and over until "Rabin" showed up. Then the researchers went looking for other interesting words nearby.
Critics contend this means that anybody could find practically anything in any document if they looked long enough.
The Bible Code author Michael Drosnin says this isn't true: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."
Apparently Drosnin didn't expect the digital fun house investigative squad to take the case!
We don't have a supercomputer. We have a Pentium-90, which, for several days, was once the second-fastest microcomputer on the planet. We don't have the original Hebrew text of the Torah in digital form. We don't even have Moby Dick. But we do have a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Finding Hidden Messages in Really Long Texts. And we have a handy piece of text to analyze for hidden messages: the software license agreement for Microsoft Access Developer's Toolkit 2.0. Moby Dick, moby schmick! Let the secret-code-unlocking begin!
First, we loaded the sample (Microsoft's software license agreement) into Word 97 and used the program's sophisticated processing capabilities to remove all spaces and hyphens, convert the text to all caps, and change the font to the nonproportionally spaced Courier typeface.
Then our analysis began.
We were shocked to see--almost immediately--the word "Rabin" staring us in the face. Chillingly, almost as if a massive cover-up were responsible, it was intersected by these phrases: "U.S. Government restricted," "information," "inability to use," "even if Microsoft has been advised of the possibility" and "damages for loss."
What was going on here?! Could someone in Microsoft's legal department be trying to tell us something about the assassination--something that could have been done, something the authorities would rather not have us know? We moved on.
Further computer analysis and advanced text searching gave us another shocking example. Recently, we'd been angered by the pay-per-view TV performance of former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson in his fight against Evander Holyfield, in which Tyson bit Holyfield's ear and was disqualified in the fourth round. As a result of Tyson's action, thousands of fans demanded refunds for the ridiculous sums of money they had paid to watch the event.
Imagine our amazement when we saw--hidden within the very same software license agreement--the word "Tyson" running plainly down the page, intersecting with..."refund!"
And that's not all. Right next to Tyson, there it was: the word "ear!" Understand, this license agreement was last updated in May--a full month before the Tyson ear-biting incident!
At this point we were--to say the least--stunned. But we felt a bit more searching was necessary in order to demonstrate either that computers are very powerful or that amazing messages are hidden within the software license agreement for Microsoft Access Developer's Toolkit version 2.0.
Even bigger shockers followed. Could this be a mere coincidence--an entire sentence buried secretly within the legalese of the end-user license agreement, a message spelling out, "O.J. did it?!"
We didn't know if we were ready for the nuthouse or the Nobel Prize!
Shakily, we cranked up the computer for one more alpha crunch! This one took almost an hour to spit out--but it surprised us as much as anything we'd seen so far. The word "Internet" was there, crossed horizontally by the words "Microsoft," "failure," "accident," and "abuse."
What does it all mean? Is there a hidden pattern of messages and predictions encrypted within this seemingly innocent-looking software license agreement?
Our research leads us to only one conclusion: whenever powerful computers, large documents, and people with a whole lot of free time are involved, anything is possible.
(7/16/97)
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