finding words, and "going fishing"

[trochee]

A friend of mine is taking a class exploring the classic English department whodunit: "who wrote Shakespeare's plays?" Now, before you wonder "is this a trick question?", apparently the answer is "no."

I don't have the details, but according to her prof (who's a Linguistics prof) the real author was Edward DeVere. Unfortunately, it may not be as straightforward as we might like to make this case. I suspect a bad smell, but her final project (I may get to help with the coding) will involve doing the proper statistics with sonnets of Edward DeVere, William Shakespeare, and some other poet from the same period.

Anyway, having thought about this, I remembered the Bible Code silliness, of which some of this style of author-ship detection relies. I did some online research, and here's what I found and sent to my friend who's working on a similar question this quarter:

I was looking for information about the "Bible Code" nonsense and I found a fairly good debunking of the whole thing at:

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html

(read his links to those who make theclaim -- second paragraph -- they're pretty wacky).

Anyway, I send you the link because the refuters (Brendan McKay et al) have some good statistical critiques of "going fishing". (In addition, they uncover some very fishy science in the Bible Codes stuff).

Anyway, the sociology here is almost as interesting as the math, but I think you'd have fun with both of them. My favorite rebuttal to "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the _Book of Genesis_" is "Equidistant Letter Sequences in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_", both of which are linked from the web site above.

Enjoy.

Comments

Code-tastic.

[lx.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing about this a long time ago, and I wondered if anyone would run a similar test against another massive body of work like War and Peace. Thanks for the links, illuminating information.

It is fascinating psychologically—people wanting to back up a key element of their spiritual Faith with obscure, indirect Math. ;)