Sometimes We Humans Get a Little Too Overenthusiastic with the Pattern-Matching.

Here's a worth-reading Scientific American article by professional skeptic Michael Shermer (who, by the way, has written some pretty good books, including Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe) debunking the so-called "Bible Code." If you're not familiar with this particular bit of silliness, it involved a guy called Drosnin using computer software to look for hidden messages in the Bible, which was supposedly found to predict -- correction, to have predicted, which is a critical distinction -- various assassinations and other important world events. Here's an extract from the article, which I found highly amusing:

...in 1997 Drosnin proposed this test of his thesis: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."

Australian mathematician Brendan McKay did just that, locating no fewer than nine political assassinations secreted in the great novel, along with additional discoveries in War and Peace and other tomes (see cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html). American physicist David E. Thomas predicted the Chicago Bulls's NBA championship in 1998 from his code search of Leo Tolstoy's novel. He also recently unearthed "the Bible code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax" from Bible Code II (see www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm).

(Link via Boing Boing.)