Geek of All Trades

GOAT updates soon to come

Faithful GOAT readers may have been wondering why I've been so slow to update recently.

There are several reasons. One is that I've been rather busy at work lately. Another is that David gave me a Nintendo GameCube for my birthday, so most of the time I have not been working has been spent getting acquainted with that new toy, especially the magnificent The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

But, I am going on vacation tomorrow, back to Arizona and then to California. My computer is coming with me, and here in the age of wireless internet connections I may have a chance to write up the blog entries that have been kicking around in my head recently.

See you then!

A statistic too good to be true

In a tidbit that I unfortunately cannot find in their online edition, the Economist reports that "Democrats really are smarter." A chart on page 26 of the May 15, 2004 issue lists the ten U.S. states with the highest average IQ and the ten with the lowest, along with which presidential candidate won that state in the 2000 election.

Only one of the ten states with the highest average IQ (New Hampshire, tied for 7th) went to Bush. The rest of the top ten went to Gore. All ten of the states with the lowest average IQ went to Bush.

A delicate blend of good and evil

According to The Gematriculator, a service provided by the interesting Finnish website The Sect of Homokaasu. The Gematriculator calculates the proportions of good and evil in a website or a portion of text using an adaptation of the ancient numerology of Gematria.

As the Homokaasu website points out, "Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God's watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct." So there you have it. Of course, since the calculated proportions depend upon the text contained in the website, the very act of posting this article changes the result.

Gematria works by converting the letters of words into numbers via a cipher, and then reducing those numbers (either by factorization, or by adding digits together, whichever gives more eyebrow-raising results) into smaller numbers. Words that reduce to multiples of 7 add goodness to the score; words that reduce to multiples of 13 add evil. The Gematriculator provides a breakdown of significant words or phrases on the page you ask it to analyze. Here are some good ones from GOAT:

Value of word "boston" 472 4+7+2=13
Value of word "sox" 760 7+6+0=13
Value of word "pedro" 229 2+2+9=13
-- Who's the evil empire now?

Value of word "patent" 526 5+2+6=13
-- oops, I guess patents are evil after all.

Value of word "missile" 293 2+9+3=14=7x2
Value of word "palestinians" 625 6+2+5=13
-- Missiles good, Palenstinians bad - remember that the Gematria is an ancient Hebrew system of numerology

Value of word "politics" 481 481=13x37 4+8+1=13
-- I guess we could all have seen that coming.

Here's your live round, son

My brother Philip has written a very thoughtful piece in his blog about sending his students off to war. Thinking about these young fellows drives home the point that the policies of the rich are carried out at the expense of the poor.