Princess Diana and Moby Dick?

from: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/diana.html copyrighted by Brendan McKay (bdm@cs.anu.edu.au)

WOW!! Herman Melville predicted the death of Princess Diana! If you click on the image above to enlarge it you will see very clear patterns with the words "Diana," "Dodi," "skid," "hearse," "royal," "Lady Diana," "mortal in the jaws of death," and even "Henri Paul!" BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!! We can also find in Moby Dick predictions of the assassinations of Indira Ghandi, Sirhan Sirhan, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and many others!! (click here) Melville was an amazing prophet!

OR WAS HE?

Actually, the page at which I found the above image and information was posted in response to a challenge put out by Michael Drosnin who claims that codes in the Bible (found in patterns of letters in the Hebrew) have predicted past and do predict future assassinations. It goes without saying that there are critics of his work. In an interview for Newsweek Magazine, Drosnin said he would believe his critics if they could find a message about the assassination of a prime minister in Moby Dick. Well...they did...and then some!!

You see, given a sufficiently large collection of letters or numbers or points or events or people, there will ALWAYS be patterns (highly organized subsystems). In a large collection (like the letters in a novel) you will always find "hidden" words and patterns. The question is, are they MEANINGFUL? The answer is, "No." This is just a natural consequence of having a large group of items. Just because the patterns are not meaningful, does that mean it's not fun to play around with them - NO! It can lead to really cool, fun things such as the intriguing and adventerous National Treasure movies. This is all great fun, as long as people don't take it seriously!

As mathematician T. S. Motzkin says:

Complete disorder is impossible.

If you're interested in looking into the math behind this, it is part of the branch of mathematics known as Ramsey Theory.