Not actually the Mona Lisa
What do the phrases: “Jackson Pollock painted the Mona Lisa”, “The homing pigeon luxuriated in the hot bath”, and “That man has a city for a head turkey archeologist” have in common?
As David at Shores of the Dirac Sea explains, they’re all encoded in the digits of pi:
This result states that any message that you want is written in the digits of a normal number an infinite number of times. Every single message.
Or, to put it in the words of my college probability professor:
Randomness is not the absence of order; it is the presence of every possible type of order.
This is, quite possibly, the single most important sentence to know when thinking about conspiracy theories or the hidden-message variety mysticism. Never be surprised at people’s ability to find messages, or even fragments of messges, in apparently randose3m;’%hkl;##%15kmg.
You did a fabulous talk on randomness a few years ago here on Whidbey Island. You went into detail about the limits of randomness and debunked attempts to attribute meaning when it shouldn’t be done. Can you put the text of that talk on this blog?
Oh, good heavens, I doubt it. I found the notes for that about a year ago, but they’re in a box in storage now. The other problem is that they’re just that: notes. I didn’t actually write out a script.
That is an excellent way of putting it. In Randomness every possible order will be found.
i like it !
its aweessommme YOO
wat is dis
wat has dis got to do wid pie