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[Wedjat]

I originally posted this in non-Christian prayer requests yesterday.

So a few days ago a read a thread in which someone had brought up a point about what we would consider the guiding hand of God or pure chance. If we flipped a coin a bunch of times and it was exactly fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails, that we flipped a bunch and it turned up one hundred percent one side, or that we flipped it a bunch and it spelled out a message in binary.
That got me thinking, so I sequenced all 248 variations of a standard byte (8-bit binary code) and aligned them with letters a-z with "spaces" between each alphabet (OO1OO11O is a K, O1O1OOO1 is a space, 1O1O1O11 is an A, just to give you an idea)
248 is not evenly divisible by 26, so instead of cutting the alphabet short at the end, I just wrote in A,E,I,and O, since vowels really make the word.
I will flip an old New Zealand twenty cent piece (it has a kiwi on the back ), which I have labeled 1(on the heads side) and 0(on the tails side).
Here's a visual if you need it.

Anyway I will be flipping this coin 800 times (enough for 100 characters, spaces included), I will allow it to land undisturbed onto my carpet (as in I will not catch it and flip it onto the back of my hand, or let it bounce against other objects) Recording the results as I go. When I'm finished I will separate the numbers into 8-bit sections, then compare the results with my chart.
For safety's sake I will also run the result through an internet binary translator. I will also take the inverse of my results (1=0, 0=1) (in case there's some confusion)
If the results still aren't clear I will run it through an anagram solver.
Any language will work as long as it uses English letters, but I can't do an anagram for a non-English language.

Here's where the prayer request comes in. I very much want this to work, but I'm afraid, as an atheist, I am incapable of praying with any kind of sincerity. If I don't believe, I really can't pray that well can I? I assure you I will try, but I would also like a bunch of people to be praying sincerely with me, to make sure that God at least knows about my little activity.

I know I'm going to hear someone say that you can't test God and that prayer doesn't work that way, but listen up. I'm not testing God. If all that comes out of this is random gibberish, then that proves absolutely nothing. For all I know he could have been sleeping in late and didn't hear the phone ring.
However if God actually decides to respond (especially coherently) then that goes a great way in proving that he does exist, or that at least something supernatural is willfully affecting the flips of my coin.

Regardless of the results, I will post them in the physical sciences section of the society forum.

I will be commencing the flippary tomorrow at noon, GMT+12
Please pray for my success.

Well the results are in! After 800 flips of the coin, I began recording the message from binary. Then After about 5 letters in I realized that I had drawn up my chart wrong (there are 256 variations of a byte, not 248)

[FONT=&quot]I re-drew the chart and (three and a half hours later) now have the words.[/FONT]

 

[Wedjat]

The binary code received from 800 flips of a coin was:
11010001 11010100 01000101 10001100 11011011 11111011 10011101 10010011 01001111 10101011 10000110 01101101 11110011 10000100 10001111 10100101 00101001 00111011 01000011 11000110 11011111 11010110 10110000 00011000 00000001 00100001 00100111 00100000 10101111 11101100 00001001 00110000 10111100 10111101 11010000 00001111 11001111 11010010 11100010 11011111 01111001 11010001 00110110 00111110 10001111 01101100 00010101 11011010 11101000 00100101 01110000 00111101 10100011 00100010 01101110 00010001 00101010 00000001 10001110 01101101 10100000 01010100 10001001 10100110 01011110 10110101 11101010 10110000 11111000 11110001 10010010 11101000 10010001 10000110 11001000 11010100 00101010 11011010 01010110 00111100 10010011 10011100 00110111 11011111 11001011 00111101 11110101 11001101 11110010 10101100 11101100 11110010 01000110 10100100 11011101 11011011 10100011 00001001 10110111



The message according to my chart is:
Tpwoecavlyizaaxhcnemigynxaflemtiuz sorujg hh ubpjdgalbqoagaycbdmsrnuykpjzkwobefluagngepzjtzpbecaiu

Run through an anagram solver with the loosest possible parameters, it yielded zero results.

For a second opinion I ran the same code through an online binary translator. This result was:
ÑÔE&#65533;Ûû&#65533;&#65533;O«&#65533;mó&#65533;&#65533;¥);CÆßÖ°!' ¯ì 0¼½ÐÏÒâßyÑ6>&#65533;lÚè%p=£"n*&#65533;m T&#65533;¦^µê°øñ&#65533;è&#65533;&#65533;ÈÔ*ÚV<&#65533;&#65533;7ßË=õÍò¬ìòF¤ÝÛ£ ·

[FONT=&quot]Which admittedly looks a lot cooler, although I didn’t bother to run this one through the anagram solver.[/FONT]

 

[Wedjat]

Finally the inverse of the entire message is:
00101110 00101011 10111010 01110011 00100100 00000100 01100010 01101100 10110000 01010100 01111001 10010010 00001100 01111011 01110000 01011010 11010110 11000100 10111100 00111001 00100000 00101001 01001111 11100111 11111110 11011110 11011000 11011111 01010000 00010011 11110110 11001111 01000011 01000010 00101111 11110000 00110000 00101101 00011101 00100000 10000110 00101110 11001001 11000001 01110000 10010011 11101010 00100101 00010111 11011010 10001111 11000010 01011100 11011101 10010001 11101110 11010101 11111110 01110001 10010010 01011111 10101011 01110110 01011001 10100001 01001010 00010101 01001111 00000111 00001110 01101101 00010111 01101110 01111001 00110111 00101011 11010101 00100101 10101001 11000011 01101100 01100011 11001000 00100000 00110100 11000010 00001010 00110010 00001101 01010011 00010011 00001101 10111001 01011011 00100010 00100100 01011100 11110110 01001000

Which according to my chart is:
Spxgidq ncmmklodiygzcenyoof bzsirmltxorbedslddlrjwbhukejvxoeknijhztuygnawbmapxjgf rljyejwmbsmygikir

Which also yielded no results in the anagram solver

And according to the translator is:
.+ºs$ bl°Ty&#65533;
{pZÖļ9 )OçþÞØßPöÏCB/ð0- &#65533;.ÉÁp&#65533;ê%Ú&#65533;Â\Ý&#65533;îÕþq&#65533;_«vY¡JO
mny7+Õ%©ÃlcÈ 4Â
2
S
[FONT=&quot]¹["$\öH[/FONT]

 

[Wedjat]

Honestly, I didn't expect it to be quite this random. What with the weighting for vowels and spaces, I thought there would be at least a few things that looked like words.

Although I didn't actually get any replies on the prayer request, so I think it's likely that God was just ignoring me.

Still this experiment did prove one thing.
I have way too much time on my hands.

 

[dewaddict84]

I have way too much time on my hands.

Agreed. How long did that take to do the flipping? But it's nice to have some actual experimentation done rather then always relying on theory.

But try to wrap your head around this: In your experiment, you came up with the word "gay". It could be random chance, it could be the hand of god insulting your sexual orientation, who knows. But if you continued doing this you would eventually get the string "not gay". There would be a similar amount of gibberish all around it, but it would eventually happen, probably. And that probability is 1/256^(string length) each time you flip the coin. It could be the very next set of flips, it might never happen, that's how a probabilistic reality works. But if you do this for long enough, the probability of getting ANY string of ANY length approaches one. You could get the exact text of the KJB, you could get the complete works of Shakespeare. It's not assured, but it's practically assured. All it takes is infinity.

OR:
Chaos theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Wedjat]

Agreed. How long did that take to do the flipping? But it's nice to have some actual experimentation done rather then always relying on theory.

But try to wrap your head around this: In your experiment, you came up with the word "gay". It could be random chance, it could be the hand of god insulting your sexual orientation, who knows. But if you continued doing this you would eventually get the string "not gay". There would be a similar amount of gibberish all around it, but it would eventually happen, probably. And that probability is 1/256^(string length) each time you flip the coin. It could be the very next set of flips, it might never happen, that's how a probabilistic reality works. But if you do this for long enough, the probability of getting ANY string of ANY length approaches one. You could get the exact text of the KJB, you could get the complete works of Shakespeare. It's not assured, but it's practically assured. All it takes is infinity.

OR:
Chaos theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yep, but after something like 45 minutes and more than 800 flips of the coin, a three letter insult to my sexual orientation doesn't give me much respect for God if he was influencing the flips. He could have bothered to put some spaces around it as well. (I had to discount the ones that bounced off of things other than the floor. Some of them were kind of hard to call, and one wrong call would conceivably throw the whole message off, but I figured God was capable of using his omniscience to know which ones I would and wouldn't count.)

It took me around three and a half hours to to the experiment in full, flipping, recording, separating, reading, translating, inverting, doing it all over again. That doesn't count the time that it took me to list all 256 variations of a byte and assign letters and spaces to them.

 

[AV1611VET]

Does the coin have IN GOD WE TRUST on it?

 

[Muad Dib]

I lol'd, after reading the original message, the 3 words that have gibberish all around them are:

woe..gay...flu

I think god is trying to say something lol

 

[ragarth]

oh no, god sent swine flue to punish us all for accepting the gays. Err, or am I reading more into a random string of letters than I should be?

 

[pgp_protector]

You didn't split it right

Tp
woe
cavlyiz
a
axhcnemigynxaflemtiuz
so
rujghhubpjd
gal
bqoa
gay
cbdmsrnuykpjzkwo
be
flu
agngepzjtzpbecaiu

(Sorta like Boggle )

 

[dewaddict84]

Hey, "flem" is a 4 letter word and that much more important.

So with only a minor amount of re-arranging, extra spaces, and punctuation we get....

"Woe, a gal be gay, so flu flem"

...hmmmm, intriguing. You all must have prayed very hard for this divine insight. For only a small fee we can continue this seance and delve deeper into your past. I'll even throw in a free palm-reading!

 

[dewaddict84]

And if god speaks in l33t the possibilities explode!

 

[thaumaturgy]

Does the coin have IN GOD WE TRUST on it?

I dunno, but at least one of their bills has ERNEST RUTHERFORD ON IT!

(which for my money is waaaay cooler! He was one of the fathers of Nuclear physics)

 

[AV1611VET]

I dunno, but at least one of their bills has ERNEST RUTHERFORD ON IT!

(which for my money is waaaay cooler! He was one of the fathers of Nuclear physics)

Perhaps then Wedjat should flip this bill 800 times and see what comes up?

 

[Cabal]

I dunno, but at least one of their bills has ERNEST RUTHERFORD ON IT!

(which for my money is waaaay cooler! He was one of the fathers of Nuclear physics)

Dude, EPIC!

 

[Wedjat]

I considered using a US. quarter (the only bit of American currency I have right now) but I decided to use the old NZ twenty cent piece for a few reasons.
a) it's bigger, easier to flip, and creates a better ring
b) the quarter is an Alaskan quarter, and I didn't really want to be showing favoritism towards any one state.
c) because it's out of circulation, there are less of them, so I figured it would make it a little easier for God to locate the coin I was using (especially since I wrote on it)

Woe, a gal be gay, so flu flem

Well, it looks like the evangelical right was correct, lesbians caused god to send us swine flu. Although his spelling and grammar is horrendous (it's spelled "phlegm").

Finally, I'm done flipping anything 800 times. So if anyone wants to flip a more godly coin, or Earnest Rutherford's bill, they can do it themselves. I'd be glad to send them the chart I used.

 

[thaumaturgy]

I considered using a US. quarter (the only bit of American currency I have right now) but I decided to use the old NZ twenty cent piece for a few reasons.
a) it's bigger, easier to flip, and creates a better ring

EVEN ON CARPETING?

You kiwis are hardcore!

Anyway I will be flipping this coin 800 times (enough for 100 characters, spaces included), I will allow it to land undisturbed onto my carpet

(emphasis added)

b) the quarter is an Alaskan quarter, and I didn't really want to be showing favoritism towards any one state.

You're always better off with the Illinois version. Illinois rulez.

Well, it looks like the evangelical right was correct, lesbians caused god to send us swine flu. Although his spelling and grammar is horrendous (it's spelled "phlegm").

I was gonna say... But I figured maybe someone who was more familiar with the KJV spelling would chime in...

Finally, I'm done flipping anything 800 times. So if anyone wants to flip a more godly coin, or Earnest Rutherford's bill, they can do it themselves. I'd be glad to send them the chart I used.

Just send me the Rutherford note...

 

[Wedjat]

EVEN ON CARPETING?

No, in the air, right after you flick it rings while airborne.
The quarter is like one of those tiny sleighbells
The NZ 20c is more like one of those small hand bells that you might ring for dinnertime. Much more pleasing to the ears.

Just send me the Rutherford note

Haha, fat chance. Go to the currency exchange in the airport if you want it so bad, it'll be around $70 US right now though, so you might want to wait until the value of the NZ dollar goes down (they are actually trying to reduce it's value now, because the high exchange rate is bad for exporters)

 

[Penumbra]

Still this experiment did prove one thing.
I have way too much time on my hands.

It would be easier and faster to write a program that randomly generates a sequence of binary. You could also include functions to invert the binary and such so you don't have to do it yourself. The program would be quick to write, and once made, you could do the experiment over and over again in a matter of minutes. If you plan on doing this in the future (such as by making sure you have at least x number of devout Christians praying before you do it, or by testing another religion like Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism), then it would make sense to have it quickly repeatable.

I lol'd, after reading the original message, the 3 words that have gibberish all around them are:

woe..gay...flu

I think god is trying to say something lol

You didn't split it right

Tp
woe
cavlyiz
a
axhcnemigynxaflemtiuz
so
rujghhubpjd
gal
bqoa
gay
cbdmsrnuykpjzkwo
be
flu
agngepzjtzpbecaiu

(Sorta like Boggle )

So basically you've shown that's how Bible Codes happen. In a sequence of only 800 binary numbers, relevant things like gay and flu came up. In something as long as the Bible or Moby Dick, more complicated words are bound to occur.

-Lyn

 

[Wedjat]

So basically you've shown that's how Bible Codes happen. In a sequence of only 800 binary numbers, relevant things like gay and flu came up. In something as long as the Bible or Moby Dick, more complicated words are bound to occur.

Good point. Although this should already be obvious to anyone who isn't contained in an impenetrable sphere of their own worldview.

As for the code, well the experiment was inspired by someone saying "flipping a coin", so I wanted to stay true to that. Also, God is pretty old, so if he's anything like my parents I doubt he'd be computer savvy enough to influence my results.
Then of course he is apparently omniscient and omnipotent, so if I ever go do this again, I will be writing code, the tender tip of my right thumb will make sure of that. (It doesn't matter how small it is, if you flick a piece of metal 800 time in a row, you start to feel it)