castledoom.com

[Baron]

Apparently, a Russian mathematician has applied the sciences of statistics and astronomy to the study of history to find that, everything we thought was true up to the Renaissance is false. Reported dates of eclipses do not match modern astronomical predictions of eclipses. Scholarly history is confused, mistranslate, and falsified. All the history from the Dawn of Mankind to the Renaissance was written in the 1500's.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/2913621058/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added/104-0599184-8831947?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

http://www.atlasbooks.com/marktplc/01098.htm

Mr. Fomenko puts forward this theory: up to the last millenium, all human history consisted of one long, drawn out dark age. Around the last turn of the millenium (1000 A.D.) a continent-spanning Latin Empire rose and fell. Here's a quote from a review:

"Fomenko's theory says, basically, that everything we are told about history pre-1600 is BS. Ancient history is, according to Fomenko, based on evidence quote-unquote "discovered" since the 15th century and arranged into a spurious standard timeline in the 18th century. (In some cases, the evidence was discovered much more recently: some Eastern religious texts were only uncovered in the 20th century.) Fomenko collates this evidence to argue that all those ancient chronicles are different versions of events which really happened roughly between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. The key event in Fomenko's timeline is the life of Christ (who was born in 1053 AD rather than 6BC, Fomenko believes.) After a relatively short-lived Eurasian empire disintegrated, each nation made up their own version of the empire's history, and generally each new version of the story was set farther back into the past than the previous one. (The newest version is the Hindu Krishna myth which is set about 10,000 years before the present day.)

"This is an appealing theory, since it eliminates the various "dark ages" which blemish the conventional chronology. On the other hand, this is an appalling theory, since it creates one big dark age extending from the beginning of time till 900 AD or so."

I find the idea shocking...but I still want to read this book...

[s_stabeler]

how does he explain the wars of the roses? ( they, acording to him, occured during the falsified period, they were in britain) the battle of hastings?

[CooJoe]

I'm gonna have to look that book up.

[FrankyG888]

Mathematicians have also proved that gambling systems work. These are betting certain amounts on certain bets to give you, not the house the advantage. These mostly occur in roulette games.

Unfortunately they don't work, and they don't stand up to computer simulations.

A mathematician could prove anything if you give them enough time.

[bannie]

Didnt a bunch of MIT students figure out a function for Roulette, then take a casino to the cleaners?

[CooJoe]

It was black jack, I believe.

Also there was an engineer around the turn of the century who figured out the tilt of the roulette wheels at Monte Casino, and cleaned out the house.

[s_stabeler]

but the engineer's methods could only work for engineers, and are easily rectifiable by making the tilt zero. and as foir the blackjack one, well, i want to know, dopes it stand up to computer simulation? ditto for the engineer's one.

[Maus]

The engineer's method would work for anyone, and didn't involve any "engineering" - he simply recorded a wheel's performance over an extended time period and then looked for numbers which occured more often than chance allows:

http://www.snopes.com/luck/monte.htm

Quote: Jaggers hired six clerks to record every number that came up on the roulette wheels in the 12 hours a day the casino was open. He then spent the next six days poring over the numbers, searching for patterns that randomness alone wouldn't account for.
He found what he was looking for. Though five of the casino's six wheels produced predictably random results, nine numbers in particular kept showing up on the sixth at a rate far exceeding what natural probability would have indicated. Clearly, the wheel was biased.

The MIT blackjack method would certainly stand up to computer simulation, because it was based upon computer simulations of standard card-counting techniques:

http://semyon.com/abc%20primetime.htm

Quote: The MIT players were not the first to count cards. But they used their math expertise — and advanced computer models — to hone their skills to a devastatingly effective science. They wrote computer programs to devise the best strategy for specific situations, then updated their data with real-life experience.

[Baron]

Has the MGM film starring Kevin Spacey been released yet?

If not, is there a release date set?

[Dochartaigh]

well i am gonna havta check that book out as well. specially since i am a history education major.