Does 'coded message in Bible point to Qaeda's nuclear weapon hideout'?

Washington, Dec 11 (ANI): Author Michael Drosnin believes that there are secret, coded messages in the Bible that indicate that Al Qaeda has nuclear weapons in a secret hiding place.

Drosnin took out a full page ad in the New York Times today that asks, "Why Won't the White House Let the President Read This Letter?" Under that is a photograph of Osama bin Laden, with a large caption that reads, "Bin Laden May Already Have Nuclear Weapons."

Drosnin, author of the best-selling "Bible Code" book series, claims he can see things in the Bible that no one else can. He believes that the Bible contains codes (hidden in numbers and letters) accurately predicting world events.

However, his critics have other things to say.

Physicist David E. Thomas showed that the patterns Drosnin and others found were the result of "data mining." If you run a computer program through enough massive pieces of text (whether the Bible or "War and Peace" or "Moby-Dick"), looking for enough patterns (every 10th letter, every 12th letter, etc.), it will eventually spit out some words and jumbled sentences that could be interpreted to make sense.

Thomas demonstrated this by downloading an excerpt from Drosnin's new book from his website.

"It was 3,681 characters in length after stripping spaces and punctuation, or just over one percent of the Torah's length," Live Science quoted Thomas as saying.

"I ran two quick algorithms, and even though the chapter is short, it teems with amazing 'Bible Codes'. For example I found the words 'vain' and 'hoax' in one analysis, and the word 'megalomania' in another. Do these codes mean anything? Of course not! They just serve to show how easily hidden messages can be produced in any text, not just the Torah." (ANI)