Epic fail

Well done. You skimmed it. Read the whole thing.
I did, but clearly not as carefully as you if...

Sorry, that sounded prickish. The answers to your questions (and corrections of your mistakes) are in the paper.

And by corrections, I mean corrections of your interpretations. I don't mean corrections in terms of correct thinking. The guy may well be wrong.

I didn't think I was interpreting it so much as trying to understand how the 'nearly' and the 'almost' bits were in fact part of the pattern, and it's ok that it doesn't quite line up because...

This definitely isn't my area, though, so I'll just keep schtum.

Yeah, **really **read it. Carefully. On the third or forth read, you'll start to see some patterns emerge.
ha!

Plato was quite bright, maybe he did put a musical scale in his writings. He believed in Platonic Love, i.e. love of the divine reflected in the mortal. It seems befitting.

Lots of shit about the Greeks recognising the golden ratio/fibonacci series, which, knowingly or not, is the basis of many great pieces of music.

I agree that it's easy to see patterns where there are none, particulaly to see relationships where there is only coincidence.

But, the fact this guy retrospectively found patterns seemingly by trial and error, doesn't in itself disprove his assertion. That this seems to factor in human ingenuity does not matter. On the other hand, if he had predicted the code, in a seemingly astonishing fashion it would be no more proven.

*The problem is that you cannot test his assertion, *unless you apply it to an as yet undiscovered piece of Plato's writing.

The validity of a theory doesn't lie in how it was concieved, but in how it survives scrutiny

Firstly, so what? Why should it be important that plato's works vaguely or less vaguely follow pythagorean, musical, or any other pattern? Is there a secret coded message about aliens? That's what the scientists should be working on. The aliens.

Anyway, the theory and theory testing thing. I am not a mathematician, statistician or a teacher, but neither do I care about explaining things badly or being wrong, so here goes...

A brief example is cancer and power lines. Some people are convinced there's a link, others the opposite.

If cancer occurs randomly, then the geographical distribution will be random. Part of random is clustering. Your iphone/ipod random song function isn't random at all, because it would piss you off to have the same song fifteen times in a row. And even with a massive song library, a truly random track selector WILL eventually do this to you, if you listen long enough (although lifespan is probably the limiting factor in that last one).

So you have random clusters of people getting cancer. If they live near a power line, before you sue the electric company / the government you have to exclude the possibility that the cluster is simply part of greater randomness. People don't. They look at the pins scattered into the map, draw a circle around a group of sick people, and drum up a lawsuit.

Poor explaining, I know.

Back to fail, although this one is dangerously close to win, and inspired by the how to carry bikes thread...