Bruce has drawn my attention to the latest Bush Pi kerfuffle on metafilter.
They are talking about the research done by Steve Luttrell which exposes the hidden messages in Kate Bush's Pi song.
I know what I am doing here. This is the sort of thing that I do in my professional life, where coding/decoding (and all that sort of thing) are things that are central to my work (have a look at www.luttrell.org.uk/papers to see what I mean), so I know a few tricks of the trade, and I am not a well-meaning fool who sees patterns in random noise. As far as possible, I have used Occam's Razor to make sure that my decodings have the minimum complexity that is consistent with the data (i.e. the song). This means that if I can find a single explanation for two or more features in the song then that is a good and economical decoding. Where a decoding is dubious, I say so.
It is quite challenging to use Occam's Razor, because you have to be able to find common explanations for different aspects of the song. For instance, it is important to be able to link the musical rendition of the song with its literal representation, which means that you have to resolve various puns. Kate likes her puns, both verbal and musical, so get used to it!
After you have done all of this, you realise that Kate hasn't merely sung the digits of the number p; she has built a very clever construction that has lots of hidden beauty. In fact, Kate has a beautiful mind! Basically, this is the reason that I got interested in this decoding problem, which led eventually to the creation of this web site.
I suggest you take a look at the work Steve has done and see what you think.
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