Conspiracies and coincidence

I got to thinking about all the various conspiracy theories out there, specifically ones that take every tenth word out of a letter someone wrote to find a hidden meaning, for instance. The architects of the English language (and probably others, but I only speak English), most noteably God probably have an interesting sense of humor. After all, He made me... But back to language, it's actually kind of fun to find the little things such as anagrams of Princess Diana = End is a car spin, or Year Two Thousand = A Year to shut down.

Yet when you think about each of those, Princess Diana has 13 letters. That's why she was unlucky, right? Mathematically, you could rearrange those letters 13! ways (ignoring spaces and assuming duplicate letters like "s" to be distinct), which multiplies out to 6,227,020,800 possible combinations. The chances are good that many of those will make some kind of sense in just about any language, and of those, probably a few will have something in common with the original subject.

Following similar analysis, something like a speech, news article, or other written text, often has hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of words. With every added word, letter, phrase or sentence, the mathematical complexity of such a construct would grow very quickly to being unimaginably complicated. In the world of computer encryption, using a key composed of 1's and 0's (that's two possible characters) that is 128 bits long, has a complexity of 2^128. This is considered unbreakable. If someone were to encode a secret message using only letters of the english language, the same 128 character key would be more than fifty orders of magnitude more complex. (an order of magnitude is basically adding a zero on the end, essentially multiplying by 10). Compound that with say... a 14,000 word English dictionary... With all those innumerable possibilites, I'm sure someone could find a code that translates this very post you're reading into a section of the communist manifesto, or a recipie for making mosquito bread.

In short, it's laughably easy to conceal information, and it's even easier to find things that aren't there.