Mr. Randi-
I'm a contributor to Skeptic, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and a few other publications as well as the author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny and director of communications for Enlighten the Vote, formerly the Godless Americans Political Action Committee
I wanted to check in to see if you could help me out with a story regarding what appears to be a ridiculous allegation to the effect that the governor of California must have intentionally engineered things such that that a three-paragraph veto he wrote the other day presents the message "IFU" - allegedly "I fuck you" - if one notes the first letter of each paragraph. The New York Post, for instance, quoted some mathematician at putting the probability of this occurring randomly at one in eight billion. Of course, this figure is hardly useful as a means of determining if the message was intentional due to a variety of factors, and though I can make something of a case for this, I'm not a mathematician by any means.
Here is an article I just wrote on the subject in case you need background info. As you'll see, I've called on ID kingpin William Dembski - with whom I've tangled in the past - to use his magical design inference powers in an effort to determine the probability that such a message could arise by chance. If he or one of his acolytes respond, the answer should be rather telling - even inadvertently damning, perhaps, as I've seen Dembski maneuvered into accidentally refuting elements of his own worldview on two occasions.
At any rate, if you could let me know if my post on the subject seems accurate or could perhaps forward this e-mail to someone who could advise me a bit further on this matter, I would be one happy little skeptic; it would also be more educational for my readers at HuffPo when the article goes up there, and that particular outfit could really use a bit of anti-whoo whoo now and again.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302