Commentary from others

So, a few updates on my earlier story about being at the center of an alien conspiracy theory.

A few websites picked up on this story:

• Metafilter has a short post about it, with some interesting discussion.
• Reason.com also has a post with a lot of discussion.
• One of the original players of the game, Andrew Plotkin, who back at that time maintained a list of pretty much every game on the web, wrote a wonderful and detailed look at the events from his unique viewpoint.
• The Big Cigarette, which is a website for the atheist/skeptic podcast "A Pair of Continents" interviewed me about this story. The interview is in Episode 44, about 22 minutes in. I'm personally not an atheist, but I have no problem with it. If you do, or you are easily offended by anti-religious sentiments, you are hearby warned.

One of the things I mention on the podcast is how easy it is to find coincidences that you can make to look like conspiracies. For example, see this article by Rob MacDougall. Specifically, I took 30 minutes to see if I could find any Great Pyramid related coincidences (using Google Earth) the morning of the interview, and frankly it was pretty easy:

• The slopes of the Great Pyramid are angled at 51.84 degrees. If you travel from the Empire State Building at a heading of 51.84 degrees, it takes you straight to Grand Central Terminal.
• The perimeter of the base of the Great Pyramid is 3023.24 feet. That is the same as the length of the path between the Empire State Building and Grand Central Terminal.

That's pretty interesting. Is there some connection? Maybe we can find supporting evidence?

• The ratio of the side to the height of the Great Pyramid is 1/2 pi. So is the ratio of the roof heights of the Empire State Building to the Met Life Building (which stands on top of Grand Central Terminal)! (to within 1.5% error)
• Pi also shows up in other places: the number of steps to the observation deck of the Empire State Building is 500 pi, and the floor area of the Met Life Building is one million pi.

Does this mean I think there is a connection between the Great Pyramid and the street layout of NYC, as well as the heights of buildings created by different people at different times? Of course not. But that took only 30 minutes. Imagine what you could find given a few days or years. It is amazingly easy to find coincidences like this, and they don't mean anything at all.