I Passed a Pop Quiz!

Edward Mendelson has a pop quiz regarding the Ra^thergate forged documents. His claim is that since you can't tell which picture shows text from a IBM Selectric Composer and which shows text from Microsoft Word, this proves that imitating a real document does not invalidate the fact that the document is real.

Now Gerry, from DalyThoughts (who, by the way, is the one who pointed me towards Mr. Mendelson's pop quiz) has a great post explaining why this is an incorrect line of reasoning as well as being a faulty comparison.

But, I decided to actually take the quiz.

The first thing I noticed is that, while similar, the fonts in the two samples is not identical. I had barely typed the first sentence before I became convinced that I knew which one of the samples was from Word. But, I continued with the quiz.

It was quite easy to format it and, when I was done, a simple comparison of each of the two samples with my sample proved that, in addition to the font difference, there was also a line spacing difference...the one with the same font matched up in line spacing, the other one simply would not match up.

Of course, I had figured out the correct one.

So, how exactly was this supposed to convince me that the documents were real?