<i>It turns out you can literally fit an elephant with four parameters if you allow the parameters to be complex numbers.</i><p>That's cool and all, but it kind of strikes me as cheating, given that complex numbers are vectors. I mean, heck, with four parameters I can fit three elephants, if you allow the parameters to be vectors in 6-space.
I would've had so much fun with this on a ti83 back in high school... But more seriously: kind of makes you wonder even more, how people can believe those doomsday proclamations based on <i>patterns</i> in centuries-old texts.