One of the things I wish I had a magic wand I could wave to cause happen, just to see what the after effects would be, would be to erase all credit card companies from the face of the Earth. I'm curious what the sudden lack of expensive credit would do to society. We've developed this bizarre economical view where when people spend beyond their means, say for the Christmas shopping season, then we're told that the economy is strong. Somehow the mountain of debt being built up doesn't register.
I'm essentially outraged that credit card companies have managed to embed themselves as far into American society as they have. The problem is that they've managed to oblige people to use them, they've managed to create negative consequences for people who don't bring them profit.
I dislike credit cards and don't use them, as a rule. I simply don't understand the point. You essentially use them for a short term loan to pay for everyday purchases that you could have paid for with cash. THEN you pay them back, often paying back more than you spent because of assorted fees. Yet it's not even limited to that, what people in the modern age seem to have forgotten (except those working in the retail sector) is that not only do you pay fees directly to your credit card company, but you indirectly pay them because all merchants that accept credit cards have to pay money to the credit card companies for every transaction they make. There's only one place this money can come from, the customer. You don't see it, but every price at the supermarket has been marked up to take this into account. What's worse is that people like me who pay in cash essentially subsidize the costs, helping to pay OTHER people's credit card fees.
I'm barely old enough to remember the day when some prices, especially gasoline, were available in both credit and cash versions. I now know that that practice is still (barely) alive today, I saw an interstate highway gas station that listed separate cash and credit prices.
It's not just that that really outrages me though. For people like me who don't see the point of credit cards are penalized in another way for not doing business with those parasites upon modern society. Let's say I find myself in the market for buying a house. My lack of credit history will make it difficult to get a loan. At best it'll mean that any loan I can get will have a higher interest rate. Isn't that convenient for the credit card companies? If I don't voluntarily waste money on an unnecessary service then I have to pay more money for something else. How convenient for the credit card companies that being THEIR customer has become the measure of a good citizen. Of course it's a power structure that they invented from the ground up, the entire thing was planned, but somehow no-one thought that allowing them to do that might be a bad thing.
It's bad enough that that sort of information has become key to getting a loan. Now all manner of businesses are using the information from the credit bureaus. Applying for a job? If you're not a customer in good standing with the credit card companies then you're penalized. Yes, somehow that sort of information is deemed valid for judging the ability of job applicants.
Shopping for car insurance? Guess what? Now they use your credit history to influence your rates. Just one more avenue of society controlled by the credit card companies. Use their product or else you have to pay a premium for other products. It's financial blackmail, fully endorsed by the government that's received thousands of dollars in donations from, guess who, credit card companies.
My feeling on capitalism is simple. It's a fine concept, so long as the government controlling it is willing to step in to protect THE PEOPLE when such protection is necessary. There's nothing about the fundamental concept of capitalism that enforces ethics, it's up to outside regulation to protect the consumers from the corporations. In cases like this the government has been happy to slurp up the bribes.. er, donations, from such entities as the credit card companies and in turn allow them to do as they please, or even rewrite laws to better benefit them (such as the recent reworking of the bankruptcy system).
I have a proposal for the first step that needs to be taken to reign in these leeches. I want all business obligated to separate the extra credit card fees into discrete added costs that are only charged to people using credit cards. It would protect cash paying customers from having to subsidize the credit card costs of others. I'm fully outraged that MY money is going into the pockets of the credit card companies even though I don't use their product (and as such am being penalized for it). Secondly it would make credit card customers aware of the extra fees they're paying without even realizing it.
Such fees are, by the way, the reason that credit card companies are making such a push to get credit cards integrated into everything from purchasing gas to fast food with the RFID tags (radio tags that let you just wave your card close to a reader, it's nowhere near as secure as they pretend it is but this isn't the time to get into that). There's nothing they'd love more than to get people to pay for a $3 fast food snack with credit, they stand to reap millions of dollars from such simple, unnecessary transactions.
There are other things I'd like to see but I'm not holding out for miracles. I want the credit monitoring agencies to be outlawed. They have entirely too much power. If your car is stolen the process is simple. You report it to the police and they try to recover it, and if you have insurance than it can be replaced even if it's not found. And that's it.
If someone steals your identity then you're out of luck. You can be stuck spending thousands of dollars to try to undo the damage. There's no consumer protection. What the credit agencies say goes, presumed guilty, with the considerably heavy burden placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
Back to my stolen car example.. Imagine someone steals it and then commits a hit and run, killing somebody and fleeing. The police make almost no attempt to catch the thief, and instead throw you into jail. There's no trial, since it was YOUR car, and you're stuck in jail until you hire a private investigator to track down the person who stole your car.
There are any number of unjust situations like this. As a society we should be interested in making the country a better place to live.
The continuing theme to posts like these is that we COULD make the country a better place if we worked to address things like this. Has all the "greatest country in the world" talk made our society unwilling to consider that anything might not be perfect already? Is that why we're embarked on an obsessive global policing quest which has cost us considerably and benefited nobody?
I can't help but make a parallel to that psychology concept I mentioned earlier, the thing where someone, fearful of some aspect of their own personality, sets out to try to change the rest of the world instead. It's as if we've said that we MUST be perfect, so the rest of the world must be at fault.
Unless the issue has to do with prayer in the schools, or stem cell research, or homosexuality. Then we're only too willing to take action. Protecting consumers from predatory corporations is an unworthy pursuit (unworthy for the politicians who are essentially on the corporate payroll, perhaps), but keeping two people of the same sex from declaring a social union is a top priority.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Internet radio day of silence
This is one of the reasons that I have no problem speaking out as boldly as I do against the record companies and their puppet organization the RIAA. One of their recent tactics is to massively jack up the royalties that Internet radio stations must pay. Not only that, but they've made the changes retroactive! Imagine that you ran a legitimate Internet radio station. Imagine that you've gone to all the trouble of securing enough funding through advertising to be able to legally play the music, and you get rewarded for that by having your rates jacked up several hundred percent, FAR beyond what any normal radio broadcaster has to pay. If that's not enough you have to backpay those absurd rates for 18 months.
It's clear that their desire is to destroy Internet radio. They complain about pirates but when people go about legally licensing the music they decide they don't like that either.
It's what I've argued for a long time. This isn't about money, it's about control. Traditional broadcast radio stations pay a relatively small royalty fee. I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I know it's widely speculated that they in turn are financially supported by the record companies in exchange for playing what they're told to play. If you listen to popular radio it's not difficult to believe that.
I think it's clear that the record companies felt threatened by the net radio stations that played their own independent selections of music, or, in the case of Pandora, allowed the end user to design their own musical selection. Because that's not what the record companies want to do. They want to tell us what we're supposed to listen to and buy.
I direct all those interested to this link, it can tell the rest of the story far better than I could. The short story is that there is currently a bill working its way through both the us Senate and House of Representatives.
If the bills are defeated and they put the majority of legitimate Internet radio broadcasters out of business then I'll have VERY little sympathy when they complain about the remaining illegal broadcasters. How hypocritical can you get?
I love Internet radio. I'm able to hear music I'd never hear anywhere else. I rarely listen to what's become known as terrestrial radio (I'm unhappy with the current terms, I'd prefer dropping the use of radio when referring to internet audio broadcasting altogether). I have the big three music stations tuned in to my car radio and I sometimes flip through them but I rarely stay on any one of them, the music is just too uniformly awful. At best I've got a talk/news station that I often end up listening to. It's a little dry, but still a lot more palatable than what the record companies are trying to force feed me through the other options.
It's clear that their desire is to destroy Internet radio. They complain about pirates but when people go about legally licensing the music they decide they don't like that either.
It's what I've argued for a long time. This isn't about money, it's about control. Traditional broadcast radio stations pay a relatively small royalty fee. I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I know it's widely speculated that they in turn are financially supported by the record companies in exchange for playing what they're told to play. If you listen to popular radio it's not difficult to believe that.
I think it's clear that the record companies felt threatened by the net radio stations that played their own independent selections of music, or, in the case of Pandora, allowed the end user to design their own musical selection. Because that's not what the record companies want to do. They want to tell us what we're supposed to listen to and buy.
I direct all those interested to this link, it can tell the rest of the story far better than I could. The short story is that there is currently a bill working its way through both the us Senate and House of Representatives.
If the bills are defeated and they put the majority of legitimate Internet radio broadcasters out of business then I'll have VERY little sympathy when they complain about the remaining illegal broadcasters. How hypocritical can you get?
I love Internet radio. I'm able to hear music I'd never hear anywhere else. I rarely listen to what's become known as terrestrial radio (I'm unhappy with the current terms, I'd prefer dropping the use of radio when referring to internet audio broadcasting altogether). I have the big three music stations tuned in to my car radio and I sometimes flip through them but I rarely stay on any one of them, the music is just too uniformly awful. At best I've got a talk/news station that I often end up listening to. It's a little dry, but still a lot more palatable than what the record companies are trying to force feed me through the other options.
Monday, June 25, 2007
My UFO experience
I've got another fun story to tell, a story of a subject that's a popular target for skeptics.
UFOs, lights in the sky. Everybody knows they're all easily explainable, right?
Not the one I saw. That doesn't mean I've experienced evidence for the existence of alien life, just that I saw something in the night sky that my collective base of knowledge was unable to explain with the usual rational dismissals.
The story is simply this. I was walking away from a restaurant, through the parking lot. It was a nice, crisp, clear night, I had looked up at the sky to see what the seeing conditions were like. I'm not even really an amateur astronomer, but I'd taken an interest in such things and was just curious what the sky looked like that night.
You see, if you get a map of light pollution for North America you'll see a few spots that have the worst light pollution of the entire country. I happen to live in one of those spots, directly underneath the massive white canopy surrounding Chicago indicating that the area has the worst classification of light pollution. This means that, if I wanted to point my camera at the sky to capture a classic star trail picture, the sky would turn a disgusting shade of vomit-red and overwhelm the stars before I had any significant trails. When I look at the night sky I see only some of the brightest stars. The night sky is never exactly black to me, and the horizon glows as if sunrise was perpetually just a half an hour or so away.
So I was pleased when I looked up and the sky seemed a little bit darker than was normal. Perhaps the air was unusually dry and thus there was less water vapor to reflect the megawatts of street and parking lot lighting perpetually blazing away to banish the dark night from the suburban streets.
In any case, I was gazing up at the sky, and just as I'd had my fill and had turned my eyes back to more mundane terrestrial matters, namely finding my way to the car, a sudden faint memory of seeing something unusual in the sky registered in my brain. I wasn't entirely sure if I had really seen something or if I'd imagined it. But the memory was off a peculiar faint light moving at a highly unusual speed through the night sky. Reflexively I glanced back up, the memory telling me roughly where to look. For a moment I couldn't find it, then I caught it again. Two faint, diffuse light sources moving across the sky at an absurdly high rate of speed.
Any composure I may have had was totally lost. I was out with my parents to dinner, and I attempted to alert them to the rather unusual spectacle unfolding in the heavens to no result. I think I managed to stammer something along the lines of "ohmygodIjustsawaUFO!", only with less clarity. But long before I could direct their attention to the lights they were gone, having faded away into the light pollution haze on the horizon.
Here's what I can say with certainty about what I saw. As I said, there were two lights, both with a visible circular shape. That is it wasn't a point source of light, I clearly saw two circles. They were moving together, but they weren't entirely static compared to each other. It's difficult to explain, but while they moved with respect to each other it still appeared as if they were connected. My crude explanation is that it was as if I was looking at lights located on the wingtips of an aircraft, and if it were to rock its wings slightly from side to side the lights would move towards or away from each other, but in a fixed, predictable pattern. They did not look like, say, a pair of balloons bobbing independently in the breeze.
If you're wondering why my first notice of them was that weird half memory experience, I think I have an explanation for that. For whatever reason we humans have two different types of light receptors in our eyes, cone cells and rod cells. Cone cells need more light to work but react faster and allow us to see color (because there's three different kinds of them), and rod cells are pretty much the reverse, working in less light but producing no color information. The interesting thing is that we have more cone cells in the center of our vision and more rods in our peripheral vision. Astronomers know this well, a standard trick when looking for faint objects in the night sky is to look at the area in question with the edges of their vision to employ the greater density of rod cells.
I found this reference in wikipedia:
"The convergence of rod cells also tends to make peripheral vision very sensitive to movement, and is responsible for the phenomenon of individuals seeing something vague occur out of the corner of his or her eye."
Until tonight I've never seen that explanation, but it does rather a good job of explaining why I had already looked away from the sky before I realized what I'd seen.
I was facing roughly south, and the lights were moving in the direction I faced. Now that I look at the parking lot I see that it's not oriented directly to the south. So if anything it came from slightly East of exact North and went slightly West of South.
I've seen satellites passing overhead. I once managed to see the International Space Station. I've seen an Iridium Flare. I know what those things look like. They do NOT look like large, faint circles of light. Furthermore they move a lot slower than what I saw. So if I was looking at something outside of our atmosphere it was moving far too fast to be in orbit. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it would have had to be a quite large object or pair of objects for me to see a visible disc from the ground with my naked eyes.
I find the aircraft explanation equally unsatisfactory. Simply because it was moving FAR too quickly, plus, again, the large circle problem. I haven't really done the math to estimate the speed, but unless the object had been quite low and therefore close to me it would have had to be going faster than the speed of sound. Most likely several times the speed of sound. Passenger jets positively crawl through the sky from the perspective of the ground compared to what I saw. First off aircraft tend not to fly that quickly, even military aircraft spend most of their time on the subsonic side of the sound barrier. Secondly when they do go that fast they tend to bombard the ground with a supersonic shockwave that's rather difficult to miss. I experienced no sonic boom.
I also know well what meteors look like. They can show a wide variety of appearances, from brief streaks of very fast moving light to slower, more detailed debris showers that appear when you're closer and it's fallen far enough to have slowed down. They can show enough speed to explain what I saw, but they tend not to travel in symmetrical pairs that travel together across the sky.. and, again, no large, faint circles. A meteor should have been a lot brighter.
So what was it?
There's only one rational explanation I find even slightly persuasive. Spotlights. The suburbs are often loaded with these things, and it's no problem for a spotlight to project a faint circle of light in the sky that moves at speeds apparently faster than the speed of sound.
Two problems with that theory. First off I've already established that it was an exceptionally clear night. No cloud layer to speak of. There would have had to be SOME sort of layer up there to reflect the circles of light while at the same time the air was still dry enough for there to be no visible beam of light emanating from the ground.
Secondly I've seen no spotlight that does what these lights did. There's a very traditional spotlight pattern, four individual lights that trace large circles in the sky and then rejoin in the center of each of their patterns. I've never seen a spotlight pattern that involves two lights sweeping a straight path across the sky and then stopping. There was no repetition, I was looking.
I'm classifying it as a UFO. I think the term is appropriate. By which I mean "unidentified flying object". I can't be certain that it was an object at all, but other than that it was certainly unidentified. You won't find me declaring that I've seen an alien space ship because I don't know what it was. To tell the truth I have no idea why aliens would go to all that trouble to fly through the sky showing faint lights.
But I hope I've demonstrated that I've done the best I can to apply the usual explanations. My nature is to seek explanations. When I see a magic trick my first reaction is to work on figuring out how it was done.
But none of the usual explanations has satisfactorily explained this experience. I'd actually like to present this story to some hard core skeptics some time, if they can come up with a decent explanation I'd have to accept it. I admit I'd be at least a wee bit disappointed, but no more so than when learning the secret of some secret of stage magic (basically a lot of what you see in stage magic is fake, even the alleged restraints are often break-aways that are discarded as soon as the curtain goes down).
For the moment though I have to file this under the category of the unresolved.
UFOs, lights in the sky. Everybody knows they're all easily explainable, right?
Not the one I saw. That doesn't mean I've experienced evidence for the existence of alien life, just that I saw something in the night sky that my collective base of knowledge was unable to explain with the usual rational dismissals.
The story is simply this. I was walking away from a restaurant, through the parking lot. It was a nice, crisp, clear night, I had looked up at the sky to see what the seeing conditions were like. I'm not even really an amateur astronomer, but I'd taken an interest in such things and was just curious what the sky looked like that night.
You see, if you get a map of light pollution for North America you'll see a few spots that have the worst light pollution of the entire country. I happen to live in one of those spots, directly underneath the massive white canopy surrounding Chicago indicating that the area has the worst classification of light pollution. This means that, if I wanted to point my camera at the sky to capture a classic star trail picture, the sky would turn a disgusting shade of vomit-red and overwhelm the stars before I had any significant trails. When I look at the night sky I see only some of the brightest stars. The night sky is never exactly black to me, and the horizon glows as if sunrise was perpetually just a half an hour or so away.
So I was pleased when I looked up and the sky seemed a little bit darker than was normal. Perhaps the air was unusually dry and thus there was less water vapor to reflect the megawatts of street and parking lot lighting perpetually blazing away to banish the dark night from the suburban streets.
In any case, I was gazing up at the sky, and just as I'd had my fill and had turned my eyes back to more mundane terrestrial matters, namely finding my way to the car, a sudden faint memory of seeing something unusual in the sky registered in my brain. I wasn't entirely sure if I had really seen something or if I'd imagined it. But the memory was off a peculiar faint light moving at a highly unusual speed through the night sky. Reflexively I glanced back up, the memory telling me roughly where to look. For a moment I couldn't find it, then I caught it again. Two faint, diffuse light sources moving across the sky at an absurdly high rate of speed.
Any composure I may have had was totally lost. I was out with my parents to dinner, and I attempted to alert them to the rather unusual spectacle unfolding in the heavens to no result. I think I managed to stammer something along the lines of "ohmygodIjustsawaUFO!", only with less clarity. But long before I could direct their attention to the lights they were gone, having faded away into the light pollution haze on the horizon.
Here's what I can say with certainty about what I saw. As I said, there were two lights, both with a visible circular shape. That is it wasn't a point source of light, I clearly saw two circles. They were moving together, but they weren't entirely static compared to each other. It's difficult to explain, but while they moved with respect to each other it still appeared as if they were connected. My crude explanation is that it was as if I was looking at lights located on the wingtips of an aircraft, and if it were to rock its wings slightly from side to side the lights would move towards or away from each other, but in a fixed, predictable pattern. They did not look like, say, a pair of balloons bobbing independently in the breeze.
If you're wondering why my first notice of them was that weird half memory experience, I think I have an explanation for that. For whatever reason we humans have two different types of light receptors in our eyes, cone cells and rod cells. Cone cells need more light to work but react faster and allow us to see color (because there's three different kinds of them), and rod cells are pretty much the reverse, working in less light but producing no color information. The interesting thing is that we have more cone cells in the center of our vision and more rods in our peripheral vision. Astronomers know this well, a standard trick when looking for faint objects in the night sky is to look at the area in question with the edges of their vision to employ the greater density of rod cells.
I found this reference in wikipedia:
"The convergence of rod cells also tends to make peripheral vision very sensitive to movement, and is responsible for the phenomenon of individuals seeing something vague occur out of the corner of his or her eye."
Until tonight I've never seen that explanation, but it does rather a good job of explaining why I had already looked away from the sky before I realized what I'd seen.
I was facing roughly south, and the lights were moving in the direction I faced. Now that I look at the parking lot I see that it's not oriented directly to the south. So if anything it came from slightly East of exact North and went slightly West of South.
I've seen satellites passing overhead. I once managed to see the International Space Station. I've seen an Iridium Flare. I know what those things look like. They do NOT look like large, faint circles of light. Furthermore they move a lot slower than what I saw. So if I was looking at something outside of our atmosphere it was moving far too fast to be in orbit. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it would have had to be a quite large object or pair of objects for me to see a visible disc from the ground with my naked eyes.
I find the aircraft explanation equally unsatisfactory. Simply because it was moving FAR too quickly, plus, again, the large circle problem. I haven't really done the math to estimate the speed, but unless the object had been quite low and therefore close to me it would have had to be going faster than the speed of sound. Most likely several times the speed of sound. Passenger jets positively crawl through the sky from the perspective of the ground compared to what I saw. First off aircraft tend not to fly that quickly, even military aircraft spend most of their time on the subsonic side of the sound barrier. Secondly when they do go that fast they tend to bombard the ground with a supersonic shockwave that's rather difficult to miss. I experienced no sonic boom.
I also know well what meteors look like. They can show a wide variety of appearances, from brief streaks of very fast moving light to slower, more detailed debris showers that appear when you're closer and it's fallen far enough to have slowed down. They can show enough speed to explain what I saw, but they tend not to travel in symmetrical pairs that travel together across the sky.. and, again, no large, faint circles. A meteor should have been a lot brighter.
So what was it?
There's only one rational explanation I find even slightly persuasive. Spotlights. The suburbs are often loaded with these things, and it's no problem for a spotlight to project a faint circle of light in the sky that moves at speeds apparently faster than the speed of sound.
Two problems with that theory. First off I've already established that it was an exceptionally clear night. No cloud layer to speak of. There would have had to be SOME sort of layer up there to reflect the circles of light while at the same time the air was still dry enough for there to be no visible beam of light emanating from the ground.
Secondly I've seen no spotlight that does what these lights did. There's a very traditional spotlight pattern, four individual lights that trace large circles in the sky and then rejoin in the center of each of their patterns. I've never seen a spotlight pattern that involves two lights sweeping a straight path across the sky and then stopping. There was no repetition, I was looking.
I'm classifying it as a UFO. I think the term is appropriate. By which I mean "unidentified flying object". I can't be certain that it was an object at all, but other than that it was certainly unidentified. You won't find me declaring that I've seen an alien space ship because I don't know what it was. To tell the truth I have no idea why aliens would go to all that trouble to fly through the sky showing faint lights.
But I hope I've demonstrated that I've done the best I can to apply the usual explanations. My nature is to seek explanations. When I see a magic trick my first reaction is to work on figuring out how it was done.
But none of the usual explanations has satisfactorily explained this experience. I'd actually like to present this story to some hard core skeptics some time, if they can come up with a decent explanation I'd have to accept it. I admit I'd be at least a wee bit disappointed, but no more so than when learning the secret of some secret of stage magic (basically a lot of what you see in stage magic is fake, even the alleged restraints are often break-aways that are discarded as soon as the curtain goes down).
For the moment though I have to file this under the category of the unresolved.
Friday, June 22, 2007
testing psychic powers in high school
A curious belief that I keep running into in the intolerantly faithful is the assumption that the sort of godless people who put their trust in science and, of course, evolution, would also believe in ghosts. This is a bit ironic coming from the church of the supernatural (fundamentalists rely on the influence of the supernatural as an alternative explanation for many things), and more or less completely nonsensical.
But let's see if I can give any support for that assumption.
The story takes place when I was in high school. I was taking a psychology class, which actually provided a limited means of understanding the obsessive quests that the religiously insane undertake. Like the anti homosexuality quest right now. The concept was that when someone can't accept some aspect of themselves, like if they find themselves even slightly curious about homosexuality, but they were raised in an intolerant fundamentalist world, then to deal with it they fight violently against that aspect of themselves.
All I have to say with regards to that is Ted Haggard. It doesn't explain his Meth use, that's a bit extreme even for what I've come to expect.. but basically I suspect the people that rail against things like that the most are doing it out of fear of an aspect of themselves and an inability to come to terms with it.
But anyway, the class. One day we did a quaint little psychic power test. It was kind of like what was shown in the beginning of Ghostbusters, if anyone remembers that.. Bill Murray was testing two people for psychic power by showing them each in turn a card drawn from a deck. The cards had a small number of distinct shapes, like wavy lines, and the person being tested presumably used their psychic power to intuit the identity of the pattern.
Only we just used ordinary playing cards. To make things simple we only tested for the identity of the suit of the card, so we had to pick from four possibilities, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. We broke into groups of two and tested each other in turn.
Basically, the idea is that through random chance we should get a right answer roughly 25% of the time, one out of four, since there were only four possible answers.
If you're expecting me to say that I got 60% correct you're in for a disappointment. I don't actually remember my score at all, but I know that the class as a whole averaged close to 25%. We didn't have anyone exhibiting significant accuracy, I'd guess that nobody scored above 30%.
But if you took the results of the entire class and averaged them, the results were slightly above 25%. A small enough number that it COULD be due to random chance.
It turns out that our teacher had kept track of the numbers she'd gotten after doing this for many years. We could see the numbers for each class. The numbers were fairly consistent in that most of them showed that slight but apparently statistically significant advantage over random chance. A truly random situation should get closer to the perfect random number the more times you run it, but this one seemed to prefer staying just ahead of chance.
And that was it. No great explanation from the teacher. We put away the oh so intriguing numbers and moved on to more ordinary subjects. I always liked that, she showed us this very interesting concept, appeared to give us evidence for the existence of a supernatural phenomena, and then put it away. So we were left to form our own conclusions.
So of course I'll say what I think. I'm biased, I'd like to find evidence that such things are real. It'd be neat to believe that the human mind has that sort of potential. You have to be careful with a bias like that, but I try to keep it in check.
I want to believe that the results suggest that everyone has a slight psychic potential. Perhaps it's some innate ability that we have to develop to make use of, and since we don't as a society understand it we never develop it.
I have absolutely no problem with that concept. I have no problem with the possibility that something supernatural could exist, because in all likelihood if it was common enough and widely accepted enough to be studied we could probably find out how it works. It's only supernatural because we don't understand it.
However I can't say that this is undeniable proof that such things exist either. If you want another explanation they do exist. First off I'm not a statistician so I can't offer detailed analysis of the numbers, I can't say how strong the variation was. Secondly there's always the possibility that the person holding the card (who can see it) was somehow unintentionally communicating the identity of the card's suit. I don't think that's very likely, it would have to be a completely unintentional, even unconscious means of communicating.
Basically it would appear that the person being tested had a means of identifying the card that was only slightly effective. Perhaps they were able to unconsciously perceive a hint of color reflected in the eyes of the person holding the cards that gave them a clue as to the hint of the suit.
The experiment gave us no answers, only a question. In a way I have to applaud that, I hear so much about the idea that our schools are training kids to take specific tests, or preparing them to be followers rather than leaders. That's partially why I took the psychology class, it wasn't about knowledge that I'd be expected to have. I wanted a little insight into the workings of the human mind. The fact that I got the teacher to call me perverse was the icing on the cake.
No, that's not really what it sounds like. I was talking about how I'm at least mildly phobic about spiders, and yet deeply fascinated by them at the same time. She said that that was perverse, that's all.
I feel like I'm just asking to be ostracized from the anti creationist community, you tend to get a lot of hard core atheists in there who reject a whole variety of things, with such concepts as ESP and UFOs ranking right up there with creationism. Unfortunately I've also seen a UFO, so I'm not scoring too highly at the moment.
But make of it what you will. I have no definite proof for the concept of ESP, and as a result I can't really say I believe in it. But it wouldn't come as a terrible surprise to me if one day it were proven to exist. Senses that to us seem extra ordinary exist all over the animal kingdom. Sharks (and oddly enough the duck billed platypus, the duck bill is actually loaded with special receptors) have the ability to sense the electrical activity of living organisms. Perhaps if we could do that it might have been interpreted as seeing "auras", before we understood enough about science to know about the electrical fields. Birds can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of the Earth. Astrology was founded on the concept that the "heavens" influence life on Earth, but we now know that the Moon actually DOES influence life.
For a total non sequitur, my desperate attempt to get out of this post now that I'm risking getting stuck in new age mumbo jumbo.. when I was younger still, in grade school, the mother of one of my friends refused to add sugar when she made kool-aid, on the belief that sugar caused diabetes. In private I told my mother (college trained as a med-tech) about that and we shared a superior chuckle at how backward she was.
Well it turns out that exposure to too much sugar CAN bring on diabetes. Doh. If anyone is reading this and feels that that's a gratuitous over simplification, well.. tough.. feel free to comment and explain the issue in greater depth, I don't understand it well enough to describe it even half decently.
In self defense I'll mention that she also believed that getting your feet wet in the winter would give you pneumonia. My friend was walking on ice (over shallow water, just a puddle on the side of the road) and one of his feet broke through and fell into the water. I'm not really sure how wet his food even got, but he was seriously upset because his mother would be mad at him, and he'd get pneumonia.
Needless to say, he remained pneumonia free.
But let's see if I can give any support for that assumption.
The story takes place when I was in high school. I was taking a psychology class, which actually provided a limited means of understanding the obsessive quests that the religiously insane undertake. Like the anti homosexuality quest right now. The concept was that when someone can't accept some aspect of themselves, like if they find themselves even slightly curious about homosexuality, but they were raised in an intolerant fundamentalist world, then to deal with it they fight violently against that aspect of themselves.
All I have to say with regards to that is Ted Haggard. It doesn't explain his Meth use, that's a bit extreme even for what I've come to expect.. but basically I suspect the people that rail against things like that the most are doing it out of fear of an aspect of themselves and an inability to come to terms with it.
But anyway, the class. One day we did a quaint little psychic power test. It was kind of like what was shown in the beginning of Ghostbusters, if anyone remembers that.. Bill Murray was testing two people for psychic power by showing them each in turn a card drawn from a deck. The cards had a small number of distinct shapes, like wavy lines, and the person being tested presumably used their psychic power to intuit the identity of the pattern.
Only we just used ordinary playing cards. To make things simple we only tested for the identity of the suit of the card, so we had to pick from four possibilities, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. We broke into groups of two and tested each other in turn.
Basically, the idea is that through random chance we should get a right answer roughly 25% of the time, one out of four, since there were only four possible answers.
If you're expecting me to say that I got 60% correct you're in for a disappointment. I don't actually remember my score at all, but I know that the class as a whole averaged close to 25%. We didn't have anyone exhibiting significant accuracy, I'd guess that nobody scored above 30%.
But if you took the results of the entire class and averaged them, the results were slightly above 25%. A small enough number that it COULD be due to random chance.
It turns out that our teacher had kept track of the numbers she'd gotten after doing this for many years. We could see the numbers for each class. The numbers were fairly consistent in that most of them showed that slight but apparently statistically significant advantage over random chance. A truly random situation should get closer to the perfect random number the more times you run it, but this one seemed to prefer staying just ahead of chance.
And that was it. No great explanation from the teacher. We put away the oh so intriguing numbers and moved on to more ordinary subjects. I always liked that, she showed us this very interesting concept, appeared to give us evidence for the existence of a supernatural phenomena, and then put it away. So we were left to form our own conclusions.
So of course I'll say what I think. I'm biased, I'd like to find evidence that such things are real. It'd be neat to believe that the human mind has that sort of potential. You have to be careful with a bias like that, but I try to keep it in check.
I want to believe that the results suggest that everyone has a slight psychic potential. Perhaps it's some innate ability that we have to develop to make use of, and since we don't as a society understand it we never develop it.
I have absolutely no problem with that concept. I have no problem with the possibility that something supernatural could exist, because in all likelihood if it was common enough and widely accepted enough to be studied we could probably find out how it works. It's only supernatural because we don't understand it.
However I can't say that this is undeniable proof that such things exist either. If you want another explanation they do exist. First off I'm not a statistician so I can't offer detailed analysis of the numbers, I can't say how strong the variation was. Secondly there's always the possibility that the person holding the card (who can see it) was somehow unintentionally communicating the identity of the card's suit. I don't think that's very likely, it would have to be a completely unintentional, even unconscious means of communicating.
Basically it would appear that the person being tested had a means of identifying the card that was only slightly effective. Perhaps they were able to unconsciously perceive a hint of color reflected in the eyes of the person holding the cards that gave them a clue as to the hint of the suit.
The experiment gave us no answers, only a question. In a way I have to applaud that, I hear so much about the idea that our schools are training kids to take specific tests, or preparing them to be followers rather than leaders. That's partially why I took the psychology class, it wasn't about knowledge that I'd be expected to have. I wanted a little insight into the workings of the human mind. The fact that I got the teacher to call me perverse was the icing on the cake.
No, that's not really what it sounds like. I was talking about how I'm at least mildly phobic about spiders, and yet deeply fascinated by them at the same time. She said that that was perverse, that's all.
I feel like I'm just asking to be ostracized from the anti creationist community, you tend to get a lot of hard core atheists in there who reject a whole variety of things, with such concepts as ESP and UFOs ranking right up there with creationism. Unfortunately I've also seen a UFO, so I'm not scoring too highly at the moment.
But make of it what you will. I have no definite proof for the concept of ESP, and as a result I can't really say I believe in it. But it wouldn't come as a terrible surprise to me if one day it were proven to exist. Senses that to us seem extra ordinary exist all over the animal kingdom. Sharks (and oddly enough the duck billed platypus, the duck bill is actually loaded with special receptors) have the ability to sense the electrical activity of living organisms. Perhaps if we could do that it might have been interpreted as seeing "auras", before we understood enough about science to know about the electrical fields. Birds can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of the Earth. Astrology was founded on the concept that the "heavens" influence life on Earth, but we now know that the Moon actually DOES influence life.
For a total non sequitur, my desperate attempt to get out of this post now that I'm risking getting stuck in new age mumbo jumbo.. when I was younger still, in grade school, the mother of one of my friends refused to add sugar when she made kool-aid, on the belief that sugar caused diabetes. In private I told my mother (college trained as a med-tech) about that and we shared a superior chuckle at how backward she was.
Well it turns out that exposure to too much sugar CAN bring on diabetes. Doh. If anyone is reading this and feels that that's a gratuitous over simplification, well.. tough.. feel free to comment and explain the issue in greater depth, I don't understand it well enough to describe it even half decently.
In self defense I'll mention that she also believed that getting your feet wet in the winter would give you pneumonia. My friend was walking on ice (over shallow water, just a puddle on the side of the road) and one of his feet broke through and fell into the water. I'm not really sure how wet his food even got, but he was seriously upset because his mother would be mad at him, and he'd get pneumonia.
Needless to say, he remained pneumonia free.
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