Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

—Terry Pratchett, Mort



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“A lover doesn’t figure the odds.”

—Jalaluddin Rumi, “A Circle Around the Zero,” tr. Coleman Barks

You can read the entire poem here:  http://yhoo.it/18osXMA

 Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Insurance.  An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.”

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Quote of the day:

"Take my advice, if you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

—C. S. Lewis,
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe


What's new in the yard:

The amaryllis are making a bold statement: three huge red-orange bells, and maybe half a dozen more buds in the planter waiting to pop. The purple cosmos are in profusion, and the pink and white geraniums are having a rave. The green callas are also having a convocation against the side front wall. We planted marigolds last week--brilliant orange and yellow accents in the yard. The Scotch broom isn't doing so well. We moved it and it's hanging on, but tired. The tea tree, otoh, is quite happy.

Interesting item of the day: I was watching a program called Is it Real? on the National Geographic Channel over the weekend. This program likes to take on things occult/paranormal/fortean and debunk them, and it's quite an interesting program, even if I think that sometimes the arguments of the skeptics seem a bit strained and shrieky and most "believers" are portrayed as credulous boobs; even if they often choose examples of phenomena which are most easy to debunk and ignore the cases that pose serious challenges. I think quite a lot of stuff in the "paranormal field" is hooey, too, but I like to see them honestly debunked rather than a burning of straw dogs. The research done by the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton wasn't so easy for them to dismiss.

This weekend the show took on prognostication. I'm not much of a fan of fortune-telling. I like to play with oracles, but mainly for the psychological side of it: oracles help me focus on issues and figure out what I truly feel about them. Sometimes oracles are also a way of releasing my own intuition about something (or perhaps reinforcing my prejudices). It helps tremendously in my decision-making process, but I really can't say I subscribe much to the foretelling aspect of oracles.

The NGeo program dealt a great deal with Nostradamus—somebody I personally think is quite easy to debunk. But they also cited this recent research at Princeton on randomness and collective consciousness that they weren't quite able to debunk, imo. Michael Shermer (ed., The Skeptical Inquirer) threw some half-hearted arguments at the subject, but they weren't at all convincing to me, and seemed to lack his usual verve and energy.

Essentially, the Princeton folks distributed random number generators in computers all over the world and had them constantly doing the computer equivalent of flipping a coin. As statistical chance would tend to suggest, most of the time the RNGs came up with a equal number of heads vs. tails. However, in the hours leading up to some of the more extraordinary events in our new century, these numbers starting skewing sharply in one direction or another. The most dramatic spike took place starting about four hours before the first plane went into the Towers on 9/11. A dramatic spike also occurred before the big tsunami.

It's as if, in the hours before super traumatic events, the collective unconscious begins to hone in on these events and somehow effects the functioning of random chance. Michael Shermer said something to the effect that every day of the week has something somewhere in the world that we'd call a big event, but I think that's a pretty flimsy argument. Events like 9/11 and the big tsunami and Katrina are not every day big events—they are stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks events, collective gasp events. We know they send shock waves in their aftermath, and it also seems logical to me that they would send shock waves behind them. Since time-space is folded and not linear, as we tend to think of it, it seems logical to me that some receptors can pick up on those back-pedaling shock waves.

But what do I know? I'll let the parties involved make their own arguments:

Here's the research paper from the Princeton folks:

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html

A somewhat more user friendly version:

http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/randomness.htm

And the skeptical POV:

http://www.skepticnews.com/2005/04/index.html