Saturday, September 16, 2006
What evil people know that you don't
It sure was exciting when Blogger went down late last night, wasn't it? For those of you who missed it, and contrary to what Blogger's claiming, almost the entire site was down for over an hour just that I verified personally; not only could I not get any Blogger blog to load, some of the Blogger help and info pages wouldn't load either... but I could still access my blog management pages, go figure. Based on how many fewer hits I got from then to when I got up compared to the usual, I'm guessing my blog was unavailable for about 5 hours; if you caught that and have come back and tried again, thanks for your patience.
Anyways: I saw the movie "Cry Wolf"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=996751327&displayBoxArt=true
which incidentally is worth a look-see if you don't mind a little gore. There's a scene where the hero has gotten into a car and been attacked by what he thinks is the killer; they spill out of the car, the hero's dodging knife thrusts and trying to escape, and suddenly the police are there... which tells you right away that something's going on, because cops would NEVER show up when someone was actually being attacked. It turns out that "the killer" was one of the hero's classmates wearing a costume (with a mask, of course), and a bunch of padding to make her look like a man; she'd thought that it'd be fun to scare him. Now, using your knowledge of American culture and the psychology thereof, or just your memories from childhood... what do you think was the response of the headmistress to this "joke" gone wrong?
If you thought, "The girl got in trouble and the boy got sympathy"... you have NOT been paying attention.
If you thought, "BOTH kids got in trouble"... sadly, you're correct. Since a game the kids and their friends were playing inspired the "joke," the headmistress also felt it necessary to penalize the whole group; if your thought when you read THAT was that their friends would blame BOTH kids for this... bonus points.
What kills me about the idea of giving the victim equal blame and punishment as the wrongdoer, or ANY blame or punishment for that matter, is, as I've said before, that in our legal system, with which we're all familiar, the victim is NOT seen as having committed any crime, not even if they've done violent acts in self-defense that would've been seen as criminal under other circumstances; what goes through the minds of parents, teachers, and, closer to home, the admins and mods of forums, chatrooms etc, that causes them to decide that the exact opposite is true? And sometimes it really is the EXACT opposite, in that ONLY the victim is blamed and penalized, while the wrongdoer not only gets off scot free but gets to have the added thrill of seeing their victim further victimized; I'd give a great deal to know what the malign magic was that not only made so many authorities internalize these sick, backwards beliefs, but made everyone else decide that this should be accepted rather than protested and fought against whenever it occurs.
We're so used to things being handled this way that we're mostly not even consciously aware of it... but evil types are VERY aware of it, as evidenced by the fearlessness with which they pursue their ugly goals, secure in the knowledge that they won't suffer for it. Once we're old enough to understand right and wrong, normal people choose to do right the vast majority of the time; a few do so for noble reasons, or because they're naturally virtuous, but most of us do it out of fear of punishment and/or condemnation. Evil people, by contrast, choose to do WRONG, for gain or, more chillingly, for the joy of hurting others; they do it because they understand, by instinct, via superior perceptions, or because they all read the same frigging book, these grim truths about how things really work:
1) In any structured grouping of people (work, school, family, forum), someone in authority is assumed to be keeping an eye on things, looking out for problems; that's rarely the case, however. Yes, there ARE people with authority, it's just that they're NOT monitoring the social (mis)behavior of their "underlings."
2) Wrongdoings are therefore unlikely to be noticed by the authority.
3) Victims and witnesses tend to not report wrongdoings to the authority; the counterproductive and stupid childhood admonition to not be a tattletale affects people all their lives.
4) The authority rarely investigates the few reports they get, unless the wrongdoing is still in progress and is serious in nature.
5) When the authority DOES check out a report, if the wrongdoing stops when they show up they'll likely consider the matter handled and leave without taking action.
6) If they DO take action, it's likely to just be to say something like "Settle down, everyone."
7) If they choose instead to mete out censure or punishment, it's entirely possible that they'll single out the VICTIM to receive it, no matter how clear it is that they ARE the victim... especially if there are multiple wrongdoers involved, no matter how blatant their attacks have been (this is one of the reasons why evil types are often found acting in groups).
8) It's also possible that they'll censure/punish EVERYONE involved (although this is VERY unlikely if there are multiple wrongdoers, because authorities are usually unwilling to penalize an entire group); the outrage and betrayal of the victim at this unexpected blow from the one they foolishly anticipated help and vindication from, combined with their original suffering, more than compensates the wrongdoer for being disciplined themselves.
9) By far the least likely outcome is that the wrongdoer, and ONLY the wrongdoer, will be singled out for unfavorable attention; this will probably consist of nothing more than a few scolding comments, which, although dismaying to normal folks, will roll off an evil person like the proverbial water off the equally proverbial duck's back.
10) If it looks like the authority is mad enough to do more than talk, the wrongdoer, who's never panicked like a decent person is at the thought of getting in trouble, will usually come out with a melodramatic apology, often peppered with lavish praise for the authority and the institution they represent; you'd think that this ridiculous speech would only increase the authority's ire, but, astonishingly, it generally works.
11) Once in a blue moon, the wrongdoer WILL be penalized; said penalty will almost never be severe enough to counteract the fun of doing the evil deed, and even if it IS the overall fun to punishment ratio remains way too high for getting the occasional butt-kicking to discourage them from misbehaving.
12) The authority SHOULD form a permanent bad opinion of the wrongdoer after having seen them in action; they don't, though, as a rule, and thus there are no long-term ill effects for the wrongdoer even when their misbehavior has resulted in punishment.
13) The witnesses to a wrongdoing will also demonstrate this inability to grasp the importance of branding a person who does evil as an evil person; without the authority's need to keep track of the big picture, they tend to not even REMEMBER the wrongdoings.
14) Sadly, they DO tend to remember the VICTIMS of wrongdoing, and to look down on them forever more; this makes repeat abuse of a victim easier, because it removes what little chance there ever was of anyone speaking up for them.
15) The authorities have the same memory and opinion of the victims; it erodes, or even eliminates, the protection they're theoretically supposed to be providing them... which virtually gives the evil ones official permission to re-abuse their past victims with no fear of reprisals.
Given all that, can you see why evil types don't hesitate to mistreat others just because they're at work or on a forum or anywhere else where there's supposed to be people in authority? On a less sinister note, this is also why they feel free to break the rules and generally behave badly; it's fun for them, and there's no real downside to it.
What can YOU do about this? If you're in authority somewhere, look long and hard at how you handle interpersonal problems, and if you're MIShandling them, CHANGE. If you're a victim of mishandling, SAY SO; it won't always get you anywhere, but it's at least the 1st step towards making the authorities re-think their policies. If you witness mishandling, SPEAK UP, and encourage others to do so; you can't call yourself a good person, or keep your karma clean, unless you intervene every time you see someone being treated unfairly (it goes without saying that if you witnessed the wrongdoing itself you should have spoken up about THAT, too).
Can you imagine how different things would be if we DIDN'T bend over backwards to aid and abet evil people in their abuse of innocents?
Anyways: I saw the movie "Cry Wolf"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=996751327&displayBoxArt=true
which incidentally is worth a look-see if you don't mind a little gore. There's a scene where the hero has gotten into a car and been attacked by what he thinks is the killer; they spill out of the car, the hero's dodging knife thrusts and trying to escape, and suddenly the police are there... which tells you right away that something's going on, because cops would NEVER show up when someone was actually being attacked. It turns out that "the killer" was one of the hero's classmates wearing a costume (with a mask, of course), and a bunch of padding to make her look like a man; she'd thought that it'd be fun to scare him. Now, using your knowledge of American culture and the psychology thereof, or just your memories from childhood... what do you think was the response of the headmistress to this "joke" gone wrong?
If you thought, "The girl got in trouble and the boy got sympathy"... you have NOT been paying attention.
If you thought, "BOTH kids got in trouble"... sadly, you're correct. Since a game the kids and their friends were playing inspired the "joke," the headmistress also felt it necessary to penalize the whole group; if your thought when you read THAT was that their friends would blame BOTH kids for this... bonus points.
What kills me about the idea of giving the victim equal blame and punishment as the wrongdoer, or ANY blame or punishment for that matter, is, as I've said before, that in our legal system, with which we're all familiar, the victim is NOT seen as having committed any crime, not even if they've done violent acts in self-defense that would've been seen as criminal under other circumstances; what goes through the minds of parents, teachers, and, closer to home, the admins and mods of forums, chatrooms etc, that causes them to decide that the exact opposite is true? And sometimes it really is the EXACT opposite, in that ONLY the victim is blamed and penalized, while the wrongdoer not only gets off scot free but gets to have the added thrill of seeing their victim further victimized; I'd give a great deal to know what the malign magic was that not only made so many authorities internalize these sick, backwards beliefs, but made everyone else decide that this should be accepted rather than protested and fought against whenever it occurs.
We're so used to things being handled this way that we're mostly not even consciously aware of it... but evil types are VERY aware of it, as evidenced by the fearlessness with which they pursue their ugly goals, secure in the knowledge that they won't suffer for it. Once we're old enough to understand right and wrong, normal people choose to do right the vast majority of the time; a few do so for noble reasons, or because they're naturally virtuous, but most of us do it out of fear of punishment and/or condemnation. Evil people, by contrast, choose to do WRONG, for gain or, more chillingly, for the joy of hurting others; they do it because they understand, by instinct, via superior perceptions, or because they all read the same frigging book, these grim truths about how things really work:
1) In any structured grouping of people (work, school, family, forum), someone in authority is assumed to be keeping an eye on things, looking out for problems; that's rarely the case, however. Yes, there ARE people with authority, it's just that they're NOT monitoring the social (mis)behavior of their "underlings."
2) Wrongdoings are therefore unlikely to be noticed by the authority.
3) Victims and witnesses tend to not report wrongdoings to the authority; the counterproductive and stupid childhood admonition to not be a tattletale affects people all their lives.
4) The authority rarely investigates the few reports they get, unless the wrongdoing is still in progress and is serious in nature.
5) When the authority DOES check out a report, if the wrongdoing stops when they show up they'll likely consider the matter handled and leave without taking action.
6) If they DO take action, it's likely to just be to say something like "Settle down, everyone."
7) If they choose instead to mete out censure or punishment, it's entirely possible that they'll single out the VICTIM to receive it, no matter how clear it is that they ARE the victim... especially if there are multiple wrongdoers involved, no matter how blatant their attacks have been (this is one of the reasons why evil types are often found acting in groups).
8) It's also possible that they'll censure/punish EVERYONE involved (although this is VERY unlikely if there are multiple wrongdoers, because authorities are usually unwilling to penalize an entire group); the outrage and betrayal of the victim at this unexpected blow from the one they foolishly anticipated help and vindication from, combined with their original suffering, more than compensates the wrongdoer for being disciplined themselves.
9) By far the least likely outcome is that the wrongdoer, and ONLY the wrongdoer, will be singled out for unfavorable attention; this will probably consist of nothing more than a few scolding comments, which, although dismaying to normal folks, will roll off an evil person like the proverbial water off the equally proverbial duck's back.
10) If it looks like the authority is mad enough to do more than talk, the wrongdoer, who's never panicked like a decent person is at the thought of getting in trouble, will usually come out with a melodramatic apology, often peppered with lavish praise for the authority and the institution they represent; you'd think that this ridiculous speech would only increase the authority's ire, but, astonishingly, it generally works.
11) Once in a blue moon, the wrongdoer WILL be penalized; said penalty will almost never be severe enough to counteract the fun of doing the evil deed, and even if it IS the overall fun to punishment ratio remains way too high for getting the occasional butt-kicking to discourage them from misbehaving.
12) The authority SHOULD form a permanent bad opinion of the wrongdoer after having seen them in action; they don't, though, as a rule, and thus there are no long-term ill effects for the wrongdoer even when their misbehavior has resulted in punishment.
13) The witnesses to a wrongdoing will also demonstrate this inability to grasp the importance of branding a person who does evil as an evil person; without the authority's need to keep track of the big picture, they tend to not even REMEMBER the wrongdoings.
14) Sadly, they DO tend to remember the VICTIMS of wrongdoing, and to look down on them forever more; this makes repeat abuse of a victim easier, because it removes what little chance there ever was of anyone speaking up for them.
15) The authorities have the same memory and opinion of the victims; it erodes, or even eliminates, the protection they're theoretically supposed to be providing them... which virtually gives the evil ones official permission to re-abuse their past victims with no fear of reprisals.
Given all that, can you see why evil types don't hesitate to mistreat others just because they're at work or on a forum or anywhere else where there's supposed to be people in authority? On a less sinister note, this is also why they feel free to break the rules and generally behave badly; it's fun for them, and there's no real downside to it.
What can YOU do about this? If you're in authority somewhere, look long and hard at how you handle interpersonal problems, and if you're MIShandling them, CHANGE. If you're a victim of mishandling, SAY SO; it won't always get you anywhere, but it's at least the 1st step towards making the authorities re-think their policies. If you witness mishandling, SPEAK UP, and encourage others to do so; you can't call yourself a good person, or keep your karma clean, unless you intervene every time you see someone being treated unfairly (it goes without saying that if you witnessed the wrongdoing itself you should have spoken up about THAT, too).
Can you imagine how different things would be if we DIDN'T bend over backwards to aid and abet evil people in their abuse of innocents?
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Here's why no progress gets made in proving the existence of "the unknown"
My husband and I enjoy watching "Mythbusters," which is just what it sounds like; a team of maniacs with specialized skills trying to disprove urban myths (and almost always succeeding)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythbusters
A few days ago, I saw the "Deadly Straw" episode
http://www.tv.com/mythbusters/deadly-straw/episode/822485/recap.html
the secondary myth of which dealt with the experiments by Cleve Backster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Backster
"a polygraph scientist best known for his controversial experiments with biocommunication in plant and animal cells using a polygraph machine in the 1960s which led to his theory of 'primary perception.'" One of the things Backster demonstrated was that plants can show a clear response from being thought about; this concept seemed too silly for the Mythbusters to even bother with, and the attitude of the members of the team showed that they felt the same way... until their results mimicked Backster's. I was originally expecting the segment to consist of them rolling their eyes as they went through the motions of testing the "myth," showing that it was entirely baseless; instead, they got steadily more stunned, uncomfortable and spooked as the plant they were testing showed inarguable reactions to being "thought at" threateningly (none of them are actors, just FYI). They were looking downright panicky as they tried to figure out what was happening; imagine their relief when it occurred to them that perhaps their movements or talking was somehow causing the plant to have reactions that were inexplicably timed coincidentally with the "thought projection." They put the plant in an isolation chamber (and I mean a big solid metal thing, not a cardboard box) and tried again; the % of times the plant reacted DID drop, from 33% to 28%, but despite the increased distance from the "thinker" and the intervening metal it still appeared to be perceiving the thoughts.
What did they do next? What they SHOULD have done would have been to try to figure out what was going on; what they actually did was to do a quick changeover to some of Backster's more extreme experiments (torturing yogurt cultures and similar nonsense), and, when those didn't produce any results, they announced that this somehow meant that the reactions they'd gotten from the plant had in some magical way been "disproved" and thus could be ignored.
NOT
There isn't any other type of experiment in which the results of a different experiment, even a related one, would be accepted as having cancelled out its results, but everyone's so anxious about being seen as a kook if they stand by any evidence that the unknown exists that they'll do ANYTHING to discredit it. I'm not saying that there couldn't be some non-mysterious explanation (although *I* can't think of anything that could cause the plant's responses to be timed to match the thought-projection unless some member of the crew was playing a high-tech joke), I'm saying that you have to either figure out what's causing an effect or ADMIT that something inexplicable is going on... you can't just sweep it under the rug with a lame excuse.
I did some research on Backster's experiments and found that he was accused of not using proper controls, and that when his experiments were conducted by others using said controls they got no results; they claimed that random fluctuations in humidity and such could cause RANDOM reactions from a plant that might occasionally seem to coincide with an attempted stimulus. I'm sure that's true... but why, then, did the Mythbuster's plant react ONLY when being thought at, and NOT at any other time, even when it was in an isolation unit? That's NOT random, and makes it hard to discount Backster's findings; frankly, I'm more dubious about how the refuters carried out THEIR experiments than I am about his at this point.
Why haven't any scientists asked to work with Backster to figure out how he gets the results he does, or invited him to do his experiments in their labs under tightly controlled conditions, even with the intention of DISproving his claims in an unequivocal way? If you figure they can't be expected to bother with what he's done because he's not a real scientist, then ask yourself; why aren't they trying to replicate the experiments of legendary Bengali physicist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadis_Chandra_Bose
who is "considered a pioneer in the field of biophysics," which showed that music made plants grow faster, and that they "feel pain, understand affection etc"?
Why do you think?
Here's an even more dismaying example of how experimental results that point to the existence of the unknown get dismissed out of hand:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologynews&storyID=2006-09-05T165750Z_01_L05488354_RTRUKOC_0_US-BRITAIN-TELEPATHY.xml
"Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.
Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.
Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.
'The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected,' he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 'The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.'
He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.
However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the e-mail -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.
Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages."
A scientist with the backing of a well-known college did experiments whose results are VERY clear-cut in what they indicate about there being perceptions that are "extra-sensory," and all his peers could come up with is sniping about his sample size and who was filmed? You know how many people you need in a sample to prove that an ability exists? ONE. In an experiment like these, if ONE person can consistently out-perform chance by a statistically-significant amount, that demonstrates that information is getting into their brain by some method currently unknown to science. There doesn't need to be any film of it either, any more than there has to be for other kinds of experiments; a scientist's results are NOT typically backed up with video of the trials, as their word is accepted that they did what they said they did... it's not like Sheldrake claimed that people were flapping their arms and flying, or anything else where you'd need to film what was happening because the exact physical actions being taken were important.
If, as it appears, this is valid experimental proof of the existence of the unknown, it'd be the biggest discovery since the atom; why isn't it front-page news? Why aren't we hearing about studies being set up to try to duplicate Sheldrake's work, as is typical when someone gets results that break totally new ground? Why isn't every scientist in the world demanding that the energy that carried information to the test subjects about their callers/emailers be detected and analyzed?
Why do you think?
Is it possible that some sort of fakery was involved with these experiments? Yes, of course, it always is; it DOES happen occasionally, even in the hardest-core areas of science. They're not suggesting that, though, or that Sheldrake misinterpreted his data, but are just making objections that don't make sense, and that he's unlikely to have, or be able to get, the funds to overcome; if YOU were a scientist in this field, or a potential financial backer, how would you feel about getting involved with this sort of thing after seeing that even the most glaringly obvious results are pooh-pooh-ed and dismissed?
And that, dear friends, is why no progress gets made in proving the existence of "the unknown."
If you're still reading this, you're either a regular or a glutton for punishment, lol, and in either case you might be interested in the current state of my health: I'm still almost as sick as I was when I last posted, with one VERY important exception; the chest pains are gone, which means I don't have pneumonia... it was probably some lesser sort of infection, or maybe some weird anxiety thing. My main concern now is stopping my normal progression of symptoms when I have a cold or flu, which leads to me having savage coughing fits dozens of times a day for WEEKS; luckily, I've discovered a way to stop a fit before it gets fully launched... I spray the back of my throat with Chloraseptic, and that seems to short-circuit the fit and thus stop the coughing. If you're a hard-core cougher yourself, you might want to give it a try; just keep in mind that this is NOT the way Chloraseptic is approved to be used, so if you get any sort of weird reaction stop using it, PLEASE.
And finally; we're still waiting to hear back about a contractor to fix the hole my husband put in the ceiling... but before we can hire anyone, we've GOT to get the rats out of the attic-no one will work in an attic full of rats, nor should they be expected to. My husband's about to climb up there and try to deploy the glue traps again; let's hope he doesn't wreck the ENTIRE house this time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythbusters
A few days ago, I saw the "Deadly Straw" episode
http://www.tv.com/mythbusters/deadly-straw/episode/822485/recap.html
the secondary myth of which dealt with the experiments by Cleve Backster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Backster
"a polygraph scientist best known for his controversial experiments with biocommunication in plant and animal cells using a polygraph machine in the 1960s which led to his theory of 'primary perception.'" One of the things Backster demonstrated was that plants can show a clear response from being thought about; this concept seemed too silly for the Mythbusters to even bother with, and the attitude of the members of the team showed that they felt the same way... until their results mimicked Backster's. I was originally expecting the segment to consist of them rolling their eyes as they went through the motions of testing the "myth," showing that it was entirely baseless; instead, they got steadily more stunned, uncomfortable and spooked as the plant they were testing showed inarguable reactions to being "thought at" threateningly (none of them are actors, just FYI). They were looking downright panicky as they tried to figure out what was happening; imagine their relief when it occurred to them that perhaps their movements or talking was somehow causing the plant to have reactions that were inexplicably timed coincidentally with the "thought projection." They put the plant in an isolation chamber (and I mean a big solid metal thing, not a cardboard box) and tried again; the % of times the plant reacted DID drop, from 33% to 28%, but despite the increased distance from the "thinker" and the intervening metal it still appeared to be perceiving the thoughts.
What did they do next? What they SHOULD have done would have been to try to figure out what was going on; what they actually did was to do a quick changeover to some of Backster's more extreme experiments (torturing yogurt cultures and similar nonsense), and, when those didn't produce any results, they announced that this somehow meant that the reactions they'd gotten from the plant had in some magical way been "disproved" and thus could be ignored.
NOT
There isn't any other type of experiment in which the results of a different experiment, even a related one, would be accepted as having cancelled out its results, but everyone's so anxious about being seen as a kook if they stand by any evidence that the unknown exists that they'll do ANYTHING to discredit it. I'm not saying that there couldn't be some non-mysterious explanation (although *I* can't think of anything that could cause the plant's responses to be timed to match the thought-projection unless some member of the crew was playing a high-tech joke), I'm saying that you have to either figure out what's causing an effect or ADMIT that something inexplicable is going on... you can't just sweep it under the rug with a lame excuse.
I did some research on Backster's experiments and found that he was accused of not using proper controls, and that when his experiments were conducted by others using said controls they got no results; they claimed that random fluctuations in humidity and such could cause RANDOM reactions from a plant that might occasionally seem to coincide with an attempted stimulus. I'm sure that's true... but why, then, did the Mythbuster's plant react ONLY when being thought at, and NOT at any other time, even when it was in an isolation unit? That's NOT random, and makes it hard to discount Backster's findings; frankly, I'm more dubious about how the refuters carried out THEIR experiments than I am about his at this point.
Why haven't any scientists asked to work with Backster to figure out how he gets the results he does, or invited him to do his experiments in their labs under tightly controlled conditions, even with the intention of DISproving his claims in an unequivocal way? If you figure they can't be expected to bother with what he's done because he's not a real scientist, then ask yourself; why aren't they trying to replicate the experiments of legendary Bengali physicist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadis_Chandra_Bose
who is "considered a pioneer in the field of biophysics," which showed that music made plants grow faster, and that they "feel pain, understand affection etc"?
Why do you think?
Here's an even more dismaying example of how experimental results that point to the existence of the unknown get dismissed out of hand:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologynews&storyID=2006-09-05T165750Z_01_L05488354_RTRUKOC_0_US-BRITAIN-TELEPATHY.xml
"Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.
Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.
Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.
'The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected,' he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 'The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.'
He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.
However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the e-mail -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.
Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages."
A scientist with the backing of a well-known college did experiments whose results are VERY clear-cut in what they indicate about there being perceptions that are "extra-sensory," and all his peers could come up with is sniping about his sample size and who was filmed? You know how many people you need in a sample to prove that an ability exists? ONE. In an experiment like these, if ONE person can consistently out-perform chance by a statistically-significant amount, that demonstrates that information is getting into their brain by some method currently unknown to science. There doesn't need to be any film of it either, any more than there has to be for other kinds of experiments; a scientist's results are NOT typically backed up with video of the trials, as their word is accepted that they did what they said they did... it's not like Sheldrake claimed that people were flapping their arms and flying, or anything else where you'd need to film what was happening because the exact physical actions being taken were important.
If, as it appears, this is valid experimental proof of the existence of the unknown, it'd be the biggest discovery since the atom; why isn't it front-page news? Why aren't we hearing about studies being set up to try to duplicate Sheldrake's work, as is typical when someone gets results that break totally new ground? Why isn't every scientist in the world demanding that the energy that carried information to the test subjects about their callers/emailers be detected and analyzed?
Why do you think?
Is it possible that some sort of fakery was involved with these experiments? Yes, of course, it always is; it DOES happen occasionally, even in the hardest-core areas of science. They're not suggesting that, though, or that Sheldrake misinterpreted his data, but are just making objections that don't make sense, and that he's unlikely to have, or be able to get, the funds to overcome; if YOU were a scientist in this field, or a potential financial backer, how would you feel about getting involved with this sort of thing after seeing that even the most glaringly obvious results are pooh-pooh-ed and dismissed?
And that, dear friends, is why no progress gets made in proving the existence of "the unknown."
If you're still reading this, you're either a regular or a glutton for punishment, lol, and in either case you might be interested in the current state of my health: I'm still almost as sick as I was when I last posted, with one VERY important exception; the chest pains are gone, which means I don't have pneumonia... it was probably some lesser sort of infection, or maybe some weird anxiety thing. My main concern now is stopping my normal progression of symptoms when I have a cold or flu, which leads to me having savage coughing fits dozens of times a day for WEEKS; luckily, I've discovered a way to stop a fit before it gets fully launched... I spray the back of my throat with Chloraseptic, and that seems to short-circuit the fit and thus stop the coughing. If you're a hard-core cougher yourself, you might want to give it a try; just keep in mind that this is NOT the way Chloraseptic is approved to be used, so if you get any sort of weird reaction stop using it, PLEASE.
And finally; we're still waiting to hear back about a contractor to fix the hole my husband put in the ceiling... but before we can hire anyone, we've GOT to get the rats out of the attic-no one will work in an attic full of rats, nor should they be expected to. My husband's about to climb up there and try to deploy the glue traps again; let's hope he doesn't wreck the ENTIRE house this time...
