The World of Stuff .com

Mind control

Is it possible that deviations in random numbers can detect or even predict major world events? The folks mentioned in this RedNova article, “Can This Black Box See Into the Future?,” say that perhaps they can.

To test their theory, they have computers spitting out zeroes and ones randomly. The researchers claim that the computers produce about equal amounts of each — as expected — most times, but that the difference in the ratio between ones and zeroes shot up during Princess Diana‘s funeral, watched by an estimated one billion people, and other world events including New Year’s Eve celebrations, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. Especially unusual, they say, is that the numbers began to shift on September 11, 2001 — several hours before the terrorist attacks happened. The computers likewise “predicted” December’s tsunami 24 hours before it occurred.

Especially interesting is the mention of a study in which strangers were shown a computer that was churning out ones and zeroes. The researcher asked them to concentrate and try to control which number the machine picked. Allegedly, the people were consistently able to influence the computer’s output. The effect was supposed to be especially strong with groups as well.

If these scientists could perform such a simple experiment, then so can anyone with a computer. All you need to have computer do is pick one of two random numbers. I thought I could write a program that does this, but I realized that my flipacoin.net site does exactly the same thing. When you “flip” a coin, the web server randomly chooses between 0 and 1. If the number is 0, the heads side of the coin is shown, and if it’s 1, then the tails side appears. So if you concentrate on making heads appear more than tails (or vice versa), then you’re effectively “rooting” for one particular number, just as in the aforementioned experiment. Hey, I have some time, so why not try it now?

As a control set of findings, I “flipped” a coin on the site 100 times and came up with 51 heads, 49 tails. Then, while concentrating on making the coin come up tails, I flipped the same coin 100 more times. Result: 59 heads, 41 tails.

Please go to flipacoin.net and try it for yourself. Then post a comment here with your results.

In other news: Jordanian man and woman meet in chat room and fall in love. While planning their wedding, they decide to meet in person, only to find… that they are actually husband and wife that had been separated for several months. (Story)