[Justan]

This is an amaziing story Learn from the collective mind. http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121 http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

[Mongo]

You would think there would be a better indicator of global concsiousness, if such a thing exists, than effects on a random number generator. It's like measuring cosmic rays by closing your eyes and counting the flashes. My problem with the conclusions is that I think there are patterns everywhere, even in seemingly random data. Look at those analyses of the bible that count every 53 rd letter or whatever. They have predicted everything to the same degree of accuracy. Once you get statistical analysts involved you find out that the sun could be rising or setting at 6:00 am, depending on how you look at the data.

[Justan]

I agree that one can statistically prove or disprove almost anything, but this appears to be little different. Accordingly the results are quantifiable. Remember that there could be some hitherto unknown energy source influencing the counters. Think back to when experiments with radioactive materials begun. Folks literally had no idea of what they’d stumbled across. As test equipment becomes more sophisticated, we simply don’t know what we might find. It would be interesting to put some of these counters some distance from the planet, to see if there is a time lag to be between the closest and most distant counters or even if the pattern continues. Perhaps the whole phenomena occurs from outside the planet and events are ultimately being played out in a manner currently undetectable by us? It would bring added meaning to the idea of tin foil conspiracies, eh? Here’s info on the lead professor http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/ Here’s little on the box http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/reg.html

[Tom]

I'm skeptical. It's easy to claim predictive power in hindsight. Consider a mutual fund manager that starts 16 funds, making opposing bets. In the first year 8 of the funds do bad and 8 the funds do good. In the second year the fund manager takes the 8 "good" funds and does the same thing. By year 5 the fund manager will have one fund that has done well in every year. Is the fund manager really good at picking stocks? Note they didn't mention all the times a newsworthy event occured and the box didn't signal anything. I could probably pick a random infrequent event, like a lightbulb going out in my house, and tie it to some newsworthy event too in hindsight.

[Lagerman]

If something predicts something, and it actually saves you from something, that would be different. But I aint going to call Miss Cleo for 3.99 a minute for her to tell me my name.

[polarbear]

[Smarto]

Guess this explains why cars run better after you wash them.