From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 21:04:20 MDT
An uncle of mine, an old school teacher, used to say. "Don't believe in the supernatural; everything is a bunch of lies for fools. Well, everything except the Bad Eye. That one is real."
I guess I have the Bad Eye, because I always get high negative scores. Anyway, it is interesting to see what is really going on here. Apparently, this is not about prediction but about making things happen.
The "demo" test, which uses pseudorandom numbers generated by the computer, probably uses the milliseconds of the system clock and some hashing function. So, what does it take to make the computer produce different pseudorandom numbers. Do we make the system clock run quicker or slower? Do we change the sampling intervals? Do we change the flow of time itself around us? And the fact that we do this by looking at the picture on the screen would have some voodoo-ish implications too.
In the "practice" and "record" tests, which use random numbers coming from radioactive decay, we also affect the radioactivity quantum effects by watching the picture. This reminds me of "Wigner's friend's" paradox, where Schroedinger's cat becomes either alive or dead when Wigner's friend looks at it, and Wigner's friend becomes either happy or sad when Wigner looks at him.
See? Although I didn't do well at all in the test and I would have every reason to trash it, I can still be "scientific" about that.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25641>
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