by mattnoel 108 Replies latest jw friends
"....The principles behind the behavior of the planchette are similar to the principles involved in dowsing. That is, it's not paranormal and has been reproduced in a laboratory....."
Is dowsing where you have a stick and it finds water? What tests have been done in a laboratory? I am very interested in this, as a sister in my congregation years ago used to do "water witching" and she got PR'd because the elders said it was demonic................
Sirona; nice links (bet guys say that to you all the time)
However, being a big old meany I have to point out the day that repeatable evidence of paranormal powers is available, then the guy who does it will spare no time in rubbing the scientific communities nose in it whilst they await their Nobel Prize. Quite right I say, but it hasn't happened yet; no levitting chairs on Parkinson yet, eh?
Also, many of the theories concerning non-testability are re-hashes of theological arguments about why you can't prove god. COnvenient is my word for this.
And everyone, this link is rather interesting. It regards dousing, and how it describes dousers being INCAPABLE of believing they can't douse in double-blind experiments, even though no douser has ever doused in a double blind experiment.
http://www.randi.org/library/dowsing/index.html
ADDED LATER FOR SPOOKY COINCIDENCE OVER ME AND FUNKY POSTING THE SAME LINK (DIDN'T READ THIS PAGE IN BETWEEN EITHER, HONEST): hey funky, I think we just proved psi abilities... whoops, bang goes the conspiracy of silence. I will levitate my gold bullion to your secret lair in the Magillycuddy Reeks. Wipe Bush's mind, it won't take long... as I pass over London I will turn Blair into a gerbil... won't take long either
Humans are capable of believing in things so strongly facts take a second place.
Be careful out there...
Great link Sirona, really great links;
THIS IS WHAT WE WANT;
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/psi/delanoy/delanoy.html
Doesn't actually get us that far along in answering the question, but it seems to be the right method to remove the la-la anecdotal mush these debates have been bogged down in since Grog suugested he could tell where the mammoths were without actually LOOKING for them, and Zog demonstarted he could do so with a degree of significance of about 
= 25.01, p = 0.00001. Unfortunately an immature Smilodont found Zog far easier to catch, as despite his spookily mathematical brain, he couldn't run as fast as a rabbit.
Sometimes evolving to only count to three leaves you time to evolve more important things, like a quick get away.
ADDED LATER FOR SPOOKY COINCIDENCE OVER ME AND FUNKY POSTING THE SAME LINK (DIDN'T READ THIS PAGE IN BETWEEN EITHER, HONEST): hey funky, I think we just proved psi abilities... whoops, bang goes the conspiracy of silence. I will levitate my gold bullion to your secret lair in the Magillycuddy Reeks. Wipe Bush's mind, it won't take long... as I pass over London I will turn Blair into a gerbil... won't take long either
Google searches 3,083,324,652 web pages. Therefore the odds that I would post a link to any particular site are 1 in 3,083,324,652. Amazing enough in itself, huh? The odds that Abaddon posted the same site are also 1 in 3,083,324,652. To get the odds that both these events happen together, we obviously multiply the probabilities getting an astronomically small possibility of 1 in 9,506,890,909,630,921,104 (or ~10^19). This is absoutely impossible to attribute to coincidence so either Abaddon must be lying or he's right about the psi abilities.
Ah, BUT there are only 829,000 pages that come up with 'paranormal' as the search string, so that immediately reduces the odds to an everyday 1 in 6.8 billion. And a search string 'paranormal + false' gets you 22,000 sites, for an almost bound to happen 1 in 484 million.
Of course,
WITHOUT EVIDENCE YOU CAN'T PROVE WHAT HAPPENED.
Quo €ucking erat demonstrandum
If, on the other hand, they said the deer flew away, then I would be more sceptical.
I was reading along and having a fine time of it when I read this and nearly fell off my chair laughing! Too funny!
Oops I think I opened a can of worms !
Did anyone see Sylvia Brown on Larry King last night? That was hilarious. She's such an obvious fraud it's unbelievable that anyone takes her seriously. She's wrong so often and people just ignore it.
She got called out on her backing out of the James Randi $1 million challenge. Made up some crap about the money being in escrow... wtf? It's not even Randi's money - the terms of the challenge are quite clear and she agreed to them two years ago already!
The thing that really irks me is that she gives out health advice... she practically diagnoses everyone with fibromyalgia. Such nonsense. Fortunately she seems to tell the callers to go to the doctor to get this or that checked out. It seems that she can cause some people some unnecessary stress by telling them they have a disease they don't have, though.
rem
