Can ISLAND CASTAWAYS really see the past/future?

[Kid Charlemagne]

And a Yahoos search taking the last sentence of his post reveals he's posted on at least 6 other forums, too.

 

[s/LaSH]

If all these psychics are real, and if thier powers allow them to tell someone's future over the phone...

Why didn't they see the 11 Sept 01 attacks coming?

Well, in my time zone I was asleep at the time of the attacks, and I distinctly remember waking up and thinking 'there's been a plane crash with lots of debris'. To be fair, I thought it was on one of the hills around my house, which is nowhere near America. But I didn't find out about the attacks until twelve hours later, at which point I was freaked. Coincidence? Disturbance in the Force? Seismic senses going haywire (I've got senses acute enough to pick up advance warning of earthquakes if I'm in contact with the right surfaces, although I shouldn't think it'd work across ten thousand kilometres of ocean and continent)? I don't know...

So I don't really mind if this is a spam thread, I find it interesting to discuss the topic.

 

[Uzumaki]

Waltz1982, you've come to these forums and posted exactly twice - started two threads in two different forums, on the exact same topic, using the exact same first post. (For reference, This is the other thread, over in the sci-fi forum).

Care to explain why?

No kidding! I saw this thread and I was just so confused...

 

[Slife]

Richard Feinman commented on this. He had, once, a sudden intuition that his grandmother had died. Seconds later, the phone rang. It was... for someone else. He remembered that specifically so that he'd take anything like that with a grain of salt.

^
^
With millions of people who can access the internet, and thousands who have joined this forum, statistically there have to be SOME that get a result like that. Bell curve, anyone?

 

[Umbran]

With millions of people who can access the internet, and thousands who have joined this forum, statistically there have to be SOME that get a result like that. Bell curve, anyone?

Consider this - events happen around us basically at the rate of one per second. That's the basic reason the second is the basic unit of time.

There's roughly two and a half million seconds in a month. That means, on average, you might well see a one-chance-in-a-million event in a month. We'd usually call such rare occurances a "miracle".

There's somethign like 290 million people in the USA. That means that you might well expect that each day, 290 people experience such low-probability events.

It's not really "the bell curve". In statistics and probability, it's called the Law of Large Numbers. When you have a great many events, some of them *will* be low-probability.

 

[Piratecat]

Duplicate threads (the other one in the movie forum) merged.

 

[Greylock]

I can't believe I read this far, or that this thread lasted so far.

Psychics are bunk-um, hokum, malarkey, you name it. There is no such thing as 'reading' the future. This thread touches upon the religious in a subtle way, and if political threads are verbotten then so should this clap-trap.

My two cents...

 

[nerfherder]

Duplicate threads (the other one in the movie forum) merged.

This thread has also been spammed across other non-EN World forums on the internet, like AV Forums. :\

Cheers,
Liam

 

[Piratecat]

In that case, original post edited appropriately. Carry on.

 

[Algolei]

I once witnessed an island castaway levitate a cow 50 feet in the air. Ha! Debunk that, Amazing Randi!