“All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

I recommend his websites at

http://www.bible-codes.org

It’s about the Bible, the END-TIMES ,

God is sending Signs from God to warn us that the END OF THE AGE is near.

and Bible Numbers, Bible Number patterns, dates, events, elapsed times from ancient Bible events to modern current events, etc

What’s the odds that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 would come up? 1 in 4 MILLION!

What’s the odds that 23, 9, 31, 38, 2, 27 would come up? 1 in 4 MILLION!

1. Even ignoring the lack of any science supporting or predicting these mysterious ‘fields’, electronic randomisers (or indeed, even physical coin flips) aren’t truly random–so there’s no reason they should be interacted with any differently to any other electronic system, and if indeed they are, it wouldn’t be indicative of anything to do with the collective conciousness interacting with probability.

2. It appears effect has been confused with cause. Let’s say that these low-randomness events do preceed major incidents (which I find hard to swallow, as it appears they attempt only to pair major incidents with these event periods rather than the other way around, which proves nothing but coincidence). This would seem to imply a causal relationship. However, a large number of the things listed on their website are bombings and other terrorist activity, and in reality the ’cause’, that is the planning stages, begin months or years before. It should be nearly impossible to locate the corresponding low-randomness periods for these events; they should only appear for incidents themselves based on randomness, like vehicle accidents or the exact timing of natural disasters.
The alternative is that these ‘fields’ can travel backwards through time. Ignoring the problems with sending signals this way, let’s say that that is indeed what happens. A major event happens, and then a ‘field’ powerful enough to travel back in time to negate randomness is created. Even if this is true, the attibution to a collective conciousness is baseless. Wishful thinking on the part of these idiots. Why would it need to have anything to do with mysterious biological ‘fields’? Why not something else, such as the huge amount of media attention attracted by large-scale catastrophes?
Obviously that’s nonsense. But invoking a time-travelling media-filtering noosphere to interphere with pseudorandom coin-flippers, in the absense of any corroborating predictions, seems equally ridiculous.

Re :What is a meme?
URL: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040213.html
More on Memes: The Teeming Millions lose their minds
URL: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040312.html

e.g.:h h h t t h h t h t h t h t h h h t t h h t h t h t h t h t h t h t h t h t h t h t the pattern apparently random but …(h h h t t h h) t h t h t h t (h h h t t h h ) t h t t h t h t h t h t t h t h t h t h h t h t. a possible coincidental event may have taken place in the time I was hitting the key board but i doubt it.

I would guess that with world events happening all the time eventually one will align itself with these anomalies. To quote a tv show (if you make enough pridictions one of them is bound to come right.) [house.]“

This is a great example for what I was saying earlier! Let’s analyze this sequence and see how big of a coincidence we’re really talking about.

You found that a string of 7 bits appeared twice in a string of 45 bits, and that the first such string was also at the very beginning of that string of 45 bits. Okay, then, there are 2^7 = 128 possible strings of 7 bits, and (not counting the first 7 bits of your 45) you had 32 7-bit sequences within your 38 remaining bits that could have matched. The probability of a random match, if we assume your typing was equivalent to a series of coin flips, is about 32/128 or 25%. Surprising? Not so much. Especially when you might have been equally surprised at matching, say, the last 7 bits, or matching the sequence of 7 bits in reverse order. Or with h’s replaced by t’s and vice versa. Already, we’re finding that a pattern of this magnitude is pretty likely, and there are a whole lot more permutations of what might be considered a “surprising” pattern that I’ve ignored.

But also, you weren’t typing very “randomly.” If you look at the sequence you typed, you’ll see that you were quite a bit more likely to place a t after an h and an h after a t than you were to repeat characters. I count 11 repeated pairs, when in 45 perfect coin flips you’d expect 22 such pairs. If I were to go to the trouble to calculate it, I could come up with a confidence estimate for the proposition that the procedure you followed in typing that was far more “patterned” than a series of random coin flips. And I expect that that confidence interval would be quite high. I can’t conclude for certain that you were mostly alternating presses with those two fingers, but I can be pretty sure that you were.

So, with your bit stream actually having a pretty strong “pattern” in it, the probability of a match goes up even higher.

In the end, it would have been surprising if there HADN’T been a pattern of that magnitude in what you typed!

Thanks for the example.