Sunday, October 1, 2006

103 - Research

Telephone Telepathy

1. Telephone Telepathy
The media has run with this story about a scientist proving that people can predict the caller when the telephone rings. In fact, Rupert Sheldrake's experiment is nothing more than a 1 in 4 guessing game and his hit rate of 45% is meaningless when using a small sample group of only 63 people.

Lab Rats

2. Lab Rats
Seeing some of these freaky animals can be disturbing without some background on the reasons why they were developed. I highly recommend listening to this Skepticality interview with Marc Zimmer which illuminates clearly why glow in the dark pigs are more than just really cool.

However

3. However
A chicken with four legs can be a bit disturbing, because it appeared randomly and we have no way of knowing why or how the extra legs appeared. Certainly it was a sort of mutation, but what caused that mutation to occur?

Cannibalisaur

4. Cannibalisaur
Based on petrified stomach contents, paleontologists have bee maligning the Coelophysis for decades, calling him a cannibal. New research shows that those contents were not other Coelophysis, but more likely crocodile.

Pale Blue Orb

5. Pale Blue Orb
An image transmitted by the Cassini deep space probe, shows us what the Earth looks like from within the rings of Saturn.

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3 comments:

Dawn said...

It's easy to predict who calls:
Mom, Sales call or Work - So already I have a 33% chance of getting it right!

Christopher Clark said...

Like most paranormal phenomena, I believe it is really all about the tendency to remember the unusual and forget about the mundane.

The few times you answer the phone while thinking of the caller seem extraordinary and the memories are filed away in the brain somewhere, whereas the millions of times this doesn't happen are immediately forgotten.

JD said...

what about those times when you're thinking about somebody and you pick up the phone to call them and you hear no dial tone and say, 'hello?', and it's the person you were about to call?!
now, that's some esp/sweet-spirits type of stuff there.