A Box That Sees The Future.

i saw this a few days ago... and then yesterday it showed up on Slashdot as well.

i thought it was pretty cool. a bit Coast To Coast... but sort of freaky nonetheless.

basically it's about a small box set up to generate random numbers... well not random numbers... but a 0 or a 1. like a coin flip. non-stop. now normally over time a line plotting the results of the random ones and zeroes would have a baseline average... basically a straight line more or less. but this is where it gets sort of strange...

During the late 1970s, Prof. Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.

weeeeeeird.

it gets even weirder though... it seems that right before major earth-changing cataclysmic events... like 9/11 or the recent tsunami... the graph would fluctuate noticeably. freaky.

Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers.

They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous.

'I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us,' says Dr Nelson.

What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps?

Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.

Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.

So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the future?

so basically. it's a future telling box. and i want one.

read the whole article... it's pretty interesting.

there are also some good comments on the Slashdot posting of the story.

...and the actual Global Consciousness Project site.

z.