June 21, 2005

• I knew you were going to post this.
• what the research did not reveal is the nolan sisters are.... CONJOINED QUINTUPLETS.
• /smack
• SideDish has never been exposed to the lyrical magic that is the Nolan Sisters, clearly. Having grown up in the UK during the late 70s, early 80s, the Nolan Sisters were somewhat ubiquibibiquitious on tv. Didn't they do the Eurovision song conquest? And why is Israel in the Eruevisoin song contest anyway?
• Ah, Sheldrake. It brings back wonderful memories of the time I was sitting by a beautiful beach on the island of Koshima, 1952. Munching on dirt-covered yams like all regular monkeys do. The monkey next to me, I can't remember her name, though she could sure peel a banana like no-one's business...i digress...anyhow she did a startling thing, she dumped her yams in the water first before eating them! The crowd went wild. We all started dumping our yams! this was progress! No more dirty yams! Days later, i heard the innovation had spread instantaneously to other islands. I immediately copped a research grant and that, my brothers and sisters was how I landed my doctoral post at the University of Oooga Booga where I am now professor of morphogenesis. The End.
• The Eruevisoin song contest is fixed! The Eruevians always win. Don't you think that is suspicious? Why aren't there any skeptics on this thread?
• They'll be here.
• We conclude that the results support the hypothesis of telepathic communication. I conclude that the correct answers were provided to the participant by the spirit of a crucified Romanian nun. /skeptic
• Interestingly enough, a friend of ours wants to do more research on this. He's a very well respected (if not a little crazy) physicist. If you google "Dick Effect" (no, I'm not joking, and yes, that's HILARIOUS), you can find some of the work he did at JPL. Anyhow, he feels it has to do with timing, not telepathy. I can't say that I completely understand it, but he wants to do this experiment on a MUCH bigger scale. So, yes, there is some scholorly research going on with this. I'll ask him about it next time we talk.
• Whenever I pick up the phone, it's always Rupert Sheldrake.
• Your phone is Rupert Sheldrake?
• One cannot simultaneously provide a rigorous distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena and know that only natural phenomena occur. To do so would imply omniscience.
• I'd lump supernatural phenomena in with theist religion...I personally don't believe in it, but don't fault those who do.
• I can't help but wonder why Sheldrake decided to focus on *telephone* telepathy. Why not *doorbell* telepathy? Or even e-mail telepathy? The good thing about his experiment though is that if there is something to it, it should be easily reproducible. I kinda have my doubts (zounds! a skeptic shows up!) just because you would think that something so obvious would have been found before. ...unless of course, it's one of those things that disappear whenever the labcoats show up.
• Sheila on The Bill is a Nolan sister.
• Another Nolan I always though the Nolan Sisters were actually from Dublin.
• The posters in the JREF forums raise some good points about holes in the methodology of the tests, including the possibility of cueing from the sound of the phone line before making the guess, the small sample size, and the lack of double-blind controls.
• Hey, that's a great link HouseP! From the forum is this suggestion by MRC_Hans to make the experiment more rigorous: -- A more sound protocol would be: One telephone connection, isolated from the normal system, to rule out unrelated calls. ALL callers use the same phone. The sequence of callers is determined a priori. Receiver does not answer call, but simply writes down his/her guess of the caller when the phone rings. At each test, a random sequence of callers make calls at regular time intervals, e.g. 5 minutes. Only after completion of the test series is the recorded guesses compared to the sequence of callers. This protocol would eliminate the fault sources, be much more effective, and cheaper.