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Bother - the web directory was full yesterday so I couldn't say anything. Now I can't remember what all I had to say.
I got something cute and funny in e-mail yesterday: a list of humorous state mottos. Some of them are very funny. I think that I especially like the ones for Connecticut, all the "I" states, the Dakotas, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (out of loyalty). I wonder where this list originated... I'm always surprised by how much of this stuff has not only been around for ages but actually came from books or radio shows or some other non-internet source. Dave Barry has a comment in one of his books about an article he wrote getting passed around the internet, munged, and finally sent back to him by readers with the comment that he should do an article on the topic. I think it was the exploding whale article.
There is a very odd study on the web called Psi-Ping. The purpose of the study is to determine if people can use their minds to control the behavior of the internet, specifically to control ping rates. Anyone who comes across the page seems to be allowed to participate and all you are asked to do is to concentrate on either slowing down or speeding up the rate at which your packets are being sent to a remote server and back. The results they give indicate that psychic power can slow down packets on the internet, though it does not speed them up. They claim to be associated with the Koestler Parapsychology Unit of the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I think the site is legitimate, but not everyone agrees with me. It's actually linked to off of the University of Edinburgh Psychology Department home page. If it's a hoax, it's a very large and highly supported hoax.
I looked at the paper they had on line showing the results from their first version of the study (they are currently on version three of the study). I wish I knew a little more about how networks work because it seems like something strange must be going on here. Their results were that the influence was most strongly seen (perhaps only significant) either on the shortest trip that the packets took, the local University server, or on the longest path to Microsoft.com which used what they called an "esoteric protocol" to get there. Since it isn't clear how anyone would even know which were the longer paths and which were shorter, it seems like either there is something strange about these paths or they would have to claim something in their nature makes them more receptive to mental influence. For instance, they said that they performance of the participants was not improving as the study went on. So maybe it's a feature that only occurs early on in as sequence of pings. Maybe looking at the network protocols for routing packets or something would show what was going on. Just because I think the site is for real doesn't mean I think the results mean what they say they do. And for all I know it's a big on-line experiment to determine gullibility or something like that. You never know with psychologists.
They have a link to another experiment that isn't going any more but which tries to get people to predict future random actions of a computer by way of guessing what string the computer will chose to pull to try to set free someone called Freaky Fifi who is gagged. They seem to have had a picture of this Freaky Fifi all tied up that was the model for choosing which string you thought the computer would randomly chose. This seems a little on the bothersome side to me, particularly for a supposedly scientific study. Gagged women are not neutral topics for contemplation. Perhaps it was another study that wasn't what they said it was, or they want to see how interested people are in it.