Black Box sees into the future

[alainbryden]

^^Agreed. Everything about this article screams "how gullable are you?"

[jewpinthethird]

What is the administration at Princeton thinking letting a hoax like this become public?

[lightdarkness]

I don't believe it's a hoax. With 41 different respected groups running tests, and all these people stating it, and it being posted on /. and fark and rednova, I doubt it's a hoax.

[alainbryden]

any information you have on this box comes from this single article ld. When something this outrageous has only one source, then there is nothing legitimate about it.

[lightdarkness]

any information you have on this box comes from this single article ld. When something this outrageous has only one source, then there is nothing legitimate about it.

However, several credible sites have linked to it. Slashdot doesn't post random stories without making sure there is some truth to the claims.

[jewpinthethird]

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

Link at the bottom of the Rednova article.

[lightdarkness]

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

Link at the bottom of the Rednova article.

Jewpin wins 8 bajillion awesome points.

These points may be redeemed when the next major world event occors, as predicted by these black boxes.

[Tps222]

We build a huge space-ship, and whenever this thing goes crazy off the charts, we evacuate the world
for a while. That way we can be safe. Not to mock it too much though, it looks like it could develop into something interesting.

[alainbryden]

Absolutely unbelievable. I'm telling you, there are alot of people willing to believe anything out there. I'm not giving this thing an ounce of credibility until a real new station covers it. Anyone can post anything they want on the internet for any sucker to believe or not. It has no support from any provent intelligencia, therefore, it is not credible enough for me. If it is for you, so be it.

[lightdarkness]

Absolutely unbelievable. I'm telling you, there are alot of people willing to believe anything out there. I'm not giving this thing an ounce of credibility until a real new station covers it. Anyone can post anything they want on the internet for any sucker to believe or not. It has no support from any provent intelligencia, therefore, it is not credible enough for me. If it is for you, so be it.

Ever heard of Princeton? You know, that really respected college?

You know the one!

It's on their website. I would say thats credible enough.

[alainbryden]

Not for me it isn't. Anyone could pay to host something on someone elses site if they wanted to.

[DracIV]

What I want to see, from this story and from all the other paranormal stuff, is proof. Not the random, uncontrolled, after-the-fact proof; I mean actual proof like we have for every other thing in reality. When you spend years searching for a pattern in "random" numbers, you're likely to imagine or force events to exist that didn't. And besides, the amount of assumptions that go into their explanations of how the "black box" works makes it unlikely in the extreme. IF times goes two ways and IF people can remember what hasn't happened and IF the event registers on every mind in the world and IF it affects random number generators and IF they are truly random number generators, THEN . . . we can't do jack. It doesn't even help if it did work.

"Something big is gonna happen!"
"What?"
"Umm . . . we don't know."
"Well that doesn't help!"
*Meteor hits the speakers*

[alainbryden]

Agreed 100%. Case closed as far as I'm concerned. The idea is not only unlikely true, but useless in essence. So much for that.

[Cenright]

It just means people can brace for impact. Of course, If we ever do rely any on it. The black box is going to predict something, there will panic, and it will fulfill itself, and everyone will herald the box as all mighty.

Coming from a religous side, I do give it credibility. I call it Demon intervention, creating just another god for men to say they know better.

Sorry, I really wasn't trying to sound like a screaming pilgrim.

[dAnceguy117]

I'm confused at what was said about being able to tamper with random number generators with your mind. First, as said before, this contradicts the meaning of 'random' itself. Second, I'm completely skeptical of this because I haven't heard it from anywhere else. If I got a bunch of friends to gather 'round while I pull out my TI-83 Plus and start up the probability simulator, we could change the results?

Lastly, the whole thing about 'They're afraid of releasing this information because they don't want to be ridiculed' seems incredibly fishy. If you do an experiment to see if something unusual will happen, and that unusual thing does, but you're afraid of being ridiculed, why do the experiment in the first place?

Alright, that's out of the way. Due to my lack of knowledge of magnetic fields, I can't really say much about that. But I still don't understand what could make a black box that spits out random variations of 0 and 1 special. If it truly is the anxiety of people making these patterns go out of whack, shouldn't it also affect any other random number generator? And was the microchip in this black box created differently than other random number generators? Above that, by who? Did the little orphan black box that could finally find a home?

Okay, that was kind of stupid. Anyway, one more thing. As much as I feel I can completely disregard the information given in this article, the fact that it talks about future predicting intrigues me a little. I want to know if these results from the people reacting to the depicted scenes and everything are really as consistent as the author(s?) of claim them to be. If I dig up more on this, and find that a lot of credible sources state the same things, that's when I'll be truly interested.

Of course, that's just about the future predicting thing. I still consider the black box to be a hoax, especially because of Alain's and DracIV's arguments. Sorry LD ;D