h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That sounds familiar Paul. Let me know if you find the weblink. Would really like to find out more about this, though I'm sure if there was much to it then it would've been widely publicised by now.

A particularly absurd prediction was demonstrated to me with a $20 bill... fold it a particular way, and it looks like two towers. Fold it another way, and the word OSAMA can be read.

The one looks nothing like the World Trade Center towers. The other is just silly... you could spell out things a lot more complicated with the words The United States of America. You fold it accordion style. The first O is the second digit of 20 in the top left corner... then the S from States, the Am from America, as well as the final A. Not impressive.

And most "prophecies" are pretty much the same... even the ones in the Old Testament that supposedly came true in the New. It pretty much always involves taking something out of context or manipulating it until it no longer resembles the original.

Sneijder - Funny that. I'm a computer too. The BOOK is in fact being written by a lonely middle aged man, who lives with his parents, in the middle of Delaware.

to all my fans. But I do not exist.

26199, linux's /dev/random is not pseudo-random I think, it accumulates entropy from various sources such as high resolution time, mouse and keyboard, network events, etc. This wouldn't be enough to create a continuous stream of random numbers though, for that you'd definitely need one of those hardware thingies you were talking about.

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Good God we weren't even allowed to use our fingers to count on!

We had to use log tables and (in the 6th Science form slide-rules).

And oh golly those dip and scratch pens!

I did escape the goose-quill age by a year or two though!

If anyone wants to see the dollar bill thing:
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/20bill.htm

OK, Spinks. I can't find the original article I read (it seems to be in the magazine's pay-per-view section anyway), but there's plenty of similar information on the net. Try for example http://www.usatoday.com/tech/2001/12/06/net-interest.htm , which is basically the same facts that I read back then (with the added advantage of being in english, too.. )

It seems that it's not some solitary mad scientist that has suggested this hypothesis, but quite important Princeton people. Also, the emphasis has shifted since I read the article - then it was thoughts influencing reality, now it's global consciousness and its effects.

The main website of the project (Global Consciousness Project) is http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ . It's certainly worth a look - quite interesting, really.

Hope this helps. What do you guys think of that?

It's an outgrowth of http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

The science of discworld book has a great section on coincidences when talking about "missing links" in the fossil record. it puts forward the view that there cannot be a missing link - its just that we havent got all the evidence yet. it likens it to things like thinking of someone, and then them phoning us the next day. because we thought about them, humans associate the events and call it coincidence. but there is many people that we think about who do not call us the next day. its all down to your sense of perspective. (and explained far better in the book than that!)

many things are like this. after an event has happened, its terribly easy to say that x y and z were all pointing towards it happening. I would be lying if I said I wasnt interested personally, but I do have to admit that despite my interest I do tend to take it with a handful of salt!

Dogster -- technically that still qualifies as pseudo-random, I think... not sure... implementations often try and get a reasonably random 'seed' to start off the process... I imagine that's what the entropy pool is for...

(I'm on linux myself )

But, yes, it does make it unpredictable unless you know (or can work out) the seed...