I simply meant blue=Israel
Speak to the children of Israel, and thou shalt tell them to make to themselves fringes in the corners of their garments, putting in them ribands of blue
Meanwhile, here are some more thoughts on the question of meaningfulness (as in: "meaningful [synchronicities] tend to come in meteoric showers scintillating and hinting at half-seen connections as though a woven fabric of intent pervades everything")
A standard skeptical response to the suggestion that an unusual occurrence may be meaningful is to say something like: "People only find that kind of thing meaningful because human brains have evolved to seek meaning; people tend to invest meaningfulness in phenomena which are not really meaningful".
Which is, in itself, a fair response.
In order for it to be reasonable to attribute meaningfulness to an unusual occurrence that would not normally be the kind of thing that has meaning, there needs to be some kind of special quality about the occurrence which makes it ... well ... not normal.
This is where the paranormal comes into the picture. Part of the value of statistically outrageous unlikeliness is that it can act as an antidote to that skeptical response by providing a paranormal setting.
If something odd happens, and someone suggests that the universe is telling us something, then it's easy for skeptics to say that the person is "only imagining" that there is meaning in it.
But if a whole lot of curiously related odd things happen, to the extent that what's happening begins to seem statistically unbelievable, then it can start looking more like a scintillating meteor shower hinting at half-seen connections as though a woven fabric of intent pervades everything.
So after that build-up, I'd like to relate the SR desk experiment.
This happened in 2007 and after the 3 forum-wide experiments which I described in part 1 of this thread was the only other forum-wide SR paranormal experiment.
Wu ran an experiment where he put a number up above his desk, and asked people to guess the number, the colour and the medium it was written in.
Several people guessed, including the person who posted as 'power' or 'wonder', who guessed as follows: "The number above the desk is equal to the number of replies in the contest until wu or someone closes the ticket window." In order not to skew any possible result in relation to his guess, he then (without telling us the reason) moved his discussion of the experiment to another thread.
The experiment closed on April 1st, and no one had guessed the number (which was 71), Rooster had guessed the colour correctly (brown) and no one had guessed the medium (duct tape).
Then a few oddities started rolling in ~ some trivial, some curious and some strange.
Wu noted that Rooster's number guess (72) was a remarkably close miss.
Neatly balancing this from the other side, we have emilio's guess ~ he'd guessed the number would be odd and prime, and settled on 67 ~ well, 67 is the next odd prime below 71.
Wu also noted that, out of the blue, Kit (moderator of the "experiments" forum) had mentioned "duct tape" for no apparent reason at all ~ but not as part of a guess.
(She actually mentioned it in the secondary thread to which 'power' later transferred discussion of the experiment)
Tom Booth claimed that his guess (which was the number pi) was (when written as a Greek letter) the closest you could get (in appearance) to 71 (if you write pi with a straight top and shift it sideways a bit)
While all this was happening, 'power' was away on holiday.
To appreciate the next oddity, note the chronology of the replies on the main thread of the experiment:
March 22nd: 11 replies
March 23rd: 11 replies
March 24th: 5 replies
March 25th: 10 replies
March 26th: 2 replies
March 27th: 2 replies
March 28th: 4 replies
March 29th: 3 replies
March 30th: --
March 31st: --
April 1st: 6 replies (including revelation of answer in coded form)
April 2nd: 8 replies (including revelation of answer decoded)
April 3rd: 8 replies
April 4th: 1 reply
April 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th: ** (silence)
----------total 71 replies----------------
On April 12th 'power' came back from holiday, and said hey look there are 71 replies in the thread.
Which was the case not merely at that instant; the remarkable thing was that the thread had calmed down of its own accord and settled at 71 replies, and stayed there for a whole week, without anyone noticing that this was the secret number.
Wu refused to accept this as a winning guess because he'd revealed the answer on April 1st/2nd and considered the experiment closed at that point.
In my opinion, on the other hand, in these semi-magical guessing-games, the exact form of words used may be very important.
'power' hadn't said "until the experiment closes", he had said "until the ticket window closes".
Well, the ticket window is the window through which bets are placed, and through which winnings are paid out. As long as there are winning tickets outstanding, the window stays open.
Thus the ticket window stayed open until 'power' came back from holiday on April 12th and declared his winning ticket, which was a winning ticket *because* the window was still open at that point.
Intriguingly self-referential, and not surprisingly this opinion didn't go down at all well with the SR skeptics.
It doesn't matter, there is more to come.
We need to review another aspect of the experiment, which is that in order to preclude cheating on the part of the experimenter, wu said at the start that he would send an encrypted form of the answer to Kit (whom everyone trusted not to try to break the code prematurely), and that he would close the experiment by publishing this encrypted form of the answer (thus giving everyone the enjoyable task of trying to crack it for themselves) and then finally (if no one cracked it) announcing the answer in clear.
But there are issues about how safe that procedure actually is and one problem is that we had to trust Kit not to try to break the code prematurely and secretly tip off someone else to make a winning guess.
Of course, we all did trust her, but still theoretically there was a problem.
Well, the beautiful thing about 'power's guess is that (unlike everybody else's guesses) it could not possibly be the result of a secret tip-off from Kit.
The only way that his guess could have been the result of dishonest collusion would be if
everyone in the forum colluded in order to make the thread settle at 71 replies.
So *any particular member* can say to themselves "I know that *I* did not collude, therefore 'power's guess can't have been dishonest."
Note also that, thinking of things the other way around, this turns collusion from a bad thing (practised by a subset of the forum in order to fool the remainder) into a good thing (practised telepathically by the forum as a whole in order to reach a desired result).
However, 'power's guess had a blemish: in order to make it win, everyone in the forum had to contribute their telepathic collusion in order to make the thread settle at 71 replies, but only 'power' would get the credit.
Since everyone in the forum contributed telepathically to making the guess win, it would be much more just if the forum as a whole could get the credit.
This sets the scene for the final oddity, the real slammer, which emerged when Aventurine (the poster of wistful sobriety) thought of analyzing the digits in everyone's guesses:
Of the 13 original guesses, here is the breakdown on the numbers 0-9 guessed:
0 - 1
1 - 5
2 - 1
3 - 2
4 - 1
5 - 2
6 - 3
7 - 8
8 - 1
9 - 0
That's right - '7' was guessed the most (8 times) and '1' was guessed second most (5 times).
or, putting it another way,
The correct answer of 71 was built up forum-wide and holographically:
Each person's guess adds a quantum of illumination to the digits they select.
At the end of the contest, the most brightly glowing digit by far is 7; second place goes to 1.
This is the essence of the Age of Aquarius : forum-wide telepathic collusion, dreaming together
