what type of religion is yours?

[OnyxCougar]

Found this on this blog:

From the London Daily Mail via RedNova.com:

Posted on: Friday, 11 February 2005, 00:00 CST
Can This Black Box See Into the Future?
DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future... (Click here for rest of article).

I went to the website for the Global Consciousness Project and skimmed over their procedures and data. Interestingly enough it does look like some pretty serious and thorough research going on here: the procedure for each step - from numerical generation to graphing - is documented at length. The data is made freely available for anyone to study on their own. And links and abstracts regarding similar research (wait a sec: our tax dollars are funding more of this?!) can be found. Some of them DO sound pretty oddball: like The RetroPsychoKinesis Project, which among other things sponsored an attempt by martial artists to alter past events with their minds. Ummmmm wasn't that the central storyline of at least five or six episodes of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues?

edit:
from the first link:

For what his experiments appear to demonstrate is that while we may all operate as individuals, we also appear to share something far, far greater - a global consciousness. Some might call it the mind of God.

'We're taught to be individualistic monsters,' he says. 'We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right.

We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise.'