Coincidence?
Do you ever wonder if coincidence happen too often to be random?
About 15 years ago, I saw a TV show about some inventor who had biult a binery random number generator. This generator electronicaly flipped a coin to land on 0 or 1, heads or tails. Over an extended period of time, a fifty-fifty chance would occur, but over the short term a greater number of 0's or 1's (heads or tails) could happen and, get this, it seemed to be in response to the "emotion" of the people around the device. This seems to imply that the human mind can, to some degree, influence the outcome of a random electronic generator!
At this point in my life, I had a commodore vic20 (yippy) so, I wrote a little program in BASIC, all it did was to 'flip' an electronic coin a hundred times and then output the difference between heads and tails (0 and 1) as a small, consecutive dot on the screen. If there were a lot more heads than tails the dot would be higher up on the screen; if there were more tails than heads; the dot would appear lower. If the outcome of the differance was near zero, the dot would appear at the same hight. I had different colours and sounds occur depending if the differance was greater, nearly the same as, or less. I also had a feature that allowed the user to stop the hundred-count-coin-toss at any time in the prossess by hitting any key on the keyboard.
Last thing I recall is my old bass player, Stefan Beinz, frozen ridgedly in a chair, watching the screen that had a series of dots going straight down saying, "I'm trying to make them go up!"
About 15 years ago, I saw a TV show about some inventor who had biult a binery random number generator. This generator electronicaly flipped a coin to land on 0 or 1, heads or tails. Over an extended period of time, a fifty-fifty chance would occur, but over the short term a greater number of 0's or 1's (heads or tails) could happen and, get this, it seemed to be in response to the "emotion" of the people around the device. This seems to imply that the human mind can, to some degree, influence the outcome of a random electronic generator!
At this point in my life, I had a commodore vic20 (yippy) so, I wrote a little program in BASIC, all it did was to 'flip' an electronic coin a hundred times and then output the difference between heads and tails (0 and 1) as a small, consecutive dot on the screen. If there were a lot more heads than tails the dot would be higher up on the screen; if there were more tails than heads; the dot would appear lower. If the outcome of the differance was near zero, the dot would appear at the same hight. I had different colours and sounds occur depending if the differance was greater, nearly the same as, or less. I also had a feature that allowed the user to stop the hundred-count-coin-toss at any time in the prossess by hitting any key on the keyboard.
Last thing I recall is my old bass player, Stefan Beinz, frozen ridgedly in a chair, watching the screen that had a series of dots going straight down saying, "I'm trying to make them go up!"
posted by youknow at 7:42 PM
