(2017-09-18, 08:05 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]I suppose we have to bear in mind that the effect is extremely weak - they're not so much going bananas, as displaying a very slight tendency to correlate with one another. And we can't say that there's a malfunction, because the numbers are random anyway, and are just deviating slightly from ideal behaviour. It's not as though they are doing a digital calculation and getting the wrong result.
Having said that, when I read Malf's question I couldn't help thinking of the common claim about clocks stopping when their owners die...
Which brings up an odd event that happened to me a couple months ago- (a little off topic,,, maybe)
I have a grandfather's clock that I built in high school in 1973. It has been happily tick-tocking away continuously for all these years with occasional pauses where it needed to be cleaned, oiled etc.
A few months ago it stopped and I haven't gotten around to oiling it.
My 1 year old grandson was visiting a month ago and I was following along after him as he puttered around the house to make sure he didn't get into any trouble. He stopped at the grandfather's clock and looked at the big brass pendulum sitting
still behind the glass door. He seemed curious.
After 10-20 seconds of him standing there with his hands on the glass, I realized I could hear the ticking of the movement. I looked behind the glass and the pendulum was now swinging fully from side to side. A couple minutes later the chimes rang out which the do, every 15 minutes.
For those who have no experience with a clock of this type, you
must open the door of the case and physically push the pendulum to one side, like pushing a child on a swing, to get things started. It cannot be started by touching or tapping the exterior of the case. Anyway- my grandson, being only 1 year old, couldn't reach high enough on the case door to open it even if he wanted to. And I was standing there anyway, and wouldn't have allowed him to open it, even if he could.
Some other things to say about this are: my daughter has been stopped twice in the street by "sensitive" people, and told that her son is somehow "special".
And a year ago, my wife and I were having a reading done and the medium made note of the fact that our second grandson (this boy) was actually my wife's mother (who passed about 15 years ago), and that he is "special" and that we should pay close attention to him.
All of this is of course completely anecdotal, and proves absolutely nothing, I realize that. But when a child who has been called special several times by multiple people, simply places his hands on a clock like this, and it spontaneously begins to work, it certainly is something of note.