Messages

I bet...anything you like?...that it's never going to be seen on NBC again. It's cancelled.

It wasn't very good, it had appalling ratings, and that article is just some tiny website trying to drum up page hits.

People getting this excited over a few seconds of footage from a series which hasn't had a good installment in over 30 years is the reason we can't have nice things.

An informal fallacy, in my view, with the burden of proof on you.

What? Which one of us is making the more unusual claim here?

Science has neither proved nor disproved them. I fail to see how you consider yourself "open-minded" as declared in your previous post.

"Well, you can't prove Santa doesn't exist, so ner"

I know what controlled conditions are. I'm not sure what you mean by "replicated under controlled conditions".

Are you asking has someone ever managed to record an identical copy of a previously captured EVP sample? Or, are you asking has anyone ever managed to produce something very similar? Or perhaps you are referring to the methodological terms of replicates and repeats, which are often confused?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

One only has to spend a short amount of time searching the internet to find some good examples of electronic voice phenomena, which makes me wonder why the subject isn't taken more seriously.

Because they aren't really good examples, no matter how much you want them to be so?

James Randi's famous challenge is not without criticism. For example:

http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge

The main criticism, of course, being "I'm a fraud and James Randi makes it difficult for me to get away with it". But there are many prizes on offer to prove stuff like EVP if you don't like Randi's - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal

Time and time again experiments have proven that incidents of communication with the dead are either hoaxes or errors, and (as far as I know) not a single experiment has shown such an incident to be otherwise.

Can you provide me with a few links to such scientific studies please? It's likely they will be of interest to me.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_15_3_baruss.pdf

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/afterlife/evp.htm

http://www.academia.edu/2526941/Talking_to_the_Dead_Listening_to_Yourself_An_empirical_study_on_the_psychological_aspects_of_interpreting_Electronic_Voice_Phenomena

Plenty of links and explanations there for you.

As I'm sure you're aware, it is only when we die and stop importing energy that we are thought to obey the second law. It's not that I'm ignoring it in my reply to Tordelback; I'm pondering it. If EVP, NDE (Near Death Experiences), OBE (Out of Body Experiences), and other such phenomena can prove that the "soul" is not subject to equilibrium thermodynamics, the second law will be violated.

If any of those things actually existed, then we could have had the debate about whether they violated a law of thermodynamics or not. But they don't.

I'm not sure what you mean by "replicated under controlled conditions". I know that many Class A EVP have been recorded in soundproofed rooms, Faraday cages, and in underground facilities which radio waves have been unable to penetrate. Unfortunately, the mainstream tends to regard paranormal investigation as pseudoscience, and I know of few examples where funded research has been conducted.

I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. You really have no idea what "controlled conditions" means?

If you could have a communication with a voice, via some sort of EVP device, and have it respond intelligibly to you, then it would be the biggest scientific discovery of all time. Without a doubt. Or you could just go and win James Randi's $1,000,000. But no-one has. Which would indicate to a casual outside observer that all results so far obtained, no matter how you arbitrarily label them ("class A" or whatever) show that EVP doesn't exist.

The right moans the BBC is too left-wing. The left moans the BBC is too right-wing. The BBC must be doing something right.

Not really - and the difference is, when the right moans it's in the form of one of the newspapers owned by super-wealthy Tory supporters, and they're doing it to force the BBC even further to the right; when the left moans, it's in places like this, and the BBC completely ignores it. I've been on a couple of leftie demos that started from outside Broadcasting House in the past few months, neither of which were so much as mentioned by the BBC.

Non-doms, however, are individuals that pay a large fee in order to have their non-UK earnings excluded from UK tax. Many aren't actually British at all and will leave rather than pay

Ah well.

To actually raise any serious tax money, we need to go after Google, Apple, Vodafone, Amazon, etc. I'm not seeing a lot of movement from anyone on that front, sadly.

Agreed. That Vodafone were allowed to negotiate how much tax they paid is a disgrace.

I thought the other two movies were just fine. I'd rather watch either of them than the last Batman effort. More fun, please!

I loved it. And I loved the sequel, which I'm not even going to spoiler-tag. Everyone wanted more of the same and they refused to give it to us - but what we did get was surprisingly fun.

I also remember "The Last Broadcast" and how it predated the first movie - but surely they're both in the debt of "Cannibal Holocaust"? Anyway, I've never been bothered about primacy when it comes to movie ideas, I just want to see the films that use them the best, and I think Blair Witch is a masterpiece.

[Alone In The Dark]

Alone In The Dark

DAMN YOU UWE BOLL

DAMN YOU TO HELL

One of his other improvised lines was "one sex position", I believe.

Back to EVP, it's never been replicated under controlled conditions, right? I mean, if someone could do that, ask a question and have it answered and have there be real evidence of this, it would be the biggest news since the invention of the wheel. That's no-one's done it would indicate to me it can't be done, but I remain open-minded.

I'm moderately sympathetic to there being more to Dando's death than we're being told, but I'd hope Britain's top paedophiles could figure out a subtler way to kill her than that.

That article does illustrate one of the classics of the "conspiracist" mindset, though. "That theory is old hat dear boy." I've encountered a fair few people on forums and so on who will dismiss out of hand any theory more than 6 months old, as if being a conspiracy believer is like being a shark and you always need to revealing new things, endlessly muddying the waters so no conclusion can ever be reached.

That article needs more backing up with actual evidence, though. It's the weasel-word-iest thing I've read in ages.

One of my housemates sold 90s indie chancers Dodgy some weed, circa 1996/7.

Easy there Sharky, I don't even think Bear's polishing up the squirrley gun yet. However there was a real political opportunity over the past 7 years to implement fair measures on the money men and hey what do you know, the opposite has happened. We are shackled with debts not our own and slash and burn speculation is the new sine qua non according to the prostituted political mouthpieces for the new world order. Sooner or later this will blow and it won't be pretty

I just get more and more sad every time I see the Labour Party - they seem really insistent on being as awful as possible. Whether there's a tipping point or not soon, decent people need to vote for better candidates. If Labour start losing to the Greens, then I think (just like Tories jumping ship to UKIP) the good Labour politicians will move to a more left-wing party. If we don't get someone in charge who thinks our well-being is more important than the profits of multinationals, then we're screwed.

[The Last Seven]

The Last Seven

British film, allegedly starring Danny Dyer (third billed on the DVD cover). There are only 7 people left in London...it's pretty awful, and everything about it is a lie. The cast aren't "the last seven", and Dyer is on screen for approximately 20 seconds. It feels like a bad episode of "Tales of the Unexpected" stretched to feature length.

[Drive]

Drive

The Mark Dacascos one, not the Ryan Gosling one. Despite it occasionally feeling more like an effects/fighting highlight reel than a movie, it's really good fun.