kareng - he was in west VA witha some friends. I was in Maryland, about 7 hours drive away.
exsto_human - Many native American cultures believe (not surprisingly, given the circular nature of their world view) that a child is less removed from the spirit world that they came from, and therefore have a stronger connection to the spirits. We then become less and less connected as we age, and then get closer and closer again as we become really old (are closer to death).
mario - if only I could control this thing, believe, me, I would have done that long ago, and retired. I could thn sit in the woods all the time drawing and helping people when possible. sadly, I have no conscious control over the whole thing. I suspect that most people are that way - which is why testing is difficult, if not ipossible. People become over-confident, and think that they have control, when in fact, they have no ability to direct their abilities at all. They just end up looking foolish.
Scientists, unfortunatly, have the habit of taking "unregularly repeatable" as proof of the lack of ability. However, there are alot of times in life where a negative test means absolutly nothing. A person can test negative for HIV for 7 years after they become infected. A negaive test result doesn't mean "there is not HIV", it just means "no HIV antibodies were detected."
Similarly, a test for psychic ability which results in a negative result only shows "no psychic ability was detected." The fact that repeted tested bring about more and more negative results suggests that either psychic ability is non-exsistant, or the tests are simply not returning positive, for one reason or another.
Let say that psychic ability is merely an extra sensative awareness of the physical and energetic state of the surrounding world. Nothing magical or supernatural, just slightly more able to pick up on photons, breezes, EM radiation; slightly better at putting that puzzle together than an average person.
Having a flash card test would very possible ruin any ability to guess those cards. The person looking at the cards may be effecting those EM radiation waves that he is giving off, preventing the "psychic" from picking up on any patterns which may carry useful information. Any number of other factors may also prevent the transfer of information "psychicly' in a controlled test environment. The lack of randomness itself, the very foundation of the scientific method, may hinder the ability of people to construct usefull info from the subtle areas of their surrounding environment.
A person on another board once asked me what "subtle energy" was. A term he had heard alot, but never understood. Well, I like science. I read alot of biology and physics books, and my idea is this:
a current theory of physics is that the universe, the matter and energy that we can see, is brought about by the vibration of strings. These strings are the underlying framework of the entire universe - the 3 physical dimentions that we see, and at least one more physical diemntion which we don't see.
Well, my question is, even though these aren't actual twine strings shaking back and forth, with these metaphorical strings are able to vibrate at rate one, which equates to the appearance of a photon, rate two, which equates to a proton, and everything in between, what about the vibrations which aren't strong enough to manifest in this 3d universe? What about string vibrational state .0001? does that vibration not effect the universe at all? or might it create tiny waves which doesn't manifest as particles, but just subtle variations in space/time? What's to say that over 1.1billion years of multi-cellular evolution, it isn't possible that some life is able to pick up on that subtlty?
If phycic ability is the variable ability to note the sub-particle variations in space/time and the strings that make up space/time, then we will not be able to test for psychic ability accuratly until will can properly detect string vibration. And THAT is most likely thousands of years away, if it is ever possible.
Until that theory can be tested, and it can be shown that no sublte string vibration is carried between distince points in space, psychic ability, or better "extra sensory perception" (don't call it ESP, actually read what the phase is saying. "more than common perception through the common 5 senses"), cannot be "proved" wrong.
That's my theory, anyway. What do you scientific minds, who like coming here for the comic relief, think?