The web as an informal survey……

One by-product of the existence of the net is that there’s a vast store of dispersed information that, if retrieved and analysed, could lead to new discoveries.

My own example is this. Although I’m an atheist and skeptic, I’ve been vaguely interested in premonitions and predictions. Some years ago, when we first went on the net, I used to look at sites where people posted their premonitions. Of course most of the stuff was just nonsense and cranks writing about angels and Nostradamus and space aliens. But some people just posted things like ‘I sense that there will be a large oil spill leading to an ecological disaster within the next few days’.

I discovered that these premonition registers, which can be checked back in time, showed a pattern. If one takes a major event like 9/11 or the Indian Ocean Tsunami, there wer virtually no premonitions beforehand that could be tied closely to the event. Yet after 9/11 lots of the predictions were about terrorist hijackings and planes flying into buildings. Similarly after the tsunami, there earthquakes and tsunamis figured prominently in the predictions. I don’t bother with such sites now, but I did look at one yesterday and there were no predictions that came anything close to the Haiti earthquake.

I’ve concluded that these prediction registries have actually served to demonstrate that none of the participants have any powers of premonition!

My interest in this comes from a personal experience of the theory that we sometimes unwittingly avoid situations that mean we escape a disaster, without even knowing we’ve made that decision. In my case I once made a bizarre decision that was totally out-of-character that almost certainly saved me from being involved in a car crash that would have happened a few seconds later. I slowed my car down to a walking pace for no apparent reason. If I hadn’t done so, I’d have been hit on a blind bend by an out-of-control speeding car that I was unaware of at the time I slowed down.