ohp
The enlightening one
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2004
- Messages
- 560
Sorry, this post is a little long, I did have a really good rummage on the site.
I did do a search on the Jref forum for this, and it returned a blank, so I can only assume this hasn't generally been seen before.
I was googling for something entirely different (boring techy stuff) when I came across this site:
http://briansprediction.com/
Well, I thought I'd have a laugh, so I dug about a bit. There's a small bit of text at the top that says "More than 4000 confirmed dream predictions"
Uh oh, I thought. This is the old scattergun approach, where you write down a load of gibberish, and wait until some of it matches. Ultimately much of it seems to be the case, but I came across this bit:
http://briansprediction.com/dd/5050.htm
Wow. He predicted the outcome of the lottery draw on the 3rd of January, in a dream on the 2nd! Not only that, but he guessed the bonus ball too.
Now, this is a bit of a statistical nightmare to work out, but the chances of winning the national lottery are 1 in (49!/(43!*6!)) = 1 in 14 million. Add the bonus ball prediction, and I believe that comes to 1 in 588 million.
Watch out Mr Randi... your million dollars might be at stake!
Oh, wait, anyone that can predict the national lottery numbers doesn't need a million dollars!
In light of this amazing power, I thought I'd poke around a bit more...
The first thing that is odd is the order of numbers. The plain text of the prediction (oh, and there's a silly face there too) was
"394613174749 48 UK SH"
When you compare this with the actual results:
13,17,39,46,47,49 Bonus Ball: 48
You can see that the difference is that the middle two numbers had been switched to the front in the prediction. So what? you might say, perhaps they were drawn in that order...
well, they were drawn in this order:
17,46,49,13,47,39 bonus ball: 48
You'd expect a psychic to read them out in the order of the draw wouldn't you? Well, perhaps I'm making too many assumptions.
OK, so what about the time of the prediction?
There's a link above the image with floatover text that reads
"This documents creation date has been confirmed"
This takes you to a site called ymlp.com, which appears to be a mailing list provider. There is an archive of posts. the one we're interested in is:
http://www.ymlp.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?brian2179+733
If you take it on face value, these predictions were posted at "2.3.2007 1:28 PM EDT USA" which is, if I'm not mistaken, is 5.28pm GMT (UK time) on 3rd February.
So when was the draw? The UK national lottery site doesn't have the actual time of the draw, so I called them up to find out. They could only tell me the usual time, even after referring me to their line manager. They suggested that I call the BBC. When I called the BBC all they could tell me was the draw was between 7.50pm and 8.35pm on the 3rd February. (the draw occurs during a panel game style quiz show)
Wow. This posting was made around 2 hours and 20 minutes before the lottery draw!
As one final check, I checked to see that the image files are part of the mail itself, as an attachment, so I know that the image files were mailed out at the same time as the post itself. The crucial one in question has the following URL:
http://briansprediction.com/pri/FEB20097.jpg
Ah. Looks like it's pointing back at Brian's site. Well, it's just an innocent mistake isn't it? we all know this image was created at the same time as the post, don't we? How can we tell?
There's a thing with http called the last-modified: header that most web servers will take from the file date stamp on the filesystem. When you download a file with the wget utility, it will preserve this date stamp on the file you downloaded. Now, it's not foolproof, but if it shows a date before the predicted event, then either this bloke is a bit clever with web sites, or he's psychic. If it's after, then he's either a faker, his server's clock is wrong, or he didn't upload the premonition until after the lottery results, which is odd, as the mailing list post that references it was posted at 5.30pm.
I checked the clock was correct from a server header response.. yes, it shows the current time, so the server clock isn't wrong.
So what's the time stamp of the image file I hear you ask?
Drum roll please....
3rd February at 10.26pm, GMT, around 2 hours after the national lottery draw.
I did do a search on the Jref forum for this, and it returned a blank, so I can only assume this hasn't generally been seen before.
I was googling for something entirely different (boring techy stuff) when I came across this site:
http://briansprediction.com/
Well, I thought I'd have a laugh, so I dug about a bit. There's a small bit of text at the top that says "More than 4000 confirmed dream predictions"
Uh oh, I thought. This is the old scattergun approach, where you write down a load of gibberish, and wait until some of it matches. Ultimately much of it seems to be the case, but I came across this bit:
http://briansprediction.com/dd/5050.htm
Wow. He predicted the outcome of the lottery draw on the 3rd of January, in a dream on the 2nd! Not only that, but he guessed the bonus ball too.
Now, this is a bit of a statistical nightmare to work out, but the chances of winning the national lottery are 1 in (49!/(43!*6!)) = 1 in 14 million. Add the bonus ball prediction, and I believe that comes to 1 in 588 million.
Watch out Mr Randi... your million dollars might be at stake!
Oh, wait, anyone that can predict the national lottery numbers doesn't need a million dollars!In light of this amazing power, I thought I'd poke around a bit more...
The first thing that is odd is the order of numbers. The plain text of the prediction (oh, and there's a silly face there too) was
"394613174749 48 UK SH"
When you compare this with the actual results:
13,17,39,46,47,49 Bonus Ball: 48
You can see that the difference is that the middle two numbers had been switched to the front in the prediction. So what? you might say, perhaps they were drawn in that order...
well, they were drawn in this order:
17,46,49,13,47,39 bonus ball: 48
You'd expect a psychic to read them out in the order of the draw wouldn't you? Well, perhaps I'm making too many assumptions.
OK, so what about the time of the prediction?
There's a link above the image with floatover text that reads
"This documents creation date has been confirmed"
This takes you to a site called ymlp.com, which appears to be a mailing list provider. There is an archive of posts. the one we're interested in is:
http://www.ymlp.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?brian2179+733
If you take it on face value, these predictions were posted at "2.3.2007 1:28 PM EDT USA" which is, if I'm not mistaken, is 5.28pm GMT (UK time) on 3rd February.
So when was the draw? The UK national lottery site doesn't have the actual time of the draw, so I called them up to find out. They could only tell me the usual time, even after referring me to their line manager. They suggested that I call the BBC. When I called the BBC all they could tell me was the draw was between 7.50pm and 8.35pm on the 3rd February. (the draw occurs during a panel game style quiz show)
Wow. This posting was made around 2 hours and 20 minutes before the lottery draw!
As one final check, I checked to see that the image files are part of the mail itself, as an attachment, so I know that the image files were mailed out at the same time as the post itself. The crucial one in question has the following URL:
http://briansprediction.com/pri/FEB20097.jpg
Ah. Looks like it's pointing back at Brian's site. Well, it's just an innocent mistake isn't it? we all know this image was created at the same time as the post, don't we? How can we tell?
There's a thing with http called the last-modified: header that most web servers will take from the file date stamp on the filesystem. When you download a file with the wget utility, it will preserve this date stamp on the file you downloaded. Now, it's not foolproof, but if it shows a date before the predicted event, then either this bloke is a bit clever with web sites, or he's psychic. If it's after, then he's either a faker, his server's clock is wrong, or he didn't upload the premonition until after the lottery results, which is odd, as the mailing list post that references it was posted at 5.30pm.
I checked the clock was correct from a server header response.. yes, it shows the current time, so the server clock isn't wrong.
So what's the time stamp of the image file I hear you ask?
Drum roll please....
3rd February at 10.26pm, GMT, around 2 hours after the national lottery draw.
May I ask, is there a thread here at JREF about it?
