Looking for Skeptics
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Maurice Ledifficile
Lost in translation
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I Agree. We should stay away from the typical loony bin slurs. Folks with mental and emotional health issues are mostly victims.
Bonus fact: A loonie bin is a piggy bank to us, for obvious reasons.
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I'd say it's more than idee fixe, I'd say it's some form of delusional disorder.
Drs_Res
NWO Acorn Hoarder
GP = Gynecological Practitioner 
Maurice Ledifficile
Lost in translation
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Hard to abstain 100% of the time...
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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Consider the possibilities.
- She's right. Spirits are communicating with her through windows media files.
- She's partially right. Spirits are afoot, but she has many of the details and inferances wrong.
- Pareidolia has her twisted in knots.
- She's yanking our collective chain.
- She's stark raving mad.
Now cross you assessment of the above with the possibility she could be led to an actual, testable claim. What then is the appropriate way to interact with flaccon?
Maurice Ledifficile
Lost in translation
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I call pareidolia.
Seriously.
I dont' suffer from pareidolia' .
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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I see what you' did there .
Biscuit
Philosopher
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I think the most likely explanation is that their evidence of voices is valid but their conclusion as to the cause is without merit. I hear weird stuff all the time and visually is a constant but I know it's just my own brain doing what human brains have been doing for ages.
I have great appreciation for flaccon's desire to hear her dad. I suffer the same desire. However my dad would not have tolerated such conclusions as have been drawn by flaccon until they were properly tested. My dad was an astrophysicist and swore he would contact me if he could and I could not image him even trying unless I could duplicate the results under controlled conditions.
Claim and proposed protocol from the claimants please.
Biscuit
Philosopher
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Somes' of us' enjoys' its'
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Wow. Put your head down for a little shuteye and five pages happen.
For starters, I do not buy the connection problem malarkey.
Perhaps flaccon's connection did fail. One would expect resolution within hours, at worst a day, maybe two if the failure occurred at a weekend. Weeks? No.
Perhaps flaccon is using one of those shoddy usb dongle style devices and the signal is poor in her area. In which case simply take laptop and dongle to anywhere with a better SNR.
Perhaps flaccon has been hijacking a neighbours unsecured router. This one is plausible. Flaccon does not even have to have been aware of doing it. I had such an issue with a neighbour, whereby one of my laptops insisted on connecting via a neighbours unsecured router, even though I had my own connection. I had to request said neighbour to set a WPA key, end of issue.
So I am not buying the connection failure for weeks at all.
With regard to the GP letter, just one question. Tippex? Really? Anybody would have simply scanned it and even MSPaint would allow one to indelibly remove whichever bits one wanted to remove. As it stands, the Tippex has allowed "show through". I could likely retrieve at least some of the obscured information if I thought it worthwhile expenditure of effort. But I don't. So I haven't. However, I might if the ongoing nonsense becomes irritating enough.
A word about magic fingers. It is inevitable that touching wires with fingers produces all manner of audio effects. I can produce audio effects at will by touching the wires of any of dozens of speakers which I have in my possession. There is no magic to it.
A word about files saved on your computer. It must be stated that if the MD5 hash is the same for a given file, then the file is identical on your computer as mine. No ifs or buts. Our protagonists seem not to realise that this is a means of guaranteeing that what you have is exactly what I have. And that being the case, what you hear is exactly what I hear. If the MD5 hashes match then you cannot claim that you hear "Robin" while I do not and there is a difference between your file and my file. By definition, there isn't and cannot be. (For the pedants, I am aware of the peculiar condition of matching MD5's, but surely you are not going to go there)
In summary, what do you actually have? Voices that others cannot hear, alterations to files that cannot be identified, a haunted laptop that cannot be examined, witnesses who will not step up to the plate, bogus connection claims, bogus claims of differences between files not borne out by examination of said files and not borne out by MD5 hashes, a protagonist who demands to be skeptically scrutinised, but gets snippy when scrutinised, witnesses who apparently live in the protagonist's head, seeing as the know the protagonists every thought and move without any apparent communication. Yet the two supporters who did show up are
A. willing to sign up to JREF, but unwilling to engage.
and
B. Unaware of punctuation, except when it suits and also seemingly unable to give direct answers to direct questions.
Bottomline? Our protagonist came looking for skeptics. She just wasn't expecting to find them.
For starters, I do not buy the connection problem malarkey.
Perhaps flaccon's connection did fail. One would expect resolution within hours, at worst a day, maybe two if the failure occurred at a weekend. Weeks? No.
Perhaps flaccon is using one of those shoddy usb dongle style devices and the signal is poor in her area. In which case simply take laptop and dongle to anywhere with a better SNR.
Perhaps flaccon has been hijacking a neighbours unsecured router. This one is plausible. Flaccon does not even have to have been aware of doing it. I had such an issue with a neighbour, whereby one of my laptops insisted on connecting via a neighbours unsecured router, even though I had my own connection. I had to request said neighbour to set a WPA key, end of issue.
So I am not buying the connection failure for weeks at all.
With regard to the GP letter, just one question. Tippex? Really? Anybody would have simply scanned it and even MSPaint would allow one to indelibly remove whichever bits one wanted to remove. As it stands, the Tippex has allowed "show through". I could likely retrieve at least some of the obscured information if I thought it worthwhile expenditure of effort. But I don't. So I haven't. However, I might if the ongoing nonsense becomes irritating enough.
A word about magic fingers. It is inevitable that touching wires with fingers produces all manner of audio effects. I can produce audio effects at will by touching the wires of any of dozens of speakers which I have in my possession. There is no magic to it.
A word about files saved on your computer. It must be stated that if the MD5 hash is the same for a given file, then the file is identical on your computer as mine. No ifs or buts. Our protagonists seem not to realise that this is a means of guaranteeing that what you have is exactly what I have. And that being the case, what you hear is exactly what I hear. If the MD5 hashes match then you cannot claim that you hear "Robin" while I do not and there is a difference between your file and my file. By definition, there isn't and cannot be. (For the pedants, I am aware of the peculiar condition of matching MD5's, but surely you are not going to go there)
In summary, what do you actually have? Voices that others cannot hear, alterations to files that cannot be identified, a haunted laptop that cannot be examined, witnesses who will not step up to the plate, bogus connection claims, bogus claims of differences between files not borne out by examination of said files and not borne out by MD5 hashes, a protagonist who demands to be skeptically scrutinised, but gets snippy when scrutinised, witnesses who apparently live in the protagonist's head, seeing as the know the protagonists every thought and move without any apparent communication. Yet the two supporters who did show up are
A. willing to sign up to JREF, but unwilling to engage.
and
B. Unaware of punctuation, except when it suits and also seemingly unable to give direct answers to direct questions.
Bottomline? Our protagonist came looking for skeptics. She just wasn't expecting to find them.
Foolmewunz
Grammar Resistance Leader, TLA Dictator
flaccon,
The above is it (IT), in a nutshell. We're going into our second month and only now just finding out that you don't need .wav files but .wmv? You need to get a techno-geek to help you. Someone who can look at your files and tell people just what you are listening to. You also need to find out why the one person in central west England who has crap for service is YOU. As evidenced above, even those of us in the wilds of southern Thailand, on Papua New Guinea and in Samoa don't have down time of more than a few hours over a given stretch.
Hint? A friend of mine just went through two weeks of crap service as you're describing. He could get on line any number of times and sometimes it would time-out on him while connecting, but even when connected it was so slow that loading BBC News' home page would take two minutes or more. The repair folks looked at all the usual suspects, changed out chips and a board, even... only to discover that it was an oldie but goodie.... the antenna on his laptop (or pad, not sure which) was damaged! What with all the playing with wires you do (your "spirits" are your "fingers"), this could be a very real possibility.
And once you get that figured out, please return to the original ideas, as reminded by Biscuit,.... and work on a succinct claim and some way of proving that said claim is actually happening.
"I can talk to the dead and you can't because you're not enlightened" doesn't work.
I would suggest you work on one or the other; the magic blood splatters or the sound files. Make a distinct claim as to what will be seen or heard and come up with a proposed method of testing that claim.
It's really not more complicated than that. I'm trying to be generous with you but I think you bear the marks of the True Believer, as I've mentioned already several times. Look back to the absolute certainty you had that a face-to-face and hands on meeting with ANYONE would convince them. Apparently that didn't work, so now it's the problem of not being able to prepare? That's similar to your claims that anyone can hear clear and distinct statements, yet no one can hear them. And that, in turn is similar to your belief that anyone who sees the spirits' magical micro art will be overwhelmed with the proof. That, too, has not happened. None of this fazes you, though. You still believe that "everyone else" will figure it out even if you'v stumbled across an anomalous group of fifty people who have accepted the challenge and do not agree with a word you're saying.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
That is the point. She wants to use WMV files to examine audio, WMV files which are highly compressed, and in which the audio is the poor relative. And in my post above, I outlind why I do not buy the lost connection malarkey. I fully accept that some people in some areas cannot get a good connection for all sorts of reasons. This is not flaccon's claim. Her claim is that she had a good connection which ceased.
Been there, done that. It can be resolved, usually simply.
I don't believe she is capable of that, now that she has gone into full blown accusatory mode.
Yup.
I hear what you are saying, problem is she does not.
Hello?:
You might as well be asking flaccon to reproduce the spirit noises by building her own computer out of matchsticks, string and paperclips.
She's just not capable of producing a protocol.
A claim, perhaps. A testable claim? Highly unlikely.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
I refer you to the OP.
Hi, I'm new here, and I'm looking for good manneredskeptics. I would love to take part in the Randi challenge, but I'm afraid to fly. Before I approach a UK base organisation "ASKE" I would welcome your opinion on the evidence of the supernatural I've gathered since last October.
Thank u
And she said later she wasn't interested in taking the challenge, which is why the thread was moved from the challenge subforum to this one.
Foolmewunz
Grammar Resistance Leader, TLA Dictator
Oh, I'd settle for a "clear" claim at this point. But if we work on the one that she initially said was a clear claim, the goalposts have moved so many times that I think they're on hydrofoils. Personally, I like the simpler variant: Here are X pictures. I you do a double blind testing on 100 neutral subjects, greater than Y % will see the objects that I've written down and are in a sealed envelope in the possession of Observer Z.
SezMe
post-pre-born
Upon reading it again, you may be right.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Yes and it became clear very rapidly that she considered disagreeing with her to be "impolite". So what is it she wanted? That we all keel over and concede she was right for fear of being "impolite"? I think that is on the far side of likelyhood.
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