Looking for Skeptics

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Jack by the hedge said:
My first reaction is that you've recorded noise at very high level.
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The two files which are generated aren't recorded, and I generated them at a decent volume. The miced recording I did record at a high level deliberately in order to maximise the background noise.

Bear in mind that flaccon is not a technical person. She says she wants "silent" files, but uses a low grade mic and very basic recording software for her own recordings, which probably produces noise at very roughly -40dB. I reckon that's what she wants.
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I could turn them down and re-upload them, but it seems like flaccon could equally turn the volume down at her end. She says that she has to turn it right up, doesn't she? So she can turn it down, too.

The other thing I noticed is that there's something wrong with "Untitled 3". Opening it with Windows Media Player, it shows a file 29 seconds long, but plays for 6 seconds then stops and puts up a warning dialog "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." If I play it with Quicktime player, that reckons it's a file 6 seconds long, but it's title is "Untitled 2".
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That must be a problem with your download. The original file plays fine on VLC on my computer, the uploaded file plays fine on box's own player, and I just downloaded a copy and it played fine in VLC and Media Player. It was exported from Cubase in exactly the same way as the other two, so if they work, that should work, too.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I've also made 3 separate screencaps of the waveforms, for comparison if any change is detected:
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I read earlier in this thread that a file on one PC spontaneously changed to match the copy of that file on a remorte PC. I found this interesting and immediately began thinking of ways this fact could be exploited.

Files on disk do not just store the bits of information that you see. In the background they also store redundant information to insure the integrity of the file. If the bits of the file were to be modified without also fixing the checksums included in each block if the file, the system would report that the file was unreadable. Whatever is hapening to the bits must also be fixing the internal checksums in order that the file can be played.

If internal checksums are modified to maintain consistency then what about external checksums? If you saved am MD5 or SHA256 checksum of the file, would that saved checksum also change to maintain consistency? What about chained blocks of checksums? Is there any limit as to how far the changes can propagate?

There exists a particularly interesting chained block of checksums. Each block includes the checksum from the previous block and the checksums are such that it takes a significant fraction of the worlds computing power to calculate. A new block gets added to this chain about every 10 minutes. And it would be no problem to insert our own file checksum into a new block that gets put on the chain.

Where it gets interesting is if our checksum is retroactively changed several months after it was added to the chain. Either something has to recompile all of those checksums for every subsequent block or allow the chain to break. If the chain breaks, all the transactions secured by the chain will become unverifiable. For this particular chain, these transactions represent money. Suddenly, $Billions could be lost at the wave of a hand.

ETA: Damn, it already happened less than 24 hours age and I didn't have a hand in it.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
That must be a problem with your download.
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You're right. I only had part of the file. Downloaded again and it's fine.

So I heard:

1)
White noise

2)
Noise passed through some kind of weird flange effect.

3)
More like pink noise this time, with rather less high frequency content than 1, and some low frequency noises in the background slightly indicative of speech, which might have been from, say, a TV in another room but it's also the kind of noise I've heard from microphones with tantalum capacitors which are ageing and starting to leak. I'd say better than even odds of being voices, but wouldn't put my own money on it.
 
Dan O. said:
I read earlier in this thread that a file on one PC spontaneously changed to match the copy of that file on a remorte PC. I found this interesting and immediately began thinking of ways this fact could be exploited.

Files on disk do not just store the bits of information that you see. In the background they also store redundant information to insure the integrity of the file. If the bits of the file were to be modified without also fixing the checksums included in each block if the file, the system would report that the file was unreadable. Whatever is hapening to the bits must also be fixing the internal checksums in order that the file can be played.

If internal checksums are modified to maintain consistency then what about external checksums? If you saved am MD5 or SHA256 checksum of the file, would that saved checksum also change to maintain consistency? What about chained blocks of checksums? Is there any limit as to how far the changes can propagate?

There exists a particularly interesting chained block of checksums. Each block includes the checksum from the previous block and the checksums are such that it takes a significant fraction of the worlds computing power to calculate. A new block gets added to this chain about every 10 minutes. And it would be no problem to insert our own file checksum into a new block that gets put on the chain.

Where it gets interesting is if our checksum is retroactively changed several months after it was added to the chain. Either something has to recompile all of those checksums for every subsequent block or allow the chain to break. If the chain breaks, all the transactions secured by the chain will become unverifiable. For this particular chain, these transactions represent money. Suddenly, $Billions could be lost at the wave of a hand.

ETA: Damn, it already happened less than 24 hours age and I didn't have a hand in it.
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Aye Dan, but that's only true for the normal world in which we live. The paranormal world has no need to be chained to the laws of physics for that is the realm of magic and the laws of physics can be broken. So all of your sciencey gobble-de-gook has no effect on the marvellous goings on in the world of the paranormal. See?
 
dlorde said:
The three 'Squeegee' files sound to me like:

a. high pressure gas escaping in a large workshop (high freq, high volume hiss, low freq, low volume reverb)
b. someone playing with noise on a synth
c. faint & muffled voices drowned out by a waterfall[/QUOTE]
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For fun, I tried to remove the waterfall noise. Then I sped up the voice, and looped the result. It's very musical, very pareidelic. Or shagadelic.

The first few seconds are just looping, so no need to listen to all 1:30.

https://app.box.com/s/k8tx1mugvl4mvz5junif
 
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This is what I hear on calebprime's latest offsering. I think this is the spirits communicating the meaning of life.

Now you could push potty .... and you could
 
And I think the safe and strong conclusion that can be drawn from this thread is that while they may yet be spirits, this is not proof of them.
 
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OCaptain said:
And I think the safe and strong conclusion that can be drawn from this thread is that while they may yet be spirits, this is not proof of them.
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Excuse me, but two self delusional individuals are claiming to hear ghost voices in youtube videos. Isn't that proof enough?
 
I started my career as a linguist with a research interest in speech perception and speech production. Each speech sound, whether it be vowel or consonant, has a characteristic pattern. There is individual variation -- for instance, in the basic frequency of the person's voice -- but the overall pattern for the consonant [z], or for the vowel will remain similar.*

One of the tools linguists use to investigate speech is the spectrogram. Spectrograms plot energy-amplitude-as-a-function-of-frequency against time. They are useful for many purposes, of course, but relevant here is that they present a good picture of speech sounds, one that does not depend on the hearer's interpretation.

A spectrogram of my old professor's favorite example, "Joe took father's shoe bench out," uses many of the speech sounds of English. It averages about 2.4 seconds. You might use it to figure out the patterns.

The freeware program Audacity has the ability to present sound stream representation as a spectrogram. The control for doing this is to the left of the visual depiction of the sound marked "audio control."

If you have or download Audacity, you could make a recording of your voice saying what flaccon claims is on one of the files she has presented. Then you could compare the spectrogram of your recording to one produced by the audio files that flaccon presented, and decide for yourself if they are similar. flaccon and scrappy could do this also.



* The square bracket pair [ ] indicates a sound rather than a spelling. The letter 'a' in English can have different sounds depending on the word in which it is used, or at what position it occurs within a word; the speech sound [a] has only one pronunciation, independent of the language in which it occurs. In the above example, [z] is the consonant and is the vowel in 'zoo', phonetically [zu]. (There is always a danger in giving real words as examples, first because dialects and accents are so variable, and second because there is not an isomorphic correlation between spelling and speech sound. But I believe all native speakers of English will pronounce these relatively identically.)
 
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Alice Shortcake said:
Does anyone know if flaccon is still leaving comments on YouTube videos?
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Apparently she no longer leaves comments:

scrappy said:
She has stopped writing on youtube since learning how to down load clips to her computer. The last clip I know off is http://youtu.be/ifpUK-vjOQk titled " ufo siting Birmingham UK" by "MrAbdiman" they are calling her family names out on the clips(at 20 seconds)
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Whatever that means :confused:. How was she watching YouTube videos before??

Also, flaccon posted her story here in September - with a small addition:

What they tell me is pretty much what David Icke explains. They don't use the word "reptillian" however, their exact wording was "They're not even demons, they're sea creatures" What we refer to as demons, are actually sea creatures from their dimension, the dimension we enter into after death. Our role is to battle and protect the living, (amongst further important issues)
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I don't recall any mention of "sea creatures" in this thread, but I may be mistaken.

One more (#15). I hesitated before posting this particular link but, as was pointed out earlier, if it's online it's public. Flaccon was comfortable enough to share the details on that forum and it's relevant to this thread, so I guess it's okay.

Scordatura
 
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What they tell me is pretty much what David Icke explains. They don't use the word "reptillian" however, their exact wording was "They're not even demons, they're sea creatures" What we refer to as demons, are actually sea creatures from their dimension, the dimension we enter into after death. Our role is to battle and protect the living, (amongst further important issues)
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Yes, I suspected that flaccon might be giving us a sanitized version of her obsessions. And do these sea creatures remind anyone else of the Sea Devils (aquatic Silurians) from Doctor Who? Hearing voices in white noise is the least of flaccon's problems. I just hope she isn't paying fake New Age 'healers' for their worthless services.

flaccon, if you're reading this: David Icke is either mentally ill or a shameless con artist. The people who frequent his forum live in a fantasy world and cannot help you. Chakras and Third Eyes do not exist.
 
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My impression is that flaccon came to this particular forum for feedback because she genuinely believed that her imagined voices and images were real evidence for her beliefs. She wanted confirmation from people used to examining paraanormal claims that she had something worth presenting to the world at large, rather just to those predisposed to believe in such stuff. Her wackier beliefs were not relevant to this supposed evidence and she (probably rightly) thought we'd be less likely to evaluate it objectively if we knew of them, so for the most part she kept quiet about them.

She's stopped posting here because she didn't get what she wanted or was expecting, but I don't think her beliefs have been shaken one iota. At most she's learnt that it's not going to be as easy to get most people to take her beliefs seriously as she had hoped.
 
Sea creatures from another dimension have come for our souls?
Lovecraft was right!
It seems that the claims of contact damaging one's sanity are accurate, too.
 
Pixel42 said:
She's stopped posting here because she didn't get what she wanted or was expecting, but I don't think her beliefs have been shaken one iota. At most she's learnt that it's not going to be as easy to get most people to take her beliefs seriously as she had hoped.
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Oh, I don't think flaccon's beliefs have been affected in the least by her experience with the JREF. As a general rule you can't reason people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. It's just desperately sad that when this still-undefined 'test'/public demonstration fails, as it must, there's a whole woo sub-culture that will welcome her with open arms and pander to her delusions, thereby preventing her from making any progress.
 
So apparently my favorite soap opera - this thread - has been cancelled.

It does appear, however, that Randall has been convinced:

inexplicable.png
 
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