Thanks for this, Jim. Can you tell me how many hundreds there were? I don't suppose that you would know the reasons why ALL of them failed? That seems statistically fishy to me, although I'm no professional statistician as you may have surmised
! I will try the forum you recommended though.
The reason why ALL of them failed is simple: So far, none of the paranormal claims have been real. That, of course, is the whole point of the challenge. Trying to talk in terms of "statistics" is the wrong way to think about it.
Imagine if there were a group of people who claimed they could jump, unassisted, over a mile in the air. Would you think it was "statistically fishy" that every single one of them ever tested, failed to actually jump that high? No? Well, the sorts of paranormal claims that have been made (so far, at least) are in this sort of category. So improbable as to be safely regarded as impossible. And so far, we've been right about that.
Thanks for this info. I'll look forward to your further response. If I'm not mistaken, there are more to the claims than what you have stated, like being able to tell if someone is awake or asleep according to their brainwave patterns, AND being able to understand, verbatim, what they're thinking. And that's only the first patent I mentioned, if I'm not mistaken.
Okay, here you have to be a bit careful with your terminology. I actually work in the patent industry, and in patents "patent claims" are specific legal passages. The meaning of the term "claim" as used in patents is much narrower than in colloquial use. It's more like a land claim: a specific legal definition of exactly what you think you have invented, that you want to be protected by the patent. If you look at the end of the US patents, you'll see a section usually set off with a header similar to "What is claimed is:" that contains these definitions. As I explained above, it is these patent claims which must be understood, if you want to know what has actually been patented.
The run-of-the-mill claims made in the description are subject to far less stringent standards than the patent claims. I could show you patents which
describe perpetual motion machines, but which have
patent claims written so as to avoid actually staking a legal claim to a perpetual motion device, as such are well known to be physically impossible. This process of "over-describing and under-claiming" is so prevalent in patents related to questionable technologies like this that it was a central part of a talk I gave at The Amazing Meeting 5 on how people "patent perpetual motion".
