~Canis, I think this is a great idea & hopefully it'll work the second time around...but who knows. All I know is I've been "like this" since I was in my early teens. It's not a guarantee everytime, but I'm learning on which thoughts are the best...and it's usually always the first one, which were the picture of wires I had in my head. So maybe subconciously (sp?) Canuck was still frazzled about having to deal with electrical issues. I'm not sure, but I just honestly said what I saw. I threw it out there, at the expense of either being ignored or chuckled at ( I do alot of chuckling at myself, so it's all good).
Either way, having a controlled environment when doing this type of experiment is a great idea and I hope we can do it again.
Hey Laurie Anne:
The one thing you don't need to do is apologize for who or what you are, or for what you experienced.
You experienced something. We are now in the process of trying to figure out what it was.
That is what scientific research is all about.
Stick with us here, and let's see where it leads.
Canuk,
I do not read this as Laurie apologizing, but rather just explaining her situation. I certainly hope that she was not apologizing. To say that she was apologizing makes it sound like she was attacked, which she was not. I was not commenting on her or her abilities, only the meaningfulness of this particular answer in regards to your experiment. I did so because it was a good example of how easily we can acheive false results in any experiment that is not properly controled.
I understand what you are saying about signals & noise, but I have to question it's validity. If someone runs an experiment with no controls, thay are simply using their subjective opinion to determine if there is a signal or not. They might as well skip the experiment and simply declare that there is a signal. Controls are put in place to remove subjectivity. The danger is that a person can let themselves be convinced of their own bias by an experiment without proper controls. Then when things are later tightened, if the results do not continue to go their way, they end up creating ad-hoc hypotheses to explain the results and maintain their theory in the face of contrary evidence. That is not good science.
I don't mean to be a pain or to lecture you. I honestly like what you are doing here and think it is fun. It is your experiment and you can run it the way you like for sure. I just like to talk about this sort of thing. I'm looking forward to seeing how round two comes out, and I will try my hand at it if I can arrange the time to do so.
Laurie Ann,
if I said anything that made you feel defensive, I sincerely apologize. I truly was not commenting on you. Only the absolute need to control such an experiment as this in order to make it valid.
Regards all, Canis