The Little Black Box

Of all the career paths that I should have taken, the best of them has to be "mad scientist." Robots, particle beam weapon systems, and brain cells on a chip that can fly airplanes are recent examples of mad scientist products that are simply fascinating. I can remember talking to my high school advisor, looking at brochures for the military and filling out college applications, but I must have completely overlooked the recruiter for the University of Mad Scientists. Have no doubt that they are out there, and they all got their degrees at good ol' UMS. They have careers in NASA, the defense department, Japanese industry, and the washouts are, no doubt, economists. Several of the better ones have gone on "to be more than you can be" at the University of Edinburgh.

According to RedNova, they have been working on a little black box for years in the basement of the library at the University of Edinburgh there in Scotland. I wonder if the library there looks like a medieval castle? At any rate, all this box does, on the surface, is to generate ones or zeros in a random order. It is a coin flipper, if you will. The physics I learned in my very standard physics classes (read, not-mad science) taught us that if you look at the long-term graph of a coin flipping session, you should basically get a straight line. Not this little black box, evidently. The graph of ones and zeros bent significantly just prior to 9/11 and, again, just before the catastrophic tsunami off the shores of Sumatra:

"It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon. 'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centered on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realizing."

The problem with the little black box that can predict the future is that there is no way of telling what the box is actually predicting. All the scientists seem to have determined in Edinburgh is that when the graph swings way to the left or right, you had better get your ass into the airtight bomb shelter for the next 48 hours. Bring a flashlight. Can you imagine what working next to these guys must be like? Everybody on the whole floor watches them like a hawk.

"Have you seen the black box team lately?"

"No..."

"RUN!!"

We have something similar here in the United States, and it is the Homeland Security Color Graph of Paranoia. I would really like to know if, say, when the terror alert has been raised from pink to mauve, do the pointy heads in Washington have one of these boxes working double time? I always had the notion that a lot of our policies and decisions as a race have had something to do with a coin toss anyway, so it would not surprise me. Mrs. Reagan was not afraid to publicly use the Family Psychic, Charlemagne never made a campaign decision without his astrologer, Donald Rumsfeld had his tin-foil hat, and now we have the "box that speaks to the Global Consciousness." Hell, I don't know about you, but I feel a lot better about our future already.