ESPoiler

Check out Clifford Pickover's "ESP Experiment". Pretty amazing, huh?

Well, watch this! I can do it, too, and you don't have to click anything!

Pick a letter from the list below and say it out loud:

A B C D E

Got your letter? Okay, now scroll down....
































Look at this list:


1 2 3 4


Hey, presto! I've removed your letter!

Okay, okay, so I removed *all* the letters. I *did* remove yours, didn't I?

Look back at Pickover's site. The first list of cards are:

Khearts, Jclubs, Kspades, Qdiamonds, Qclubs, Jdiamonds

Depending on which "eye" you click on, there are two "exit" lists with "your" card "removed":

beta1: Qhearts, Kclubs, Jhearts, Qspades, Kdiamonds
beta2: Kdiamonds, Qspades, Jhearts, Kclubs, Qhearts

Notice: NONE of the cards on the first list appear on either of the exit lists.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Pickover's experiment is the set of responses it gets (well, the set of responses he has posted, anyway). They range from simple mystification to extremely complex hyptheses attempting to explain the "result". Some respondents clearly "get it" while others appear to "get it", but offer jargon and obfuscation to play along with Pickover's misdirection. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between a response from someone who was honestly tricked and is offering a hypothesis to explain the mechanism of the "telepathy" and someone playing along with the illusion. (My wife suggests that Mr. Pickover may have simply made up *all* the responses.)

Perhaps the funniest responses are the ones that say, "Nope, you screwed up. My card was still in the final set." The only way this could happen is if the person simply got confused and remembered, for example, Qdiamonds as Qhearts. (Or lied, my wife points out.)

Could it be that *all* our religious, metaphysical, spiritual explanations are this kind of over-explanation of simple changed lists?