For Real???
Okay. Got the link in the latest Tourbus from Bob Rankin. Call me skeptical or whatever, this is really something else....

Jinxed computer users might be sending out a bad vibe, researchers suggest

Jen Horsey-Canadian Press

August 6, 2005

TORONTO - Some people seem to carry a computer curse, frustrated by a plague of viruses, hard-drive failures, power surges and software conflicts that appear and disappear without rational explanation.

They blame their machines and suffer the scorn of others who accuse them of doing something wrong. But researchers at Princeton University may have an explanation: these computer users, it seems, could be sending out bad vibes.

"There are some people who seem to have a natural rapport with computers and other complex machines, and there are other people who seem to manage to break everything even without touching it," said York Dobyns, analytical co-ordinator at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR).

The laboratory has for 26 years studied a phenomenon that just might have something to do with it.

Through countless experiments, the researchers have tested whether people, through their consciousness alone, can somehow affect the output of various devices.

The devices - including mechanical and electronic gadgets - produce random outputs when there are no humans around.

The experiments appear to demonstrate a small, but statistically significant, anomaly: study subjects seem to be able to change the output of the machines merely by thinking about them.

"Viewed collectively across all of the experiments, the odds that this is all just a statistical fluctuation are ridiculously small," said Dobyns. "One in a trillion would be the right general ballpark."
--from Canada.com Technology

I kept looking to see if this was a send-up by The Onion or some similar humor site. The more I looked, the more it seems to be for real. I can understand that there are people who are themselves hard-wired in such a way that they either get computers easily or computers forever confound them. I am the former; my wife is the latter. She just has an extremely difficult time managing to work easily with these things. She does it- and quite well, actually- but how and why they work and how to work with them can be a real challenge.

I also believe in "vibes." Those are whatever those feelings and thoughts and electromagnetic fields that we as humans send out. Some of which I guess could be affecting sensitive electronic equipment.

Come to think of it I do know people who have computers that won't do for them what they do for me.

Hmmmm.

[Voiceover: Meet pmPilgrim. He thought he was reading the latest news. He was sure the day was quiet and calm in his Twin Cities suburban home. But little did he realize that his computer was truly a gateway into....

The Twilight Zone.]