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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

I know quite a few interesting Wikipedia entries get posted here but this was a particularly fascinating one! I've spent the best part of an hour learning about numbers stations and fail-deadly game theory :)

Great submission.

On topic: does anyone have anything extra (link wise) about "The Buzzer", Google searches are mostly leading to conspiracy sites...

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If you haven't heard it, The Conet Project [http://www.archive.org/details/ird059] is a collection of the numbers stations recordings. Pretty neat and eerie.

The Buzzer can be heard on disc 4, track 32 of the Conet Project. The entire collection is a free download.

Wilco's Poor Places uses a sample from track 4 of disc 1, which also gave the title to the album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

#79 is my favorite so far.

These are really creepy and keep giving me the chills.

Going to pass these on to my friend so he can sample them into his music. Wow, these sound so transmundane.

I don't wish to rain too heavily on the potential smug parade that other HN users might be participating in after reading such praise for their collective submission pool, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that this particular topic was posted on 4chan yesterday, subsequently causing quite a stir.

This also accounts for the continued vandalism on the wiki entry, as mentioned in some of the comments beneath mine.

Probably quite a null point (everything has to be come across through some medium); lots of stuff gets posted to 4chan and little of it makes it here... :-)

I'd say it's a pretty good filter.

True enough, but I think that blaming HN users for the vandalism isn't quite the whole truth it the article also made the rounds on sites like 4chan, which are known to house wiki vandals.

http://brix.wikispot.org/ was pointed out to me by a friend - it has a collection of a number of the "weird" articles on wikipedia, everything from the "Baghdad Battery" to the "Ordo Templi Orientis"

curse you. i just came out of a 6+ hour wikipedia binge

Skeptoid has a nice episode on number stations and also “The Buzzer” including audio samples: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4107

Sorry, but I have to be skeptical about any show that declares itself skeptical. Skepticism isn't good science or good logic; it's just reverse religion. True science does not immediately believe or disbelieve. It investigates dispassionately.

Yeah, and that is also what Skeptoid promotes.

Philosophical skepticism implies just that. It's not so much nay-saying as deference to evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism

You have this beautiful (albeit probably incomplete) definition of what being a skeptic means in your comment – I only have to change one word: “True skeptics do not immediately believe or disbelieve.”

That would be my definition and I’m pretty sure it would also be one that Brian Dunning (author of the podcast) would accept.

What’s wrong with that definition? What wrong with using the word in this way?

I know there are a good many conspiracy nuts who abuse the term (which might explain your harsh reaction) but I can assure you that Brian Dunning is not one of them. Try to read or listen to some of his stuff.

Regardless of the dictionary definition, in practice, skeptics immediately disbelieve and then claim they're willing to believe if shown exhaustive proof. Pro Skeptic Michael Shermer, for example, strongly doubted global warming for years, presumably because he could not observe the molecular activity first-hand. Michael is not a scientist. He's just a skeptic.

"True science does not immediately believe or disbelieve. It investigates dispassionately."

You may not like the label they chose for themselves, but that's exactly what the skeptical movement advocates! (skeptoid included)

Listen to the show sometime. The guy actually does a pretty good job of doing the research, and is willing to admit when arguments "disproving" conspiracy theories don't work.

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