{"id":1022,"date":"2012-04-10T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoddsmustbecrazy.com\/?p=1022"},"modified":"2012-04-10T09:00:55","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T16:00:55","slug":"a-reversal-of-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/2012\/04\/10\/a-reversal-of-graphics\/","title":{"rendered":"A Reversal of Graphics"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Submitted<\/strong> by reader\u00a0Bob Carroll<\/a>, of The Skeptic’s Dictionary<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

A<\/strong> few years ago I was working on an article for The Skeptic\u2019s\u00a0Dictionary<\/em> about a guy who worked as a teen counselor in Australia\u00a0named David John Oates. He\u2019d accidentally dropped his tape recorder\u00a0in the toilet and when he repaired it, the thing ran backwards. He\u00a0started hearing all kinds of messages in his tapes, which led him on a\u00a0quest to understand all kinds of backwards communication. Oates\u00a0developed a hypothesis about the unconscious mind sending out\u00a0backwards messages to the conscious mind so that, for example, if you\u00a0wanted to know what Bill Clinton really meant when he said \u201cI try to\u00a0articulate my position as clearly as possible\u201d then you have to play\u00a0his speech backwards. His unconscious mind, which cannot lie, spoke in\u00a0backwards speech to his conscious mind and said \u201cShe’s a fun girl to\u00a0kiss.” \u00a0Anyway, this is the kind of pseudoscientific gibberish that\u00a0readers of The Skeptic\u2019s Dictionary<\/a><\/em> have come to expect me to cover.<\/p>\n

I<\/strong> was using Microsoft\u2019s FrontPage for my HTML editing in those days\u00a0and was using a template that had a graphic in the upper left-hand\u00a0corner that just said \u201cThe Skeptic\u2019s Dictionary.\u201d While typing\u00a0fairly rapidly I hit some sort of key combination that reversed the\u00a0graphic so that it was backwards. At the time, I didn\u2019t realize\u00a0either that there was such a key command in FrontPage or that I had\u00a0accidentally typed it. For a few seconds I was completely taken aback.\u00a0What’s going on? I\u2019m working on an article about backwards messages\u00a0and suddenly my logo is reversed? Were there gremlins in my computer?\u00a0How could this happen?<\/p>\n

Once<\/strong> I figured out what had probably occurred,\u00a0I liked the idea of the backwards graphic so much that I left it in\u00a0and added another one. I use a different template now but you can see\u00a0the reversed graphic at\u00a0http:\/\/www.skepdic.com\/oldreversespeech.html<\/a><\/p>\n

[EDITOR:<\/strong> People love to focus on the fact that there are great mysteries in the universe, and forces at work that we don’t understand. And this is quite often true, even when those mysteries are why Microsoft hid their features behind such deep menu structures, and the forces at play are our cat walking across the keyboard. Reality’s frequently just as startling as anything we can dream up.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago I was working on an article for The Skeptic\u2019s Dictionary about a guy who worked as a teen counselor in Australia named David John Oates. He\u2019d accidentally dropped his tape recorder in the toilet and when he repaired it, the thing ran backwards. He started hearing all kinds of messages in his tapes, which led him on a quest to understand all kinds of backwards communication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1620,1621,1622,1623,1624,1625,1626,1627,1628,1629,1630],"class_list":["post-1022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","tag-backwards-communication","tag-bill-clinton","tag-bob-carroll","tag-david-john-oates","tag-messages-on-tape","tag-microsoft-front-page","tag-reverse-graphic","tag-tape-recorder","tag-teen-counselor","tag-the-skeptics-dictionary","tag-unconscious-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tombc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}