Confirmation bias. You remember the occasional light that happens to go out when you pass under it. You forget the vast majority of lights that didn’t go out when you passed under them. Ever bought a new car, and suddenly you see the same car everywhere? Confirmation bias.
I assume that’s the case in some places. I know there’s one hill I come over that the light tends to turn off when I come over the hill and it’s dusk/dawn and close to where a sensible sensor would be triggered.
As far as lights turning off when you are walking, or no where near the lighting that should turn it off, most of that is sodium lamps near the end of their life. These tend to cycle on and off over a period of 2-15 minutes, which is often enough that you notice it when it happens near you, but not often enough that you notice it on other street lamps around.
I attended high school in a largely rural area. In the late summer and fall “spotting deer” was something kids did.
You’d borrow the family car and pick up a bunch of friends, then drive around shining a powerful spotlight looking for/at deer in the fields. The idea was to figure out good spots for hunting season.
We’d also shine the light at the personal “streetlights” people had around their property, shutting them down. There were no streetlights on the roads. Often the residents would come out and yell. We’d throw our empty beer cans at them and drive off.
It was a simpler time.
About the bolt caps: I would hazard a guess that they loosened themselves and fell off. Vibration will do that.
My first summer job in high school was as a light harasser. They give you a list of cars to be harassed with the the license plate number, the person’s usual schedule, and a photo of the car. It is a lousy job, having to work at night and constantly watch a bank of monitors waiting to throw the right switches, and most people don’t do it for long. In my case, we were harrassing known Christians who were caught by traffic cameras with Bibles on their dashboards, but different groups use the technology infrastructure for different reasons, usually as a warning to people Too Close To The Truth. I probably shouldn’t be talking about this now, but I don’t think that they know who I
I have done this as well, and I’ve also gone back and found one of my lost hubcaps that someone had kindly put up against a pole.
It’s not any different than putting a found glove or hat on a fence post. It may help its owner get it back.
Me too. Sometimes the obvious answer is the answer.
When Mr VOW was Sgt VOW, we lived in Kentucky. We rented a house in Radcliff, and I found work in Louisville (Lo-vo).
In wintertime, I drove to work in the dark, and I noticed one particular streetlight along the highway I traveled exhibited this strange behavior. I probably mentioned it to Sgt VOW, and we both chalked it up to “strange.”
I got the daily paper (Louisville Courier, I think) and they had a regular column devoted to folks asking questions about anything that didn’t seem to have an answer.
I perked up when I saw that someone asked about the haunted street lights that go off when someone gets near. A Public Information person from the City of Lo-vo Street Maintenance had an answer.
The lamp sometimes overheats, and to prevent it from destroying itself, it shuts off. When the lamp cools enough, the light will come back on.
Wikipedia apparently agrees with this answer, because it says essentially the same thing about high-pressure sodium vapor lights.
~VOW
That’s specifically a form of Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as the frequency illusion, but related. Anyhow, I had the same sort of thing going on with me in terms of lights when I was early in college and, after observing it for awhile, realized it was just confirmation bias and not that I had some sort of weird electromagnetic field around me that somehow toggled lights on and off. If I sit on the porch and look at streets like long enough, some of them do cycle on and off for no discernible reason. Also, the vast, vast majority of lights did not turn off when I walked under them.
There was one across the street from my old Seattle office in my previous position at work. I thought it was an art project.
People were constantly being murdered right outside my building so I wonder if it was from an accident or something else.
(We moved that office by the way.)
I have retrieved lost hub caps after going too fast over a railroad crossing with a little jump. The house next to the crossing set them prominently displayed.
What the hell is a “bolt cap”? If you are missing lug nuts, I seriously suggest you replace them.
You have to be really strong to throw sneakers over a power line while they’re on someone’s feet.
Lug nut covers. They are just snapped on, not screwed on.
https://www.amazon.com/Lug-Nut-Covers/b?ie=UTF8&node=10379967011
Why do you doubt that? Are yours secured with more than just a snap? The rim of a car wheel on a road is a high vibration place, and you don’t seem to have doubted that hubcaps fall off.
I’m not saying it’s aliens.
But it’s aliens.
You just have to read all the missing/non-missing hubcaps on the I-90 as a binary message and you’ll get the blueprints for the stargate.
Thanks. After I wrote that, I had a nagging feeling that my second example was not quite a clear-cut example of confirmation bias, but I shrugged it off. Since you pointed it out, I looked up Baader-Meinhof, and according to Wikipedia:
Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias is […] a process involving two cognitive biases: selective attention bias (noticing things that are important to us and disregarding the rest) followed by confirmation bias (looking for things that support our hypotheses while disregarding potential counter-evidence).
Ages ago, when my cousin was a kid, he pointed to a set of sneakers hanging from a telephone line and asked “Why didn’t you do cool things like that?”
There’s your answer. Some people, for whatever reason, think it’s cool.
I didn’t, and still don’t.