QUOTE (eight bits @ Mar 10 2008, 10:06 PM)

Many streetlights, in the US anyway, also have thermal protection that switches them off when they get too hot, and back on again if it's still dark when they cool off. A person on the street wouldn't affect those sensors, but it does add a certain haphazardness to when the lights switch on and off. A break from the dull on at dusk, off at dawn routine.
Much of low-rent psi is looking at random, quasi-random, or haphazard events and thinking "Hey, I did that!"
Absolutely - this coupled with
confirmation bias, which in this case amounts to remembering the unusual events (street light going off), and forgetting the far more numerous mundane non-events (street lights
not going off) which outweigh the unusual events so much as to make them statistically nonsignificant.
I remarked a while ago on a thread about 'electrokinesis' that, since taking part in a discussion about it, I'd noticed far more electrical quirks and foibles around me. The fact is, as I said then, we live in a world packed full of cheaply made, mass-produced electrical and electronic equipment, buzzing, crackling and going wrong all around us. If you 'tune in' to that, as I did having discussed it for a while, you simply stop filtering it out as the random noise it actually is. Link that with a belief, or wish, that you are somehow special, or have a power of some kind, and it's a recipe for statistical illusion.