Col’s Rational World

Operation Psychic-watch

So I had another great idea.  Lots of psychics put up predictions on their websites; predictions of events that they claim will take place at some point over the upcoming year.  One of the most verbose seems to be Nikki, psychic to the stars, the audacity of whose predictions is matched only by her ridiculously poor accuracy.

But there’s a few predictions on her site that look, well, suspiciously good. Your intuition is always triggered when you read a page of complete nonsense from category 5 hurricanes wiping out Miami to a giant rabbit being found in Surrey; and then, just after that, you read that she predicted a bridge collapse in Minnesota and a list of obscure celebrity deaths. Some of those just seem ludicrous shots in the dark, but some seem surprisingly accurate. Which made me wonder exactly when those predictions were put up on the website. I wonder if, perhaps, they were put up after the events they described?

Well, that’s easy enough to test – I can just set up a monitoring script that checks the psychic predictions every day and caches the pages and emails me every time they change.  And I can do that for all of the psychic websites I find.

So, that’s what I’ve set up And now, when something interesting happens, I can see if the psychics got there first, or if they’re just reporting old news. Watch this space, folks!

EDIT – see this site for a wonderful example or two of Psychic Nikki’s previous cheating. And here’s another. This must be the site I remembered hearing about before. Great work!

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