Because the universe is beautiful enough without having to lie about it

Archive for the ‘Paranormal’ Category

Lecture 13- Significance

Saturday, December 12th, 2015 Posted in Education, General, General Science, Health, Paranormal, Psychology | No Comments »

Hi all, I've posted another lecture on YouTube. This one is all about Significance - what does it mean to say that a scientific result is significant, and what happens when you get that wrong? You can watch it here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B5mCKIJTZ8.

Psychic Detective Nonsense

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 Posted in Bad media, Paranormal | No Comments »

So I note with interest (thanks to my convenient Perl script that emails me on occasion to let me know) that the Psychic detective has updated their website again, and I thought it might be a good idea to review ...

The Scandalous Decline of Rational Thought

Monday, April 13th, 2009 Posted in Education, General Science, Paranormal | 3 Comments »

In the most literal sense possible, I urge you to read it and weep. The bit that angers me isn't the whole 'heaven' thing. I can sort-of understand why people would want to believe in an afterlife that is better than ...

Psychic Detective Monitor

Friday, March 27th, 2009 Posted in Paranormal, Psychology | No Comments »

My "psychic detective monitor" has been going haywire recently, picking up several changes to the psychic detective site in the last few months.  And best of all, I found this gem. Yes folks, there's some good news - you too ...

Fun with Fraud Ratings

Sunday, February 1st, 2009 Posted in Internet, Paranormal | 2 Comments »

Those of you who have been following for a while will remember my previous work on fraud ratings. Remember that a fraud rating is not claiming that a person is a fraud, lest I get sued: it is simply a ...

Gratitude

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 Posted in Biology, Health, Paranormal | No Comments »

I'm stuck at home today feeling like death, with a splitting headache, fever, cough and sore throat. Fortunately, I went to see the doctor yesterday before it got too bad, so I'm all stocked up with medicines. At least it ...

Browne’s ‘Fraud Rating’ jumps sharply

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 Posted in Internet, Paranormal | No Comments »

 Here's an interesting discovery over the last week: Sylvia Browne's fraud rating has suddenly shot up by over three times! Between 29th September and 6th October 2008, despite a fall of nearly 5% in the number of web pages mentioning her ...

Sheldrake on Psychics

Monday, September 22nd, 2008 Posted in Paranormal, Psychology | No Comments »

I stumbled across this video of Rupert Sheldrake, renowned researcher into the paranormal, talking about how terrible it is that mainstream science ignores claims of psychic powers.  He seems to be advocating the Brian Josephson-style position that these things are ...

Fraud ratings

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 Posted in Internet, Paranormal | No Comments »

As part of my new role as Cyber-Skeptic (TM), I thought I'd start monitoring some other numbers that people might find interesting.  So, here's introducing the fraud ratings system.  Yet again, this comes thanks to those wonderful folks at Google. Here's ...

Operation Psychic-watch

Monday, July 28th, 2008 Posted in Internet, Paranormal | 3 Comments »

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, ...