Hot Randi Frauds Online!

[athelind]

James Randi has put the whole of his Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural online as an HTML document. He's taken a page from The Baen Free Library, which has repeatedly demonstrated that making free eBooks available via the Internet increases rather than decreases an author's sales.

This looks like a useful, interesting reference work, but be forewarned: Randi tends to assume that any "Claim" of the "Occult and Supernatural" is in fact a "Fraud" or a "Hoax" -- or just gullibility. The work, therefore, is not entirely sarcasm-free.

Comments

OT: Bats

[shavastak.livejournal.com]

Somebody has shown you to the bat embryology page, right?

Re: OT: Bats

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I read ursulav's journal regularly. Aren't those li'l guys CUTE?

[jdarkwulf.livejournal.com]

I still recall a snippet of a quote, but can't remember its source or context. I always remember, though, it talking about "Uri Geller, who has the power to bend spoons with his mind, and the Amazing Randi, who has the power to prove that Uri Geller can't bend spoons with his mind."

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Now, did Randi actually prove that Geller wasn't bending spoons with his mind, or just that it's possible to bend spoons without any kind of psychic power?

I still remember a presentation he did on astrology. He passed out horoscopes to a class of high school students.

"For how many of you is this exactly true?" 10%
"For how many of you could this be true?" 25%
"Okay, how many of you would LIKE this to be true?" 90%

He then had them exchange pages. All the horoscopes were the same.

[darkkdragon.livejournal.com]

Nice! Thanks for the link; now I've even more things to read at work  :D