Archive for June, 2009

Stacy Horn on WUNC’s The State Of Things

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Author Stacy Horn was interviewed by Frank Stasio on WUNC’s The State of Things two months ago to discuss her new book Unbelievable, which is a history of the Rhine Center. Horn provided many good stories from her research and did well in presenting the topic. She made it sound far more exciting than it probably was (imagine staring at Zener cards, day in and day out)!

Stacy is as engaging in person as she is on the radio. If you get a chance to hear her speak about her book or her research, don’t pass it up!

Closed minds and open minds

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Geek blog Boing Boing linked today to a video of Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer presenting what he calls a “baloney detection kit.” Essentially the “kit” is a way to weed the truth from what someone only claims is true.

In spite of the biased, derogatory scenes that accompanied Shermer’s talk, he did provide many good points. Shermer kept referring to using science to test claims, and for “following the data” when trying to prove a claim. It sounded like the recipe for good science: when confronted with new phenomena, test it.

Then around the 13:10 mark of the video, Shermer throws this advice out the window. (more…)

Nancy ‘sees’ Ronald Reagan

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan told Vanity Fair that sometimes she ‘sees’ her late husband, Ronald Reagan.

“At night time, if I wake up, I think Ronnie is there, and I start to talk to him… And I see him,” she told the magazine.

Twitter used for remote viewing experiment

Monday, June 1st, 2009

This week, University of Hertfordshire professor Richard Wiseman will use Twitter to conduct a remote viewing outbounder experiment. At 3 PM (UK-time) each day this week, Professor Wiseman will travel to a certain location. Participants will then try to get an impression of where he is and “tweet” this information to Wiseman’s Twitter account. Thirty minutes later, Wiseman will upload photographs of the target location.

While it will be good fun, I would hope the good professor will make everyone well aware that this experiment is not being conducted under laboratory conditions. I also have concerns that reading the Twitter stream will unduly influence the imagination of many participants. However, if a participant were to simply concentrate on Wiseman’s location rather than the Twitter feed, I would think some good results could be obtained.

It would be interesting to have some of the more seasoned RVers I know join in on Wiseman’s experiment. If you’d like to try your hand, go to his Twitter Experiment website, visit his blog, or follow his Twitter feed.