The Smug Baldy Speaks

The Guardian reported the interesting story of self-proclaimed psychic, Patricia Putt, and her attempt to take home 1 million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). While many “psychics” have tried to take home the top prize, which would be a scientific stamp of approval to their claims of esp or other super powers, [...]

Over on the comments on my Sylvia Brown’s 2007 predictions post, Bethany asked this: WHO CARES IF SHE IS FAKE?! WHAT HARM IS SHE DOING?!?!?!?! I almost let this slide, but couldn’t do that in good conscience. You tell me: Most famously, Sylvia tells Shawn Hornbeck’s parents that their child had been murdered. Oops, he’s [...]

You’re surrounded by Ghost Whisperers, Allison DuBuois, and freaky kids seeing dead people, so it’s only (super)natural to ask yourself, “Hey, could I be psychic?” Take our little test and find out if you have a hidden psychic ability. Have any of these things ever happened to you?

Over on StupidEvilBastard recently, someone (not naming names) forgot “That guy with the million dollar challenge” for psychics. That guy, if you don’t know, is the esteemed James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation (or JREF). Mr. Randi has been debunking kooks and frauds for years, and the JREF recently announced that it was [...]

They say that Truth is the first casualty in war. Not now. Not in this war. A week ago, a hacker group calling themselves Anonymous posted their Declaration of War against the “Church” of Scientology, shortly after they were able to bring down one of the church’s websites. Then afterwards, Anonymous posted a second vid [...]

Last year we took a look at the 2006 predictions of self-described psychic, Sylvia Browne. We had to wait until the 2007 in order to be able to make a fair judgment of her psychic predictions for 2006. Since it’s now 2008, let’s go back and track how well Sylvia Brown’s predictions for 2007 hold [...]

In this article, I’ll outline a proposal to utilize a well known conceptual framework to increase our ability to rigorously and dispassionately examine the accuracy of psychic predictions of future events. In part one, I propose two sets of guidelines related to data recoding and validation, as well as data analysis. In later parts, I [...]

In part of one True Believer’s drive by on my Sylvia Browne piece, in which the commenter admitted that I amaze her, she said: Of course, I’m one that doesn’t believe the human race ever had a tail or gills too. Although she went on to say how she wasn’t, “so closed minded that I [...]

Please see the updated analysis at the bottom of this post for any corrections and notes. Below is a list of predictions that famed psychic superhero Sylvia Browne made at the beginning of 2006. Let’s see how well she did. Weather and Natural Disaster Predictions for 2006: The weather this year will be worse than [...]

On the Skeptic forum, Robbynne asked: Does anyone happen to know if there is a website anywhere that documents her [Self-Proclaimed Psychic, Sylvia Browne's] hits and misses? I’d love to see what type of an average she gets (I suspect random guessing produces a higher average IMHO). I tried googling it, but I didn’t come [...]