From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 22:16:35 MDT
At 12:34 PM 6/5/03 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>Well, then, he should go claim his Randi prize and wouldn't have
>to worry about the sales of his book. <http://www.randi.org/>.
You'd think so, but Randi is a slippery customer, and besides his target
seems to be those palpable frauds or self-deluded ninnies who are easily
unmasked, dowsers who can't dowse and aura-readers who can't tell if
anyone's standing behind a screen although they swear they can see colorful
auras poking over the top. Presented with a probabilistic phenomenon, his
methods of assessment are too coarse. That would be equally true, I think,
if he were trying to evaluate neutrino flavor shifting en route from the
Sun to the Earth. `Hey, c'morn, I can't *see* these little buggers, and you
say most of them just zip right through lead, I want to see eight out of
ten on this meter here RIGHT NOW, I'm mean, WHO ARE YOU KIDDING?'
Damien Broderick
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