The Skeptical Teacher

Musings of a science teacher & skeptic in an age of woo.

Posts Tagged ‘fortune’

Women Thinking Free Hosts an Un-Psychic Fair in Indianapolis!

Posted by mattusmaximus on June 19, 2011

I just wanted to pass along to you some news which might interest those of you in the Midwest next weekend: another Un-Psychic Fair!  You may recall the first WTFF Un-Psychic Fair in Chicago last year, and we hope that this one will be even more fun, more skeptic-y, and more un-psychic-y!!!  Read on for details…

John Edward, un-psychic douchebag, endorses this event 🙂

… This event launches our presence in Indianapolis, a city where we’ve found great skeptics and the potential for a truly bad ass skeptical mofo community. Our only option was to invade Indy and bring some mofos together to help us save them from their little notch on the Bible Belt.

Come out to the Unpsychic fair this weekend and be a part of WTF Indy! We’ll give you all you can eat food and buy your first drink. Then, we’ll be raffling off an entire bottle of alcohol. And we’ll do unpsychic readings… by real fake psychics!

The Women Thinking Free Foundation has arrived in Indianapolis!

Please join us on June 25, 2011 for our first ever Indy event: Mysteries of the Totally Explained, an Unpsychic Faire.

Tarot card readings!

Psychic predictions!

Discover your fate with a oujia board!

You will be amazed at the occasional accuracy of your readings!
We can already sense your presence!


Tickets are $20 and include all you can eat appetizers, cash bar with drink specials and your first drink is on us!
FREE admission for ghosts entering through the Ouija board or other spiritual portal.
We predict an awesome time!

Register to attend

Contact

Louise Kellar
Women Thinking Free Foundation
louise@womenthinkingfre.org
312-869-9833

When

Saturday June 25, 2011 at 6:00 PM EDT

Where

Loughmillers Pub
301 W Washington St
Indianapolis, IN

Posted in psychics, skeptical community | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Skeptical Psychic Fair in Chicago a Hit & How Ouija Boards Fail

Posted by mattusmaximus on August 1, 2010

On Friday, July 23rd, the Women Thinking Free Foundation held a skeptical psychic fair in Chicago as a fundraiser while also having some fun exposing the various tricks & techniques that go into all manner of psychic nonsense.

Among all the drinking & merriment, there were a number activities that we had, including a tarot card silent auction, a “psychic showdown”, along with some fun mentalism & magic tricks.  We also handed out many copies of Michael Shermer’s Learn to be Psychic in 10 Easy Lessons! which outlines the tricks of the psychic trade, including such time-honored (and completely NON-paranormal) techniques such as cold reading.

My primary contribution to the event was to bring a Ouija board to demonstrate a lesson in critical thinking regarding these supposed “spirit boards”…

The whole trick behind the standard operation of a Ouija board is a well-documented & understood phenomenon called the ideomotor effect, whereby the people holding their hands on the pointer of the board (the planchette) subconsciously maneuver it around without necessarily knowing it.  In fact, with Ouija boards, tests have been performed that illustrate that when the people using the board are blindfolded, and the board is randomly rotated without their knowledge, then all the supposed messages from the “spirit world” turn into gibberish.  Just take a look at this footage from Penn & Teller’s Bullshit where they tested a Ouija board in just this manner… 🙂

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ghosts & paranormal, psychics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

“Mysteries of the Explained” Psychic Fair in Chicago

Posted by mattusmaximus on July 15, 2010

As a way of having some fun while raising money for a good skeptical cause – the Women Thinking Free Foundation – we’re going to be holding a “fake” psychic fair at a bar in Chicago on Friday, July 23rd (I put fake in quotes because, as near as I can tell, all psychics are fakes)…

Help support the Women Thinking Free Foundation by joining us for a night of psychic fun, including a pseudoworkshop teaching you how to impress your drunk friends by doing your own bad psychic readings!

Friday, July 23, the Women Thinking Free Foundation will introduce you to . . . your future! (And show you how we do it.)

Ask us any question you want! And we’ll answer it for you! We’ll have tarot cards! Palm readings! A crystal* ball! And dowsing pendulums (courtesy of SurlyRamics)!

You can even attend our pseudoworkshop “5 minute Google: How to impress your drunk ass friends with psychic readings”. Then you can hold your own psychic fair!

We’ll even have raffles (we already know that you’re a winner!) And a silent auction. And chairs! And an open bar! And a skeptical psychic face off!

You can even compete to prove your own psychic powers are the best in Chicago!

Be there!

Friday, July 23
8:00pm
Galway Arms
2442 N Clark
Chicago, Il

The event cost covers all of the mystical mental augmenting refreshments you can handle, including all tap beer as well as wine! We will have our own room on the second floor complete with bartender.

The Women Thinking Free Foundation will be showcasing a set of brand new Tarot cards signed but the latest and greatest skeptics who appeared at the James Randi Education Foundation’s The Amaz!ng Meeting 8 held recently in Las Vegas. Names on the Cards include the cast of the venerable Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast (Steven Novella, Jay Novella, Evan Bernstein, Bob Novella, Rebecca Watson), world renown psychic investigator Joe Nickell, the UK’s science writer and libel reform advocate Simon Singh, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, Skeptic society founder Michael Shermer, Banachek: the world’s leading mentalist and television magic producer, the “honest liar” Jamey Ian Swiss, JREF president DJ Grothe, Australia’s own Richard Saunders, James The Amaz!ng Randi and many more!

Find out more information at: http://psychicfair.womenthinkingfree.org/
Purchase tickets at: http://shop.womenthinkingfree.org/Mysteries-of-the-Totally-Explained-Psychic-Fair-Psychic.htm

Tickets are $45 in advance and $50 at the door.

Discounted parking is available from the Children’s Memorial outpatient facility at 2515 N. Clark Street.

Posted in humor, psychics, skeptical community | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Wisdom in a Cookie

Posted by mattusmaximus on January 19, 2009

My wife and I love Chinese food.  Often, after a long day, I like to drop by our favorite Chinese restaurant and pick up some dinner.  And I think it’s hard to find many things better than a good, relaxing meal at the end of the day – unless, of course, you’re talking about dessert.  And what is the classic dessert of such fare?  The fortune cookie…

fortune cookie

Just today, we had some Chinese take-out, and I chomped a fortune cookie for dessert. Now, while I’m not going to claim that anyone really takes these kind of fortunes seriously, I’m going to use them as a little lesson in critical thinking because there are related phenomena that some people do take seriously.

Let’s take that fortune revealed in my cookie:

A party with friends is in your near future

Now, it is true that there are a few events in the upcoming weeks where I’ll likely be getting together with friends. So should I conclude that this little cookie successfully predicted the future? Of course not!

Were I to conclude this party prediction a “hit”, I would be guilty of a common logical fallacy, namely observational selection (also known as “cherry-picking” or “counting the hits but discounting the misses”). Observational selection is a common fallacy employed by those who believe the messages of psychics – like Sylvia Browne or Nostradamus – can accurately predict the future.

Think about it, of all the people who receive fortune cookies every day, probably many people got the same message about an upcoming party with friends. Chances are, most were not going to have such a party (a “miss”), and those people would basically ignore the miss and just eat the cookie. But then I get this cookie which seems to successfully predict an upcoming gathering of friends (a “hit”?). You can see what’s going on here – it’s just basic statistics. Many more “party with friends” cookie predictions miss than hit, but those are ignored in favor of the hits.

With a psychic’s predictions, such as Ms. Browne’s predictions for 2008, as with a fortune cookie, most of the predictions fall flat as misses. Actually, to be fair to Browne, she got half of the predictions listed at that link correct, but many were extremely vague predictions that I think hardly count (when do we go through a year with no earthquakes?). But the true believers ignore these misses, and then they employ selective thinking to justify whatever hits they perceive of “proof” of the psychic’s powers.

Side note: If Sylvia Browne (or any other psychics) really had any powers she claims to have, you might think that she would have predicted the global economic meltdown. Funny that she didn’t, isn’t it? I mean, it was only the biggest financial crisis in the world since the Great Depression…

Oops, that’s a pretty BIG miss!!!

Now, can a fortune cookie (or psychic) get lucky, providing a “prediction” of a once-in-a-million hit? Certainly, it can happen. For example, here’s a story about a “fortune-cookie-payout” where many people won millions of dollars based upon the numbers on a fortune cookie…

Powerball officials initially suspected fraud, but it turned out that all the winners received their numbers from fortune cookies made by Wonton Food Inc., a fortune cookie factory in Long Island City, Queens, New York. The number combinations printed on fortunes are reused in thousands of cookies per day. The five winning numbers were 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39. The sixth number in the fortune, 40, did not match the Powerball number, 42.

Were those people just lucky or was there something psychic at work with the fortune cookies? The discussion about statistics above should give you a hint, and besides, there’s a reason why it’s a called once-in-a-million shot. With enough cookies handed out over enough years, and with enough people playing lottery numbers based on those fortunes, eventually someone will get lucky.

So where’s this “wisdom” I mentioned in the title of this entry? Well, dear reader, I think the wisdom given to us by those tasty little fortune cookies is a lesson in critical thinking – how not to be fooled and, more importantly, how not to fool ourselves.

Posted in psychics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

 
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