Regulating Psychics? It’s About Time!

British psychics are in for a rude awakening. A new set of laws may force them to prove their talents in court, or “give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results.”

Daylight Atheism sums up the situation quite well:

The law currently in force in this area is the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which does in fact make it illegal to fraudulently claim to possess psychic or clairvoyant powers. But the key word is “fraudulently” - meaning that any enterprising prosecutor would have to prove that not only that the defendant has no psychic powers, but that they were aware of this and deliberately set out to deceive. This is a high bar to surmount, which is why the Act has hardly ever been used to prosecute psychic claimants…

But now, as part of an effort to harmonize consumer-protection laws across the European Union, the Act may be repealed. The new regulations proposed to replace it ban “treating consumers unfairly”, and psychics worry that this language could be used against them, to force them to prove their claims are genuine. Gee, you think?

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Your Car Is One of the Safest Places To Be In A Lightning Storm, But Not Because of the Rubber Tires.

You may have heard this one before. Some say the safest place to be during a lightning storm is in a car because of the rubber tires because the rubber tires will effectively ground the electrical charge.

An auto IS a safe place to be during a lightning storm, but for a different reason. The tires do little to dispel electricity should the car be struck by a lightning bolt.

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What if you managed your own real life baseball team? Draft your own players, decide the batting order, and make play by play decisions during games. Would you have your players stealing bases? Would you spend big bucks on a strong closing pitcher? Bill James would not advise you to do any of these things. In fact he has shown that a number of common decisions made in baseball do not make statistical sense. Why should you listen to him, you ask?

Bill James has been studying baseball statistics for years and started publishing his findings in 1977 ^[1]. He coined the term sabermetrics, which can be defined as the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball. Baseball, like many sports, is driven by statistics. traditional thinking often puts an emphasis on stats that everyone believes to be important, such as batting average and earned runs average. But sabermetrics takes statistics one step further.

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Are you one of many Americans who believe they’ve experienced the presence of a ghost? Your own brain could be deceiving you. I am not referring to intelligence or alertness, but the electrical inner-workings of the brain. Electrical interference could be the culprit, rather than a supernatural entity. Let me explain.

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism refers to an invisible magnetic field generated by any electric charge in motion. Transformers, light bulbs, and anything else that conducts or uses electricity emits an electromagnetic field. Much like light or sound waves, these electromagnetic waves can be perceived by our senses and brain. In fact, electricity exists within the human brain, which sends messages via electric currents.

Is it possible that the electrical currents in our brain can be affected by external electrical currents in our environment, causing the brain to sense things that aren’t really there? Parapsychologist William Role seems to think so (Role, 2008). In a 2008 episode of Megascience, Dr. Roll performed an experiment in a Georgia motel thought to be haunted.

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