questioning of Sheldrake's credibility is a bit of hyperbole (M.Ted)

Well, but Bill was only quoting from your link, M.Ted.

That bit of 'research' only adds to the doubts in Sheldrake's credibility. I do not doubt his counting, I bet he's correct in that. His trick is to compare what should never be compared in any meaningful sense.

Double-blind testing is only necessary under some very specific conditions and unnecessary (or even impossible) else. These conditions occur in many of the experiments in parapasychology and not very often in psychology and (nearly) never in the physical sciences.

He found that, while it is used more that 80% of the time in parapsychological research, he found that it is only ocassionally used in medical and psychological sciences, and nearly never in biological and physical sciences

Such a silly argumentation is an advocate's argument, meant to score an easy point with those lacking knowledge. For the others it is a belly laugh. Double blind means that neither the analyser nor the participants in an experiment know in which test condition the participants are run.

The participants in physics are usually particles. They are not allowed to 'know' in which condition they are run in a double-blind procedure. Any scientist submitting a paper to a physical sciences journal explaining how the particles were blinded to the experimental conditions would get a letter back asking whether she was still sane. A double-blind procedure makes no sense at all here. In biology as well, if you state that the rats (monkeys, flies,...) were blind to the experimental conditions the nicest the editor will do is to erase such a nonsensical sentence without further comment.

A simple-blind procedure sometimes can make sense in the physical sciences when the counting has a subjective component like for instance in a cloud chamber. Most of the time, the measurement has no subjective component worth mentioning (or may even by done by an apparatus). In all these instances even a single blind procedure ("we did not tell our automatic counter in which condition it did the counting. It was only debriefed after the experiment was completely finished") is at the very best superfluous, or worse, an indicator of anincompetent.

The whole Sheldrake argument and counting is very obviously fishy and the only question remaining is whether he knows that and still does it for the effect in discussions (that's what I guess) or whether he himself believes what he writes to be sound.

The only subject area in which he may have a point is in medicine which is haunted by sloppy experimenting even in mainstream medicine research.

Speaking about Einstein, here's another quote:
Only two things are infinite, the universe and the stupidity of mankind, and I'm not sure about the former.

As for the quote above "astrology is a science..." one astrology site just copies it from the other. Michael Shermer (editor of SKeptic magazine) once has asked for a source of that quote at the Einstein archive and got the following response:
According to Alice Calaprice, Senior Editor at Princeton University Press and an editor on the Einstein Papers project for the press for the past 20 years, this astrology quote, like so many others attributed to Einstein by people in order to gain credibility, is totally bogus.

That's about the usual carefulness of astrology.

Wolfgang