I remember seeing Randi, the magician, on PBS once. He gave every one in a college classroom a copy of their horoscope he had worked out. As you would expect, a number of people in the class thought of themselves as skeptics but when they read their horoscopes, they were really impressed with the specificity of their readings. They thought that Randi had nailed their personalities in his reading. Then Randi asked each person to pass their reading on to the classmate next to them. You guessed it. The readings were all identical. Every person in the class had read the exact same piece of paper.

Randi's point was that it is possible to write in a way that is ambiguous enough for people to fill in with what they want to hear, whether it is good or bad that they expect. It was a very striking piece of television.

Other students of human nature have noticed how hard wired we seem to be looking for patterns. I think that may be a part of it, too.

I made a proposal to NOVA a while back to do a study of such things as the birth dates of members of Congress. There are enough similarities in what you have to do to be elected, be a leader, raise money, etc. I thought it would be interesting to see what we came up with. There is a guy who is now on ABC television as their science reporter, Michael Guillen, who has written a lot on how we fool ourselves by innaccurate observation. IHe had been a leader of a skeptic's group of highly trained scientists who were investigating paranormal claims. I think deep down they wanted to be convinced that there were special forces at work but they have never found anything that stands up to their knowledge of statistics, physics, bilogy, linguistics, etc. I wanted to work with him and his group and he was willing. I thought it would have been interesting bit of television but Paula Apsell, the Exec. Producer of Nova apparently didn't. Ah, well.

Sourdough