I’ve been a skeptic for almost as long as I can remember. There’s a story I’ve often told about being at the World’s Fair in New York City when I was eleven years old – I had already been doing magic for several years – and figuring out that the IBM pavilion had scammed me out of two weeks of allowance money with a phony computerized handwriting analysis. Although I didn’t know it at the time, when I look back I can see that as a defining moment of sorts.  A moment when my already consuming interest in magic crossed circuits with my fascination with science, and with my admiration for Harry Houdini’s historic work as a psychic-buster, and crystallized my identity as a skeptic. But of course, not quite yet as an activist, movement-oriented skeptic.  That would take longer. But I think it’s safe to say that by age eleven I was already personally, as an individual, a skeptic.

I can still recall watching The Amazing Randi on television when I was a little boy, on a popular local New York Sunday children’s show called “Wonderama,” hosted by Sonny Fox (who spoke at TAM a few years ago and with whom I was thrilled to get a photo!). But I was in my early twenties when Randi wrote a book called The Magic of Uri Geller that would change my life. (I still prefer that original title to the later reissue as The Truth About Uri Geller. One word tells the whole story: MAGIC. As in TRICKS. So simple and direct and devastatingly blunt. So … Randi.)

Randi’s book didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about Uri Geller in particular or psychics in general. I’d been weaned on Harry Houdini along with the art and craft and psychology of deception. But that book radicalized me about the harm that con men and phony psychics do, whether it is distracting the pursuit of science down rabbit holes of confusion and anti-science, or setting the public up with toxic misinformation that can readily lead to victimization by an army of similar con men and women and their catalog of techniques with which to take people’s time, and money, and sometimes even lives away from them.

If you have a friend who likes to lift weights, it’s time to make a bet. Bet them that you can use your supernatural abilities to change the gravity around your body, making yourself impossible to lift. And make sure it is a good bet, because you are going to win this one.

When Penn and Teller hosted Penn & Teller Tell a Lie on the Discovery Channel, they featured a woman who claimed exactly that: that she could make herself impossible to lift, even for Muscle Beach body builders. The demonstration was pretty convincing. None of the macho men could lift her once she activated her “powers.” She had all the would-be lifters stumped. She fooled everyone except a physics professor.  

So before you bet the farm with your willing friend, let’s look at the physics behind this little trick. At least you won’t be engendering some kind of belief in the supernatural once you fleece your lifter.  

Happy Darwin Day!

Here is a rundown of the top stories in pseudoscience, superstition and conspiracy mongering from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

It was a big week in conspiracy ties. Of course, that never brings good news. The WORST news was another killing tied to conspiratorial thinking. The motive for why this man killed his children, himself and EVEN the dog is not clear, but his work on 9/11 government conspiracy is mentioned.

The misinformation about Sandy Hook continues. Thanks for your sloppiness, media.

The following is a contribution to the JREFís ongoing blog series on skepticism and education. If you are an educator and would like to contribute to this series, please contact Bob Blaskiewicz.

The British poet Christian Ward became a controversial figure recently when his poem "The Deer at Exmoor," which won the Exmoor Society's Hope Bourne poetry prize, was revealed by the Western Morning News to have been plagiarized from Helen Mort's "Deer," which had itself won the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition in 2009.