With the Forer (or Barnum) Effect, we saw how making generalised, non-specific statements can both apply to anyone and be used by anyone.  People are always happy to believe nice things about themselves and to completely ignore the things that don’t apply.  Something to remember about these fraudsters is that none of their methods is used in isolation - they couple Barnum Statements, Cold reading and Hot Reading together to make the “mark” believe that they have special powers.  Cold Reading is especially effective in a group setting, with one psychic and a large audience.  In fact, the bigger the audience the better this works.

So what is cold reading?  In short, it is a method where the questioner makes vague statements and asks open questions to the mark to get the person to provide information.  At the same time, they make it seem as though they knew this already and thus reinforce their powers in the mind of the believer.  Worryingly, this even works on pre-recorded shows that can be taped by the home viewer and seen over and over again.  You would have thought that this would stop the phenomena, but it doesn’t.  The joy of being human, I guess.

Most psychics will start their show with a caveat.  They will say something like “I can’t guarantee what will come through or whether what comes through will apply to you.  I don’t know where my powers come from or whether they will even work.  If you don’t receive an answer this could be for any number of reasons”.  If they do wash out completely, it’s not their fault, it’s yours for either not believing hard enough (”negative energy”) or just because you’re too dense to realise that you’re being given the correct answers.  I may use this to become a mechanic, I will say “your car may get repaired, but I can’t guarantee it.  If it doesn’t work it’s because you didn’t diagnose the fault correctly.  I may even fix something else entirely.  That’ll be £500 please.”

Typically, the psychic will say “I get the strong feeling that someone here has lost a woman; a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a sister.  An older woman.”  And they will gesture to an area of the audience.  So, you the individual reader, cast your mind through a list of every woman you have ever known.  Are they all still alive?  If so, you will not be featured in the show.  So, someone puts up their hand.  Likelihood is that a good number of people will put up their hands.  The psychic will look at these people and make a decision about how to narrow down the choice.

Let’s say they decide that the person has lost their mother.  This will be done by looking at the ages of the people - if they are older, that is a very likely choice.  So they will say “You have lost a mother; an older woman; a mother-like figure.”  A small number of people will lower their hands, the remainder will be even more hopeful.  “I’m getting chest pains - the heart or lungs, possibly lower in the stomach area.”  Guess which areas make up the largest number of defects leading to death?  If you guessed chest and stomach you’d be right.  In fact, broadly speaking, the heart stopping beating is what causes death - no matter what illness you have, your heart will stop beating.

That statement has culled accidental deaths and car crashes and any other difficult to guess illnesses or accidents.  So let’s say that leaves 10 people.  Now the psychic can get it down to one person (though the rest can be kept in reserve in case they need to go back to them).  “I’m getting an older woman with a heart or chest problem.  I’m getting E, L, R or S.”  The psychic will keep looking to see who nods their head, someone will pick up on at least one of those letters - remember that they haven’t specified what those letters may signify: first name, last name, town or title.  We see an older lady who seems to be happiest with the letter ‘S’.  So the psychic can say “I’m getting drawn to this lady who lost a mother called, and I want to say, Sally, Susie, Sarah” and the lady will say “Yes of course, my mother died of a heart attack 20 years ago and her name was Susannah”  the psychic will respond “Yes, that’s correct, a heart problem”.

The mark will be amazed - he correctly guessed that her mother, called Susannah, died of a heart attack.  The psychic correctly pulled her out of 500 hundred people nd put her in touch with her mother.  But let’s look at what actually was said, shall we:

• I get the strong feeling that someone here has lost a woman; a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a sister.  An older woman.
• I’m getting chest pains - the heart or lungs, possibly lower in the stomach area.
• I’m getting an older woman with a heart or chest problem.  I’m getting E, L, R or S.
• I’m getting drawn to this lady who lost a mother called, and I want to say, Sally, Susie, Sarah
• Yes, that’s correct, a heart problem

Now this is a crude way of putting it, the psychic may well have a bunch of guesses and questions, but that is in shorthand the way these things tend to go.  The best way for you to test a psychic is to not respond to the questions and ask the psychic to tell you rather than ask you.  As you will see, they will very quickly give up.  As an illustration of this, please read these two posts from Simon Perry when he went to see Joanne Jordan and Pamella Blaby - there are some revealing mp3 files to have a listen to.

To close, cold reading is easy to spot if you know what to look for and go in forewarned.  The psychic will ask a lot of questions, mostly very open and you will be required to provide the answers.  These answers will then be fed back to you as if the psychic were providing them.  If you don’t believe this is happening, take a look on YouTube for John Edwards videos and other psychcs.  Compare them side by side and look at what they do and how they do it.  It will be very revealing to you!

Further Reading:

• Australian Skeptics Guide To Cold Reading
• The Skeptic’s Dictionary: Cold Reading
• Wikipedia on Cold Reading

If you follow the Mayan Calendar/End of the World type stuff, just 3 short years until you know for sure whether the world will really be ending or whether the Mayans just couldn’t count beyond 2012. Fun Fun Fun!!!

Happy New Year and I hope 2009 brings all sorts of goodness to you.

First, the reasons people test out Linux.  These are many and varied, but the main ones seem to be: they heard it was cool, it was sold as a major panacea for all computing ills, they are geeks and think it’s de rigeur to do so, it looked good on a friend’s PC, it solves a problem they have, they are sick of lock in and viruses.  There are other reasons, but I think these are representative.  Here’s the thing: none of these reasons are bad reasons.  I have tried various things out over the years for similar reasons - some I have stuck with and some I haven’t.  The more rabid Linux evangelists will tell you that you have to try it and that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t.  I’m not going to do that.  It would be great if the balance were tipped from proprietary OSes to the FOSS way, but I am realistic enough to know that this isn’t going to happen soon.  We are making major inroads, particularly on the server front, but by being realistic I have more chance of being persuasive.

If you are planning (however vaguely) to try out Linux I cannot stress this enough: do your research.  Look at the more popular distributions and check that your hardware is supported and won’t have any major issues.  Google is an excellent resource for this, Linux is an operating system that wouldn’t have come in to being without the internet and problems and fixes are discussed widely all over the place.  Head over to Distrowatch and see what people are looking into, hit the various websites that distributions have and see what they look like and make sure that you feel comfortable with the look and feel of the distribution.

An amazingly cool resource that will be of great help is the Live CD.  This gives you an entire operating system on either a CD or DVD.  Many distros offer this and you can use them to see whether Linux is for you and to test out what a distro will look like and get a great feel for the usage.  You can use them for diagnosing and fixing problems or as a handy and portable method for always having Linux on whichever PC you use.  They do not make changes to your hard drive and so you don’t have to install anything.  For the price of the download and a blank CD or DVD you can save yourself a lot of hassle.

Investigate dual booting.  You don’t have to wipe your current OS to test out another system, you can simply give it space on your hard drive and switch between.  This will give you the best idea of how it will work with your system and whether it will be for you on a daily basis.  Dual booting is pretty simple and straightforward.  It will also enable you to research problems on your known working OS if you do hit snags.

Don’t give up on your first failure.  I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen posts about how crap Linux is only to find that the poster has used it for a few hours and given up at the first hurdle.  Remember that Windows has a major lock in with a number of hardware vendors (and Mac restricts the hardware it will run on) and also software vendors.  This means that hardware and software will always work on those systems because the vendors will make it work.  Most of the drivers and software on Linux only run because the coders are dedicated and intelligent enough to make it work.  (I won’t go into the “Linux is a kernel not an OS” here because it’s irrelevant to the discussion)  For a good chunk of it’s life, Linux coders worked for the joy of coding and the fact that it runs so well on such varied hardware is testament to their skill and dedication.

Finally, research, research, research.  I’m going to mention this again because it is all important.  Think about what you want to run it on - if you have any obscure hardware or important hardware (webcams, scanners, ISP provided modems) look around the web to see if they are supported.  If you have a particular piece of software that you absolutely must have running look to see if there’s a Linux version or if there is a different piece of software that will run just as well.  Read Linux Is Not Windows - it may be a few years old, but it is still relevant.

None of this is rocket science.  It’s been a few years since Linux emerged from the “geeks only” state to an “anyone can get it running state.”  You can install Linux in around 20 minutes (from start to finish) and you will have a full desktop and a varied amount of software.  There are some 40,000+ software packages available for it from a variety of resources, so it’s likely that you will find the software you need.  You don’t have to reboot after each software install or update.  There are no real viruses available for it and malware just isn’t there.  Out of the box, it is more secure than Windows and will cost you a lot less in monetary terms.  You can distribute it freely and legally and this is explicit in the licence.  You don’t have to agree to EULAs or other restrictive licences.

So there you are, that’s how to do it.  If you want to know how not to do it, just don’t follow my advice.  The vast majority of people who fail to install and run Linux (or one of the BSDs or any other alternative OS) do so because they went in with the wrong attitude.  Before you can ride a bike or drive a car or do most tasks, there are steps to take before you do it - and computers are no different.  There is no magic bullet which will make you an automatic expert, despite the advertising, the only real way to do it is to research and persevere.  If you do decide to stick with it there are any number of resources that will assist you, from hard copy books to online forums to blogs like this.  If you stick with it you will be part of a community and a movement and will meet many interesting and fun people.  My first trip to the US was off the back of Linux - so how’s that, run an OS and travel the world?

My PC is all infected with those nasty viruses.  I had no idea that my browsing was so unsafe and that I was such a poor computer user.  Oh, that’s right, I run Linux and I don’t have a C:/ or D:/ drive or any viruses.   This is a genuine public service announcement: after Christmas, lots of you will be returning your PCs and laptops to the store because they run slowly or not at all.  A number of you will have had these problems after clicking one of those free virus scan ads.  They are a scam and will put viruses onto your hard drive.  So, a plea: for the sanity of the poor techs and salesmen who gave you a perfectly good machine either browse sensibly or install Linux (even better, do both) and you’ll never have to worry about this sort of nonsense again.

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Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous speaker on atheist, anti-religious and sceptical viewpoints out there (though James Randi gives him a great run for his money!).  Derren Brown is a British illusionist who focuses on suggestion and who is guaranteed to entertain.  As someone involved in stage magic he is in an excellent position to notice when someone is running a con or using any one of the usual tricks that psychics use.   With thanks to the nice people at Bad Psychics (the largest sceptical and medium debunking site in the UK) for bringing this to my attention, I bring you the first part of an interview in which Brown and Dawkins discuss the phenomena of psychics, the reasons why people go to them (and why they shouldn’t) and the tricks that psychics use to make you believe in them.  This is an informed interview between two intelligent and experienced men.  Each part is around 10 minutes long and the next part will (or should) load automatically.

The first part is provided free online.  If you would like to support the work Dawkins and other people do, consider purchasing ‘The Enemies of Reason: The Uncut Interviews’ on DVD by clicking on this link.  The video can be seen after the jump:

HPLIP

Linux.  For Linux as a whole, there have been numerous successes ranging from it’s growth into the mainstream (though there is still far to go) in the server world through to the desktop take up in the last few years.  One thing that I would suggest has slowed is the individual users that can report their own successes.

Let me elaborate.  Today I went out and bought an HP Deskjet F4280 all-in-one printer - it was on sale and I have needed a multifunction device for work and home for a long time.  I went with HP because I have long been a fan of their printers and I know that their Linux support is excellent.  I went with this model because I saw in the catalogue that it had Linux support (though it stated “web only”, I knew that it would work).  I plugged it in, ran the command sudo hp-setup and Kubuntu did the rest.  I now have the printer working as well (or even better) as it would in Windows.  I opened the HP toolbox and the scanner worked first time without errors.  It was an absolutely pain-free experience and was much much quicker than the whole thing will be on Monday when I install it to my work laptop running XP.

On the one hand, that is a clear success - HP now supports Linux to the point that I can put a new printer on my system and have it work, literally, out-of-the-box.  Enormous thanks to HP, to the coders who make this possible and to the community who have pushed hard over the years.  All we need now is for other manufacturers to do the same.  But, and this may sound ungrateful, where’s my success?  I remember the days when, with massive amounts of Googling and help from communities, I was able to install and run fairly commonplace hardware and software.  Instead, now, it’s all really easy.  I am positive that I’m not alone in having things work really easily with no problems, but wonder if I am the only left with an empty feeling when I realise that all the work is now done for me?

The plugin supports WordPress (duh!), Blogger, TypePad and Tmblr with more to come.

UPDATE - I have disabled the plugin.  Indexing the comments was taking too long, Commentluv and KeywordLuv were inactive and it was too much trouble.  This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the plugin - if I had started with IntenseDebate from the beginning, there would not have been any issues, but the wait was just too great.  Don’t let me put you off it - if I were to start a second blog, I would definitely install it.

Sapphire & Steel - Articles

1. Sapphire and Steel - UK TV Series
2. Assignment One
3. Assignment Two

I suspect that this episode is the more famous of the series (possibly even more so than the final

Sapphire & Steel Assignment 2

episode).  Whenever I recall any of the series, it is this one that comes to mind most readily.  First broadcast in July 1979, this is one of the more chilling episodes in the entire run.

As with all of the episodes, the storyline is fairly sparse and pretty simple to explain: Sapphire and Steel arrive at a disused railway station.  An entity, known as The Darkness, is using the negative emotions felt by a dead WWI soldier, a dead WWII pilot and dead submariners.  A ghost hunter arrives at the station and becomes caught up in the plot.  Our heroes suffer at the “hands” of the entity and are caught up in it’s scenarios.  In the end, the entity is beaten (to an extent) by a chilling method.

In essence, you could quite easily remove some of the pronouns and you could write your own episode by filling in the blanks.  And yet, these aren’t simple cookie-cutter episodes.  This Assignment has only 4 main characters: Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum), Tully the ghost hunter (Gerald James) and Pearce (Tom Kelly), the WWI soldier and primary ghost.  The sets are equally limited - the short railway station platforms, the lobby, the footbridge between platforms, one hotel bedroom and the hotel bar.  The number of sets reflects the limited budgets, of course, and it also reflects the fact that early TV programs showed their stage roots and the live audience roots.  Yet it also adds to the claustrophobic character of the shows; the feeling of being trapped in the situation.

The acting in this episode is first rate.  Our ghost hunter is an absolute amateur pitted against the cool professionalism of our two protagonists.  Pearce alternates between a malicious glee, a cold predator and a melancholy man who just wants his life back.  The other ghosts all show their fear in the situations they are put in.  There are several extremely chilling set pieces: Steel possessed by the ghost of the dead fighter pilot, Tully, Sapphire and Steel trapped in a recreation of the submariners’ deaths, Sapphire possessed by the Darkness.

It may be that this is chilling because of the age in which it is set.  In my schools (during the 1970s and 1980s) we were taught regularly about the Second World War.  Films shown were set then.  We all either had grandparents who fought or parents born during the war and the whole country still bore scars from the conflict.  Having a malicious and powerful ghost from not long before that conflict made it seem chillingly real.

Take a look at this clip: Steel Gets Trapped (YouTube) and tell me that the clip doesn’t send shivers up your spine.

Sapphire and Steel was made and shown in a time when meta humour hadn’t become the norm.  None of the shows broke the flow by sending itself up or by referring to a previous run in a mocking way.  As far as the series was concerned, there were no other shows anywhere and they existed in their own reality, in their own “now”.  This made them more immediate and helped to draw you in.  This episode was written for adults rather than children (nowadays it would come with all sorts of warnings about the perceived terror) and yet, because of it’s early evening showing, there was no bad language, no sex and no real violence.  The entire sense of danger came about by well designed sets, great writing, an extremely eerie music score and finally by the fact that the actors played the whole thing entirely straight and used their skills to their best effect.

In the final scenes, we are shown the cold practicality of Sapphire and Steel: they trade the last years of the ghost hunter’s life to the Darkness in exchange for it departing.  Worse still, from our perspective, it is Sapphire that leads him to his end - the compassionate Sapphire leads a human being to his death for the greater good.  That is the sort of writing that needs to return to television drama.

So how do you cope with December?  Well, faking your own death is harder nowadays what with DNA testing and the internet so thats not always an option.  The days of a clean fake death are over and you will need to sacrifice another human being to make sure you leave a body.  Pro-tip: pick a part of society where there are both lots of them and they won’t be missed: Members of Parliament are plentiful but not always available, so scout out your nearest reality TV studio for ideas.

After the jump, I will be providing you with a list of dos and don’ts which will enable you to get all the way to the end with only minimal mental anguish:

Do: avoid the shops like the plague.  Not only will they pump continual Christmas songs at you, they will try to part you from your money in the most painful way possible.

Don’t: go shopping alone.  If you ignore the first tip, make sure you go as a team. Not only will you be able to fight back in the stores, the resultant pub crawl will last that bit longer.

Do: wear warm clothing.  Remember, if you are from the South your blood is thin and watery and you will feel very poorly.  Only the Northerner has built up the necessary resistance to be able to venture outside.  Call in sick and avoid the cold.

Don’t: watch TV at all during this month.  While those shiny goods with flashing lights will look tempting, the shops are only selling them because they don’t want them.  And neither does anyone else.  They only want the space on the shelves to sell Easter Eggs next year.  And your money.  Don’t be fooled.

Do: stock up on tinned food and other non-perishables, like alcohol.  The Apocalypse is predicted, don’t be the only one not ready.  On the same note, don’t forget your extra rounds and landmines - the ravening hordes will be after your food and blood, keep them both safe.

Don’t: be a member of the wrong religion should the Apocalypse occur.  I have no idea which religion is right, but will you look daft if you’re not a member.

Do: remember that while lakes of blood look good to drink when all the water has turned to sand, it may not be.  Boil the blood before drinking it to ensure it’s cleanliness.

Don’t: approach any animals unless you are sure they are dead.  Attacking one of the four horsemen’s modes of transport will be both embarrassing and painful.  It will also make you very dead.

Do: avoid any pits of lave or passages to Hell that open up in front of you.  Both will result in very nasty burns.

Don’t: ignore any prophecies coming from the seemingly insane.  This could mean the difference between a set of wings and a white robe and eternal damnation.

Above all, have fun, stay safe and don’t get between me and the Rapture!