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(Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from a recently-completed chapter of James Randi's forthcoming book, A Magician In The Laboratory. - BKT)

lulubio1Magicians are a critical part of my discussion here, so please bear with me while I give you a peek behind the curtain; a cursory glance at who and what we magicians are, and aren’t. First, we’re entertainers, actors, showbiz people who have as our primary objective the delight of our audiences. We’re deceivers, taking on roles and characters to express our art, just as any actor does. With a few rare but important exceptions, we're not scientists – though some us will have enough knowledge of science to recognize flummery, simply by using common sense. Our highly specific expertise comes from knowledge of the ways in which our audiences can be led to quite false conclusions by calculated means – psychological, physical and especially visual. Scientists think and perceive logically by using their training and observational skills, and are thus often insulated from the possibility that there might be chicanery at work. After all, a bacterium or a crystal will not go out of its way to deceive the scientific observer, which an appropriately motivated human being most assuredly will…

In this chapter, allow me to lead you through some of the differences between how magicians and scientists view – and manipulate – the world. The former do so for purposes of entertainment, the latter to further our knowledge of the world around us. But not always.

The scientific establishment within the former Soviet Union spent tremendous sums of money in the pursuit of such questionable projects such as “psitronic machines,” “faster-than-light communication,” ESP, PK, “free energy” and countless other notions that – presently – can only be described as pseudoscientific. Lest the ghosts of formerly doubtful ideas such as radioactivity, x-rays, relativity and even germ theory – all at first condemned and even ridiculed by orthodox science – be flaunted as examples of academic myopia, I ask you to note that those major discoveries were very quickly tested and accepted into the ever-widening spectrum of facts and wonders that serve us in probing our universe; parapsychology and the above mentioned Soviet gizmos have, by comparison, produced not a single positive, definitive, repeatable event or claim, despite the bleatings of their apologists who suggest that perhaps their delusions should not be expected to conform to the standards of real science because this is something “different.” Bullshit. It’s either science or it’s not. Either plant your feet in the soil of terra firma, or establish a base in Elysium…

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Our friends at Reason magazine have a cruise on the horizon! We would like to invite interested skeptics to join Reason’s all-star cast of investigative journalists, policy wonks, and assorted warriors for freethinking and free markets for a week at sea. It’s Reason’s first-ever seven-day cruise! They will sail on the Celebrity Solstice, which will embark on January 30, 2011, from Fort Lauderdale, and visit the tropical ports of San Juan, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten.

You’ll enjoy thought-provoking discussions on science, the culture wars, and the future of liberty. Special guests include bestselling science writer Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist, Genome), and Reason’s science correspondent Ron Bailey, author of Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution. Also aboard will be The Seasteading Institute’s Patri Friedman, Reason columnist and Mercatus scholar Veronique DeRugy, and Reasoners Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Shikha Dalmia, Jacob Sullum.

Shared cabins start at around $1,500 per person, but some are selling out quickly. Get more information and register today at www.ReasonCruise.com.

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I was shopping at our local produce market in 2007 when I happened to overhear someone talking about a problem he was having with his beehives. For the second year in a row, many of his bees had flown off and never returned. Others outright died. My fellow-shopper lost about half his hives.  

This was worrisome, because bees are not individualists – certainly, they are not so individualistic as to decamp from their hives. Yet after doing some research I found that beekeepers all over the country beekeepers had reported this same problem since late 2006. They even began referring to it as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.  

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In the week of February 4th, 1982, biologist, baseball fanatic, and wit Stephen Jay Gould published a warm, funny review of Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus in the outsized weekly called The New York Review of Books. The review was about many things. It was about the even distribution of bad science and woo across all economic classes. It was about the thanklessness of the job of being a public defender of reason. It was about Martin Gardner's prose style. It was about creationism. One of the things it was not about, as it happens, was Uri Geller. Nevertheless, Uri Geller responded with a letter to the editor.

He did so this week, in the issue of October 14th, 2010, nearly thirty years after the publication of the article in question. Both the article's subject and author are dead.

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Category: Latest JREF News
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Here is a recap of the stories that appeared in recent weeks at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo in medicine.

  1. We don't like science so the media don't talk about science which makes us not like science which makes the media not report on science which –
  2. Fact or Faked: Faked!
  3. Unbalancing The Power
  4. Homeopathy: Now Available at Your Local Wal-Mart