At last! From an anonymous donor, a box with large notices announcing "DELICATE INSTRUMENT" has arrived at the JREF headquarters bearing a Los Angeles return address, and inside we find a pristine, working, "Mark V" Scientology E-Meter! It's complete with the famous "tin-can" hand-grips, in a beautiful wooden case obviously designed to discourage examination of the interior, but as you might expect, this mysterious device is now in the process of being opened and examined. I can promise you that the circuitry will be developed, and published here as soon as it's available.

This model dates from 1979. It's not the plastic-and-chrome version that replaced this much more Frankenstein-era beauty. In any case, the device retailed in 1995 for $625; the fancier Mark Super VII now goes for $3,850! It's simply an ohm-meter, a "Wheatstone Bridge" circuit that measures resistance. The subject holds what appear to be used used hairspray cans attached by cables to the meter box, one in each hand, and as the pressure or moisture of the skin changes, the meter registers significant mystical data — if you're a Scientologist.

With visions of highly-paid lawyers dancing in my head, I noticed a bright red-and-silver plaque attached to one end tells the potential user:

By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counselling [sic]. The Electrometer is not medically or [sic] scientifically useful for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any disease. It is not medically or [sic] scien [sic] tifically capable of improving the health or bodily function of anyone and is for religious use by students and Ministers of the Church of Scientology only.

Then I guess I won't be using this super-quack device a lot....

The ever-complaining Sylvia Browne — now into 200+ days of ignoring the JREF challenge — has chosen to use a direct lie (that's fabricate, deceive, misrepresent, and prevaricate, to make it quite clear) when asked, on the MSN Live Chat site by a woman: "What ever happened to you and Randi, Sylvia?" She replied by saying, "I was ready for what he had to show me and he never contacted me!" Folks, this is a lie. As readers will know, I have been making every attempt to reach Sylvia Browne, here on the web page, by postal mail, by e-mail, by telephone. And I assure you that she has made no attempt whatsoever to reach me, or this Foundation. We are easily reachable, we always respond, and Sylvia knows this full well.

Ah, but now I learn that she's opted to offer this most compelling reason for not being willing to fulfill her internationally-witnessed, live, on-air, promise to be tested by the JREF for the million-dollar prize. She says, "I don't like people who don't believe in God." So she doesn't like me? Hold on! Where have I heard that before? It was Uri Geller, who, when asked why he didn't snap up the million bucks, told the interviewer that he, too, doesn't "like" me.

Let's get real here. If these folks don't like me, what better blow to me would there be, than carrying off the JREF prize? Think about that....

The Just-look-at-this department:

Click in on http://www.keelynet.com/energy/perry.htm and call in a ten-year-old to pick out the scientific howlers. I'll just quote one sentence from the site:

Now it doesn't take a genius to figure out if I put in 100 watts and get out 350 watts I am getting a lot of free energy.

Very true! Now, you can take the million-dollar prize, of course. Unless, that is, you don't like me.....

I am frequently confronted with challengers who insist that science is "another religion," or that "science and religion are compatible." A response to those assertions can be long and tedious. I've come upon this excerpt by James Robert Brown, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, in his book "Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars," published by Harvard University Press. He observes:

We are often told that science is just another religion. No doubt there will be a number of striking similarities. Football is also called a religion, and again, there are lots of similarities. Of course, football is also called a science, and science sometimes called a sport. Are all these analogies helpful, or just tiresome duff? The religion/science analogy fails to hold up at the most crucial point — commitment.

Every physicist allows that quantum mechanics could be deeply wrong. They all agree that tomorrow it may be overthrown by some quite unexpected experimental result or by some new and profound theoretical insight. Of course, it would take time to assess the new evidence; it would be rash to abandon such a wonderful theory too quickly. But in principle, it could go the way of earth-centered astronomy.

Could any Christian, by contrast, abandon belief in the divinity of Christ? Or abandon the belief that Christ died for our sins? Or abandon the belief that God is the creator of all things? The difference between a physicist and a priest is not so much in the subject matter. Rather, the difference is fundamentally this: A physicist can abandon all the central beliefs of current physics and still remain a physicist. A priest cannot abandon certain central beliefs without giving up the vocation.

Commitment is a virtue in religion — and a sin in science.

I would add that despite this willingness — even eagerness — on the part of scientists to be rejected, reversed, or revised, science does work. And it works very well. Look around you and recognize that fully a fifth of those fellow humans you see might not be there, were it not for the benefits of science, and all of us would have significantly less life expectancy — to point out just part of the advantages we gain through science. Religion, on the other hand, cannot point to any example where it has produced a positive step forward in our progress. Indeed, it has hindered and muzzled progress; we need hardly go far to find how deeply responsible religion was for the madness of 9/11.

For "Christian" and "God" in Mr. Brown's comments above, we can substitute "Moslem" and "Allah," or "Jew" and "Jehovah,"along with other adjustments.....

News item from the past: In the summer of 1950, New York City hired an official rainmaker to ease a prolonged drought. The rainmaker, a Dr. Wallace E. Howell of Mount Washington Observatory, was paid $100 a day to create rain. That's 1950-dollars, remember. But we're now far beyond that sort of action, right? Maybe not. To quote Ricard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times:

In a world where the pope has performed exorcisms, it's perhaps not fair to mock anyone's belief system — even if that means calling some goofy psychic to tell her about your bad marriage, or trusting in a TV host to tell you that your late mother is watching over you and isn't angry with you for not visiting her more in the hospital. We find faith, and hope, and closure where we can.

That damn Krups coffee-maker just won't die, or at least stop blabbering. Reader Bryan Sink writes:

Oh how unfortunate that you weren't a teenager in the Bible Belt in the 1970's and 80's when the whole "backmasking" craze hit youth groups in every church on every street corner! I'm referring, of course, to the movement of ministers and youth leaders and ex-guitarists who listened to innumerable rock & roll records backwards, looking for satanic messages. Inevitably those who looked hard enough found them, and some lucky folks with connections in Nashville even made videos about these cryptic backwards messages, warning youths of the hidden satanic influence lurking behind their favorite pop stars' lyrics.

The crown jewel was Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," which, they claimed, was loaded from beginning to end with statements about loving and worshiping the Prince of Darkness. These messages, the clerics claimed, could enter into your subconscious, which would then decode them, absorb them and turn your thoughts toward unspeakable evil. "Hell's Bells" was the name of one of these video sets, which you might still be able to purchase today. The show host might, for example, play a clip of a backwards track from Styx's "Snowblind" telling you clearly in advance what the message said, simultaneously displaying the words at the bottom of the screen, and replaying the message several times (even at slower speeds) in case you felt that the spirit's statement was unclear.

Curiously enough, these backwards messages never came in complete sentences. Instead they were clips and quips of isolated words and phrases, never anything genuinely complete, coherent and meaningful. And of course, as evidenced by the fact that the announcers on such videos would play the clips again and again, the messages were admittedly quite indiscernible.

So when I visited http://coffeepotghost.com at your suggestion, I felt like I was taking a trip back down memory lane. All the supposed messages from the coffeemaker came in the form of two or three word phrases, some longer, mostly consisting of names ("Golly! It doesn't sound like any other English words we know, so it must just be somebody's name"!); not to mention the fact that most of the messages are ridiculously garbled. But the most important thing you'll notice is that, to people like myself who were fed from adolescence on the backmasking doctrine, these are obviously heavily doctored recordings.

On the "Meet the Spirits" page, the very first spirit introduced is Andy, of whom a certain Miss Whitey allegedly says, "Today Andrew said he don't mean it." You can click on the link and have the .wav file play the supposed spirit voice for you. It sounded so suspiciously familiar to me that I saved the link to my desktop and then opened it up with Microsoft's Sound Recorder, which has a "reverse" function on it. Sure enough, after reversing the cryptic message it turned out to be nothing more than a clear recording of a young American woman talking casually, edited mid-sentence. Unfortunately that appears to be about the clearest message you'll find from any of the coffeemaker quotes on the site. The rest is meaningless goop. I should say, it's meaningless goop that some poor soul spent a whole lot of time creating in order to dumfound the unwary. Sigh. All too familiar.

Reader Amos Elberg adds:

I visited the very amusing coffee pot ghost website you linked to from this week's commentary. I thought several of the voices sounded oddly familiar. Then I recognized one of them, and recalled where I'd heard them all. They sound exactly like early speech synthesizer software that I had on a computer in the '80s, I believe a Commodore 64. The software, which was not very good at matching a voice to English spelling and grammar, required the user to spend a lot of time adjusting aural parameters of the speech. You could make it sound quite unnatural, but it was usually possible to make out what the voice was saying anyway.

Of course, you could adjust them for the purpose of making funny voices instead of accurate ones, which I found very amusing when I was 12. In any event, I'm rather sure that at least one of the coffee pot voices was the unmodified, default voice that came with the software. Most of the others sound exactly like the funny voices I used to make with the software when I was a kid.

Another reader, Ken Teutsch, participated by actually writing to the site:

I looked at the website and offered the simple suggestion that, if she wanted people to listen to the voices, she should get rid of the obnoxiously loud music. (It's louder than the voices and very annoying.) She cheerfully replied:

Howdy Ken, Thank You for taking the time to write. Actually, I couldn't care less whether people listen to the voices or not. I'm not out to change the mass paradigm. The site is what it is. Thanks for stopping by! : D. Charli

Now, if I thought my coffee pot was speaking to me with voices from beyond the grave or wherever, I would be a lot more bent out of shape about it. Ghostly voices in coffee pots (or waffle irons, for that matter) is pretty mass paradigm-squashing stuff. I think I would prefer wild-eyed fanaticism to this hair-tossing, "Whatever!" sort of attitude. I look forward to the test results, but don't harbor a lot of hope that any paradigms will be smashed.

"Just Paul" adds:

This reminds me of the Kingsman's "Louie Louie" song — where the FBI was investigating the supposed pornographic lyrics — but in the end couldn't agree on what was being sung, and finally had to ask the band personally. Turns out all of the pornographic lyrics that people had been "hearing" weren't there at all — just wishful thinking and active imaginations. I noticed that each "voice" has a label next to it that states what it supposedly "says." I downloaded the "voices" without reading these labels. I was unable to hear anything but noise. Next I read the labels for each "voice" and was able to pick a "voice" out of the noise. Finally I placed everything in a playlist and chose random order playback and was again unable to pick out the "voices."

Another contributor, Christine Engleman, suggests:

All I can say is that someone needs to switch to decaff! It should be interesting to see how far she is willing to go with this.

Bernie Siegel, of Miami, writes:

Mr. Randi, just a short note to let you know how much I enjoyed this week's column. I must return to my kitchen now, as my toaster is calling me!

Have I created a monster by publicizing this damn Krups device?

A reader merely signing himself "Jeff" has suggested:

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend visiting the site www.wearerobots.com and viewing the fourth cartoon from the left, entitled "Tendertron." It's about a robot that believes in all things paranormal, spiritual, and "new-age," and quite amusing. I think I have a better appreciation of the type of people you have to put up with every day!

I endorse that suggestion....

With an appropriate 04/01/2002 credit to "Think, published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy," here is an account from our friend Tony Youens, in the UK. Since it's rather long, we'll run it in two parts:

Psychic Sophistry

I was once offered a free psychic reading by someone who described herself as a "mystic." We had met during a television debate and afterwards one of her satisfied customers told me of her amazing talent and assured me that a single visit would be enough to convince me of her abilities.

Accepting the offer, I made an appointment and visited the psychic at her home in Nottingham. I was ushered into a small room that was suitably festooned with mystical artifacts and adorned with books on tarot cards and astrology. During the reading my psychic used such ancient arts as numerology, astrology, palmistry, tarot cards and rune stones and even found hidden meaning in the color of my tie. I remember that, amongst other things, she told me I was an only child and that I had four children the eldest of which was a boy. Both these statements are certainly true.

I can see how this might make an impact on many of her clients: the buildup was superb and the ambience just right. But I was, and still remain, utterly unimpressed. The reason for my indifference was that I had studied many such psychic readings and understood how and why they worked.

The absence of critical thinking

Psychic readings come in a variety of different flavors and each psychic uses slightly different techniques to achieve their effect. Apart from those I have already mentioned above, the list includes spiritualism, tea-leaf reading, graphology, psychometry, and a host of other methods of divination and character analysis, each with its own impressive-sounding name (although, mercifully, "extispicy," the reading of entrails, seems to have fallen into disuse). There are two common fallacies that play an essential part in the uncritical acceptance of psychic readings.

Firstly, post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). This fallacy occurs when people assume that if event A preceded event B, then A caused B. An example would be believing that, as one passed one's driving test soon after buying a good luck charm, the charm must have caused one to pass the test. Many superstitions are based on the post hoc fallacy. And psychics make use of it too. People assume that, if one had an unhappy childhood, and if one's psychic claims that one had an unhappy childhood, then this must be because the psychic is somehow causally sensitive to one's past history: the psychic has occult powers. But of course, a one-off observation of one thing happening after another is not nearly enough to justify the belief that the one thing is causally related to the other. I scratch my nose. Immediately after, someone in China sneezes. Did my nose-scratching cause the sneeze? Of course not.

In addition, when people assess the effectiveness of such esoteric arts, many simply look at the results without considering what, if any, mechanism might explain how the results were achieved. Thus astrology, for example, is still highly regarded without anyone being able to come up with an even half-credible explanation of how it is supposed to work. You are told that you are going through a difficult time because Saturn is aligned with Mars in the third house; you are indeed going through a difficult period: ergo, astrology works! The question of how it is supposed to work is never raised.

Secondly, there is the appeal to ignorance (ad ignorantium). The burden of proof clearly lies with those who think that psychic powers exist, rather than on those who believe they don't. Yet people often assume that, in the absence of any proof that psychic powers don't exist, it is as at least as rational to believe that they exist as it is to believe that they don't. Again, this is fallacious reasoning.

There is also a tendency to automatically attribute a supernatural explanation when a more mundane one does not immediately present itself. Psychics thus often try to claim victory by default. Those of us who are skeptical of psychic powers are familiar with the challenge, "Well how do you explain that, then?" Sometimes it's possible to give an answer and sometimes not; but when we can't, psychics often smugly assume their case is proven. This has happened to me in a number of interviews. For example:

INTERVIEWER: So, Zarina, explain to us how do you communicate with the dead?

ZARINA: Well I communicate with those who have passed on through my spirit guide, Chief Running Wolf.

INTERVIEWER: Well, Tony, how do you explain it?

All Zarina has said is that she communicates with the dead (those who have passed on) by communicating with the dead (Chief Running Wolf) but any attempt by the skeptic to point out that no evidence has been offered, will look evasive.

(That's Part I, to be followed next week by Part II, headed, "Cold Reading.")

Just a thought: How did the ancient Hebrews survive without Chinese food?