Tell The Internet

Yes, I really am OCD enough to still have thisClick to make it bigger*

For this, you need to know two things:

1. Talent vacuums Peter Andre and Katie “Jordan” Price have separated after four years of marriage; and
2. Several years ago, for reasons I can’t fully remember now, I followed a year’s worth of predictions by newspaper “psychic” Mystic Meg.

Suffice to say, that Meg made a number of predictions for the coming (as was) year of 2006 in popular “newspaper” the News of the World. Over the following year I made it my tedium-filled internet business to see if any of these predictions came true. The results were pretty damning. Of the estimated 30 definitive predictions Meg made, five (5) came “true”, that’s 1/6^th of her predictions; let’s face it, you’d be able to make that amount of shit up for the next 12 months just as accurately. But Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t pay you for them.

Anyway, when the terrible news of the Andre/Price split broke on the world, I couldn’t help but recall that one of the five correct predictions Meg made was: “Jordan and Peter Andre will be lovers in 2006 and for ever…”

Oh dear. I’m not going to take any pleasure in Andre’s misfortune - he’s a close** personal friend; I am however going to take pleasure in knowing that “Mystic” Meg is even worse a psychic than I’d thought before. As a post-script, since I did all this crap, Meg has never made another series of predictions like this. Of course, she’d have known that I was going to check up on her…

* That’s what she said! etc.
** Well, I know his cousin

According to the internet, a couple in Gloucestershire are using “Physics laws” to find their missing dog; and this “little-known practice involves sending energy to people, animals or plants anywhere in the world”.

According to another place in the internet, radionics has no plausible biophysical mechamism [and] “most physicians dismiss radionics as quackery.”

It makes you wonder in this day and age a) what science in the media is coming to, b) how gullible some people can be and c) just how cruel pseudoscientists can be. You may remember that radionics was also used to try and find Madeleine McCann - and that worked well.

I’d suggest that everyone who has ever been blinded by science in the papers read Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science