Reading The Weird

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

As I’ve said recently, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about ESP and the paranormal.  This of course is a great relief as last week it was “gruesome unsolved crimes” and “ghosts” – a decidedly more unwholesome mix.  And incidentally possibly in itself a symptom of being ill, since weird hormonal fluctuations and sinus infections both send me to the “unclean” side of the mind.  (By which I mean MOSTLY the gruesome unsolved crimes.)  I spent months reading truly strange things like stories of Roman atrocities when I was pregnant with #2 son, which involved both hormonal fluctuations (natch) and my having a massive upper respiratory infection which we couldn’t treat without antibiotics, not advisable in my condition.

But the fact that the reading “craving” (there is no rhyme or reason to it) has now moved from crimes completely and is only touching ghosts peripherally as I research other “psi” stuff, leads me to believe that what set it off is Rye Crisp.

Rye Crisp is something Amanda Green and I wrote as a proposal and outline YEARS ago.  It was supposed to be ALMOST a straight mystery, with just a hint of supernatural.  My agent refused to send it out flat.  (Actually through my eight years with her, she turned down everything I ever tried to write with anyone else and, I’m now convinced, either got horribly confused lied about one that had been submitted before I hired her saying my partner had withdrawn it.  This cost me a friendship, and in retrospect – and having talked to my now ex-writing partner again and believing her – was probably not true.)  Why?  I don’t know.  Perhaps the books really weren’t that commercial.  (Amanda and I might have been taking the fine edge of supernatural/not supernatural too tightly.) Or perhaps – given the 5 for 5 turn down rate of collaborations, my agent simply hated dealing with multiple authors, one of them not her client.

Anyway, recently we started kicking it around between us again, because what it could become – once we were afraid it would be too supernatural for mystery – was sort of a cross between CSI and Monster Hunter.  (More CSI, I’m not plagiarizing Larry.  Nor could I.  In fact the collaboration with him is going to need major assists on guns from some of you.)  What I mean is that there is an organized police force dealing with the paranormal.  Yeah, I know, not a new concept, (just like a force that kills monsters is not new – I mean Buffy) but our schtick is to make it as realistic as possible.  Which means having enough techno-babble to make it sound “real.”

This means I’ve fallen sideways into a world of weird to very weird reads.  It’s appropriate to where my life is just now, because I can read a chapter or two while having breakfast or doing dishes, and there’s no story continuity I must mind. In fact, I have a book in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, a different one by my bed.  Which is okay, as hardly any of them are riveting reads.

Look, I have reason to know there are SOME psi phenomena – we’ll leave it at that.  Though if pushed I’ll point out I abandoned the office in our last house (and sort of because of other stuff eventually moved out) when I came up the attic stairs, and my computer was on (it turned off after ten minutes.  This was early morning.) which could be a glitch.  What couldn’t be a glitch was the mouse moving on the pad.  I don’t mean the cursor.  I mean the mouse.  On the pad.  (Before you ask, the kids were too young to rig anything.)  I could ignore the creepy feeling I’d been getting while I was in the attic/office alone (like someone reading over my shoulder) and I could think the creepy “messages” I’d found typed on the screen were the guys freaking me out, even if they denied it.  But that mouse moving around sent me running down the stairs and to working remotely on the laptop for a year before we moved.  And no, this wasn’t an isolated incident.  More on that later – but if I ever need to convince myself that they are all fakery and become a confirmed skeptic, I’ll read more books on psi research.

One I bought for its truly wonderful title (which I might steal for a fantasy novel) for instance the gentleman writing starts telling us how he got interested in the paranormal because he had a near fatal illness.  As you read the FIRST chapter of the book you realize he had all these interesting experiences and feelings because he was doped to his gills.  And the “messages” he feels are important to transmit to the world are just what you expect in the circumstances.  When I read them aloud to older son, he said “That sounds like that take off parody on what Moses would have been like if he really had been smoking pot ‘We should all be kind to lizards, because they’re awesome and stuff.’”

Then there’s the UFO conspiracy books (they’re sort of sideways related to psi) in which the aliens all give the sort of messages parodied in Good Omens, “Take care of your planet and be nice to people” doesn’t seem like the sort of thing anyone would cross the galaxy to tell you, does it?  I mean you can get the same from your priests, shamans or teachers and for that matter from the manned drones in government (who seem to think of themselves as priests, shamans and teachers.)

Then there’s the psi researchers on a tour of the USSR’s famous psi research facilities who meekly believed it was an accident when their visas were cancelled before the greatest demonstrations.

You sort of look at these books and go to the back and see where these people have degrees, real degrees from real institutions, and then you look at the page again and you think “you can’t be THAT dumb.”

Part of the reason to persist – in fact, part of the reason to own these books at all – is that Heinlein at least was convinced that psi not only existed but that it could be researched and harnessed.  He not only used it in his books, but talked about it extensively in at least one essay.

Partly of course, it was because it was the seventies, and people were taking psi at least somewhat seriously, and both sides of the iron curtain were at least making gestures towards researching it.

And I wonder how much the fact that it got swept away – far far away – from all respectability has to do with its big push being in the seventies, when everyone was on drugs.  Cause or effect, take your pick, but yeah, the phenomena might have “manifested” because everyone was swatting away purple lizards (and being kind to them.) But I also wonder if the loss of respectability – which in turn means it attracts more mentally-unstable and “I wanna believe” types… and writers, natch – was related to the same sort of reaction that consigned shag carpeting and bell bottoms to the ash heap of history.  (And the attempts at reviving them have only sort of worked.  I keep wondering who in heck was nostalgic for the seventies.)

However, I think part of the problem, and the reason the “scientific harnessing” of the subject matter might never be possible, or at least not until a scientific breakthrough in another area makes it possible to figure out better instruments to view it, is that the subject matter might fall (with quantum) in that broad area of “the observer influences the observed.”  I.e. we get silly and unreliable data because the researchers are silly and unreliable.  If the universe truly is full of quantum thingies and powered by narrativium this is quite possible.

Something to consider is that the experience I described above, of coming up the stairs and seeing my mouse move by itself on the pad, while I KNEW everyone else in the house was asleep, is not even unusual for writers.  Nor is the creepy, disturbing feeling of someone reading over your shoulder.  Or finding stuff written you know you didn’t write.  (And I don’t mean like the Medieval Romance, because that one, by the date was right after I hit my head, which in case you wonder was AFTER I moved from the house with the auto-moving mouse.)

Almost every writer, including friends who are atheists will tell of this sort of experience.  (Of course, they have to trust you to tell you that, so I’m not naming names.)

Apparently there’s something with working with story and invoking people who never exists that invites WEIRD “supernatural” events.  The pattern seems to be that these happen after you live and write in a house for about five years, and it will center on your writing area.  (Which holds true of all except the house we rented in SC and there our experiences were neither unique nor isolated.  I mean, I thought I was going nuts till I heard that the chick across the lake who let loose with the firearm occasionally in the evening was shooting at the fairies that lived under the lake and who had stolen her boyfriend.  Yeah, I wish I was joking.)

Anyway – what part of this is the mind influencing the world and the world influencing the mind?  The narrative telling the story or the story imposing itself upon the world?

I don’t know.  I wouldn’t presume to guess.  I don’t even know where precisely my stories come from.  And every time I get sick and can’t write, I start worrying it will never come back.  I totally understand Stephen King keeping his teaching certificate up to date “in case the writing goes away.”

Like all those psi researchers, I’m making my living on the margins of the “not quite reputable”

Only, unlike them, I’m not absolutely sure all of this stuff – including my writing – is real.  In fact, I’m sure the story he tells of someone controlling the Chinese population through psi isn’t real.  I wish I weren’t sure, because that would mean I’d never have heard to forced abortions and dying rooms.

On the other hand, the books occasionally make me laugh aloud (unintentionally.  Particularly the ones written in the seventies.)  And you know, lizards ARE awesome and stuff.  And besides, we should take care of our planet and be nice to one another, because the guys from Alpha Centauri say “Don’t make me come out there.”

 

441 thoughts on “Reading The Weird”

  1. I am a rationalist. I don’t like the ideas of Bigfoot, ancient astronauts, homeopathic medicine. I don’t believe in UFOs. I suspect that 99.99% of people who are interested in psychic stuff are nutbags.

    Give me the good old scientific method any day of the year.

    There is no compelling reason to believe in psy.

    …but there is also not rigorous proof that it does not exist.

    I’ve had several odd experiences that I think are likely best explained by selective memories, confirmation bias, defective monkey brains evolved to eat banannas instead of doing science, etc.

    …and yet, despite being a rationalist, I still think that it’s not impossible that
    some psychic phenomena are real.

    We have no idea how the universe really works (are we all running in a simulation? In the mind of God?). Personally, I’d not be surprised to learn that some limited form of precognition exists. I’d bet against it, but I’d bet $20 against it, not my left arm.

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    1. Rationalist? What’s rational about disbelief in psychic phemomena? Does it commit the fallacy of the undistributed middle? Or the fallacy of four terms? Does it cherry pick? Or commit argumentum ad misericordiam?

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      1. > Rationalist? What’s rational about disbelief in psychic phemomena?

        Exactly my point – “skeptics” are often not really rational at all, but just parroting back a certain set of “skeptical” talking points.

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      1. Wayne- telekinesis takes a lot of energy. The most I have ever seen is rolling a pencil or something like that. The practitioner was wiped out of hours afterwards. ;-) Physics is still a phenomenon in our world and applies to telekinesis– Work equals force times distance. Short answer– your hand is too heavy and too far away.

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        1. “distance” in the equation you give isn’t the distance from the origination of the force, it’s the distance the object was moved.

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          1. True, but you’re dealing with an inverse square for the distance. And I believe there’s a multiplying effect for blog interference.

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        2. Is Telekinesis focused or radiative? If it is radiative like light, then the inverse square law applies.

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          1. What do you mean by those terms? (I hate being lost in scientific terminology lol) If you mean focused the way I used focused– You have to focus on the pencil and it becomes your entire world. (I bet you don’t mean focus the way I mean focus)

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            1. Probably. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” — Carl Sagan.
              I read once that the first hide of the duck-billed platypus brought to England still has scissor marks from where a sceptic tried to demonstrate that it was pieces of different animals stitched together.

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              1. The problem is that it’s not extraordinary and not even a claim. ;-) Just experience. Frankly I don’t even care if I am disbelieved. It is when someone believes me that I get worried (don’t want or need followers– just another way to get into a lot of trouble).

                Yea– I remember reading the skepticism about the platypus–

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              2. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” — Carl Sagan.

                Given that he knew squat about philosophy, I think we can gratuitously dismiss his gratuitous assumption. In any case, we all know he was only trying to squirm out of the question of the existence of You-Know-Who.

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            2. If Marco tells me about Unicorns I say maybe.

              If Marco tells me about Pegasus I say bollocks.

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        2. Many of the forces explained by physics could not be measured until we were able to build sophisticated instruments. Also it is only recently that we could see and measure atoms and counterparts (neutrons, electrons, protons –and now even smaller pieces). A few years ago (please forgive me if I cannot remember the scientist or even the paper– I blame it on chemo) one scientist said after the discovery of another particle that they wanted to find it desperately and then suddenly it was there. (I got shivers when I read it– did we observe it into existence? or was it there?)

          The supernatural world has been there with the beginning of humanity. Shamans and other tribal healers and seers found plant that could help and sometimes heal disease. How did they do it without the sophisticated test methods etc of today? Well, anthropologists have talked to working shamans in places like the Amazon. The men and sometimes women walk into another world and are taught– Many of those medicines that they first found end up in our medicines.

          So rational or not, I do think we either don’t have the right equipment to measure the supernatural experience or we can’t discover this realm with logical means. There might be another state of being that shows us these other things. So we are logical, emotional, and missing element beings.

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          1. Kind of hard to set up a situation to measure input like “my sister and I suddenly felt a huge urge to go pick my brother up an hour early, and arrived two minutes after he’d taken a discus to the head.” (The coach wasn’t supervising– we got there before he did– and was going to have him sit on the sidelines until it was time to go home. We were only halfway to the hospital before he wasn’t able to answer the question “what is your name?”) For the record, I hate waiting, and I had been writing/reading on my star trek boards.

            It’s like trying to set up a way to measure lightning strikes, but rarer and with a wider variety to confuse stuff.

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            1. True– or when my father came home from the Navy, my grandfather dreamed that his car was in the ditch off the side of the road and was dying (my grandfather even remembered what road from his dream). He got out of bed and rushed there in the car in his bathrobe. Found my dad in time. He was bleeding badly. This was before my parents met and long before I was born.

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              1. I’d claim these are two totally different phenomena, at that– and I know that my family has a bad habit of dropping a line to anybody we know if we have a nightmare and they’re in it. Thank God, I haven’t had anything accurate.

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                1. Maybe my grandfather was more open in his sleep– though his dream was in real time– He believed it was a vision from G-d. I think families are more connected (by blood and spirit maybe?) than strangers are connected imho.

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                    3. I think that it’s entirely possible that our connections to our family could cause some sort of ESP, and that God could cause ESP.

                      Kind of like the folks who try to debunk stuff in the Bible by showing how it could happen naturally, when there’s nothing that says God couldn’t use a natural process on command.

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                    5. Yep, that one always annoys me, if God made the world, he obviously made all the ‘natural’ stuff, so why can anything ‘natural’ automatically have nothing to do with God?

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                2. My family lies, when I call. My accuracy rate is about 90%. Unfortunately. The bad part is when I call mom and say “have you heard from so and so?” because I haven’t heard from them in a while, she says “Oh, no. did you dream?” :P Of course, there are tons of rational explanations for the dreams.

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            3. Of course, you’d need to remember all the times you had this urge and nothing went wrong. [Smile]

              Of course, I remember the time Mom got this “urge” to call me and nothing was wrong on my end. [Wink]

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              1. True– however, when you read in the paper the next day that someone was *blink-blink either raped or mugged on that street– you kind of listen to the urge even when it is not anything important. Although how you can think that your mother calling you is NOT important, I don’t know. *slice and run

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                1. In this case, she had called me *because* she thought something might be wrong. On the other hand, she hadn’t called me when things *were* wrong.

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                  1. She did call– and did she call before it went wrong? Maybe she is a few days late… my mother’s timing is impeccable i.e. calls at the worst time ever lol

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                    1. Logically, if you can foresee, and you act to avert an outcome, you have changed the future to one where you needn’t have bothered. This would affect your hit rate.
                      Without that failure to change the future, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex would have been called Laius: the King Who Lived to a Great Age and Peacefully Bequeathed His Kingdom to his Appointed Successor, and the major point would have been the scene where he told the oracle, “what, do I look dead?”

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                    2. Sometimes– you can affect an outcome (i.e. my grandfather prevented his son’s death or Foxfier prevented a death) or sometimes it is lesson that whatever you do does not affect the outcome. And then you may not even figure out that it was a warning until too late. As my hubby says when you are dealing with hurricanes “run early, run often” because you never know when it will really be devastating or not. As for the other stuff– I don’t know– I think time is involved and we still don’t know what time is– Maybe only small things can be affected– Maybe the major historical turning points are going to happen anyway. Idk

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                    3. (Missed this the first time around.)

                      Logically, if you can foresee, and you act to avert an outcome, you have changed the future to one where you needn’t have bothered. This would affect your hit rate.

                      An extreme example of this is the movie “Source Code” [spoiler warning!] where the operative in the experiment attempting to view the past discovers he can change the past, which means the people running the experiment never ran it, and they’re still waiting for their chance to demonstrate that it might possibly work.

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                    4. One of the fascinating theories of time is that it runs both ways. BTW my husband’s explanation for ANYTHING weird happening around the house is that it’s time travelers. Like the mouse thing? He says it must be they’ve got some kind of invisibility shield and time travel. I THINK he’s joking…

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                    5. Time does NOT go “both ways.” Time doesn’t run — that is an illusion caused by people who run through Time. Most only run in the one direction (and at constant speed) but a view figure out how to run the other direction … and some just wander about aimlessly.

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                    6. What I meant — and I find the theory fascinating if not necessarily plausible — is that what we do in the future can change the past. Not just the TELLING of the past, but what happened.

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                2. By the way, one of things I liked about Anne McCaffrey’s Pegasus stories was that they had a way of knowing if a “bad dream” (for example) was a psi dream or just a bad dream. The idea was that when an individual had a psi experience there was certain activities in the individual’s brain which could be recorded/detected. In the stories, the psis brain activity was recorded so the team could know if a psi event occurred.

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                  1. Dreamers know the difference… that is all I can say. It is more real than other dreams. Most dreams are symbolic or clearing out the brain and body dreams. The true ones– well, they are hard to miss.

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                    1. Not going to argue that. All I’m saying is that in the McCaffrey’s stories there was *objective* evidence. Science needs objective evidence to work from.

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                    2. Yea– McCaffrey had some great stories. ;-) Objective would be nice– but this phenom is in the subjective area, I am told. ;-)

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                    3. The comments about objective evidence reminded me of another story. It was one of Hugh Walters’ space stories. I think it was Sojourn to Saturn. UNESCO had found a pair of telepathic twins and were using them to communicate between Earth and Saturn. (Telepathy is not limited by the speed of light in that universe.)
                      In order to control the ship from Mission Control while the crew was in cold sleep, the twins would be wired up to EEG monitors, and signals would be sent down wires into the brain of one twin, and read in the brain of the other twin through her EEG monitor.
                      Now a phenomenon like that would be objective evidence of telepathy.

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                    7. If that is your objective for telepathy, it is already happening in the tech world.

                      Um…
                      Not “my objective for telepathy”, my idea of an objective test for the existence of telepathy. You’re switching cart and horse.

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                    9. That’s nice. The tech, as I understand it, has information flowing
                      Brain -> computer -> other computer -> other brain.
                      The set-up in the SF stories I recall is
                      Computer -> brain -> other brain -> other computer.
                      Different situation entirely.

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                    11. I’m astounded — even though not telepathy at all — at prosthesis that can be moved by the person wearing them. I mean, through nerve endings, same as normal limbs. AND they’re now working on ones that can feel. This to me is the stuff of sci fi, the stuff we used to dream of.

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                    12. Yes– it astounds me too since I know people who had plastic and wooden legs only thirty years ago. It is totally amazing to me.

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                    13. I agree it’s amazing, it’s just not the amazing thing I was specifically referring to. :-)

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                    14. Part of why I hate “argument” sci fi– she got to make the world work how she wanted it to work, including making all the ESP stuff all the same basic thing.
                      It was fine for her stories, because she wasn’t trying to make an argument but was just making a setting, but it gets really old seeing it in stuff that “cheats” to make the outcome favorable to the author’s views.

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                  2. When I say my accuracy is 90% — I have bad dreams far more often than that. But the “real” dreams are more vivid. I think it’s time slippage.

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                    2. Time slippage would lay bare the mysteries of the Universe. This sounds more like time demi-slippage, just the universe showing a little leg.

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                  3. I was thinking of the Pegasus books too, but McCaffrey really had a thing for psi, the majority of her books had at least some psi talent in them in some form.

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              2. I’m an utter worry-wart…but that’s the only time it was that extreme, I was in control of us going and it hit my sister at the same time. Five to ten minutes early, all the time; less than halfway through practice, never.

                I can’t remember if you’re in an area with rattlesnakes, and I have no idea what the bugs that sound a little like rattlesnakes in Nevada are called, but the difference is like that– or sort of like how you’ll jump back when you see a “rope snake” but it feels different when you see a real snake.
                I still jump back just-in-case it’s a snake, but when it is really a snake…. *shudder*

                Now, could be explained as editing memories, but if you’re going to allow “you just think you think that” it has the same effect as the poison-the-well fallacy.

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                1. I hear you Foxfier– I also jump anyway because if it is ever the real thing, you will be very unhappy (or dead) if you didn’t jump. Some of those not-jumps are actually practice runs imho.

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                2. I don’t doubt that “strange things” happen but you were talking about scientific evidence and I’m pointing out the problems with anecdotal evidence. If we could see (as in McCaffrey’s Pegasus stories) a difference between a “true urge” and a “false urge”, psi research would be more scientific.

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                  1. No if you read my remarks vs. others, I don’t think it can be scientifically proved because we don’t have the instruments or even the theories as of yet to prove it. Maybe someday we will be able to, but not now. Plus we are imperfectly connected to it. (Sarah points out about animals and how they can predict and feel earthquakes coming while we can’t). Also not everything happens in the immediate NOW. (I have a theory about time being a construct and not a reality because of some experiences).

                    Our NOW is not always NOW. We see and feel a world that is here (but not here). Since we are imperfectly connected to this urge, pulse, whatever, we might get it before, as it is happening, or after. Or NOT at all. Plus it is dangerous to be connected to phenomenon 24 hours a day seven days a week…. i.e. insanity.

                    I can’t explain any better than that–

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                    1. I have said that I have experienced it– and that I would rather I had people around me to be non-believers than followers because followers want to become connected to it. When they do (as Foxfier said) it is a huge mess to clean up.

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                    2. Worse – if we are tied in to things via something like “Quantum Consiousness” – it’s possible that the active attention of a skeptic, even if they’re being “open minded” could be a very effective dampener.

                      Seriously, if you’re assuming that some people are stronger/more sensitive broadcasters/receivers, then someone broadcasting skepticism would be a dampener.

                      I guess it would be falsifiable, but i’m not sure how you’d rule out dampening effects from people oppositely – willed since we’re talking about phenomena that presumably go through walls/etc.

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                    4. I know Sarah – and thus the difficulty of falsifying/not falsifying, because then you hand out the excuse of “well you didn’t believe, so of course it failed….”

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                  2. Part of the thing with scientific method is that you have to be willing to risk that it not work.

                    In the case of “feelings,” that would mean abandoning loved ones to whatever the warning was about. Up to and including death.

                    I’d rather have folks be snide about the evidence, especially since even if I did start ignoring the “maybies, the evidence would still be entirely on my word. *smile*

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                    2. Hehe, just thought of something else– I’ve had arguments with folks (and use to have an official biology site) that claimed coyote/dog hybrids didn’t exist.

                      I know that they do. Some folks have recently found DNA proof. But because they’d only seen them created by AI– unless all else is right for creation of hybrids, coyotes eat dogs– they couldn’t exist.

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                    3. Considering the fact that a friend of my dad’s had one, I know they exist. In fact many of the Eastern coyotes are coydogs, and people have intentionally bred dogs with captive coyotes for longer than we have records for (and crossed dogs and wolves also). Male coyotes only have viable sperm for 2-3 months a year, so to successfully raise coydogs you either need a female dog in season at the correct time, or to cross a male dog on a female coyote. People who deny the existence of coydogs are similar to those that deny we put a man on the moon, or Holocaust deniers. “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts.”

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                    4. Ah, but the theory said it didn’t happen!

                      The really annoying part is that the “Eastern Coyote” is DEFINED as being part (almost entirely, in some cases– such as the pack of at least two that killed that little Canadian artist) wolf, and dogs are defined as tamed wolves. Oy.

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    4. I wouldn’t be particularly interested in homeopathy except that a vet back in North Carolina prescribed a homeopathic remedy for my cat’s chronic hot spots — and it worked.

      Somehow I can’t quite believe it was placebo effect.

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      1. My dad had a long list of homeopathic remedies he used on us when we were kids growing up. All of them worked, more or less. Some of them worked better than any pharmaceuticals I’ve tried. Wish I could remember more of them. Most of the sources don’t exist here in Colorado, though…

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        1. Many homeopathic remedies are effective for reasons such as those recently discussed re: tobacco as treatment for wounds and the bark of certain trees used in a tea to treat inflammation. The fact that the science hasn’t caught up with them does not mean there is no scientifically determinable basis for their effectiveness.

          OTOH, some homeopathic therapies are like Grannie Clampett’s cure for the common cold: take her “medicine”, drink lots of fluids, get plenty of rest and in a week to ten days your cold will be gone.

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          1. No, no. Those are HERBAL or “traditional”. Actually homeopathic remedies are the ones that rely on something that wakes up your immune system only so diluted that it “can’t possibly be scientifically true” — some unrelated chemical studies that seem to indicate water has a “memory” (yes, it sounds stupid because I don’t know how to explain it) might show a mechanism.
            While I don’t have a dog in this fight, my mom is a late-convert to homeopathic remedies, and all I can say is if I’ve been seriously ill and she sends me something, I take it. No ill effects. Do they help? Who knows?

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            1. I know that taking a pinch of local bee pollen makes my low-grade runny nose alergies go away in the early summer, the bees pick up every thing that sets me off.
              On the other hand I have to be a little skeptical about some. Maybe a little less skeptical would work better for me.

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              1. Take that bee pollen and put it in a small amount of water.

                Stike the vessel holding the water against something hard.

                Now mix in the same amount of water. Strike again.

                Repeat that last instruction 32x

                Now drink a teaspon.

                Most allergies are an excessive immune response. For some people a bit of bee pollen or honey from local bees can “train” or suppress your immune response to local pollens. Dunno why or how, but it’s *not* homeopathy.

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                1. When it was first devised, it was still arguable that there were not atoms of a finite size — it was Einstein who first came up with reasons why there were such things — so that the potion might contain some.

                  No longer.

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              2. Take that pinch of local bee pollen, and dissolve it in a lake. (The lake needn’t be the size of Michigan or Superior, but it should definitely contain more water than any man-made swimming pool you’ve ever seen or can imagine ever seeing in the future.) Then ride a boat to the other side of the lake from where you dissolved the pollen, dip a glass of water in the lake, and drink it.

                The effect you’re going for, here, is not merely a treatment which contains no _detectable_ active ingredient, but one which has a high probability of containing _literally not a single molecule_ of anything remotely related to your condition.

                That’s homeopathy.

                I’m not inclined to disrespect natural treatment out of hand…after all, virtually every important pharmacological discovery we’ve ever made has come down to investigating, isolating, and purifying some natural product. But homeopathy per se? Yeah, I’ll accept ghosts and telepathy and precognition and Bigfoot and space aliens long before homeopathy.

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                1. And to finish the joke, “if it doesn’t work try taking less.”
                  I can’t see the mechanism to explain it, but I know it won’t hurt you, and I sure won’t tell you it doesn’t work.

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                  1. Caption to a cartoon: “It’s a placebo overdose. He just thinks he’s dead.”

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                  2. As a friend pointed out, every glass of water I’ve ever had in my life has been a homeopathic cure for EVERYTHING. Why do I need to do it again?

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                    3. When hexavalent chromium in the water was the panic du jour, I was fond of pointing out that at 10 micrograms/liter, it was a homeopathic dose suitable for treating something.

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            2. My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was an herbalist. I wish those recipes had been handed down. Anyway– by the time I knew about them, my grandmother had signs of dementia and couldn’t remember what he used.

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              2. Please, use a .22 short or a BB cap.

                Mark Twain, in _Roughing It_, says that he acquired for his trip west one of the new Smith and Wesson cartridge revolvers, and mentioned that it had bullets the size of a homeopathic pill, requiring three or more to equal a regular dose.

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      2. I’m pretty sure you’re mixing up homeopathy with “herbal medicine” or “natural medicine”.

        Homeopathy involves the principles of “like cures like”, dilution and succussion. Often times the dilution is such that there is incredibly trivial amounts of the original substance left–which means there is no active ingredients. Homeopathic advocates will say that this works because water has memory.

        What they don’t explain, as argued by the Philosopher Tim Minchin, is why it remembers whatever YOU want, but forgets all the poo that’s been in it.

        I suspect you’re either talking about herbal medicine, or you cat just got over whatever is wrong with it.

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        1. I don’t know how that might be. I know I read about “water memory” in an article in scientific American in mid to late eighties. I remember because I meant to write a story about it. Yes, I know scientific American. But… all the same, they weren’t talking about hopmepathic medicine, so…

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        2. I think what I’m talking about is neither “herbal” nor “homeopathic”, but “traditional”, handed down through the family for umpty-hundreds of years. It involves some plants, some insects, and some other ingredients, and it WORKS, 100% of the time, at least to some extent. It won’t cure death or the common cold, but it will end a toothache, stop the pain of a bee or scorpion sting, end an earache, or “cure” an upset stomach, much like willow bark tea is now accepted as being a headache remedy (because it contains the same ingredients as aspirin). The Native Americans devised these remedies over thousands of years, and they WEREN’T stupid.

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          1. What you’re describing is pretty much what I’ve always thought herbal remedies were. St. John’s wort *is* good for mild depression. Turns out that spiderwebs do help clotting and rebuilding. Etc.

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        3. I don’t give a [FILLINTHE BLANK] what you say, I am not, not, NOT smearing the cat’s chest with Vap-O-Rub!!!!

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          2. No, no, you use an onion poultice (on the cat) and an asafetida bag (for yourself). And a hot toddy (in the owner) if the cat’s cough persists. The same treatment works as well on small humans. Oh, and hot toddies in parent and child are supposed to be good for colic. neither of you will mind the colic after each has a toddy.

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            1. Apropos sideways — Older son taught The Late Lamented Pixel Who Walks Through Walls Hoyt, cat non pareil to blow his nose. No. I am not joking. Pixie had congestion the last three years of his life, and Robert would hold Kleenex in front of his nose and say “Blow” and he would.

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          3. Totally off topic, but a study was done in Pennsylvania or Michigan (can’t remember which) on bears. Somehow they came up with enough orphaned cubs to figure out how to get a sow to adopt them. They tried just placing them in with her natural cubs, but she would smell them around and kill all the ones that weren’t hers. So they started packing the sows nose full of Vicks Vap-o-rub, (they were tranquilizing the sows) by the time the Vap-o-rub had worn off the cubs had all been playing, and sleeping together, and nursing from the sow for a few days, and she couldn’t tell her natural cubs from the adopted ones by smell any more, so she would just raise them all.

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        4. Amusingly enough, deadly allergies are being treated with crazy tiny amounts of the stuff that triggers a result– NYTimes had an article on it a while back, and other than being horrifying because the FDA insists that each pill for each individual– and there’s a different pill for each allergen– be given a full approval run-down, it’s kind of amusing in how it is highly accurate homeopathy. (Note: “accurate” means you hit what you aim at, not needfully what you want to hit.)

          Keep a firm grip on Sturgeon’s law– and remember he may have been an optimist.

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          1. They have did that with shots for many years, in fact I got them for allergies when I was a kid, (and I have no allergies other than bee stings now, which I wasn’t allergic to until I was 12 or thirteen) I wasn’t aware they were giving them in pill form now days, however.

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  2. You might want to move closer to me. I have been told I have a paranormal ability that you might find useful. I crush it. Demons haunting a room? disappear when I enter. Spells being cast? Fail in my presence, no matter how reliable. Haunted room? Not anymore. To believe that I would first have to believe in the paranormal activity, I haven’t seen any evidence of it for some reason. Now ESP is a different but related topic. I will say that the guy willing to be $20 against precognition is not sensible. If he is correct there will never be proof allowing him to win, he can only lose…sucker bet

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      1. Incidentally, the same thing happens around me. No matter who I talk to, no matter how much they say they see paranormal phenomena all the time, never happens around me. Some of them have even said I’m psychically invisible. That there’s a “hole” where I should be.

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        1. You are very fortunate Wayne– it makes you the rarest of all creatures, a null. I was very fortunate to find one– it makes my sleep easier and my experiences less scary and less often. ;-) It still happens, but at an easier level.

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        2. So both of you guys are Goats? (SheepGoat Effect – a term coined by parapsychology researchers for the observation that test subjects who do believe get better results than people who don’t, and those who don’t believe actually seem to have a tendency to score well below the standard deviation)

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          1. Nope, for the goat effect to be working We would have to be actively disbelieving, we simply see no evidence. I would be happy to see some, especially if it would confirm my “talent” at shutting such things down. I could then make a mint going around selling my services to the highest bidder

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            1. Sounds a bit like a chicken and egg problem. You presumably can’t quite believe because you have seen no evidence. But since you can’t quite believe you may still act as a goat. :D

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              1. In my case it is subsequent to over two decades of wanting to believe, and several attempts to induce results (using multiple methods to induce the right mental state, though no drugs), but never witnessing anything that was far enough outside random chance to give it any particular credence.

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            2. And perhaps you could still sell your talent. Just advertise as a potential solution to the problem of anybody who is bothered by a haunting – no guarantees given. Or find some ghost research group – you’d enter the premises after the others have concluded their research in those cases where the home owners want to get rid of the haunting, and then they could see if the haunting really is gone. You might have a bright future as a television celebrity. :)

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              1. lol– I thought of that too- Don’t call yourself a goat though… a null is a better word. ;-) BTW I don’t hold with the sheep/goat affect because I have seen people who didn’t believe have experiences (see their dead grandma etc) and didn’t consider it paranormal. So — I think it is a talent.

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            3. The evidence will have to come from others because if you shut it down, you will not see the evidence. ;-) TG for people like you because some of us would never get a good nights sleep.

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              1. John Ringo talked about a similar effect to this Goat stuff as ‘black silk’ in ….Princess of Wands, I think. He was talking about a person as that as a p null.

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      3. Can’t say, Those are on the to be read pile, scheduled for this summer. By the way, the destruction of supernatural things I was talking about, Not anything I know about personally, I have been told of this effect by others

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  3. This is something which baffles me: people can recount paranormal experiences as moderately interesting anecdotes — about on par with the time you saw Robert Redford buying ski equipment, or the time that you bumped into Joan Didion at a bookstore in New York.

    If I ever had a genuine paranormal experience it would fundamentally change my life in large-scale ways. I’d either start aggressively evangelizing because I have PROOF that the soul exists and survives after death — or I’d start maniacally trying to fortify my house against Lovecraftian spirit beings.

    Either way, it would become the defining event of my life. I can’t imagine just more or less shrugging it off and going on as before.

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    1. I think it depends on how many experiences. For me– I do a lot of cleansing and certain runes on my doors and windows. But I have been having experiences since I could talk. You walk into a room and see a video of a person’s life on the drapes… it becomes common after awhile. ;-) (my first experience– I was around four)

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      1. Yes, that too. I’m not going to discuss mine, but the one that freaked mom out was at about that age.

        Mom also swears at one time (it was a particularly interesting nightmare) she caught me levitating two feet above the bed (I was 19.) Her scream woke me up and it FELT like falling, but it’s not mine to swear I was levitating. Though mom is not given to THAT type of flight of fancy and she wasn’t on meds. OTOH well… It wasn’t ME seeing it. I can tell you the nightmare was one of the worst I’ve had.

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        1. I am prone to nightmares too– I was told by a friend who came from a certain type of ancestry that I had a huge crack… I find that writing (any type) helps to alleviate the nightmares.

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          2. I have no nightmares. I have dreams which might seem like nightmares, but I’m never scared in them. I think I may be borderline lucid during most of my dreams. I have been fully lucid only a couple of times, but since nothing much scares me while I’m dreaming and I am usually able to steer the dream to what direction I want, at least a little, borderline lucid seems like a good bet.

            Most of my experiences have been very small scale. The spells seem to have results a bit more often than chance should dictate, as well as my tarot and other divinations, and there are some feelings and shadows seen from the corner of the eye kind of things. The only big one ever was the time I woke up in bed with one lamp having been turned on, and the covers being pulled towards the foot of the bed. Nobody else in the room – besides there was so little room at the foot of the bed, or under it, that nobody could possibly have been hidden there, and I had no dog or any other pet big enough to manage something like that (had a rat, then) – and the lamp was too far for me to reach it from the bed so unless I had sleepwalked it hadn’t been turned on by me (and as far as I know I don’t). Well, I was pretty young and my reaction was pretty much the same it would have been if I was still a child. I yanked the covers back up, over my head, and spend the next hours, until morning, well wrapped up. Never talked about it to anybody, and nothing similar ever happened again while I still lived in that apartment, or anywhere else after I moved, but I guess it was the experience which finally made me gravitate towards studying magic (had always been interested, but not seriously before that). I have always thought it might have been some sort of near sleep hallucination, but it felt real enough that I can’t completely dismiss it as one.

            So, I figured I’d better learn all I can because all that stuff just may be real, and if it can affect me just denying it may not be good enough a deterrence.

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            1. Oh, Tarot is another thing – my readings invariably come up half major arcana, but nothing ever sounds remotely like me or my experiences.

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    2. No. I have no clue if the soul REALLY survives after death (though new research seems to prove it does — scientific research at that.) The experiences I’ve had could as easily be explained by time loops or parallel world crossing over, or energy worlds coexisting, or…

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      1. Link?

        SRSLY. Even scientific evidence of a soul would be an interesting read.

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    3. It’s scary. Easier to treat it as an interesting or amusing anecdote. Besides, you sound far less nutty if you do that, people who don’t have them and don’t believe tend to consider anybody who tries to evangelize – or even just seems to treat all that stuff seriously – as a certified nut.

      And sometimes it also seems to be something which doesn’t want to be remembered or taken seriously.

      By the way, one problem with all that – especially practicing magic – is how unreliable it is. I use it as a backup, and just in case, but I have never dared to count on it.

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    4. This may be the worst part. You can’t evangelize or even share your expirence with your normal friends and co-workers because you only have proof for yourself. It is the nature of the thing that it can’t be reproduced like a science exeriment. It’s been proved to you, but you can’t prove it to anyone else. Seeing something like this seperates you from your social circle. I imagine it’s a little like being an in the closed gay man when co-workers make homophobic jokes.

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      1. And then there is the fact that this is something which also _does_ draw lots of truly certified nuts into it. It’s something which seems to exist but can’t be fully proven at this time, and what can be pieced together is at best vague, but many of the people who are in the open believers are those who seem to also fully believe some pretty weird explanations, and to treat them as proven facts. You know, the crystal healing or demon manifestations or fairies and elves as these nice fantasy derived helpers of nature and humans and UFOs as either the spacecrafts of enlightened beings or as the crafts of the hostile lizard aliens from where ever (or demonic manifestations) types.

        One gets tired of trying to explain that yes, I do take it seriously, but no, I don’t think I KNOW what it is, just that there seems to be something real behind all this and it deserves to be looked at, and perhaps just enough is known of the rules that it can be used to some extent, but you should still be very careful with it because we don’t have all the rules, not even close. The nonbelievers will treat you as one of the nuts anyway, and the actual nuts may latch onto you as a fellow believer, neither of which is something easy to deal with. A lot easier to avoid the subject, or talk about it as amusing anecdotes, and perhaps admit to using something but just because it’s a fun custom or maybe makes for pretty decorations (kind of like leaving milk and cookies for the Santa in the Christmas eve).

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        1. You have codified my beliefs exactly– careful, slowly– it is something we don’t understand or know what the rules are–
          No offense, but a lot of people shouldn’t even dabble. I have seen what happens when a person who wants to gain power taps into it, freely.

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          2. Nothing good happens, and cleaning up the pieces is a real pain, especially if it is in an environment of people who desperately want to believe in something.

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    5. People have an amazing capacity to ignore that which they want to ignore. Indeed I have heard more than one anecdotal report of people ignoring miracles, either in the teeth of the evidence, or on the grounds that the miracle didn’t produce exactly what was desired and so was insufficient.

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    6. “I’d either start aggressively evangelizing because I have PROOF that the soul exists and survives after death”

      If it can’t be replicated on-demand, it’s not proof. :)

      Also, even if the experience could be repeated on-demand, how could you prove that it was related to a soul surviving death? (As opposed to, say, a soul which had never been associated with a living body? Or one which still inhabited the living body of someone who was trying to trick you into thinking they were some dead person’s soul?)

      I tend to take the same attitude as tjic does, in this. I’m willing to be persuaded, but haven’t yet. I’m also willing to accept the possibility that the consistent failure of any paranormal phenomena to prove out when tested “scientifically” might be attributable to confounding variables present in the test environments or the evaluation criteria (see ref “how do we know that white rats aren’t just naturally predisposed to getting cancer when kept in a lab environment?”) Several of the more notable paranormal phenomena are allegedly of a sort that, frankly, would be pretty hard to construct a good test for, and impossible to rule out conclusively using any method presently known or contemplated. Which doesn’t mean they’re not real (as the hyper-skeptics would claim), nor that they are (as the True Believers would claim).

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  4. What scared me was when I read a book by one of the founders of the drug culture– Leary– he was seeing under drugs things I had seen as a normal person. Plus I do not like hallucinating under even prescribed medication–

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      1. I guess I’m lucky. Vicodin just makes me feel woozy. (Doesn’t do anything for the pain, doesn’t make me sleepy, just makes me woozy.)

        On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 10:41 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

        > ** > accordingtohoyt commented: “Vicodin. I’d rather have the pain than the > singing lizards..” >

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      2. LOL- I take a half pill and it just puts me to sleep– I hate the way I feel afterwards though. I don’t do it often either– I don’t like to be out of control. Strange things happen.

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      3. So… what if the drugs don’t induce hallucinations, but merely open your mind to the energies so you can sense these phenomena? Yeah, not original, but…

        M

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          2. I’m beginning to get that. I’m just following the thread from Fringe, in which Walter takes LSD and goes into an isolation tank to see weird stuff.

            Also ties back to the Leary thing, too. “So raise your glass, we’ll raise a toast to the little man who sells you pills along the pier.”

            M

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              1. The little green pills are iron, the yellow ones are aspirin, the large salmon colored pills are multi vitamins (and, no, spell checker, the word I was looking for wasn’t “sensitivities”), the little pink pills are B12 . . .

                On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 4:35 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

                > ** > Cyn Bagley commented: “I wish it was only little green pills.” >

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                2. My little white ones are iron or oxycodine. (for the c-section; if I were the sort that was willing to street sell prescriptions, I’d have a nice chunk of change from the leftovers)

                  What about the gold gel ones for “fish” oil?

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          3. I got pink elephants. And I thought, “well dang, they really are pink!” That was the last of those pills. I’d rather look like a chipmunk than see things.

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              2. No, just pink. A few pink elephants blew bubbles, but most of them just circled around a center point. It was entertaining but I have no desire to repeat the experience.

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                1. You know, the first time I saw a pink pig (most pigs aren’t) it terrified me because of the thing about “toys waking up and walking.” I had little ping pig figurines. Meeting a giant sow (not as big as in the US. ) who had escaped her pen and gone for a stroll, face to face on the street, sent me screaming into the house sure the universe had broken.

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          4. The lizard bit is merely how your brain interprets the signal. Your hind brain, your … lizard brain.

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          5. Singing fish. Holy Zarquon’s Singing Fish. The sort of thing you refer to when hanging off the lip of a miles high replica of Arthur Dent throwing away the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser cup.

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      4. In mild defense of Vicodin, I love it. Takes the pain far away and doesn’t seem to affect me otherwise. That time I had a 5-day migraine … I SO looked forward to a Vicodin at bedtime. BUT I’m not a writer … so there’s that …

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  5. What type of weapons would you use to deal with ghosts? Well, since by definition a ghost is a non-material apparition, paranormal or supernatural, any weapon you use cannot simple manipulate mass or matter. So, slug throwing guns are out.
    Energy weapons might be feasible, depending, of course, on what TYPE of energy spirits are composed of, and if energy would affect them.

    I had an interesting idea a while back, that the quest for zero point energy might actually tap into the same realm as spirits dwelled. And that, by mining zpe, we accidentally destroy our afterlife. It would, however, do much to alleviate the energy crunch. And perhaps the most fruitful areas would be cemeteries and mortuaries ….

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    3. If there is an afterlife, wouldn’t they take steps to prevent our mining their zpe? I wonder what those steps might involve.

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    5. Plasma or directed EMP. If ghost phenomena is energy based, and it might be looking at the coldness, possible static discharge and electrical glitches happening while apraritioning, then scrambling the energy signature would work either temporarily, or longer depending on if you can disrupt it beyond re-configuration. It would suggest that a magnetic containment might work also.
      On the other hand if it is more like the current hand-waving theory about gravity – a 3 dimensional shadow of something moving over a greater dimension, then all bets are off. You need to invest in Cavorite. (And pick me up some too)

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    6. Well, considering that I personally think ghosts and related things go into the “dark matter” category… that is to say, not strictly non-material, but a different category of matter altogether… off the top of my head, I think you’d have to do something related to gravity. But the “fallout” (“fall-in“?) from a gravity-based weapon would probably be orders of magnitude more destructive than whatever it is you were aiming at.

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    8. Spirit energy– I’d choose blessed objects or holy water, but I’m sure some would go with a sage smudge or something.

      Oooh, I’ve got to see if there are any rules about blessed incense… I’m a big fan of the smells’n’bells.

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      1. Incense is a symbol of prayer, but I don’t think church incense is usually a sacramental. (I suppose it could be blessed, but I don’t recall any liturgical blessing.) Probably because frankincense is kinda its own symbol.

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        1. In Neo-Pagan workings it certainly is.
          “I exorcise thee, o creature of air, casting out all impurities and uncleanliness of the material realm. I bless the that thou mayest aid me.”

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          1. Dear me. That’s a new Manichean touch — at least, new in my experience. I’ve seen quite a bit in other pieces of neo-Paganism.

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        2. I don’t think it is, but then I didn’t know that Palm Sunday palms were special and had to be burnt or similarly respectfully disposed of, either; US catechesis(sp) is sad.

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          1. I know that Palm Sunday palms are frequently burned and used for Ash Wednesday, but I think that’s just a tradition, not a ceremony. ICBW

            On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 6:10 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

            > ** > Foxfier commented: “I don’t think it is, but then I didn’t know that > Palm Sunday palms were special and had to be burnt or similarly > respectfully disposed of, either; US catechesis(sp) is sad.” >

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            1. It’s kind of like how you’re supposed to burn the US flag for proper disposal– I thought the Ash Wednesday thing was just a cool tradition, too, but apparently it’s linked to the “respectfully burn blessed stuff instead of throwing it in the trash” tradition.

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              1. Yep, Catholic sacramentals you have to burn, bury, break, break and bury, or burn and bury. Partly because it’s respectful, and partly because it prevents careless or blasphemous misuse. (Breaking sacred vessels, etc.) Melting down metal sacramentals is also okay (although it’s usually not reused except for sacred things — as a mixer for bell metal, I think I remember one use being).

                In practical fact, it ensures that a lot of Catholics have a lot of Stuff around the house, that they often give away Stuff to other Catholics, and that devout Catholics often have a strange compunction to check dumpsters or EBay for sacramentals that need a good home. (Heck, I even have Jewish semi-sacramentals around the house.) Occasionally parishes have occasions for sacramental disposal (like bonfires), but a lot of times it ends up being Granny burying broken stuff out back under the bushes (and now you know, just in case you ever find something like that in your backyard).

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          2. Actually incense is a symbol of prayer, in some cultures putting letters on a string around an old tree is a symbol of prayer (Japan), putting letters in a Wall is a symbol of prayer (Israel), and so forth

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            1. Involve as many senses as possible. Makes sense to me, humans are physical.

              …

              Oh, gad, now I have that song stuck in my head… and given the ghost talk, too, it lends itself to horrible humor.

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  6. “the chick across the lake who let loose with the firearm occasionally in the evening was shooting at the fairies that lived under the lake”

    Hope she loaded her own rounds with iron shot; lead don’t do crap against the fay.

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        1. I have a friend who used to work for a gun shop in California . He says that once an older lady came in and asked for a dozen .45 long colt cartridges to be loaded up with silver bullets, and brought in a bunch of silver rounds to melt down to cast.
          They quoted the work to cast the bullets and then the owner questioned her, I understand he was concerned she was going to be hunting werewolves in Carmel or something, and found out her husband had worked for the Lone Ranger TV Show and was given one of the prop guns and holster and she wanted the cartridges to complete it for him.

          Dang, they only have standard calibers. They should have 8 x 50 rimmed or 8mm Rast and Gasser for Austro-Hungarian werewolf hunters.

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            1. KuK Infanterieregiment “Sheridan le Fanu”, out of Temesvar, (now Timisuora Romania)
              *ambiguity retained out of spite

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            2. I can see the movie version now: forest glade under a full moon. A little old lady enters stage right; she is wearing hunting boots, camo-pants, a brown hunting jacket and high-crowned hunting cap. Turning slowly she looks into the camera, slowly raises one finger to her lips in a cautionary gesture and murmurs: “Be vewwy vewwy qwiet; I’m hunting werewolves.”

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            3. Heh. I actually have a story where the question comes up. “What did you do about werewolves during the Communist era?” The reply was, “We’d read them Cousin Imre’s copy of the last Party Meeting minutes. They died of boredom before we could get past the opening speech about the glories of the proletariat revolution.” :D

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          2. What about the 7.62×25 Tokarev? Seriously though they say that most of their orders are custom, so to call and ask for what you want. Unfortunately they also say they are ‘currently’ inert, so you would have to pull the bullets and handload them to actually be able to use them.

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            1. Isn’t it pretty common to custom load shotguns? (My family is more “black powder and muzzle loaders,” and I don’t do it so my understanding is pretty distant. I LIKE stuff that’s ready to use when it goes boom!)

              Fill it with lead that’s been plated with silver or iron, and fill the empty spots with salt, then have a priest bless the whole thing.

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              1. Depends on your definition of custom loading. Reloading for shotguns, rifles or pistols is all fairly common. But usually they are loaded with standard components, either commercial bullets (or shot for shotguns) or somewhat less commonly bullets or shot that are cast from lead. I load both commercial bullets and cast lead bullets I cast myself for rifles and pistols, I have never reloaded shotgun shells (it takes a different press, and I don’t commonly shoot shotguns, my 12 gauge I have had for 8-10 years has never had anything but turkey loads shot through it, and probably not more than thirty or so of them. You don’t do a lot of shooting 3 1/2 mags for fun). Lead has a low melting point, is cheap or free (I used to get wheel weights from the tire shop by the five gallon bucket) and fairly easy to melt and cast, whereas silver has a much higher melting point, requiring different equipment than my cheap little electric lead pot, and different molds (all of my bullet molds are aluminum, although cast iron molds are common and should work for silver).

                Loading shotgun shells with rocksalt used to be somewhat common, but usually was intended for unwanted trespassers such as the neighbors dogs or boys, not the supernatural.

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    2. Most sporting loads now are loaded with steel shot. The SAY it is because of lead poisoning. I figure it is to reduce the population of ondine, waterhorse and such competing for fishing rights.

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        1. Well, it might be considered to be like predator control. “Well, pookas got into the trash again. I swear, the population has soared since the Californians moved in and banned hunting them with hounds of Tindalos. Undines are supposed to keep the numbers down, but they are up at the dams eating salmon and kayakers, and now they are saying we can’t do anything about _that_ either. On top of the salamander infestation we’ve been having the last 3 summers, I don’t know how we are supposed to keep living in these hills. The only thing Fish and Wildlife cares about is trout, tansy and tags.”

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              3. Now I’m picturing basilisks with high capacity magazines. That is, they’re carrying around National Geographic. Or perhaps JAMA. (It’s hard to turn pages when they turn to stone, but the basilisks don’t mind.)

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            1. Dang– just tell me what kind of coffee– and I’ll give it to you in a dream. GEEZ you only had to ask– (oh, you’re talking to Bob) lol

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            3. You are in luck. Dad just came back from a cruise and brought me 4 kilos of Guatemalan Antigua. Sugar? Cream?

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  7. A friend picked up a ghost from an old house in one city… It followed her to at least the next two places the family moved…
    Not only were things moved when there were any explanation, but several times warnings were given when the kids were in danger or other things were wrong.
    Of course that particular friend was such a nice person that I can easily understand even a spirit finding comfort in her presence

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    1. Plenty of reports from immigrants of hearing the ghosts or the resident brownies packing the night before they left.

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  8. Small tepid beer compared to your experiences, but:

    1. After several days with my back out, I just had a dream involving my ex, an unspecified superior rival for her affections, a former supervisor, and my current and a past line of endeavor. Upon awakening, I concluded that the point was that my current entrepreneurial exploit, into which I have put my life’s savings, was too little too late and I would die in poverty after misery & humiliation.

    As soon as I got out of bed I felt better than I have in months.

    2. Iirc William James cautioned that not all mystical experience comes from a higher realm. Not that I consider my dream mystical, but if it wasn’t the interplay of digestion and a subsiding wrenched back (the null hypothesis), it may have come from Something that wishes me ill.

    3. Maybe the potentially creative individual becomes a battleground for entities, some of whom want to utilize him to instantiate something in our reality and others of whom want to prevent that from happening.

    Neither faction of whom gives a hoot about you as a person. One views you as a means to an end; the other, as a threat to be eradicated.

    4. I see where my man Fred was coming from:

    Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
    The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
    That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
    With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.

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    1. Something that wishes one ill — well, have you heard of peak experiences?

      There are also trough experiences. I’ve had them. I’ve also been clinically depressed. It’s nicer than trough experiences.

      Something that wished me ill indeed.

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      1. I had this GREAT idea for a story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Only I found out somebody had already used that idea, so now I’m trying to rewrite it as an inversion: girl meets boy, girl loses …

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        2. Boy is raised ignorant of his true parents and in humble circumstances, an old man wanders into his life and tells him of his destiny, boy saves kingdom/earth/galaxy …

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          1. My favorite, Boy meets girl, boy looses girl, boy makes another. What do you call a female android?

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        3. No no no.

          You have to invert it COMPLETELY. Girl loses boy, girl gets boy back, girl meets boy. THAT would be an interesting tale to tell.

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            2. * motorcycle crash. Rider flatlined.
              * Girl does CPR, revives rider.
              * Rider takes Girl out to dinner after he gets out of the hospital.

              I’m probably a bit too literal to turn that into a story.

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  10. “I come in peace. I brought no psychic jokes. But I beg you, with tears in my eyes–if you mention quantum physics and ghosts in the same sentence I will reduce you to molten slag with my Death Ray, see if I don’t.” (Adjusts Mad Scientist goggles) Sorry, but I’ve actually had to explain that no, quantum mechanics does NOT mesh seamlessly with Ayurvedic theology so I am a tad touchy on the subject ;-) Do not make me drag out the whiteboard and explain eigenfunctions to you…

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    1. LOL. I wasn’t thinking of ghosts as manifestations of dead people. I was just saying that “weird stuff observed might be influenced by the observer” the same way that it is in some quantum applications (which I realize are only in nano situations.)

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        1. One of the reasons not to believe it’s ghosts qua ghosts is that we’ve been “haunted” by one of my characters. Now, it was a dead character, but still…
          (And if Jarl starts haunting me, I’m going to go out the nearest window.)

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          1. You do know the story about the pulp character The Shadow – that the character was said to haunt the house where his creator had lived while writing the stories even after he had moved out? You may have created an entity. Or tulpa. Or the character is something which was born somewhere else, you just happened to be somebody who could sense it and give it a story.

            Heh. A few card readers have told me about this very dark, foreign or exotic looking man in my life. Never any living men who fit the description, but one very persistent character I have had since early teens does. One of them was a pro so it might have been cold reading, but the rest were just people who attempted a reading for fun, so a deliberate cold reading was a bit less likely with them.

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      2. Careful, there. There’s a fair amount of confusion over the exact meaning of the term “observer”. My reading of QM is that wave functions are collapsed by particular types of events, whether an intelligent observer is arranging them or not. The premise behind the Uncertainty Principle is not that attempting to observe a particle changes its state, it’s that whatever tool you can use to observe it will disturb it.

        The “Schroedinger’s Cat” thought experiment was proposed as a way to pull QM out of the nano-scale into the macroscopic scale. In theory, once the cat is shut in an information-proof box, the state of the cat becomes an indeterminate state which collapses when an “observation” is made.
        But the “observation” occurs whenever a passing photon interacts with the cat. And at a temperature of 300 degrees above absolute zero, any box is going to be chock full of photons. An “observation” will be made within femtoseconds of the cat’s status changing. Any blurring of probabilities due to wave nature of reality has that length of time to produce interesting results.
        The notion of any passing photon being enough to count as an “observation” does away with any notion of needing a mind to make the observation, unless you decide the entire universe has a mind of its own.

        Like

        2. Eh, if you lock a cat in a box at 300 degrees above absolute zero I can determine it’s state fairly easily, I believe the scientific term is ‘froze harder than a brick.’

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    2. Apparently our host (hostess? hostperson?) is now in a superposition of two states, slagged and unslagged, but that’s not what gets me.

      What gets me looks around nervously for the Spanish Inquisition is the possibility of transitions between the two.

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      1. If you’re looking for it, it won’t be there.

        It’s only when you don’t expect it.

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    4. Do not make me drag out the whiteboard and explain eigenfunctions to you…

      Not even if we ask nicely? I haven’t seen an eigenfunction since college…

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    5. Well obviously you were dealing with idiots, everybody knows that it is quantum mechanics that meshes with Ayurvedic theology, not physics.

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      1. But I thought ayurvedic/Greek humor medicine was all about flavors, and quarks have flavors, so there you go!

        I’m pretty sure the three quarks for Muster Mark weren’t curry-flavored hot and dry, but then, that was in Dublin.

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        2. Greek humor: So I was over at the Agora, and this guy, Lykobades, came up to me all white in the face, I mean he looked like he had a fox under his cloak…

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  11. Was a kid living with my grandmother ( my family, grandmother, and aunt and her husband and kid) when things started happening. At first it was shadows, a sort of siloute that would move across the entryway from the kitchen to the side hall, or across the dining room to the den. It always was quick and you wanted to write it off, but sometimes others would be there and comment on it as you were about to do the same.

    After a while it started visiting us at night in the bedrooms. You’d wake up and it would be standing there next to the bed, like it was studying you as you slept. I did research to nail down what it was and at first thought it was sleep paralysis, but many of us (it happened many times to different people) managed to get out of bed, walk around the bed and approached it before it disapeared. Shadow is as close as I can describe it. The eye wanted to slide off it, almost like it was something seen from the edge of your vision.

    Then the blender started to go off by itself. One of the few things my mother and grandmother agreed on was that small countertop appliances were treacherous things that would burst into flames if left plugged in over night. Before we went to bed the counters in the kitchen were always cleaned and the toaster oven, blender, and other little things were unplugged and the cords wound up. Sometime after the bedroom visits began, the blender started to go on by itself without the benenfit of being plugged in or being touched by anyone.

    It happened to just about everyone at least once. By the time it happened to me I was kind of ready. I walked over to it and slowly checked to make sure it wasn’t plugged in even though it was immediatly obvious it wasn’t. Still, I took my time, ran my hand down the length of the cord, made sure nothing else was near it. Nope, wasn’t plugged in. Then I pushed the STOP button, again and again. Nothing.

    I checked the clock on the micro-wave. the whole thing lasted just short of 2 minutes. And it wasn’t a low powered spin. It was puree, so fast that the base vibrated.

    I’ve spent the years since looking for some non-supernatural answers for what my family and I went through, without success. I don’t like the idea of having invisible things able to be in the same room with you, watching you, whenever it wants. Almost as annoying is the smug attitude of so many skeptics, though I envy their abiltiy to discount this sort of thing. I want it not to be true as much as they think it silly.

    As for mental abilities, I recall news from a year or so back where some company had invented a helmet that would let someone write an email just by thinking it. If tech can read your thoughts to form words on a screen, then it’s only a matter of time before it can read your emotions and other things running through your head. Mate that with ever shrinking cell phones – say down to the size of a grain of rice that can be implanted in the head – and you have tech based telepathy.

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    1. Ahh yes, those are what I call “the ones in between” they seem to have self-direction but no obvious intent (can’t think of how to describe it better at the moment).

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  12. I think there is a higher tendency of atheists to believe in psi. Arthur C. Clarke being an example.

    But I’m more interested in the story. I love Buffy, Dresden Files, etc., etc..Read at least one of the MHI books.

    One rule I like is that of Equal Powers. I played Vampire the Masquerade and its kinda annoying. Humans are just there to be killed. Give the Humans some powers as well…..if only as one GM friend of mine who runs Vampire says ‘in other games I give you a second chance, but in Vampire…no. If you’re a Vamprie the Universe hates you.”

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    1. For a short time in college I ran a vampire RPG campaign. One of the PCs tried to treat humans as livestock, started to create a LOT of problems for the rest. Shame it didn’t last long enough for things to get really rough…

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  13. It may be premature to investigate consciousness, let alone the paranormal. Perhaps we lack the intellectual and technological infrastructures. For example, Archimedes could not have developed a modern vaccine.

    Though you never know.

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  14. I’m definitely of two minds on this subject. I hear and read about really unexplainable things like the moving computer mouse and the unplugged blender, and think there might be something happening outside the scope of scientific knowledge. I also think of my own experiences which are arguably “all in someone’s head” — only the “someone” reacted in the exactly correct improbable fashion the operating magical theory would have predicted.
    =============
    On the other hand, I see things on the Syfy channel like “ghost hunters”, where any stuff that happens persistently happens on the edge of detectability. Even with the most sensitive recording equipment, no ghost voices are ever recorded. No objects moving by themselves except under the effect of plausible physical forces. Ghosts seem to be persistently camera-shy.
    =============
    I have studied astrology, which I generally define as the premise that the positions of other bodies in the solar system influence events hear on earth. I paid for my textbooks one year with the proceeds from a horoscope column in the campus paper. I also know some math. (I’ll stipulate the astrologer in Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” represents some, many, maybe even most astrologers. She does not represent all.)
    There are a number of astrologers who know statistics and probability theory. They are capable of learning mathematical techniques like Fourier analysis and principle component analysis in order to shake the sifter for any hard facts that may be in the mix. Examples of gold in the dross are extremely rare, and in general, not reproducible.
    =============
    I’d think if there were paranormal effects in existence, someone would have noticed. In particular, “someone” who gets paid to take probabilities into account. Psychic healing, reiki, miracle cures, and so on, ought to show up at the far end of the statistical distributions. Given enough data, a deviation from the expected distribution can be found and analyzed. (After all, that’s how the Higgs Boson was found.)
    Where are the numbers?
    Could it be, as one friend of mine has suggested, God wants the supernatural to be taken on faith, and will not allow the accumulation of enough data to be probative?

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    1. They HAVE done double blind tests on being prayed for healing, (Sorry this sentence is inside out, and I don’t know how to fix it) and it does seem to work, as well as most medicines. There have been other studies of the kind. On scy fi channel, I suggest that even other processes don’t happen for the camera. This is why “reality” shows are scripted.
      I could tell you of an accidental recording (yes, also having to do with the last house) but I won’t, mostly because I spent most of yesterday convincing myself it couldn’t be true…

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      1. I’ve looked in to some of the reports, but it’s a lot of work to follow them back to the original papers. So far, all the papers I find are those where the patients know they’re being prayed for, which is not “double blind”.
        I also read of one meta-study reported in the “Skeptical Inquirer”. It seemed that in the meta-study, there were three broad groups of outcomes — in one group, there was no significant effect; in another, the test group (prayed for) had better outcomes than the control group; in the third group, the control group had better outcomes than the test group.

        Within the limits of the meta-study, the proportions were about what you’d expect if there were no effect, and any cases where there were significant results were due to random chance. (Remember, if you correlate two random variates, you will get significance below 0.05 in about 5% of your trials.)

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  15. Happy to offer any help you want on gun issues. Been a shooter and reloader for over 40 years, so have some experience in the area. Provided a bit of similar aid to Ringo back when he hung out on the Bar and used to post snippets for our inputs. Would not however presume to claim near the expertise as Larry C.
    Ran across an article today by an Iowa State student reporter that is extremely well crafted on the disconnect between the two sides in the whole gun/Second Amendment issue. It’s at:
    http://m.iowastatedaily.com/mobile/opinion/article_1c144792-b36d-11e2-8ac6-001a4bcf887a.html
    “One of the many observations I was taken with was:
    I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being.”
    Article seems to dovetail well with some of our recent discussions in dealing with the liberal progressive mind set.

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    1. The Iowa State writer hit a nerve. I’ve been sent links to that piece by three people today, and seen it appearing on at least a half dozen blogs.

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      1. Hit a nerve much like the editorial calling for NRA members to be summarily imprisoned.

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  16. I’ve posted several times here about my “paranormal” experiences. I do believe that there are some very valid examples — I’ve experienced them. At the same time, I can understand why so many paranormal experiences are discounted by “scientists” — the experiences are almost always impossible to duplicate, a main attribute of the scientific method. This is also why most tests of “psionic” abilities don’t prove anything — they don’t seem to happen when you’re trying too hard. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but that we humans aren’t good enough at it yet to do it on a regular basis. I’m sure, as with just about anything else, practice improves performance. I’m just not sure how to practice. I just need to say that I’m alive today because I’ve learned to recognize those rare instances where I experience a precognative moment, and avoided some rather nasty experiences. Several of them may have very well have killed me, my wife, and some of our children.

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    1. Astronomy has a hard time duplicating supernovas, too.

      To be sure, supernovas tend to leave more physical evidence.

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      1. Not only do supernovas leave what the law would refer to as “circumstantial evidence”, they happen often enough that once people know what to look for, they see them on a regular basis.

        Where do I look to see ghosts, and what circumstantial evidence do they leave?

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        2. The parapsychology community think ghosts leaves recordings of their voices and lives on the land around them also this is not an active ghost, but a memory loop (earth has a magnetic field–where that idea comes from), cold spots (active ghosts draw warmth out of certain areas), and energy fluctuations. The best places to look for ghosts besides buildings is where there have been a lot of death such as battlefields.

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          1. Certainly reasonable.
            And then their effect on the material world is…
            * Cold spots (energy flowing away from or out of that spot) (measured how?)
            * Energy fluctuations (what sort of energy? electric? magnetic? gravitational? measured how?)
            * People see them. (How? Visible light? Mental impressions? If mental impressions only, do independent observers see the same thing?)

            For all I know, the “cold dark matter” showing up as excess gravitational attraction at the galactic level is ghosts. But then how does it interact with warm non-dark matter?

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              1. Removing energy from the person? Possible. Removing energy from an area? Also possible. But then the question remains, by what means? Newton’s First Law of Motion states that moving objects don’t slow down unless acted on by some outside force. What’s slowing down the molecules in the air, or in the person?

                Ghosts of stars, maybe. Ghosts of all the life forms that lived on all the planets around all the stars, also possible. If ghosts live outside of space-time, they might survive the end of the universe and cluster around the next one to pop out of the quantum foam.

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                  1. Well, I did read a Wizard of Oz mash up with zombies, I guess that could be A Wrinkle In Time with ghosts.

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            2. You should look up parapsychology sites for the instruments they use–
              1. Cold spots– most people can feel them. Plus they use a kind of digital reading to see the changes in temperature in that area.

              2. Energy fluctuations — very hard to measure because sometimes it will turn off the equipment. You need something passive to measure that.

              3. People see them– not all, some see shadows. they have an instrument that measures light waves and into the extreme (infrared and other side) that is not normal in the human visual range–

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              1. And these effects seem to be persistently “camera shy”, since the “Ghost Hunters” shows never seem to catch them happening.

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                1. probably– kind of makes you think it might be sentient? There is a paranormal group in our area that spends time in Virginia City. They have a lot of stories about what they find– but as soon as it goes on national TV– then poof. ;-)

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    2. FWIW – under the category of “coincidence but hardly provable”.

      For whatever reason (ADD?) I’m really comfy in the woods. Even at night. Much more so than most at night, and in the Lithuanian-ethnic sortof-scouting organization I did week long summer camps with, going out at night to hunt up other people’s banners/flags, I had no problem getting in and out of other people’s campsites.

      That said, there were some patches of the new england woods, plus the environs outside one lakeside house I stayed several months while in Nuke training, that just felt wrong for some reason. That creepy feeling made me wholeheartedly understand why so many of Lovecraft’s storeies were set in NE.

      A couple houses I lived in had areas that felt… occupied.

      I’ve also got a very odd history with accidents and near-misses – friends would joke that I could get hit by a truck and walk away , but I kept attracting trucks.

      I’ve had several people I did not know, for no good reason stop, take a close look at me, and tell me I’m “sensitive” in that serious kinda way.

      Nothing that couldn’t be brushed off as odd coincidence or the mead playing subconsious games with itself. Or other people being a bit… “off”… or playing head games with me.

      Two cases of precog though that had several hallmarks – high degree of “reality” and groundedness instead of the usual dreamy surrealism. Explicit and clear details. Nothing in my life or experience would cue me in on some of the details. And I woke up the following morning thinking “what the heck was that??”

      One – I dreamed I was reading a computer manual. Folded pamphlet. Black ink on blue pages. Turned the page and started reading a description of the algorithm used for the AI. Woke up with a WTF. Three months later, I’d bought the computer game version of Ogre for the Apple II. Never seen a copy – to the best of my knowledge it had just come out. Was reading the manual, and got to a page where I recognized the material and immediately knew the next page was going to be a description of the AI – and the paragraphs on the next page were exactly what I remembered.

      Two – dreamed I was sitting at a folding table, back up against a sliding accordion wall. White bowl hat on the table in front of me. I was wearing blue jeans and a blue long sleeve shirt. At the board in front of me some guy was giving a presentation on savings bonds. Woke up with a WTF.

      A couple months later, student loans for the following year deep-sized, I enlisted in the navy (hadn’t considered it until a month before I did). A month after that, in boot camp, I’m sitting in that room, wearing navy dungarees (something I’d never seen before to my knowledge) listening to a familiar face about savings bonds.

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  17. You can measure supernovas. They act through very well-known physical laws. Most of them occur the same way, regardless of where in the Universe they take place.

    The tornado that tore up the trailer where we would have parked if my wife had had her way left little in the way of physical evidence, and would be rather hard to duplicate, also. I still had a very bad feeling about that spot, and forced my wife to agree to living elsewhere.

    Paranormal experiences and psionic activities aren’t like that. They differ not only from individual to individual, but from event to event. Almost every one of mine involved either traumatic weather events (tornadoes, flash-floods, etc.) or considerable pain suffered by someone else, someone close to me. Not only would that be difficult to duplicate, but in many instances would be criminal. Makes it very difficult to conduct scientific experiments.

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    1. Even assuming that they are impersonal. If they’re personal, and realize you’re experimenting on them, they may sulk.

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  18. I seem sensitive to “genus locii” as well as having the family precog. There are certain places of worship I will happily sit in or meander around for as long as I’m permitted to remain. There are others that I can’t stay in, no matter what faith they belong to or how beautiful or important in art or architectural history they are. *shrugs* And when I get that sense in my gut and the back of my neck “don’t go there/do that/buy that” I don’t. Once I get schooled, I stay schooled.

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    2. I’ve experienced something similar, though it’s mostly houses and cemeteries. My husband’s grandparent’s house is one of the most evil places I’ve ever been in that still had people living in it. There were at least 2 suicides, 1 possible murder and 2 other deaths from natural causes that I know about. We actually had to live there for a while and I was pushed down the stairs to the basement multiple times when I was the only one there. It finally drove me so crazy, I had to move out. What was weird was that, before we moved in, I would regularly have conversations with my dead grandmother in my sleep. After we moved in they stopped, and started again after I moved out.

      But, how do you prove any of that?

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  19. I’m reminded of an article by Larry Niven on psi talents. Basically Niven commented that humans have existed for thousand of years and we haven’t “harnessed” psi talents in all that time. Now he commented that it was possible psi talents were linked with something undesirable (like insanity) so that’s the reason psi talents aren’t common.

    I’d note that at least one SF author (IIRC Nourse’s _The Mercy Men_) linked psi talents and insanity in a story.

    My personal take on psi talents is 1) they are extremely rare, 2) they are basically unreliable, 4) may be extremely limited/weak, and 4) can be dangerous to the person possessing the psi talents.

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    1. I think they are seriously DANGEROUS. There is a reason every religion tries to hem them in and give you protection — read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siren_Call_of_Hungry_Ghosts

      But there are after effects of anything “paranormal” that are fairly constant for everyone. One of them is swollen/inflamed eyes, and often an upper-respiratory thing.

      Apropos that, I’m at a remote office for the first time in a month, and the upper respiratory is clearer than it’s been in weeks. Perhaps my approach to the house — clean really well — is wrong. Perhaps there’s something supernatural going on? I suppose CLEANSING wouldn’t go amiss, or at least a few prayers. (No, I haven’t EXPERIENCED anything, but what kind of paranormal anything would manifest around my cats?)

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      1. Psychic cat dander perhaps?
        For that matter, ever watched a feline go into full bore hunting stance at something invisible to you?
        It’s not that cats are evil, it’s just that we are beneath their notice unless they’re hungry or want their bellies rubbed.

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            1. Most Catholic priests will do a house blessing. Stipends and/or dinner and goodies are usually welcome.

              Epiphany chalk is a really nice sacramental for house use, also, and so’s blessed salt. (Just don’t ask about anti-zombie uses, okay?)

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              2. What would happen if I put blessed salt in a Bug-A-Salt? Would it be then the weapon of choice for vampire horsefly?

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              3. Anti-zombie use is simple. You feed it to them. To be sure, unblessed salt works just as well, but I doubt it’s profanation.

                The trick is, you have to be sure that it’s real zombies, and not the medieval-style vampires that show up in apocalypses and stole their name — since the fatal lovers of the Good Folk had stolen the name
                “vampire.”

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                  1. go ahead.
                    To be sure, these are the Haiti zombies, which are not dangerous to meet. The horror of the original zombies was the threat of becoming one.

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                    1. *nod* Thralls, or human golems, or magically enslaved.

                      I like the idea of shifting terminology more than many flavors of the same thing. (Think Dresden’s vampire Courts.)

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        2. One thing to consider in a world in which psychic phenomena are commonplace is the idea that real estate listing for houses (and, I guess, rental properties) would include the fact of the property having been cleansed as well as cleaned. Shamans & priests who provided such services would probably have to have liability insurance …

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          1. Do you know it’s forbidden to list a house a haunted? Or mention it’s haunted? In CO?

            Not last house, house before last… long story, but real estate agent saw stuff, and her reaction was “Well, fortunately I’m forbidden from telling.” :D

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              1. Sort of, but not really. Its how Colorado law cuts off liability for the seller for failing to disclose lawsuits. There is a list of things you can’t “disclose” and therefore can’t be sued for failing to disclose in Colorado law. CRS 38-35.5-101 list some, that someone was murdered or suicided at the house, that a resident had HIV, etc. Some other states have similar restrictions on home sales listings.

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                1. Interesting. Here in California, the seller has to disclose whether someone died in the house he’s selling. (I wonder if the relatively large number of Asian immigrants had anything to do with that.)
                  In the case of a lawsuit where I was accused of failing to disclose the house was haunted, I’d have counter-sued the Realtor for failing to charge extra for the extra value of an interesting and TV-show worthy haunting.

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              3. Catholic canon law says that if you sell a blessed object, it’s no longer blessed. (You can give a blessed object, though.) Not that it becomes evil or anything, just not blessed.

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                1. Interesting. Did yo know there’s a superstition that knives can’t be given, they have to be sold. Otherwise they don’t know you are the owner and will cut you?
                  I think it’s Irish, at least the family I learned it from was Irish background.

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                  1. I’m Portuguese and I still demanded a penny from my kids when I got them their tactical knives for Christmas. Though our belief is that if it’s not paid for it will destroy the friendship. (It might be related to some idea it would be used to kill you.)

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                    2. Amongst my kith and kin, giving someone a decent pocket or sheath knife is likely to strengthen the friendship; we all appreciate good tools, and there are few things more useful than a good knife.

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                    3. Yes– I am likely to give a knife or a book. But those pesky Vikings– they are so perverse. I am planning on putting runes on the hilts when I get some good ideas. ;-)

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                    4. *sigh* When I was in college, (mumble) years ago, none of my friends were familiar with that phrase (I had been playing Password with them, got the word, “kin”, and gave the clue, “kith”. They looked at me like my third head was on backwards.)

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                    7. I’m getting there. The page to post content took a long time to get the way I wanted it, because I want to categorize and set visibility, links, edit, etc.

                      I had been getting a little time to do some work at lunchtime at work, but haven’t been able to do any of that for a week.

                      I keep running into the “Opps, didn’t consider that” problems, but I am definitely seeing progress now.

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                    9. Just to let you know, I’m working in ASP.NET, in case that creates a problem for the hosting.

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                    10. I’m afraid we don’t have any servers live that can support .NET applications yet. Frustrating, since I’ve got some of my own .NET apps I want to put up, but we’re working on it. Are you working in C#? If so I may be able to have my server guy set something up on an existing server with Mono. You can email me at jason at the domain in the link in my name, and we’ll stop cluttering the bottom nest of the comments. :)

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                    11. Wayne, just don’t refer to “Kith and Kine”.
                      Even if it is the kithing kouthin kine.

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            2. Huh. In New York, which is usually a buyer-beware state, a sale was voided because the owners had talked up how haunted it was — and therefore were estopped from claiming it wasn’t haunted — and sold it to someone without mentioning that, because the most careful inspection would not have been able to uncover that.

              The lawyer who blogged it loves the discussion of the estoppel, which concludes, “The house is, at law, haunted.”

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          2. lol Someone tried to claim liability on the part of a person who rented them a house that was haunted and not cleansed. ;-) It was on Judge Judy (of all places).

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  20. Well, there is folklore about cats and the supernatural (ie witches). [Evil Grin]

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    1. I’ll note my reason to HOPE it’s the supernatural is that otherwise it’s the cats. In which case we’re going to have to bathe them in mineral water every week… Any haunt would be preferable to THAT.

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  21. I’ve never seen anything. FELT stuff a bunch of times, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but I’ve never seen anything.
    Which sometimes makes me feel a little disappointed. My wife has seen things, her grandpa sees things. Me?
    The one time I came closest was when I was in the Philippines as a missionary, and someone came running over to say that her daughter was having some kind of an attack, and did I think it was some kind of possession or should she get to a hospital, and I responded Get Thee To A Hospital, Go.
    Later, I found out that when they were trying to get to the hospital, there were some other missionaries on the jeepney (bus) and they said as soon as the mom and this girl got on the bus, suddenly the jeepney started having all kinds of problems. Which was weird.
    But like I said, I’ve never seen anything.

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  22. After reading this, I happened to go into the bathroom where the litterbox is, and noticed the warning about toxoplasmosis. It made me recall reading an article about how T. gondi bacteria induce behavioral changes in rodents that causes a loss of fear of cats, so the infected rodents will actively seek out cats and be eaten, completing the T. gondi life cycle. And that there’s also evidence that T. gondi infection has behavioral effects on humans.

    All that made me wonder whether the old thing about cats being witches’ familiars might have some basis in fact — except with the causal arrow backward. If someone takes in an infected cat and is exposed to T. gondi bacteria in the animal’s feces, and thus becomes infected, might the resultant behavioral changes lead people to believe that the person is a witch?

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    1. Look, I’ve had cats since before I could talk OR had any idea of hygiene. My favorite companions as an infant/toddler were my grandmother’s cat, Tareco, and her dog, Lord, and I REMEMBER sharing food with them. As in “We’ll each take a bite.” When I got pregnant I was tested. Then I was tested again. I have to say catching it MUST involve more than casual intercourse with cats. Some people now say it might be caught from a weird form of pica. No, don’t think about it, and ew.

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    2. Ha. Pshaw. If T. Gondi were all that sophisticated, they would have arranged for the inventor of anti-bacterial soap to lose his fear of lions.

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  23. The then wife and I once attended a seance put on by a friend who was and still is a card carrying witch. Also owns and operates a Little Shop of Horrors and other Wicca paraphernalia in Chattanooga. She told us later we were both nulls surrounded by hefty barriers to any and all psychic influences. I took this as all in all a good thing.

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  24. Another issue that arises with respect to the paranormal or supernatural is, how does it interact with the natural?
    If some paranormal force is to move a computer mouse, somehow it has to interact with matter. Perhaps it generates local electric forces to push against the electron clouds in the atoms making up the object (which is what we do when we move a mouse around). Perhaps it’s creating very localized gravitational gradients. But somehow, whatever the paranormal entity is has to have some area where it interacts with the forces of nature we all know and love.

    Even effects that are “all in the mind” — to the extent that our mental state is reflected in the firings of neurons in our brains, if we perceive a ghost, even if only by the “sixth sense”, somehow information is translated from the paranormal realm to the normal realm.

    Now, once the existence of ghosts, or of paranormal ability, is established, there’s room for experimentation. If we find a way to reliably detect ghosts, we can explore the interface between the ghostly realm and the material realm. How do we get from ectoplasmic vibrations to neural discharges? Once a connection is found, it should be possible to measure it, even if it takes the construction of an artificial neural network. And a device that can measure something can also effect it. (Uncertainty principle strikes again.) The device that can detect ghosts can affect them, possibly manipulating them, possibly injuring or destroying them.

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    1. Indeed, that’s a story idea I’ve been noodling around in my head. In a world where magic has returned (never mind why it went away), some people realize that if magic can affect matter, there’s some way for matter to affect magic. This leads to mechanical detectors, then to shields and amplifiers, and ultimately to “spell-o-trons” that allow the un-gifted to wield magic.
      To the intense irritation of the rulers of Faerie.

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      1. Considering some of the older stories about the “Lords of Fairie”, I’d want to do more than cause them “intense irritation”. [Wink]

        Oh, C. S. Lewis (in a letter of his) about a location in England that had a “fairy” and a ghost. People didn’t avoid the location because of the ghost. They avoided it because of the “fairy”. The “fairy” were not called the “Good Folk” because they were good. They were called that so they wouldn’t get annoyed toward humans.

        Finally Sarah mentioned religions warning people about “meddling” with the paranormal. It’s “interesting” that one of the earliest known “uses” of the paranormal was in curses. While some claim the Hebrew word translated as “witch” means poisoner, according to people who know Hebrew the better translation is “person who casts spells causing harm”.

        Even if such spells don’t really work, what does it say about a person who wants to use them?

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        1. IIRC, C.S. Lewis mentioned somewhere that the only person he knew who admitted to ever seeing a ghost still didn’t believe in them.

          On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 3:34 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

          > ** > Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard commented: “Considering some of the > older stories about the “Lords of Fairie”, I’d want to do more than cause > them “intense irritation”. [Wink] Oh, C. S. Lewis (in a letter of his) > about a location in England that had a “fairy” and a ghost. People didn’t > avoid t” >

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        2. Considering some of the older stories about the “Lords of Fairie”, I’d want to do more than cause them “intense irritation”. [Wink]

          That’s actually a plot point. I won’t go hashing out the details here. :-)

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    2. Well, to paraphrase The Matrix, what we experience as real is all electrical impulses interpreted by our brains. So, if a non-material entity was able to influence that, then it could potentially make us perceive anything it really wanted to. And in a complex / chaotic system like the brain, maybe it’s easier to have an influence.

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      1. True enough, but there still has to be some mechanism for the interaction.
        Chaos theory says the flap of a butterfly’s wing can provoke a hurricane on the other side of the globe, but you still have to have a physical wing pushing against some physical air.

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          1. The “butterfly effect” is named after the influence of a butterfly on air. No wing pushing against the air, no “butterfly effect”. By definition.

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  25. It wasn’t just the 70’s that had a lot of ESP stories. Harry Harrison used it as a minor plot element in the Deathworld series and in the Stainless Steel Rat series, and Randall Garrett used it a lot in the non- Lord Darcy stories. Harrison used it like a form of radio, but Garrett looked through it like he did with magic, logically exploring it, its uses, and its consequences. In the Queen’s FBI series he talked about mind-readers going insane because they couldn’t develop a self-identity, and he talked about (and in other stories as well) what happens when espers decide to do good deeds.
    I don’t know if there was something in the air about ESP then, or if it was because everyone wanted to sell to Astounding/Analog, and John Campbell liked to explore the idea.
    (these stories as shorts are in the Gutenberg site for you who need more to read)

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    2. Bob– that one is true (mind-readers going insane because they couldn’t form an identity). The ones that do form an identity are taught shielding techniques or learn then so they can live a normal life outside an institution. ;-) I wouldn’t be surprised that psi abilities are linked mainly to bi-polar and schizophrenic personalities. (or others)

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    3. I know Heinlein had at least a couple of stories where psychic abilities were located in the “90% of the brain that isn’t used”.

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            2. Truer than you may realize. When I was taking Anatomy and Physiology (mumble-mumble) years ago, one curious fact I learned was that we don’t have enough blood in our bodies to fill our entire circulatory system. So parts of it shut down and effectively “take turns” getting nutrients. (Obviously not the heart, lungs or brain.) (Except for teenagers on the last one.)

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              1. My son says we only use also about 30% strength (might be 50. I have wretched memory) because to use more than that for more than a very short time can damage us. This is how you get 90 lb girls who lift cars off their children. Galvanized enough they use their WHOLE strength — for a very short time.

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            1. Are they sleeping in class? I used to now military guys that went out all hours of the night and sleep-walked at work. TRUE sounds like that might be what your students are doing— of course it doesn’t help that they have spent several of their growing up years learning junk.

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              1. Online students. And from the interactions I have, if they are using all of their brains … well: dynamite … nose-blowing … not happening.

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          3. I’m reminded of the old joke, “Humans only use X % of our brains, the rest is taken up by the operating system…”

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        2. Hence the scare quotes. I don’t recall what was said to have given rise to the legend, but I’m sure Google can dig it up.

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        3. What does he say about surviving hydrocephalics, who can be nearly completely normal, while in some over 70% of their brain is essentially dead?*

          * Saw this on a Discovery or Science channel show many years ago – if it’s not true, well, there you are.

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          1. I met a young man who had viral encephalitis when he was ten. He lost 1/2 of his brain (he can’t move one side of his body very well). He is very intelligent and does computer programming even though he can’t move one hand. So I think what happens is that the other part of the brain takes over. I don’t know if they have more neurons in the live tissue. (In his case they had to take out the brain because it could infect the rest of the brain). But — the boy may have better info ;-)

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            1. I know there are famous cases where lots of the brain is simply not there– displaced by fluid, only discovered on accident.

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              1. The ones I’m talking about are something like that. Hydrocephaly, IIRC, is caused by a valve malfunctioning and causing cerebrospinal fluid pressure buildup (typically in EARLY infancy, such as before being brought home from the hospital), causing the brain to die from the inside out, unless corrected. In one of the cases covered in this show, a rather smart man had lost about 90% of his brain mass before the pressure was released.

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                1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus#Exceptional_case

                  One interesting case involving a person with past hydrocephalus was a 44-year-old French man, whose brain had been reduced to little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue, due to the buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in his head.
                  ….
                  Remarkably, the man was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant, leading an at least superficially normal life, despite having enlarged ventricles with a decreased volume of brain tissue. “What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life,” commented Dr. Max Muenke, a pediatric brain defect specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side.”

                  Conjecture: The human brain is not wired as compactly as is theoretically possible.

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          2. I shall ask. Though the joke around the house is that when I die my brain will be found to be this shriveled little thing the size of a walnut. He says functions can compress and replace (in reference to that joke.)
            But interestingly, I attended middle school with a “surviving hydrocephalic, the cousin of one of my best friends. He was one of the top students in the school.

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    4. It wasn’t just scifi and fantasy that used ESP, in a number of Louis L’amour stories a character is mentioned to have ‘The Gift’ a form of precog, it is usually irrelevant to the story, but is a minor plot point in a couple of them.

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  26. I do not believe in psychic phenomena. I also do not believe in Marxist economics, fiat currency or the Designated Hitter.

    Nor do I believe that my belief in a thing is a necessary requirement of its happening.

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  27. You sort of look at these books and go to the back and see where these people have degrees, real degrees from real institutions, and then you look at the page again and you think “you can’t be THAT dumb.”

    Sadly…yes, yes they can….
    Recently been driving me NUTS. Intelligent and educated =/= sensible.

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      2. Yeah. A prof at Flat Sate U was voted “most likely to have tinfoil wallpaper.” And not a psych prof, which was odd. Most of the psych profs seemed amazingly well adjusted. This one, however . . .

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        1. Robert looks mighty fetching in a tinfoil yearmulke, but he found it makes no difference at all to his getting WAY too many story ideas or “idiotic” ones, like the romance that’s forcing him to write it. (Giggles.) He thought it was worth a try. Or he wanted to make me laugh. whichever came first.

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        2. The psych prof at our local university liked to date students, last year he stalked and killed one of his student ex-girlfriends, holed up in a motel and had a shootout with police, then blew his brains out rather than be arrested when they tear-gassed the room. Yeah, well adjusted probably didn’t describe him.

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  28. “I have reason to know there are SOME psi phenomena…”

    This is another data point supporting my belief that most* science fiction writers don’t understand science and the scientific method. Anyone who KNOWS that psi phenomena exist falls into the same category as those who know that one or more gods or spirits exist: they believe or have faith in something, therefore it definitely is true. Then they use selective memory, event filtering, and misinterpreted sensory information to support their beliefs.

    *I appropriately exclude scientists who also write science fiction.

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    2. Did I say I knew scientifically? That I tested it?
      I’m being a true witness — I’m telling you what I saw and which people would describe as psi phenomena. I’m not saying I’ve scientifically proved it. I’m saying I experienced it and therefore believed it.
      Yes, the same way I believe in G-d because I’ve experienced it, but I’m not going to rush out and write a scientific paper on it.
      There’s KNOWING and there’s proving. Not the same thing. For instance, right now I know a cat is not typing this — but I can’t prove it to you or make you experience it.

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      1. Maybe fifteen years ago I was lying on the couch reading. I glanced out the window and saw the sun about halfway down toward the horizon. Suddenly things clicked into perspective and I realized it was a big hot ball, high up, moving across the sky.

        The sensory details have faded, but not the recollection of primal authenticity, of direct knowing. Some part of my mind continues to know that the sun is a big hot ball moving high in the sky.

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    3. Gee, that’s the same argument folks had about the early explorers who dared sail the seas and risk falling off the edge of the world or being eaten by dragons. It’s the same as saying we shouldn’t believe there is the possibility of life on other planets that might not be human based because there is no scientific proof it exists right now.

      Sorry, but to put forth such a statement and exclude so many folks because they might believe — or acknowledge the possibility — that something exists that has yet to be proven scientifically is to show yourself for a fool. How many things that are common place today were the things of imagination a hundred years ago? If someone hadn’t believed they were possible, they never would have been invented.

      Atoms and sub-atomic theory were nothing but theories that couldn’t be proven until we had the technology to allow us to build the equipment that let us see on an atomic and sub-atomic level. So, MingoV, get over yourself. You might not believe in something but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

      BTW, do you exclude those same scientists if they happen to believe in God or have a belief system that can’t be proven according to what you view as scientific theory?

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      1. The problem is that, in general, people who mess around with occult stuff get messed up. And yes, even though chemists and volcanologists have high death and crazy counts.

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        1. Oh, I agree. It was just the whole attitude of “you believe in something that can’t be proven so you don’t understand scientific theory” that got to me.

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      2. I just kinda shrug and remember that there’s a reason “skeptics” are so annoying– for some reason, even when a debunking is dead easy, they’ll go off the rails a Sturgeon’s law amount of the time. I had to stop listening to several “skeptical” podcasts because they mistook “that guy is a creationist” for an argument. There’s some levels of fun that can survive bad arguments, but not that bad.

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    4. Science can’t prove anything that cannot be repeated. Therefore, it’s useless in proving that events happen in a historical sense. After all, we can’t repeat the Ides of March over and over again to see if the Senate will always kill Caesar. I’ve lost a lot of respect for Sagan over the years, but he had a firm understand of the limits of science and the scientific method. Unfortunately, most skeptics don’t.

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      1. Science can’t prove anything that cannot be repeated. Therefore, it’s useless in proving that events happen in a historical sense. After all, we can’t repeat the Ides of March over and over again to see if the Senate will always kill Caesar.

        Science can examine the logical consequences of assuming Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, and assuming he wasn’t killed on that date. There is certainly conceivable evidence that would disprove the hypothesis, such as solid evidence that he was killed in September.

        Repeatability is one aspect of some forms of science.
        Other sciences, such as historical sciences, can’t be repeated.
        Supernovas have been mentioned. We can’t have the Crab Nebula explode again. However, we can analyze the debris left behind by the explosion, we can come up with new analyses, and new if-then questions.
        For example, some of the young earth creationists have postulated that neutrons from a nearby supernova caused nuclear reactions in the earth’s crust and that’s why the radiometric dating persists in showing an old earth.
        Well, this postulate has certain logical consequences. In order for a neutron flux to be that intense, the supernova had to have at least so much mass. The debris field would have to be this massive.
        If the planet had been bombarded with enough neutrons to accelerate radioactive decay here, it must be possible to replicate that reaction in the lab. Slam neutrons against rock specimens and see what results.
        If the desired reactions do occur, what other reactions occur? Neutrons don’t cease to react with other elements merely because it would be convenient for creationists.
        And so on, and so on, and so on.
        We can’t send someone back to watch the supernova that created the crab nebula, but we can look at the evidence that remains today and infer lots of things about it.
        And these inferences can be checked by independent researchers.

        That’s what “repeatability” means in the historical sciences.

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  29. A. Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

    B. J.B.S. Haldane: “Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

    C. Yipee! Yee haa! Anything goes!

    Either jointly or separately, A and B do not imply C.

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      1. Oh, I didn’t post the above because of anything you wrote. On the contrary, I am impressed by your balancing act and hope to learn from it.

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        1. Well… While I’ve had weird experiences and therefore believe those happen, I don’t know they don’t happen for perfectly natural reasons that either I’m not aware of or that none of us is. (I mean getting killed by a thunderbolt — thunder itself — was once pretty “supernatural”)
          Also, frankly, even if they are “supernatural” I’d prefer not to believe in them. I can’t plan my actions or make sense of my life according to the universe’s whimsy.
          Besides, if you believe in the supernatural, it gets uppity.

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          1. 1. Also, frankly, even if they are “supernatural” I’d prefer not to believe in them. I can’t plan my actions or make sense of my life according to the universe’s whimsy.

            This!

            Even if, despite the debunking that goes on, you believe that there is a residue of real signal amid the “supernatural” noise, that signal may be at least as capricious as noise.

            Or it may be a cipher of unknown difficulty. (Hey, congratulations on your successful signal processing! :razz:)

            2. Besides, if you believe in the supernatural, it gets uppity.

            Arthur C. Clarke: “I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”

            3. By your “balancing act”, I meant balancing the demands of a disruptive (per #3 here) creative talent with the requirements of ordinary life.

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            1. By your “balancing act”, I meant balancing the demands of a disruptive (per #3 here) creative talent with the requirements of ordinary life…

              …of which your balancing your experiential and critical outlooks on the supernatural is an example.

              (Sometimes part of my brain, without telling me, goes off to mull something over, then taps me on the shoulder well after I’ve forgotten all about it.)

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  30. In the aviation world, there are many tales told of a pilot who is following what seems to be the correct course-of-action; then hears a voice, usually that of a respected teacher or other authority figure (and usually also Long Dead), telling him “take this action, *NOW*”; the pilot takes the action, and later learns that, had he continued on and ignored the voice, he would have crashed and been killed.

    Most people take this as evidence (if not “proof”) of Ghosts. Myself, I see a rather more obvious conclusion: The pilot suspected something was wrong. He kept trying to tell himself “you need to do this in order to avoid getting killed”; but since it was his own voice, he paid it no heed. That being so, his subconscious (or whatever it’s called) said, “OK, he won’t listen to himself… but he *will* listen to this person!”, and replayed the message in a voice which would command instant obedience.

    Side note re fey creatures:

    Dwarves: Short; hairy; live far from humans; known for making things; hide when humans appear; usually associated with mountainous regions; males and females indistinguishable from each other at sight.

    Beavers: Short; hairy; live far from humans; known for making things; hide when humans appear; usually associated with mountainous regions; males and females indistinguishable from each other at sight.

    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

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    2. As amusing as the dwarf/beaver thing is, the “femalet dwarves look just like male ones” thing is pretty modern as best I recall; someone being funny on why you don’t see girl dwarves. (They’re small flipping warriors, and you’re not an ally; what, you think you’ll see babies, too?)

      Also, when beaver dams have carved wooden chains I might grant the making things claim…..

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      1. In Brittany, there are the Korrigan, which are like dwarves, but the males are hideously ugly, and the women are beautiful temptresses (similar to the Sirens). It all depends on which folklore you delve into. And whether or not all your knowledge about elves and dwarves comes from Tolkein.

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        1. Tolkien wouldn’t be so bad; D&D type books (note: Drizzt fangirl from way back, BUT modern fantasy is so massively stealing from Tolkien’s new mythology) and TV shows would be the issue.

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    3. Well, _my_ Beaver Creek isn’t anywhere _near_ any mountains, and beavers will live in pretty much any temperate, wooded wetland. But the rest of it is pretty darned funny!

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  31. After all the ‘revolutionary’ talk of last week, it’s nice to have a discussion over something fluffy like the paranormal. Or at least, it gives me a chance to look away from the glaring, neon “FIGHT THE POWER” sign that such state-of-the-union discussions tend to light in my brain.

    Though I like to bill myself as having a rational perspective on life, I too have seen Things Which Cannot Be Explained By Science(tm). ‘Twas strange, really. At one point I’d been in the Boy Scouts long enough that it seemed like druids and shamans started popping out from behind every tree (spending weekends in isolated forests can do that I guess). Eventually I befriended a few of them. At the time, science was more or less my religion, but I was still intellectually curious, so I would watch their rituals at a distance (with permission) and attempt to make sense of the things I was seeing.

    After a few strange experiences, I decided that I needed to know more, and that the only way to collect such information was to become more involved. Since they had managed to successfully suspend my disbelief, I was wary to have any spell or ritual placed upon me (just in case this was real, and not all in my head). I approached one who was known as a reader of auras, as I assumed a passive “read” would be a good way to collect information without putting myself in any kind of undue danger. After hearing about the activity and observing it done on another person, I sat down and awaited my turn to be assenssed. As he started reading me, a haunted look came upon him, he stopped his ritual, and when I pressed him to tell me what he’d found he would glare and refuse to speak to me. And that was the end of my association, as the rest of their group rapidly fell out of contact with me. To this day, I still wonder what it was he saw that spooked him so.

    Ever since then, I’ve maintained an interest in the supernatural. I’ve never taken it upon myself to actually practice anything, but rather I read and study whatever materials are available in an attempt to make empirical observations about the matter.

    I love this blog. Sometimes I think my life has gotten mundane, and then I come here and read the discussions people have and it gets my Weirdness Engine moving again.

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    1. On having this blog — Yes, I felt that way too. Sometimes I get too intense for myself when we’re going on politics.

      What disturbs me about the whole “don’t get involved in paranormal” is that there is a whiff of paranormal about the activity of writing. It disturbs me.

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      1. Storytelling and magic seem to go hand in hand. (or at least the possible science we don’t have the ability to poke and prod yet. –bone to madscientist and others in our midst lol)

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  32. Hmm, my own two cents:

    I think one of my elementary school teachers was saying something about ESP one day. I said something to the effect of “Extra-sensory perception. Has anyone realized that this term is self-contradictory?” That didn’t earn me any points with the believer crowd, but ‘this is imposible’ wasn’t what I was trying to get at. Rather it was, ‘don’t be sloppy in your thinking’. (Though I’m not holding my breath on many psi claims I’m aware of)

    Either you have a sense through which perceptions register in your conciousness (your internal model of the external world), or you don’t. If you do, cool. Let’s poke it and figure out how it works. (Images of Isaac Newton trying to figure out how his own eye-balls worked by distorting his cornea with toothpicks while looking at a target image)

    Heinlein was interesting in the manner in which he treated psi-type stuff. In the settings where he assumed it was real, he also assumed that, because it was real, it could be poked, prodded, investigated and eventually understood. Instead of psi as a mystical power that can’t be reliably understood, and is the exclusive domain of a few special wizards, you get psi as another tool in the box, along with psi-training, psi-jamming, ps-eye-poking, etc. (images of three stooges)

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    1. I see karllembke was musing along similar lines up above.

      If something is real (interacts at all with the universe), then it is all-the-way real. The interaction mechanism by which it does things to us can be used to do things with it. I have a hard time imagining how you can have a coherent boundary between “super-natural” and “natural”.

      I suppose there is one seperate definition of (is/true/real) than the empirical one – the mathematical definition is sort of its own thing. (Mathematical is means, does this follow self-consistently from a set of axioms. Empirical is is an algorithm saying ‘can we tell whether or not this exists (interacts with the state of the universe)’.)

      Presumably in entirely alien hypothetical universes operating according to entirely different laws with entirely different state variables – the Platonic realm of mathematics is still the same. 2+2 still = 4 (with 2,4,+,= having the same meanings we use when defining these terms)

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    3. Rather ironically, you were being sloppy… that’s the fallacy of ambiguity.

      “Sensory” can mean “thing that is sensed,” but it also means “relating to the sense organs.” (I had to go double check; depending on the dictionary, that’s either secondary or primary definition, via Binging “sensory definition”.)

      Extra Sensory Perception– sensing something by means other than the sense organs/physical senses; that it’s also called “the sixth sense” would indicate that the name is in that meaning, rather than the “things that are sensed” meaning.

      It’s kinda like the classic “driving on parkways and parking on driveways” question.

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  33. Sarah: one of the more scientific of the “magickal” writers about the Paranormal is “Constantinos”. He specializes mostly on ghosts, and frankly, that’s his best work.

    Yes, roll your eyes at his goth fettishism, but he has a consistent, usable terminology and has a reasonably rigorous set of criterion for results. Also, a lot of his ideas are practical things that the average person could do on their own. You can extrapolate on your “Fringe Squad” from there. Bonus: his books are pretty short usually, too.

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