Alien revelations

No one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal proof of intelligent life on other planets.  It would demonstrate what I've been saying for years -- that given the right conditions, developing living organisms is straightforward and common.  It would mean that we're not alone in the cosmos, something I'd find reassuring.  And it would give us an opportunity to explore the minds of creatures whose thoughts float on a completely different biological matrix.

I mean, I'm the guy whose favorite movie is Contact.

But all wishful thinking aside, I think it's pretty unlikely that they've come here.  The distances involved are simply too large.  When you consider that the fastest man-made vehicle, the Juno spacecraft, will take five years just to get to Jupiter -- itself only one-sixth of the way out from the Sun in our own solar system -- the idea that even an advanced civilization has crossed the interstellar wastes and come in for a visit is pretty far-fetched.  Science fiction aside, faster-than-light travel really does seem to be impossible.  And fanciful proposals for ultra-fast travel, such as the Alcubierre warp drive, have yet to be proven practical or even possible.

So it was with a great deal of eye-rolling that I read a news story today about the most recent weird twist in the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Hillary Clinton's campaign manager has said that if elected, Clinton will come clean on the government's role in covering up UFOs and alien contact.

John Podesta, who not only serves as Clinton's campaign chair but was Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, sounds pretty serious about this.  In an interview with Jake Tapper on The Lead, Podesta said it's time that the government 'fesses up:

The U.S. government could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena...  What I've talked to the secretary about, and what she's said now in public, is that if she's elected president, when she gets into office, she'll ask for as many records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that's a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to.

Podesta's been on this kick for a while.  Last year, while working for the Obama administration, Podesta tweeted:

Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere cc: @NYTimesDowd

When Tapper asked Podesta whether he believed in aliens, he sidestepped:

That's for the public to judge once they've seen all the evidence that the U.S. government has...  There are a lot of planets out there.  The American people can handle the truth.

Which certainly sounds like it's a veiled "Yes."  After all, if Podesta didn't think there had been alien contact, what would be the big deal?  He's not likely to say, "The American people can handle the truth that there haven't been any real encounters with extraterrestrials."

What's to handle?

Me, I'm skeptical.  Of course, I would be.  Every time there's been news of revelations from government regarding their role in covering up alien contacts, it's turned out to be the same old anecdotal eyewitness stuff that really isn't admissible as evidence.  After all, last year the Air Force declassified and released (online, for free) the files from Project Blue Book, and what was in there turned out to be... not much.  My guess is that even if Podesta and Clinton end up making some grand pronouncement, it's gonna be more of the same.

Even so, the conspiracy theorists are all abuzz about this.  Some are predicting that Podesta is going to be taken out before he has a chance to reveal anything.  Others say that anything Podesta says will have been screened to remove all of the interesting stuff -- just as Project Blue Book was.  Why exactly the government would be so determined to prevent us from knowing that there was intelligent life out there is never fully articulated.  They have their reasons, apparently.  The sinister, all-knowing, all-powerful They.

So we'll see what happens.  My guess is that the whole thing will fizzle, even if Clinton gets elected.  Probably all for the best.  Even if there have been visitors from another world, we have more pressing concerns at the moment, like how not to continue fucking up this world to the point that it's uninhabitable.

Scary Sophia

I find the human mind baffling, not least because the way it is built virtually guarantees that the most logical, rational, and dispassionate human being can without warning find him/herself swung around by the emotions, and in a flash end up in a morass of gut-feeling irrationality.

This happened to me yesterday because of a link a friend sent me regarding some of the latest advances in artificial intelligence.  The AI world has been zooming ahead lately, its most recent accomplishment being a computer that beat world master Fan Hui at the game of Go, long thought to be so complex and subtle that it would be impossible to program.

But after all, those sorts of things are, at their base, algorithmic.  Go might be complicated, but the rules are unvarying.  Once someone created software capable of playing the game, it was only a matter of time before further refinements allowed the computer to play so well it could defeat a human.

More interesting to me are the things that are (supposedly) unique to us humans -- emotion, creativity, love, curiosity.  This is where the field of robotics comes in, because there are researchers whose goal has been to make a robot whose interactions are so human that it is indistinguishable from the real thing.  Starting with the emotion-mimicking robot "Kismet," robotics pioneer Cynthia Breazeal has gradually been improving her design until recently she developed "Jibo," touted as "the world's first social robot."  (The link has a short video about Jibo which is well worth watching.)

But with Jibo, there was no attempt to emulate a human face.  Jibo is more like a mobile computer screen with a cartoonish eye in the middle.  So David Hanson, of Hanson Robotics, decided to take it one step further, and create a robot that not only interacts, but appears human.

The result was Sophia, a robot who is (I think) supposed to look reassuringly lifelike.  So check out this video, and see if you think that's an apt characterization:

Now let me reiterate.  I am fascinated with robotics, and I think AI research is tremendously important, not only from its potential applications but for what it will teach us about how our own minds work.  But watching Sophia talk and interact didn't elicit wonder and delight in me.  Sophia doesn't look like a cute and friendly robot who I'd like to have hanging around the house so I didn't get lonely.

Sophia reminds me of the Borg queen, only less sexy.

Okay, okay, I know.  You've got to start somewhere, and Hanson's creation is truly remarkable.  Honestly, the fact that I had the reaction I did -- which included chills rippling down my backbone and a strong desire to shut off the video -- is indicative that we're getting close to emulating human responses.  We've clearly entered the "Uncanny Valley," that no-man's-land of nearly-human-but-not-human-enough that tells us we're nearing the mark.

What was curious, though, is that it was impossible for me to shut off my emotional reaction to Sophia.  I consider myself at least average in the rationality department, and (as I said before) I am interested in and support AI research.  But I don't think I could be in the same room as Sophia.  I'd be constantly looking over my shoulder waiting for her to come at me with a kitchen knife, still wearing that knowing little smile.

And that's not even considering how she answered Hanson's last question in the video, which is almost certainly just a glitch in the software.

I hope.

So I guess I'm more emotion-driven than I thought.  I wish David Hanson and his team the best of luck in their continuing research, and I'm really glad that his company is based in Austin, Texas, because it's far enough away from upstate New York that if Sophia gets loose and goes on a murderous rampage because of what I wrote about her, I'll at least have some warning before she gets here.

Control vs. conspiracy

Being a science teacher, I'm perhaps to be excused if I think that a lot of the world's problems would be significantly mitigated if everyone learned more actual science.

It wouldn't fix everything, mind you.  Even I'm not gung-ho enough to think that.  But if we all could admit that anthropogenic climate change is real, that evolution happened, that vaccines work, that scientists aren't some kind of evil cadre of conspirators who would like nothing better than to destroy the Earth -- well, it would go a long way toward making this a much saner world.

This idea is bolstered by some research that I just ran across -- although it dates to 2008, I hadn't heard about it.  Entitled "Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception," by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky of the University of Texas, it describes research supporting the idea that when people feel confused or out of their depth, they have a tendency to see patterns that don't exist.  It's as if the mind becomes desperate to find something to hang on to, and attempts to force order from chaos.  The authors write:

Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.  Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self.  Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them.

Science writer Ed Yong draws a connection between this phenomenon and belief in conspiracy theories.  In his wonderful blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Yong writes:

Obviously, the effect has both good and bad sides that should make for interesting discussions.  For a start, an ability to spot patterns isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could be downright beneficial if it ramps up a person’s skill at spotting subtle trends that are actually real (although future studies need to test whether this actually happens). 

Even spotting false patterns could have psychological benefits if it restores a person’s sense of control, increases their confidence or even reduces their risk of depression.  Scientists, fond as we are of truth and fact, would typically argue that it’s better to get an accurate picture of the world around you.  Whitson and Galinsky agree but they also take a pragmatic stance, saying that “it may be at times adaptive [to allow] an individual to psychologically engage with rather than withdraw from their environment.” 

Of course, there are instances when making false connections can be downright damaging, especially if they’re used as the basis of bad, or even fatal, decisions.  Imagined pharmaceutical conspiracies or implications drawn about medicines from one-off anecdotes could drive people to embrace fruitless or potentially dangerous forms of alternative treatment.  People can avoid taking responsibility for, or psychologically coping with, events in their lives if they ascribe them to higher powers or sinister agencies.  And seeing too much meaning in the actions of others could lead to paranoia and severed social ties.

Which certainly supports the conjecture that belief in conspiracy theories would be stronger amongst people who feel that they have little control over their lives.  If you feel yourself to be at risk, if you think your home, family, or your entire way of life is in danger of being irreparably damaged, you begin to cast about for explanations -- because, after all, even a terrifying explanation is better than all of those bad things happening for no reason at all.  So you begin to put together pieces of information, all the while looking for a pattern.

And Whitson and Galinsky's research implies that if there is no pattern, your brain simply invents one.

See the pattern?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's not that I don't understand the drive people have for there to be an explanation.  The idea that bad things just happen because they happen -- that the world is so constructed that it raineth alike on the just and the unjust -- is a pretty bleak view.  

But there are a lot of things that we do understand, and that's where science education comes into play.  Whitson and Galinsky's research shows once we know more about those phenomena for which we do have an explanation, we not only make smarter decisions, but our feelings of befuddlement and confusion diminish.  We're less likely to find illusory patterns and miss the reality, or to be taken in by people who are muddying the situation because of a specific agenda (currently the case with the political attitudes toward climate change).  

It brings me back, as I have many times, to the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."  

Ten questions, ten answers

The site Today Christian posted an article a couple of days ago entitled, "10 Questions for Every Atheist."  The subtitle reads, "Some Questions Atheist [sic] Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer!  Which leads to some interesting conclusions…"  Because evidently we atheists never think about these things, and faced with questions have no choice but to say, "Golly!  I hadn't considered any of this!  I will go out and become a Christian immediately!"

Only ten, actually, but close enough.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So in the interest of setting the record straight, I thought I'd answer them.  Not that the Today Christian people are ever likely to read my answers.  But just in case.  So here they are:

Question 1:  How did you become an atheist?

I was raised Roman Catholic, and spent the first part of my life trying like hell to believe the whole shebang.  There was (and is) something attractive about there being a Grand Pattern to it all, something bigger than myself that gives meaning and purpose to life (a topic I'll deal with more in a moment).  However, after reading the bible more than once cover-to-cover, and talking with various priests, ministers, and other true believers, I was forced to the conclusion that belief came from one of three sources: (1) I believe this because it's how I was raised; (2) I believe this because I've had a personal experience that convinced me; or (3) I believe this because I was convinced by an authority figure I trust.  None of these seemed to be acceptable reasons to commit to a belief, so I started casting about for actual evidence that any of it was true.  When I was about 28 or so I realized that there didn't seem to be any, or at least no evidence that would be acceptable to someone from outside the system.  At that point, I had no choice but to admit to myself that I was at least an agnostic, and that the complete dearth of hard evidence strongly supported atheism.

Question 2:  What happens when we die?

I don't know.  I'll find out when I get there.  Furthermore, not only do I not know, neither does anyone else, despite what they'll tell you to the contrary.  Wherever death leads, it's a one-way trip, with no possibility of sending text messages back to the ones we've left behind.

Question 3:  What if you're wrong?  And there is a heaven?  And there is a HELL!

Ah, yes, it always comes up sooner or later -- Pascal's Wager.  "I'd rather be a Christian who is wrong than an atheist who is wrong."  The problem with this is twofold.  Of all the gods humans have ever worshiped, how do you know that the Christian version is the one we need to worry about?  What if you die and find yourself in Valhalla? 

Of course, the other problem is that it's hard to conceive of a just deity who hides every shred of available evidence of his/her/its existence, creates a world full of confusion and ambiguity, and then when people come to the wrong conclusion says, "Ha ha!  You're wrong!  Into the fiery furnace with you, sucker!"  I'm not sure that such a deity would be worthy of worship in any case.

Question 4:  Without God, where do you get your morality from?

Easy.  My morality is based on doing the least harm I can and the most good I can, and continuing to learn and grow.  This sort of attitude is seen in all social species -- sharing food, taking care of family, banding together to face dangers.  So the reason I am moral is because I'm a social primate, and morality evolved to make the social structure cohere.

Question 5:  If there is no God, can we do what we want?  Are we free to murder and rape?  While good deeds are unrewarded?

Cf. my answer to question #4.  And if the only reason you're not murdering or raping is because the Big Sky Guy says no, I think you're the one whose morality needs some analysis.

Question 6:  If there is no God, how does your life have any meaning?

I create the meaning of my life.  For me, the meaning in life comes from connections with the people I care about; from learning and teaching; and from creativity.  I don't need an external source of meaning. 

Question 7:  Where did the universe come from?

Physicists are hot on the trail of this question, and current research on the topic of cosmology is tremendously exciting.  I find that people who criticize cosmology usually don't have the vaguest clue of what the physicists are actually saying, and almost never have read a single scholarly paper on the subject.  So before you start spouting nonsense like "atheists say that nothing exploded and made everything," try learning some actual science first.  Then we'll talk.

Question 8:  What about miracles?  What about all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?

Throughout the ages, people have claimed to be in touch with gods, demons, spirits, whatever.  I think the more pertinent question for you is: if you think that such experiences are real, what about all of the Hindus who have claimed to have an experience of Krishna?  What about the ancient Greeks who believed that they'd gotten prophecies from Apollo?  What about the Cheyenne who had vision quests in which they met, and spoke with, Coyote?  Accepting these kinds of mystical experiences as real actually creates a far bigger problem for you than it does for me.

Question 9:  What's your view of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris?

I think they are (or were, in Hitchens's case) strident because they've needed to be.  The religious model has dominated all discussion for thousands of years; in a lot of places, it's impossible to hold public office unless you are religious.  In some places, being an atheist can get you imprisoned or executed.  But because I largely agree with them about religion doesn't mean that I agree with them about everything.  They're not the Popes of Atheism, or something.  They're human, which means they'll be right about some things and wrong about others.

Question 10:  If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?

Let me ask you a question: if the Christian god is the only real one, then why does every society have a different religion?  The things that drive religious belief -- the desire for explanations for the deep questions, fear of uncertainty, fear of death, trust in authority -- are universal to the human condition.  It's unsurprising that many societies have landed on religious explanations.  What's more puzzling is that if only one religion is true -- and it's hard to see how they could all be true, despite what some ecumenical types might claim -- why the various religions aren't at least similar.

So, there you are.  Ten questions, ten answers.  Despite the condescending attitude of the person who wrote the original post, I've tried to keep the snarkiness to a minimum and answer the questions as honestly as I can.  Like I said, it's unlikely that this post will be read by the person who asked them; my sense is that in any case, they didn't want answers, they were just hoping to be able to say "Gotcha!" and have us atheists retreat in disarray.  But if anyone who is religious does read this, and wants to discuss these points further, feel free to post a comment.  Increased understanding is, as always, the watchword around here.

Scam detection

I am asked sometimes why I care so much if people believe counterfactual nonsense.  "What's the harm?" is a frequent way the question is phrased.  "So what if folks like to check their horoscope or get a Tarot card reading every so often?  Who is it hurting?"

There are two answers to this.  First, once you've accepted one idea without requiring that it have any connection to reality, it makes it all too easy to get suckered again.  One gets in a habit of sloppy thinking -- or not thinking at all -- and the attractiveness of certain forms of woo are such that once you've started down that road, it's hard to turn back.

The second, though, is more insidious, and it is that it puts you at risk of being taken advantage of by predatory charlatans.  These are people who know damn good and well that they are liars, but are shamelessly bilking people for thousands of dollars, preying on gullibility, desperation, and grief to swell their own ill-gotten gains.

Take, for example, "psychic detectives."  These people descend like vultures on families whose loved ones have gone missing, claiming that they will gather information from The Cosmos to tell the grief-stricken whether the missing individual is dead or alive, whether there's any hope of their safe return, or (if they're dead) where the body might be found.  One session can cost $500 or more.  And driven by the loss and emptiness, together with the horrible uncertainty regarding what happened, the victims are often willing to pay.  The result?  "Psychic detectives" do a thriving business.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it does my heart good to see one of them get found out.  Just last week, Inside Edition reporter Lisa Guerrero did an exposé on Portland, Oregon "psychic detective" Laurie McQuary, wherein the show's producer, Charlie McLravy, hired McQuary, posing as the brother of a missing girl.  He brought along a photograph and asked McQuary what had happened to the girl.

McQuary didn't hesitate.  The girl was dead, she said.  She hated to tell him that, but she had to be honest.  Her death was violent, and involved sexual assault.  In the end, her assailant hit her in the head with a rock and killed her.

But it went further than that.  McQuary brought out a map, and told McLravy where he could find his sister's body.  "She's right here," she said.  "No more than a mile or two away."

The next day, McQuary was brought in to be interviewed by Guerrero.  Guerrero brought out the photograph, and McQuary verified that she'd spoken to the missing girl's brother, and that the girl was dead.

"You always know... if a person is dead or alive?" Guerrero asked.

"Oh, yes," McQuary answered.

"Then would you be surprised to know that this little girl is me?"

There was a moment of pure shocked silence.  Then McQuary said, her voice faltering a little, "And... um... you haven't been abducted?"

Guerrero said, "No, as you can see, I'm right here.  Can you explain this?"

McQuary said, "No, I can't."

Then Guerrero went in for the kill.  "This little girl is me, and you told him she was dead.  You're taking advantage of desperate people with a bunch of hocus-pocus, aren't you?"

McQuary said, "No, I'm not," and then got up and walked off the sound stage, trying to gather whatever shreds were left of her dignity, ending with, "This has been very interesting.  You all have a very nice day."

All in all, McLravy and Guerrero showed the photograph to ten psychic detectives -- all of whom said that Guerrero had died as a child.  Not a single one said, "Um... she's still alive, she was never abducted, and in fact, she isn't your sister.  What's going on here?"

It's not that I don't understand the pain people feel over loss.  And although I've never had a close friend or relative disappear, I can imagine how hard it is not to know the fate of someone you care about.  So I have some sympathy for the grieving family members who hire these people.

But the idea that "psychic detectives" and other such charlatans are using the pain of the grieving to bilk them out of huge sums of cash, and giving them nothing in return but a skein of lies -- that is unforgivable.  And to Guerrero and McLravy, all I can say is: touché.

Cloaking device activated

New from the "Don't We Have Worse Things To Worry About?' department, we have two astronomers from Columbia University proposing that we use a laser-based device to cloak our planet from being spotted by hostile aliens.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, David Kipping and Alex Teachey suggest that it might be time to consider shielding our planet from unfriendly eyes.

"About ten years ago, it was proposed that aliens might choose to signal their presence to us not through radio waves, but by building megastructures, which would transit their star and create very weird and artificial-looking transits," Kipping said, bringing to mind the odd luminance drops discovered last year in "Tabby's Star," an anomaly that has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

Scientific luminaries as prominent as Stephen Hawking have suggested that however exciting the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would be, it might not be so great if the aliens came for a visit.  "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans," Hawking said.  "If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Put even more succinctly by none other than Dave Barry, "It's all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with aliens, but I bet he'd change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door.  I bet he'd be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us."

Kipping says that the idea of cloaking the Earth is feasible, and wouldn't be very expensive, costing around the same in energy as seventy typical homes.  "We realized that because lasers are narrow directed beams, it was quite feasible to produce artificial transits," Kipping said.  "We then took this a step further and had the idea that one could use such a laser system to completely cloak the Earth's transit."

So that sounds okay.  But this does bring up two troubling points.

The first is that if there are intelligent life forms out there looking in our direction, they already know we're here.  Starting in the 1950s, we've been beaming radio waves into space carrying our television shows, an idea that has spawned movies as different as Starman and Galaxy Quest.  Any aliens intercepting our transmissions started with such feats of brilliance as Gilligan's Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and (heaven help us all) Lost in Space, which means they have probably already decided that Earth's inhabitants are a bunch of complete morons.  It wouldn't surprise me to find out that we've already been the subject of a documentary on another planet entitled The Derpuloids of Dumbass-3.

So there's the problem of too little, too late.  But the more serious issue is that maybe instead of worrying about the arrival of hostile aliens, we should attend to more pressing problems.  To wit: climate change (and the fact that our leaders are largely sitting around with their fingers in their ears saying, "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" whenever a climate scientist brings up the topic).  Environmental devastation on a mammoth scale.  The increase in earthquakes directly caused by hydrofracking.  The fact that the American presidential election is increasingly looking like it will boil down to, "Which disease would you like?  Leprosy or syphilis?"

I know that installing a Romulan Cloaking Device on the Earth doesn't preclude our attending to some of these other issues, but I do worry about our attention being trained on the wrong things.  If you consider overall risk, I think that the collapse of the ice shelves, and the flooding of every coastal city on Earth -- now considered virtually inevitable -- is a little more critical than taking measures to keep away the Cardassians.

So anyway.  I'm all for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  I would love nothing better than to have concrete proof that we're not alone in the universe.  But considering the vast distances we're talking about -- keep in mind that light from the nearest star takes a little over four years to get here -- I'm thinking we're safe.  Even if the aliens watched episodes of Green Acres, decided that humanity didn't deserve to live, and took off in their spaceship with planet-destroying missiles, I think we won't have anything to fret about for a long time yet.

Psychic health care fundraiser

I swear, sometimes humans are so weird that it leaves me not knowing what to think.

Take, for example, the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre, in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.  Like any good hospital, Red Deer is committed to excellence in patient care.  It's also like other hospitals in that there's never enough money to achieve everything they want to achieve, so they rely on volunteers, donations, and groups like the Friends of the Red Deer Regional Hospital to meet their goals.  The FRDRH says on their homepage that their vision is to "improve care and comfort to all patients and residents through selfless efforts of staff and volunteers," and their mission to "facilitate innovative fundraising programs for services and equipment to benefit patients and residents in our facilities."

Which all sounds fantastic.  So the FRDRH decided to hold a fundraiser to support their efforts, and as part of this fundraiser, hired...

... a psychic.

For a hundred dollars a pop, you can have a chat with medium Colette Baron-Reid, who bills herself as follows:

Colette Baron-Reid is an internationally acclaimed intuition expert and host of the TV show Messages From Spirit.  She’s also a bestselling inspirational author published in 27 languages, keynote speaker, recording artist, and entrepreneur. 

Vote into the Watkins List as one of the Top 100 Most Spiritually Influential People in 2013, her reputation as a noted contemporary thought leader was firmly established.  In person or on paper, Colette delivers her message of perspective and hope with her trademarked compassionate candor peppered with a pinch of infectious personality.

All righty, then.

So we have a fundraiser for promoting cutting-edge, evidence-based health care that involves paying lots of money to have a woman tell you she can get in touch with your dead relatives, and that Aunt Bertha is just having a jolly old time in heaven.

Which brings up a question I've always had.  When the mediums do their shtick, why do they never find that your dead relatives are in hell?  I know that given some of the people in my family, it seems pretty likely.  We always get told that Grandpa Albert is happy and wishes all of us people down here on Earth the best, but we never get messages like, "Grandpa Albert says to tell you, "DEAR GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE SATAN JUST SENT A CRAZED WEASEL TO CHEW OFF MY FEET."

Which, now that I think about it, could be kind of entertaining.  Maybe I should start my own business as a medium, specializing on getting in touch with people who are in hell.  It'd be fun to tell people, "Uncle Steve says the Lake of Eternal Fire is kind of toasty this time of year.  He also said to tell you, 'Satan said to say "see you next Thursday."'  Do you know what all that's about?"

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I can't argue with a charity event that raises money for a needy hospital, but for cryin' in the sink, why couldn't they have found a better way to do it?  Hire a magician.  At least with a magician, no one's pretending that what they do is real.

Anyhow, if you're in Red Deer, Alberta on April 9, and have $100 to throw away, you might want to consider attending.  I'm always curious about how these hucksters ply their trade, and would love to hear a report.  And at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that your money is going to a good cause, and not to the medium's downpayment on her next crystal ball.