Chaos Theory

"She could almost imagine spending her life with him, if she could just keep him from trying to eat her brains."

Zombie chick-lit.

Enormous amounts of shirtless men.

Thank you, Improv Everywhere.

Corny costume.

I'd love to see a vidoe of how they got the cat into this.

An amusing bit of Supernatural screenshotting

“That’s it, we’re freakin salting and burning the damn internet right now.”

The Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator

Lots of options!

Statistics and ESP

"I think it's probably like music ability or sports ability," she said. "Everybody has a little bit, but some people have more than others."

Utts says skeptics often ask why psychics cannot get the right answer 100 percent of the time.
"To me, that's like saying if home runs are possible, then why doesn't a batter hit one 100 percent of the time?" she said. "I think that it's going to be physically impossible."
While she encourages keeping an open mind, Utts cautions not to believe every spooky tale you hear this season: "I am more skeptical now, not about the existence of phenomena, but about the stories I hear or studies I read. One of the things I've learned is how easy it is for people to fool themselves or others."
Nevertheless, Utts points out that hundreds of tightly controlled, published parapsychology studies meet the rigorous scientific criteria established to weed out flukes and shams. She shares some of these studies with students in the "Testing Psychic Claims" class that she occasionally teaches for the Integrated Studies honors program.
"I think students are surprised by how much research there's been on this subject, and the quality of it," says Utts, who also directs the Davis Honors Challenge.
However, Utts finds that even among honors students, people's beliefs (or disbeliefs) about parapsychology are often so entrenched that reams of published data are not enough to change their minds.
"We are much more likely to believe one poorly done study in the newspaper about how some food prevents cancer," she said for perspective. "Nobody questions those kinds of studies."

After giving talks at conferences, Tart was often approached by other scientists seeking to confide their own lucid premonitions or out-of-body experiences. "They were sharing what to me were garden variety parapsychological experiences, but to them were extraordinary," he said. He recalled that many colleagues showed visible relief upon learning the name of their experience, hearing that it was commonplace, or that it was not connected to mental illness.
Such exchanges prompted Tart to develop an online journal called The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences, a forum where scientists could openly discuss their brushes with psi, anonymously if desired, and without fear of derision or retribution — www.issc-taste.org."

There's some interesting reads at that site:

• "Because I thought a little pilot study would be useful for concretizing my thinking for my paper, I resolved that I would, by force of psychic power, cause the leading bus to make an unscheduled stop before it arrived in Oakland. The only scheduled stop before Oakland, if any, would have been at Manteca or Tracy. I forgot at which point in the trip to Oakland I exerted intentions to stop the bus, but I believe it was no less than a half-hour before the resulting event. While the buses were climbing up the Altamont pass, the engine access door at the rear of the leading bus flew open. The driver of the bus in which I was riding pulled up alongside the leading bus and signaled the other driver to stop to correct the problem. The leading bus stopped, while my bus continued on. As I looked back at the stopped bus, I was amazed that I had apparently succeeded."
• "Had I known that the heiress Patty Hearst had been kidnapped, just down the street, a few minutes after we had left? "
• "That evening at about 9 pm I was sitting at home in front of my fire about to read a book when I had a very strong image of Pat dying of a heart attack."
• "In May 1988 I had the following dream, which in conjunction with certain experiences, prompted me to relocate and change jobs, and also predicted the unexpected death of my father by just a few months. Had I NOT had this dream and the associated meaningful synchronicities, I would have never gone to France for the next decade to found and direct a particular academic center there. Thus, this dream guided me into a major life transition and helped shape my career."
• "I heard a voice that said "Do not speak, the time will come for you to tell people what to do...".
• "This experience confirmed my prior belief, on the basis of no evidence, that ESP was real but useless."
• "Go to the library.  Go to the library and you will see her."
• "I have had a number of psi experiences throughout my life, beginning with a very significant precognition dream portraying my brother's funeral service in precise detail two weeks before his unexpected death."
• "I know this is not an earth-shattering story, but on some level I feel that I picked up on something in him that needed contact with a friend from the past who had fond memories of him when his life was going well for him."
• "I said to her two days before she died and while she was conscious, that if she continued after death I would sorely want to hear from her. I anticipated a very long lonely road." (I think this one's my favorite. Highly recommended reading there.)
• "You'll hit it into right field and it will be all OK."
• "We have each had similar co-dreams with other people, and we always enjoyed discussing the synchronicity of the experience. But, for the first time, we had a very trustworthy third person exquisitely placed for verification."
• "So, I thought, this is a good time to test this hypothesis, and started to concentrate on finding 3 quarters for buying a small ice cream."
• "Only after she left did I recall my dream, but then realized that today was Wednesday and in the dream she said we had to meet on Thursday. I shrugged and thought to myself, "Wow, that was nearly a precognitive dream."
• "Apparent contact with a deceased loved one is indeed much more common than we ever suspected, and grief counselors are now being trained to accept it as normal and not make a person feel that they are strange for having such experiences. Such experiences are accepted enough now to have an acronym, ADCs (After Death Communications). They may go on much longer than six weeks and still be in the normal range."
• "I know.  He told me."
   

Emergency Novel Helper

Check this out (Word doc).

FNL sponsor talk

"Anyway, our beloved supersponsors this week, apart from Tecate, the Tijuana Clinic for the Injection of Shark Into Spinal Fluid, and the Benevolent Association of Law Enforcement Agencies Portrayed by Landry's Dad, are:
TV Guide. TV Guide's biggest problem is convincing people that it exists. Back in the pre-Internet/pre-digital days, TV Guide -- like telexes, record-cleaning spray, video rewinders, and The Club -- served a valuable purpose. As broadcast channels proliferated, it saved people from having to kneel in front of the TV, spinning the dial in the hope of finding something worth watching. Just when remote-control threatened to obsolete that advantage, the rise of cable, and newspapers' curious decision to relegate cable listings to the fine print, enabled TV Guide's comprehensive listings to maintain their utility, with such added bonuses as informative interviews with Anson Williams and glossy promotional photos of Dick Van Patten. Now, after the advent of the TV Guide Channel, digital programming guides, title-searchable DVR listings, and Internet schedules, it may be hard to imagine why on earth someone would buy TV Guide. The answer to this is obvious: some people are senile. If you cannot dial a non-rotary phone, you cannot cancel your subscription. So the next time you ask "why the hell do we need a TV-Guide-sponsored mid-FNL recap of what just happened in the first half-hour," please remember that TV Guide's sole audience at this point is people with mid-stage dementia."

Halloween photos from e-mail #4

(Oops, the order.)

Halloween photos from e-mail #6