Entangled Minds

I flew to Madison, Wisconsin last week to participate in a fund raiser for the Deer Park Buddhist Center, where I was fortunate to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak to a small group. On the way to Madison my flights were unexpectedly rerouted when I reached Denver, so I had to run around the huge Denver airport to find the gate for the next flight. As I was anxiously rushing from one terminal to another, at one point on an escalator I looked up and saw this billboard. There I was rushing like a nut all over the airport to make sure I would make it to the meeting with the Dalai Lama early the following day, and I suddenly encounter him on a 15 foot high billboard. It made me laugh. The rest of the trip was fine.

Presentiment in the news .

Try this link to see a new educational initiative from the Institute of Noetic Sciences: PsiWars.org

I enjoyed this remark from an article about the author Kingsley Amis in The New Yorker (April 23, 2007), by Adam Gopnik: It is a very good thing to have a built-in bullshit detector, but a bad thing when the bullshit detector crowds out the rest of your brain; that's why they call it being narrow-minded. You quickly reach the stage where anything ambitious, complicated, or merely foreign gets spat on along with the things that are genuinely phoney. I'd add to this that those with HABS (hyperactive BS) syndrome, including cynics who proudly belong to "skeptics" societies, -- which revel in the presumed stupidity of others who don't belong to the club -- tend to reflexively spit on anything they regard as unorthodox or anomalous, including claims of psi experiences and experiments supporting those claims. This is not to say that a refined BS detector is a bad thing. On the contrary, it is a necessity, especially when it comes to evaluating all those exciting new opp...

Nancy Zingrone provides a nice annotated list (reachable here ) of 36 basic books on parapsychology covering the history and evidence of this field. Another book to consider: The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof: The Enigma of Séance Phenomena by Rosemarie Pilkington, PhD. You can read about it here , including a sample chapter. Warning, this book is likely to push your boggle threshold. But I know Rosemarie, and I know she's meticulous about her facts, so prepare to be boggled.

The idea of a large, user-contributed encyclopedia is, in principle, a good one. But the implementation of the largest such effort to date, the Wikipedia, is an excellent example of how good ideas can go dreadfully wrong. Authors of Wikipedia articles are anonymous in many cases, so expertise in the topic is not vetted for accuracy or depth. Worse, for controversial topics and for biographies of living persons, experts are specifically asked not to contribute to the articles. I discovered this when attempting to correct factual errors in the entry page on my name, and for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I've been asked not to edit these pages, even though I am arguably the expert on me, and an expert on IONS, because it violates Wikipedia's guidelines. The most persistent editors on Wikipedia, by the way, largely seem to be 20-something students who are riding high on arrogance, because like all kids, they're suffering under the delusion that they know everything. (I rec...

This week I participated in a series of radio shows all around the US, promoting Entangled Minds , which can be purchased for one dollar as part of an IONS membership promotion. The stations included WPEG-FM (Charlotte), KXXR-FM (Minneapolis), WOCA-FM (Gainesville), WEOL-AM (Cleveland), WICO-FM (regional Baltimore), KSFR-FM (NPR, Santa Fe), FRES-FM (Columbia), Voice of America, WLRN-FM (NPR, Miami), WMEL-AM (Daytona Beach), WQUB-FM (NPR, Illinois), WFTL (regional Florida), WLW-AM (Cincinnati), KRLD-AM (Dallas), KKZZ-AM (Los Angeles), KXKL-FM (Denver), KFWB-AM (Los Angeles), and KPQ-AM (Spokane). I have a few more stations remaining on the "tour" next week, including KSVY-FM (NRP, Sonoma) and KLPW-AM (St. Louis). In general, I do not enjoy the self-promotional aspects that are necessarily associated with being an author (that is, necessary assuming the author wants to sell books!). I have author friends who love traveling on speaking tours; they're on the road almost conti...