I am in the wrong job!

Found this in my letterbox this morning:

From KungFuWoo	From KungFuWoo

I was amused more than anything, but then turning over on to the back page I was impressed with this womans fees:

• $90/ half hour for a cold reading
• $50 for a demonstration
• Workshops ranging from $75 – $150

Man, I am in the wrong job. I could make a lot of money just by bullshitting for two hours a day. Just two hours…

Being Skeptical is sometimes like killing Santa Claus

I have a colleague at work who is a little susceptible to woo. She visits pyschics, reads her star signs, buys into alternative medicine and doesn't mind a bit of mild conspiracy theory to boot. I think this sort of thing has been inculcated early in her life. She has more than once told me that the women in her family are sensitive to psychic stuff (I'm not sure what exactly) which suggests to me she got it from grandma, mum or aunty.

We get on well and have discussions about this stuff and I always hold up the skeptical end of conversation. I have introduced her to cold reading, regression to the mean and many other ways of explaining the mysterious and miraculous. She takes it pretty well, all the time agreeing to disagree.

Coming back from lunch the other day I got a good look at the "problem" with a skeptical outlook.

My skeptical bookshelf

So, recently I cleared out all of my books in an effort to impose some order on my life.

Problem: 3 bookcases cluttering up my sun room and approx 500 books distracting me from my work.

Answer: Box everything up and shove it under the house.

New problem: What am I going to read?

New answer: Keep out a dozen or so books for when I just have to read something.

After everything was boxed up and put away I looked at the books that I had kept out and was a little suprised. My dozen books contained not a single work of fiction and most of these books were related to skepticism. The longer I looked at this pile of books the more meaningful it became. I’ve been collecting my books for a long time and a lot of treasure went in to those boxes. Books I would never throw away or trade, some of them worn thin as you like with no other reader but me ever touching them. Sci/Fi (Niven/Heinlein), fantasy (Pratchett/Tolkien), thrillers (Hiassen/Patterson), historical fiction (Sutcliffe/Cornwell), horror (Stephen King) and classics like Dracula, Pride and Prejudice and Heart of Darkness. None of these books made the cut to stay out of the box and with me. Boy, I think I’ve really changed.

Let me take you through the list and why these books had to stay: