https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/james-randi-obituary-1079316/

This is the intro to his NYTimes obit:
James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

His death was announced by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

At once elfin and Mephistophelian, with a bushy white beard and piercing eyes, Mr. Randi — known professionally as the Amazing Randi — was a father of the modern skeptical movement. Much as the biologist and author Thomas Henry Huxley had done in the late 19th century (though with markedly more pizazz), he made it his mission to bring the world of scientific rationalism to laypeople.

What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Mr. Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality.


He's probably having a brandy with Christopher Hitchins now.

Hey, I didn't know he was a Toronto-born boy.

+Brother Of Jerry:
The thing I love about him is that his profession is being just a magician.
In one case, a researcher with a big reputation, who has published many white papers, who had published in nature, had done research on homeopathy and him and his team concluded that homeopathy is real.

Wow. Big mistake!
Come on. How could someone like that come to such a conclusion?
I thought all scientists understood well how the natural world functions.
You better triple check everything before making a claim that some magical thing works.

James Randi came and solved it for him with a double blind test.

Thank you James Randi. You served humanity well and hope many more James Randi's come along.

~~~~iceman9090

I have no idea where you found the "quote" you are attributing to me. I didn't say it, the Rolling Stone obit I linked to doesn't say it, and the NYTimes obit, a snippet of which I copied and pasted, doesn't say it.

??

If he says you said it, that's good enough for me!         /s

+Brother Of Jerry:
I didn't quote you.

~~~~iceman9090

Then the symbolism of "+Brother Of Jerry:" mystifies me. It exceeds my meager abilities at parsing, or semantic attribution, or something.

Not that it matters all that much.

+Brother Of Jerry:
The old youtube comment section would put a +_username_ or @_username_ and that made it easy to follow who replied to who.

I wish this forum did something like that as well.
It does an offset to the right but I don't like it.

The other reason is that I copy some of these conversation to my files. I insert a +Brother Of Jerry: in the text.

Maybe this forum should have a collapsible thread system like youtube has.

BTW, anyone know that the () is at the end of the usernames?

~~~~iceman9090

The code links to a WHOIS lookup on arin.net . I suspect this is an admin function to allow IP lookup, and that the IP address is suppressed in the end user version of the page.

Tyson

He was a great - and USEFUL - man.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

Oh no!

“No amount of belief makes something a fact.” — James Randi

...hmmm...

How about, "No amount of facts can make someone give up a belief."

I, for instance, continue to believe that EOD is not a aging Latino but rather a Nordic Fabio hiding from public attention lest his blond locks shatter his incognito.

My biggest issue with him was his paranormal prize. It was basically designed so no one could win it, and could hang onto the money, as he alone decided the parameters.

But he was a sign of the times... We now take our medical advice off a computer nerd, took our theological advice off a stage magician and we still have a geneticist who lectures us on fantasy literature and why we should have church bells and not minarets in our cities.

Minarets are lovely.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=minarets&atb=v174-1&iax=images&ia=images

I hope the City of a Thousand Minarets gets its act together before I die. Once you drink from the Nile, you are destined to return

Bad monkeys! https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/monkeys-ruining-attempts-to-repair-the-taj-mahal-s-minarets-says-asi-252713.html

Once you drink from the Nile, you are destined get a horrible gastrointestinal illness.