for anyone still hitting up this thread, Steven Novella has written a fantastic blog entry on this subject.

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=300

Hurrah!

I've been waiting anxiously for a long time for Cory's podcast to return to his own work.

@9 Thank goodness there was someone getting Randi's back.

@2 Was your wife's aunt sick? old? There is a huge difference in odds between predicting an elderly relatives expected death and predicting the untimely death of a young relative.

In order to establish any kind of extraordinary phenomenon (something that breaks the current scientific understanding of the world) extraordinary evidence needs to be provided. A single unreproducible coincidence is not the extraordinary evidence needed.

I cannot believe that swallowing a magnet could have a negative affect vs a ball-bearing of the same size. Citation Needed.

@7 In an interview by the SGU ( http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ ) James Randi commented that he wasn't comfortable creating a book/DVD detailing the going-ons of the million dollar challenge. The con-artists caught on quickly that Randi couldn't be fooled, and the ten years of the challenge were spent testing deranged/deluded 'psychics' the majority of whom Randi felt should be receiving some professional therapy.