James the Amazing Randi

So, I met James Randi today.

You know, James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation and the Million Dollar Prize? Yeah, that James Randi.

The Auraria Campus Atheists hosted a Pseudoscience Fair today. They had people presenting on all sorts of things, from conspiracy theories to ionizing foot baths. They each set up a table, like at a science fair. One person had re-created Emily Rosa's therapeutic touch experiment, and would take new data from anyone who came to the table. One guy-- who took second place-- had set up a presentation about homeopathic "beer" (he had to use root beer, since it was on a college campus), which had no calories, no alcohol, left you with no hangover, and did not impair your driving! (For those who don't get the joke, read up a little on homeopathy, which James Randi later named as one of the most dangerous instances of pseudoscience in America today.) The winners had set up a display with a bunch of methods used to contact the dead, with an explanation (in fact, the same explanation) of what actually happened. They also had the most fantastically neon green ties I have ever seen.

(On a side note, I met the Regional Coordinator for the Colorado Regional Secular Student Alliance. Nate told him he thinks I am the most enthusiastic of the Mines people, and that he is therefore backing my "candidacy." It amused me.)

Randi himself judged the projects, and then after he had eaten dinner, he got up and gave a talk. It's hard to describe it, really-- like any 82 year old man, he rambles a bit. The difference is that everything James Randi has to say, rambling or not, is fascinating. He talked about his travels around the world, about his life and his childhood, about his work as a debunker... it was fascinating. And he's so personable. From the moment he walked in (my boyfriend kind of accosted him to ask for an autograph, because he had to leave early), he was laughing quietly and joking about things. When his microphone batteries died, he handled it beautifully. When my friend couldn't figure out my phone's camera, he was perfectly patient waiting to get a picture taken with me. It still came out blurry, but I don't really care. I got to meet James Randi.

Probably the best part for me, though, was the fact that at the end of the question and answer session, he came down and did a card trick for us. Before he founded JREF, before the Million Dollar Prize, before he was a great debunker of psychics and pseudoscience, he was a magician. Or rather, a conjurer-- he made that distinction at the beginning of a talk. A magician can actually warp the laws of reality, a conjurer merely tricks people into thinking he does so. So James Randi did some conjuring for us. I was quite proud of myself: I caught him at it. I saw what he did, when he did it. My boyfriend's tutelage is helping, apparently.

Finally, he tells a story, at least part of which I feel I must repeat here. He arranged to do the first card trick ever done in space, where an astronaut blindly picked a card and he managed to match it. And when he asked the astronaut-- a highly educated man-- what the odds of that were, the guy gave the correct answer: it was one-hundred percent certain they would have the same card, because it was a trick. Randi called this the correct answer, but said that highly educated people rarely get it.

I've never met someone I admired so much, before. I thought I would be a bit more starstruck... but James Randi, it turns out, is just too friendly, too approachable, to be nervous about. Got his signature, and though it is blurry, I'm still pleased by this: