Day 350: Mind Reading

I get bored

     Mind reading? What a bunch of bologna right? With all of these Chis Angel weirdos running around making magical claims about the supernatural, it's hard to tell who the fakers are. Paranormal occurrences seem to be happening all around us, it's just a shame that nobody can prove it. That's why -although I'm a total skeptic- I decided to put one particularly suspicious claim to the test. I wanted to find out if I could read minds. To help me find out, I adopted the exercise from one of the opening scenes of Ghostbusters.
     I made 60 flash cards, all of them had either a square, triangle, circle, or star drawn on them. There were 15 flash cards for each shape. Then I tossed them into a bucket and had my brother pick out each card one at a time while I guessed (er, I mean answered telepathically) each one. I hung up a blanket between us to ensure that I couldn't see any of my brother's cards. Sean patiently plucked out each card as I guessed. Once all the cards were picked, we went over my answers and found that I can read my brother's thoughts about as well as I can read my own. I ended up getting 15 of the 60 cards right, which is exactly where the law of probability said I'd land. With a 1 in 4 chance of guessing the right shape, a score of 25% sounds about right.
     So it seemed obvious that I was merely guessing and not relying on any mystic mind reading abilities. But I wanted to be sure that it wasn't a fluke. That's why I constructed a tin foil that Sean would wear as we repeated the test. He'd pick a card at random like normal, and I'd write down my guess, but Wikipedia tells me that tin foil hats block brain wave activity. This means, that if I was using any mind reading talents, they'd be dulled down by Sean's hat. If I did worse on the second test, it would back up the notion that a tin foil hat would interfere with my mind reading, thus solidifying the possibility of mind reading in the first place.

     So we went through with the experiment again, and then we went about grading it as well. And as it turns out, I did better on the second test. I actually got a higher score (26%) on the one that I was supposed to bomb. And I know that the two scores were too ridiculously close to make a claim, but results are results!
     In the end, I've decided that I don't have any mind reading capabilities (dang!), and that my scores were left up to chance. It only took me 60 flash cards, a few yards of tin foil and forty minutes to establish that I can't read minds.

=(