James Randi to end the Million Dollar Challenge in 2010. Nobody's won it in 10 years, and the money would work better if it wasn't tied up waiting for the impossible. Many have tried, none have succeeded.... and just so this isn't a single link, here's Randi owning Uri Geller, and Randi owning James Hydrick (using only styrofoam!) [YouTube links].
posted on Jan 4, 2008 - View this thread

"The watch shown could not exist." Would Neiman Marcus spend $200,000 to advertise an expensive watch that doesn't, and couldnt, exist? Magician James Randi thinks so. I am skeptical.
posted on Nov 14, 2006 - View this thread

Randi Rhodes is the MC at the mainstage at 4:20 Seattle Hemp Fest 2006 I knew you were cool Randi! Also, Dr.Bob Melameda explains why humans need marijuana to fuction properly.
posted on Aug 26, 2006 - View this thread

I just finished up reading The Turk by Tom Standage (briefly mentioned in passing here) a biography of the chess-playing automaton that toured Europe and later the Americas during the pivotal transition from the 18th to the 19th century. The Automaton was invented as an exercise in national pride by Wolfgang von Kempelen, who considered it a trifle compared to his experiments with mechanical speech synthesis. As a celebrity, the automaton had historic encounters with Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Beethoven, Philidor and Charles Babbage, and fictional encounters with the monarchs Catherine the Great, George III and Frederick II. Standage credits it with influencing the development of the Difference Engine, the power loom, Poe's mystery stories, and Barnum's manipulation of the press. The myths surrounding have even caught James Randi, who seems to have been unaware of a colleague's reconstruction based on notes from the last owner.
posted on Sep 21, 2005 - View this thread

The man who wrote 10,000 Grooks (grooks, grooks, grooks), Piet Hein, was also the inventor of Hex and the creator of the Soma Cube. In the design world, he is most famous for the SuperEllipse, a figure that rivals Buckminster Fuller's geodesics in ingenuity, an aesthetic balance between a circle and a square, and a mathematical figure which has been used to design a square in Stockholm. From the SuperEllipse, you can get the SuperEgg, a strange solid which will unexpectedly balance on one end and has been mistaken for an alien artifact.
posted on Oct 28, 2002 - View this thread