My mom has been sending me these predictions made by an alleged psychic. Obviously, being psychic is quite a significant claim, and I asked for some sort of proof. The psychic claims a success rate of ninety-something percent; perhaps 98%. I figured with such a high success rate, I could just randomly take any of his predictions, and if 2 or 3 of them were wrong, then with great probability he's lying about his 98% rate, right? Well, the problem is, going through his archives, most of his predictions are no verifiable. I'm saw stuff like "The girl who went missing in such and such a state and whom the police is searching for; she's dead." No way for me to verify that, right? And there are other predictions which aren't verifying because they're very vague.

My mom is convince though that this psychic is legit. I asked her to send me predictions with specific dates mentioned, so once the date has passed, it's clear whether they are correct or incorrect. So she's been sending some to me. Unfortunately, a lot of them occur in the semi-long term, like around 2 years. I add them as reminders on my Outlook, so I won't forget. If the guy really is psychic, I'd like to know about it.

Anyway, I was going through my old e-mails, and it looks like I forgot to add one of the predictions. It reads:

Expect an earthquake close to the border of the United States and Canada, will happen in the next 2 days.

And this was sent to me by my mom on March 20th, 2006. I notice that "the next 2 days" means that the earthquake must have occured on or before March 22nd, and this is "in the past", so finally, here's a prediction that can be verified. So I go to http://earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/ and click on the "Recent Earthquakes" list. There were two earthquakes between the period of March 20th and March 22nd (both of which occured on March 22nd). Of the two, one of them occured 91 kilometers south-east of Cranbook, BC. Specifically, it occured at latitude 48.77 North, longitude 115.19 West. This seems to be very near the Canada-US border.

So I think "Well, maybe Earth quakes happen all the time" (I don't know, I'm not a seismologist). Well, if you look at the archive of recent earthquakes, they happen more frequently than I would have imagined, but not so frequently that you could say "An earthquake will occur in the next 2 days" and be right most of the time. Earthquakes seem to occur about 4 times a month, so you could say "An earthquake will occur within the next week" and probably be right, but 2 days is quite a risky claim to make (especially if you want to maintain a 98% accuracy ratio). Not only that, but he also predicted the location fo the earthquake. So I'm genuinely impressed.

The psychic's next verifiable prediction is that on May 16th, 2006, Michael Jacksong will be murdered by some sort of Poison. Someone named "J" is the murderer, and someone named "Prince" is involved.