I'm fascinated how people come to believe what they do, but often have a hard time deciding how to respond to others' beliefs...

Over at The Two Percent Company Rants there is an interesting article, Calling All Psychics: Help Natalee Holloway. While the don't want to make fun of a tragedy, I think they have a valid point in that this is exactly the type of tragedy that "psychics" abuse to promote themselves.

I contributed to the comments with some "psychic predictions" from a random word generator. (It appears to randomly select a word from a very long list of nouns.) The first ten times I tried it produced the following:

Signature, Anvil, Camera, Aerosol, Reporter, Pill, Drought, Siren, Pyramid, Alphabet

Aren't you amazed at the psychic ability of the word generator? So many of the words are directly applicable to the disappearance! Of course, they are just as applicable to what anyone has done anywhere in a day. They're probably as good or better than anything any "psychic" is going to contribute as well.

So, why do we see meaning where there is none? The Skeptic's Dictionary has some clues for the curious: subjective validation, apophenia, pareidolia.