Bob McCoy has been a friend for many years. We've appeared on TV together, displaying his prized collection of quack medical devices which have been on display since 1983 at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in the basement of Minneapolis' St. Anthony Main shopping center. Devices of all sorts, weird head-gear, magnetic bandages (what else is new?), phrenology machines, a foot-operated breast enlarger, machines for growing hair (which I examined with great interest), diagnostic machines, and radioactive — and deadly! — nostrums, make up the nation's largest collection of quirky and wacky gadgetry. The museum has been cited by the New York Times as one of the Twin Cities' top tourist attractions.

But now Bob is retiring, after a long service to the public. He's given the collection to the Science Museum in the Twin Cities, and will continue to share his fine wit and bizarre stories with the public by periodically giving presentations on the devices when they're put on display at the museum in late March.

Bob McCoy has always been one of the leading opponents of quackery, has lectured all over the world on the subject, and is a good friend of the JREF. We are happy to know that his collection will be going to a proper museum and will be thus preserved. Thank you, Bob, for your service to the rational world and your dedication to truth.

As promised last week, here is Part One of a fascinating article. Dorion Sagan is an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist in the "advanced amateur" class, and it was that fact that first brought us together. I don't recall whether I was by that time acquainted with his father Carl, but I was certainly impressed with his consummate handling of the paste-boards, otherwise known as a deck of cards. He kindly agreed to put together, along with Columbia University paleontologist-to-be Jessica Whiteside (otherwise known as "Jeka"), the following observations on aspects of scientific thinking in regard to such diverse subjects as a possible physical basis for belief in ghosts, to a skeptical attitude about "complexity theorists." The authors believe that these theorists have perhaps gotten a bit carried away with their mathematical models, and that the other chaos/complexity/fractal gurus are, well, too much gurus.

A gentle warning: the average reader of SWIFT will find this heavy going, in parts. We are moving up a notch with this publication, which is devoted to informing readers of how they can think about and deal with the plethora of absurdities with which we are being bombarded. Working through this article will be anything but easy, but I suggest that it should be encouraged. Don't balk at the "Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction" nor the "hexagonal convection cells, called Bénard cells," you will soon be handling, nor Goldilocks and those who move compass needles with hidden magnets. It's all designed to help dispel the popular notion that even science supports the view that life — and in particular, human life — enjoys an existence due to some special supernatural intervention or magical influence. We are, rather, the results of wonderful natural processes that have taken place over very long periods of time, and vast cosmic interactions; and that in itself should make us fiercely proud — knowing that we were not fashioned by a divine Gepetto to be manipulated by strings in the hands of cruel, jealous, vindictive, deities and their acolytes.

We thank authors Sagan and Whiteside for their generosity to SWIFT. Now, sit back and fasten your seat-belts. It's going to be a bumpy, but very stimulating, ride....

A Skeptical View of "The Sciences of Complexity" by Dorion Sagan & Jessica Whiteside.

As a magician-scholar and a paleontologist with over 73 years of existence between us, we the authors together have the benefit of experience without any overly obvious signs of senility. In this piece, for our friend James Randi at SWIFT, we push the envelope of critical thinking a little further than may be expected for readers of Skeptical Inquirer and other skeptics' periodicals by pointing a spotlight not on those admittedly on the fringes of reason — spoon benders, astrologers, dowsers, ufologists and their ilk — but on a group that has heretofore enjoyed immunity from critical scrutiny — the purveyors of complexity theory. Among the claims that have generated much media attention, bestsellers, and some subsidiary interest in complex phenomena — but seem spurious to us — are pronouncements of the development of "artificial life," the production of "order for free," and the derivation of a new, "fourth law" of thermodynamics. But rather than wallow in the dangerously negative (but highly Swiftian!) enterprise of scrutinizing not only relatively easy and obvious purveyors of chicanery — but those hallowed by reputations of excellence or genius among leaders in the skeptic community — our primary aim is to suggest the true scientific nature of phenomena superficially and insufficiently explained by the "sciences of complexity."

Kids have to learn to love the world and to want to understand it, to be amazed at the stars and to be amazed at the wind and to see the wonder of the rainbow and see the changing of the colors of the leaves — to really want to know how these wonderful things happen, not to just sit back and take it all as a magic show, but to try to want to figure out how the tricks are done. The difference is between just sitting back and enjoying, or really wanting to know how it's done.

When one of us (Dorion) was 12 years old he showed his skeptical not-yet-so-famous father some sleight-of-hand tricks. The result was laughter, followed (after a partial explanation of certain magical methods) by Carl Sagan's astonishment at the lengths to which magicians would go to fool their audiences. A later comment to which he would return in philosophical discussions with Dorion over the years was "Nature doesn't cheat; people do." (Compare this with Heraclitus's comment that "nature loves to hide.")

In fact, nature may not consciously cheat (except through her animal avatars) but she does display the equivalent of the magician's unseen threads, dark sleeves, and imperceptible sleights. Consider gravity, for example, able to confer action at a distance with no visible means of connection. The ways and means of nature are subtle and numerous (and sometimes themselves surprising), but science has distinguished itself, in the main, by progressively replacing complex explanations with simple ones. Even a smart pre-scientific rationalist like Plato would have us believe the planets, great animals, traveled by their own volition in perfect circles; early humans perceived weather not so much as the capricious acts of wind, rain and sun, but as the acts of gods; and even in scientific times the complex epicycles of Ptolemey's Earth-centered view of the universe gave way to simpler descriptions of planetary motions such as ellipses orbiting the sun. "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler" remarked Einstein (another advocate of wonder as the key emotion spurring scientific discovery). Or, to quote physicist Steven Weinberg (who shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow), the gift of science — what has allowed it such power in understanding and manipulating the natural world — is to provide "simple but impersonal principles."

With these preliminary remarks in place we are now ready to approach our subject. First of all, there is a problem, in fact a few, at the heart of the "sciences of complexity." One of the primary is that the attempt to explain complex phenomena (like the weather, or life) has often lead to very complex explanations. While the best interpretation of a poem may be another poem (as Yale critic Harold Bloom has said), the same cannot be cogently held of scientific explanations (think of Einstein and Weinberg). Complex explanations of complex phenomena remind us of the proliferation of alchemical signs and astrological symbols in medieval attempts to do chemistry and astronomy. An even more colorful example of such obfuscatory explanation may be recalled by some readers of Al Jaffe's "Mad Book of Magic," a spoof of explanations of magic tricks that included on one page a picture of a hydraulic system engineered under one side of an entire house; remote control of this system was sufficient for the magician to effect the "simple" (in Jaffe's language) after-dinner trick of water flowing uphill out of a glass. Although devoid of comic intent, explanations from the complexity sciences can be similarly lacking in elegance and credibility. Here is an example of Stuart Kauffman, widely considered a genius and the world's foremost theoretical biologist, grandiosely attempting to derive a fourth law of thermodynamics for a general readership:

So the biosphere, it seems, in its persistent evolution, is doing something literally incalculable, nonalgorithmic, and outside our capacity to predict, not due to quantum uncertainty alone, nor deterministic chaos alone but [because] emergence and persistent creativity in the physical universe is real . . . among those candidate laws to be discussed in this book is a candidate fourth law of thermodynamics for such self-constructing systems . . . To roughly state the candidate law, I suspect that biospheres maximize the average secular construction of diversity of autonomous agents and the ways those agents can make a living to propagate further. In other words, on average, biospheres persistently increase the diversity . . . maximize the average sustained growth of their own "dimensionality."

This seems to us a tricky way of offering up as a fourth "law" the notion that biospheres become more complex! Now, obviously, we do not want to claim that Kauffman and other complex explainers of complexity theory are on a par with faith-healers and alien abduction "experts," but they do seem to partake of an all-too-human tendency to latch on uncritically to what should be tentative and eliminative explanations. Like the young heckler at a magic show who "knows" how the trick is done (but is wrong) yet refuses to be told otherwise, complexity experts may attach too much importance to their initial (and mistaken) understandings of complex phenomena. Without being reductionistic, we would attribute much of the excitement of "complexity sciences" to the widespread availability of laptop computers. Designing self-similar graphics (fractals), self-reproducing programs, and other intriguing two-dimensional patterns on computer screens, bright individuals, armed with little more than laptops and their imaginations, perceive suggestive similarities between the patterns and complex natural phenomena. But the similarities are, we would argue, largely superficial. A reproducing computer program may resemble life in that it replicates, but it has no metabolism, no organic chemical history; it is an algorithmic phantom, as much alive as a Barbie doll is a woman. Like the heckler who insists there are two coins (the method which makes sense to him) rather than one coin and a simple bit of sleight-of-hand (with which he is not acquainted), the complexity theorists sling to overly-complex, incorrect description/explanations of phenomena. In this media age, one of the "coups" for complexity science was, no doubt, actor Jeff Goldblum's mention of chaos in the blockbuster film Jurassic Park, by which he suggests the spontaneous emergence of order, due to mathematical necessity, when more than a certain number of elements interconnect.

What Kauffman really means (it seems, he has a talent for grandiose obfuscation) is that order (i.e., nonrandom arrangements of matter) can arise without natural selection. This is a decent idea (one attractive to Stephen Jay Gould, long opposed to the narrow adaptationist view of evolution which would invent a natural selection survival story for every attribute of every organism — e.g., socially objectionable ones like rape), but completely mistaken if we accept it at face value. Order (or better, organization, which suggests a process more than a state) in physics is never "for free" but always the result of previous order or organization, always paid for in the coin of energy.

Indeed, although we believe that Kauffman (with Murray Gell-Man, the premier figure associated with the premier complexity think tank, the Santa Fe institute) has not correctly divined the basic — and simple — method by which nature produces the magic trick of complex systems, including organisms, he is getting closer. First of all, no one should doubt that natural selection is not the only way to produce complexity. Natural selection requires reproducing variants. But the first cell (before it reproduced) and the global biosphere, were both complex systems that got that way without any natural selection (which would have required reproduction). And now we are getting into an area both of less acrimony and more direct concern to SWIFT readers. For the sad political truth is that, without natural selection as an accepted means of explaining complexity, there is a tendency to jump in with claims such as "Aha, you see, it must have been created by a higher power, some sort of conscious design." We thus see the reluctance of many diehard evolutionists to admit explanations of complexity through means other than natural selection. But the fact is, there are many complex structures and processes in nature that come about not through the replication of smaller elements (e.g., genes or computer instructions) but via the breakdown of more complex wholes.

Increasingly, it is becoming recognized that complex phenomena require this sort of broader perspective — which is properly the science of non-equilibrium thermodynamics — to make sense of them. Even would-be guru Kauffman himself, in his new book "Investigations" looks high and low for a 4th law of thermodynamics to explain life. The basic problem is that the second law says entropy increases in isolated systems — that disorder — not order, organization, or complexity — tends naturally to grow. But then how can we have life, or even highly organized spinning tornados, ornate chemical patterns, or other complex systems, cropping up naturally? The answer, as beautiful in outline as it is simple, is the brainchild of Montana thermodynamicist Eric D. Schneider: nature abhors a gradient. A tornado reduces a pressure gradient, a Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction (a kind of chemical clock) reduces an electron potential (chemical concentration) gradient, and life reduces the solar (an electromagnetic) gradient.

This isn't armchair theorizing. Schneider shows that the most complex assemblages of life we know (not Silicon Valley but rather Amazonian ecosystems) are cool if you measure them with airborne black body thermometers or from satellites in space: using clouds they more effectively degrade the vast gradient between sun and space. Schneider's gradient principle is really an extension of the 2nd Law. Complex systems arise to destroy the order around them more efficiently than would otherwise be the case. Kauffman's mad scramble to intuit a 4th law is misguided: to understand life (as a complex system) you need only extend the second law.

The Goldilocks Paradox

Perhaps even more fascinating, for those of us interested in how naturally-occurring thermodynamic complexity can give the appearance of intelligent design, is what we call The Goldilocks Paradox. The Goldilocks Paradox derives its prefix from the fact that cycling thermodynamic systems often appear between gradients that are neither too steep nor not steep enough, but "just right," (like the porridge in the fable of Goldilocks and the Three Bears). Hexagonal convection cells, called Bénard cells, for example, will appear in thin layers of fluid, but only if the difference between bottom and top is within certain parameters. The suffix, the reason we call it a paradox, is that such naturally cycling thermodynamic structures sometimes reach levels of such complexity that they are mistaken as products of natural selection, human-like purpose, conscious behavior, or divine intervention (design). Natural systems temporarily exhibiting complex behaviors as they head toward equilibrium may even be mistaken for ghosts, as we shall see.

The deep philosophical irony is that we as conscious agents are ourselves a highly evolved primate form of equilibrium-seeking complex system; the complex behavior that even scientists sometimes dismiss, because no familiar mechanisms exist to explain it (as Continental Drift tended to be dismissed before plate tectonics was accepted), will ultimately, we believe, be found to be deeply at work in the evolution of living complexity, purpose, and consciousness. And the explanation of the paradox, like most of the great magic tricks, is basically very simple: the organizing environment, consisting of improbable gradients (productive of the mysterious phenomenon), is not taken into consideration. Imagine a compass needle mysteriously moving on a tabletop: strange, unless we notice the movement of the conjuror's legs, holding a powerful magnet, beneath the table, or the fact that he leans in closely toward the compass, to bring his upper body closer. Or consider a levitation on stage resulting from a magnet beneath it, or the disappearance of a draped object by secret entry into a trap door.

Although thermodynamics began with the study of energy change in isolated systems, complex structures in the real universe, paradigmatically life, are open to their non-equilibrium surroundings. Life is not so much miraculous as a cyclical process bringing the sun-heated planetary surface to equilibrium with 2.7-degrees-Kelvin outer space. But since the gradient is so large, and since life has a genetic means of repeating its complex degrading systems, the complexity continues to expand. Stars themselves are low-entropy structures that occur from gravitational collapse, producing gradients and further complexity. Complex structures are connected; they are gradient-organized, not, as we so often hear, "self-organized." The Goldilocks Paradox is about context: when you look at things from the bottom up, as constructed or reducible to elements in an artificial box, it is difficult or impossible to see how complexity can be localized; when you see the full energetic context, however, the complexity is revealed to derive from its surroundings.

End of Part One. Part Two will appear next week....

My friend Mogens Winther sends me an interesting item from Denmark. Astrology is very big in that part of the world, and we've had interesting discussion about Denmark's International Society of Business Astrologers (ISBA) about whom you can read at: www.skeptica.dk/mw/astrologi/randi.htm. As a result of my challenging the ISBA, they became very upset and promptly stopped all discussion about court action they had threatened against Mr. Winther. However, he informs me, the association is still growing. Look in on www.businessastrologers.com and see what they have to say.

On their link www.amanita.at/e/e-Diss.htm you can read about a recent case of business astrology at a University in Vienna, Austria. You will learn all about a Mr. Zimmel and "ISBA President" Mrs. Boesen. The chairman of the EU Skeptics (www.skeptica.dk) Kees de Jaeger has dealt with the preposterous ISBA claims.

Mogens tell us that the business astrology fellows have had quite a lot of — unforseen — bad luck. Their stock market "goldie" prediction for the year 2000 did not follow their rocket climbing astrological predictions, but instead ended up being among the ten worst investments for that year. Mogens also tells us of a further reversal....

In Scandinavia there has been quite some stir among astrologers due to a recent Worker Protection law accepted in the Finnish Parliament. This law directly refers to an international declaration which strictly warns against the use of graphology and astrology:

[This law] provides that personality tests or any similar testing procedures should be consistent with the provisions of the code and not be conducted against the worker's will. . . . National laws or regulations specifying the extent to which the consent of workers' representatives or works councils is required and the requirements governing the administration of such tests (for example, that the tests be validated) will supplement this provision of the code. In this regard, the use of astrology, graphology and the like should be precluded.

Both astrology and graphology, as well as biorhythms, have been widely used in Europe, in India, and in Asia for determining if applicants are suitable for certain positions. We can only wonder if this new law will survive the angry objections sure to be made by devout believers.....

Incredible. Just incredible. We're accustomed to getting very bizarre propositions at the JREF. The groans let out down the hall by Andrew Harter are sufficient indication of many such that I just never get to see. Generally speaking, the real howlers are sent in by lay persons with no scientific credentials or knowledge. Occasionally, someone with proper credentials drops in with claimed validation (most frequently of dowsing/divining abilities) that must be taken more seriously.

There exists a journal titled, "Frontier Perspectives" which is published by the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University, Philadelphia. It purports to be a scientific journal, but is so chock full of pseudoscience and quackery, that Professor John Allen Paulos of Temple University, author of "Innumeracy," reports that the faculty of Temple is embarrassed by the journal.

Consider the claim of one Dr. Amrit Sorli of the Institute for Meditation and Spiritual Growth in Frosini, Italy. He informs us that "The publication in Frontier Perspectives gives [his] results credibility." Let's examine what was published, and consider the degree of credibility thus conferred.

First, there were serious — and understandable — language problems in Dr. Sorli's account, none of which were addressed or corrected by the Frontier Perspectives editor, though the experimental setup was thus rendered undecipherable. I did the best I could to make sense of the report and revise it, and I wrote the author via e-mail:

Let me try to reconstruct your experiment. I refer to the experiment done August to September of 1988 at Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Please tell me if I have any of the details incorrect:

You used two sealable glass ampules. One was the experimental ampule, the other was the control ampule. In the experimental ampule you placed 70 grams of live California worms. You also placed inside, unsealed and upright, another small glass tube containing 0.25 ml of a 36% aqueous solution of formaldehyde. You prepared the control ampule containing 70 ml of distilled water and a similar small glass tube, unsealed and upright, with 0.25 ml of a 36% aqueous solution of formaldehyde. You hermetically sealed both ampules by melting the tips, and washed them with an ethanol solution, and dried them. You set them aside for one hour. You then weighed both tubes (3 times) at intervals of five minutes. You then inverted the tubes to spill the formaldehyde into the other contents of each tube. You then weighed the tubes at intervals of 15 minutes.

This experiment was repeated twelve times.

Is this a correct reconstruction?

Dr. Sorli would not answer whether this was essentially a correct description of his experiment. In fact, as you will see, he was very reluctant to respond in any useful way, and eventually slammed the door on further communication with me, even though he had initially written me to make application for the million-dollar prize.

The reported results of the experimental procedure I tried to describe above, were that three minutes after the tubes were inverted (and the worms were poisoned) Sorli found an increase in the weight of the experimental ampule amounting to an average of 60 micrograms, followed immediately by a decrease of weight to 90 micrograms below the initial weight. He stated his conclusions:

The experiment shows that there is some unknown energy concentrated in living organisms and that this energy leaves the organism at the time of death. It is energy that science do not know yet.

(Essentially, this is the same claim that has been made many times in the past by spiritualists who have attempted to weigh souls. It appears that to determine the average weight of a worm's soul, Dr. Sorli only needs to divide 90 micrograms by the number of worms he murdered....)

A short pause here. That last claim, of his measurements, demands examination. Dr. Sorli says that he is able to detect a change that amounts to less than one millionth of the weight of the experimental tube! And, he writes (I have made minor corrections for clarity):

The size of both tubes must be equal because the humidity of the air is changing constantly and so condensation of moisture on the tubes is different. By changing of the temperature of the tubes the condensation of the humidity becomes different, so I measured the temperature of both test tubes with a sensitive thermometer.

Back in the 1970s, I used a sensitive electronic scale of the sort that Dr. Sorli says he used, though I'm sure the technology has moved forward greatly since then. I found that if I reached well beyond the reasonable needs of my experiment, I could detect the weight of a fingerprint on a test-tube! This explains why I asked Dr. Sorli how he had handled the tubes during the weighing procedure. But surely, possible condensation of moisture from the surrounding atmosphere would amount to many times the weight of the substances that constitute a fingerprint? The variables present in his experiment, as described, are orders of magnitude above the differences he believes he measured, in my opinion.

To return to the experiment: Basically, this means that somehow there has been a loss of weight of 90 micrograms in a closed system from which nothing could escape but energy. If true, this is an absolutely revolutionary discovery, one that would change the entire face of science — as we know it. But Dr. Sorli also invoked Einstein's famous equation E=mc² to resolve the matter-to-energy situation. Please be sure that you're seated for this part of his claim. He concludes (corrections made):

According to [the Einstein] formula, transforming 93.6 micrograms of matter into energy releases 2X10⁹ calories [two gigacalories] of energy. In the experiment no such energy release was observed. This means that energy that enters into a living organism and leaves at the time of death does not belong to gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, or weak nuclear force energies. The momentary increase of the weight after poisoning shows that the organism is in active relation with this unknown vacuum energy, and that this energy is essential for its functioning.

(I must comment here that Frontier Perspectives ran the first sentence in the above excerpt as, "According to formula E = mcc, by transforming 93.6 micrograms of matter into energy releases 2 X 10 E9 calorie of energy." The editor apparently saw this as a quite proper and clear account.)

This claim, the extrapolation of matter converted to energy, is ridiculous. For such a reaction to occur, particularly in a test-tube, we would expect a dramatic release of gamma rays, heat, light, and/or another very obvious manifestation. Perhaps Dr. Sorli "observed" an energy release in the form of a mushroom cloud, had his conclusion been correct, or perhaps he now glows in the dark. Unless, of course, this energy is — as he postulates- an "unknown vacuum energy." I believe that inventing a new form of energy takes more work than merely poisoning worms twelve times.

(Aside: a friend has suggested to me this interesting possibility: since we know that many more souls go to Hell than to Heaven, and they are obviously chock-full of energy, that could be the explanation for the high temperatures said to be in effect in Hell. I mean, if a mere handful of worms provides two million kilocalories to that environment Down Below, imagine how much Osama Bin Laden will put out! Just a thought....)

I was puzzled at Dr. Sorli's statement:

The pressure in both test tubes was one atmosphere for the entire duration of the experiment; the temperature in both test tubes was the same.

He could have no authority for this statement. He had no way of measuring the pressure, nor the temperature inside the tubes. The biological activity inside the experimental tube could raise both the temperature and the pressure. Also, he wrote:

Neither the pressure nor the temperature could have, therefore, been the cause for the difference in weight.

This is a very puzzling statement. How could it ever be imagined by any informed person, that pressure or temperature could in any way affect the weight of an object? A kilogram of water — or of any substance — still weighs a kilogram, whether the substance is in the form of ice, or liquid! Similarly, at any pressure, one kilogram of water always weighs one kilogram!

A graph provided by Dr. Sorli is incorrectly presented. Though he only had a few data points, he invented a curve, when only a bar graph could be used to represent such data. And, I cannot understand how he could possibly know that "The weight of the worms increased in the first 3 minutes after the poisoning . . ." if the first weighing after the poisoning was made 15 minutes later. He offered no explanation of this, even after I addressed a specific question to it.

I find his description of his experiment to be incomplete, vague, contradictory, and rambling. Such an experiment, if properly performed, should be an adequate one — if it is actually as I have reconstructed here — but from what I see, there are several problems with it, as he has described it. For example, when the first (before poisoning) weighings were performed, were they all done by the same person? If so, since that person would undoubtedly have been aware that all three weighings were confidently expected to be the same, those measurements should have been done "blind" by three persons.

Similarly, and for the same reasons, were the second (after poisoning) weighings also all done by the same person? Was that person (or persons) aware of the expected results? When we are looking for differences of one-millionth in measurements, those measurements require much more care and distribution. Could it be — I suspect it was — that Dr. Sorli himself did all these weighings, without any independent input?

I wrote for information from Dr. Sorli, repeating basic questions I'd previously asked, but to which he'd not responded, and this time I also inquired about his doctorate, since to be very candid with you, I could not picture a genuine scientist exhibiting the seeming lack of basic scientific knowledge shown by this man. He responded (corrections were not made to this selection):

Daer James

You are clever enough to discover bimetal forks and that is jour limit, so stay there and have a good time. And do not write taht you give 1 milion award and than you try to pool out, you are realy an idiot.

Best Wishes, dr. Amrit sorli

Interesting indeed. It appears that Dr. Sorli believes that "psychics" bend specially-manufactured forks — which I've never heard of nor suspected, aside from the one that follows this item on this week's page — but this is the over-application of technology that the uninformed often resort to. It also seems that the Dr. has no intention of answering simple, direct, inquiries. I wonder why. I also wonder whether Frontier Perspectives ever asked him about his academic standing....

Just as we "go to press" with this item, a note has been received from Dr. Sorli. He writes (corrections made):

The only causes for a difference of weight can be that something goes out at the time of death or that the cause of the weight [change] is condensation of humidity.

Agreed! Now we at least have Dr. Sorli allowing for the possibility of another modus for the effect reported!

And that is where this application by Dr. Sorli for the JREF million-dollar prize now stands.

Just to reinforce the status of this journal Frontier Perspectives, in another article in the same issue, dealing with "geopathic zones" ("dangerous sites on the Earth's surface") which, readers are told, are associated with

the crossing of subterranean water flows at various depths (magnetic-hydrodynamic anomalies) with geological fractures (gravitational anomalies) and also with the sites where they cross the lay [sic] lines of the so-called energetic networks

we're assured by the author, who works at the Research-Practical Center of Traditional Medicine and Homeopathy of the Ministry of Health, Russian Federation, that these zones are

investigated by dowsers, using a pendulum or wires frames.

Now, if that's not real science, I ask you.....! As further evidence of the validity of this journal, I ask you to recall that it was in those pages that Dr. Jacques Benveniste first announced his startling discovery that homeopathic "vibrations" could be sent over the Internet from a sample of homeopathic water in France, to a container of quite ordinary tap water anywhere in the world. This scientific breakthrough earned him his second IgNobel Prize, which I had the delight to deliver to him in absentia.... Is there no end to the contributions that Frontier Perspectives makes to science?

Frontier Perspectives journal says that its intention is

. . . to provide an unbiased professional forum for research and discussion of topics including investigation of anomalous phenomena that lie outside the conventional disciplines of science. Research articles are selected for publication on the basis of scholarship, as determined by peer review, and can be either supportive, critical, or neutral toward the reality of any anomalous phenomenon. . . . The goal of the journal is to make available high quality reports, reviews, and commentary for use by researchers, teachers, students, and the general public.

"Scholarship"? "High quality"? "Peer review"? Get real!

Prediction: Uri Geller will be suing Toyota. The latest affront to the sanctified art of spoon-bending has just appeared in a TV commercial in which a psychic performing at a psi lab, trying to bend a spoon "with his mind" looks out the window and sees the newest model of Toyota, and the spoon curls up all by itself. Geller says that he originated this effect — not true — and he's very jealous of anyone using it. He sued Timex Watch a few years ago for daring to have a TV actor do one of his numbers, and lost the case.

Which reminds me: go to www.hanklee.net/hankievision/index.html and click on "The Bending Fork." You'll see the latest technological wonder that allows anyone (who can afford it, at $695!) to do cutlery-bending without any sleight-of-hand — or psychic forces! Of course I prefer the old-fashioned way that works with just any old fork or spoon, but it might be nice to have one of these, just to fool the occasional magician.....

We hear that Tribune Entertainment Company has sold its series, "Beyond With James Van Praagh," in 58% of the U.S. TVmarkets. The guessing-game will run for an hour starting in the Fall of this year. Dick Askin, president and CEO of the company, is quoted as saying

We are delighted with the enthusiastic response this strip is receiving from station general managers. James Van Praagh is considered 'the dean' of psychics with a phenomenal following. He appeals to a wide array of viewers intrigued by life's mysteries and his personal presentation takes this form of television to the next level.

No, at least two levels. Down.

Van Praagh is the author of "Talking to Heaven," "Reaching to Heaven," and "Heaven and Earth,"which seems to indicate that he has discovered a buzz-word that sells books.

Timed perfectly to promote this cruel game, the CBS TV network will present a four-hour prime time miniseries on Van Praagh's life, starring Ted Danson as the acclaimed "psychic." In a shameless gush, Donna Harrison, senior VP at Tribune added:

From active criminal and missing persons cases to riveting family dramas, "Beyond with James Van Praagh" brings emotion, celebration and mystique to the daytime landscape. Even the most skeptical of viewers will become engaged by James' unique talents.

Not at all to my surprise, the series will be produced by the same person who produced "The Maury Povich Show" and "Sally Jessy Raphael."

But there's a ray of hope here. From what I see on my e-mail, viewers are beginning to see through the "cold reading" process, now that John Edward is so prominently seen on TV. Add another performer using the same technique, and soon it will be evident to the most dedicated dupe that it's a guessing game, not a miracle. And, the more shows these guys do, the greater the chance that those who work the behind-the-scenes ropes, will defect and tell all....

About last week's poster.... "appearing" is the operative word. My face slowly appears..... Get it? And yes, that was a repeat of the "Down Under" dowsing story. Sorry. I knew I'd done it somewhere, but didn't recall that it was right here. As my buddy Jerry Andrus would say, "I had another attack of salinity."