Table of Contents:
Young Perry Goy of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, has a very sensible mother who obviously raised a rational son; he also seems to have a proficient teacher. Though Perry's opening sentence didn't strike me as particularly flattering, I read on and was mollified:
Anyway, I have an interesting story to tell. This is the first time I've even come close to someone like this. My mom recently had her knee replaced [at the hospital in Menomonee Falls] and while she was waiting in her room a woman came in. She started talking to my mom about God and my mother quickly said she wasn't a very religious person. So the woman tried a different tack. She led my mom on one of those visual exercises, then took out a jewel on a piece of string. She hovered it over my mother's recently replaced knee so it spun in an ellipse, saying, "See how the pendulum is swinging? There is a lot of negative energy around your knee which is preventing the pendulum from swinging in a perfect circle." She then started pushing on the air around my mom's knee, making a lot of extravagant swooshes and strokes and probably looked a lot like a mime.
After a little while of this, she again hovered the pendulum over my mom's knee and — oh my gosh! — it spun in a circle instead of an egg! She told my mother that she should be able to plainly see the negative energy was no longer affecting her knee and therefore it would heal a lot easier.
Thankfully my mom knows enough to not take her seriously and she came home to laugh about it. I will never tire of hearing and reading about things like this.I started reading your site because my Scientific Method and Modern Culture teacher, Mr. Ron LeMay, made us. He said it was probably a good idea to read it because he gave us a quiz on it every week. At first I couldn't even access your site, so I failed the first few. But once I did, I'm glad I tried however many times I did.
Thanks, Perry, but I must caution you: don't get so enchanted with what I write or say that you automatically accept and believe it. Test it, question it, as you should all such material. Yes, I think I'm right most of the time when it comes to my subjects of expertise, but I'm fallible, as well. When I meet a person who enthusiastically states, "I'm a skeptic, too!" I often say, "I doubt that," just to keep in character and in practice!
I should point out that the "divining" method described above is only one example of the "ideomotor" effect that is explained at www.randi.org/library/dowsing/ among other varieties such as a forked stick, parallel wires, and various balanced- and swiveled-pointers. Of course, a simple double-blind test can be applied to any claims of divining or dowsing powers — which are by far the most common claims that are received for the JREF million-dollar prize.
Just to demonstrate the impossible job we have of trying to establish rapport with the uninformed "investigators," I'll publish here a recent exchange. An email arrived from "Dick Kay," another one of our correspondents who chooses to write all in lower or upper case, as if that were a way to look "cool." It's something that juveniles often adopt to stay in tune with their peers. Mr. Kay sent a confusing mixture of messages to us, some from "Proof Paranormal" — a group that proudly states that to detect ghosts they use
...night vision surveillance, conventional as well as digital video and photography, various recording devices to capture EVP recordings, EMF detectors, digital thermometers, and more
They're at http://www.proofparanormal.com/
Another message source supplied by Mr. Kay was "Doug 310 2049027." In any case, "Doug" announced to us (no changes in format or punctuation):
DO YOU KNOW ANY GHOST HUNTERS IN SOCAL THAT HAVE THE EQUIPMENT TO GO IN AND GHOST HUNT I HAVE MADE CONTACT WITH A FAMOUS GHOST AT MY UNIVERSITY MUCH ,MUCH EVP AND MANY SIGHTINGS DO YOU HAVE THE EQUIPMENT FOR THIS I have found a famous ghost
I presume that "SOCAL" means Southern California, and EVP means "Electronic Voice Phenomena." The "EMF" used in the "Proof Paranormal" text refers to "Electromagnetic (or Electromotive) Force." Attached to this startling bulletin was a message from John-Michael Talboo at (john@proofparanormal.com) who wrote a general invitation to stay at a haunted house. I decided I could resist that temptation, and I responded, apparently to Dick:
What equipment will detect ghosts? I don't know of any....
Immediately, this impatient statement was tossed my way — again, in original spelling and format:
emf meters lasar thermal motion detectors infra red ultra violet and more CAN YOU DO THE JOBSubject: EQUIPMENT
Trying to provide a bit of education in my response, I fired back:
EMF meters detect electro-motive signals such as low-frequency (AC) magnetic field radiation from power lines, signals from cell phones, computers, kitchen appliances, TV, radio, and lightning strokes.
Thermal Motion detectors indicate the movement of a source of infra-red radiation from one designated scan zone to another.
"Infra red" is the designation of a specified zone of the EM spectrum, 3 x 1012 to 4.3 x 1014 Hz.
"Ultra violet" designates another such specified zone, 7.5 x 1014 to 3 x 1017 Hz.
Until the nature of a "ghost" has been determined, it is not possible to define what is being sought, nor how the "ghost" would be manifested.
You propose an impossible task; there is no "job" definition in your question. No, nor can we photograph/detect/measure Santa Claus. For your information:
Trying to imagine a response is pretty tough, but there's been none so far....
NZ Reader Peter Nield tells us that for ten years now, a company named Ecoworld has been selling — at NZ$200 to NZ$13,000 a pop — a water treatment device they call "The Grander Living Water System," which it says "energizes H2O," so that it will
...permanently resonate with the cosmos, improving circulation and blood pressure, detoxifying the body and relieving allergies.
The drinking water, they claim, was treated by a secret process arrived at by divine inspiration granted to Austrian naturalist Johann Grander, thus implanting a range of "natural vibrational frequencies" into it, which
...energize it like a mountain spring which bubbles up out of the ground and tumbles over rocks and waterfalls, becoming full of vitality, freshness and energy.
Judge Merelina Burnett found that scientific tests had shown no measurable difference between water treated with Grander Living Water technology, and untreated water, and that the company had demonstrated "a significant level of willful blindness and negligence." She said that their
...[promotional] material contains inconsistencies, quackery and pseudo-science that even when presented with credentials, glossy journals, explanatory photographs, tables, graphs and laboratory aids, does not escape the impression of promising the improbable.
Ecoworld were charged with breaching the New Zealand Fair Trading Act, and found guilty on nine charges of misrepresenting their products, seven alternate charges of misleading consumers, and a total 26 breaches of the Fair Trading Act. The company faces a fine of up to $100,000 when it is sentenced on July 1.
The magic water product comes in two forms: a rod or pendant containing the water, which they said energized other water into which it was immersed; and taps, bores and other devices containing Living Water which they said treated water which flowed through them. The Ecoworld Director of Research and Marketing, Barry Jones, said that the product was used by more than 3,000 New Zealanders, which agrees well with a recent estimate that there are 3,440 naïve citizens in that country; apparently some 400 or so have not yet received the Ecoworld brochure. Jones accused NZ authorities of trashing "so-called alternative" remedies, "because we're starting to have an impact, with people getting away from chemical usage."
(Yes, those are what we call, "the deceased.")
Judge Burnett was quite clear in her judgment, using such phrases as "quackery" and "pseudo-science" as well as "willful blindness and negligence." Occasionally, something like this happens that restores one's faith in the sanity of the world and its administrators, but I'm left — again — wondering why the USA can't do the same thing.
Eric Grissell, an interested and concerned scientist, has informed me:
Cristián Samper is the Director of the National Museum of Natural History (a part of the Smithsonian Institution), but he is not the "Director of the Smithsonian." The Smithsonian Institution is composed of 16 museums and the National Zoo in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and two museums in New York City. Lawrence M. Small is Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
I stand corrected. Eric continued, expressing his satisfaction with Dr. Samper's reaction to the recent fuss:
Again, we congratulate Director Samper.
A good treatment of the evolution-bashing comedy/tragedy/farce is to be found at swiftreport.blogs.com/news/2005/05/foes_of_evoluti.html, where The Swift Report — no actual relationship to this column — suggests another approach that I find powerful and entertaining.
It covers many different facets of deception, including science frauds, state-sponsored deception, people speaking in the name of God, forgeries, newspaper hoaxes, tricks used to fool the enemy in battle, and more. This is all good ammunition when you're faced with the usual questions that start out, "But how do you explain...?"
And, I repeat excellent advice I've offered you before: simply send a blank e-mail to join-whatsnew@lists.apsmsgs.org if you're not already on Bob Park's mailing list. That newsletter should be read as eagerly as this one, every week. You'll not only enjoy Bob's zingy wit and style, but you'll learn from an insider just what's going on where science and politics come together. You'll thank me, and that's a prediction....
Bob's work was one project that inspired the theme of the upcoming Amaz!ng Meeting 4: "Science in Politics & the Politics of Science."
Our friend Dorion Sagan, a son of Carl Sagan, makes very cogent and powerful statements about reality that can be difficult for the average reader, but are impossible for the irrationalists to deny, though they contort and misrepresent rationality and reason attempting to do so. I give you here a small excerpt from a recent document that he and Eric D. Schneider issued, "Science and God: Can We Handle the Truth?" that warns of the "Intelligent Design" [ID] farce that recently stirred action at the Smithsonian, and which we featured here on our web page. For more on creationism and complexity and the religious right's lack of understanding of thermodynamics' second law, please visit Sagan/Schneider's site at www.intothecool.com. Excerpt:
If this doesn't alarm rationalists, I can't imagine what it takes to get their full attention.
Folks, as I remind you often, I'm not a scientist — but when I see obviously stupid statements from those who profess scientific acumen, I often can come up with what I believe can be a proper analysis. As an example, I offer you this quotation, also taken from Dorion's article, from the literature issued by the "Institute for Creation Research":
What nonsense. Just think: when nature — through almost endless opportunities, permutations, and combinations, and almost endless time — puts together a simple viable system that can reproduce itself and begin the process of benefiting from subsequent changes of that nature, that system tends to survive and to continue its struggle to perpetuate itself. It is no longer an accidental coming-together of elementals, but an entity that strives to go on; it has arisen from disorder and has become an organized system. Of course, literally billions upon billions of such serendipitous combinations occur, begin the survival and perpetuation process, and may go on with that for thousands of years — only to run into a circumstance, simple or calamitous, that terminates its efforts. The fossil record has any number of examples of that sort of minor tragedy having occurred. And as humans, though we are superbly equipped to resist negative influences and can evolve to survive long-term threatening changes, we can at any time join that parade of extinction.
An errant asteroid, a deadly new virus, or a philosophical failing such as ID that takes us back into medieval ways of living and thinking, may do us in. And that's nature. How or whether we resist extinction, is sometimes — happily — a matter of choice.
That choice is now offered us.
I occasionally sit down and write something which I can't improve upon by revisiting it and fussing with it. The one-and-only Phil Plait — the guy at www.badastronomy.com — recently did that and came up with this:
In April, I was asked to give a short speech to a group of local students who participated in a science fair. I wasn't sure what to say to them, until I saw a newscast the night before the fair. The story was some typically inaccurate fluff piece giving anti-science boneheads "equal time" with science, as if any ridiculous theory should have equal time against the truth.
I sat down with a pad of paper and a pencil and scribbled down this speech. I gave it almost exactly as I wrote it:
It's a mountain, and it's on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it's in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day — well, the Moon's day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.
I know a place where the Sun never shines. It's at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.
I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.
I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.
I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.
I know these places because I'm a scientist.
Science is a way of finding things out. It's a way of testing what's real. It's what Richard Feynman called "A way of not fooling ourselves."
No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns.
But scientists did.
No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have, all the time.
It wasn't someone who practices homeopathy who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did, medical scientists.
No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists did. Molecular biologists did.
They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry, biology, astronomy, engineering.
They used science.
These are all the things you discovered doing your projects. All the things that brought you here today.
Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes?
All by scientists.
Those places I talked about before — you can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known.
No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
Welcome to science. You're gonna like it here.
Could Phil's thoughts have been better expressed? How I wish I could put down words so eloquently and economically. This is poetry that inspires you and gives you that lump in your throat; it's beautiful. You, dear reader, will have an opportunity of meeting and experiencing this prodigious talent at The Amaz!ng Meeting 4, this coming January, in Las Vegas. I know that Murray Gell-Mann, our keynote speaker, will be spending a lot of time bending the Plait ear, and will himself have a kinked ear to show as a result. Registration for TAM4 will be announced shortly....
Reader Steve Baughman, an attorney in California, took a good close look at a "miracle worker":
As you know, Rev. Grant represents to his audiences that he has never had contact with the people he "heals" prior to the encounter at the crusade. While he is technically telling the truth, the actual fact is that he has usually had contact with a family member of the distressed person whose illness he has just miraculously discerned.
After the meeting I attended, I spoke to two individuals who had just been "healed." Both told the audience prior to their healing that they had never been in contact with Rev. Grant at any time. But it turned out that both had family members who had contacted the Grant ministries and told them about the particular symptoms of their loved one. In one case, a Chinese woman with a tumor in her neck told me (after her "healing") that her husband had met with Rev. Grant immediately before the meeting that night and had told Grant about her tumor. She was wearing a bright yellow dress and was easy for the Reverend to spot. In the other, a Latino man had written to Grant to tell him that about his brother's problems, which Grant proceeded to divine at the meeting. So although the Reverend had not actually spoken to this man, he had had written communication.
What is most disturbing to me about these two examples is that both individuals felt that Grant had miraculously acquired his knowledge of their conditions even though they knew about the prior contacts.
I thank you for your work in exposing this charlatan.
In 1989, shortly after my exposé of Grant first appeared, he was arrested, charged, and convicted of income tax evasion. He served 16 months in prison, was fined, and ordered to repay $350,000 in back taxes. It was a disappointment to me that the authorities didn't get him for stealing from, lying to, defrauding, and otherwise cheating his victims, but opted for an easier way to go after him. After prison, he's back in business again — as are the others I exposed over the years — doing the same scam in the same way. Better support from law enforcement agencies — despite the present political pressure in place to not pursue anyone who has any sort of religious position — would rid our society of much grief and financial loss.
Reader Dave Bailey informed me of a program about one of my heroes, a show that I'm looking forward to seeing. He wrote:
He made a specific comment which I have transcribed verbatim. It shows that, while he may not have the academic background of someone like Stephen Jay Gould, he has a greater understanding of our world than most:
Mr. Bailey, thank you for this item. And — dare I say it? — amen.
Reader Roger Harris, who wrote us in June of 2002 with an analysis of the supernatural "rods" nonsense (www.randi.org/jr/060702.html) has again contacted us concerning the "anomaly" images that Joseph P. Skipper alleges are evidence of a civilization on Mars. See www.randi.org/jr/061005smug.html#4. Roger agrees that reader Dan Pallotta is correct to point out that JPEG compression can produce blocky artifacts because of the numerical processing that is involved in producing that sort of image.
But then Roger details other facts about the ways in which the images offered by Mr. Skipper are processed, and that because of image compression done both by the space craft camera and by the engineers on Earth, banding and checkerboarding artifacts within the original block artifacts, precisely like those seen in the "anomaly" images, are easily explained — and Skipper's interpretation is most certainly faulty and presumptuous. Moreover, Skipper's images are not directly from the satellite, but actually computer-generated "perspective" views, which gives rise to even more false "artifacts."
In short, Mr. Skipper is far out of his depth, and his claims are baseless. To simulate the effect over which Skipper got so excited, Roger took a small section from the picture of me that Mr. Pallotta referenced, and found civilizations all over my face and the wall behind me! Who knew?
As Roger mentions, Mr. Skipper will have a quick answer to this, of course: "Intentional tampering" by The Dark Forces to destroy the evidence! But it's a safe bet he will present no credible evidence or reasoning whatsoever to support that hypothesis.
Thank you, Roger!
A biologist with the SRI Bioinformatics Research Group, Alexander Shearer, Ph.D., has an opinion on Brenda Dunne's absolute refusal to have her data examined. He begins by quoting Ms. Dunne:
Oddly enough, no one seems to take it that way when the Nobel committee gives a large sum of money for scientific accomplishments each year. I'd also have to say that if someone came to the research lab I was a part of two years ago, and asked one of us to demonstrate an effect we were claiming existed for a million dollar prize, we'd all have jumped right on that. After all, if your research is that important, isn't it worth a little time to pick up that much funding?
All the real scientists I know, myself included, would gladly do something like that to fund additional research. Heck, if Nike paid researchers to do shoe endorsements, most of the ones I know would be happy to appear on TV and look silly to secure that kind of funding.
The idea that someone "believes in their work" too much to (1) have it peer-reviewed or (2) undergo a simple test that would prove it and thus secure funding, is silly. Legitimate research organizations trumpet exceptional results far and wide.
Reader Malcolm Dodd in the UK notifies us that Uri Geller continues to ride the Jackson pony, contributing his endless wisdom and philosophy to the event:
In the interview, the cutlery manipulator described Jackson as “naïve and gullible.” This is an incredible admission for him to have made, since it was he who arranged the Jackson interview with the BBC’s Martin Bashir that was to result in the investigation and prosecution of Jackson.
Not only does he destroy cutlery, but also everything and everyone that he comes into contact with.
Well, I have to agree that Jackson is naïve and gullible, proof of that being provided by the fact that he believes Geller has magical powers...!
Today, Geller sent a complaint to the UK Daily Mail about an article that had apparently been less than complimentary about Jackson:
Really? Was Mr. Morgan convinced of Geller's powers at one time, I wonder....?
Next week, we'll review an hilarious book by Sylvia Browne, "Animals On the Other Side" (and she doesn't mean "of the river") and a program that appeared on "Animal Planet," Jane Goodall's "When Animals Talk." This "pet psychic" nonsense and other anthropomorphic delusions are increasingly used as sucker-fodder in the media....
I work for the USDA at the NMNH. Last week Dr. Samper explained the entire situation to the various departments within the museum. He did so with sincere care and concern. It was obvious that he had to make the best of a precarious situation created by others and that he will strive to correct the circumstances that lead to the series of unfortunate events.
If you're a teacher, or just someone who needs appropriate material to use in countering those who stridently denounce evolution and endorse a superstitious alternative notion, you'll do well to go to the National Center for Science Education's site www.natcenscied.org/ for good arguments and facts to use. Though it seems to me ridiculous that anyone should have to make a case for the well-established findings of science in regard to evolution — let alone the age of the Earth! — there exists a large percentage of citizens who not only prefer but desperately need to have a magical alternative to this powerful and awesome process.
Michael Farquhar is a writer and editor at The Washington Post, and author of a new book published by Penguin titled "A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds."
"Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, a new book by Simon Blackburn, was reviewed in the UK's New Statesman. We give you this telling excerpt, and direct you to this website for more:
Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, is feeling harassed. What troubles him is "the minds of other people." Astrology, feng shui, Christianity and other manifestations of mass irrationality are flourishing shamelessly. "If only people would be sensible. If only they would submit to the order of reason." However, what really irks Blackburn is not these popular aberrations, but that intellectual sophistry — variously labeled multiculturalism, postmodernism or relativism — which gives them license and even encouragement. Truth is a riposte to such woolly-mindedness. Its urbane and witty prose belies a formidably austere rationalism.
It is a poignant irony that the biblical Jesus reserves his harshest language for the rich and for lawyers. Perhaps predictably, an unholy alliance of these two forces appears to be behind the well funded, rhetorically unctuous attack on what is arguably civilization's greatest triumph: the honest search for truth, the rewards of which include knowledge, education, technology, and science. Much of the ID power and coordination comes from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, with a full time staff of less than 10 people with some forty Fellows including all the high-profile ID advocates. It is partially funded by reclusive, deeply Christian multi-billionaire, Howard H. Ahmanson Jr., who sits on the boards of the Discovery Institute and the Claremont Institute, an ultra-right-wing think-tank that stresses "Christian values." The last data available showed that he and his family own Home Savings of America, worth $47 billion in 1997.
Evolutionists are embarrassed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The obvious tendency of nature from disorder to order and organization is, of course, only an assumption of evolutionists.
Science Fare
I know a place where the Sun never sets.
Mr. Randi, I just received your Faith Healers book and I notice that you pay considerable attention to W.V. Grant. I want to let you know that I attended one of Rev. Grant's crusades here in San Francisco about 15 years ago. What I learned was another troubling aspect of this man's practices, one that says much about public gullibility.
I am sending you a quote which you may wish to mention in Swift. Last night I watched a BBC documentary about Sir David Attenborough, a man I watched when I was a child growing up in England. He is the man who set, and continues to set, the standard for documentaries on the natural history of Earth. If I could live anyone's life I would probably choose his.
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.
Perfectly said Sir David, perfectly said, and another reason why you continue to be a hero to me.
"Contrary to your assumption, I am too great a fan of the scientific method to prostitute it by such games."
Thanks to the excellent services of Stephen J. Goodson, the contents of my book, "An Encyclopedia of the Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural," are available online. We're working on getting the illustrations in there, and we've made many necessary corrections, and some additions, as well. You can now find http://jref.sawco.com/more.htm on our opening page, and just click!
Following the acquittal of Michael Jackson, the BBC Radio 4 Today program (the leading morning news broadcast) decided to interview the spoon-bender in the prime slot. Replay in Real Player www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/tuesday.shtml and scroll down to the 08:10 slot. This clip will only be available until Monday – the 20th.
I was shocked by the vitriol Piers Morgan uncorked about interviewing Michael Jackson (Femail). The words he uses — "manipulative," "deceitful" — ring false for anyone who knows Michael well. I can only imagine Piers was talking to an imposter. It wouldn't be the first time he'd been taken in by a fake.
