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Cambridge University (UK) has performed a sterling task for both the public and researchers around the world by placing on the Internet the complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin. They have digitized some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications, and all of it is searchable. Those with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files.
This, I'm sure, will deeply annoy the creationist crowd – they dread having anyone exposed to Darwin's ideas – and I'm sure there will be all sorts of legal moves underway to try to get it taken down from the Internet. Before that possibly happens, go to www.darwin-online.org.uk and take advantage of this wonderful – all free! – gift from Cambridge. The site features many newly transcribed or never-before-published manuscripts written by the great scientist, including a field notebook from his famous Beagle voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where detailed observations of the wildlife there served to back up his scientific arguments. What's even more remarkable about this achievement is that there are also German, Danish and Russian editions available.
The site presently contains about 50% of the materials that will be provided by 2009, the bicentenary of the great naturalist's birth.
Reader Darren Snodgrass in Australia gives us a reminder that some kooky old ideas are still with us, though long ago revealed to be farcical. I recall that I was a teen fan of Astounding Science Fiction – yes, they had magazines at that period of history! – and that meant that I was exposed to the talents – and eccentricities – of the editor, John W. Campbell. This man, who is credited by experts in the field as the father of science fiction as we know it today, rather left his fans astounded in the late 1950s when he embraced not only a variety of perpetual motion theories, but a device which became known as the Hieronymous Machine. You may have to read this sentence twice to be sure that you did it correctly: the Hieronymous Machine was its own blueprint. Yes, all the operator needed was a diagram of a machine that did not exist, and that diagram itself served as the device.
I'll avoid getting into all the fictitious technology that surrounded this thing, for which I'm sure you will be grateful. Boiled down, a market developed for a simple "touch plate" over which the operator would stroke his fingers to see how "sticky" the surface was, and that was said to be an indicator of almost anything you wanted to look into – health conditions, quality of food, the validity of a political candidate, the location of a missing child – the Hieronymous device had no limitations to what information it would reveal. The directions called for the operator to maintain contact with the food, the political advertising, a photograph of the missing child, or something that related to the sought information, while stroking the plate. The user was supposed to notice a difference in how much resistance was offered his fingers as it slid across the plate.
This idea came from a Thomas G. Hieronymous, who proposed the “Eloptic Radiation Theory,” which he described as
…an all-pervading media that is capable of being set into activity by certain forces. This media might be the same as that which is described by electronic and electrical engineers and physicists as the ether in action at higher harmonics than so far explored, or it may be a finer media.
Yes, I know that you're scratching your head over this bizarre claim, but his device was at one time very, very, popular with a certain segment of the sci-fi crowd, believe it or not. I’m told that many of them later sobered up and rejoined the useful populace of this planet.
Well, Mr. Snodgrass writes us:
I really enjoy reading SWIFT each week. It reminds me on a weekly basis that there are other rational people out there! You may be interested in using the following story for SWIFT or elsewhere on the JREF web site.
Back in 1988 I met a friend of a friend who is a chiropractor. He had a device he called a "Toftness Box" which was a little different to the Toftness Radiation Detector (see http://tinyurl.com/yeacbg http://tinyurl.com/ymg8wh, and http://tinyurl.com/yav4c6, among many others) but the claimed operation was similar.
The basic idea was that the practitioner would touch parts of the patient's body (generally the spine) with one hand while rubbing a plate on the Toftness Box with the other hand. When an area of the patient's body with a problem was touched, the friction between the other hand and the plate would supposedly increase. This could then be used to diagnose the site of problems in a patient.
This box contained electronics which was supposed to amplify signals from the body (apparently in the 70GHz range) and send the amplified signal to the plate. The plate was apparently made of some special alloy used in the aircraft industry.
Since I am an Electronics Engineer, he asked if I could make another one of these units for him as he was unable to purchase them any more. I took his device home and opened it to see if I could "reverse engineer" it. The first thing I noticed was that the battery was completely flat and probably had been for some time. The next thing I noticed was that the transistors used had a cut-off frequency of around 100MHz. It was completely impossible for this to provide any amplification in the GHz range.
Randi comments: It seems to me that Darren missed an opportunity of tracing the circuit and discovering whether there was any function possible.
At the time I was a firm believer in all of this sort of stuff, but I realized that clearly the user was fooling himself. I wanted to help him to recognize the reality of the situation, but I was reluctant to embarrass him. In the end I made a fake Toftness Box which contained no electronics at all, but looked just like the real thing. He tried it and declared that it worked perfectly. I explained that it contained no electronics and that his "real" one didn't do anything either. This did make him question the device a little, but I am not sure whether he stopped using it or not. least I tried...
Count on it, Darren, he didn’t question it enough to stop using it. He's one of the Unsinkable Rubber Duckies about which we frequently write here in SWIFT... This "new" bit of quackery is actually rather old, the name has been changed, and it has re-emerged on the marketplace – that's all.
Reader Steve Allen, a doctoral candidate in Biodefense at George Mason University, inquires, about a certain specific scientific misjudgment:
Are there any characteristics common to scientists that make them susceptible to trickery? To a magician, do scientists seem easier to fool, or less easy to fool, than other people? If one were seeking to fool scientists, how would one go about it? How can scientists guard against being tricked?
This inquiry provides me with an opportunity to once again ask my readers to consult our archives rather than ask questions that might have already been adequately answered. Our lead article last week handles this entire situation, and I refer Mr. Allen to that source. PLEASE do an archive search before asking involved series of questions. That will save all of us a great deal of time. Thank you.
Our buddy Scot Morris, ever alert for a puzzle, came up with this weird one…
Conspiracy theory fans: As I'm sure you remember shortly after 9/11 there was quickly passed around a simple way of folding a $20 bill to show the flat-roofed burning Pentagon on one side, and the World Trade Center in flames on the other. (Also you could fold the back side using the big O from the "20" the "S" from "STATES" The "AM" and the final "A" from "AMERICA" to spell OSAMA.)
The new discovery is that if you use the exact same fold on a $5, a $10 and a $100 bill, line the four bills up in order, reading from the "WTC" side, you get the tragedy in four steps, from the undisturbed Towers on the $5, the attack is shown on the $10 and the $20 and the $100 – well, you gotta see it.
The Government clearly had this plan for 9/11 all along, and hid the secret in our currency.
I caution readers, it must not be assumed that Scot has any belief in this wild idea; he’s among the sanest of my friends. He’s just fascinated, as I am, at the ability that otherwise idle minds have to find meaning where there is none. For a good illustrated run-down on this exercise in futility, go to www.glennbeck.com/news/05172002.shtml and invest some time. That will surely be held against your record when you show up before Peter for The Big Decision…
I admit it, I occasionally get carried away on flights of fancy when I discover some legislative declaration that I just might turn to our advantage in going after the Bad Guys. Read this, and see if the same thing occurs to you that flitted through my mind briefly when I first came upon it. Section 1001, Title 18, of the United States Code states:
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully –
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years ...
Gee, from my admittedly amateur viewpoint, this would appear to apply to a huge percentage of the situations we handle! Could we have here a new approach to getting at The Bad Guys…?
Our lead article last week brought in a good number of comments about the presumed expertise of Peter B. Lloyd. Reader Edmond Orignac wrote about Lloyd’s process of relating spoon-bending to the OSI [Open Systems Interconnection] situation:
Not only is this analogy useless as an explanation of spoon bending, but it just makes the issue more absurd; are there really 7 layers as in OSI or just 4 in TCP/IP, which committee has designed these layers, when and where, which industry has adopted the norm etc. As anyone must have succeeded at least once in his/her life to bend a spoon by pressing it too hard against an overcooked cake, the real explanation of Geller's amazing mental powers is not hard to figure out.
One is left wondering whether in trying to "explain" a supernatural phenomenon by an arbitrary engineering standard that he does not know nor understand, this Mr. Lloyd is simply displaying his inability to see the difference between science and technology, or whether he is betting on the public ignorance of this difference to reinforce Geller's mystification...
Reader Darren McBride:
As a computer and network designer I read last week's commentary about Peter Lloyd's gullibility regarding Uri Geller, with interest. Not only does Peter Lloyd demonstrate ignorance of the conjuring art, he also shows a lack of understanding of his own field – computers. In comparing “psi” phenomena to the layers of the Internet, he discusses the “physical layer” and then goes on to say: "At the top, there is an ‘application layer,’ which is the email client that displays and stores the email. In the internet, there are also five other layers: data link, network, transport, session, and presentation."
Not so….
Mr. McBride proceeded to a discussion of the “7 layers of OSI” that is far beyond my understanding, and probably beyond the ken of my average reader, so it will mercifully not be presented here. He ended with:
I find it fascinating that the lack of rigor that marks Mr Lloyd's thinking in evaluating Mr. Geller's claims is evident in his understanding of even his own field.
Reader Dan Thompson:
As a person with a background in Information Technology, it was quite apparent to me upon reading Mr. Lloyd's excerpts that he is applying the mechanics of his intelligently-designed (in the literal sense of the term) software world to the physics of the real world, which is simply ludicrous. His frequent references to "application layers" and "object-oriented systems" clearly show his bias.
This becomes apparent when you use a more familiar subject: suppose an auto mechanic tried to interpret Geller's spoonbending using his area of expertise. He might surmise that the mind is like the carburetor, while the stroking of the spoon is analogous to the sparkplug and the spoon itself is the piston. Of course, such an analogy would be completely nonsensical and has nothing to do with the way real physics work... but by using such an analogy, you can strip away the technobabble and see how ridiculous his claims are on their face.
Of course, given his unending references to the Matrix movies, maybe I'm overexplaining the writings of someone with a clear lack of a grasp on reality...
Dan, I sense here an implication that psychics actually have something going for them besides tricks and subterfuge... That, I cannot accept.
Finally, reader Matt Yarbrough:
Lloyd's analogies of technology threw up a few red flags with me. I have been in IT [Information Technology] for 15 years now and have dealt with a tremendous number of programmers. There is a perception that because someone is a programmer that they are logical. This is the case far less often than one might expect. The ability to deal well with math and algorithms does not automagically imbue one with the ability to engage in logical analysis or even to think clearly. Based on his explanations of things technological I would venture to say he is a programmer of very limited ability. This is in agreement with the emphasis on his metaphysical writings rather than anything technical on his website and his software company website.
I am often dismayed at the number of people in IT who are capable of complex analysis of technological problems and who still persist in believing in nonsense like remote viewing and crystals. But I am more dismayed at the general public who assume that because someone has a technical background (be it computers, math, biology, astrology, medicine, etc., etc.) of some sort, that they are qualified to declare the “scientific value” of some supposed phenomenon or other. I largely blame this on the lack of any teaching of critical thinking in schools, and not just in the U.S., based on the many items you comment on weekly from around the globe.
I will refer you to one event in my own life that illustrated this problem of an expert being out of familiar territory. I send you to a previous SWIFT at www.randi.org/jr/12-29-2000.html. Go there, do a search for "Coliseum" and read that short account…
An anonymous reader refers to the item last week about the Cache Creek Veterinary Service and their insanity:
When you realize that Woodland, CA, has a phone prefix of 666, all will come clear. I was doing work for a Migrant Head Start program with class rooms in a Christian School there when I noticed this. I didn't ask...
Reader Karen Howe of Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada, after describing a dear friend who believes he can heal via Reiki despite his superior intelligence, tells us:
…it was with much chagrin that I recently investigated our new medical coverage (from a new employer) only to find a shocking waste of funds. I was in need of new eyewear, and hoped they'd cover the cost. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the company will pay $500/yr for chiropractor fees, $500/yr for massage therapy fees, $500/yr for holistic healers (which includes Reiki if prescribed by a naturopathic physician), but only $175 every 2 years for glasses.
I would gladly exchange $500 of, say, holistic medicine for the opportunity to have a very expensive, yet physically necessary, item. I am extremely nearsighted with a vision prescription that degrades every year, yet I am expected to use the same glasses for 2 years which cost on average $250. Legally, I cannot drive a vehicle without my glasses, nor would I be able to work as I cannot see the computer screen! …Hopefully, there will come a day when foolishness like this will be outlawed.
Hopefully…
Reader Dirk Oden of Monte Vista, Colorado, commented on the Jacob Spinney video of fork-bending seen here last week:
If a person could truly bend a fork (or spoon) with his or her mind, it shouldn't be necessary for the bender to hold the utensil during the act. I would challenge any self-proclaimed utensil bender to bend a fork from my silverware drawer while he had his hands in his pockets and I dangled it from fishing line two inches in front of his forehead.
I answered him:
As I’ve said many times before, you cannot impose your own conditions on a performer. Would you prove that a drummer is not a musician because he could not play the harpsichord? How can you say that it should not be necessary for a psychic to hold a utensil while bending it? Perhaps contact is needed for a reason you know nothing about. Would you challenge an electrician to repair an appliance – or even to turn it on – without touching it…? A failure to meet that challenge would not indicate that the electrician lacks ability…
If these powers exist – and we have zero evidence that they do – they may require specific conditions for their success. We cannot say that they don’t.
Of course, since the conditions under which a “psychic” operates are those which allow of regular, non-supernatural explanations and/or simple trickery, we have no need to resort to woo-woo solutions.
Incidentally, we received about a dozen attempts to explain Jacob’s trick. A few of them were pretty close, and one of them was right on! However, not one of the super-smart Coppens/Lloyd/Osborn/Pilkington/Sarfatti bunch responded, as we’d asked…
Reader Jeff Fitzmayer directs us to http://tinyurl.com/8jcnf for a disconcerting experience. He writes:
Thanks for all that you do. In light of the upcoming election cycle, I thought you might find this Presidential Prayer Team web page interesting if you have not yet seen it.
In addition to the incredibly shallow and quaint subject matter that permeates this web site, you can also download a "Pray the Vote" PDF prayer guide. In the guide you learn that among other things, you can actually pray for "Accuracy in the voting machinery and tabulations."
In the pink "Pray Now" box on the home web page, you can see a multitude of specific governmental events of the day that you should pray for. For example, as I visited today, we were supposed to "Pray for President Bush as he welcomes to the White House several astronauts including crews of Discovery and Atlantis and the International Space Station." For some reason, there was no mention of crews from the Challenger and Columbia. But along the same lines, I couldn't find a "Failed Prayer" section on the website either.
I just can't help but wonder what this web site would have been like if it existed back in January 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky scandal befell President Clinton. Based on the overly conservative content of the page as it is today, I bet the main focus back in 1998 would be "Pray for a Different Damn President!" But that's only a hunch.
We’ve just found out that as of November 1, Chinese print media will be prohibited from accepting misleading advertising. This follows a ban on similarly misleading television and radio commercials issued in August by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. Publications will be prohibited from accepting advertising that promote unproven medical products; as here, Chinese consumers are offered ads promoting male potency, breast enlargements or magical cure-alls. The State agency says the misleading ads are often vulgar and offensive, and they “seriously impair the credibility” of the print media.
China's advertising market, at US$17.7 billion in 2005, ranks fifth in the world. Some two-thirds of Chinese responding to an on-line survey last month said they had been victimized by fake and illegal advertisements for medical products, health food and cosmetic products. In addition, advertisements that are obscene or contain superstitious content, and those “teaching gambling tricks” will also be strictly prohibited.
Maybe we could learn to accept more than the invention of gunpowder, noodles, and the compass from this ancient civilization?
Taken from This is True, featuring bizarre-but-true news items from the world's press, we give you these Top Ten indications that you’re over-obsessed with religion:
#10 – You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
#9 – You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that humans were created from dirt.
#8 – You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.
#7 – Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the male first-born babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" – including women, children, and trees.
#6 – You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods consorting with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
#5 – You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of the Earth (4.55 billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is about a couple of generations old.
#4 – You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs – though excluding those in all rival sects – will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering, and yet you consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."
#3 – While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor “speaking in tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" your choice of religions to be the correct one.
#2 – You define .01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers, and consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% failure was simply the will of God.
#1 – You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history – but you still call yourself a Christian.
Accompanying this list was an interesting addition from Joseph Campbell, the writer and author best known for his work in the fields of mythology and religion:
The wicked thing about both the little and the great "collective faiths," prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known.
They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the "error of the found truth," or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and, therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society.
It’s been a busy week. The last-Wednesday-of-the-month open house get-together at the JREF was interesting indeed, following hard on a complete burn-out of our telephone system – wrongly named, “Merlin” – and certain complications with dear Linda’s recovery from her recent appendectomy. But, we’re still in business, though wearied by events. We’re readying ourselves for an upcoming “tenting” of the JREF after termites were found to be consuming our obviously delicious library. What’s next, Sylvia Browne? Registrations for TAM5 continue to come in, so all is well.
Also, we're still working on the wording on our upcoming changes to the challenge. Patience, friends, patience..
