Skeptic (Altadena, CA) articles from January 2000

Skeptic (Altadena, CA) archives from January 2000

'Twas Brillig...
January 1, 2000... Observations on a Bizarre World URI GELLER & THE MOVING COMPASS TRICK IN JANUARY 2000 I appeared on ABC TV's morning talkshow The View, hosted by Barbara Walters and others. The occasion for the invitation was that they had hosted the...

SO LONG DOUG.
January 1, 2000... I lost a fiend recently. Magician Doug Henning died of liver cancer after five weeks of fighting the disease with Transcendental Meditation--his preferred philosophy and his chosen way of life. He is survived by his wife, Debbie. Doug was...

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.
January 1, 2000... WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN SKEPTICISM? NEXT TIME YOU ATTEND a skeptics' meeting, look around. What you don't see will be as obvious as what you do see--a white, older, largely professional group, with few to no women. Sadly, this...

HEAL THYSELF.
January 1, 2000... Simply writing about stress can relieve the symptoms of asthma and arthritis, researchers say. A study by North Dakota State University in Fargo found that 20-minute writing sessions each day for three days led to a 19 percent improvement in...

THOU SHALT SUPPORT THE SEPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.
January 1, 2000... Alabama Probate Judge Bobby Day has ruled against a petition to form a city whose government would be based solely on the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus. "The Bible rules are great, but you can't live by them alone," said a...

OR, YOU COULD WAIT FOR THE MOVIE.
January 1, 2000... Book publisher HarperCollins is defending their new version of the Bible, retitled "The Word." A spokesman says the traditional leather-bound hardcover is "intimidating" for many. "Now the classic 'Old English' King James Version of the Bible...

ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHICALLY CHALLENGED.
January 1, 2000... Three prison inmates in South Dakota concocted a plan to call attention to their organization, "The Group of Justice Reform." Prosecutors say Christopher Fonseca, 26, Charles Mann, 19, and Edward Maguire, 22, decided to hang themselves so that...

COUNT ON IT.
January 1, 2000... A joint study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Service Hospitalier Frederic Joliot in France has found that math computation tasks are spread among different parts of the brain, rather than centered in one special calculation...

NOT COVERED BY HMOs.
January 1, 2000... A controlled study by the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that placebos worked nearly as well as Prozac in treating depression. Study lead Dr. Andrew E Leuchter said the results "might give clues...

CIVIL IN HIS DISOBEDIENCE.
January 1, 2000... Clifton Courtney Moss, 75, has pleaded guilty after firebombing Australia's Parliament House in Canberra. Several years ago, Moss had smashed his car into the building's foyer. The gasoline bombs were to protest the bill for A$55,000...

E-SCAMS: TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
January 1, 2000... They show up in your e-mail...the promise of money; material goods, or simply good luck--if you only forward that e-mail to 10 other people. Sound familiar? The chain letter has graduated, and is now an e-scam. We could have guessed it...

BOO!
January 1, 2000... In celebration of Halloween, on Sunday, October 31, 1999, at the California Institute of Technology, the Skeptics Society hosted Dr. Barry Glassner, Professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, and author of the...

THE MARS MAN.
January 1, 2000... The brilliant and revolutionary space scientist Dr. Robert Zubrin, lectured on Sunday, January 16, 2000, at the California Institute of Technology, on the subject of his latest book, Entering Space: Creating a Space-faring Civilization. ...

A HISTORY OF HEAVEN--DANTE TO THE INTERNET.
January 1, 2000... On Sunday, November 21, 1999, science writer Margaret Wertheim gave a brief history of heaven from ancient times to the present, including its latest incarnation in cyberspace. In the Christian West, humans have always dreamt of a higher...

URBAN LEGENDS Too GOOD TO BE TRUE.
January 1, 2000... On February 13, Dr. Jan Harold Brunvand entertained a standing room only audience at Caltech. The "King of Urban Legends" did not disappoint them. Alligators in the sewers? A pet in the microwave? The vanishing hitchhiker? You know these...

SKEPTICS VISIT WORLD FAMOUS MUSEUM OF QUESTIONABLE MEDICAL DEVICES.
January 1, 2000... On Tuesday, March 21, the Skeptics Society visited Bob McCoy's Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, picked as one of the top five tourist attractions in the Twin Cities by the New York Times, but rated by the Skeptics Society as the number...

AMERICANS CONTINUE TO DOUBT EVOLUTION.
January 1, 2000... According to a new Yankelovich poll, commissioned by People for the American Way, an overwhelming 83% of Americans think Darwin's theory of evolution, not creationism, belongs in science class. Yet a CNNUSA Today-Gallup poll found that 68% of...

THE CHANGING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE THE 2000 GALLUP & BARNA POLLS.
January 1, 2000... For years SKEPTIC has tracked the ever-changing religious landscape of beliefs. Although overall rates of belief (and disbelief) remain steady, the variations within the numerous variables that go into what we know as religion and spirituality...

VIRGIN ICE CREAM.
January 1, 2000... American Atheists News, January 14, 2000. Faithful supplicants from as far away as Canada and Seattle are trekking to Houston, Texas, where believers say an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has appeared in an ice cream stain on a sidewalk....

NOAH'S FLOOD IN THE BLACK SEA?
January 1, 2000... The freshwater Black Sea was inundated almost overnight 7,500 years ago by a catastrophic flood of Mediterranean saltwater. This summer a team of deep-sea explorers will return to verify their findings from last summer to further test the...

CULT MASS SUICIDE/HOMICIDE: JONESBORO/HFAVEN'S GATE REPLAY?
January 1, 2000... As we were going to press with this issue reports came in of an apparent mass suicide or homicide by a doomsday religious cult with hundreds dead. In the preceding weeks, cult members sold all their possessions and received a book of matches...

ABC PAYS DAMAGES TO PSYCHIC NETWORK.
January 1, 2000... LOS ANGELES, February 15. (AP)--ABG paid more than $900,000 to a Psychic Services Network worker who claimed a secretly made videotape shown on "PrimeTime Live" ruined his reputation. Mark Sanders received a check from the network last week,...

RECOVERED OR FALSE MEMORIES?
January 1, 2000... Since SKEPTIC began in 1992 we have been following the debate about recovered memories versus false memories, with a strong slant to the probability that most so-called "recovered" memories of childhood sexual abuse, particularly those for...

SKEPTICS' FORUM.
January 1, 2000... THE WHOLE WORLD ISN'T CRAZY This is my first letter to any publication of any kind. I just had to say thank you for a great magazine. I have a limited education and some articles have been a challenge, but I would not have you change a...

THOUGHT FIELD THERAPY FORUM DEBATE.
January 1, 2000... THINKING THROUGH THOUGHT THERAPY As a practicing psychotherapist, I really appreciated the articles about Thought Field Therapy and EMDR (Vol. 7, No. 4). These "therapies" are promoted in otherwise reputable magazines like Family Therapy...

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL SKEPTIC SYMPOSIUM ON Race & Sports.
January 1, 2000... JON ENTINE'S TABOO: WHY BLACK ATHLETES DOMINATE SPORTS AND WHY WE ARE AFRAID TO TALK ABOUT IT RACE IS TO AMERICA WHAT THE GODDESS DISCORD was to Homeric legends--invite her to the banquet and she brings trouble with her, ignore her and she...

BREAKING THE TABOO.
January 1, 2000... WHY BLACK ATHLETES DOMINATE SPORTS AND WHY WE'RE No LONGER SO AFRAID TO TALK ABOUT IT IF YOU CAN BELIEVE that individuals of recent African ancestry are not genetically advantaged over those of European and Asian ancestry in certain...

TOTEM AND TABOO.
January 1, 2000... THE MYTH OF RACE IN SPORTS IN APRIL 1989 THE AUTHOR OF TABOO produced an NBC-TV documentary titled Black Athletes--Fact and Fiction. The purpose of this program was to examine the question of whether the dominance of black athletes in...

THE FINAL TABOO.
January 1, 2000... RACE DIFFERENCES IN ABILITY JON ENTINE'S BOOK, TABOO, IS A DIRECT, POWERFUL, and, effective challenge to an orthodoxy that has developed over the last 50 years or so for very understandable, though not valid, reasons. This orthodoxy says,...

BLOOD, SWEAT, AND FEARS.
January 1, 2000... WHY SOME BLACK ATHLETES DOMINATE SOME SPORTS AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANS IN AN ESSAY ON MAN, THE 19TH CENTURY English poet and essayist Alexander Pope elucidated the pitfalls of speculating on ultimate causes derived from immediate events:...

THE HEAT OF THE SOUL.
January 1, 2000... THERMODYNAMICS AND THE MIND/BODY PROBLEM METAPHYSICAL DUALISM, the idea that the mind and the body are distinct entities (which may or may not interact), has been the subject of contentious debate since the ancient Greeks. But its full...

PERPETUUM MOBILE.
January 1, 2000... THE DREAM OF INFINITE FREE ENERGY WELL, THE PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE is breathtaking these days, isn't it?" Dan Rather asked rhetorically on the CBS Evening News. "Now a backyard tinkerer in Mississippi says he's built a machine, a...

ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER.
January 1, 2000... GOOD SCIENCE OR GOOD MARKETING? IN THE 1960S, AMERICANS discovered illegal mind-altering drugs for themselves. In the 1990s, Americans discovered a legal mind-altering drug for their children. Although it is illegal drugs that draw the...

CHIROPRACTIC.
January 1, 2000... CONVENTIONAL 0R ALTERNATIVE HEALING? WHAT SHOULD CHIROPRACTIC'S ROLE BE in the future of medicine? Should chiropractors position themselves as primary care physicians and take advantage of the current popularity of alternative medicine, or...

THE GRAND OLD MAN OF EVOLUTION.
January 1, 2000... AN INTERVIEW WITH EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST ERNST MAYR Ernst Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany, on July 5,1904, making him, at age 95, the grand old man of evolutionary biology, one of the primary architects of the modern synthesis of genetic...

NONZERO & NONSENSE.
January 1, 2000... GROUP SELECTION, NONZEROSUMNESS, AND THE HUMAN GAIA HYPOTHESIS HOLY LEVIATHAN! SUPERORGANISMS, once thought to be as imaginary as dragons, may actually exist. First James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which portrays life on earth...

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE EVOLUTIONIST'S SOUL.
January 1, 2000... Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, Pantheon, 2000, $27.50, 435 pp., ISBN: 0-679-44252-9 HUMANS ARE pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. We look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives, then weave narratives...

WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS.
January 1, 2000... A review of The Watchdogs: A Close Look at Anti-Racist "Watchdog" Groups by Laird Wilcox, 1998, P.O. Box 2047, Olathe, KS: Editorial Research Service; with new Addenda, 1999, 103 pp. Softcover. $19.95. ISBN 0-993592-89-2. LAIRD WILCOX IS...

HOCUS-POCUS HISTORY.
January 1, 2000... WHAT IF FDR KNEW ABOUT PEARL HARBOR? Review of Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, The Free Press, 2000, ISBN 0-684-85339-6, 374 pages, $26.00. WHEN A MAGICIAN pulls a rabbit out a purportedly empty...

How the History Of Life Was Discovered Part I.
January 1, 2000... IF you've ever thought about being a detective you'll love science! A lot of scientific work involves thinking like a detective: questioning, observing, hypothesizing, testing, and drawing conclusions. Charles Darwin, as you will see, was one...

BOB FRIEDHOFFER MADMAN OF MAGIC.
January 1, 2000... GALAPAGOS ISLAND SNAKE EGGS EFFECT: Make your friends jump with surprise when they open an envelope. ROUTINE: This is a make-it-yourself toy from my book Toying Around With Science that's really a wonderful practical joke. You hand an...