Skeptic (Altadena, CA) articles from March 2006

Skeptic (Altadena, CA) archives from March 2006

Caltech public events--2007.
March 22, 2006... Performing Arts--Beckman Auditorium, Jan. 27, 2007 Ale Moller Band Feb. 2, 2007 Universe of Dreams featuring Ensemble Galilei, narrator Neal Conan March 9, 2007 Boys of the Lough...

What is a skeptic?
March 22, 2006... What does it mean to be a skeptic? Some people believe that skepticism is rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that...

Bad vibrations and magical thinking.(superstitious intuition)
March 22, 2006... AT A RECENT SCIENCE FESTIVAL OF THE BRITISH Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), a very interesting experiment was announced by Dr. Brace Hood, professor of psychology at Bristol University. Hood was researching the origins of...

Deja vu in the Lab Attention Paradox Amygdala-driven Emotions.
March 22, 2006... Deja vu In the Lab Ina statement released July 21, 2006, the British magazine New Scientist reported results from new research on the brain that reveals the deja vu experience to be due to a mix-up in the brain. Deja vu is the sensation of...

Pluto downgraded.
March 22, 2006... The recent vote by the International Astronomical Union on the definition of a planet has led to the "demotion" of Pluto from its traditional planetary status. What is less known is that before this vote, there was no formal definition of a...

Jews for Darwin: evolution, intelligent design, and Orthodox Judaism.(Charles Darwin)
March 22, 2006... I AM AN ORTHODOX JEW WHO believes that the Book of Genesis is the word of God. This article--a rebuttal of the article by Alexander Nussbaum in Skeptic (Vol. 12, No. 3) which argued that Orthodox Jews do not accept evolution and other areas of...

Was Louis Pasteur anti-evolution?
March 22, 2006... CURRENT CREATIONIST LITERATURE and advocacy websites, such as Answers in Genesis, make the claim that Louis Pasteur was anti-evolution. This claim is part of a campaign to acquire public credibility and lend prestige to creationist viewpoints...

Darwin as straw man.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... In Vol. 12, No. 3, Leo Scully's letter claims that evolutionary biology fails to account "for the entire progression from inorganic molecules to the human brain." This is a straw man, since Darwin did not pretend to explain the transition from...

My experience with ball lightning.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... I enjoyed your article in Skeptic (Vol. 12, No. 4) and it reminded me of an encounter I had back in 1975. I was the pilot of an Air Force C-141 transport caught in a violent thunderstorm over central Japan. Two nearly simultaneous...

Still skeptical of global warming.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Many commentators in Skeptic Vol. 12, No. 4 Forum assume there is a consensus among scientists that anthropogenic global warming exists and that it will pose a major problem. S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery in their recent book, Unstoppable...

Catastrophe in the making.
March 22, 2006... I was interested in Moderchai Ben-Ari's well-stated argument against crying wolf over possible, but little understood, threats to humanity (Skeptic, Vol. 12 No. 3) Scientists serve us best When they: a) put their speculation and projections...

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Although I found Mordechai Ben-Ari's article on naive egocentric catastrophism interesting, I did notice that he too seems to forget his history, something he rightly criticizes several catastrophists of doing in the article. Ben-Ari states...

Results from "religious belief and societal health" study illusory.
March 22, 2006... Matthew Provonsha, in his review (Vol. 12, No. 3) of Gregory S. Paul's study of societal ills and religiosity, has not approached the subject with a degree of skepticism to be expected of a magazine for skeptics. Rather, he used the study as a...

No prayers for amputees or WMDs.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Your article on "Prayer and Healing" (and the study) confirmed the obvious--no effect. In looking at people who fervently believe in prayer I have always found it curious that they will pray for the probable (please let this plane flight be...

Governments do lie.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Responding to George Case's article in Vol. 12 No. 4, we unfortunately live in a world where political conspiracies do occur (e.g., Watergate, Iran-Contra). It's a world where governments often do abuse their power by committing brutal acts,...

Systemic bias in the mass media.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... George Case mentions George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I couldn't help bur recall Andrew Marr's discussion with Noam Chomsky on BBC2's The Big Idea. The show begins with some similar trivializing rhetoric, and includes footage from the...

Longevity forum.(Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever)
March 22, 2006... There is so much misinformation in Harriet Hall's review of our book (Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever), that it is hard to know where to start our rebuttal. She asks repeatedly for scientific evidence, but ignores the 2,000...

Don't let them Hoodia-Wink you; bunkum reigns in weight loss pills and bad back devices.
March 22, 2006... HOODIA GORDONII IS A CACTUS-LIKE succulent that grows in the deserts of southern Africa. The San people have traditionally used it as a thirst quencher, an appetite suppressant, and as a cure for severe abdominal cramps, hemorrhoids,...

A fancy rack for a bad back.(back pain)
March 22, 2006... Have you seen the ads? They're all over my local newspapers, and they're probably in yours too. "Who Else Doesn't Want Back Surgery?" "One of the few doctors in our area to treat serious back pain conditions WITHOUT ...

A voyager in the Cosmos: an interview with Ann Druyan.(Interview)
March 22, 2006... For nearly twenty years Ann Druyan was Carl Sagan's collaborator, co-author, companion, and wife. Together they worked on numerous projects, including: NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message of humanity that is hurdling out of the solar system...

Science, religion, and human purpose: a cosmic perspective.
March 22, 2006... A PRIMARY CONCERN OF THINKING individuals throughout history has been to discern some overall purpose to human existence. Traditionally, the answers to this important quest have been drawn from religions, which, with few exceptions, assert both...

Conversations with Carl: the many voices and varied opinions of Carl Sagan come alive again in this excerpt on the 10th anniversary of his death.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2006... Editor's note: The following excerpt is from the introduction to the volume, Conversations with Carl Sagan, edited by Tom Head and published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book consists of many of the most enlightening interviews...

The God hypothesis: Carl Sagan.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2006... Editor's note: The following excerpt is from Chapter 6, "The God Hypothesis," from The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan, edited by Ann Druyan. Each of the chapters represents a...

Carl Sagan's vision.(Tributes to Carl Sagan)
March 22, 2006... CARL SAGAN SAW A VISION OF HUMAN space-explorers venturing out into the universe, following the great tradition of the sailors who ventured out onto the oceans and began to explore the continents of this planet 500 years earlier. But Carl was...

Carl Sagan and Edward Teller: an uneasy alliance over defending the earth.(Tributes to Carl Sagan)
March 22, 2006... CARL SAGAN AND EDWARD TELLER WERE bitter opponents in national security debates about issues such as "Star Wars" and nuclear test bans, but ironically they agreed on defending the Earth against asteroids--an agreement that neither, however, was...

Carl Sagan and the search for E.T.(extraterrestrial television)
March 22, 2006... WHEN I WAS A GRAD STUDENT OF ASTROPHYSICS at Comer in the late 1960s, I ploughed through dry scientific journals. Occasionally, I found papers bordering on science fiction, hidden within them like naughty pictures. These gems were often by an...

Leaving a demon-haunted world.(Tributes to Carl Sagan)
March 22, 2006... I was born and brought up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a Mormon I devoted considerable amounts of time and material in furthering the purposes of the church, including serving a two-year mission to Okinawa,...

Popular and pilloried.
March 22, 2006... IN THE EARLY 1990S THE NATIONAL ACADEMY of Sciences held its annual election to membership. Richard Feynman had already become so exasperated that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that...

The Sagan file.(Tributes to Carl Sagan)(Biography)
March 22, 2006... WE MOVED OFFICES, AND I BEGAN TO purge files, stuff I don't need and haven't looked at in years. Digging deep, I came across a fat file marked "Sagan." The astronomer died in December 1996. Save? Throw away? From the documents,...

Our place in the universe.(tributes to Carl Sagan)
March 22, 2006... CARL SAGAN WAS A SCHOLAR AND A visionary. He changed the world. His work still does. As I think back on the time I got to spend in his classes, I realize now what made him the best science communicator of his day. He loved discovery, he...

The origin of superstition, magical thinking, and paranormal beliefs: an integrative model.
March 22, 2006... IN HIS ALWAYS QUIRKY BUT USUALLY insightful look into the human condition, comedian Woody Alien once remarked: "There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far it is from midtown and how late is it open?" (1) In...

The gospel of food: the myth of the doctrine of naught.(diet foods)
March 22, 2006... AFTER GARY TAUBES, A VETERAN SCIENCE writer, argued in a New York Times Magazine piece in 2002 that foods such as steak and cheese, "considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma, turn out to be comparatively benign," and that "cutting...

Deities for Atheists.(Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... A review of Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials by George Basalla, Cambridge Universty Press, 2006, 224 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 0-19-517181-0) On February 8, 2000, the New York Times science section...

Of scholars, scrolls and mushrooms.(John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... A review of John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Judith Anne Brown, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005, 288 pp. $25.00 ISBN 0-802828493 SOME TIME IN THE LATE 1970s a friend lent me a hard-over copy of John...

If God could talk what would he say?(The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... A review of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins. Free Press, 2006. 304 pp., $26.00 ISBN: 0743286391. THEISTIC EVOLUTION WAS A religious sentiment that blossomed late in the 19th century as a...

Evolution: part one of two.
March 22, 2006... HELLO! I'm Daniel, the Editor of Junior Skeptic. Welcome to Part One of our two-part look at the exhilarating subject of evolution, and Darwin's idea of natural selection, which explains how evolution happens. A lot of people have...