ISSUE #2
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The Newsletter of Science and Reason in Hampton Roads
Issue 2 (August 2001)
Editor: John Robinson
Welcome to the second issue of this turkey! First of all, some info on the upcoming August SRHR meeting:
It will be held this Thursday, August 9, at 6:30 PM at the home of your humble newsletter muckraker. The address is 5224 Powhatan Avenue. How to get there: Take whatever route you usually take to get to the regular SRHR meetings at ODU. However, instead of stopping at Mills Godwin, keep going west until you reach Powhatan Avenue (it's sort of the back border of the ODU campus. Turn north and go about 3 blocks; if you reach Bolling, you've gone too far. 5224 is on the right as you face north; it's an old white wooden two-story house with a big tree in the front yard. The house numbers are hard to see from the street, so look for a light blue Accord with a bumper sticker: "I MAY NOT AGREE WITH YOUR BUMPER STICKER, BUT I'LL PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO STICK IT!"
Larry's post-Superstition Celebration message said to bring snacks and drinks; this is cool, but please don't bring anything that needs to be plugged in or set afire; the house is about 90 years old, and its wiring is nowhere near up to code. I'll have some chips/snacks/soda/beer here already, so there's no need to bring a whole bunch. So far we don't have an official topic for this meeting, so be prepared to discuss just about anything. Come on out Thursday, sit on the famous Singing Sofa, meet Storm the World's Sheddingest Dog, and have a great time!
Format Issues: Right now I'm creating this newsletter in MS-Word. However, to e-mail it out I copy the text into a Web-based e-mail program for ease of sending. This creates a problem: formatting, photos, etc. are all lost in the copying. I'd like to start either sending this out as a Word file, or converting it to an Adobe .pdf file and sending it out that way, so that it'll appear as a complete newsletter. Free Adobe readers are commonly available all over the Net; will this create a problem for anybody? Let me know via e-mail.
Editorial Blather: Now that the 2001 Superstition Celebration (see attached photos) is over and everybody had fun, I'm wondering if we maybe did more harm than good in some ways. The psychic card-reading experiment was a superb method for demonstrating probability to the crowd; after about 90 minutes we had a pretty respectable bell curve shaping up, but did we really explain what was going on? Only a couple of the adult kibitzers were interested in the chart, and none of the kids were - to them it was basically a free carnival game. Having some preteen get five or six cards out of six right and then rush off shouting, "I'm psychic! I'm psychic!" can't be helping the cause (and I'm as much to blame as anybody else, considering I kept laying out cards for the kids until it got too dark to see).
In the middle was the Homeopathic Juice Bar, and it was neat to see some of the tasters swear they could still taste the juice after it had been diluted about ten thousand times. However, due to resource constraints we couldn't replace the water after each dilution, so subsequent tasters were in serious danger of overdosing as the juice concentrations got up to six or eight parts per 10K! We might need to have tasters sign releases next time.
Down at the other end Larry was working the bad-luck table with a ladder to walk under and mirrors to break, plus a voodoo doll to abuse. However, I'm again uncertain whether SRHR's message actually got out to people. Larry's report said the children were much more likely to smash a mirror than their elders were; great, but how much encouragement does any adolescent boy need to smash something, or poke holes in it? Were these kids really aware of the superstitions involving broken mirrors, ladders, black cats, etc.?
A lot of pundits claim that today's children haven't learned some basic things we all had to learn as kids: politeness, proper English, respect for others, and so forth. Maybe the parents and schools that have failed to pass these lessons down to the youngsters are also not passing down the old good-luck/bad-luck clichés we all took for granted. Even when I was a kid, way back in the antediluvian Seventies, a nostrum like "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" was considered kind of corny.
Perhaps we've actually made progress when a child isn't afraid to step right up and give a mirror a good crunching. Even so, the next time we hold a Superstition Celebration we need to take more pains to explain exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it. The old superstitions may be dying out, but plenty of slick new ones are evolving into the vacant niches.And with the rant concluded, on to the fun stuff:
CSICOP, Eat Your Heart Out: New York City's Parapsychology Foundation held its 50th Anniversary celebration this weekend. The foundation was created to fund and guide "scientific" research into what was a sketchy and disreputable field back in 1951 (and it's good to see how much that has changed over the decades -ed.). PF is especially proud of its library, which holds over 10,000 volumes, and is sited in a "serene, Upper East Side town house". See the Associated Press article at: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010804/ sc/parapsychology_foundation_1.html
Didn't See It Coming, Pt 2: Jay Nixon, Attorney General for the state of Missouri, has filed multiple lawsuits against Fort Lauderdale-based Access Resource Services, sponsor of TV psychic "Miss Cleo", for allegedly violating Missouri's no-call law and consumer fraud statutes. "No-Call" laws prohibit telephone solicitation of people who request not to be called, and "Consumer Fraud" is self-apparent. See the AP story at: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010725/en/psychic_lawsuit_2.html, and a more light-hearted look at: http://web.startelegram.com/content/fortworth/2001/07/26/fwnews/fw010413-0726-XB014-1.htm
Look Deep Into My IR Sensor: A July 24th article in the Edmonton Sun reported that a woman known as "Lynn" (no last name given) was offering computerized palm readings to customers at a city fair. Marks would place their palms on a special reader for scanning, and then receive a diagram of their hands along with predictions for their futures. Lynn was careful to warn customers that their fortunes were only valid for three months. She also claimed to not use any other methods to predict the future, so she had no data regarding how accurate her scanner is versus something more traditional. Kenny Hawkins, a professional tarot reader several booths down, disputed the reliability of cyber-seers, claiming, "I'm just not sure they're reading energy." The Sun story is online at: http://www.fyiedmonton.com/cgi-bin/niveau2.cgi?s=default&p=43474.html&a=1
Mr. Nickell, Call Your Office: Still looking at Canada - on Monday, July 23, a small group of people, led by hypnotist and mindreader Blair Robertson, held a séance at Barrymore's Music Hall in Ottawa to see if the 91-year-old vaudeville hall is haunted. They weren't looking for the shade of anybody in particular, but several participants, including Ottawa Citizen correspondent Melanie Brooks, reported seeing a "Mayan-looking face." Brooks' visit to the Barrymore is the13th in the Citizen's "Haunted Ottawa" series, which is worth a look; see her article at: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/ (go to the Search function, search on "séance," and select the first result. No word on whether Mr.Robertson plans to go cyber like Lynn.)
What Do You Want On YOUR Tombstone? The August 1st edition of the "RusData" Russian Press Digest reported that on July 17, Russian test pilot Timur Apakidze was killed in a crash while giving a demonstration flight of an Su-33 FLANKER fighter near Pskov. The initial report claimed that the pilot had deactivated a safety governor that controlled how strenuously the aircraft could maneuver; it exceeded viable flight parameters and crashed.
A new report has surfaced, however, that may exonerate the pilot. The Moscow Tribuna claims that the fighter may have collided with a UFO. A press official videotaped the demonstration flight and claimed that an oblong object about one meter long was visible next to the aircraft a moment before it departed from flight. (This item is not available online; source is Lexis-Nexis)
Online Goodies: IMG2 is a Website that hosts Internet radio. See its June "Webmaster Show" archives for two online shows about UFOs, space tourism, and the SETI project. While you're there, check out the July 21st show on Face Recognition & Video Surveillance Technology to get some background info on the current controversy surrounding plans to activate such technology out at the Beach. IMG2 is at: http://www.img2.com/ Listen/allArchives.asp
Uh-Oh: Some places get frogs, but Kansas gets corn. On Friday, August 3, an uncounted number of corn husks hurtled out of the sky onto an East Wichita suburb. The source of the semi-Biblical phenomenon remains unknown, although some residents suspect a prank carried out by enthusiastic fans of the University of Nebraska's Cornhuskers football team. So far conventional science has no better explanation; when asked about the rain of corn leaves, Wichita meteorologist Jeff House commented, "Corn husks falling from the sky. Hmmm. . . . That is odd." See the story online at: http://web.wichitaeagle.com/content/wichitaeagle/ 2001/08/04/frontpage/0804cornhusks.htm
Adventures in Journalism: The Sci-Fi Channel has launched "The Chronicle", a comedy-suspense series about reporters at a Weekly World News-type tabloid. In the grand old tradition of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the supernatural scoops chased by the Chronicle staff usually turn out to be real, if somewhat pithy. (Comment: this is a good thing. Remember Scooby-Doo? It never was a real monster, was it? Always some clown dressed up in a monster suit, or a hologram or something similar.)
The Seattle Times calls the new show "'Lou Grant' meets 'The X-Files' - the inventive, fun 'X-Files' of old, not the exasperating, dragged-out series of today." Currently "The Chronicle" airs Saturdays at 9PM and 12AM, Eastern time. See the review at: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgibin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=thechronicle14&date=20010714&query=chronicle+grant
The Sci-Fi channel's guide to the new show is at: http://www.scifi.com/chronicle/
(End of Issue 2)
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Comments/Questions/Suggestions/Threats? E-mail them to
me at tympani@att.net -- John A. Robinson, editor