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News Briefs 20-05-2005

By Katon

Do we really want anyone to find the Ark of the Covenant? I’m having flashbacks of Indy’s warning, ‘No matter what happens, don’t open your eyes!’

Quote of the Day:

The federal government today has the look of an asteroid headed for America at high speed.

Alan Caruba

Kat
Related

11 Comments

  1. How do you do it!
    Geez Kat how do you do it!

    The story of the dog licking the man’s leg to make it better brought tears to my eyes.
    My dogs would do that for me.Well Pepe would, anyway.

    Don’t worry, I don’t blame the US for the lake disappearing overnight.
    Although….where were you that night,hmmmmmmmm?????

    I’ll save the rest for the weekend.
    Well done, chickipoo.
    Thanks,

    love shadows

  2. Dissapearing lakes
    Back around 1980 or so, the Americans were the victims of just such an attack by sinister forces, as a lake dissapeared. This brazen attack took place in the middle of the day. I think it was in Texas, but I’m not entirely sure. They blamed it on someone drilling into an empty salt mine.

  3. God’s Rod Goes Limp
    Defence Tech has a debunk on the story, which started with an article in the NY Times and has been picked up uncritically elsewhere.

    “Yes, “Rods from God” is mentioned in the 2003 “Flight Plan.” But the idea was debunked so long ago that’s it’s hard to believe the service is actually pursuing the Rods in any serious way. As Columbia University physics professor Richard Garwin noted, the Rods could only work if they orbited at low altitudes. And that means they “could only deliver one-ninth the destructive energy per gram as a conventional bomb.”

    There’s more here.

    Regards, C

    1. Rods
      What Garwin is saying is that from an energy point of view the rods don’t make sense, the effort to lift them to orbit and then de-orbit them makes it much more expensive than more conventional means. Another aspect is that the penetrating depth achieved by a projectile does not increase with the speed of impact, so dropping them from higher orbit doesn’t improve that.

      What he doesn’t address is the aspect of control, i.e. accuracy of aim. I’m not sure what the advantage is of throwing sticks at something from orbit. Probably the psychological side to it, plus the lack of notification on the receiving side.

      For the best accuracy of aim, I would recommend sharpening one end of the rod, and standing in from of the target at a distance of, let us say 1.5 meters. Wait until they look the other way.

  4. Earthquakes.
    My money is on a 8+ quake on or after May 22-24th and then the window is open again on June 20-24th. Tides are high and we are close to the equinox. I’d hope not in the pacific northwest. It could destablize the cascade volcano’s. And yeah that’s where I live. The salmon did not show up this spring,( some still hope ) a great loss to the tribes and all those that depend on them.

    1. low salmon run
      Hi bladerunner,

      Thanks for bringing up the salmon. I had no idea it was so bad this year. Whatever the reason for them not showing up, I agree that rivers full of volcanic ash definitely wouldn’t help the situation.

      The mystery of the disappearing salmon

      Perhaps for the first time in history, the fish Native communities require for their springtime ceremonies had to be gathered from last year’s frozen catch or from other tribes and friendly fishermen downstream.

      While some people are optimistic that the salmon run may yet come in and speculate that the salmon are massing out to sea, perhaps waiting for some biological trigger that has yet to go off, most scientists are not expecting miracles. Most scientists, in fact, don’t know what to expect anymore.

      The biggest quandary is how to figure out what is going on, as human assaults on nature, both globally and regionally, compound and threaten fragile ecosystems.

      This article goes on to speculate about possible causes.

      Kat

  5. Indiana Jones
    That’s an interesting story about the real Indiana Jones.I hope if he finds the Ark he doesn’t go all fundamentalist.

    I also loved the Scotsman article about Pontius MacPilate.I have always known of course that all that religious stuff happened in Scotland and they just changed all the names.
    Of course Arthur was a Scot.
    The entire thing is completely believable.

    St Brendan is an interesting character and unlike St Patrick would seem to have actually existed.
    I love all the historical stuff.

    shadows

    1. Discovering America
      I am sure many people have “discovered” the Americas, by being afloat for long enough. It is hard to miss. Columbus thought there was money to be made by being famous for it, didn’t work for him personally. Those northern people tried the trade-secret way. Maybe it worked for a few generations?

      1. Discovering America
        “Many people had discovered America before Columbus – however they had always managed to cover up the discovery.”

        Oscar Wilde.

  6. Let this be your James Randi
    More Randiesque bullshite — Fooling the Fools…. yet again. (LOLOL)
    ———-
    Randi was an entertaining and effective speaker with his mixture of fun, facts, and fiction. Including him would certainly make a lively addition to the panel. Jerry was aware that Randi had not investigated the Resch phenomena but that he thought he knew how they were produced… by fraud! Jerry thought that a magician of Randi’s expertise might also provide some good tips about how such phenomena could be produced by magical tricks.

    Fred Shannon was the only witness who managed to attend the PA convention in Dallas. The others sent written reports of their experiences. I sent copies to Randi, including my own. Randi ignored them all.

    After Fred and I gave our presentations it was Randi’s turn. He did not discuss Fred’s written report, but directed his remarks almost exclusively to Shannon’s photos, showing slides that he had copied from a selection of the thirty-six pictures Fred had taken during his visit to the Resch home on 5 March. Without citing Fred’s statements about what he had actually seen in the house, Randi told the audience how Tina could have produced the incidents by simple trickery.

    I was amazed and distressed at what was in effect an attack on Fred’s intelligence and ability to observe what was happening right in front of him. Randi did not propose that Tina was performing magical tricks but simply that she was throwing, pushing, or pulling the objects that moved when Fred and the others present were not looking.

    Photographic evidence is often considered especially reliable, and Randi used his slides to particularly good advantage because they were Shannon’s own. There was not enough time during the discussion to adequately reply to Randi, and he clearly won the day. I felt sorry that Fred had been the victim of Randi’s attack. He had come to the meeting expecting to be among friends and to have his photographic work in the Resch home appreciated. Instead he was treated like a fool.

    In the paper Randi wrote for Skeptical Inquirer the following spring, he showed he is a master of sleight of words as well as of hand. You say one thing and he turns it into another. For example, I said that Tina and I had spent 30 minutes upstairs together before the chaotic events of 13 March. I did not say we were alone in the house – we weren’t – but that we were alone upstairs. By placing Tina there by herself, Randi had her prepare the soap and painting incidents.

    A scene where Tina screamed for me to rush upstairs to “see miracles,” was created by Randi out of thin air. It never happened. I was already upstairs and she did not scream for me – we were in the same room. I became the straight man for Randi’s jokes. “Roll described his own observing abilities in such a way that we must place his performance in the paranormal category… he saw the tape machine fly away from a position directly behind him.” I never wrote that I “saw” the tape recorder fly, only that it moved while I was hammering in a nail with Tina standing right next to me. If she had reached back, taken the recorder from the dresser and tossed it, I am certain I would have seen something.

    Having reduced my account to inanities, Randi dispatched me with a coup de grâce: “Roll is myopic and wears thick glasses; he is a poor observer.” What could I say to this? I could say that I am not myopic but farsighted. There is a photo showing Randi and me facing each other in the Resches’ driveway, no more than three feet [1m] apart. Lenses for farsightedness magnify the eyes, near sight lenses make them smaller – surely he could tell them apart? Randi judged me a poor observer and at the same time demonstrated that he couldn’t see what was right in front of his eyes. I wonder what he would have seen, or not seen, had Joan let him in the house?

    Steven Shore, the astronomer-physicist and fellow CSICOP member who had accompanied Randi to the Resches’ house, had told reporters that the direction in which the phone was pointed in Shannon’s now-famous photograph (the twenty-fifth on his roll of film) violated the laws of physics because it did not show a “straight-line trajectory.” Shore implied that Tina had picked up the phone and thrown it. Randi ignored the idea proposed by his scientific colleague to come up with another technical term, “transverse blurring”. The cord, he said, displayed transverse blurring, which showed that Tina had picked up the phone and thrown it.

    My enlargement of the same photo shows blurring of the phone cord, but it seemed no more transverse than lengthwise. Still the photo by itself does not prove that Tina hadn’t thrown the phone. This issue could only be settled by the people who were present and saw what took place: Shannon and Harden. Fred Shannon only saw the event in his peripheral vision when he put the camera down and deliberately turned his face away from Tina and the phone. But Mike Harden, who was seated on the couch next to Fred, was facing Tina when the phone took off. In his report, Mike said he saw the phone in motion without its being aided in any way by Tina. Randi simply ignored Mike’s report.

    Randi next turned his ridicule toward Fred Shannon. Fred had discovered that the only way to catch the telephone in flight was to take his camera down and look away; he would then snap a picture whenever he caught a glimpse of movement. Sometimes he would get a shot of the phone as it flew past Tina, sometimes he would be too late, the phone having already fallen to the floor, and sometimes he would only get a picture of Tina squirming in the recliner.

    One such time Tina is shown holding the armrests of the recliner, a startled expression on her face as she leans back. As she does so, she must have accidentally released the footrest, causing it to pop out. In Fred’s report there is no indication that he regarded this as anything unusual. This did not faze Randi, and he played the picture as further proof that Fred had been fooled. “While he snapped frame number 26, photographer Shannon, as he looked elsewhere awaiting a miracle, must have believed that something ‘psychic’ was happening.”

    Randi even dismissed Bruce Claggett, the local electrician and family friend who witnessed the lights turn on and the tape disappear when no one was near. Randi said only that Bruce “gave strange and contradictory accounts of the wonders in the Resch household.”

    Randi’s only revealing observation was not about the incidents that Shannon and the others could not account for, but an incident no one had any problem explaining: Tina pulling over the lamp the day of the press conference. Randi said he had studied WTVN-TV’s longer, unedited tape of the incident. In it, Randi says, Tina can be seen both setting up and performing an attempt at illusion. The lengthy preparation and clumsy execution of this simple trick is in sharp contrast to the way the witnesses described the occurrences. The movements, they said, were fast, sudden, and often happened when they were watching the girl. The incidents that took place when I was present convinced me personally that genuine psychokinesis was involved.

    Above all, Randi failed to realise that the occurrences took place under informal circumstances in a private home, not in a laboratory. He went on to claim that the occurrences around Tina, if genuine, would amount to “a repeal of the basic laws of physics.” Physics does not say that objects cannot be affected without tangible contact. The Moon revolves around the Earth and magnets attract pieces of iron without visible contact. Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis requires an extension of the laws of physics, not their repeal as Randi imagines.

    http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/190_poltergeist3.shtml

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