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Even then, you'd need to ensure that the rest of the audio reproduction path was the same: a CD played on crappy speakers will almost always sound worse than a high-quality analog setup with top-notch speakers.

Finally, keep in mind that these kinds of do-it-yourself experiments are notoriously lax at controlling for confirmation bias. This is particularly troublesome when your goal is to measure something as subjective as audio perception.

> However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.

That's true, and I admit that certain forms of meditation may be benficial as relaxation techniques, or even simply for the spiritual benefits, but it's not TM the technique I take exception to so much as TM the institution, and their excesses - in this case, crackpot science.

> As for part II, what's that all about?

This part is a lot of fun. At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD? If he's the developer of the most successful Grand Unified Field Theory, even better, although I have more on this below. Also among his credentials is his position at MUM, the Maharishi University of Management - Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.

The first connection that I made between Hagelin and TM was in the NLP platform on crime, where they claim that TM is scientifically proven to reduce stress, and claim that stress is the leading cause of crime, which are both possible. However, I'm the kind of guy that likes to hear from the opposition as well.

trancenet.org is the opposition. There is plenty to read here, but the only article immediately relevant to what I'm discussing is from Dr. Dennis Roark, who used to work for the Maharishi at MUM back when MUM was MIU. The following quote from Roark is especially interesting:

While Chairman of Physics at M.I.U., I was asked to develop a quantum theory, a unified field theory, which would incorporate consciousness in such a way as to explain the "flying" technique as non-ordinary and which would give to the subjective experience of meditation a fundamental role in physics.

Sound familiar? Is Hagelin still employed because he was a good scientist, or because he was a good lackey?

It's speculation until I actually see Hagelin's work, I admit, but the past insanities of TM are too much for me to do anything but distrust the Maharishi and his cohorts. I wouldn't advocate voting for John Travolta, a known Scientologist, either. At least not without evaluating the nature of his involvement with them - that's some code I'm going to want to look at before I run it on my country!

The Skeptic's Dictionary is another good source for this kind of thing.

> I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)

It certainly is rebuffable, iff you know enough about Hagelin's theory and my speculations aren't accurate.

I'll agree that an autonomous mind requres a goal-finding mechanism, but I won't agree that an AI has to stick with the one that it started out with. The parent goal can be respecified each time the AI runs, and it can be much more specific than the basic human desires. I think that's the separation, really. Humans have a very coarse set of desires - full stomach, human contact, that kind of thing ... whereas AI is important, in particular, for fine-grained, specialized application of intelligence.

BTW, Carl Jung was a raving nutter. Not that it has anything to do with your other comments.

Uri Geller isn't a spoon-bending psychic. He's a money grubbing charlatan who has tried to employ the same tactics as the Scientologists (lawsuits anyone?) against his detractors, albeit with less success. He's now jumped on the new age bandwagon and his latest snake-oil are crystals and tapes on how to develop your ESP and other psychic abilities.

Suing over the Pokemon card is just another attempt of his to get rich quick. He might be on to something but I doubt it. The Pokemon card could probably be defended as a parody of Uri Geller, a public figure.

Click here. Professional skeptic, James Randi (also a shameless self promoter, but hey, at least its for a better cause) has debunked Geller in a book. He's also challenged him to perform his feats of telekinesis under controlled circumstances for a million dollar prize. Given he loves publicity and will do anything for a buck his refusal to compete for the prize speaks volumes about his credibility.

Anderson! My thesis was descended from his work. He was the first person to prove that in sufficiently disordered materials electrons become localized and what was a metal becomes an insulator. Pretty cool (and the Nobel committee thought so too).
I met him a few times. He's just as hilarious as you might think from the quote.
Generally though, what distinguishes a real scientist from a loon and how can you tell? It's quite rare for the one to become the other. I feel I can tell pretty quickly when someone is a loon; for one thing they get angry very fast when you start questioning them. Real scientists have to give up a cherished idea pretty much every day before breakfast, because good science is about you or someone else proving yourself wrong. In many cases this makes scientists fairly mellow when their work is questioned, at least by someone reasonably knowlegeable.

Anyone else think they can tell the difference, and if so how?

On this kind of thing check out this link.

BTW I'm only an AC 'cause I can't get Slashdot to send me a password. This happen to anyone else?

John Drewery

This is as offtopic as an offtopic thing with a degree in offtopicness from the Massachusetts Institute of Offtopicality, but the abovementioned site has a link to the funniest and most entertaining thing I've read since Old Man Murray was slashdotted a couple of weeks ago. It's blurbed as follows (for those who prefer to teleport non-blind):

On another lighter note, let me tell you the story of Fry, and how the Internet got him laid. He was in a Yahoo chat room talking to a married woman who lived near him, and they decided to meet. The story isn't as simple as that though, as you will find out if you decide that you feel like reading a true account of a regular [21] year old guy who found out that there is more to life than playing Quake 3. Check out the story here, it's pretty erotic in a perverted Dawson's Creek sort of way.

I could bring this back ontopic by linking the obligatory Richard Dawkins Astrology 99 buglist, or citing 'the very real phenomenon that the birth days of proficient sports people tend to be distributed very non-uniformly across the seasons' [Dudink, A. (1994), Birth date and sporting success, Nature 368, p.592.], or whiffle on about horoscopes as Dicemanesque Mission Packs.

But how unfunny would that be on an 'It's funny. Laugh.' topic? And anyway, I aint no steenkin' Jon Katz.

I've often thought about starting some kind of web database where this false/misleading claims could be stored along with pointers to the documents showing the fact to be misleading.

Things like the BYTEmarks and this could be explained. Somethig like the skeptics dictionary. Of course I just don't have the time or the webspace to track down everything.

OTOH, probably could call it either www.phb.com or www.fudbusters.com [who y'gonna call?]...

In fact the greatest leaps in history have been made by people who dared combat the stagnant dogmas of society.

Your statement above is most likely correct, but it has nothing to do with the authors of the text on the starchild web-site, or Erich von Däniken either for that matter--Yes I read several of his books in my teens, along with books by Zecharia Sitchin etc. Used to really like reading the stuff, and think wouldn't it be wonderful if it was true... IMHO this pinpoints the whole phenomenon quite neatly. What we are are dealing with here is not people combatting stagnant dogmas, but wishful thinkers, and dreamers that fit evidence to their theories. These guys would serve mankind much better by using their creativity to write SF.

For those interested, here are some notes on von Däniken.

By the way, your notion on evolution is quite correct, but science does not work according to evolution. OK, social theories, might to some extent work according to the Hegelian thesis+antithesis->synthesis paradigm (which relates somewhat to crossover in genetics), but physics, chemistry, biology etc, work to a much larger degree by testing theories against the real world by conducting experiments, and studying evidence (such as this skull). New ideas are always nice, but they bear little relevance if they neglect large bodies of evidence, or rely on heresay, falsified "evidence" etc as is often the case for "radical thinkers" such as von Däniken. Such new ideas are better classified as fantasies (or science fiction), and should be labelled as such.

Your description of being open minded annoys me as well, open minded for me means to be open to new ideas. This is not the same as respecting everything you are told. If I tell you the sun is blue, you can still be open minded if you don't respect my claim. The majority of complaints about the alien head theory that I've read here were rejecting the claims on sound basis.

Just think, how much of older science was blatantly wrong, or "creative". How do we look at older science today. How do you think future humans will look at OUR science?

Yeah, who knows. But many old theories are actually used today, even though they are partly erroneous. For instance classical mechanics are taught to much more people than the more correct quantum mechanics. Other theories, such as the epicycle theory in astronomy, are used to show us how predjudice (such as the notion that the Earth is the centre of the universe) might lead us wrong. I hope, and assume that this is how our science will be used, and looked upon in the future.

http://skepdic.com/crystalskull.html

Check out the entry for pareidolia in "The Skeptic's Dictionary" (http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html ) to learn more about why people see ghosts in a bunch of blurry pixels. You may also wish to visit my page, which deals specifically with such images on the Moon (http://wfmh.org.pl/~thorgal/Moon/). Enjoy.

-=-=-=-=-

...is mostly bunk

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

(Hopefully this isn't redundant..)

The "Packers" vs. "Mappers" distinction looks a lot like the Sensing vs. iNtuiting distiction in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and it's ilk.

See http://www.keirsey.com for an online MBTI clone, or http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html for a more skeptical look at MBTI.

There have been efforts like the "good software group", or Linux or BeOS's streamlined systems, or even GNU to an extent. I mean to be skeptical. What is "better"? Do we mean our smaller, more manageable systems which have less features and don't crash? I argue that anyone can make a small program which doesn't crash... it's adding features that mucks things up. Microsoft has always pushed the envelope for features, at the expense of backward compatability, robustness, and even good taste (remember the Word Paper clip?) But isn't that what their consumers wanted?

This is how they won. Now they are the biggest company in the world because everyone else just didn't get it... push the envelope on features and market those features . BeOS, Linux, and every other system has to play catch-up on the stupid features, now, if they want the Windows marketshare.

But better designed, streamlined, and fully functional unix stations seem better to us. That's because we aren't Microsoft customers, never really were, and never will be. We want something else, all we really wanted is the *choice* of which features we get. And the coolest new features, not the most. Does this mean Microsoft is wrong and we're right? In a way, no. They have more money. But we have our OS, now.

-Ben