Slashdot Mirror

Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:

• Crossan, John Dominic (1991): The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. North Blackburn, CollinsDove.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1986): Pagans and Christians. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1991): The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Romer, John (1988): Testament: The Bible And History. London, Michael O'Mara.

I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic , particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.

Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.

Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!

References and Links please...

Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.

Some pages on the topic of Einstein's statements about god and religon:

http://condor.stcloudstate.edu/~lesikar/einstein/p ersonal.html
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einstei n.html
http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html
http://www.2think.org/einstein.shtml

Slashdot readers tend to work in scientific or technical fields, are well educated and well read, secular, and take an interest in social and economic matters. There are also a lot of people here with the hacker ethic: make just as much money as you need, and put the rest back into the pool. On all those counts, Bush has scored terribly, by politicising science screwing up the economy, and by blurring the line between church and state. This is a man who goes on instinct rather than reason, is devoid of intellectual curiousity, and fights for the interests of the rich and powerful. When told that someone wrote a book while attending Yale, he quipped "I read a book at Yale." His is the epitome of what Steve Allen called Dumbth.

And you're suprised that the majority of Slashdotters can't stand Bush? I'm amazed that anyone here would support him.

True. Rand's cult was a bit less bizarre.

Now Zapp, you may ask: "What has that to do with anything?"

If you really don't know what staunch dfenders of free speech the Scientolgy[tm] "Church" is you might find some interesting reading at this link.

If you want to dig deeper then Xenu can guide you.

"Johnny Carson, America's popular talk-show host, loved to affectionately mimic Carl - one of his favorite guests - by saying "billions and billions," until everyone associated it with Carl. Yet Carl never said that precise phrase in public until years later.

He grew quite tired of it. I remember a concert for Planetfest, a Planetary Society celebration of space exploration in 1981. He spoke about space exploration while accompanied by music conducted by John Williams, and inevitably had to use the word "billions." As soon as he did, tittering broke out in the audience. He glared at the offenders and continued."

Seriously, I would LOVE to use "Sagan" as a unit of counting "billions" or something.

Time to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

As long as you don't take it as gospel and turn into yet another hyper-libertarian free-market-worshipping Rand cultist. "Objectivists," AKA Randroids, are easy to spot with their propensity for congratulating themselves and condescending to others simultaneously. All hail the omnipotent Invisible Hand, which solves all problems!

I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, since randroids are overrepresented here, but there it is. I'll just take it.

Actually, I agree with many of Rand's ideas. Unfortunately, many people tend to take it a little too seriously..

There is no point at which you can say "okay, this is an ape, this is a human."

We did not descend from apes. Siminans and hominids are on different branches of the same tree.

Be that as it may. there had to be a point where the first hominid couldn't interbreed with the other creatures around it. And there had to be more than one of these hominids around; otherwise, there would be nothing else for that creature to breed with, and it would have died without passing on it's genes.

Evolution is a process, not a step.

Or not:
'paleontologists had long been mum about their "dirty little trade secret:" most species appear suddenly in the fossil record and show no appreciable change for millions of years until their extinction.'

The other magazines I subscribe to are:

The Diplomat (an Australian perspective on world affairs, but much more lightweight than the Economist)
History Today (British history magazine, which is what I'm studying. A bit too middle-brow though *sniff*)
Fortean Times (my favouritest mag ever, a monthly dose of high strangeness)
Skeptical Inquirer (a necessary counterbalance to Fortean Times)
The Skeptic (a necessary counterbalance to Skeptical Inquirer!)
Warship (an Australian naval history/news etc magazine, very much a small press sort of thing. Don't know if I'll keep it up, may look for something a bit more professional)

I probably don't need two skeptical mags. I do feel the lack of straight science in there; tried Scientific American for a while but it's a bit too detailed for me; New Scientist is more like it but as it's a weekly, between that and the Economist I'd never get to read any books! A compromise might be an astronomy (my first love) mag like Sky & Telescope, but then I'd like something with a bit more aerospace type stuff ... Oh well, I read too much anyway!

My old professor at Occidental College Michael Shermer started the great Skeptic magazine. They debunk crying Jesus statues, UFO pictures, that Jonathan guy that talks to dead people, etc. Check out this article on Creating your own UFO pictures.

My old professor at Occidental College Michael Shermer started the great Skeptic magazine. They debunk crying Jesus statues, UFO pictures, that Jonathan guy that talks to dead people, etc. Check out this article on Creating your own UFO pictures.

I am a science buff with a subscription to Nature, amongst other journals. I know many people (well, like four) who are intrigued by science due to popularizers such as Shermer and Sagan, but never take the next step and read the journals due to the subscription fees. Nature, being the premeire science journal, really needs to step up and do some popularizing now that Sagan is gone, and what better way than making the content free?

Your signature is a lie: Einstein was an atheist.

"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being."
--Einstein 1945

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
and thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
with windlasses and with assays of bias,
by indirections find directions out:
so by my former lecture and advice,
shall you my son.

You have me, have you not?

--Polonius, from Hamlet Act II Scene


Whenever I acquire the use of an attorney, doctor, or an accountant, I google their name first. I googled (searched outside of google as well) the names of my professors to determine their research interests and teaching style. I can understand this man's complaint. However, I believe his complaint is with the website owner (in this case the state of California).

Although this does bring up an interesting legal question. Does Google have the same responsibility that say the New York Times (haha, I know) of providing context for their reporting. Matt Drudge has demonstrated the power of the internet. Heck, I've recently run into two cases where people in our justice system have been disbarred|fired for misconduct based solely on their internet postings.
There is a deeper precedent here.

Imagine a future in which programmers are hired to place data to throw off intelligent agents parsing for good information. Do you have a bad credit history? You need to call a data munger. Did your business get a bad review in the local paper and it's now been preserved for all of history on the Wayback Machine and Google -- get a data munger. You see a data munger won't hide the information, but he will surround it with so much spamorific tripe as so to make it unparsable. The Orwellian future is now. Are you a struggling musician wishing to create some word of mouth for your band -- hire a data munger. Perhaps we should all jump on board the new field of data manipulation for profit.

A case study of the church of scientology newsgroup

I've created a simple business plan:
Step 1: Spam|Parse the internet at large
Step 2: (Blackmail|Obfuscate data for|plant news for) clients
Step 3: Profit

• James Randi Foundation - Randi is a stage magician who now spends his time in the debunking business. His weekly column sometimes degenerates into a rant (he's not known for his diplomacy), but overall it's an interesting read. He also offers a $1 million prize for reproducable paranormal phenomenon.
• CSICOP
• Skeptic Magazine

Other interesting sites are CSICOP and Skeptic Magazine.

Skeptic Magazine wrote a great article on Wolfram and his claims. After reading it, I got the impression Wolforam is a fraud, but the article didn't explicitly say that:

Skeptic Magazine Article Link

There is testimonial evidence that he is a psychic (people he has read will vouge for his accuracy)

and circumstantial evidence against (other people can do similar readings but either admit to it being a trick like cold reading or are caught doing sleight-of-hand. But just because others do this is not proof that JE is doing it).

I'm puzzled by people who consider it a foregone conclusion that he's a fake, without offering any evidence (other than showing that fake psychics exist). If you can show hard tangible evidence that JE (not others) is faking, I'll be sold. Catch him in the act, don't associate him with others.

Here is a much longer and more specific refutation of Duesberg's claims.

> And another thing, who on earth are the Objectivist Center and Reason Foundation??

Followers of Ayn Rand (affectionately known in some circles as "Randroids"). You gotta read Atlas Shrugged, or at least The Fountainhead to get into Rand's philosophy known as Objectivism, which is not without its merits, but is predicated on an interesting mixture of shoddy logic (it loves tautologies) and vitriol toward fictional strawmen constructions of opponents (anyone who doesn't believe in absolutely unregulated capitalism) that makes the Two Minute Hate look like a love-in. I'm not going to pan it completely, it's a decent branch of existentialism, but it's not well-known for being very self-critical or indeed taking criticism of any sort gracefully. More of a culture problem than a belief one.

Again, her distinctly populist philosophy is called Objectivism, and thus you get names like The Objectivist Center. TOC (nee IOS, or Institute for Objectivism Studies) is actually one of the more moderate groups, because Rand's "official" legacy is carried on by a pinhead by the name of Leonard Piekoff of the Ayn Rand Institute who, to put it charitably, is nuttier than a fucking crate of baklava. Strident and dogmatic doesn't begin to describe Piekoff... but those internal politics are another story.

Anyway, obLinks:

Ayn Rand Institute
The Objectivist Center

opposing viewpoints aren't terribly well-organized, but my favorite is a paper called The Unlikeliest Cult In History. I suggest reading it only after reading one of the books (I'm sure you can do a very uncapitalist thing and download a copy over p2p), since you won't really know where it's coming from otherwise.

Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine do a good job.

Unfortunately there are magazines based on pseudoscience that make it to the bookshelves; not only the crystal-waving, aura-reading kind, but even a few that seem on the surface to be legitimate scientific publications, until you see the bizarre anti-environmentalism or cold fusion stuff.

...skeptics will notice that, despite his flawless credentials, staggering intelligence, and depth of knowledge, Wolfram possesses many attributes of a pseudoscientist: (1) he makes grandiose claims, (2) works in isolation, (3) did not go through the normal peer-review process, (4) published his own book, (5) does not adequately acknowledge his predecessors, and (6) rejects a well-established theory of at least one famous scientist.

Actually, it wouldn't be Elvis collecting, it would be his wife Priscilla, and his Daughter, Lisa Marie. And since they're in the cult of $cientology, that means a good share of that money will end up in the cults pocket as well.

Which gets turned right around into paying lawyers to sue the internet out of existance.

Which is why I won't buy any Elvis stuff.

"If you buy Elvis... you support terrorists!" wait... no "If you buy Elvis... you support people who will call you 'Copyright Terrorist!'"

In more ways than one...

I think the list is for cases completed through the court system. If it wasn't, I'm sure we would have seen PanIP, and Scientology vs. Google, Internet Archive, and other assorted Scientology vs. The Internet threats.

The Church is desperate or paranoid. But they haven't sent me any spam. :-)

But sure, in the sense of trying to squelch criticism, same idea.

Come to think of it, the Church proper is another example of "Why didn't I think of this?" ;-)

I think that you'll find that there is very very little love lost for scientology (I refuse to capitalize it; churches and religions don't have "trade secrets", IMO) on Slashdot. The people involved with the running of the "church" of scientology have been heavy handed in the extreme when it comes to things near and dear to the Slashdot readership. It is a hot-button topic, to be sure. Your "church" is not seen in a very positive light by those that come here. One could therefore argue that, by extension, this means that a healthy percentage of the online "geek" community harbors negative feelings towards your "church". So it's likely that you might get a little heat if you bring up scientology on Slashdot.

The reason you might not be terribly welcome here in most people's minds is because, for good or ill, they cannot separate what your "church" does with what you say -- when you mention scientology. If you don't bother mentioning it, it's probable that nobody will like or dislike you anymore than they would any other person here. It's not a First Amendment issue so much as a "cultural" thing. I certainly wouldn't start yelling about my PETA membership at the annual Meat Packers Association convention meeting unless I wanted to start a shouting match. Perhaps you feel differently. I don't know. It's a free country.

Whatever my personal feelings are about scientology, I really don't care one way or the other about your religious beliefs (especially if they have no bearing on the conversation at hand). To each his own, I say; I certainly don't bother mentioning that I'm an agnostic Libertarian every time I post here. I'm just trying to give out a little friendly, free advice: you'd do well to not bring up your religion in this forum unless you're participating in a discussion about religion. Assuming you don't want your conversation degenerating into a flamefest, that is.

-B

The `standard' theory of evolution identifies natural selection as the primary mechanism for selective filtering of genes into successive generations. Other mechanisms are recognized; they are considered to be of lesser impact.

There is a large a body of evidence, however, indicating that other mechanisms might play a more prominent role than thought previously, if only under certain circumstances.

See this retrospective on one of the most visible debates about Darwinian gradualism (and puntucated equilibrium).

Curious that creationists and other pseudo-science-mongers jumped upon this 25 years ago--as some jumped on the article in question here--as a surrender by science of evolution to the `wisdom' of creation.

Of course, it's obvious to any real scientist--anyone who can read and think for that matter--that this is the essence of science: continual observation, debate and reassessment of data, hypotheses, and theories.

Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society (Skeptic.com) sent this essay to the email list he runs. ADIEU STEVE

By now almost everyone has heard about the death of Stephen Jay Gould. My phone has been ringing all day so tonight is the first moment I've had to sit and think about the meaning of Gould's life and death. I won't bother here with the basic details of his life, which can be found at www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/obituaries/21GOUL.html.

Instead I'll provide some general commentary along with a few excerpts from a forthcoming paper I have written analyzing Gould's work.

Steve told me about this latest bout with cancer back in March, and I was amazed at his stamina and strength when, after having brain surgery on Monday, May 1, I spoke with him at his home in Cambridge four days later. He had just finished giving a lecture at Harvard! This cancer was a totally different type than the one he had back in the early 1980s. He was symptom free and went in for a routine check-up in February when they discovered a couple of masses in his lungs. Further investigation revealed that he also had tumors in his brain, and "something going on with the liver," he said. As he characteristically told me back then, "we're still in the data-collection stage, no conclusions yet." Spoken like a true scientist.

Steve seemed hopeful the past couple of months, but I could hear in his mother's voice the past few weeks that the end was coming soon. We can only rejoice in the fact that he lived long enough to see his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published and widely reviewed. Still, his death was something of a shocker because I just spoke with his family on Saturday morning, and they were bringing him home that afternoon to spend the rest of his days there. I got the impression that there were weeks to go. As Gould himself might have said, life is so very fragile and contingent.

Gould was so famous that when asked to do something that he could not, he would send out the following form letter, which I myself received in 1988 before I knew him very well. (He later became a friend and huge supporter of Skeptic magazine, and he wrote a brilliant essay as a foreword for my book Why People Believe Weird Things.) The rejection note is written in vintage Gouldian style:

"I can only beg your indulgence and ask you to understand an asymmetry that operates cruelly (since it produces tension and incomprehension) but that leads to an ineluctable (however regrettable) result. The asymmetry: you want an hour or two, perhaps a day, of my time--not much compared to what you think I might provide (exaggerated, I suspect, but I won't struggle to disillusion you). From that point of view, I should comply--not to do so could only be callousness or unkindness on my part. But now try to understand my side of the asymmetry: I receive on average (I promise that I am not exaggerating) two invitations to travel and lecture per day, about 25 unsolicited manuscripts per month asking for comments, 20 or so requests for letters of recommendation per month, about 15 books with requests for jacket blurbs. I am one frail human being with heavy family responsibilities, in uncertain health and with a burning desire (never diminished) to write and research my own material. Thus, I simply cannot do what you ask. I can only beg your understanding and extend to you my sincere thanks for thinking of me."

I wrote a chapter on Punctuated Equilibrium ("The Paradox of the Paradigms") in The Borderlands of Science, and one on Gould's emphasis on contingency in evolution ("Glorious Contingency") in How We Believe. There is an interview with Gould in Skeptic, Vol. 4, #1. I thought I would share with you an excerpt from a paper I have written on Gould's work, soon to be published in Social Studies of Science, entitled "This View of Science: Stephen Jay Gould as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian." It is an attempt to tease out deeper meaning on Gould's work through a quantitative content analysis of his writings. The original material for this was compiled for the Festschrift we held for Gould at Caltech last year. This is the section on his 300 consecutive essay streak in Natural History magazine (figures not included). Enjoy.

And adieu Steve. We'll miss you.

Head over to the Skeptics Society's web page if you want to read a good debunking of John Edwards.

It can only serve to enlighten you as to the existence of another path

It can't serve to enlighten; it's a hodgepodge of unproven allegations and hokey theories.

Why do you find them disturbing? Have you ever heard that the AIDS is a 'hoax' before? You've obviously dismissed this as a possibility - why? Perhaps you'd like to take a look at http://www.aliveandwell.org [aliveandwell.org] - a site that tells one woman's story of surviving being diagnosed with 'HIV'. (without perscription drugs of any sort)

I'd suggest you read this for a well-researched article on the AIDS skeptic movement.

The only reason I responded to your original post was not to change your mind, but to let anyone else reading it to take your suggestions very cautiously.

It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.

If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.

It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.

If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.

It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.

If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.

It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.

If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.

SHAME on people for posting this kind of nonsense. Nostradamus has been discredited numerous times.

You need to read some books by James Randi, such as The Mask of Nostradamus.

Some other skeptic-related links:

http://www.randi.org/
http://www.csicop.org/
http://www.skeptic.com/

vymths.com typically has debunkings of numbers like this.

It's definitely recommended reading for any geek. The introductory section is here.

I don't buy these numbers. These exorbitant figures are created from generous estimates of downtime, repair costs, and so forth. In addition, they take into consideration elements only tangentially related; I think that anybody with their Michael Shermer hat on can tell that a more serious inquiry than this is required.

(But, then again, this would be good fodder for anti-Microsoft arguments. Now how ethically responsible would that be?)

Skeptic Magazine has a "Skeptic Jr." section this [quarter/month] devoted to Atlantis. It's targeted at younger kids, but it's still a good read.

The part I liked the most was the summary of the Internet's views on Atlantis... about the blue-blooded mermaids and so on.

1. Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz

2. Church of Scientology vs. the Net

3. Scientology Court Files

4. Scientology Cult Attacks XS4ALL

5. Scientology v. the Internet

(Found via Google and Yahoo!)

"So, can anyone explain to me why these things happened?"

Three of your four questions were answered in the link given in the article.

Another good source was Michael Shermer's "E-Skeptic" email for February 17, 2001. I won't copy and paste it in because I don't know if that's allowed; unfortunately I also can't find it online at the Skeptic magazine website. Oh well...

"The nasa guy on the show commonly said that their arguements did not make sense, but he never actually said why. He never gave any explanation for their arguements, just a general, that guys crazy."

As Skeptic's writeup commented,

"Unfortunately, this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space program could have handled."

This is a common trick used by sensationalistic crap TV. They have an "expert" who has not had time to think about debunking the specific issues, and then frame the presentation as if his failure to immediately respond means that all scientists everywhere are similarly dumbfounded. This is not science, it's National Enquirer type entertainment.

"1. The lack of any dust on the landing feet of the lunar lander. (It would seem to me a landing like that would kick up quite a bit of dust, some of which would setttle on the landing feet)."

The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.

First, the lunar dust is denser than what we think of as dust; it's apparently more like dense sand.

Second, your intuition about how much dust would be "kicked up" is based on your experience in an atmosphere. If you spread out dust and blow straight down into it, the pressure of your breath into the atmosphere will spread around the dust a lot more than your breath alone. You'll see dust curling up and around, and being pushed out, and drifting down slowly, due to the atmosphere.

With a rocket in a vacuum, only those dust particles directly pushed by the rocket exhaust move. An area directly underneath the rocket would be swept clean, but just a few feet away there may be no effect -- or there may be thicker dust because what was under the rocket had to go somewhere.

"2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon."

The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.

It's bleed-over. When the thin black lines appear in front of something light-colored, the exposed film appears to erase the thin black lines. You see this all the time, and it's something photographers have to be aware of.

Besides, what is the claim here? That NASA didn't actually use crosshair cameras in their $30 billion "simulated" moon landing? Is the theory that NASA instead went out of their way to meticulously paint black crosshairs on the background of the photo? Absurd.

"3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)"

The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.

See number 1 above. The crater was there, but more localized than your experience in an atmosphere would expect.

Also, the main point here is the rocket motor which the non-moonie suggests had "30,000 pounds" of thrust. Guess what? It had a throttle. Would the astronauts endanger their lives and mission by roaring down at the surface at maximum velocity so that they had to have the throttle wide-open to land? Of course not.

They did the 30,000-pound burns high above the surface, and by the time they were a few feet above the surface, it was operating at a fraction of its capacity.

"4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?"

I didn't see the show and I don't know what was said about this; this is the only point that isn't addressed at badastronomy.com or in the Skeptic writeup.

I guess the issue is that the LEM lander was doing rocket burns during descent and we should have heard the noise on the tape. I would point out, first, they were not doing continuous burns, I don't know what fraction of the descent time the rocket was actually on. Second, I do not believe the comm link was open the whole time. Third, I would not be at all surprised if the rocket motor caused more vibration than noise inside the LEM. Again, our experience in an atmosphere can be counter-intuitive, and rockets are constructed so that most of the energy, sound and otherwise, goes out the nozzle.

Fourth, given the deceitful way that these charlatans try to convince the gullible, I would not be at all surprised if they distorted the evidence regarding rocket noise.

Jamie McCarthy

Don't suppose you could provide a link to those studies, Bluedemon? Otherwise it's just your word against common sense.

There is an article in the current issue of Skeptic magazine that goes into the whole pyramid thing (it's available online, too).

While I agree, it won't happen. I used to think that if anyone were given the facts, clearly and simply, they'd 'get it'. I thought that these folks were just not too bright, or just hadn't spent any time thinking about what they actually do 'believe' or better yet what they know.

For a variety of reasons, I don't think that anymore.

The book that changed my mind was Why People Believe Weird Things By Michael Shermer. He talks about his early life as a not-so-skeptical person, and how that ties into some very whacked out points of view such as the anti-evolutionists. It's not a promising read on the likelyhood that these folks will all the sudden get a clue. It is a very good and entertaining read, though.

On that note, here's a good quote, I can't remember the source;

1. Don't expect to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themseves into.

Please just remember, that all material you send to them can and WILL be used against us - if possible! During the $cientology wars the $cn-lawyers have used many time for their benefit Usenet flame-messages with rather vulgar language which looked very bad in courtroom...
Scn court file archive
"$cn vs. Net"
How to support the fight
V, just my 2 euro-cents..
.signature not found