In the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a respected publication of the American Psychological Association (APA), veteran psychologist and sometime psi researcher Daryl Bem has published an ambitious paper describing nine experiments which he claims demonstrate precognition, the ability to know the future – or perhaps, a phenomenon in which the future somehow appears to affect the present.

The paper has received a fair amount of attention in the short time since it has become public knowledge, and there is no shortage of discussion around the blogosphere and among other interested outlets, from Psychology Today to Wired magazine. Not the least of reasons why the paper is garnering such attention – the potential for shattering contemporary scientific knowledge notwithstanding – is the simple fact that a prestigious journal is publishing a paper about parapsychology at all, much less one in support of paranormal claims. Parapsychology hasn’t been in the news in any serious manner in quite a while – that is to say, outside of television screens and pop culture scenes, which both fuel and feed a gluttonous appetite for such fare, from dime-a-dozen talk-to-the-dead mediums to programs exploiting children by supposedly exploring their psychic abilities. (See: “Psychic Kids” on A&E for the most recent evidence that just when things seem to hit their lowest on the offensive and manipulative trash scale, someone finds a denominator a giant leap straight downward.)

[Read the full article ... ]

At Dragon*Con earlier this year, I took part in the “Raising Skeptical Geeks” panel, moderated by Desiree Schell (of the “Skeptically Speaking” podcast), and joined by Adam Savage, Laura Phillips, LaVerne Angela Knight-West, Daniel Loxton, and Barbara Drescher. [You can find the complete audio of the panel discussion HERE.]

One of the subjects we discussed was what to teach your children about fantasy figures like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. (Unfortunately, there were apparently some young children in the audience, on whose behalf a few parents subsequently expressed disappointment in the panel’s inadvertent “spoilers.” This was certainly unintentional and recently, when I attended a “Jill & Julia” show — my friends Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney — I made sure to find out in advance if there were any Santa spoilers, and this gave me the chance to walk my seven-year-old twin boys out for a bathroom trip at a critical juncture!)

On the panel I explained that while my partner, Kandace, and I (along with the boys’ birth father and stepmother) are all raising our children with the hopes that they will adopt the same atheist beliefs we all do, in our household we celebrate a secular Christmas that upholds the magic of Santa Claus. I grew up in a New York City reformed Jewish household (that typically experienced December days with both a Christmas tree and a lit Chanukah menorah), and today we continue a tradition from my own childhood.

[Read the full article ... ]

Whatever gets you through your life ,’salright, ‘salright.
Do it wrong or do it right, ‘salright, ‘salright
Don’t need a watch to waste your time, oh no, oh no.
— John Lennon

In “Hereafter,” Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial outing, three characters explore the impact of death — or near-death — on their lives. George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a construction worker who, thanks to a brain trauma suffered early in his life. possesses mediumistic abilities — or at least, believes he does. Marie LeLay (Cécile de France) is a French television journalist who, accidentally caught up in a tsunami tidal wave, suffers a near-death experience. And a London schoolboy, Jason, is killed in an accident, leaving his surviving twin brother Marcus (the boys are played interchangeably by both George and Frankie McLaren), to try to survive on his own.

[Read full article...]

HAPPY HALLOWE’EN, HARRY!

This Hallowe’en marks the 84th anniversary of the death of the legendary escape artist, Harry Houdini. While on a major North American tour, Houdini was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, after days of suffering high fevers and abdominal pain. Doctors removed his burst appendix, but knew that, his body already wracked with peritonitis, he was beyond saving. His wife, Bess, was told he would not live out the night; the all but indomitable Harry, an extraordinary physical specimen at age 52, somehow fought off the grim reaper for a week, finally telling his wife he could no longer keep up the fight, and succumbing on October 31st, 1926.

Eighty-four years later, Houdini remains the most famous magician of all time — albeit that many experts and enthusiasts in the world of magic resent this status, since Houdini achieved his greatest performing success as an escape artist, even though he loved magic. His final tour consists of a show in three parts — escapes, magic, and a lecture/demonstration segment exposing the methods of fraudulent séance mediums — in effect, neatly highlighting the three chief elements of Houdini’s extensive career as a live performer.

[more...]

He talks about his survey of the Ganzfeld Experiments of extra sensory perception, and the controversies that resulted. He explains why focusing on the flaws of parapsychology research is the wrong approach, because it shifts the burden of proof away from replicability. He responds to the camp in parapsychology that argues science should change its rules to make it easier to find evidence of psi. And he explains why he thinks skeptics are abnormal, or “mutants.”

Also, in this week’s installment of the Honest Liar, Jamy Ian Swiss remembers when he and Ray Hyman joined a channeler on the radio.

National Capital Area Skeptics:
http://www.ncas.org/2010/04/apr-24-ncas-philip-j-klass-award.html

Channeling:
http://www.skepdic.com/channeling.html

In this wide-ranging interview, Paul discusses the motivation of leading comedians, and whether or not they intend to impact society with their comedic art; comedians who preach ideology, and great comedic artists like Tim Minchin who advance a particular point of view in entertaining ways. Paul argues that the leading comedians in the United States are like the spiritual descendants of the revolutionary Founding Fathers. He considers Jay Leno’s nuanced reasons for why he avoids controversial social issues in his comedy; explores how aware the famous social critic comedians interviewed in his book, such as George Carlin and Craig Ferguson, are of their role in society; and addresses the impact of Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, and Penn Jillette on American public policy. . And he explains why leading comedians may be different from the common man, and how they embrace their differences, seeing the world in productive and unique ways.

Also, in this week’s Honest Liar commentary, Jamy is flattered to have received an invitation from Presidential Who’s Who.

Dear Spam Diary:

http://www.spamdiary.com/category/vanity-spam/

One of many links about poetry scams:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/poetry_scams.htm

In Defense of Baseball: Adam Gopnik Replies

One of the risks of blogging for the non-blogger – and for the veteran blogger too, I imagine – is that it freezes in place as set ideas and arguments feelings and intuitions that are, in their origin, much vaguer and more nebulous than that.   In that little “End of Baseball?” blog post I wrote,  and you responded to, I wasn’t trying to construct a Case Against Baseball. I was trying to do something much more modest but, maybe, more useful: I was taking note of something interior to me that I had never thought would happen.  I don’t follow baseball much, or even at all, anymore, and once I did so much.

Perhaps I should have emphasized more how much I was attached to the game and to all the interior rhythms that you describe so well: all the micro-dramatics of each inning and each pitch. I recall, in my remote youth, going out to Jarry Park and then Olympic Stadium in Montreal thirty or forty times a year – truly that many – and becoming lost in the tiny significant actions between actions, and the way that one lay on top of the next to create an intricate construction, like a Rube Goldberg mouse-trap, in which the action eventually  got caught, resolved.    In those days, as no one now recalls, the Expos had a track team leading off — Rodney Scott, Ron Leflore, Andre Dawson, Tim Raines  (who came a little later) – and it was a delight just to realize, once man was on base, how many options had been opened for the offense, and how many foreclosed for the pitcher, just by the presence of a single runner taking an audacious lead.    The very first piece I wrote for The New Yorker was about baseball and time, baseball and the slow accretion of meaning over time – the very thing you love and think that I’m neglecting. ( And I’d written it , originally, as a wedding present for a sister and brother-in-law who had shared many of those Montreal games.) And it wasn’t just the action – it was the lore, too, as much, if not more. You recall the piece in “ Paris To The Moon” where I told Luke, your future protégé to be, about an imaginary three-year-old fastball pitcher for the 1908 New York Giants nicknamed “The Rookie”?  Well, that really happened, night after night, for years: if I ever assembled all the Rookie stories in a single book – maybe I should – they’d be as long as the Iliad, which in certain ways they resembled.

So, whatever the source of my disenchantment is, it isn’t an indifference to all of that intricate intimacy that, again, you describe so well. And though I have other passions in sports – hockey is my Canadian leftover passion, and even football I’ll have to try and convert you to someday – baseball was first. And it was the one – not to be sentimental here, but there is a difference between sentiment, which rises from the heart,  and sentimentality , which is forced out by the will ,and this defines it as well as anything – that I shared utterly with my own father, who started taking me to ball games when I was five or six,”twi-night doubleheaders” at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia , which he still called Shibe Park, year after year.  He taught me to watch the pitcher, mark the catcher – and my grandfather, who came to “this country” at the age of twelve, was there too, and, like a million other immigrants, baseball was America to him. No, I get it – I really do, beginning to end.

So: the question I wanted to put was not why didn’t I get it, but why, getting it as much as I do, or did, why did I no longer care?   I don’t – we don’t, as people, as a rule – lose our passions as we age, whatever anyone may say. We may have less time for them – I’ll avoid the obvious one here – but we don’t lose them.  They temper, alter, mutate a little – but, really, not that much. Hockey, which has been as mismanaged as any sport can be, still sweeps me up in its elemental drama and turn-on-a-dime emotion (We’re losing…we’re tied! We’re winning!)  and I follow football closely enough, still.

One simple theory is that my team, the Expos, are gone…but I once rooted for the Phillies, I could find a new team. Another is that my son, your student, Luke Auden, isn’t turned on much by baseball, and, lacking that connection, my own interest fades.  Nothing wrong at all with the game, but just a missed link and a loss of love.

But if I ask – and here I think we come to the center of our quarrel – why Luke doesn’t care for the game as you do and I once did, we come to some real troubles, actual problems.   He can speak for himself, of course, but if I had to deduce, it’s because, first, it’s not a game he really plays much, except occasionally in its softball form…but then it’s not a game he really watches much, because it’s …slow. And though the slowness is, as you say, part of the glory, I do think, truly, that there’s a new slowness out there that’s real, problematic and hard to wish away.  There was a piece in the POST this morning about how long the Yankee-Red Sox games are going now – three shading into four hours each time – and though I know that cricket matches go on for days, there is a limit to how many times you want to see a pitcher approach the catcher, a batter call time out, one more pitching change get made.  These things, as Bill James has written – even Bill James! — are not part of the game, part of its changeless rhythm , but are instead intrusions on the game, part of the many attempts made over the years not to play the game, but to keep the other team from playing it by creating distractions. Changing pitchers four times an inning to get the platoon advantage is not the way baseball was ever meant to be played.  Nor was baseball meant to be played in frigid autumn evenings after midnight – and yet, since those are the hours in which Luke has seen the game played at its best – is it any surprise that he’s indifferent to the game in its cozy mid-season form?

And then the issue of changing affiliations…. Jerry Seinfeld has a funny thing about “rooting for laundry” – that since the players change allegiances every year or so, we can only be cheering for a uniform, not a player – rooting for laundry.  This is part of the condition of fandom, of course, and always has been, and as I think I said in that original piece, I accept that the old condition, where players were bound to teams not by any kind of actual “loyalty” but by brutally unfair contracts and conditions, was ridiculous.  But ….the constant churning of the talent, Matsui in, Matsui out – doesn’t it bug you more than the shrug you give it?  Doesn’t it make rooting for your beloved Yankees somehow abstract, unanchored in anything continuous and rewarding?  Doesn’t it ever take the edge off your passion? Maybe it doesn’t—maybe it shouldn’t – but it does mine.  And then while I entirely agree with you that the real villain in the steroids story is Selig – and isn’t it sickening that the villains in our national nightmares, in the banks or on the ball fields – get right off, with their millions, and no complaints? – still, there’s something about the inexpugnable presence of the steroid problem right there in the middle of the century’s record book that I don’t think can be wished away. My friend Ben McGrath points out that there are many ups and downs in the record books – sixties pitching is about as crazy and anomalous as nineties home run hitting – but the other anomalies come from odd and easily-altered conditions, not from clandestine and ugly cheating. The steroids scandal, as I say, is much more like the gambling scandals of the teens — only without a Landis coming in to clean it up.  It’s as though the Black Sox were mostly still playing, and people were arguing about the rights and wrongs of gambling, what cheating really means, whether it’s really fair to blame the players, etc.  (I’m surprised by my own vehemence here, since I don’t really blame the players for being driven to adjust their abilities unnaturally – if someone made a pill that would enable me to write for twice the hours, twice as well, would I really refuse it? If someone made a pill that would enable a card-man to work his hands twice as fast, would he refuse it? But the problem is that every other card-man would have to take the pill, too, and that would be wrong.)

So: as I said – and maybe I’m merely repeating myself here, but sometimes repetition is the path to truth – I don’t doubt the truth of every word you write about baseball’s inner beauty. I used to write ‘em, too. I don’t doubt for a moment that the alteration is interior, and my own. Yet there it is – and it isn’t entirely my own, either. A lot of people have written to me to offer their sad concord with my own feelings. It’s pretty rare for any emotion that washes over one of us not to wash over many: you decide to stop wearing a hat in 1960, and soon the world was hatless. I don’t think that a hatless – or, in this case, a capless – world is a better one. But it is the world I see right now.

What we really ought to do is … go to that Yankees game together.  Ever,

Adam G.

Also, in this week’s edition of the Honest Liar, we consider the similarities between a streetside scam artist and a billion dollar Ponzi schemer.

Ponzi scheme: http://www.skepdic.com/ponzi.html

There is a wealth (as it were) of material to be found concerning the Madoff case, however here are some of the sources cited in my commentary:

Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/business/14nocera.html?pagewanted=all

Madoff Victims: Get Over It
http://executivesuite.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/madoff-victims-get-over-it/

Ire at Madoff Swings Toward the Referee
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/business/04nocera.html

The Talented Mr. Madoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/business/25bernie.html?pagewanted=all

And here is my colleague Michael Shermer, who first drew a connection between Madoff and Monte:
http://skepticblog.org/2008/12/23/ponzi-dilemma/

In this weeks Honest Liar commentary, Jamy Ian Swiss revisits what happened in last week’s episode to victims of the ancient con of the Three Card Monte.

_________________________________________________________________

It’s true, so let’s admit it: It’s easy to fall away from baseball. It doesn’t really matter if the game is 2-1/2 or 3 or 3-1/2 hours – it’s a distinctly paced game that is nothing like basketball or hockey. (Although is there really any more speed or action in football?  Not so I can tell.)  And many aspects of what makes the game beautiful are actually due to that pace. The ever-changing battle between batter and pitcher, which alters with every pitch, which unfolds after every series of signs that ricochet around the diamond, in and out of dugouts, between coaches and players – none of that could happen if it wasn’t for that awful pacing.

I recently devoted one of my “Honest Liar” podcast commentaries about deception in baseball, and how all the subtleties of deception, which date back to the earliest days of the game – concealing signs, stealing signs, and so on – depend for their existence on the pace of the game. [My piece is typically the last five minutes of the podcast HERE.]

There have been scandals before and there will be scandals in the future. Steroids are terrible not so much because of players getting away with it, but because the owners – and Bud Selig – got away with it. But because baseball fans are by their nature fascinated by statistics and in love with history (and football game commentary always seems to me to be so dull and simple-minded by comparison to baseball commentary for the same reasons), steroids will become another subject on the endless list of fan fascinations. It’s something more to talk about in the stands. The reason we don’t have to put up asterisks – which is impossible for any number of reasons – but the ultimate reason is that 20 and 50 and 100 years from now, real fans will know where the asterisks are because of the statistics and history. When the wunderkind Ryan Howard flirted with breaking Roger Maris’s home- run record in 2006, the Maris family came out and said they would endorse it if he beat the record. The meaning was unmistakable: they don’t accept the Bonds, McGuire, and Sosa records, but they would accept this clean kid. And that is the way it will be.

That same history, continuity, and respect, has helped baseball survive all of its current ills, all of which have been experienced before, in slightly different garb, both figuratively and literally (i.e., in baggier uniforms).

True, free agency and the fluidity of team rosters is perhaps the most troubling of our contemporary complaints – and countless fans suffer them. But loyalty to a team has always been, first and last, a concept, an abstraction, a metaphor for loyalty. The current system tests our faith in that abstraction a bit more, and I admit that it tests mine too. But what is the alternative? Was it really better when baseball players (and actors) were indentured servants? I celebrate every dollar that baseball players receive, because it’s a dollar less for the owners. Nobody buys a ticket to see the owners.

So yes, for Yankee fans, this one included, it was sad to see Hideki Matsui go, and unarguably odd under the circumstances of his being World Series MVP. (Although I understand the logic – with aging players like Posada, the only way to rest them is to not have a full-time designated hitter.)

But … I went to the season home opener, on April 13^th, and watched as Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford handed out the 2009 World Series rings to the Yankees. As each player received his ring, and shook hands with Yogi, Whitey, and Joe Girardi, he would then take his place in a line-up between first and second base.

And after all the rings had been handed out to the Yankees, the announcer (Bob Sheppard has finally retired) said that there was one more ring to be handed out. And we all knew whose it was – Hideki Matsui, by marvelous coincidence of the schedule, was crouched in the visitors dugout, all dressed out in his red Angels gear – and he came out to receive his ring, along with a stupendous ovation from the crowd. He would get another ovation at his first at bat (as soon as it dwindled I shouted, “Now strike him out!”, and got a laugh from my section), and even another a day or so later when he hit a home run against the Yanks. Imagine that!

He came out and received his ring (actually a phony ring, a joke by Jeter that Matsui never noticed because of what happened next), and then began to walk across the diamond toward his former teammates. And an astonishing thing happened that I shall never forget.

The Yankees spontaneously broke ranks and mobbed him. Utterly mobbed him, embracing, hugging, surrounding him in the center of the diamond. It was completely spontaneous, deeply emotional, and it brought tears to my eyes. I’ve seen some memorable things at Yankee Stadium, I’ve shed some tears – never more than when we clinched in 2001, not long after 9/11, and no one would leave, no one would sit down, and the stadium stood and sang along with St. Francis of Hoboken the entirety of two complete renditions of “New York, New York.”

But I have to tell you, this moment was up there on the list of memories. And what it said to me was that there are differences between fans and players – as if we didn’t know that. I’ve watched Red Sox and Yankee players joke together on the bases, and that always reminds me of those differences. These guys are pros, and we’re the amateurs who pay their salaries, but there’s not much we have in common. And watching this outpouring of affection – and personal loyalty – made it clear to me that uniforms are for fans to be loyal to, but players have their own loyalties and relationships. There were three ex-Yankees on the Angels roster that day, including Bobby Abreu, a marvelous player, and I’m sure those ex-Yanks have plenty to talk about when they’re sitting in the dugout. Teams are abstractions. Fandom is an abstraction.

And so what?

The game has survived all of this because of its essential beauty and power and timelessness. Because of the ineffable magic of 90 feet. Because even though Bob Sheppard has retired, he lives on in a recording of his voice that continues to introduce Derek Jeter’s at-bats, which will be used until Jeter retires – how’s that for continuity?   Hell, my dad saw DiMaggio play on the same outfield grass I watched Bernie Williams play on – and it kills me that they’re tearing down those grounds. But the next generation won’t care about that, and yet they’ll still remember Bernie and Joe.

Perhaps, just perhaps, you’ve fallen away from the game for other reasons – and because of the games inherent pace, it’s easy to do that with baseball, isn’t it?  It’s hard to keep up with 162 three-hour games over six months when you’re raising kids and trying to make a living. Let me tell you – it’s even harder when the damn games start at 4:05 Pacific Time instead of 7:05 EST, smack in the midst of dinner prep and dinnertime. It’s easy to fall away.

But that’s not baseball’s fault, that’s just the fault of our lives, and the choices we make, and isn’t it a game for boys anyway, boys with more time on their hands, enough to memorize baseball cards? And it’s a shame if we forget, in the face of all those real demands, that baseball is important and beautiful and something worthy to find a little of our time for. Turn on the baseball news every night and there’s a good chance – an  excellent chance – you’ll see something that happened that day in a baseball game that has never happened before in the history of the world. The Yankees got a triple play early in the season, and lost the game anyway. That’s just one game, just one day. I once saw Roger Clemens set a personal record for giving up eight runs in the top of the second inning. Then the Yanks came up in the bottom and put on eight runs of their own. A 16-run inning, a record.

It can happen any day in baseball, and that’s part of its grandeur. And these complaints of yours, they’re pale and puny by comparison. It’s not really anyone else’s fault if you’ve let your passion and attention wane – it’s not the owners, the players, the salaries or the steroids. It’s not baseball’s fault. It’s just your choice. And I do understand and I’m genuinely sympathetic to the forces at work, and it makes me sad when a real fan such as yourself, who understands and has loved the game, drifts from this church – but I don’t like to see you blaming the game. And I do wish you’d reconsider. And if you do, the game will be here for you. As beautiful, and constant, as ever. And then when we head out to Yankee Stadium for a few hours in the sun, we’ll have time to argue about all your complaints, and bitch about what a jerk Bud Selig is, and whether Bonds belongs in the Hall, and if that last pitch really was a strike or not …