A love that lasts 100 million years

Skeptics have a reputation for being a little hard around the edges, mainly because people confuse the word "skeptic" with "cynic".  

I am in love with the podcast from WYNC, "Radio Lab", which is brilliantly done by Jad Abulmrad and Robert Krulwich.  One of the short pieces they have used for two episodes is a short interview with Ann Druyan, a writer in her own right, political activist, and poet, but best known as the widow of Carl Sagan.  

I remember being deeply touched by the story of how Druyan and Carl Sagan had worked together for three years, on the Voyager Golden Record, and then later on the television series Cosmos, and finally fell in love.  As she told it, they had a conversation by phone where they agreed that they loved each other and should get married, and they hadn't even kissed yet.   

The Golden Record has compressed EEG data from Ann's brain, and she was thinking while they were recording her brain "I am in love... I am so in love!", and somewhere, at 35,000 miles per hour average, that recording is out in deep space.  

And will be for 100 million years (estimated).  Until, at some point, perhaps an alien society retrieves the spacecraft and decodes the messages.  Carl Sagan died in December, 1996, and who knows when, at some point in the hopefully far future Ann Druyan dies, but those brain waves, of a young woman in love, will be far out in space when all of us no longer are on the Earth.

I find that touching. 

Ted Serios and Thoughtography

Image by Jordan.A. via FlickrI first learned about Ted Serios in a Skeptic Magazine eskeptic mailing list article about him. His psychic photography method is called thoughtography.

As the "blur of the otherworldly" website says:

"Ted Serios

Ted Serios came to the world’s attention, briefly, upon the 1967 publication of The World of Ted Serios: Thoughtographic Studies of an Extraordinary Mind, by Jule Eisenbud. Eisenbud was a psychiatrist interested in the paranormal powers of the mind; Serios was an unemployed alcoholic bellhop from Chicago who could allegedly project images on unexposed film by staring into the lens of a camera with intense concentration. In “carefully controlled” experiments, while chugging quarts of Budweiser, the oftentimes shirtless Serios would work himself into a sort of ritualistic froth, snapping his fingers at the moment of telepathic impact and then falling back into his chair exhausted. The results were mixed, but he did sometimes inexplicably produce imagery of buildings, people walking down the street, Neanderthal families, and space ships. This seemingly random archive was guided by Eisenbud who placed “target pictures” in manila envelopes for Serios to access and re-imagine onto the instant film. The bubble of interest in Ted Serios was part of a larger cultural fascination with the paranormal that peaked in the late 1960s in the climate of alternative lifestyles that included meditation, new age religions, and “mind-expanding” drugs. Serios was not a participant in, but a subject of this cultural phenomenon. In a way Eisenbud viewed him as a kind of “urban primitive,” who still had access to ancient powers of the mind that modernity had banished as superstitious and uncivilized. Recently there has been some resurgent interest in Serios, not so much in terms of his telepathic powers but more in relation to a peripheral history of photography, a chronology of photographic image-making at the margins of the accepted canon."

Ted Serios, was a man, an alcoholic, a possible psychic, and a former Chicago bellhop who briefly came to prominence in the 1960s for his purported ability to psychically impress images onto Polaroid film. The article I read purported to suggest that no one had an explanation or was able to reproduce his methods for how he made images appear on polaroid film. However, at least one man is able to reproduce the results, and has a potential explanation:

http://www.niler.com/estitle.html

For the other side, a "pro-Serios" article:

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/08/lets_get_serios.html

Using Asparagus to Tell the Future

From the "Law and Magic" blog, I found the following hilarious entry:

"I was poking around, looking for an update on that storyabout the fellow who got Italian store clerks to turn over money to him by using hypnosis, and came across this story about Jemima Packington, who lives in Worcestershire, who throws asparagus on the floor (or, I suppose any flat surface would do--why not?) and who then uses the patterns the stalks make to tell fortunes. She calls herself an "asparamancer," a word that as far as I can tell she seems to have invented, along with her fortune telling technique. She made an appearance at the recent British Asparagus Festival to predict attendees' futures, so her asparagus future seems to be sprouting. She says foreign asparagus doesn't work as well as the homegrown kind for divination.

Now, according to Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, asparagus tied in a bundle can predict something. "Asparagus, gathered and tied up in bundles, is an omen of tears. If you see it growing in your dreams, it is a sign of good fortune."

I've heard of using tea leaves and coffee grounds (tasseography), but I've never heard of using this particular vegetable, although as I say, Charles MacKay mentions it, so it's got a history as a symbol of some kind of future meaning."

The Amazing Meeting (TAM)

The Amazing Meeting is coming up again in Las Vegas, the first one in June (previous TAMS were always in January). Due to financial issues, this will be the first one in five years that I probably won't attend, and that makes me sad. There's something about being with like minded people of a scientific bent, that is incredibly powerful, and makes you feel that you're not alone, which is great.

If anyone attends, please leave a comment. I'd love to know which speakers you found most interesting. If you get a chance to see Richard Wiseman, a TAM regular, speak anywhere, you should take that opportunity - he's a wonderful and entertaining speaker.