Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Ask for it under the counter in a plain brown wrapper


Eli has unearthed (and it was buried pretty deep in the stacks) the Journal of Scientific Exploration, an all arounders source for denialists and denial. As they themselves say (well they said it, but now have thought better of it, so down the memory hole -7/2010)

"While one organization may cover parapsychology, another consciousness, a third exotic energy sources, and a fourth UFO inquires, the SSE cover the gamut..." and more [a tip o the ear to Johan Mashey for digging that one out]
The bunny hereby opens the contest to find the strangest article published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. To do so, you need access, some of which is on line and some of which has been posted by the proud authors. At the end of his comment John Mashey inquired if Eli had a subscription [NO, NO, NO]. Being an academic Eli never subscribes to what he can read for free, but it does raise the question of where you can go to put your hot little paws on a copy so you can enter. For those out in the SF bay area there are some likely suspects such as
  • Stanford University which has it shelved in the Engineering Library under research not pathology.
  • UC Berkeley, and UC Davis but the rest of the UC system appears not to subscribe.
  • San Diego State has v 1 and 2, but no more and has put it into the compactor and the rest of the CalState system is too poor or too smart to subscribe
Does your library subscribe??

UPDATE: The JSE website has been redone. Some of the bunnies favorites

Unexplained Weight Gain Transients at the Moment of Death - In the Words of William the Sane, this guy weighed sheep while he was suffocating them with a plastic bag. He concluded...there's no way to tell what he concluded.

"Retrotransposons as Engines of Human Bodily Transformation" also was a favorite

Radiation Hormesis: Demonstrated, Deconstructed, Denied, Dismissed, and Some Implications for Public Policy - an entry by our old pal Joel Kauffman

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

Humm, just checked the local University library and they do not have the Journal of Scientific Exploration. On the other hand, we are proud subscribers of Energy and Environment!!!

Yelling in the Fog

Dano said...

Who can I pay to read this for me, so the black helos don't swoop down on my home? Do you think I could maybe read it from a wifi hot spot at a Starbucks in, say, Boulder?!? Man, this is gonna increase my tinfoil bill...

Best,

D

Anonymous said...

I'm in for this contest. What do I win?
Ok, my entry from the JSE is http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/pdf/17.3_kauffman.pdf

Anonymous said...

wildrat, part of your link got deleted at the line break (to avoid that problem, embed the link as I'm about to do), but was it perhaps this article? I must say it puts the pseudo into pseudoscience in a manner I hadn't quite imagined.

Anonymous said...

woodrat, that is. It's important to not mislabel our furry friends.

William The Sane said...

Oh, come on. It's impossible to pick a best paper from JSE. It has everything: resurrection, homeopathy, zero-point energy, William Tiller.

If I have to choose one, I pick this one . This guy weighed sheep while he was suffocating them with a plastic bag. He concluded...there's no way to tell what he concluded.

John Mashey said...

Awesome sheep experiment. I'm not sure what he concluded either, but I did find
(p.5):

"Donald Carpenter has also considered the weight function. He has suggested that the energy required for a ghost to function is limited to 60 joules based on anecdotal reports... quantized in units of 20 to 30 joules ..."

There are also discussions of weighing human mediums during levitation experiments, and with others during remote viewing experiments.

Mitchell said...

"Retrotransposons as Engines of Human Bodily Transformation" caught my jaded eye as something new. But it'll be hard to beat the sheep.

Anonymous said...

I yield to William, but only because I am unable to read the piece by Hollander, and so cannot properly judge if it is more strange than my entry.

I saw the phrase "wrapped in plastic" and then my browser got sick.

Anonymous said...

I think there is a big difference between journal of Scientific Exploration and E & E.

Namely, the former actually asks for goofy stuff (ie, stuff on the fringes of mainstream science) and makes no claim that this is not the case.

The latter, on the other hand prints goofy stuff with the pretense that it is actually mainstream science.

Anonymous said...

WILLIAM
regarding the transient weight gain of sheep at death.

isn't it obvious?

Everyone knows that sheep (like humans) have souls. After all, the nursery rhyme does say "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow" -- clearly a reference to the purity and godliness of sheep.

Therefore, when sheep die, the soul goes up (to Heaven, at the speed of light) and to conserve momentum, the sheep "recoils" -- pressing down the scale and momentarily increasing the weight reading.

Since the actual mass of the soul (essentially pure energy) is tiny, however, there is no lasting measurable loss in weight.

See. That's not so dumb after all.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, you and William should write this up and get it published. I'll chip in the thirty dollars.

The soul mass must be getting reflected by the layer of zero point energy building up around the planet during the current solar minima.

The it is either heating the planet directly (no tropospheric heating, and therefore troposphere is lagging)(I knew Spencer has it right)
or causing undersea volcanoes, which are forcing more water vapor into the atmosphere.

Anonymous said...

The one thing that still has me puzzled about the sheep experiment is the variable weight change at death for different sheep.

Perhaps it has something to do with the color of the fleece. Perhaps we should test a black sheep and see if it shows the same effect but of lesser magnitude -- or if perhaps it actually suffers a transient weight loss (indicating it's soul has gone in the other direction)

Which also brings up another important question: whether Dick Cheney will gain or lose weight when he passes (soul) away.

My money is on the latter: lose weight. (The Cheney Diet?)

Perhaps Eli would set up a pool -- a betting pool, that is. I'm not suggesting any water-boarding, of course. I want Cheney to die a natural death -- in prison at The Hague.

Anonymous said...

Sheep souls are pure energy? Now that's an answer to the world's energy woes if I ever see one... :-B

-- bi, International Journal of Inactivism

Anonymous said...

Ah, but as the world's slaveholders will attest to, "soul harnessing" is no easy task -- and that's even before the soul leaves the body.

On the other hand, maybe a parabolic mirror installed above the body (or below, for those souls headed downward) with a collector at the focal point would do the trick.

Perhaps one of those older satellite dishes like my neighbor still has in his back yard.

Which raises another important question. The varying weight gain by the different sheep would seem to imply a varying energy of the leaving souls, since the velocity for all would be the same velocity of light "c" (and also assuming the soul takes the same time to depart the body in all cases, of course). So, in order to maximize the energy collected, we would want to choose only those with either the whitest or blackest of hearts (figuratively speaking, of course. I'm not talking about heart disease or anything here).

And how would God react to all this? Presumably she would be none to pleased to be deprived of her own energy source. My guess is she'd probably zap the satellite dishes with bolts of lightning and that would be that.

Anonymous said...

Evidently a guy named Tom Chalko claims that there's a link between earthquakes and global warming. This claim sounds pretty far-fetched to me! Far-fetched or not, I'd like to hear what some of you think of this...

EliRabett said...

I could believe it when a huge glacier melts above, but there would have to be a lot of weight removed.

OTOH youse guys are fantastic:)

Anonymous said...

"NASA measurements from space confirm that Earth as a whole absorbs at least 0.85 Megawatt per square kilometer more energy from the Sun than it is able to radiate back to space. This 'thermal imbalance' means that heat generated in the planetary interior cannot escape and that the planetary interior must overheat. Increase in seismic, tectonic and volcanic activities is an unavoidable consequence of the observed thermal imbalance of the planet," said Dr Chalko.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25222766/

That just seems goofy to me -- maybe even more goofy than the sheep. At least we have a plausible mechanism for the sheep weight gain at death. :)

Anonymous said...

I think this might explain some things about the earthquake-global warming connection.

Calko also wrote a book called "The Freedom of Choice"

The Freedom of Choice addresses "the purpose of existence" - the most fundamental question, that intrigues humanity on Earth from time immemorial. Dr Chalko explains the purpose of human existence in the widest possible context – the Purpose of the entire Universe.

"Some people seem stuck so much, that they won’t change unless they are born again" – warns Dr Chalko.

I believe that may be enough said to put that theory to rest.

Now, back to more serious matters: dead sheep ...

Anonymous said...

wow!
this beats anything I saw in Journal of Scientific Exploration by a long shot!
This Chalko guy is really into some weird stuff
our Consciousness may be holographically encoded in the electro-photonic interference pattern of Light that surrounds every cell of our body. Recent discoveries in physics of consciousness seem to confirm this.
We think that our studies of the mechanism of color stimulation point to the direct interaction of the tuned color interference patterns with the information in our consciousness – information that seems encoded in the electromagnetic pattern of Light that surrounds us.
-- Tom Chalko. 2003

Anonymous said...

But I must admit that Chalko does have some excellent ideas about energy conservation that he has put into practice.

I especially like his solar mirror placed flat on his deck that reflects the sun into his house and also his chest fridge (horizontal refrigerator) that only consumes 0.1 kWh a day.

Marion Delgado said...

William if you think the sheep results were amazing, you should see the stuff we found out working with peo- ... oh wait, this is kinda hush-hush so we don't get any competition for our Nobels.

Forget I said anything.

TrueSceptic said...

Marion is clearly referring to the famous experiments first made just over 100 years ago, when mainstream science was shown to be closed-minded by proof of the existence of the human soul. Not only does it exist, but it has mass (see, it's Real Physics because I didn't say "weight"), and that mass is 21 grams.

Of course, this didn't stop in 1907...