From: Paula-Jo ([email protected])
Date: 3/19/2001
Subj: wrong dates

I am reading your article about the USS Constitution and the dates are wrong. the ship was launched in 1797. Is there a way I can view the original article? I am writing a program on this ship and her captains and want to get the information right. Many thanks

I’m sorry, the article is clearly a hoax (not only is the date wrong but the amounts of liquor consumed are beyond human capacity.) My understanding is that the article as cited for source was a real article; none-the-less it is a gag.

Richard Harter, [email protected]
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri
George Bush won because he ran against Al Gore;
if he had run unopposed he would have lost.

… continued on next rock …

Thanks Richard, sounds a little weird to me too, so many battles being fought during those times, no way they could have won so many with so much liquor. It’s in many places on the net. I have another question, what do you mean if George W. ran unopposed he would have lost? Is this a trick too?

It’s a bit of genial sarcasm. The implication is that Bush is worse than nobody and Gore was even worse. It’s an updating of a quip that Mort Sahl made about Reagan and Mondale.

From: “mary” ([email protected])
Date: 3/16/2001
Subj: whats your opinion of

yonger guys and older women??

I loved the bit about in praise of older women. I feel that seeing an older man and younger women is accepted now, but i wonder, say a 38 years old woman and a lets say, 21 year old guy, what do you think??? You two seem like down to earth people:)))

Hmm. When I was 26 I was engaged to a woman who was 38 although the whole thing fell through when she decided to go back to her Spanish lover. I knew a woman in her mid thirties who left her husband for a 19 year old man; that lasted until he went off to college.

Seemingly nature planned things for the older woman, younger man relationship. They say that a woman’s libido peaks in her thirties whereas a man’s peaks in his early twenties. Then, too, women tend to outlive men. If men married women a few years older there would be fewer widows living on past their husbands.

Still, it’s difficult. Dore Previn, the wife of Andre Previn who discarded her for Mia Farrow, had a breakdown after Andre Previn left her. As part of her recovery she wrote a number of songs which came out on records. (I don’t know if they are available in modern formats.) They were brilliant and bitter. One of the songs was called “Lemon Haired Ladies”. The voice of the song is an older woman with a much younger lover. She laments her need for the young man and fears that he will leave her for a young woman – one of those lemon haired ladies.

That’s one of the problems – those lemon haired ladies are always there. Another problem with 38/21 is that the person who is 21 is too young for the relationship; they haven’t fully established their adulthood yet. When I was 30 I was in a relationship with an 18 year old woman. I was desperately in love with her. She called it off and started a relationship with someone nearer her own age. It might have worked but it probably wouldn’t have; it would have been hard for us to be equals. When I was 40 I was in a relationship with a 28 year old woman. That worked very well.

A dozen years is not a large gap once both parties are established as adults. It can work either way; a good friend of mine has a permanent relationship with a man ten years younger than she is. Twenty years is more difficult; people are going through different stages in their lives.

And so on and so forth.

From: Sue Wood ([email protected])
Date: 3/12/2001
Subj: howd you know that?

i was wondering where you get your information for your page? all the stories seem true enough.

They come from a variety of sources. Many of them come from readers. Some come from sources such as News of the Weird. Some of them come from other “Darwin Award” sites. (Despite what various sites say, there is no such thing as an Official Darwin Award.) Where possible I check the stories out; most newspapers now have web pages. Some stories are urban legends; if I know they are I add a disclaimer. Most of them are true though; people do funny things.

You may be thinking of the Final Exam or the THEOLOGICAL ENGINEERING EXAM 1.

From: Jason Lewis ([email protected])
Date: 3/15/2001
Subj: hello

i am Jason Lewis i am from Ohio and i go to school at oak hills and my teacher told us to look up a term used for beating up your commanding officer if he was to harsh. Do u know what that term might be?? Wll if u do could u please write back as soon as possible

You might be thinking of fragging although that usually refers to officers that are killed in action by a wound in the back.

From: Anthony R. Lewis ([email protected])
Date: 3/13/2001
Subj: Divers thoughts

1. Wendell Ing was from Hawaii, not the Philippines. Are you confusing him with Tinoy Lichauco? Wendell claimed his mother was a rotten cook and he never had any decent Chinese food until he came to Boston.

You’re right; I did get them mixed up. Does anybody know where Wendell is these days and what he is doing?

“But so are her archrivals, people like Doug “Ice Man” Hoylman, a 57-year-old retired actuary from Chevy Chase, Md. He has won six times, which nobody else has. Mr. Hoylman gets his nickname because he is exceedingly quiet and very methodical. He’s the kind of solver who starts by filling in Number 1 Across, moves on to Number 2, and never pauses till he has completed the last down clue.”

Doug Hoylman has a frightening mind.

I never got into Babylon 5. It’s just as well; television reception here is limited. I get CBS, ABC, and PBS regularly and NBC part of the time. Fox rarely. Cable would be expensive to install because they would have to dig a new line. Getting a dish doesn’t seem worth it to me.

I should be there. I’ve got a membership and a hotel reservation. I look forward to seeing you and Suford.

From: Tobias Eriksson ([email protected])
Date: 3/9/2001
Subj: iam a mutant

iam a mutant help me!

Sadly, there is no help for you.

By the way, you might pay attention to whom you are sending email.

From: Mark A. O’Neil ([email protected])
Date: 3/5/2001
Subj: Your Arguments on Your Fossilization Page

Note: My site actually has two pages on fossilization,
The evidence for evolution by yours truly and
Fossilization by Chris Nedin.
It is unclear as to which page the gentleman is referring.

You have made a wonderful case against the Model of Evolution as being scientific fact. The mechanisms of Evolution if you examine them just starting from Darwin to the present day (not counting the previous historical attempts at Evolution such as Spontaneous Generation) have been in constant evolution itself. Scientific facts do not continue to evolve or change with time, but stand the test of time. Scientific facts have clear unambiguous mechanisms which are are testable in the present and reliably predict the future. Evolution has no clear mechanism, is not testable presently, and cannot be relied upon to predict an outcome in the future. Evolution is a failure as scientific fact, but is an excellent example of a constantly changing hypothesis. Since Evolution is a hypothesis or model it belongs in the realm of faith. All hypotheses result from a belief (faith) that the hypothesis is true, and the scientific method is used to demonstrate empirically that the hypothesis (faith) is justified. However, when a hypothesis cannot be directly testable, such as Evolution, then it is appropiate scientifically to model the hypothesis. Modelling makes it possible to make predicitons and more importantly to test those predictions which will either agree with the model or not. However a scientist must remember that a model will never become scientific fact because all the indirect supporting scientific evidence does not replace concrete, direct scientific testing. Therefore, in conclusion, Evolution is actuallly beyond the realm of the Scientific Method since it cannot be tested directly, and can only be tested as a model. Furthermore because Evolution can never be directly tested by the Scientific Method and can only be modelled, Evolution belongs in the realm of faith along with the model of Creation where it truly belongs.

However you might try to say that Evolution is directly testable by the Scientific Method because Natural Selection is an example of that Evolution is scientific, that is a logical fallacy. Natural Selection is a scientfic example that organisms with genetic information that is favorable disposed to certain environmental conditions will survive, reproduce and pass on their genetic information. Natural Selection has never been scientifically verified as a mechanism of Evolution. A scientific example of an mechanism for Evolution will demonstrate one genetic organism A becoming a totally different genetic organism B. Natural Selection demonstrates a mechanism by which genetic organism A becomes another variation of genetic organism A. Natural Selection is a weak example of Evolution. Natural Selection is a prime example of preservation of genetically healthy organisms and the loss of genetically unhealthy organisms, and to draw any further conclusion that Natural Selection produces genetically new organisms is erroneous. It is erroneous because Natural Selection has never been Scientifically demonstrated to produce such a different genetic organism B. Therefore, what mechanism is there that actually scientifically demonstrates Evolution? There is no such know mechanism. Furthermore Natural Selection occurs on preexisting organisms and does not apply when there are no organism present to begin with.

This leads us to the other only known mechanism for Evolution and that is random chance. This is better known as Spontaneous Generation. Where matter by randomn chance stumbles accidentally upon the magic mathematical combination of matter that produces life! However, this mechanism too has never been scientifically demonstrated. The magically combination of matter that forms life by randomn chance is apparently eludes our intelligent efforts to discover. The true skeptic wouldn’t believe in Evolution because there is no evidence for it. However a gambler would place a bet upon it.

The fact is that the beginning of life can never be repeated because it is beyond man’s ability to repeat empirically. Therefore the beginning is a matter of faith. Faith in randomn chance or faith in intelligent design. The third possible faith is that everything has exist as it is and will continue to do so. Take your pick, but do not try push your faith upon me as the only true and logical choice. I will decide for myself which faith I will hold and you can have yours, but don’t fool yourself that what you believe is reality until you can Scientifically demonstrate it to me in the present and can predict the future effect for me.

truly and sincerely,

Thank you for writing. As a general rule I don’t conduct email debates about evolution – there are public venues for that. I will make a few brief comments though. First of all the fossilization page is by Chris Nedin and not by myself. Why you should think that it argues against evolution is quite obscure.

There is some confusion in your account between models, facts, and theories; it take more effort than I wish to undertake to straighten it all out. Just as a comment scientific theories aren’t uniformly fixed and unchanging. Thus Newton’s theory of gravitation was superceded by Einstein’s theory of general relativity which in turn is expected to be superceded by a unified theory which combines relativity and quantum mechanics.

What you mean by the Model of Evolution is quite unclear. There are the historical facts of the history of life on Earth. There is exceedingly strong evidence that the species of life extant today are the descendents of ancestral species that evolved into the current species and this process continued over most of the history of life. How life got started is open to question. Likewise whether all life is descended from a single common ancestor is also open to question.

Evolution in that sense is well established. Theories about the nature of the process (commonly grouped under the rubric, The Theory of Evolution) have been the subject of active investigation for the past 200 years. This should not be surprising; there are tens of millions of species currently extant and quadrillions of individual organisms, each of which lives in a complex network of other organisms.

I will note without enumerating them that you have made a number of statements which are seriously erroneous. May I suggest that you read some basic texts on evolutionary theory. (Futuyma’s text would be a good start.)

From: Dr. Esmail Nooriala ([email protected])
Date: 3/8/2001
Subj: Great site

This is a great site. Thanks for sharing your world with us. I think what is missing is a search engine so that readers can easily go to wherever they want.

I will remain an enthusiastic reader,

Thanks for the kind words. A search engine is definitely needed. I lament its lack myself. It is one of the projects in the queue. lamentably, the queue is long.

The liberals give good whine? I suppose the conservatives give good tantrums and riots? (Or lies — note in particular the claim that Nixon conceded gracefully in 1960 instead of exploring options.)

The conservatives, like the liberals, argue for partisan advantage under the mask of principle. The recent election may be best understood in terms of a playground game in which the republicans had the ball and the democrats were trying to take it away. Republican rhetoric, with the rubbish removed, amounted to “finders, keepers”. Democratic rhetoric in turn is reducible to “not fair”.

The fundamental difficulty is that the election was fucked. There was no legitimate winner. The inevitable results were (a) of necessity the election necessarily had to be decided by maneuvers of dubious legitimacy and (b) the partisans of the loser quite reasonably would feel that they had been had.

Interestingly enough (or perhaps not) it appears that the Gore camp screwed the pooch even more than I had thought. If the news accounts of the ballot examinations are to be trusted (something akin to akin to trusting Sgt. Bilko) they should have hunted for votes in the republican counties.

Indeed. This election wasn’t as close as the Tilden-Hayes election. Bush won his election 5-4 whereas Hayes won his 8-7.

As an oddity there have been some strange political ads in SD of late. The republicans have been running ads suggesting to SD folks that they write to Daschle & Johnson (Dem senators from SD – for some reason SD, a highly republican state, regularly elects democratic senators) to tell them that us SD folks just love the Bush tax cut. In turn Daschle has been running ads saying how he’s so glad that Bush agrees with him that a tax cut would be a good idea and that he hopes that they can work together to get one that will be responsible and fair. I don’t know what this is about but I speculate that it has to do with Daschle being a potential presidential candidate. If the democrats are smart they won’t nominate him. If Ohio and Virginia are the homes of presidents, SD is the home of failed democratic candidates. The democrats are odds on favorites to win in 2004 and they don’t need a jinx.

PS: George W. Bush is promising to be our greatest president since Hoover.

… continued on next rock ..

Short-term, your speculation is not probable; the GLOBE recently reported that the Republicans were deliberately running such ads wherever they thought somebody could be pushed — Maine, with two ]liberal[ Republican senators, is another site of such ads. Cheney and the other stringpullers apparently feel they’re playing Diplomacy, where causing another party to attack your attacker takes the pressure off you.

Apparently Bush is fishing for support for his tax plan in the senate. The Dakotas are being graced by visits from our glorious leader. The Dakotas may be inconsequential in the electoral college and the house of representatives but they are as large as California and New York in the senate. CNN news had an article on the trip. http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/03/08/bush.reut/index.html

I take it you also subscribe to the idea that the 2000 winner doesn’t matter (except as an opposite) because the economy will go far enough south to bring in the other party in 2004?

Pretty much. It doesn’t have to go far south to do that. Bush has gotten a break in that the economy is going south now. If it comes back reasonably quickly he will get credit and may squeak by in 2004. Probably not, though. The demographics are against him. He has four years to convince the blacks and latinos that he is a good guy. I don’t quite see how he can do that and be a republican.

Otoh the democrats seem to be taking over the mantle of scorched earth politics. The republicans squandered their advantages by bitterly attacking Clinton; the democrats appear to want to do the same thing by rehearsing their grievances over the election. The diehard partisans never learn.

(*) an all-meat dish featuring parts of the digestive system of an unweaned calf — did this ever make it as far north as you? The only explanation Tolbert gives for the name is “I’ll be an SOB if I know what goes in it.”

I don’t know how much the stock market can be blamed for the great depression although Galbraith put his finger directly upon it in “The Great Crash”. It wasn’t just the US stock market – the structure of the entire international system was unstable and bizarre. The great depression was not just a US phenomenon.

Keynes showed that the capitalist market system (sans government intervention) was stable either in a state of full capacity or in a state of high unemployment. Economists are good at confirming the theoretical basis of events after the fact. I don’t recall that he established that it could be metastable, making catastrophic transitions from one state or another.

Be that as it may, Hoover failed, not because he caused the depression (he didn’t) or because he didn’t cure it (Roosevelt didn’t either), but because he didn’t do anything effective in response to it. The cure required government spending on a much larger scale than was conceivable at the time.

SF scenario: Hitler dies in the 20’s; there is no WW II; and the world depression continues for another two decades. What happens?

… continued on next rock ..

[Re Bush needing to convince blacks and latinos]

Convincing Latinos is easy; he speaks Spanish better than most politicians, and even the ones who break out of their own ]cultures[ to come here tend to be conservative in several ways — worst case, he can actually play “hard-working latinos” vs “lazy blacks”, which can’t cost him as much as 1 percentage point based on the black vote this time.

Speaking Spanish didn’t gain him many points this time around. I opine he has to deliver something beyond symbolic gestures to get much more. It’s odd in a way. He’s forced the republicans to do some very unrepublican things but nobody believes that he means it.

The question is whether it’s better to go along and thus be seen as not offering alternatives (or worse, play softball when your opponents are still playing hardball).

That’s not the question – of course you work for what you believe in. The question is: Are you (the generic you) working for your principles or are you fighting demons?

Well, you could always come to Boskone and throw that out at the alternate-history jam. But you’ll get arguments that Keynes was missing the shape of the transition; certainly WW II helped end the depression, but there was a transition in process, such that where it would have gone is a theological argument. (ELLEANDER MORNING jumps between the first 2 decades and the 80’s without saying what happened in between, although it does take the interesting slant that there wouldn’t be airline travel without WW II to stimulate the aircraft industry.) cf Houseman, who in RUNTHROUGH (first volume of autobio — like Asimov, much more readable than the and-then-I-did of the other two) says PANIC (MacLeish) was a hard sell because people felt they were putting the Depression behind them.

It seems reasonable that there would eventually have been a real recovery. However it hadn’t happened by WW II – there were partial recoveries that collapsed. The worst of the effects of the depression were ameliorated.

What is ominous is that the totalitarian experiments “worked” in that strong governments could put people back to work by fiat. Perhaps the democracies would have fallen one by one. Anyone for President Huey Long?

I haven’t seen it. My TV and movie viewing is quite restricted out here in the wilds. I made a run to civilization to take in movies – Hannibal, Chocolat, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The latter two, btw, are well worth seeing.

… continued on next rock ..

It’s all very well to be even-handed, but the election was clearly not just lost (the butterfly-ballot screwup) but stolen: the lack of verification laptops in poorer/darker areas, the bogus purge of “felons” (in direct contradiction of state law) and so on.

Well there you are. To say that the Democrats got screwed in the election is fair enough; they came out on the short end of the screw ups that are endemic in the election machinery. There are many such screw ups; they are not specific to Florida. Registration fraud is common in many states. The process is error prone in many places. Moreover it is true enough that these deficiencies are more common in the poorer precincts, both because of local funding and because of the volunteer system.

That’s one thing. The rational thing to do – if you are a partisan of the democrats – and the fair thing to do – if you are a partisan of the republicans – is to fix the system. To say, however, that the election was stolen, at least at the level you refer to, is both inaccurate and unwholesome.

Er, yes, I think we can agree it’s a simplification. The Clintons got good ratings because they were charming, personable, intelligent, and presided over the longest economic boom in history. I dislike them because they are, the both of them, corrupt, self-serving, vicious hypocrites. Oddly enough I dislike a great many of our noble elected leaders for being the same thing.

The republicans manage to make themselves look mean; they’re very good at it. I dunno as Reagan was slick. Clinton was slick; Reagan was something beyond slick. I was repelled and appalled by him and yet there he was – enormously popular. I suspect that the difference between the two is that Reagan was adept at manipulating the affections of the public whereas Clinton was adept at manipulating the affections of his partisans. Reagan was able to command handsome majorities; Clinton was not.

It’s not a key to winning; it’s a key to holding the core constituencies. It’s a treacherous tactic – partisanship tends to sound shrill and turn the independent middle off. I opine that the democrats have the advantage – they have demographics and the economy working for them.

I am perplexed by Bush. He clearly is not the dolt that the late night show comedians make him out to be (the democrats will err mightily if they operate on the assumption that he is stupid). He appears to mean what he says which is an unnerving thing in a politician at best. He is like Reagan in that I can’t stand to listen to the man. He personally is comfortable with blacks, latinos, and women in a way that his party isn’t. This doesn’t seem to matter – at the moment; said groups in the public don’t seem to be comfortable with him. This isn’t really a party thing or an issues thing; it turns on public personality perceptions. I expect that, like his father, Dubya will be a one term president. I am prepared to be surprised.

Of course, from my perspective, both parties are radically wrong. The future is fast coming upon us and we, the human race, shall be royally fucked with the devil to pay and no pitch hot.

No argument here.

From: “Henry Veilleux” ([email protected])
Date: 3/5/2001
Subj: Mountain Oysters

I saw a reference to Wendell Ing in the Mountain Oysters recipe. Could this be the same Mr. Ing that I met at the university? The musician’s musican.

I don’t think that it is the same Wendell Ing. My Wendell Ing was a member of the New England Science Fiction Association and was, if I recall correctly, from the Philipines.

From: “Michael Goldman” ([email protected])
Date: 3/8/2001
Subj: The Piltdown Man skull

Where is the Piltdown Man skull now ?

Still in the British museum under lock and key.

From: Naomi ([email protected])
Date: 2/25/2001
Subj: Shakespaw

hi.
do you have any idea who wrote Shakespaw’s “Hamlet’s Cat”? It’s all over, yet we can’t figure out who started it. thanks.
Naomi

I’m sorry but I don’t have any information as to the source. I will post the question in my correspondence column. Maybe one of my readers will know..

From: sandra sotello ([email protected])
Date: 2/28/2001
Subj: Exotic bird

I have a exotic parrot, that has a runny nose.
should i worry. what should i do

I’m sorry but I really don’t know much about the diseases of parrots. May I suggest that you talk to your local veterinarian?

From: Gladys Pineda ([email protected])
Date: 2/28/2001
Subj: About your page

I visited your page but I couldn’t find something about the baby Taung found in Africa en 1926 Do you have some information? Thank you!

You might check these pages

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/rdart.html
(On the specimen page scroll down to Taung)

There are further links to be found upon the way.

From: Tydebilu ([email protected])
Date: 3/1/2001
Subj: Evolution picture

Hey, do you have a photo of human evolution in witch at the end is the “computer gamer” ??????????????

If yes pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease send it to me. It’s so cool. please once again i need that photo.

No sooner said than done.