Wheat-dogg’s world
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Robert Lancaster is a California computer programmer, who like me, is fed up listening to so-called psychics trying to convince the public they actually have supernatural powers. His site, which is about six months old, scrutinizes the career of Sylvia Browne, who purports to be able to find missing persons.

Ms Browne’s track record is awful, yet she manages to bamboozle people into believing she is somehow gifted. A close look at her failures should convince anyone she is a fraud. Lancaster does a pretty good job of documenting her work. James “The Amazing” Randi also tracks Browne’s predictions and readings.

She is so bad that it is doubtful she will ever appear again on George Noory’s radio show, Coast to Coast AM. During a live broadcast in January 2006, while the nation anxiously awaited news of West Virginia miners trapped underground, Browne said she knew they were all alive.

As it turned out, all but one was dead, and that news came out while Browne was on the air. It was obvious she blew it, on a show with millions of worldwide listeners.

Why criticize Browne? She is a multi-millionaire who has made her fortune off the gullible and the desperate. (John Edward of TV fame is another example.) As Lancaster and Randi put it, if she’s a real psychic, she needs to put up or shut up.

The International Schools Review has issued a travel and work advisory for teachers intending to visit or work in Kuwait, after a middle school administrator reported a powerful parent was harassing her.

Katherine Phillips of the Al Bayan Bilingual School has been unable to leave the country after an angry, influential parent filed charges of “unlawful imprisonment” against her. Phillips had assigned three fifth graders to in-school suspension last year, after the three were caught fighting in school.

Saying that such harassment is not unusual for teachers in Kuwait, the ISR posted the travel/work advisory on its website, saying in part:

We encourage all teachers/administrators to contact their Kuwaiti Schools, calling for an immediate resolution of Katherine Phillips’ situation, one that will lift her travel ban and allow her to return home to her family.

We further encourage all teachers/administrators in Kuwaiti Schools to consider not returning to Kuwait or honoring their contracts in Kuwait until this situation has been resolved.

The advisory includes Phillips’ original email to ISR, a supporting letter from another teacher who has taught in Kuwait, and a message apparently from a Kuwaiti supporting the charges against Phillips.

ISR sent an email to its subscribers containing letters from Dr. Barbara Spilchuk, a teacher placement advisor at ISR, and from Phillip’s parents in Bahrain. It is reproduced here.

While her plight has not yet made the world mainstream media, both the print versions of the Arab Times and Kuwait Times have covered the story. Meanwhile bloggers like 2:48am, an expat living in Kuwait, are publicizing her situation. Commenters at 2:48am are conducting a lively debate about the issue.

Katherine Phillips, a US citizen in Kuwait, cannot leave the country and is in fear of her life, because her by-the-book punishment of three fifth graders pissed off the wrong kind of parent.In Kuwait, it seems, it is dangerous to make influential parents unhappy, particularly if you are a single female in a position of supposed authority. Phillips is apparently stranded in Kuwait, and US State Department officials seem unable or unwilling to assist her.

“I am in fear for my safety,” she wrote in an email sent today to Internationals School Review. “I do not feel safe. I am not safe.”

Phillips has been middle school vice-principal of the Al-Bayan Bilingual School for six years. In March 2006, she sent three boys to in-school suspension for fighting, a standard school procedure, according to her own account.

That afternoon, one of the boy’s fathers, Fawaz Khalid Al Marzouq, called Phillips and in the course of a very brief, angry conversation threatened to “destroy her.” He did nothing immediately.

In fact, things apparently settled down, after she and the parents met with other school officials. The angry father moved his son to a different school that June. Meanwhile, the education ministry advised the Al-Bayan Bilingual School that in-school suspensions were now forbidden.

Then in February this year, Phillips learned that a case had been filed against her with the local police department. The charge was “illegal detainment” of Al Marzouq’s misbehaving son. After interviews, the situation again seemed to be settled …

The folks at Answers in Genesis are crowing about the latest addition to the YabbaDabbaDo Museum staff, geologist Andrew Snelling, “one of the world’s most respected creation scientists (sic).”

Snelling, who holds a doctorate in geology science from the University of Sydney in Australia, used to work for Ken Ham, the AiG head, in the Land Down Under. Snelling has focused on disproving the commonly accepted idea among most geologists that the Earth’s crust has been formed and shaped over millions of years. Like most Young Earth Creationists, he contends that the earth is no older than 6,000 years, and that features like the Grand Canyon were formed by the Great Flood.

Snelling’s work rests on his theory that radioactive dating methods, by which geologists estimate the age of rock, are based on a false assumption: that the rate at which radioisotopes decay has been constant throughout history.

Modern science assumes that all radioisotopes of a certain type are created equal. That is, a sample of carbon-14 from the US is identical to one from Borneo, or a sample of uranium-238 from Earth is the same as one from the Moon. Their nuclear structures, and the laws of quantum mechanics, determine their decay rates and thus their half-lives.

Most geologists also assume that the elements today are identical to those in the past. That is, a sample of U-238 now should behave the same as one from deep inside the Earth (or anywhere else in the universe for that matter). This assumption (and it’s a pretty good one) enables geologists to “date” rocks and the sediments surrounding those rocks. Knowing the age of the sediments enables archaeologists to date fossils and human artifacts.

On Flickr, here. Really, why bother going now?

That’s 200K miles, for your metric types. The happy event occurred just before we pulled up to an Arby’s drive-up window yesterday.

I bought this little car just after we returned from South Africa, to replace our Dodge Neon. I needed a commuter car, and the Metro fit the bill nicely. It had about 42,000 miles on it, and was in pretty good condition.

In fact, the car was trouble-free until an incompetent mechanic replaced the timing belt, but failed the retension it. After a few more thousand miles, the belt started to jump off the cogs, fouling up the valve timing. In a very short time, I had several bent valves and a useless motor.

A competent mechanic installed a used engine, and that four-banger has popped along just fine for the last 60,000 miles.

It’s small, but at 35 mpg, I’m not complaining — much.

Before Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Beekman, there was Mr Wizard. During the dim days of black-and-white broadcast TV, Don Herbert portrayed a kindly, soft-spoken science pal to scores of youngsters appearing on his show, and thousands of kids watching at home on the TV. I turned on “Watch Mr. Wizard” whenever it was on, and mourned its loss when it was canceled in 1964.

Now I mourn the loss of the man himself. Herbert died yesterday at age 89 at his California home, after suffering for years with bone cancer.

Herbert’s show, by today’s glitzy, high-tech standards, was slow and dull. Most kids nowadays would probably not have the patience to watch it all the through. But in the 1950s and early ’60s, that’s what TV was like. The appeal of Herbert’s show was the gee-whiz effect he created, encouraging kids to use household materials to discover science.

(You can order Mr Wizard programs here.)

One Mr Wizard trick I still use is his method of removing tarnish from silver. Fill a disposable aluminum-foil pan with hot water (or place a sheet of Al foil in a glass baking dish) and dissolve a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of baking soda in the water. Place the silver article in the water and wait. Gradually the tarnish (silver oxide) will leave and be deposited on the aluminum. Why? Because aluminum is more reactive than silver; oxygen would rather form an oxide with Al than with Ag.

The folks at BluegrassRoots.com took a trip up I-75 to visit the Yabba-Dabba-Doo Museum in Petersburg. The more I see, the less I would want to shell out almost $20 to visit the place. I’ll just stay home and watch The 10 Commandments.

Newspaper editorials rarely give advice to competing newspapers, but the family-owned The New York Times today urged family-owned Dow Jones Inc. and The Wall Street Journal to rebuff media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s bids to buy the organization.

Speaking of Murdoch’s courting of the owners of Dow Jones, the Bancrofts, the Times editors wrote:

Mr. Murdoch has dangled a hefty $5 billion before the family that has controlled The Journal for more than 100 years. Frankly, we hope the Bancrofts will find a way to continue producing their fine newspaper, or, failing that, find a buyer who is a safer bet to protect the newspaper for its readers.

Murdoch lords over a global media empire that includes outlets as diverse as Fox News Network, MySpace and The Times of London. Murdoch wants his media outlets to make money, so many observers — including the NYT — fear he will emasculate the fiercely independent journalism of the WSJ. Despite earlier promises to stay out of the prestigious London Times‘ news operations, Murdoch has quashed some news stories that might impinge on his bottom line.

Family-owned media outfits are a dying breed. It’s a rule of thumb that family-run enterprises rarely survive the third generation. We know all about this in Louisville, when the Bingham family sold The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times to the Gannett Corp. in 1986, after controlling the C-J/T for almost 70 years.

My webhost’s server was hacked day before yesterday, so my site’s been down while they rebuilt the server. Their last good backup was from May 19 and mine from the 24th, so my posts since the 19th were lost.

Thank Google! I was able to recover all but one of the lost posts by copying and pasting Google’s cached pages. The missing one I recovered from my own computer. Then I changed the posting dates by editing the database.

Nice to be back in business!