Earthquake Predictions

The "Mozart Effect" (can listening to Mozart music increase intelligence?)

The Miami Circle (Archaeologist Bob Carr and Archeoastronomer Ed Krupp analyze the meaning of this recent archaeological discovery)

Ghosts and haunted houses (our skeptical correspondent Kari Coleman goes to the famous haunted hotel in San Diego, the Del Coronado, with real-life ghost busters to see if their high-tech equipment can detect the presence of ghosts and spirits).

Fake UFOs. Jr. Skeptic editors Devin Ziel, Shoshana Cohen, and Tyson Gilmore construct fake UFOs out of household items, glue them together, spray paint them silver, and dangle them from fishing line or toss them like frisbies, then we take the photos to a professional photography analysis lab in Santa Barbara for analysis--the results are startling! Our kids' fake UFOs pass muster equal to any so-called real UFO photos!!

Today's Los Angeles Times (front page, above the fold) features an article entitled "A Doom and Bust Cycle for Y2K suppliers" by Elizabeth Shogren (go to www.latimes.com) in which she demonstrates that the run on food supplies, wood burning stoves, storage units, water tanks, etc. from a year ago has gone bust. The bubble has burst. All these Y2K companies are now either out of business or barely hanging on as the anticipated mass hysteria has not and is not happening with only two months before the big day.

Also, in talking with J. Gordon Melton, a sociologist who specializes in fringe cults and alternative religions and sects, he tells me that he and his colleagues have been searching far and wide for the anticipated glut of doomsday fanatics and they can find almost none. This too appears to be a bust. Except for a handful already given the boot in Israel, it appears that, as in the year 1000, reports of the hysteria over the end of the world may be greatly exaggerated.

But, since we are not prophets, we should be at least mildly cautious and aware until the big day comes and goes.

If anyone out there in the So. Cal. area has yesterday's Los Angeles Times magazine (it comes with the Sunday paper), if you would be so kind as to send it to me I would be eternally grateful (or at least grateful for a long time). Patt Morrison did a nice story on myself, the magazine, and on skeptics in general, show how and why the scientific world view can be so liberating and fulfilling without a need to believe in a higher power. Because yesterday was our big lecture at Caltech I didn't have time to run around town and get additional copies to send to my publisher, parents, etc.