Thank you one and all for your many suggestions for topics and for offering to contribute entries. I have collected them all and am now going through and organizing them. Those we will need I will be contacting you by e-mail shortly. If you do not hear from me then we either had that subject already covered or could not include it in this volume. I thank you again for your valuable input.

The Baloney Detector is now complete and will be going to the printer shortly and, thanks to your numerous and generous contributions, we will be mailing them out to the 12,000 professors. We also included the list of the recommended skeptical and scientific books you all provided, so for that I am also thankful to you.

Skeptic and e-Skeptic reader Max Davies (maxdavies@prodigy.net) sent me a great idea for gathering valuable information from this e-Skeptic list. Max writes:

Your list of Skeptic's favorite books prompts me to make a suggestion to you: why not also compile a list of Skeptic's favorite quotations? I'd like to present two favorites from among many:

"Whereof Nothing can be said Thereof say nothing" --Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Plurality should not be assumed without necessity." (otherwise known as "don't invent in order to explain".) --William of Occam

There are oceans of pithy, concise quotations that explain and support the Skeptic's position. You'd be doing our movement a service by gathering them together.

Agreed Max, and we shall do so.

PLEASE E-MAIL ME YOUR THREE FAVORITE SKEPTICAL OR SCIENTIFIC QUOTATIONS (THREE IS TOTALLY ARBITRARY--ONE IS FINE, AS IS SIX; BUT DON'T SEND ME A HUNDRED). PLEASE INCLUDE THE AUTHOR, DATE, AND SOURCE.

I shall gather them together and post them all to the e-Skeptic list, publish them in Skeptic, and post them at our web page at www.skeptic.com

I use a lot of such quotes as epigrams in my books, so to get the ball rolling, here's a couple of my favorites:

1. What I call Hume's Maxim (Hume himself calls it a maxim and puts his own words in quotes!) from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1758:

"The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.'"

2. What I call Darwin's Dictim (the dictim part is the final sentence) from a letter he wrote to a friend on September 18, 1861, reflecting on geological debates:

"About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!"