King Crank
Tags: Useless research. Yes, yes, clever of you to spot the irony. So what was I up to in the Archives of Useless Research, you ask? Here (below the fold) is the prospectus for a paper I’ll be...
View ArticleThe Earth is Flat
(Just testing this Performancing Bookmarklet Plugin Widget Thingamabob.) Sunday Times review of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, by Christine Garwood. Recent flat-earthism was revived by an...
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Dungeon Master Zero
Tags: Timothy Burke and I, Napoleonic miniatures on acid, the first Dungeon Master, God versus the Metric System, the Lost Tribe. Timothy Burke and I at the AHA in January:* Me: It seems like 2006 was...
View ArticleAgent Crank
Takes one to know one? Declassified CIA files (via Wired) on various “cranks, nuts, and screwballs.”
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Great Franklin's Ghost
I’ve been reading about Ben Franklin again—what else is new? But this time it’s actually related to a project, something I’m tinkering at with Bill Turkel and the clever, clever elves at the Center for...
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The Further Adventures of Ben Franklin's Ghost
The other day, I posted about Ben Franklin’s posthumous popularity as the go to ghost for American spiritualists. Probably Franklin’s most frequent and energetic earthly correspondent was an...
View ArticleStrange Love
P.D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, on mad scientists and the dream of the superweapon.
View ArticleSex Magic Rocket Science
A biography of Jack Parsons, occultist and rocketeer, in comic book form.
View ArticleThe Things, You Say
Blog promoting the book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. (Is it me or are subtitles getting longer?)
View ArticleDemon Haunted
Richard Lewontin, on his friend Carl Sagan and how to think about pseudoscience, from a 1997 review of Sagan’s Demon Haunted World: [Carl] Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience...
View ArticleWe Can Be Happy Underground
From the “Further Readings” section at the back of Paul Collin’s wonderful Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change The World: There is one very simple way to see what Beach’s...
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