From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:17:45 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: What's New
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 4:49 PM
To: What's New
Subject: What's New
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 01 Nov 02 Washington, DC
1. IBM TIME BOMB: ADVERTISING GIMMICK OR QUARK-GLUON PLASMA CHIP?
Of course, I saw at once that the full-page ad for a time machine
in Tuesday's New York Times was a spoof. But I looked up at the
TV and there was Fritz Mondale, running for the US Senate from
Minnesota. Whoa! Is this possible? My only time machine is the
WN archives, so I typed in "teleportation" and was taken back to
1996. An ad in Scientific American said: "IBM scientists have
discovered a way to make an object disintegrate in one place and
reappear intact in another" (WN 26 Jan 96). So how are people
supposed to distinguish what is real and what is just advertising
hype? I looked for other big ads that are too preposterous to
believe. I came up with "Vitamin O" (WN 27 Nov 98), perpetual
motion (WN 5 Nov 99), and Yogic flying (WN 28 Sep 01). These are
at least as preposterous as time machines, but they weren't mere
gimmicks. They were intended to defraud a gullible public.
2. HERBAL HYPE: CBS NEWS DOES AN ACCURATE TAKE ON SUPPLEMENTS.
Sales of herbal medications have soared since passage of the 1994
Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act, which allows natural
supplements to be marketed without proof of safety, efficacy or
purity. The media, riding the wave of popularity of alternative
treatments, seemed to reinforce the supplement-lobby hype. But
since the NIH Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine
began rigorous testing of supplements, the media has discovered
what the responsible medical community has been saying all along:
this stuff is untested, impure and often harmful (WN 23 Aug 02}.
The shift was evident on Monday's CBS Evening News with Dan
Rather, which spent almost 4 minutes on the dangers of
supplements. That's a long time by network news standards.
3. SCUD DEFENSE: BUILD THEM NOW; MAYBE WE CAN TEST THEM LATER.
During the Gulf war, the military failed to destroy a single
mobile Scud missile. Concerns about the vulnerability of U.S.
troops to Iraqi Scud missiles in a new conflict led Congress to
approve funding for increased production of the advanced Patriot
missile, known as the PAC-3. Moreover, the Pentagon would like
to shift money from other missile programs to further accelerate
production. The only problem is that the PAC-3s don't seem to
work either, having fared badly in tests between February and May
(WN 17 May 02). There are proposed fixes, but they haven't been
tested at all. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld nonetheless is
leaning toward increasing PAC-3 production, in the hope that the
planned fixes will work if we ever get around to testing them.
If we don't get around to testing, what's the problem?
4. ELECTION PREDICTION: PHYSICS WILL HOLD ITS MARGIN IN CONGRESS.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY.
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or
the American Physical Society, but they should be.
--- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN. You are currently subscribed to whatsnew as: <ljk4@msn.com> To unsubscribe, send a blank e-mail to: <leave-whatsnew-33035Q@lists.apsmsgs.org> To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: <join-whatsnew@lists.apsmsgs.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:31:56 PST