Swami Paramhansa Yogananda's great wish was to establish world brotherhood colonies, communities devoted to plain living and high thinking, where people could practice Dharma away from the negative atmosphere of the modern world, while still being a part of it. These colonies embodied the ideal preached by Jesus of being in the world but not of it. They also embody Sri Aurobindo's* ideal of Integral Yoga, combining the best advances made east and west.
Yogananda's disciple, Swami Kriyananda, helped to set up eight of these colonies (several in USA, Asisi, Italy, and Pune, India). I looked into the economic model practised by the Ananda villages, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. They are not some hippie, take handouts from the government, socialist orders. Everyone in Ananda is responsible for their own income and they have to pay for their own housing. If anywhere is a good example of responsible living, it seems to be the Ananda villages.
Here is a wonderful video on the history of Yogananda in America, his disciple Kriyananda, and the Ananda villages. Run time 23 minutes.
*Aurobindo also set up an intentional community, Auroville, in Pondicherry in India, which was then governed by the French because, as a political dissident, Aurobindo was a criminal in British India.\
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Hamosque
You all know about the hamosque that the terrorists want to build at Ground Zero. Here are two videos on the topic, first with Pat Condell (the man said to be beyond the help of both Rogaine and Viagra), the second by someone calling himself Acts17Apologetics. Basically, they both say that whenever Muslims conquer a place they destroy the main symbol of that culture and replace it with a giant mosque. The same thing is going on in America (and was stopped in Britain).
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Egypt : A Call for Restraint
Egyptians have no history of self governance. They have lived under absolutist rulers for 5,000 years. Any government that is created in the heat of the moment will either be one ruled by a tyrant or will soon fall to tyranny. We must let cooler heads prevail, end the protests, and begin the long process of negotiations in which a realistic solution can be reached. This can best be done by letting Mubarak serve out his term.
Run time 13 minutes
Run time 13 minutes
Friday, February 4, 2011
Obama Is Not To Blame For Everything (Neither Is Bush)
Radio personality Mark Simone's stupid political commentary is not more important than what the President has to say. Him blaming Obama for everything is no different than the news people on the left blaming Bush for everything. They are both completely wrong and their behaviour is completely uncalled for. You can hate the man, but you must respect the office of President of the United States.
Today, Sean Hanity was out and Mark Simone guest hosted his show. Some time into the show the President gave a press conference and Simone made rude comments during the whole thing, insulted the President's intelligence, and said he mispronounced a word when he did not.
Today, Sean Hanity was out and Mark Simone guest hosted his show. Some time into the show the President gave a press conference and Simone made rude comments during the whole thing, insulted the President's intelligence, and said he mispronounced a word when he did not.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Forbidden Geller 3
Reader Steve (now practically a contributor) has contacted me with more information regarding Geller, Byrd, and nitinol, that all too mysterious substance that has dominated the one and only controversey ever to hit The Urban Mystic (if I recall correctly). I personally have no stake in the issue, though continue on with the subject because talking about Egypt will make you, my valued couple of readers, want to slit your wrists and write graffiti on the nearest public building with your own blood yelling at the government to just waste the Muslim Brotherhood already to keep their pernicious evil from consuming the world as you slowly bleed out, fully aware that Mubarak is a monster and yet he is still better than the alternative.
Steve interviewed Eldon Byrd in 2001. He presented it to me to help provide context to the debate.
In the interview, Byrd picks apart many aspects of Gardner's article. According to Byrd, the wires given to Geller were marked with a razor and the ends were cut in such a way as to identify them later. These unique markings were later confirmed, meaning Geller did not substitute the wires for any he had prepared earlier to use in some form of trickery. Of course, Gardner does speculate that the hotel room Byrd was staying at was broken into by one of Geller's associates, the pieces of wire removed, taken back to where Geller was staying, manipulated so that they would produce the characteristic kink, and returned to Byrd's hotel room and the evidence of the break in covered up all with no one noticing. If you're willing to accept that whole shopping list of an explanation of trickery then Geller is a fraud. If you perfer the simpler explanation that Geller deformed the unique wire without prior handling it, in the presence of Byrd, then, well, he still might be a fraud but the possibility of the effect being genuine is now an open possibility. If Randall and Davis' experiment with a young boy who produced the same effect as Geller is evidence of anything then the more likely explanation seems to be that Geller, at least in Byrd's test with nitinol, is not cheating and genuinely produced a nonphysical deformity in the metal wire.
According to Byrd, Frederick Wang at the Naval Surface Weapons lab did try to remove the kink from the Gellerized wire, and that when Gardner interviewed him he caught Wang off guard. Thus, when Gardner said Wang didn't remember trying to un-Gellerize the wire, it was not because he did not try to un-Gellerize the wire but because he genuinely forgot, as all humans do from time to time. If Byrd is to be believed (and I believe him a whole lot more than I believe Gardner, who not only likes to trick his readers with the old bait-and-switch tactic mentioned in the previous post, but also thinks Randi is a credible source of information), then the un-Gellerizing did take place and was not a fabrication.
Now, I'm biased. I am biased against Martin Gardner because he likes to trick his readers, because he cites Randi as a credible source, and because he is a debunker and debunking goes against everything science stands for. I am inclined to believe that Byrd is telling the truth. Could he have been tricked? Yes. Is it likely that he was tricked? I would have to say no. Unless Geller tricked him on multiple occasions, and with the same or similar tricks, and the young boy R&D tested tricked them under much better conditions than the Byrd/Geller tests and without ever having met Geller to learn how his trick was performed, then trickery seems unlikely. Trickery is possible, in the same sense that whenever you hear someone's voice on a radio that the voice is really produced by a ventriloquist nearby and not coming from the radio, but trickery is far from the most likely possibility, regardless of what debunkers like Gardner (and Couttie for that matter) want to believe.
I'm not going to say the issue is settled, but the circumstantial evidence does seem to be pointing strongly in one direction.
Update: After looking through all the posts here at The Urban Mystic, I have concluded that, as of today, 15 posts have been on Uri Geller, or a total of 8.93% of all Urban Mystic posts. This is more than mysticism, religion, the Jews, the Bible, atheism, communism, or global warming. Looking through the tags one finds that "History" has more posts (25), but 4 of them are about the 100 Greatest Battles and one is repeated twice. History is also a broad category, not a single topic like Uri Geller. "The Urban Mystic" and "Irked-Confusion" appear more too, but that's just because everything here is self-referential. "Fundamaterialism" has 19 posts, but they are roughly divided evenly among cosmology, evolution, and the mind/brain connection, none of which out do the Geller posts alone. The same is true with "USA" (18 posts), and "REAL Science" (34 posts, including significant overlap with the Geller posts). Thanks to Bob Couttie, The Urban Mystic is more about Uri Geller than any othe single topic. There will be two more posts on this topic, my written report tearing apart Forbidden Knowledge, and the video version of it, and that's it. I don't care what Bob has to say, he is finished here after that.
Steve interviewed Eldon Byrd in 2001. He presented it to me to help provide context to the debate.
In the interview, Byrd picks apart many aspects of Gardner's article. According to Byrd, the wires given to Geller were marked with a razor and the ends were cut in such a way as to identify them later. These unique markings were later confirmed, meaning Geller did not substitute the wires for any he had prepared earlier to use in some form of trickery. Of course, Gardner does speculate that the hotel room Byrd was staying at was broken into by one of Geller's associates, the pieces of wire removed, taken back to where Geller was staying, manipulated so that they would produce the characteristic kink, and returned to Byrd's hotel room and the evidence of the break in covered up all with no one noticing. If you're willing to accept that whole shopping list of an explanation of trickery then Geller is a fraud. If you perfer the simpler explanation that Geller deformed the unique wire without prior handling it, in the presence of Byrd, then, well, he still might be a fraud but the possibility of the effect being genuine is now an open possibility. If Randall and Davis' experiment with a young boy who produced the same effect as Geller is evidence of anything then the more likely explanation seems to be that Geller, at least in Byrd's test with nitinol, is not cheating and genuinely produced a nonphysical deformity in the metal wire.
According to Byrd, Frederick Wang at the Naval Surface Weapons lab did try to remove the kink from the Gellerized wire, and that when Gardner interviewed him he caught Wang off guard. Thus, when Gardner said Wang didn't remember trying to un-Gellerize the wire, it was not because he did not try to un-Gellerize the wire but because he genuinely forgot, as all humans do from time to time. If Byrd is to be believed (and I believe him a whole lot more than I believe Gardner, who not only likes to trick his readers with the old bait-and-switch tactic mentioned in the previous post, but also thinks Randi is a credible source of information), then the un-Gellerizing did take place and was not a fabrication.
Now, I'm biased. I am biased against Martin Gardner because he likes to trick his readers, because he cites Randi as a credible source, and because he is a debunker and debunking goes against everything science stands for. I am inclined to believe that Byrd is telling the truth. Could he have been tricked? Yes. Is it likely that he was tricked? I would have to say no. Unless Geller tricked him on multiple occasions, and with the same or similar tricks, and the young boy R&D tested tricked them under much better conditions than the Byrd/Geller tests and without ever having met Geller to learn how his trick was performed, then trickery seems unlikely. Trickery is possible, in the same sense that whenever you hear someone's voice on a radio that the voice is really produced by a ventriloquist nearby and not coming from the radio, but trickery is far from the most likely possibility, regardless of what debunkers like Gardner (and Couttie for that matter) want to believe.
I'm not going to say the issue is settled, but the circumstantial evidence does seem to be pointing strongly in one direction.
Update: After looking through all the posts here at The Urban Mystic, I have concluded that, as of today, 15 posts have been on Uri Geller, or a total of 8.93% of all Urban Mystic posts. This is more than mysticism, religion, the Jews, the Bible, atheism, communism, or global warming. Looking through the tags one finds that "History" has more posts (25), but 4 of them are about the 100 Greatest Battles and one is repeated twice. History is also a broad category, not a single topic like Uri Geller. "The Urban Mystic" and "Irked-Confusion" appear more too, but that's just because everything here is self-referential. "Fundamaterialism" has 19 posts, but they are roughly divided evenly among cosmology, evolution, and the mind/brain connection, none of which out do the Geller posts alone. The same is true with "USA" (18 posts), and "REAL Science" (34 posts, including significant overlap with the Geller posts). Thanks to Bob Couttie, The Urban Mystic is more about Uri Geller than any othe single topic. There will be two more posts on this topic, my written report tearing apart Forbidden Knowledge, and the video version of it, and that's it. I don't care what Bob has to say, he is finished here after that.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Forbidden Geller 2
Today I finish the articles provided by reader Steve regarding Uri Geller and nitinol, that mysterious substance whose properties no one seems to agree on. This last one was written by Martin Gardner, science and mathematics writer who had a side job in debunking.
Gardner seems to write in such a way to present the reader with one set of facts then produces a sort of plot twist, revealing something to the contrary for no evident reason. For example, he mentions the laboratory where Byrd met Geller first, the Isis Center, saying "Is not Isis a peculiar name for a naval laboratory?" (emphasis in original) Well, I don't think so. The government always picks seemingly random names for its projects. Paperclip was the name of a project to transport Nazi scientists and research to the United States after the war before the Soviets got them. Able Danger was the intelligence operation that uncovered the 9/11 plot, or at least was going to (depending on who you ask) until red tape got in the way (wasn't Able Adam and Eve's son who was killed in a fit of jealous rage by his brother Cain? No, Gardner really speculates on the religious connotations of the name Isis). Grudge was the UFO investigation project that preceded Blue Book, so named because the Air Force didn't want to do it. Sailor Hat was a simulated nuclear blast, using hundreds of tonnes of conventional explosives, to see how well defended combat ships were. What I'm trying to say is that government projects always have goofy names, there's nothing suspicious about that.
He does reveal, in the very next paragraph, that the Isis Center was an organization created by an occult group, (possibly Theosophists, he's not too clear on that) not the Navy. Why mislead the readers by proposing the rhetorical question about why the Navy would name their laboratory Isis then? The world will never know. (Okay, I just wanted an excuse to link to that commercial)
Gardner agrees with Couttie that nitinol was not uncommon during Byrd's experiments. That means that the same number of people who say it was common as who say it was uncommon. Without some tie-breaker we may never know who is right.
He does make two references to Randi in the footnotes, so I'll have to subtract points for that. Anyone with half a brain knows that Randi isn't the great paragon of wisdom. He's even less reliable than the other wiki (I've had people grading papers at universities tell me the stuff some students got off Wikipedia is no better than stuff people just make up on the spot, although some of the stuff they have on different guns is pretty good).
Gardner does point out some holes in Byrd's paper, and some issues with the controlls of his test with Geller:
"Since no magicians were present during the chaotic session at which Uri bumped and kinked one piece of wire, it is impossible to do more than speculate on possible nonparanormal explanations. One scenario is that Uri came prepared with samples of wire to which he had previously given permanent kinks (in a way to be explained below) and then straightened. He passed up the wire of lager diameter because he had not brought wire of that size. The smaller-diameter wire was then switched, by Uri or Shipi, for Byrd's sample. Uri bumped the wire while stroking it - easily done by a push with the thumbnail. Then when Byrd heated the wire it naturally lost the bump and assumed its permanent kink."
He then goes on:
" However, it is not necessary to suppose that Uri came with prepared wire. Nitinol wire is now harder to get than in 1973, but I finally obtained a sample about a foot long of the 0.5mm. wire. I cut off a small piece, and I swear by all that is holy that my very first experiment was a whopping success. Using two small pairs of pliers I bent the wire at a sharp angle. I straightened the wire, then by holding the wire between thumb and first two fingers, and pressing with my thumbnail, I created a bump at the wire's center. I put the wire in a bowl and poured boiling water over it. The bump vanished and the wire assumed the shape of an angle, almost 90 degrees, with a sharp vertex. The angle was unaltered by applying a match flame.
"Excited by this unexpected success, I tried producing a sharper angle (about 3 degrees), but when I straightened the wire it snapped in half. I then repeated the experiment with a third piece, this time using nothing more than two pennies to grip the wire, and a third penny to force an acute angle. I straightened the wire, letting the angle remain as one side of the bump. When boiling water was poured over this wire the bump disappeared and the wire assumed an angle with a sharp vertex of about 75 degrees. I have it before me as I type. It is indistinguishable from the wire in plate 4 of Panati's book."
Playing Devil's Advocate,
I can say that since we have only Mr. Gardner's word to go on (he provides no pictures of this metal he bent, and there were no other witnesses) we can't know if he's lying or not. This criticism then is completely worthless, by his own standards. He then goes on into speculations of the sort of "someone could have cheated by doing X, where X is whatever Rube Goldbergian scenario I can think of but cannot prove one way or the other." Speculation of this sort is completely useless, as he himself says a few paragraphs down (he likes to repeat this tactic throughout the article), since the test was uncontrolled all speculation on it is useless. Well, then why did you spend the past six whole paragraphs doing something you yourself admit is useless speculation? Is it to add length to the article because you get paid by the word? If so I can respect that.
Gardner talks about correspondences with Byrd that point out inconsitencies in Byrd's paper, but does not actually provide us with evidence that these correspondences exist. Again, we must take his word for it, and again, Devil's Advocate, we have no way of knowing whether he's making stuff up. Gardner then goes on to do more speculation about how Geller might have cheated, but he doesn't know, he's just speculating, and what's worse, he mentions Randi again. No one is convinced by Randi's shitty magic tricks! Randi is a terrible magician, as Don Lane could attest to (I can't find the original video I was looking for, so here's this one instead).
He says Byrd had to let go of the wire at some point to get out a match and light it: "Now surely it takes two hands to open a match folder, take out a match, close the folder, and strike the match," but there has been at least one side-show performer who could not only light a match without needing both hands, but could also roll a cigarette, strike the match, and light the cigarette, and he had severely diminished limbs that were functionally useless, so no, it does not take two hands to strike a match.
What are we left with? 2 for cheated and 3 1/2 for not cheated. Since there are no more articles, and no more opinions to assess, we can go no farther in figuring out where exactly the truth lies, which is exactly what I predicted in the previous post. I suppose I should end with the following quote made by Arthur Koestler at the top of Gardner's article, "Uri is certainly 25 percent fraud and 25 percent showman, but fifty percent is real." I don't know what the truth is, but Koestler is probably right.
Gardner seems to write in such a way to present the reader with one set of facts then produces a sort of plot twist, revealing something to the contrary for no evident reason. For example, he mentions the laboratory where Byrd met Geller first, the Isis Center, saying "Is not Isis a peculiar name for a naval laboratory?" (emphasis in original) Well, I don't think so. The government always picks seemingly random names for its projects. Paperclip was the name of a project to transport Nazi scientists and research to the United States after the war before the Soviets got them. Able Danger was the intelligence operation that uncovered the 9/11 plot, or at least was going to (depending on who you ask) until red tape got in the way (wasn't Able Adam and Eve's son who was killed in a fit of jealous rage by his brother Cain? No, Gardner really speculates on the religious connotations of the name Isis). Grudge was the UFO investigation project that preceded Blue Book, so named because the Air Force didn't want to do it. Sailor Hat was a simulated nuclear blast, using hundreds of tonnes of conventional explosives, to see how well defended combat ships were. What I'm trying to say is that government projects always have goofy names, there's nothing suspicious about that.
He does reveal, in the very next paragraph, that the Isis Center was an organization created by an occult group, (possibly Theosophists, he's not too clear on that) not the Navy. Why mislead the readers by proposing the rhetorical question about why the Navy would name their laboratory Isis then? The world will never know. (Okay, I just wanted an excuse to link to that commercial)
Gardner agrees with Couttie that nitinol was not uncommon during Byrd's experiments. That means that the same number of people who say it was common as who say it was uncommon. Without some tie-breaker we may never know who is right.
He does make two references to Randi in the footnotes, so I'll have to subtract points for that. Anyone with half a brain knows that Randi isn't the great paragon of wisdom. He's even less reliable than the other wiki (I've had people grading papers at universities tell me the stuff some students got off Wikipedia is no better than stuff people just make up on the spot, although some of the stuff they have on different guns is pretty good).
Gardner does point out some holes in Byrd's paper, and some issues with the controlls of his test with Geller:
"Since no magicians were present during the chaotic session at which Uri bumped and kinked one piece of wire, it is impossible to do more than speculate on possible nonparanormal explanations. One scenario is that Uri came prepared with samples of wire to which he had previously given permanent kinks (in a way to be explained below) and then straightened. He passed up the wire of lager diameter because he had not brought wire of that size. The smaller-diameter wire was then switched, by Uri or Shipi, for Byrd's sample. Uri bumped the wire while stroking it - easily done by a push with the thumbnail. Then when Byrd heated the wire it naturally lost the bump and assumed its permanent kink."
He then goes on:
" However, it is not necessary to suppose that Uri came with prepared wire. Nitinol wire is now harder to get than in 1973, but I finally obtained a sample about a foot long of the 0.5mm. wire. I cut off a small piece, and I swear by all that is holy that my very first experiment was a whopping success. Using two small pairs of pliers I bent the wire at a sharp angle. I straightened the wire, then by holding the wire between thumb and first two fingers, and pressing with my thumbnail, I created a bump at the wire's center. I put the wire in a bowl and poured boiling water over it. The bump vanished and the wire assumed the shape of an angle, almost 90 degrees, with a sharp vertex. The angle was unaltered by applying a match flame.
"Excited by this unexpected success, I tried producing a sharper angle (about 3 degrees), but when I straightened the wire it snapped in half. I then repeated the experiment with a third piece, this time using nothing more than two pennies to grip the wire, and a third penny to force an acute angle. I straightened the wire, letting the angle remain as one side of the bump. When boiling water was poured over this wire the bump disappeared and the wire assumed an angle with a sharp vertex of about 75 degrees. I have it before me as I type. It is indistinguishable from the wire in plate 4 of Panati's book."
Playing Devil's Advocate,
I can say that since we have only Mr. Gardner's word to go on (he provides no pictures of this metal he bent, and there were no other witnesses) we can't know if he's lying or not. This criticism then is completely worthless, by his own standards. He then goes on into speculations of the sort of "someone could have cheated by doing X, where X is whatever Rube Goldbergian scenario I can think of but cannot prove one way or the other." Speculation of this sort is completely useless, as he himself says a few paragraphs down (he likes to repeat this tactic throughout the article), since the test was uncontrolled all speculation on it is useless. Well, then why did you spend the past six whole paragraphs doing something you yourself admit is useless speculation? Is it to add length to the article because you get paid by the word? If so I can respect that.
Gardner talks about correspondences with Byrd that point out inconsitencies in Byrd's paper, but does not actually provide us with evidence that these correspondences exist. Again, we must take his word for it, and again, Devil's Advocate, we have no way of knowing whether he's making stuff up. Gardner then goes on to do more speculation about how Geller might have cheated, but he doesn't know, he's just speculating, and what's worse, he mentions Randi again. No one is convinced by Randi's shitty magic tricks! Randi is a terrible magician, as Don Lane could attest to (I can't find the original video I was looking for, so here's this one instead).
He says Byrd had to let go of the wire at some point to get out a match and light it: "Now surely it takes two hands to open a match folder, take out a match, close the folder, and strike the match," but there has been at least one side-show performer who could not only light a match without needing both hands, but could also roll a cigarette, strike the match, and light the cigarette, and he had severely diminished limbs that were functionally useless, so no, it does not take two hands to strike a match.
What are we left with? 2 for cheated and 3 1/2 for not cheated. Since there are no more articles, and no more opinions to assess, we can go no farther in figuring out where exactly the truth lies, which is exactly what I predicted in the previous post. I suppose I should end with the following quote made by Arthur Koestler at the top of Gardner's article, "Uri is certainly 25 percent fraud and 25 percent showman, but fifty percent is real." I don't know what the truth is, but Koestler is probably right.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Forbidden Geller
No, I won't comment on Egypt, except to say that Mubarak does want Israel to give the Syrio-palestinians "East" Jerusalem, and this is completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, the big angry mob that wants to get rid of him (and probably behead him too) likely holds the standard Arab position of "KILL ALL JEWS!!!!!" so I would have to say that the US should at least publically condemn the rioters, as we would be better off with Mubarak in power than some jihadist.
On to the main topic. I read one of the articles a reader, Steve, brought to my attention in regard to Uri Geller, nitionl, and the controversey here at The Urban Mystic involving myself and Bob Couttie. Seems John L. Randall and C.P. Davis performed a similar experiment involving an eleven year old boy, who was also a metal bender, where they gave him nitinol and he produced a permanent deformation. Randall and Davis tried to remove the bend, using high voltage and tension clamps and the metal never did return to its rightful shape. The R&D article seems to agree with the original Byrd assessment that nitinol was uncommon during the time Byrd tested Geller (a claim Couttie disagrees with) and that permanent deformations cannot be created using trickery such as tying the metal in a knot and heating it with a match (one of two ways Couttie says it can be done in his book).
Who is correct? Is Couttie or are Byrd, Randall, and Davis? I will only say this one time, so pay attention: I Don't Know. Reading through the other article provided by Steve I will keep tabs on how many people agree with which position. Admittedly, just because lots of people agree on something doesn't make it true, but we can perform an interesting little game here. Sure, it won't tell us anything, but it will be a lot more fun than having to clean up the weekly blizzards that climate change has been dumping here since December.
So far, Bob Couttie stands along in the group of people who claim Geller could have cheated with the nitinol. Eldon Byrd, John Randall, C.P. Davis say Geller could not have cheated. R&D also mention a Dr. G. Rowlands who provided them with samples of nitinol and the specs of the material, and while his opinion regarding Geller is not mentioned his specs are the same as those provided by Byrd, so we can count him as half a point in the "not cheated" category. As of now the score is 1 for cheated and 3 1/2 for not cheated. Again, let me be clear that this little exercise is not a scientific assessment in any way and cannot tell us who is right. The issue likely can never be solved. Only two people know if Geller cheated or not, Geller himself and God, and neither seem to be providing us with what really happened, but this exercise can provide at least circumstantial evidence toward figuring out what happened.
Prediction: After reviewing all four reports, Byrd's, Couttie's, R&D's, and Martin Gardner's, I predict that we will be no closer to knowing whether or not it was possible for Geller to cheat with nitinol than we did when we first began.
On to the main topic. I read one of the articles a reader, Steve, brought to my attention in regard to Uri Geller, nitionl, and the controversey here at The Urban Mystic involving myself and Bob Couttie. Seems John L. Randall and C.P. Davis performed a similar experiment involving an eleven year old boy, who was also a metal bender, where they gave him nitinol and he produced a permanent deformation. Randall and Davis tried to remove the bend, using high voltage and tension clamps and the metal never did return to its rightful shape. The R&D article seems to agree with the original Byrd assessment that nitinol was uncommon during the time Byrd tested Geller (a claim Couttie disagrees with) and that permanent deformations cannot be created using trickery such as tying the metal in a knot and heating it with a match (one of two ways Couttie says it can be done in his book).
Who is correct? Is Couttie or are Byrd, Randall, and Davis? I will only say this one time, so pay attention: I Don't Know. Reading through the other article provided by Steve I will keep tabs on how many people agree with which position. Admittedly, just because lots of people agree on something doesn't make it true, but we can perform an interesting little game here. Sure, it won't tell us anything, but it will be a lot more fun than having to clean up the weekly blizzards that climate change has been dumping here since December.
So far, Bob Couttie stands along in the group of people who claim Geller could have cheated with the nitinol. Eldon Byrd, John Randall, C.P. Davis say Geller could not have cheated. R&D also mention a Dr. G. Rowlands who provided them with samples of nitinol and the specs of the material, and while his opinion regarding Geller is not mentioned his specs are the same as those provided by Byrd, so we can count him as half a point in the "not cheated" category. As of now the score is 1 for cheated and 3 1/2 for not cheated. Again, let me be clear that this little exercise is not a scientific assessment in any way and cannot tell us who is right. The issue likely can never be solved. Only two people know if Geller cheated or not, Geller himself and God, and neither seem to be providing us with what really happened, but this exercise can provide at least circumstantial evidence toward figuring out what happened.
Prediction: After reviewing all four reports, Byrd's, Couttie's, R&D's, and Martin Gardner's, I predict that we will be no closer to knowing whether or not it was possible for Geller to cheat with nitinol than we did when we first began.
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