[meteorite-list] SETS: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Stupidity

From: drtanuki <drtanuki_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:11:24 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <715766.14199.qm_at_web53103.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

Dear Ed and List

Ed wrote, " Would anyone like to apologize to Hibben now?"

Read this and my answer is still , "NO"!

Philanthropists' shady pasts sully college bequests

Posted on: Monday, 1 December 2003, 06:00 CST

""IT SHOULD have been the culmination of a sparkling redesign for New Mexico University's campus: the Hibben Center for Archaeological Studies. Built with a pounds 3.5 million gift from Frank Hibben, a renowned American archaeologist, the institute was created to give a flourish to its plans to become a leading research centre.

Then officials discovered an uncomfortable fact. Hibben, who died last year, may have done striking research on ancient Americans, but he was better known among colleagues for his decades-long habit of forging results. As archaeologist Vance Haynes told the journal Nature : 'He thought that it didn't hurt to make the evidence a little better.'

For example, in 1946 he described a site at Chitna Bay in Alaska at which he claimed to have found 10,000-year-old flints. Subsequent expeditions revealed that the site simply did not exist. Today, faking archaeological evidence is known as hibbenising. 'Some think Hibben's work is all faked,' archaeologist Bruce Huckell said. 'Others think we don't have enough information to know.'

Either way, the naming of the new centre after a scientific twister is a blow for a university seeking academic excellence.

Neither is the problem is confined to New Mexico. An investigation by Nature magazine has revealed that as more and more US universities look to private donors to help them, increasing numbers of benefactors are turning out to have shaky pasts.

Take Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. Thankful for his donations, the university named a recreation building after local businessman Robert Brennan. Last year workers had to scrape his name from the building following Brennan's conviction for fraud.

Or consider the case of land magnate Kemper Marley. His family made a $6m contribution to Arizona University so that its agricultural science department could be named in his honour. But Marley is also known as the reputed mastermind of the 1976 murder of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter. Many university academics still refuse to enter the building.

These examples are causing increasing unrest among academics both in America and in Europe, and in particular Britain, where pressure is mounting on universities to raise increasing amounts of money from private benefactors. Where will it end, they ask?

'There is a touching moment at the end of the film The Shawshank Redemption when the prison's library is named after inmate Brooks Hatlen,' said one academic. 'They were lucky. At least, they knew in advance that their candidate was a crook.""

--- On Tue, 8/25/09, E.P. Grondine <epgrondine at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [meteorite-list] SETS: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Stupidity
> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 6:00 AM
> Hi all -
>
> Given the lack of intelligent life here on Earth, what are
> the chances of finding it elsewhere?
>
> Every habitable planet will lie in an accretion disk, and
> thus be subjected to extinction level cometary impact.
>
> Now consider carefully NASA and other space agencies
> response to this fact.
>
> As further disincentive, I've seen it said that without the
> Moon, the Earth would not have plate tectonics: in other
> words, there would be water on top of rock underneath. And
> without a mixed environment intelligent life would not
> evolve. (Though I'm not too sure about octopuses, but even
> so, would they really become space faring? Would they really
> develop radio?)
>
> Finally, considering the total transmissions from the
> Earth, someone elsewhere would be far more likely to be
> watching Lucy, Desi, Fred and Ethel, if they picked up
> anything at all.
>
> Would anyone like to apologize to Hibben now?
>
> E.P. Grondine
> Man and Impct in the Americas
>
>
>
>
> ? ? ?
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Received on Mon 24 Aug 2009 05:11:24 PM PDT