Re: The Venn Diagram Of Irrational Nonsense http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/message/339067
Fowarded to FFL by a shade I met in a dream: "My dear FFLers Until my eyes died and gave me all-seeing vision I was unaware of your august journal. But what a shock to my ethereal system! My life's work, what? "Bollocks"? BOLLOCKS? And all neatly classified too: "Religious BOLLOCKS", "Quackery BOLLOCKS", "Pseudoscientific BOLLOCKS" (now there's irony, ed.), and (Lord preserve us) "Paranormal BOLLOCKS". I am deeply humbled." Poor chap, eh? It seems the deceased was a Professor Archie Roy: << A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University, Roy was the world authority on the mechanics of orbits, on which he carried out research long before computers were capable of doing the work for him. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked as a consultant to Nasa, helping to put the first man on the Moon. He also had an asteroid, 5806 Archie-roy, named in his honour. But he became better known among the general public for his research into the spirit world. This began in the 1950s after he lost his way in Glasgow's old university library and found shelves of books on spiritualism and psychical research. "My first ignorant reaction was 'What is this rubbish doing in a university library?'," he recalled. "But curiosity made me open some of the books. I was surprised to recognise some of the authors of this 'rubbish', such as Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor William James, Professor Sir William Crookes, and so on. My balloon of ignorance was punctured by the needle of my scientific curiosity, and I found myself called up to a new career. >> Professor Archie Roy, born June 24 1924, died December 27 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9946847/Professor- Archie-Roy.html