Asymmetrical Information

Be very careful. In high school, it was widely believed that cigarette ashes in a coke made the contents wildly aphrodesiac.

I heard there's an English with terminal cancer, whose dying wish is to accumulate the largest collection of greeting cards. Send yours to Craig Shergold who lives on Shelby Road in Carshalton, England.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/children/shergold.htm

but what happens when you eat poprocks on the Atkins diet?

I always rather envied archaeologists; they seem to spend most of their time bossing lax third world workers around excavation sites; they do that wearing khaki caps and drinking ice drinks. Ahhh the life it must be. I don't know if that's at all accurate, but watching the Discovery Channel gave me that impression. I also don't know if archeologists do the same kind of work as say road engineers or something. I mean, there might be this whole bunch of them working for the state or something. I also can't say I know exactly what the monetary value of their popular work can be, as the best their discoveries can do is add notes to ancient history.

They do sell pots and mummies and masks to museums and collectors at good prices though; but lately the market's been rather stalled. Also, from what I've read a lot more of the valuable treasure comes from China, where the authorities are rather anal about protecting national treasure-hood. Does that really pay for all their work? Is it subsidized by the governments of those countries? Do universities pay for the prestige?

Walter: So at your high school, the 'spit take' was considered some sort of irresistable mating call? ;-)

"I'm going to spend the next three days eating pop rocks and drinking coke to see whether I really do explode."

Been nice knowin' ya, Janey.

Al Gore was born exactly nine months after Roswell. Clearly there are national security implications in this important investigation.

podzdorf,

I'm studying archealogy and I assure you that just about everything you said is false. mheh

Most of the time you're trying to keep the third world guys from stealing the relics and selling them on the black market and when (if) you do find something you don't get to sell it as you're work is strictly research. Almost all artifacts end up in the Country (State) they were found in and then the owners can choose to sell them.

The money blows and in fact most jobs in the field are working for the state (at least out here in Cali they are) as to stop construction crews from destroying burial grounds and what have you.

The only real pay comes from Grants and yeah, it's mostly for the prestige.

Thanks for playing, as it is 05:30am I need to get some sleep. gah! I hate insomnia.

Podzdorf, dude, don't believe everything you see on Discovery. We don't sell pots and mummies and masks to museums and collectors, nor do many of us lounge about with cool drinks and watch the peasants dig. Maybe that sort of thing happened 100 years ago, but not anymore. Now it's mostly just hard, dirty, sweaty work. All that stuff already belongs to someone, either the private land owner or some government entity, and either way they're usually watching pretty close to make sure we don't make off with all that valuable stuff. Actually, in 25+ years of doing archaeology what I've found probably wouldn't fetch $10,000 on the market. But that's okay - it's not what we find, it's what we find out.

Now let's see. Four archaeologists and six volunteers for ten days of fieldwork. Plus, you'd have to identify every scrap you find to address the question and it's amazing how much nondescript garbage you will find just about anywhere. I'd guess that the SCIFI channel is laying out $50,000 minimum for this, and probably a lot more, since the University is going to take a hefty chunk of overhead off the top. (One of the reasons I'm a private consultant. The university overhead is a killer.)

I'm reasonably certain that Doleman and his crew are doing this as a spoof, a training exercise, and a nice little money maker. However, on a few minutes reflection I'm not sure I'd have touched this job for any amount of money, short of enough to retire and move far, far away. The problem is, they're probably not going to be able to absolutely identify every scrap of glass and plastic and metal, every fragment of bone, every bit of cloth, and all the other stuff that they find, and the true believers will point at the unidentified stuff with a big 'AHA! Scraps of unidentifiable metal and plastic! They must have come from an unidentified flying object!!'

The talk of 'startling new evidence' and 'smoking guns' suggests that the SCIFI channel didn't laying out their bucks to debunk the UFO scenario either. All in all, I'm not sure that fifty grand would be enough to cover the hit in credibility that you could take from being involved in something like this. No matter how loud you holler 'spoof!' some folks will think you were serious and others simply have no sense of humor.

I also wonder how the rest of the UNM faculty feel. They've worked very hard to make UNM Anthro one of the top departments in the country. Now, not only will they go down in the annals of UFO research, every tinfoil-hatted loony in the country will be contacting the department to see the collection.

All in all, I can't wait to see the program. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

My earlier comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. I tend to be very skeptical about anything 'scientifician' on cable tv. Discovery and TLC being the worst of the bunch. TLC has caught on to this and does a pretty good job with reality shows (Junkyard Wars, Trading Spaces). Discovery is doing the same.

Speaking of UFOs and scientific inquiry (and Discovery), there was a show on some weeks ago about crop circles. Basically a blotch job, but still rather fun. I think they found some graduate students from MIT to try to recreate some of the more exotic crop circles. If I recall correctly, the challenge was to create a complex design, have strange cavities in the corn branches, small round metal balls scattered about and vague radiation (you know the kind that knocks cameras and airplanes out). It's not that the students failed, it was more like the narrator wasn't exactly impartial. Something like "Even though all of the requirements were met, this is still inconclusive... there are strange crop circles... tune in tomorrow to find out the truth".

More like, 'Tune in Tomorrow and mention when us you buy the Ford™ you see in this next advert'.

I've put out the link to the SCIFI program on a professional web ring and I'm getting some interesting comment. At the least, no one thinks Doleman is a crank. Here's the transcript of a SCIFI channel interview with Doleman you may find interesting.

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