A week ago, this passage appeared in an article about timing and the brain:

If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

As if people had three ears. “Triangulating between the three points” is gibberish. The between-ear time-of-arrival comparison gives you a direction, not a location (which is what triangulation does). Perhaps it was added by a copy editor. If you delete it, the passage makes sense.

Wouldn’t that make a nice newsbreak (one of The New Yorker’s column-ending “Funny Usage Mistakes Made by Other Publications”)? I tried to submit it but couldn’t. So I wrote a Letter to the Editor about it.

In this week’s issue, Hendrik Hertzberg, the magazine’s main editorial writer, calls the idea that “global warming is a hoax” a “denial of reality”. He lumps it with birtherism and the ideas that “evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.” In case you are reading this blog for the first time, I’ll say it again: Claims that humans have dangerously warmed the planet are based on climate models that are far from fully verified. That these models manage to fit past temperatures means little because the models have many adjustable parameters. Alas, this was no over-zealous editing mistake.

Thanks to this article, I learned that many issues of Spy magazine have become available at Google Books (here). I loved Spy. In the last few years it got much worse but before that I would often read each issue three times. Now you can judge for yourself.

Soon after I moved to Berkeley, someone I met on the street invited me to a dinner in the Berkeley Hills. I thought it was a religious group; it turned out to be more cult-like. The cult wasn’t named. Maybe it was Moonies, maybe Scientology. At the dinner, after the guitar-playing leader learned I was a psychology professor, she ignored me.

The New Yorker has just published a long fascinating piece about Paul Haggis’s defection from Scientology. It reminds me of a piece in Spy — an exchange of faxes between the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and Michael Ovitz, who at the time was the head of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and considered the most powerful person in Hollywood. Eszterhas called Ovitz a bully. It seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Ovitz’s career.

My interpretation of the piece and associated material is that Scientology is dying. Just as Eszterhas wasn’t afraid of Ovitz, quite a few people, the New Yorker piece reveals, are not afraid of what Scientologists might do to them. The New Yorker website has a great deal of fun-to-read source material, which provides a vivid picture of what you can expect if you decide to join. The famous people associated with the movement, such as Cruise and Travolta (and Greta Van Susteren) are getting old. Simple-minded celebrities will always be with us, sure. But any aspiring actor who considers joining Scientology now faces two hurdles not faced by Cruise and Travolta: (1) Fear of ridicule. The Xenu stuff, for example. They tried to keep that stuff secret for a reason. Anyone can now read endless damaging stuff about Scientology. (2) Fear of professional damage. After South Park ridiculed Scientology, Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist, quit the show. Was he forced to quit by his Scientology superiors? Well, one of his South Park bosses said, “He said he was under great pressure from Scientology, and if we didn’t stop poking at them, he’d have to leave.” Loss of that job must have really hurt him.