The Straight Dope 02/07/2003

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The Straight Dope -- By Cecil Adams
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THE STRAIGHT DOPE 02/07/2003

Dear Cecil:

Has anyone ever bothered to seriously check the claims of
TV producer Chuck Barris in his book Confessions of a
Dangerous Mind to see if he's a fraud or not? Also, could
you personally investigate his claims? (I think he's a fraud,
but I don't have the time to investigate myself.)
--Russell, Sacramento, CA

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Cecil replies:

Ah, right, Chuck Barris. Barris is the showbiz entrepreneur
who created The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong
Show (the last of which he hosted), hits in the late 1960s
and '70s that were thought to represent the absolute low in
schlock TV, at least until everybody got a load of Temptation
Island. In 1982 he published an "unauthorized autobiography,"
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which has recently been given
a new lease on life as a movie. Central to the book is the claim
that "Chuckie Baby" (as Gong Show fans liked to call Barris),
in addition to being a busy executive responsible at one point
for 27 half hours of network TV a week, was a decorated CIA
assassin. Barris writes that after chaperoning a winning couple
from The Dating Game on their dream date in some foreign capital,
he'd slip away, blow somebody's brains out, and then head back to
Los Angeles to contend with those A-holes at the network.

And you want to know if maybe he's making some of this up.

You want to know, to be precise, if I think Chuck Barris is a fraud
for claiming, inter alia (I have always wanted to write inter alia),
that his nom de guerre--the name he used to order airline tickets--
was Sunny Sixkiller; that in 1953 he took his 75-year-old
grandmother on a camping trip to the Poconos, where they spent a
wonderful day, but unfortunately when he woke up the next morning
she was dead, so he zipped her body into a sleeping bag, tied it to
the roof of his Volkswagen, and drove to a police station, but even
more unfortunately while he was inside making a report someone
stole the car . . .

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030207.html

STAFF REPORT

Dear Straight Dope:

After seeing a Discovery Channel show on astronomy
which included an explanation of "Hawking radiation"
from black holes, I have a question. If the black
hole is radiating away particles, however randomly,
will the mass of the black hole eventually cross
back over the threshold of infinite density and become
"normal" matter again? Will a black hole eventually
become a brown dwarf that is visible? Or, do black
holes, having at one point crossed the critical
threshold, retain their infinite density? So to get
down to brass tacks, are black holes forever?
--Keith S. Sollenberger

SDSTAFF Chronos replies:

There are two important things to know about black
holes. First, they're weird. But second, they're not
as weird as most people think.

For instance, the gravitational field of a black hole
is just like the gravitational field of any other mass.
If the sun were instantly replaced by a solar-mass
black hole (that is, a black hole having the same mass
as the sun), the planets would continue to orbit in
exactly the same manner: They would not get "sucked in,"
despite what many people think. I know you didn't ask
about that, Keith, but it's a common enough misconception
that I thought I would mention it anyway.

For more, see: 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhawkingradiation.html

STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC - 06/11/1981

Dear Cecil: 
            
The other day I got into an argument with a friend
who's a Christian and he claimed it can be proved
the moon is only 12,000 years old (thus bolstering
creationist claims about evolution) by the amount
of meteoric dust on its surface. He said that some
scientists have calculated that if the moon were
really billions of years old it would have five feet
of dust surrounding its surface features. However,
when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon in 1969,
there was only one inch of dust! What's the scoop?
--George W., Baltimore

Cecil replies:

There's a lot more than one inch of dust on the moon;
Armstrong only sank in one inch, which is a different
matter. After all, you only sink into loose beach sand
about an inch, although it's certainly a lot deeper. 

The surface of the moon is composed primarily of debris
called "regolith," which is from 36 to 60 feet deep and
consists of boulders of varying size intermixed with
dust. Most of the material is made up of lunar rock
shattered by meteorites; the remaining 1 to 2-1/2 percent
is the pulverized remnants of the meteorites themselves.
Much of the dust is in the form of tiny glass spheres
created in the heat of the meteorite impact. Dating of
lunar samples has established the age of the moon at
about 4.6 billion years. 

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_159a.html

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