GRIEVOUSLY CRIPPLED

The dean of the half-inch-leap researchers is, of course, our old acquaintance Ernest Sternglass, whose technique could be used to prove that the bumps on Manhattan's sidewalks are the cause of rheumatism in left-handed Indonesian chimneysweeps. The trick is simply to ignore all evidence that might contradict such a profound scientific hypothesis.

I have no information on what the thyroid hormone is doing to Dr Sternglass's brain, but the reporters attending his press conference must have had their cerebral functions grievously crippled, for not one of them asked about the SAT scores in the states adjacent to those involved in the distinguished scholar's demonstration; likewise, the editors of UPI and AP feeding the story to hundreds of newspapers and radio-TV stations across the country, as well as the news editors of these stations and papers who unquestioningly gobbled up the story, must also all have been downwind from the Nevada test site.

With one exception. Mark Roth of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (11/16/84) took the trouble to look up the change of SAT scores in neighboring downwind states: they varied from 0 to + 19 as shown on the map below. (He also found other bugs for which we lack space, and reported how the U of Pittsburgh disassociated itself from Sternglass' "research.") Here is one journalist who will not get a Pulitzer Prize: that goes to "investigative" journalists like Woodward and Bernstein who were handed everything by Deep Throat on a silver platter.

As for Sternglass, God bless this brilliant scholar. He is doing a great job of embarrassing the antinukes.