Brexit bending, and the flerfs visit Antarctica

Whatever else you can say about the woo-woos, you have to admit that they have the courage of their convictions.

Once they have settled on a favorite idea, they hang onto it with a death grip.  Nothing -- not the most convincing evidence, the most logical argument, the most precise data -- will budge them one millimeter.

I ran into two especially good examples of this in the last couple of days.  They both leave me feeling torn between frustration at their pig-headedness and a grudging admiration for their tenacity.

In the first, which I was alerted to by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, we learn that the Flat-Earthers (hereafter referred to as "Flerfs") are planning a trip to Antarctica... so they can see first hand the "ice wall that holds back the oceans."  The FEIC (Flat Earth International Conference) calls it their "biggest, boldest adventure yet."

There's just one problem with this, if you exclude the obvious one that anyone who believes the Earth is flat would have to have the IQ of a peach pit.  In order to get to Antarctica, they're going to be aboard a ship, and if the ship has even a passing chance of getting to its destination, it has to use GPS, and the GPS system...

... assumes the Earth is spherical.  Remember, after all, what the "G" in "GPS" stands for.

Unless somehow they are able to convince the ship's captain to navigate based upon the assumption that the Earth is a flat disk, in which case the U. S. S. Flerf will probably never be seen again.

I would hope, of course, that the captain would nix any efforts by the Flerfs to plot their course based on the dimensions and orientation of a disk.  Captains are usually fairly particular about having their ships not get lost or run aground or sail around in circles, not to mention having a bunch of landlubbers telling them what to do.  So I suspect that the captain will tell them to buzz right off and use his GPS, and let them have their silly fun when they get there and declare victory regardless what else happens (which you know they will).

In our second story, we have the reappearance of a woo-woo who you'd think would not be willing to show his face in public after being publicly humiliated by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.  I'm referring, of course, to Israeli "mentalist" Uri Geller, who was invited to do his psychic spoon-bending shtick on live television.  But Carson, who had been a stage magician himself and knew all the tricks, did not give Geller access to any of the props beforehand.

What happened afterward was almost painful to watch.  I absolutely hate seeing someone making a complete and utter fool of himself, and even the most generous of folks couldn't see Geller's performance in any other light.  To put it bluntly, he got his ass handed to him.  After failing to bend any spoons, he told Carson he "wasn't feeling strong" that night.  And his inability to psychically detect objects hidden under cups mysteriously vanished, which Geller attributed to the "atmosphere of suspicion and distrust" that Carson was creating.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Guy Bavli, Bavli.in.denmark.2010, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's surprising, honestly, that he was willing to go on the show at all; he had to have known what was going to happen.  Maybe by that time, he was so cocky that he figured he'd be able to wing it and still come out okay.  But the demonstration, in front of a live audience and beamed out live to television watchers worldwide, went on, and on... and on and on.  Geller just wouldn't give up.  I found myself squirming in discomfort after five minutes; I can't imagine what it was like to be him, sitting there, unable to do a thing to get out of the hole he'd dug for himself.

If this had happened to me, I don't know if I'd have ever been willing to stick my nose outside my front door again.  But Geller not only got past the embarrassment, somehow, he's actually continued to claim psychic abilities -- and perform his nonsense in front of sold-out crowds.

But now, he's topped any of his previous exploits, because last week Geller announced that he was personally going to stop Brexit -- by telepathically controlling British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Most Brits, Geller says, are against Brexit, a conclusion he has come to "psychically and very strongly."  So he can't let May and her supporters lead the UK out of the European Union.  In an open letter to May, Geller wrote, "I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit.  As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this -- and believe me I am capable of executing it.  Before I take this drastic course of action, I appeal to you to stop the process immediately while you still have a chance."

So that's pretty unequivocal.  But what's the most frustrating about all of this is that no matter what happens, Geller won't lose a single audience member.  If Brexit falls apart (whether or not May herself is the cause), he'll claim that his psychic powers are what did it.  If the UK follows through and leaves the EU, he won't mention it again -- and the woo-woos will conveniently forget it ever happened, just like every other time a psychic has had a conspicuous failure.

As I've pointed out before, you can't win.

But like I said, you have to almost admire their stubbornness.  It reminds me of the quote from Bertrand Russell -- "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wise people so full of doubts."

So look for updates from the Flerf mission to Antarctica and Uri Geller's attempt to stop Brexit with his mind.  Me, I'm not expecting much.  But I guess it all falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.

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I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

Spin doctors

It's always entertaining when the woo-woos start running experiments or collecting actual data, because that moves the argument into the realm of testable science.

It happened with homeopathy (homeopathic remedies don't work), anti-vaxx (vaccines don't cause autism), and astrology (horoscopes rely on dart-thrower's bias, and when that's controlled for, show zero accuracy).  So it's kind of inadvisable to play that game and think they're going to win -- much better to stick with "I believe this because it sounds right."

This is a lesson the flat-Earthers ("Flerfs") have yet to learn, judging by a recently-released Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, in which some dedicated Flerfs spent a huge amount of money on a highly sophisticated ring laser gyroscope, determined to show that the Earth is flat and does not rotate -- and ended up proving the opposite.

Gyroscopes are a particularly good tool for this kind of study, because they have an interesting property -- they exert a force to resist changing their axis of rotation.  I remember being in high school physics and playing with a bicycle wheel gyroscope.  I spun the wheel, and sat on a lab stool -- when I tried to change the angle of the axis of rotation, it actually made the lab stool rotate so the axis remained parallel to where it was when it started.

And that was a low-tech gyroscope that wasn't even spinning very fast.  Ring laser gyroscopes use a beam of polarized light instead of a spinning wheel, and have an accuracy to within less than a hundredth of a degree shift per hour.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Misko from Bilbao but I wish it was Amsterdam or Biarritz, Simple Gyroscope, CC BY 2.0]

So it's a hard instrument to fool.  And the head Flerf, Bob Knodel, who has a YouTube channel devoted solely to proving that the Earth is flat, actually bought a ring laser gyroscope (to the tune of twenty thousand dollars), and the gyroscope showed...

... that the axis of rotation was deflecting by fifteen degrees per hour.  Precisely what you'd expect if the Earth is making one full rotation (360 degrees) in twenty-four hours.

"What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift," Knodel said.  "A 15-degree per hour drift.  Now, obviously we were taken aback by that - 'Wow, that's kind of a problem.'"

Yeah, you could say that.  But he and his friends were undeterred.

"We obviously were not willing to accept that," Knodel said, "and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth."

Yup, that's the way to approach science.  If the data from an extremely accurate instrument disagrees with your favorite hypothesis, then throw out the data.

"We don't want to blow this, you know?" Knodel said to another Flerf.  "When you've got $20,000 in this freaking gyro, if we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad?  It would be bad."

Then he added, "What I just told you was confidential."

Which explains how the entire conversation ended up on the internet.

I try to be kind, but I have to admit that when I read this, my response was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, wheeze* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I mean, really.  These people have gone to ridiculous lengths trying to support their ridiculous ideas, so I have to say when they sunk twenty grand into an instrument and it ended up proving them wrong, they deserved everything they got.

It'd be nice to think that this would be the end of the Flerfs, that they'd retreat in disarray and we'd never hear from them again.  Of course, this is almost Flerf-level wishful thinking.  Once woo-woos find out their cherished ideas are wrong, they immediately go into wild gyrations to show how the evidence is actually what's wrong.  For example, every year there are more studies to show that the anti-vaxxers are completely full of horse waste, and yet they are not only undaunted, their numbers are growing, and they dream up all sorts of convoluted reasons (mostly revolving around conspiracies by Big Pharma) to show that the data is wrong.

Same with the Flerfs, which is kind of depressing. especially since their arguments all kind of boil down to "I've looked, and it sure looks flat to me."  But I'd better wrap this up, because the Sun is getting high above the edge of the disk, so time's a wastin'. 

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Sphere factor

When Flat-Earthers ("Flerfs") talk to Oblate-Spheroid-Earthers ("Sane People"), usually the topic comes up of "what about places that are experiencing night while we're experiencing day, and vice versa?"

I know that when I was in Malaysia three summers ago, it brought home the fact that we're on a spinning ball as vividly as anything could have.  Malaysia is exactly twelve hours different from upstate New York, so when I Skyped home with my wife, I was getting ready to go to dinner while she was getting ready to go to work.  Showing her a horizon with a sunset while she was showing me a horizon with a sunrise was a little surreal.

However, it should come as no surprise that the Flerfs have an answer to that, since they have an answer to damn near anything a rational person could come up with.  But their answer to the "opposite hemisphere" issue is positively inspired:

Australia doesn't exist.

That Australia is a figment of our collective imaginations was brought to my attention by a friend who, and the irony of this is not lost on me, lives in Australia.  My comment to her was that I wished she'd told me ages ago that she was nonexistent.  I mean, friends should own up about stuff like this, you know?  It was a little hurtful that all this time, I've been talking to someone imaginary, and I didn't even know it.

So I guess that means that kangaroos don't exist, either, which is kind of a shame.  [Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As far as the Flerfs, the article I linked above has some explanations (if I can dignify them by that term) of what they think is going on, apropos of Australia.  Here are some especially inspired ones:

Everything you have ever heard about [Australia] was made up, and any pictures of it you have seen were faked by the government. 

I am sure you have even talked to people on the internet who claim to be from Australia. They are really secret government agents who are surfing the internet to enforce these false beliefs. 

We are not entirely sure why the government made up an imaginary continent, or why it is trying to convince the world that this continent is real, but we can tell you that we know for a fact that Australia doesn’t really exist.

Another person said that any Australians you happen to know are "computer-generated," and said the hoax has been going on for centuries, despite the fact that CGI kind of didn't exist in the 18th century:

Australia is not real. It’s a hoax, made for us to believe that Britain moved over their criminals to someplace. 

In reality, all these criminals were loaded off the ships into the waters, drowning before they could see land ever again. 

It’s a coverup for one of the greatest mass murders in history, made by one of the most prominent empires.

So that's kind of sinister.  But what about people who claim to have gone there, and seen the place, as advertised?  They've got a response for that, too:

[T]he ‘plane pilots’ are in on this secret.  Instead of flying you to Melbourne or Sydney, they fly you to islands close nearby ‘or in some cases, parts of South America, where they have cleared space and hired actors to act out as real Australians.

Well, okay, maybe Australia doesn't exist, but what about other countries in the region?  Does Papua-New Guinea exist?  I have to admit Birds of Paradise are weird enough that they could well be a hoax.

[Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But what about Indonesia?  And Japan?  And China?  I mean, they're all way closer, time-zone-wise, to Australia than they are to us.  Why have they singled out Australia?

Then there's Malaysia, which I can verify exists because as I mentioned earlier, I've been there.  (Actually, I stopped along the way in Hong Kong, but maybe that was secretly part of South America.  I wasn't there long enough to check.)  But given the fact that the flight back -- from Hong Kong to La Guardia Airport in New York City -- had me in the air for sixteen hours, I can say with some certainty that those two places are not located near each other.

Not that I'd expect any of this to be convincing to your average Flerf, who has long ago jettisoned anything like "evidence" as a road to understanding.  Me, I'm still wondering what to do about my imaginary and/or computer-generated Australian friend.  Given that she's the one who sent me the link, it's kind of rubbing my face in it, you know?  On the other hand, if she doesn't actually exist, I probably shouldn't worry about it.

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This week's Featured Book on Skeptophilia:

This week I'm featuring a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan, famous for his work on the series Cosmos, here addresses the topics of pseudoscience, skepticism, credulity, and why it matters -- even to laypeople.  Lucid, sometimes funny, always fascinating.