Birdwalking into the Miocene

From the One Thing Leads To Another department, we have: a cute little fuzzy mammal from Madagascar, some thoughts about genetic drift, and a period of geological history during which a lot was happening.

I'd like to say that this kind of twisty mental path is infrequent for me, but unfortunately, it happens pretty much on a daily basis, and has since I was a kid.  When I was around twelve years old, my parents splurged on a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, ostensibly to assist me with my schoolwork, but they (the Encyclopedia, not my parents) were honestly more of a hindrance than a help.  I'd go to the Brittanica to look up, say, something about the Monroe Doctrine for social studies class, and my mom would find me three hours later with fifteen open volumes spread on the floor around me, with me in the middle immersed in an article about venomous snakes in Malaysia.

It's why conversations with my older son, with whom I seem to share a brain, are like some kind of weird exercise in free association.  We've occasionally tried to reconstruct the pathway by which we got to a particular topic, and there's usually a logical connection between each step and the preceding one, but overall, our discussions give new meaning to the word labyrinthine.

Anyhow, today I started on this particular birdwalk when someone posted a photograph on social media of an animal I'd never heard of: the ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans).  The vontsira is kind of adorable:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Charles J. Sharp creator QS:P170,Q54800218, Ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans) 2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The vontsira and its relative the falanouc are in the family Eupleridae along with a species I had heard of, the fossa, which is a sleek, elegant, weasel-like animal that is only distantly related to other members of the Order Carnivora.  All of the eupleurids live in Madagascar, and like most of the endemic species on the island, they're threatened by habitat loss and competition from non-native species.

What I found most curious about these mammals is that they're a clade -- genetic studies have found that eupleurids all descend from a single small population that arrived in Madagascar something like twenty million years ago, and then diversified into the species you see today.  Chances are, the ancestors of the vontsira, falanouc, fossa, and other eupleurids came over from Africa via rafting in the early Miocene Epoch.  They're distant cousins of the much more common and widespread mongooses, hyaenas, genets, and civets, and it was probably some prehistoric viverroid (the parvorder that includes all five groups) that made its way to Madagascar and gave rise to modern eupleurids.

This led me to looking into what was happening, geology-wise, during the Miocene.  I knew it was a busy time, but I didn't realize just how busy.  Tectonic movement closed off the Mediterranean Sea from the Indian Ocean, and then a shift at the western end of the Mediterranean closed off the Straits of Gibraltar; the result was that the Mediterranean dried up almost completely, something called the Messinian salinity crisis because what was left was a salty desert with an average temperature of something like 110 F and two disconnected lakes of concentrated brine.  At the end of the epoch, another plate movement reopened the Straits, and there was a flood of a magnitude that beggars belief; at its peak, the flow rate was enough to raise the level of the refilling Mediterranean by ten meters per day.

This is also the period during which the Indian subcontinent rammed into Asia, raising the Himalayas and introducing a bunch of African species into Asia (this is why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India, but none in the Middle East).  Also, it's when the Columbia River Flood Basalts formed -- an enormous (175,00 cubic kilometers) blob of igneous rock covering what is now eastern Washington and Oregon, and the west parts of Idaho -- an eruption probably due to the same hotspot which now underlies Yellowstone.

Because of all this, the climate during the Miocene might as well have been attached to a yo-yo.  Warm periods rapidly alternated with cold ones, and wet with dry.  As you might imagine, this played hell with species' ability to adapt, and groups came and went as the epoch passed -- the borophagine ("bone-crushing") canids, the terrifying "hypercarnivorous" hyaenodonts, and the enormous, superficially pig-like entelodonts amongst them.  The first apes evolved, and the split between the ancestors of modern humans and modern chimps occurred in the late Miocene, something like seven million years ago.

If all that wasn't enough, some time during the Miocene -- geologists are uncertain exactly when -- there was an asteroid impact in what is now Tajikistan, forming the twenty-five-kilometer-wide Karakul Crater Lake, which at an elevation of 3,960 meters is higher than the much better-known Lake Titicaca.

So there you have it.  A brief tour of the chaotic paths through my brain, starting with a furry woodland animal from Madagascar and ending with a meteorite impact in Tajikistan.  Hopefully you found some stops along the way interesting.  Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go look up a single fact in Wikipedia to answer a question a friend asked about linguistics.  You'll find me in a few hours reading about how general relativity applies to supermassive black holes.

I'm sure how I got there will make sense to me, at least.

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The empire of chutzpah

Allow me to make it clear right at the outset that in general, I disapprove of crime.

Most crimes are designated as such because they harm innocent people, either materially or physically.  This is something that a moral person would naturally deplore, and is why just about every culture out there, from empire down to the smallest village, has rules outlawing such behaviors.

Still, every once in a while, you run into a criminal who is just so damned clever that you have to admit some grudging admiration, if not an outright, "Why didn't I think of this first?"

But before I tell you about the criminal I'm thinking of, some background.

Perhaps you've heard of the phenomenon of "micronations."  These are small tracts of land, usually owned by cranks, rogues, misfits, wags, or malcontents, which have been declared "free and sovereign nations."  These declarations are universally ignored by the parent country, but this hasn't stopped the aforementioned cranks et al. from founding a good many of them.  (See the Wikipedia list, with descriptions, here.)  The commonality across the lot is that the leaders seem to trumpet fairly loudly but then make sure to fly under the radar when it comes to potential unpleasantness.  For example, the Principality of Hutt River (formerly a part of Australia) regularly has its taxes paid to Australia by its founder, Crown Prince Leonard I (formerly Leonard Casley), with the proviso that the tax check is to be considered "a gift from one world leader to another."

I find this whole phenomenon simultaneously charming and perplexing.  Perplexing because (with the exception of the handful who have clearly set the whole thing up as a joke), these people seem to take themselves awfully seriously.  Consider the Principality of Sealand, which consists solely of one abandoned military staging platform in the North Sea.  Take a look at Sealand's webpage (of course it has a webpage).  Reading through that, and the other assorted websites for micronations, leaves me thinking, "Are you people loonies?  Or what?"

The Principality of Sealand [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ryan Lackey, Sealand aerial view, CC BY 2.0]

On the other hand, it is somewhat charming, in a twisted, Duchy of Grand Fenwick sort of way.  The majority of the self-proclaimed nobility from micronations seem to be doing no real harm.  Let them issue their own currency, stamps, and legal documents.  Hey, if it gives them a hobby, then why not?  I don't think it's really any crazier than many other hobbies, such as collecting beer bottle caps or doing Civil War battle re-enactments.

And then, the depressive existentialist side of my personality has to pipe up and ask, "Why is this so different from what all countries are doing?"  Countries only exist because a group of people with adequate weaponry have decided to band together, declare that they have the right to draw a line on the ground across which None Shall Pass, and tell everyone what they can and can't do.  The lines are mostly arbitrary, and a good many of the laws seem to be as well.  (Imagine trying to explain to an alien why on the north side of an invisible line on the ground, LGBTQ+ people can marry, and on the south side, they can't.  I think all you'd get from the alien is mild puzzlement, up until the point where he decides that there really isn't any intelligent life on Earth, and vaporizes you with his laser pistol.)

So then, what's the difference between micronations and regular nations?  There's this thing called "recognition" -- that other countries recognize the existence of a legitimate nation.  So, because the United States is pretending not to notice the Republic of Molossia (a totalitarian dictatorship, formerly part of Nevada), it doesn't exist?  It's a little like a three-year-old covering his eyes and concluding that everyone he can't see is gone.

Of course, recognition isn't everything.  There are also diplomatic ties -- who are you willing to negotiate with?  But that gets a little dicey, too, because there are countries that clearly exist by most people's definition (e.g. Cuba) but with whom we have no diplomatic relations.  So, apparently you only exist if (1) we are willing to admit you exist, and (2) we both agree to send people to meet at a five-star hotel to drink hundred-dollar-a-glass wine and discuss how much our people want to cooperate, despite our differences and our occasional desire to annihilate each other?

Sorry for being cynical.  But so much of politics seems to me to be high-stakes game playing, not so very far advanced from the Inner Circles and Exclusive Clubs that middle schoolers dream up, with the only difference being that middle schoolers aren't capable of blowing each other up with tactical nuclear weapons.  Yet.

Anyhow, all this is background.  So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Harsh Vardhan Jain, of Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Jain took the whole micronation thing and raised it to the level of performance art.  He created four of them, all on small tracts of uninhabited land in various places around the world, naming them West Arctica, Saborga, Poulvia, and Lodonia.  He then not only produced documents, postage stamps, and currency for each one, he had his modest, two story house in Ghaziabad registered as an embassy.  He digitally altered photographs to make it look like he was hobnobbing with high-ranking dignitaries, up to and including the president of India.  He created shell companies, supposedly headquartered in the micronations -- but requiring contact through the auspices of the embassy (because of course, correspondence addressed to "Saborga" or "Poulvia" would never arrive).  He acted not only as ambassador but as a broker, luring in investors.

And amazingly, people fell for it.  Lots of people.  Me, if I was investing overseas, I think I'd at least take the time to look up the country where the company was located, and find out if it actually exists.  As astonishing as it sounds, this did not happen.  Enough people invested in Jain's micronations that when he was arrested last week, police found four vehicles with fake diplomatic plates, twelve forged diplomatic passports (representing all four micronations), fake documents bearing the seal of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, two forged PAN cards (the Indian equivalent of a Social Security card), two fake press cards, thirty-four different rubber stamps with official logos and symbols from various countries and organizations, faked documents from all of his various shell companies, and 4,470,000 rupees in cash (a little over fifty thousand dollars US).

Jain is now being held in prison in Ghaziabad pending trial.

You might know the Yiddish word chutzpah.  Chutzpah is kind of synonymous with the English "audacity" or "gall" (as in "you have a lot of gall"), but with overtones of a cheerful, in-your-face brazenness.  Chutzpah, they say, is the guy who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

Harsh Vardhan Jain has a shitload of chutzpah.

I mean, he didn't do it by half-measures, did he?  And what astounds me is that he got away with it for years.  I'm not sure how the authorities figured it out -- the source I linked is unclear on the point -- but what's certain is that he had just about everyone hoodwinked, and was living the high life as ambassador of West Arctica for way longer than you'd think possible.

And I have to admit that I can't help but doff my hat to him.

It's entirely fair that he's being charged with business fraud, forgery, and various other crimes, but at least he was creative about it.  I'd take criminals like him over the current bunch of ignorant, racist, pedophile-enabling fascists we have running this country in a heartbeat.

At least Jain has panache, you know?

Anyhow, if you want to contact me with a response to this post, or send along some much-needed foreign aid, you can reach me at the imperial castle of the Great and Glorious Empire of Perry City.  You may address your correspondence to my personal secretary, Jethro LaFlooffe, who will get right on it once he's done taking a very important nap.  Unfortunately, he's as likely to eat your letter as to pass it along to me, so be forewarned.  Assuming it eventually reaches my desk, though, I'm happy to consider any official request for diplomatic recognition between my country and yours.

You know, as one sovereign nation to another.

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Jars, bones, and solar calendars

Today we're back to the subject of cool archaeological discoveries, thanks to a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia who sent me links about recent research giving us a lens into humanity's past.

The first has to do with the discovery of 65 giant sandstone jars that were found buried in Assam, in the northeastern part of India.  "Giant" is no exaggeration; these jars average three meters tall and two meters wide, and some weigh over three hundred kilograms.  Stone artifacts are notoriously hard to date accurately -- the archaeologists believe that they were created some time before 1300 C.E., but might be as much as two millennia older than that.  Just about everything about them -- who created them and why, and why they were buried in the site -- is unknown.  They must have had some pressing reason, as fashioning (and then burying) tons of sandstone into a lidded jar is no inconsequential amount of work.  But the jars haven't yielded any contents of note that might account for their creation.

But the story has an interesting legendary twist.  The Naga people, who are one of the main ethnic groups in the region, say they've stumbled upon such jars before, and found them filled with bodily remains and valuables -- i.e., that they were used in burial rituals.  However, they're insistent that they (well, their ancestors) weren't the ones who made the jars.  The jars were created, they say, by a mysterious people called the Siemi -- a race of small, dark-skinned people who dwelled in the forest, and were known to be "uncanny" and adept at magic.  In particular, they were skilled at making deo-moni, or "spirit beads," that conferred power upon the wearer.  Well, in the thirteenth century C.E., when the region was overrun by the Bodo-Kachari, the king caught some of the Siemi and wanted to know how the beads were made.  The Siemi refused, even under torture, to reveal the secret.  Infuriated, the king wiped out the entire culture, except for a few survivors who disappeared into the jungle, where they still live today, in secret.

The legend has a lot of commonality with the Irish sídhe, which is sometimes translated as "fairies" or "elves," and who are supposedly the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a magical race who were the first inhabitants of Ireland.  When the sídhe were defeated and ousted, they went into hiding, and became the "good people" of wild areas, for whom the appellation "good" is more appeasement than it is accurate, because they were tricksters and sometimes outright dangerous.  (The famous banshee -- Irish bean sí -- is one of them, and the name translates to "fairy woman")

Our second story comes to us from Peru, where a remarkable structure in the desert known as Chankillo has been found to be a solar calendar.  It's a curious-looking place, thirteen massive stones in a line down the crest of a hill, each with a slot cut into it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juancito28, Foto torres de chankillo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Excavation of the site not only uncovered a fortified temple, but clarified the function of the towers.  They are angled so that the rising Sun shines straight down the slot of each tower in turn as the point on the horizon drifts southward in summer and northward as winter approaches.  The angle at which the sunlight at dawn strikes the slots makes the array act as an enormous sundial -- but keeping track of the day of the year rather than the hour of the day.  Scientists have suggested that careful observation of this angle could have allowed its creators to estimate the day of the year to an accuracy of a day or two on either side, a highly useful skill in an area of extremes of seasonal rainfall and drought.

The people who built Chankillo are called the Casma-Sechin culture, but they're almost a complete mystery.  The earliest traces of the Casma-Sechin are in the region of Chankillo all the way back in 7600 B.C.E., and for the next seven millennia they left a continuous (if sparse) archaeological record of pottery, textiles, and stone structures.  There are signs of hostile invasions toward the end of their rule, and evidence of complete destruction in around 100 B.C.E. -- leaving behind traces of a mysterious people about whose ethnic affinities, language, and culture we still know next to nothing.

Our final story comes to us from Hungary, where relics of an ancient civilization of conquerors have yielded secrets of their origins.  I'm not talking about the infamous Huns, who ruled much of central and eastern Europe in the fifth century C.E., but the Avars -- who were in charge afterward and for almost three times longer, only collapsing under pressure and outright attacks from the Franks (to the north and east) and the Slavs (from the south and west) in around 900 C.E.  

Despite their being well-attested in the records, nothing was known about where they came from, nor whether they were allied to another group that went by the same name in the Caucasus Mountains.  But now, a DNA analysis of bones from eight Avar graves in Hungary has found their surprising origins -- thousands of kilometers away in what is now eastern Mongolia and northern China.

"The Avars did not leave written records about their history and these first genome-wide data provide robust clues about their origins," said Choongwon Jeong of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Archaeology.  "The historical contextualization of the archaeogenetic results allowed us to narrow down the timing of the proposed Avar migration.  They covered more than five thousand kilometers in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus, and after ten more years settled in what is now Hungary.  This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to this point."

What could have impelled them to haul ass across the steppe is still uncertain, but a good guess is that these are the remnants of the ruling class of the Rouran Empire, who ruled what is now the state of Xinjiang, China and much of Mongolia, only collapsing under pressure from the Turks and Chinese in the mid-sixth century C.E. -- right around the time the Avars tore into eastern Europe.

And that's this week's cool stuff from the ancient world.  And thanks to the readers who sent me the links -- keep 'em coming.  I'm always eager to learn about stuff I didn't know, and all three of these were completely new to me.

So much to know, so little time.

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Feats of clay

As I write this, I'm waiting for a kiln full of pottery to cool enough that I can open it.

Opening a kiln, especially after the final (glaze) firing, is a bit like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.  Even though I have about ten years of experience making pottery, it's still a crapshoot every single time, mostly because so many things can go wrong along the way.  My first pottery teacher said never to get attached to a pot until it's cool, in your hands, after the final firing, and there's a lot of truth in that.  Besides the built-in uncertainty of a complex, multi-step process that never quite works the same way twice, there's the added complication that I love to mess around with new techniques, especially new glaze combinations.

So I must admit that just about all of my failures have been my own damn fault.

Sometimes, though, things work out a great deal better than you expect.

I got into pottery on a whim.  I've never been much good at artistic pursuits -- my former students will attest to the fact that my ability to draw kind of topped out in third grade -- but my wife is a brilliant artist, and had been taking lessons in pottery for a while.  She convinced me to give it a try, and after one lesson I was hooked.  I'm still at it ten years later, even though mostly I still just think of it as playing in the mud for adults.

Then there are the (many) times it doesn't go so well.  We have turned our failures into a game called "Confusing Future Archaeologists."

I've done a lot of wheel-throwing and hand-building, and we now have a studio that is completely taken over by pottery equipment.  I must say, in all seriousness, that pottery kind of saved my sanity during the pandemic lockdown.  Having something creative to focus on was a godsend.

Working on the wheel

I have no desire to learn to be a professional potter; an amateur I am, and an amateur I shall remain.  If every once in a while I produce something I judge as worthy of keeping, that's cool, but mostly I'm just in it to have fun.

Then, there's the potential for combining pottery with my other obsessions.  Yes, I know I'm a total fanboy.  No, I don't care.

The reason this comes up is a paper I ran into a couple of days ago in The Journal of Anthropological Archaeology about the techniques for pottery-making used by the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization of northwestern India four thousand years ago.  A team led by Alessandro Ceccarelli of the University of Cambridge did a detailed analysis of fragments of pottery from the Indus Civilization, and found that they were already using a great many of the techniques potters still use today -- pinching, slab-building, coiling, and wheel-throwing.  You might wonder how the researchers could discern the latter; a well-made coiled pot and a wheel-thrown pot can look a great deal alike.  But microscopic analysis of the shards showed that even after smoothing and firing, hand-built pottery still shows traces of the scraping potters do to join the pieces together and avoid cracking, while wheel-thrown pottery retains evidence of rotational stress in the clay particles that comes from the torque on the clay from the spinning wheel and the drag exerted by the potter's hands.

When I read that last bit, I thought, "Oh, of course."  One of the things wheel-throwers learn very early on is that throwing creates a twist in the clay, even if the homogeneity of the material makes it hard to see.  Multi-part pieces like teapots are where this is the most critical; when you put the spout on a teapot, you have to account for the fact that during firing the clay will "relax" or untwist a little, so what was joined to the body of the teapot as a perfectly-aligned spout can come out of the kiln tilted to the side.  Once you figure out how much the clay you're using untwists, you compensate by putting the spout on tilted a little in the other direction -- so during the firing, the spout will right itself and come out properly aligned.

It's kind of amazing to me how far back these techniques go.  Think about the insight our distant ancestors must have had to take this common substance -- clay -- and fashion it into something not only useful, but beautiful.  Now, I sit down at an electric wheel with homogeneous store-bought clay and perfectly-formulated stains and glazes, and fire my work in an electric kiln.  (And I still have pieces that flop sometimes.)  Consider the trial-and-error that must have gone into digging and refining natural clay, developing techniques for shaping (including figuring out how to build a kick-wheel), figuring out which available minerals would work as colorants and glazes, and using pit firing to harden the clay to make the piece usable for containing food or drink.  Modern potters are the inheritors of what clay artisans have learned over millennia of attempts, innovations, successes and failures.

"This study doesn’t just look at how pottery was made – it gives us a fascinating insight into some of the earliest ‘social networks’ and how people passed on knowledge and skills over centuries without the use of books or the technology we now take for granted," Ceccarelli said, in an interview with Heritage Daily.  "The objects we examined suggested that while communities of ceramic makers lived in the same regions – and often in the same settlements – different traditions emerged and were sustained over centuries.  There was a clear effort to keep alive their unique ways of making pottery to set them apart from other communities, like a statement of their identity."

All of which makes me wonder what those future archaeologists will think about my pile of smashed pottery.

But now, I need to wrap this up, and go check the kiln.  I swear, waiting for it to cool is like a kid waiting for Christmas.  And hoping that the brightly-colored boxes under the tree contain something better than socks, underwear, or an ugly sweater.

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My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Congress of lunatics

I don't know if it's reassuring or distressing for me to find out that here in the United States we don't own a monopoly on anti-scientific whackjobs.

I mean, we do have a good many of 'em, there's no doubt of that.  Just counting the young-Earth creationists and the climate change deniers, we're pretty well stocked.  Add to that the people who believe in astrology, phone-in psychics, homeopathy, conspiracy theories, and the latest heinous lies uttered by our alleged commander-in-chief, and you've got a sizable fraction of Americans for whom logic and evidence are not exactly paramount.

So it's easy for me to slip into despair about my countrymen, and accounts for the mixed feelings I had upon reading about last month's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress, meant to be a gathering of the finest scientific minds across India, where attendees were told a number of eye-opening claims, to wit:

• Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity were a "huge blunder."
• Dinosaurs were created by the god Brahma.
• The first in vitro fertilizations of humans were not done in Great Britain in 1977, they were done thousands of years ago in (where else?) India.
• Isaac Newton "didn't really understand gravity" and his Universal Theory of Gravitation is flat-out wrong.
• The first mechanical flight was achieved in (where else?) India, when twenty-four different kinds of aircraft were invented by Ravana, a demon god with ten heads.

If at any point you were expecting me to say, "Okay, I made the last one up," sorry to disappoint you -- these were all genuine claims made, by alleged scientists, at the meeting.

Ravana, inventor of the airplane [Image is in the Public Domain]

And in case I haven't made the point strenuously enough; this was a meeting of, by, and for professional scientists.  To be fair, a lot of the attendees were up in arms that their gathering had been, for all intents and purposes, hijacked by a bunch of superstitious loons.  "We never dreamed that some of them would spout such irrational ideas," zoologist Ashok Saxena said, in an interview with NPR after the fiasco occurred.  "They were invited to speak based on their science credentials."

"It makes me uncomfortable when pseudoscience statements are made from a platform like the Indian Science Congress," said Kushagra Agrawal, senior lecturer in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.  "The idea of such events is to show the world India's scientific prowess, but it makes me wonder what impression those Nobel laureates and other foreign scientist dignitaries will take from our country."

Indeed.  It's hard to see how any serious scientist wouldn't be appalled at this -- and, very likely, take his contributions to the field elsewhere rather than presenting at an event that had been turned into a Three-Ring-Circus of Superstitious Nonsense.  But it remains to be seen how they could have prevented it.  Previously, there was no requirement by the oversight agency that presenting scientists submit their speeches for review prior to the event; organizers trusted that credentials would assure relevance.

Fortunately, they're not going to make that mistake again.  "We've never censored scientists before," said Indian Science Congress General Secretary Premendu Mathur.  "We expected them to motivate young minds and speak responsibly, but now, each session will have to be closely monitored.  We won't allow others to use our platform for their selfish reasons anymore."

I wish Mathur luck, and certain agree with his aims, but I would like to warn him that the one thing superstitious nutjobs don't do well is shut the hell up.  If you deny them one venue, they'll find another bigger and better one.  Anyone who has the balls to get up in front of a bunch of scientists and say that airplanes were invented by a ten-headed demon god is not going to be dissuaded by a little inconvenience like submitting his speech ahead of time.

So that's today's dip in the deep end, which to my fellow Americans should either be reassuring or not, depending on how you choose to look at it.  Of course, there's a part of me that hopes there is a flaw in the Theory of Relativity, and that the speed of light isn't the universal cosmic speed limit.  Because I really want warp drive to be a thing.  But given that these same people are claiming that dinosaurs were a special creation of the gods, I'm thinking it unlikely that if it is true, these guys will be the ones who will discover it.

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You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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

Night stalker

Just last night my wife and I watched the Dr. Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor," from 2010 (one of the episodes of the Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith).  In it, he and his companion, Amy Pond, go back to Auvers-sur-Oise, France, in 1890, where they meet Vincent van Gogh.

Well, it turns out that van Gogh is having a hell of a time, and not just because the townspeople in Auvers think he's a nut and his paintings are trash.  (Which, apparently, they did in real life.)  Van Gogh is being hunted by a giant reptilian/avian monster called the Krafayis, which kills people but doesn't eat them -- and the twist is that for reasons never explained, van Gogh is the only one who can see it.

Okay, I have to admit when I summarize it that way, it sounds pretty fucking stupid.  But it's a really good episode, and I say that not just because I've become something of a Dr. Who fanatic.  It's a seriously bittersweet story, very well written, and Tony Curran's portrayal of van Gogh is spot-on.  And if the end doesn't make you cry, you have a heart made of stone.

The reason this comes up is because by some sort of odd synchronicity, I ran into a report from the site Mysterious Universe this morning that a beast that no one has been able to describe has (as of the point the article was written) injured twelve people, not in France (that would have been too much of a coincidence) but in the village of Dapodi, in the state of Maharashtra, India.  Like van Gogh's Krafayis, whatever is doing this makes a lot of noise, attacks people out of the blue and mauls the hell out of them, then disappears.

And this is one even the skeptics can't scoff at, because whatever's behind it, the injuries are quite real.  One of the victims, 35-year-old Kailas Pawar, suffered major head injuries, required 45 stitches to put him back together, and is still in the hospital.  The people who were attacked were sleeping outdoors, common in this sweltering climate.

Shadowman [Image licensed under the Creative Commons w:User:Timitzer, Shadowman-3, CC BY 3.0]

At first, officials thought the culprit might have been a leopard, but leopards are familiar animals to people in that region of India, and the victims swore up and down that's not what attacked them.  But when it came to describing what did attack them, things got oddly vague.  According to forest ranger M. N. Hazare, who spoke with several of the victims, "We showed the injured people photographs of leopards, hyenas, and even foxes, but they could not identify it.  They only said that the animal was larger than a dog.  Leopards normally attack their prey and drag them, but this has not happened here.  A hyena does not attack people sleeping in groups. So we are not able to ascertain which animal attacked so many people...  This is flat terrain.  There is a jungle along Bhima River, about ten or twelve kilometers away.  We don’t think a leopard would have come this far away."

I must say, the attacks are odd.  Unless an animal is rabid, most animals will attack people only when they feel threatened.  It's hard to see why an animal would repeatedly maul people sleeping near homes in a decent-sized village.  The other possibility is that the animal was hungry -- but animals that will hunt, kill, and eat humans are fortunately very few in number (a few documented cases have been the result of mountain lions, polar bears, and tigers).  And besides, none of the victims were dragged away and eaten.

All the thing did is pounce, beat the poor people to a pulp, and take off.

What's oddest is that no one has been able to describe it.  You'd think being clawed to within an inch of your life would sharpen your senses pretty well, but nobody has been able to refine the description past "big animal," which you could presumably figure out just from the nature of the attacks.  Of course, the attacks occurred at night in a village where I doubt there are streetlights, and the victims were roused out of a sound sleep by being bitten and scratched, so I suppose it's understandable that during the attack, "getting a good look at the attacker" took second seat to "figuring out how not to die."  But it's still strange that none of the victims could give any sort of description.

So right now, officials in Dapodi are discouraging people from sleeping in the open, and they're trying to keep an eye out for any big animals that aren't behaving themselves.  The problem is, if it's a Krafayis, they wouldn't see it anyway, unless they happen to have a brilliant but half-mad painter handy.

Okay, maybe it's just a leopard.  Stranger things have happened, and my desire to have it be something out-of-the-ordinary is just wishful thinking.  Still, if there's a whooshing noise, and a blue police box appears, and a disheveled man in a bow tie comes out with a gorgeous red-haired woman with a Scottish accent, somebody damned well better let me know.  I'll be on the next flight to India.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

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

Pride in place

Although it's pretty obvious that patriotism can be taken too far, I'm all for making the country you live in the best it can be, and then expressing your pride in it.  There are a lot of things I like about being American, for example; and although there are times I wish I lived elsewhere (mostly after listening to Ann Coulter), all in all I'm pretty happy about being a citizen of the United States.

Of course, there's a couple of ways this perfectly natural predilection for your own culture can go wrong.  One is that it can blind you to its faults.  Consider the column this week from Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow, who said that what the world needs is an American jihad:

An American jihad would turn back and topple the terrible self-loathing in our citizens set in motion by President Obama, beginning with his ‘apology tour’ — a psychological plague... We would not only allow, but teach, Americans — including American children — to internalize and project their justifiable feelings of pride in our democracy as superior to all other forms of government. In grade schools we would teach the truth that the founding of our nation and its survival in the face of communism and fascism weren’t just good luck or good planning, but preordained by our commitment to the truth about the essential nature of man. And we would embrace the certain knowledge that history will eventually spread our values all over the globe. 

We the People of the United States are good and we are right. And we need the spirit of an American jihad to properly invite, intensify and focus our intentions to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution here at home, and to seek to spread its principles abroad.

So yeah.  I can see no way that that could go wrong.

But there's a second, and more insidious, way that unbridled patriotism can go awry, and that's when you come to the conclusion that anything that's good must have come from your culture.  And as if to bookend Dr. Ablow's jingoistic screed, this week we had some baffling observations from the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

Modi addressed a gathering of doctors and other professionals in Mumbai last Saturday, and presented his opinion that advances in our understanding of genetics and medicine were not due to research done primarily in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe; the West was merely rediscovering what the Indians have known all along:

We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time.  We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb.  This means that genetic science was present at that time.  That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.

But that is far and away not the most bizarre thing that Modi said.  As regards to astronomy, Modi made the following observation:

There must be many areas in which our ancestors made big contributions.  Some of these are well recognized.  If we talk about space science, our ancestors had, at some point, displayed great strengths in space science.  What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago is being recognized by science today.  What I mean to say is that we are a country which had these capabilities.  We need to regain these.

And lest you think he was just talking about astronomical observations, you should be aware that Modi believes that airplanes were invented by the god Rama.

My favorite comment, though, was about a different god:

We worship Lord Ganesha.  There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.

That's right, folks; the leader of one of the most populous nations on Earth thinks that an elephant-headed mythological figure is evidence that his distant ancestors had discovered how to do plastic surgery.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's all very well to be proud of your culture, nation, religion, ethnicity, or whatever.  But being willfully blind to the accomplishments of others is hardly a virtue.  "I'm happy I'm an American" can all too easily morph into "I'm happy I'm not from Ruritania," and that into "If anything great is out there, it must be from the United States and not from Ruritania."

Which is not only bigoted, it's also demonstrably false.

Homeopathy, allopathy, and the right to prescribe drugs

New from the "This Is Seriously Not A Good Idea" department: the Indian Medical Association has just announced a decision to allow homeopathic "doctors" prescribe real medicines, i.e., substances that have actual therapeutically active compounds in them.

Not everyone is thrilled by this idea, fortunately.  Dr. Jayesh Lele, who is the secretary of the IMA's Maharashtra chapter, didn't sound particularly sanguine.  "We have gathered over thirty judgments delivered in various Indian courts, including the Supreme Court, that ruled against practitioners of alternative therapy prescribing allopathic medicines," Dr. Lele told The Times of India.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, "allopathy" means "real medical science."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You'd think that the homeopaths would be elated to have this kind of Official Seal of Approval.  After all, the fact that they're being allowed to prescribe actual medicines could be construed as some sort of vindication of their skills as healers by the powers-that-be.  But in an odd twist, not all of the homeopaths are happy with the decision.  "Dr." Shreepad Khadekar, a Mumbai homeopath, hinted that the ruling would dilute homeopathic practice, which I find so ironic that it should somehow be added to the Alanis Morissette song.

Khadekar said, "It is definitely the darkest period in a real homeopath's life.  Soon my science will become extinct, thanks to the unfortunate decision."

My response, predictably, is I doubt that we'll be that lucky.   Khadekar's "science" has thus far survived a concerted effort by the folks over at the James Randi Educational Foundation, not to mention a whole list of lawsuits against the manufacturers of homeopathic "remedies" and the charlatans who dispense them.  Of course, the situation in India adds a whole new layer of crazy to the topic; do we really trust people who don't understand the concept of serial dilution, Avogadro's limit, and the placebo effect to dispense real drugs correctly?  Individuals who in order to prop up their bizarre concept of how the body works have to resort to blathering about "energies" and "vibrations" and "quantum imprints?"

I mean, at least before, all they were handing out were vials of water and sugar pills.  Sure, they weren't curing diseases, but at least what they were giving you was harmless.

I have a dear friend whom I watched studying for the board exams to become a nurse practitioner -- the amount of information you have to have at your fingertips in order to decide which drug to prescribe, not to mention correctly calculating dosage, is absolutely immense.  So the folks over in India think it's a good idea to allow people to do that who evidently don't understand the fact that zero atoms of an active ingredient have no effect?

I don't see this ending well.

I find it amazing that this nonsense is still out there, given what we now understand about biochemistry.  Here in the United States homeopathic "remedies" are ubiquitous -- they're on the shelves in our local pharmacy, row upon row of glass vials containing nothing of value (but quite expensive, I feel obliged to point out).  But at least we haven't taken the further step of allowing the homeopaths themselves to have access to real drugs.  That, fortunately, is still the purview of people who have the educational background to know what they're doing.  If you're in India, though, and you fall ill -- well, all I can say is, make sure you ask what your medical service provider's background is before you take his or her advice, and beyond that, caveat emptor.

Sanal Edamaruku and the death curse

A good many of the topics I discuss on Skeptophilia are serious, and more than a few are (or should be) rage-inducing. There are times when the idiocy people are driven to by superstition and credulity rightly makes rationalists furious.

Other times, though, the whole thing devolves into street theater.  Witness what happened to Sanal Edamaruku back in 2008.

You might know Edamaruku's name.  He's a skeptic and outspoken atheist in India, where he is the president of the Indian Rationalist Association and the founder and president of Rationalist International.  Edamaruku has, in the past few years, become something of a lightning rod in India for the fight against superstition, and in fact he was brought up on blasphemy charges last year after exposing a "weeping Jesus" statue in a Catholic church in Mumbai as a hoax.  (He left the country shortly thereafter, and is currently touring Europe and speaking out against the role of religion in government -- so the outcome of the charges is, as yet, pending.)

So a lot of what Edamaruku involves himself in is deadly serious -- his courage at fighting indoctrination and discrimination in one of the most thoroughly religious countries in the world is an inspiration.  But just yesterday, I ran into a video of something that he did that ranks right up there with some of the best comedy I've seen -- and that's even considering that the whole thing was in Hindi and I didn't understand a single word of it.

Apparently it all started five years ago when the minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Uma Bharati, accused a political rival of using the powers of a "tantrik" (a black magician) to harm her.  The magic of the tantrik had, Bharati said, caused her uncle to die, made her hit her head on the door of her car, and made mysterious blisters arise on her leg.

Well, Edamaruku was interviewed and asked about the claim, and he said that it was ridiculous.  No one, he said, could harm someone using magic.  And then, Edamaruku challenged the tantrik -- one Pandit Surinder Sharma -- to try and kill him on public television.

You should watch the video of the result.  Trust me.  It's brilliant.

It's hard to pick out my favorite aspect of this film.  The serious expression on Sharma's face, as contrasted to Edamaruku, who looks like he's trying not to burst out laughing.  The point where Sharma takes off his shirt, as if to say, "Okay, this magic will work much better if you can see my flabby chest."  The chanting, the waving around of a knife, the flicking of water droplets at Edamaruku, who stands there, an amused expression on his face, through it all.  Best of all, the point where Sharma asks for more time.

"Hang on," Sharma seems to be saying, "I'm not done yet.  Hold still while I kill you some more."

The ordeal lasted two hours (the video I linked is a six-minute excerpt), at which time the anchor declared it a failure, as Edamaruku had endured it all without a scratch (much less a mysterious blister).  According to one source, Sharma was baffled by his inability to magically hurt Edamaruku, and said, "You must worship a strong god who was protecting you the whole time."

"Actually, I'm an atheist," Edamaruku replied.

But it takes a lot to discourage a magician, and Sharma said that he wanted to try again, this time using "ultimate magic."  Here's an eyewitness description of what followed:

The encounter took place under the open night sky. The tantrik and his two assistants were kindling a fire and staring into the flames. Sanal was in good humour. Once the ultimate magic was invoked, there wouldn’t be any way back, the tantrik warned. Within two minutes, Sanal would get crazy, and one minute later he would scream in pain and die. Didn’t he want to save his life before it was too late? Sanal laughed, and the countdown begun. The tantriks chanted their “Om lingalingalingalinga, kilikilikili….” followed by ever changing cascades of strange words and sounds. The speed increased hysterically. They threw all kinds of magic ingredients into the flames that produced changing colours, crackling and fizzling sounds and white smoke. While chanting, the tantrik came close to Sanal, moved his hands in front of him and touched him, but was called back by the anchor. After the earlier covert attempts of the tantrik to use force against Sanal, he was warned to keep distance and avoid touching Sanal. But the tantrik “forgot” this rule again and again. 

Now the tantrik wrote Sanal’s name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. Nothing happened. Singing and singing, he sprinkled water on Sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. Sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. Only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. He kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked Sanal to touch it. Sanal did so, and the grand magic finale begun. The tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. That moment, Sanal should have broken down. But he did not. He laughed. Forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five… it’s over!

Myself, I think Edamaruku missed a sterling opportunity.  I think when Sharma threw the "clod of wheat flour dough" into the fire, Edamaruku should have clutched his chest and fallen to the ground.  Then, when Sharma declared himself victorious, Edamaruku would have stood up and said, "Oh, sorry.  Just kidding."

I know that's what I would have done.  But I'm just mean that way.

I find it heartening that we have people like Edamaruku in the world, who are not afraid to expose the sort of credulous nonsense of charlatans like Sharma for what it is.  And the fact that he can do so with confidence and unfailing good humor (and on public television, no less) is an inspiration.  You have to wonder how many Indians were led to question the veracity of their beliefs by watching this spectacle.

In some religious philosophy, one is encouraged to laugh at the devil -- ridicule, it is said, is the one thing that Satan cannot stand.  I, however, would turn that around.  Laughter is one of the soundest weapons of rationality.  If we illuminate superstition with the clear light of science, it can't help seeming funny -- and our ability to laugh at it is the first step toward letting it all go.

Real vs. fake astrology

Astrology is not, unfortunately, limited to the western world.  People have looked to the sky for portents, not just in Europe and the Americas, for millennia.  There's a tale from Chinese history that over four thousand years ago, two astrologers, Ho and Hsi, were executed by the emperor for failing to predict a solar eclipse (that their other predictions were correct, I doubt, but that's a big one to miss given that astrologers are supposed to have their eyes in the sky all the time).

India has its own astrological tradition, based in the Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindu religion.  And like many of these beliefs, they have persisted up to today.  Vedic astrology is still so popular that courses in it are taught in several Indian universities.  And I'm not just talking about looking at the beliefs from an anthropological perspective; no, they're taught as if they were science (which I find appalling).  In particular, the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party has championed the study of astrology as science, with one of their most outspoken leaders, former Minister of Human Resources Murli Manohar Joshi, stating that he wanted to see universities come up with grant proposals for ways to "rejuvenate the science of Vedic astrology in India," and then "export it to the world."  [Source]

As if we don't have enough ridiculous woo-woo ideas of our own around here already.

Now, however, Joshi and others of the BJP are trying to introduce legislation that would require astrologers to register with state authorities.  Joshi himself was the keynote speaker at the 4th International Astrological Conference in Karnataka, where he made the announcement.  The Karnataka Astrologers' Association, who hosted the conference, are fully in favor of this, which is a little puzzling; you would think that such a move would be as popular as the time that legislation was passed in Romania requiring witches to pay income tax.

But no, the KAA and other such groups are solidly behind this move.  Why, you might ask?

The answer: because this will help to sort out "real astrologers" from "fake astrologers."

I'm not making this up.  The vice president of the KAA has gone on record as stating that these fake astrologers put forth "mindless prophecies," that damage "the reputation of astrology, which is traditionally viewed as a science."

Oh.  I see.  And the "real astrologers" put forth what kind of prophecies, again?

It would be entertaining to have the KAA host a contest, where a "real astrologer" and a "fake astrologer" both make predictions based on the stars, and wait to see which one comes true.  My own analysis of the position of the planet Saturn relative to the constellation Orion has indicated that both of them would fail miserably, an outcome that would confirm my belief that all of astrology, be it Vedic, Chinese, or the horoscope from the New York Times, is patent horse waste.

Of course, the sad fact is that it's pretty unlikely that (1) the KAA would agree to any such thing, or that (2) true believers would stop believing even if such a contest had the results I predicted.  Astrology is far too subject to such errors in thinking as the dart-thrower's bias -- the tendency of people to notice the hits and ignore the misses.  And the astrologers themselves often engage in a form of the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy -- where they call attention to past correct predictions, and conveniently fail to mention all the ones they missed.  (The name of the fallacy comes from a story of a Texas man who had bullseyes painted on his barn wall, and each one had a bullet hole exactly in the center.  It turned out that he'd shot the holes first, and then painted the bullseyes around them afterwards.)

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out.  Will the "real astrologers" have to present a document certifying that they've taken Vedic astrology course work at one of the Indian universities that offers it?  Will they have to undergo a rigorous exam testing their knowledge of the rules of the game?  The worst part of it all is that if this legislation succeeds, it will amount to a major world government lending credence to the superstitious beliefs of a bunch of charlatans, and further confusing the gullible public about what science actually is.

But of course, since we have the Institute for Creation Research right here in the US doing the same thing, and doing their level best to influence public policy, perhaps I shouldn't point fingers.

Blasphemy, leaky plumbing, and the Weeping Cross of India

It is an interesting distinction, and one many people seem to be unable to recognize -- that there is a difference between being victimized and simply being told that you're demonstrably wrong.

I remember, for example, a former student of mine, a young African American woman who had a chip on her shoulder so big she could have used a visit to a chiropractor, who was in one of my math classes.  She routinely failed exams -- whether from lack of effort or from lack of ability was hard to tell -- but her low grades finally resulted in a parent conference.  During the conference, her mother said that her low grades in math were due to one thing: the fact that I was a racist.  I was giving her daughter low grades, she said, because I was prejudiced against African Americans, and considered them "less intelligent."

I tried (unsuccessfully) to point out that my attitudes toward people of other races had little relevance, especially given that this was a math class -- the girl was seemingly incapable of solving algebra problems correctly.  My marking a problem wrong had nothing to do with her race; anyone who had tried to solve the problem that way would have been marked wrong.

Of course, it made no difference.  People who make a career out of being victims have remarkably little respect for facts and logic.  Whether she thought that her daughter's wrong answers would have magically become right if her math teacher had had darker skin is a matter of conjecture, but that's certainly what it sounded like.

Which brings us to the case of the Weeping Cross of India.  (Source)

In the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni, in Mumbai, there is a cross that began to drip water one day, resulting in a steady trickle that collected at the feet of the figure of Jesus.  Devout Catholics pronounced it a miracle, and began to show up by the hundreds to collect the "tears" in vials, stating that it was "holy water" and could heal people who were anointed with it.  Local church leaders jumped right on the bandwagon, circulating photographs of the miraculous statue, and encouraging everyone to come and witness the phenomenon.

One of the people who did is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International.  He came to Mumbai on March 10, and after a brief investigation he discovered what was happening; a water pipe in an adjoining washroom had sprung a leak, saturating the wall behind the crucifix.  The water was being wicked up through the porous material of the cross, eventually seeping out and dripping onto Jesus' feet.

You'd think that the Catholic leaders would have a good laugh at themselves, and then hired a plumber, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong.  Five church leaders, including Father Augustine Palett, the pastor of the church that houses the crucifix, were interviewed by a local news program and demanded that Edamaruku apologize for his "hostility."  He refused, and held his own news conference in which he explained his position, and described how the phenomenon had a purely natural explanation.  The priests responded by demanding that local law enforcement officials arrest Edamaruku for blasphemy, under a clause of Indian penal code that one may not "hurt the sentiments of a particular religious community."  As of this writing, the police are trying to locate and arrest Edamaruku, so far without success, so I'm uncertain as to how this story will end.

What occurs to me is, can these people really not see that there's a difference between being harassed and simply being wrong?  Edamaruku didn't say that the Catholics were bad people, or that they should be discriminated against; he simply said that they had made a mistake.  This is no more blasphemy than my marking my long-ago student's algebra problems wrong was racism.

And as far as India's anti-blasphemy law, under which Edamaruku may well soon be arrested; is it really reasonable that anyone should be able to claim anything, without challenge, simply by the expedient of adding, "and that's my religious belief?"  A statement that is factual in nature can presumably be verified, and its correctness determined by some means that is the same for everyone.  (This is called science, by the way.)  The water in the crucifix either is appearing by miraculous means, or it is not.  Edamaruku determined that it was not.  You do not suddenly turn the claim of its being a miracle into a factual statement by saying, "Oh, but it is my religious belief that the water isn't coming from a leaky pipe!" -- any more than 2 + 2 = 5 as long as you aren't a racist.