Shorts weather

Being the end of summer, I thought my readers would be in the mood for shorts.

No, not those kind of shorts.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons marcore! from Hong Kong, China, Board shorts 4, CC BY 2.0]

Today I've got three quick-takes for you from the world of the weird, starting with one of my favorite places: the beautiful land of Scotland.

A company called "Snaptrip," a UK-based holiday booking company, is offering free stays in Scotland -- for life -- for the first people who can provide proof that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

"We want to get our hands on as much evidence as possible to prove that the monster is real and give our customers yet another reason to visit the beautiful Scottish Isles," said Snaptrip founder and CEO Matt Fox.  "If you have any proof, please get in touch and let us know!"

Fox said that his company will foot the bill for five Scottish holidays per year, for life, for the first twenty people who come up with "satisfactory evidence."  Which is pretty optimistic, given that people have been at this for over a hundred years and have yet to produce any evidence that would convince someone who wasn't already leaning that direction.  So the chances of one person coming forward to claim the prize are low to nonexistent, much less twenty.

Still, the idea of free trips to Scotland is a pretty nice incentive.  If I had some good cryptid-searching equipment, I'd probably give it a go myself.  In any case, if any of my readers are so inclined, here's an opportunity to use your hunting skills for a reward other than the notoriety.

Second, there's a group in Thailand that is meditating daily, with the goal of inducing aliens to help us avoid a nuclear apocalypse scheduled for 2022.

The group, UFO Kaokala, got its name and its mission after one of the members spotted a UFO on top of Mount Khao Kala in Thailand, so now they meet there every day to try and get the aliens to come back.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the aliens are apparently from Pluto.  So seems like they'd find it a bit warm here on Earth, given that the average surface temperature on Pluto is -230 C, or only 44 degrees above absolute zero.  You'd think that even if they landed on a mild spring day on Earth, they'd melt or spontaneously burst into flame or something.

Who knows, though?  If they have the technology to get here, they probably have refrigerated suits.

"Instead of eating food, [the Plutonians] eat capsules," said Wassana Chansamnuan, who has been part of UFO Kaokala since 1998, following her receipt of a telepathic message from the aliens.  "They can communicate with anyone, regardless of their native tongue.  Most importantly, they follow a sabai sabai, or relaxed, working style.  When disaster strikes, they don't want humans to stress out, at least not too much."

Well, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, I think I'd stress out no matter how much I'd meditated, but that's just me.

Apparently the goal of attracting the aliens is working, if you believe fifty-year-old Ukrin Thaonaknathiphithak, who I had to mention just so I could include his last name in my post.  He said he's seen seventeen UFOs at one time, which seems a little excessive, but maybe he's really good at meditating.

Still, the outlook is kind of grim.  Only thirty percent of the human population is going to survive past the nuclear war in 2022, said long-time member Ann Thongcharoen.  "At the time of crisis, the aliens will choose good people to live in the new age," she says.  "So people who think about dhamma or cosmic law or Buddha are good universal citizens," and will presumably be the ones the aliens will select.

So I guess I'm pretty well fucked either way, but I suppose that's not really a surprise to anyone.

Speaking of death, doom, and gloom, our last story is about people who want to cheat the Grim Reaper, and I'm not referring to Mitch McConnell, although cheating him would be kind of nice, too.  This is the brainchild of a company called HereAfter, which for a fee (of course) will upload hours and hours of your voice saying stuff, so when you die, you can still have a conversation with your loved ones.

"My parents have been gone for decades, and I still catch myself thinking, 'Gee, I would really like to ask my mom or dad for some advice or just to get some comfort,'" said Andrew Kaplan, who has agreed to be one of HereAfter's first guinea pigs.  "I don’t think the urge ever goes away...  I have a son in his thirties, and I’m hoping this will be of some value to him and his children someday."

HereAfter's founders, Sonia Talati and James Vlahos, have their sights set higher than just prerecorded messages, though.  They're hoping to eventually use software that can form a picture of someone's personality through asking increasingly detailed questions, and download that personality profile along with the recorded voice into an emotionally intelligent digital personality to create a "PersonBot" that could interact with the survivors in the same way the original person would have.

Me, I'm not so fond of this idea.  I mean, I love my friends and family as much as anyone, but this really doesn't seem to be the answer.  I was really close to my Grandma Bertha, my father's mother, but if I was rooting around in the kitchen for a snack and I heard Grandma Bertha's voice saying, "Gordon, dear, you really need to eat something more nutritious than leftover vanilla pudding and a bag of potato chips," my reaction wouldn't be to get all sentimental about how nice it was to have her back.  My reaction would be to scream like a little child and run out of the room.

Also, this kind of thing always makes me think, "Haven't these people ever watched a science fiction movie?  Like, in their whole life?"  Because this has been tried before multiple times, and it never ends well.  BerthaBot ends up taking over the entire internet, killing various scientists, politicians, and innocent civilians including Sean Bean in the process, and a crack team of operatives led by Chris Evans has to infiltrate the Central Computer and unplug BerthaBot, at the end ignoring her plaintive voice crying out that for heaven's sake Chris really needs to put a shirt on before he catches his death of cold.

So I'm not really a fan.  If we're gonna put our time into something, immortality-wise, I would rather the effort go into ways to extend our healthy lifespans.  Because even if they somehow were able to upload my personality into the Cloud, it's not going to make much difference to the real me, you know?  I'll still be dead.

Anyhow, that's our shorts for today.  Free trips to Scotland, meditating to avert the apocalypse, and digital immortality for our voices.  It's nice, in a way, to see that people are still loping along, doing weird and pointless things, despite the fairly horrible stuff in the news lately.  Regardless of what happens, we're still capable of engaging in truly bizarre behavior.

Which now that I come to think of it, isn't really that comforting.

*****************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

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

Polygons on Pluto

When NASA's New Horizons probe made a flyby of Pluto last summer, it sent back remarkably detailed photographs of this strange frozen dwarf planet, so distant that even one of the fastest man-made vehicles took nine years to get there.  Naturally, it's taken scientists a while to explain what the photographs contained, given our prior lack of knowledge of Pluto's composition.

One of the most curious features noticed were more-or-less straight-sided "polygons" in a region called "Sputnik Planum."  There's no doubting that the pattern is peculiar:

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

And of course, all it takes is "peculiar observation" added to "scientists haven't explained this yet" to send the woo-woos of the world off into a dizzying spiral of completely loony speculation.

Here are a few suggestions as to what the "polygons" might be:

• the rubble-strewn walls of an ancient alien city
• a secret base on Pluto designed (possibly with alien help) by NASA.  If you buy this one, then New Horizons was not a research mission, but was going to reestablish contact with people who are already there
• evidence that Pluto is actually the fabled planet Nibiru
• the encampments of a hostile force from another solar system

Apropos of the last one, it didn't take long for someone to remember that Pluto has been identified as the site of H. P. Lovecraft's world "Yuggoth," home to sentient fungus-beings who are able to switch personalities with human beings and keep our consciousness stored in what amount to high-tech tin cans.

So okay.  Let's start with the fact that H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Whisperer in Darkness" is labeled "fiction."  As far as the rest of the hypotheses (I hate to dignify them with that name), allow me simply to say that if I were looking for a place to build a base, Pluto would not be my first choice.  For one thing, I hate cold weather, and Pluto's average surface temperature is -229 C.  Plus, it doesn't appear to have much of an atmosphere, and I kind of like going outside without putting on a space suit.

Additionally, we just got word a couple of days ago from actual scientists (i.e. people who prefer evidence and logic than talking out of their asses) that they now have a good working explanation for the polygons.  Planetary astronomers Andrew J. Dombard and Sean O'Hara of the University of Illinois have proposed that the pattern can be explained by vigorous convection -- what we are seeing are the tops of Rayleigh--Bénard convection cells, which occur when a fluid is heated from below.  (This is what causes the pattern you observe if you carefully add cream to hot coffee without stirring.)

"Evidence suggests this could be a roiling sea of volatile nitrogen ice," Purdue planetary scientist Jay Melosh explained.  "Imagine oatmeal boiling on the stove; it doesn't produce one bubble for the entire pot as the heated oatmeal rises to the surface and the cooler oatmeal is pushed down into the depths, this happens in small sections across the pot, creating a quilted pattern on the surface similar to what we see on Pluto.  Of course, on Pluto this is not a fast process; the overturn within each unit happens at a rate of maybe two centimeters per year."

So once again, we have a cool explanation of an odd natural pattern, without any recourse to aliens, conspiracies, Nibiru, or Yuggoth.  All of which reminds me of the wonderful quote from Tim Minchin: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... not magic."

Shenanigans in space

Well, you knew it was gonna happen.  I mean, I didn't think it'd be this fast, but I figured it was gonna happen sooner or later.

People are already saying that NASA is faking the images from Pluto.

Yes, I know.  The question of "Why would they do that?" appears to be unanswerable.  But as we've seen before, there is nothing that is so completely idiotic that there won't be conspiracy theorists who think it's true.

First we've got YouTuber Crow777, who has put together a video calling NASA out on their shenanigans.  As proof, he shows a photograph of Jupiter he took from right here on Earth with his own telescope, and then a fuzzy photograph of Pluto from the New Horizons probe.  "If this is all real," he says, "why can I get a clearer image of Jupiter in my backyard at four hundred million miles than NASA can get of Pluto at nine million miles?... Now this is just an insult to your intelligence."

Let's start with the fact that (1) Jupiter is bigger, (2) Pluto is much further from the Sun and therefore reflects less light to a camera regardless where you are taking the picture from, and (3) they did get much clearer pictures than the one that Crow777 used for his comparison.  But those were all faked, too, apparently.  How do you know that?  Because they are.  Stop asking questions.

[image courtesy of NASA]

And Crow777 is not just a lone wacko.  Well, maybe that's not true; he's a lone wacko, but there are many like-minded lone wackos out there.  Twitter erupted with tweets under the hashtag #NASAHoax like the following:

Pluto? You all having fun with this fake cgi pic !!! #NASA #NASAHoax biggest lie in history!!!!! #WakeUpAmerica they lied about that to 

Lmao so their other fake as hell satellite is able to take a photo of the #pluto inbound satellite. #gullible much? #NASAHoax 

TOO BAD ALL #NASA MISSIONS ARE FAKE HOAX.............. #PLUTO DON'T BELIEVE THE HOLOGRAMS , AT LEAST STAY CONSISTENT WITH THE IMAGES SMH #NASAHoax

Then we have a whole different sort of crazy over at Scam.com, courtesy of a poster going by the handle TruthIsNeverTooHorrible.  And Mr. Horrible has the following to say:

To get this mockery of the "space travel" simulated reality to terminate the show:
Pluto was the first celestial body created by the illuminati, decades before the creation of the space travel hoax, as exposed first by Last Prophet... 

Any celestial body that can not be observed with a telescope located ON Earth, is fake.  This one basic fact implies that for instance Pluto (the first example among millions) is an invention created by the illuminati.

And in the "Insanity Creates Odd Bedfellows" department, the Pluto Truthers here in the United States got some unexpected support... from hardline Muslims in Malaysia.  Apparently the consensus over there amongst the extremely devout is that the NASA photographs are "poyo" -- the Malay word for "stupid."  The images of Pluto, they said, were created using a green screen.  (Because green screening an image, and then replacing the green with black, makes ever so much sense.)  One poster on the Malay Daily Facebook page went on a lengthy tirade about how the Quran explains everything you need to know about space, including the fact that the sky has seven layers "guarded by angels who do not eat or sleep," thus making space travel impossible.

And also proving that it's not just here in the United States that we have people who would like to see ignorant superstition based on a holy book controlling science education.

Other pious Malaysians stated that it's impossible that the United States achieved this given that Russia and China are so much further ahead of us technologically and they haven't gone to Pluto, and that travel to Pluto is impossible anyhow because it's ten thousand light years away.

The news from Southeast Asia isn't all dismal, however.  The scientifically-minded countered with arguments demonstrating that the aforementioned loons are wrong.  Not that they'll do much good, given our track record for success in arguing with creationists over here in the States.  "This is why we can't be a developed country," lamented one Malaysian, while another put it more succinctly:  "RIP, brain."

But maybe NASA didn't invent the images of Pluto.  Maybe they're real... and they're still covering stuff up.  Like alien bases and buildings and stuff.  "We have discovered something shocking on the heart-shaped ice cap on the north of Pluto," says YouTuber UFOUnionTV.  "It looks very much like an alien base...  There is a perfectly-shaped building, and a road leading to this base...  The shadows have edges, they aren't round...  This is completely explained by this structure being artificial."

As further proof, let's go to the scientific texts written by H. P. Lovecraft about the planet Yuggoth, which supposedly orbited the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune:

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system...  There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone...  The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light.  They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples...  The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

So there you are, then.

You know, I wonder if back in the day there were people who thought like this.  When the first photographs of Jupiter and Saturn and so on were taken in the late 19th century, did people say, "No, those are faked!"  I mean, you can see Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye, and see some details even with a good set of binoculars... but remember that there are people who think that the Moon is a hologram.

There probably were, but my guess is that they were laughed into oblivion.  One of the downsides of the internet is that anyone who has a computer can launch a website or a YouTube channel, and it puts everyone on an equal footing, access-wise (although hardly credibility-wise).  And given that there are folks out there for whom "I saw it on the internet" constitutes proof, it's not to be wondered at that the crazy stuff spreads a lot faster today than it did a hundred years ago.

But I live in hope that the same forces that spread bullshit like wildfire are also giving people better access to science than they've ever had before.  The availability of knowledge, free (or nearly so), to everyone -- this is also a new thing.  All we need to assure is that people have the critical thinking skills to sift the wheat from the chaff, the science from the nonsense, the Pluto from the...

... Yuggoth.

Postcards from Pluto

I spend a lot of time, here at Skeptophilia, railing at unscientific, irrational views of the world.  Today, I'd like to celebrate a major accomplishment of humanity: this morning, virtually as I'm writing this, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons is making the closest-ever pass of a spacecraft to Pluto.

The magnitude of this feat isn't obvious at first.  Pluto is a small target -- its radius is estimated at about 1,180 kilometers -- and it's so far away that it's hard to picture.  Pluto's average distance from the sun is about 6,000,000,000 kilometers, although its orbit is so eccentric that it varies from a perihelion of 4.4 billion to an aphelion of 7.3 billion kilometers.  So how amazing a feat is this?

Let me give you an analogy.  This is like hitting an object the size of a tennis ball with an object the size of a speck of dust -- from 175 kilometers away.

Thus far, the information that has been coming back has been breathtaking.  Already we have seen that the surface of the planet is rusty-red in color and has a pattern on its surface shaped like a heart; that it seems to have ice caps of some sort; and that on its surface is a mysterious dark formation that's been nicknamed "The Whale," whose structure is as yet undetermined  We stand to learn more about Pluto's composition and history, and the characteristics of its moon Charon -- which, at a radius of about 630 km, is over half as big as the planet itself.  (In fact, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this weekend, "Pluto’s primary moon Charon is so large that their mutual center-of-mass lies not within Pluto but in empty space.")

Pluto, as seen from New Horizons on July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

But even tiny Pluto -- one-sixth the mass of the Earth's Moon, and one-third its volume -- has four other moons.  They've been named Styx, Nix, Kerberos, Hydra, after other denizens of the Greek underworld (Charon, you'll remember, is the ferryman who brings dead souls across the River Styx).  Its surface seems to be made predominantly of various kinds of ice, including frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide.  It's lightweight for its size -- its density is only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, only twice the density of liquid water -- leading astronomers to conjecture that it has a rocky core, and a mantle composed primarily of liquid water and water ice.  If this is correct, Pluto may have the highest percentage composition of water of any object in the Solar System.

Pluto and Charon -- July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

And the fun won't end with its closest pass this morning.  The probe is designed to keep sending back data for another sixteen months.  After that, it will continue sailing out of the Solar System, following Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, and now zooming out into interstellar space, some 12 billion kilometers away.

Some naysayers -- and there are more than you'd think -- have asked why we put time, effort, and (lots of) money into such endeavors.  So we find out the composition of a celestial body five-some-odd billion kilometers away from us.  So what?  What good does it do us?

I think the reason is that knowledge, in and of itself, is a worthy goal.  Always looking at the profit motive -- what benefit will it bring? -- is ignoring the fact that the inspiration gained from reaching for, and achieving, a lofty goal has a worth that can't be measured in dollars.  How many young minds were inspired by previous successes in pure science -- the discovery of how DNA works, the first humans to reach the Moon, the uncovering of countless bizarre fossil animals by paleontologists, the first manned submarine to descend into the Marianas Trench?

And what did those minds go on to accomplish?

I look at the images coming back from New Horizons with nothing but a sense of wonder and curiosity.  Such missions represent one of humanity's most fundamental drives; the thirst for knowledge.  So when you see the images that are coming back from the furthest reaches of the Solar System, don't just think of them as pictures of a distant denizen of our Solar System.  Think of them as symbols of the highest aspirations of the human mind and spirit.

Look before you leap

A friend and fellow Skeptophile sent a story to my attention on Facebook that seems fitting for the last Skeptophilia post of 2013.  It combines all of the essential elements: a claim that is so ridiculous that it clearly started as a hoax; a bunch of people (including folks in the media) who know so little science that they seem to have taken it seriously; a prediction that will have gullible individuals worldwide making complete fools of themselves next Saturday; and a Facebook back-and-forth that resulted in cheerful contributions from several loyal readers of this blog who were eager to get in on the fun of ripping the whole silly story to shreds.

The (recent) origin of the claim seems to have been this story in News Hound, entitled, "January 4, 2014 - Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity - Float For Five Minutes!"  Here's what they're claiming:

It has been revealed by the British astronomer Patrick Moore that, on the morning of January 4th 2014,  an extraordinary astronomical event will occur. At exactly 9:47 am, the planet Pluto will pass directly behind Jupiter, in relation to the Earth. This rare alignment will mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, temporarily counteracting the Earth’s own gravity and making people weigh less. Moore calls this the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect.

And here we run into our first five problems with this claim:

First, 9:47 in which time zone?  You can see how that would make a difference.  I'm assuming that it's 9:47 Greenwich Mean Time, which would certainly be the most logical interpretation, but it'd have been nice if they'd specified.

Second, even if we do assume that it's 9:47 GMT, then only the point on the Earth that is angled away from the Sun, and thus toward Jupiter and Pluto, would experience the effect, given that the Earth is spherical.  The other side of the Earth would actually experience the opposite -- an additional pull of gravity (the Earth's plus Jupiter's plus Pluto's), and people in those regions would feel heavier and fall faster.  People elsewhere on the Earth would experience this as a sideward pull, and would thus be more likely to trip over curbs and fall down.

Third, why would it only last for five minutes?  In terms of apparent angular velocity, neither Jupiter nor Pluto is moving that fast.  You'd think we'd at least have a few weeks' worth of floating about the place until everything drifts out of alignment.

Fourth, we have a problem with magnitudes, here.  Jupiter is a big planet, yes, but at closest approach it is still very far away.  We had a whole kerfuffle over "planetary alignments" amongst the astrology crowd a couple of years ago, which prompted me to calculate the gravitational pull of Jupiter on the Earth, and I came out with one ten-millionth of a Newton, a force a hundred million times smaller than the force the Earth itself is exerting.  So there's no way that the pull of Jupiter will have any significant affect on your hang time, and Pluto would have even less.

Fifth, "British astronomer Patrick Moore" was indeed an authoritative figure in the world of astronomy, and for many years hosted BBC's popular show The Sky at Night.  The problem is, he's been dead for two years, so he's not revealing much of anything at the moment.

Patrick Moore and fellow astronomer Dr. Fiona Vincent [photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But all of this isn't stopping the author of the story on News Hound, who goes on to tell us:

Moore told scientists that they could experience the phenomenon by jumping in the air at the precise moment the alignment occurred. If they do so, he promised, they would experience a strange floating sensation.

Astronomers have long been aware that there would be an alignment of the planets on that date, when Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto would be on the same side of the Sun, within an arc 95 degrees wide. But now the effect could be expected as the gravitational effect of the other planets on the Earth’s crust is maximum even at their closest approach.

If you think you will be able to float around your house then you will be mistaken. BUT if you jump in the air at 9:47AM local time on January 4th 2014, it should take you about 3 seconds to land back on your feet instead of the usual 0.2 seconds.

We are then told to join in on Twitter, using the hashtag #ZeroGDay, which I definitely encourage all of you to do.

Okay, so here's the real scoop -- a discovery for which I thank my friend and loyal reader David Craig, who did some stellar research work on this whole ridiculous story.

Apparently, like so many crazy claims, this one does have a germ of truth to it.  Patrick Moore was a smart, clever, and exceptionally funny man, and on April 1, 1976, he played an April Fool's Day prank on his listeners by claiming that at -- guess when? -- precisely 9:47, Jupiter and Pluto would be in alignment, and if they jumped into the air, they'd feel weightless.  When the clock hit 9:47, Moore said, "Jump now!" -- and the telephone switchboard lit up with calls from listeners who said they'd felt the effect.  (In fact, one listener was furious because he said he'd jumped so high that he'd hit his head on the ceiling.)

So this story is apparently just the whole thing going around again, because, after all, if a practical joke works once, it can always be reused, right?   Evidently Patrick Moore thinks so.  He wasn't content with pranking people while he was alive, he's continuing to do it two years after his death.  Which he'd probably be pretty pleased about, and, honestly, is what I'll do if I have the opportunity.

Of course, I couldn't end this piece without some information on where the relevant planets actually are.  If you'll take a look at the Planetary Orbit Map from Lunaf.com, you'll see that the Earth, Jupiter, and Pluto are very far from alignment -- Earth and Jupiter are more-or-less in alignment, but Pluto is clear on the other side of the Sun.

So I encourage you to participate on Twitter in #ZeroGDay, but don't bother jumping up and down unless you are doing so for another reason, in which case you should have at it.

And this seems like a fitting place to end.  I am taking a brief vacation for the remainder of the week, so this will be my last post of 2013.  I will be back at it on Monday, January 6, 2014, however, so keep those suggestions and comments coming.  I wish you all a lovely New Year's Day, and that 2014 is everything you hope for!