About face

When the topic of the paranormal comes up, I'm sometimes asked how I can be so sure that (fill in the blank: ghosts, cryptids, psychic abilities, the afterlife, extraterrestrial visitations/abductions) don't exist.

The answer is: I'm not sure.  Proving a negation is pretty close to impossible.  How, for example, could you prove that unicorns don't exist?  "I've never seen one" is pretty weak.

After all, I've never seen a wombat, and I'm pretty sure they exist.

To me, all that stuff boils down to probabilities based on rational evaluation of eyewitness testimony combined with what we know to be true from science.  What I mean by this is if you take all the sightings and personal accounts, and look at them with a coldly skeptical eye, you can come up with a good estimate of how likely the claim is to have at least a kernel of truth.  This is why I've always been more inclined to take cryptid sightings more seriously than UFO sightings, and UFO sightings more seriously than claims of psychic abilities.  None of them have any hard evidence in their favor.  However, there's nothing inherently impossible about the existence of Sasquatch and his buddies, while there's at least a good argument for the unlikeliness of alien intelligence making its way across the vastness of interstellar space; and even that is more likely than psychic abilities, which not only have no known mechanism by which they could occur, but have been tested to a fare-thee-well and thus far have not given a single positive result in any sort of controlled experiment.

So: it's not that I'm certain any of those don't exist.  All I'm arguing is that thus far, a skeptical analysis leans heavily toward the "no" side of things.

Sometimes, though, you can argue implausibility based on the number of claims made, and that works in an odd sort of fashion.  If there are a great many claims but still no hard evidence, that's a pretty strong indicator there's nothing there.  This is one of the strongest arguments against the existence of (for example) Bigfoot.  The claims of Bigfoot sightings easily number in the thousands; if the things are that common, surely by now there would have been at least one unequivocal bit of hard evidence in the form of bones, teeth, or hairs that don't match any known species.  So here, the more claims there are, the less likely they are to be about anything real, and the more likely they are to stem from suggestibility or outright fakery.

As an example of this, take the piece that appeared yesterday over at the site Mysterious Universe.  Brett Swancer wrote an interesting account of some claims being made on Reddit by a guy who goes by the handle @searchandrescuewoods.  The gist of his posts, which have gotten a good bit of buzz in the paranormal claims community, is that there's a faceless entity stalking the woods, freaking out hikers and (possibly) being responsible for several cases of abduction.  Swancer does a good job pulling together the stories, and I don't want to steal his thunder -- you really should read the article, although preferably not when you're alone at night -- but I will quote one of them, just so you get the flavor.  This one was told to @searchandrescuewoods by a friend who had been tasked with repainting an information sign on a woodland trail.  He was standing on a ladder working when a man came up asking for directions to a nearby campsite:

The second he came up and talked to me, the hairs on my neck stood up, but I wasn’t sure why.  I just had this really uneasy feeling about the whole thing, and I wanted to finish painting and get out of there.  I figured maybe part of it was that I couldn’t turn around to look at him, but something just felt off...  So I waited for the guy to walk away, but I didn’t hear him leave, which made me think he was just standing there and watching me, so I asked again if I could do anything for him, and he didn’t answer. 

I knew he was there though, because I hadn’t heard him leave, so I did this awkward turn on the ladder to look down and see what he was doing.  Now I admit it could have just been my brain fucking up, but I swear to you, Russ, for a split second when I turned around, that fucker didn’t have a face.  Like he had no face.  It was almost concave, and totally smooth, and I just about had a fucking heart attack because I couldn’t even wrap my brain around what I was seeing.  I think I started to say something but there was this kind of ‘pop’ inside my head and suddenly he was just a normal looking guy.  I must have looked weird because he asked me if I was okay, and I was just like ‘yeah, I’m fine.’  He asks about the campsite again and I point to where he has to go, and he’s like ‘I’m not from around here, can you help me get there?’  Now this is when I know something is really up because there’s no way this guy got out here and didn’t know where he was.  And for that matter, there’s no car around, so how’d he get here in the first place?  I said I was sorry but that I couldn’t take him anywhere in a company vehicle, and he’s like ‘please?  I really don’t know where I am, can you come with me and help me get there?’ 

So now I’m seriously weirded out, and I start wondering if this is some kind of ambush or whatever.  I told him I could call him a taxi to come out and take him where he wants to go, and I pull out my phone and he just goes ‘no’ and walks away really quickly.  But he doesn’t walk out of the park, he walks back into the fucking trees and I got right in my fucking truck and start to get out of there, fuck the paint or whatever.  I looked in my mirror to see where he was as I was leaving and he was standing right at the tree line again,  I don’t know how he got there so fast, but this time I know that fucker didn’t have a face.  He was just watching me leave, and right before I turned the corner he took a big step back into the trees and kind of dissolved, I guess.  Maybe it was just dark so he blended in, but it felt more like he just melted away.

Creepy, atmospheric stuff.  Shades of "Slender Man" (remember him?), the gaunt, faceless man who started from a story over at Creepypasta and made his way into the urban legend universe.  (In fact, Slender Man makes an appearance in my novel Signal to Noise, but -- I hasten to add -- that's a work of fiction.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LuxAmber, Тонкий человек, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Okay, what strikes me here is that if this thing is haunting our National Parks so much that @searchandrescuewoods and his friends have seen it multiple times, why hasn't anyone else?  When I was in my twenties and thirties I pretty much spent all summer back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics, and -- suggestible as I am -- I never saw a single thing out of the ordinary.  Think about it; if this creature, whatever it supposedly is, is this common, surely a whole bunch of the other thousands of campers hiking around the wilderness would have reported seeing it.

The fact that no one is reporting sightings other than @searchandrescuewoods is a strong argument that there's nothing there to investigate.

To return to my starting point, however; all this doesn't mean that I know the stories are untrue.  I just need more than some more-or-less anonymous posts on Reddit to convince me that they're anything but engagingly scary fiction.

On the other hand, if the next time I'm on a trail run in the nearby National Forest, I am accosted by a guy with no face, I suppose it'll serve me right.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week should be in everyone's personal library.  It's the parting gift we received from the brilliant astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died two years ago after beating the odds against ALS's death sentence for over fifty years.

In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking looks at our future -- our chances at stopping anthropogenic climate change, preventing nuclear war, curbing overpopulation -- as well as addressing a number of the "big questions" he references in the title.  Does God exist?  Should we colonize space?  What would happen if the aliens came here?  Is it a good idea to develop artificial intelligence?

And finally, what is humanity's chance of surviving?

In a fascinating, engaging, and ultimately optimistic book, Hawking gives us his answers to the questions that occupy the minds of every intelligent human.  Published posthumously -- Hawking died in March of 2018, and Brief Answers hit the bookshelves in October of that year -- it's a final missive from one of the finest brains our species ever produced.  Anyone with more than a passing interest in science or philosophy should put this book on the to-read list.

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

Bad moon rising

It's been a good while since I've written a post about a story that's just plain loony.

Maybe it's because here in the United States, it's not so funny any more because the loonies appear to be in charge of the place, led by a man who spent ten minutes in an interview bragging about how he had successfully passed a test to detect dementia.  ("The doctors were amazed," he said.)

But yesterday I ran into a story that was so completely wacky that I would be remiss in not bringing it to your attention.  As with so many strange things lately, it began on TikTok, the bizarre social media site wherein people upload short videos of themselves doing dances or singing songs or whatnot.  Me, I don't honestly see the point.  It was ages before I was even willing to get on Instagram, and mostly what I do there is upload photographs of my dogs, my garden, and stuff about running.  (If you want to see pics of my dogs etc., you can follow me @skygazer227.)

Be that as it may, TikTok is wildly popular.  It has remained popular despite allegations that the app contains some kind of spyware from China.  TikTok users have been credited with reserving hundreds of seats at Donald Trump's Tulsa rally and then not showing up.  And apparently, it is also the host of a "vibrant witch community," which is called, I shit you not, "WitchTok."

But this is where things start to get a little weird.  Because a rumor started to circulate on "WitchTok" that a group of "baby witches" had put a hex on the Moon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luc Viatour, Full Moon Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unclear how the rumor got started, but once it did, it gained a life of its own, spreading to those estimable conduits for bizarre bullshit, Twitter and Reddit.  When the elder witches who were panicking about the thing tried to find out who these alleged "baby witches" were, they were unsuccessful.

For most of us, this would have been sufficient to conclude that there was nothing to the rumor, and to say, "Ha-ha, what a silly thing I almost fell for, right there."  But no.  The apparent absence of the "baby witches" could only mean one thing, they said: the hex on the Moon had backfired and killed all the "baby witches."

Well, with all the "baby witches" dead, surely that would put an end to it, right?  If you believe that, you don't know how social media works.  This made the rumor spread faster, with other witches claiming that they were the ones who'd hexed the Moon, not the "baby witches," and next they'd go after the Sun.  Some said that not only was the Moon hexed by these evildoers, but so were the "fae," the non-human denizens of fairyland, and admittedly this would be a pretty nasty thing to do if the fae actually existed.  One Twitter user, @heartij, cautioned that all this was walking on some pretty thin ice.  "Upsetting deities is the last thing any rational practitioner would want to do," they said, and I can't disagree with that, although none of this seems to have much to do with anything I'd call "rational."

@heartij added rather darkly, "the people behind the hex are more than likely being handled accordingly."

Others said that there was nothing to worry about, that the Moon was perfectly capable of withstanding being hexed, and that everything would settle down once the stars went into a better alignment.  "The Moon is a celestial being which controls us," said Ally Cooke, a trainee priestess.  "We’re currently in a new Moon that takes place in the sign of Cancer, which explains why so many practicing witches report disconnects with the Moon or personal odd feelings, but they’re confusing them with evidence for malpractice.  This new Moon is centered around releasing, and Cancer is a water sign, so emotions are running high at this time."

Makes perfect sense to me.

My first inclination upon reading this was to point out that through all this, the Moon has continued to circle around the Earth completely unchanged, and in fact not even looking a little worried.  But upon reading a bunch of the posts from WitchTok members and commenters on Reddit and Twitter, it became apparent that they're not saying anything physical has happened to the Moon.  It's all just invisible "bad energies" and "negative frequencies" aimed in the Moon's general direction.  But my question is -- forgive me if I'm naïve -- if (1) the hex itself operates by some mechanism that is invisible, and (2) it hasn't had any apparent result, how do you know it happened?

I guess we're back to "personal odd feelings."  For whatever that's worth.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I find it a refreshing change of pace from stories about elected officials who studied at the Boss Tweed School of Ethics and a president who thinks you get extra points for successfully saying "person, woman, man, camera, TV" from memory.  Compared with that, witches trying to stop other witches from aiming invisible hexes at distant astronomical objects is honestly a welcome diversion.

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Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

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

Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warn my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's pretty solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we didn't all just watch Donald Trump wink at Vladimir Putin and then commit high treason in full view on television, or witness all of the Republicans respond by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog" from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that the US has been renamed the "Amerikan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republik," and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Crazy claim pop quiz

Here at Skeptophilia we've talked about "Poe's Law" -- the general rule that a sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing.  Usually, this happens because of the cleverness with which the satire is written -- matching in tone, style, and verbiage the particular slice of crazy that the writer is satirizing.

There's another force at work here, too, however.  And that is that the range of nutty things that people actually believe is frightening.  Every time I run into something that seems too completely batshit insane for anyone to take seriously, it always turns out that there is a whole cadre of folks who believe it fervently.  Sometimes there are schools where it's taught as fact.  Sometimes it's been turned into a religion.

I'm not sure where such irrational credulity comes from -- yet another question I've asked here more than once.  But to illustrate this capacity for people to buy into ideas no matter how completely ridiculous they are, I decided to have a little fun today.

Below are ten claims I dug up this morning.  Five of them are from satirical websites, and five are serious -- i.e., there are actually people who think these views are true.  See if you can figure out which are which.

1. The movie Despicable Me is rife with satanic messages.  In particular, the "minions" were designed to trick children into accepting their role as the mindless slaves of Lucifer.
2. The Israeli town of Petah Tivka is a model made out of cardboard.  Baron Edmond de Rothschild conspired with the Israeli government to make a beautiful-appearing town at the site to intimidate the Palestinians.
3. There is an attempted coup going on, right now, amongst the Illuminati.  A cabal of radical atheists have infiltrated the Illuminati and are trying to overthrow the leaders, and institute laws forcing atheism to be mandatory worldwide, and religious belief (of any kind) punishable by death.
4. The US has declared war on a coalition comprised of China and Russia, because the Chinese and Russians were trying to block the dominance of the American corporate world, headed by David Rothschild and the Jews.  There have already been nuclear detonations, but the US media is covering it up.
5. Ellen Pao, chairperson of Reddit, is a puppet of the New World Order and rules the site with an iron fist.  Her employees seed the site with disinformation, deleting or downvoting posts that don't toe the party line (or that might threaten to reveal what's going on).  The site also has links to satanism.
6. The mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia is paying pilots to chemtrail the city with chemicals that will turn the citizens into mindless zombies.  One guy found out about the plan, so the mayor sent cyborg sea otters up the Powell River to attack the guy's house.  They broke through a wall, but the guy got away.
7. The German city of Bielefeld does not exist.  The town that existed at the site was damaged during World War I and razed completely during World War II, and never rebuilt.  The German government has kept up the façade of Bielefeld's existence to save face.
8. The Charleston church shooting was a hoax, masterminded by President Obama and overseen by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Reverend Clementa Pinkney is still alive and is in hiding.  Dylan Roof isn't a real person, and film footage showing him is faked.
9. Vladimir Putin is in cahoots with some secessionists in Texas to get Texas to break away from the United States, in hopes of triggering a domino effect of secessions similar to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the resultant destruction of the United States as a world power.
10. The Tour de France is a hoax.  Every year it is filmed in the same studio, out at Area 51, where the Moon landing films and photographs were made.

Ready for some answers?

1. Real.  This site claims that the whole game is given away by Despicable Me's tag line which is "When the world needed a hero... they called a villain."
2. Satire.  Petah Tivka is real, and the idea that it's only a lot of false fronts has become something of a running joke in Israel.
3. Satire.  As much as I'd love to see this happen, because the whole idea of a "cabal of radical atheists" cracks me up.  The site where this article appears, HardDawn, has tricked thousands of people.  The fact that it's a satire site becomes clearer when you say the website name out loud.  (Get it? Hur hur hur.)
4. Real.  This one is from the notorious site Before It's News, which should be all you need to know.
5. Satire.  Although to hear some Redditors talk, you'd think it was true.  Note that the website name is NaturalNewd -- one letter off from another notorious site.  The article further claims that the site Digg went down the tubes after its owner sacrificed a baby to Baphomet to boost their hit rate, and Jesus objected.
6. Real.  This site, owned by one Callum Houston, has a whole series called "Things I've Seen in the Powell River," which you should definitely check out  But the cyborg sea otters by far are my favorite.
7. Satire.  The "Bielefeld Conspiracy" started as an online joke amongst some German college students, after they kept receiving three "no" answers in a row from everyone they asked the following questions: (1) Have you ever been to Bielefeld? (2) Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? (3) Do you know anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld?  Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a little fun with it after she mentioned a town meeting she'd attended in Bielefeld, ending with, "... if it exists at all."  She then looked puzzled and added, "I had the impression I was there."
8. Real.  The whole "crisis actor" thing just makes me nauseated, but seems to crop up every time there's a well-publicized shooting.  I'm only surprised it took them this long to jump on the Charleston massacre.
9. Real.  That Putin is a pretty tricky guy.  Although I must say that it doesn't take much to get the secessionist wackos in Texas yammering.
10. Satire.  The Danish satirical news program De Uaktuelle Nyheder did a story a few years ago that the Tour de France was a hoax, and in subsequent followups went on to say first that the French language was gibberish, and finally that France itself didn't exist.

How'd you do?

You know, there's a problem with this whole thing, which is that once something appears in print, there will be people who will believe it.  Look at the fact that HardDawn (the same site that claims that radical atheists are taking over the Illuminati, #3 above) had an article back in 2013 that chemtrails were killing the angels in heaven, and I am still seeing that one posted as real on conspiracy sites.

So the line between satire and belief just keeps getting blurrier and blurrier.  Which should not surprise regular readers of this blog, but is a conclusion that makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

Crowd funding for antigravity

I've commented before how the advent of the internet has changed information transfer -- both in good ways (such as the availability of databases for quick fact-checking) and bad (such as offering a rapid, and virtually unstoppable, conduit for bullshit).  What I want to look at today is the way that the internet has changed how we view ideas and innovation -- again, in good ways and bad.

In the past, informal groups of like-minded individuals generally coalesced in some kind of formal setting -- a school, a church, a community center.  Now, there are places like Reddit where people, most of whom have never met, come together to discuss everything from gaming to world news.   This is all to the good, of course; I check several "subreddits" daily, including the ones that specialize in stories on science and skepticism.

The problem is, of course, like-minded people are... like-minded.  Groups form that seem to have the sole purpose of reinforcing the opinions that the members already had.  (And for every group, there's an equal and opposite group.  Check out "Conspiracy" and "Conspiratard" for a pair of good examples.)

Reddit isn't the only place this happens.  The same devolution into self-reinforcing silliness can even infect groups that started with the best of intents.  Take "Kickstarter," for example.

Kickstarter started out as a way for people with great ideas in any field, but who lacked the funds to see them realized, to get small donations from large numbers of people.  From their front page, the organizers of Kickstarter say,

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects.

We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, more than 3.9 million people have pledged over $577 million, funding more than 39,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now.

There's no doubt it's a groundbreaking idea.   CNN called Kickstarter "paradigm-shifting" -- which is certainly apt.  But the problem is that once you've opened up the gates to anyone, you've opened up the gates to... anyone.  The field starts widening to include people who are, to put not too fine a point on it, wingnuts.  Take the Kickstarter proposal by Peter Fred, for example, that has as its aim making an anti-gravity device:

The gravity theory that I am trying to promote has the fundamental hypothesis that gravitational phenomena is the result of transferred momentum produced by "stopped wind" a term which will be described. We already know a lot about momentum and the dynamics of wind.  Thus the fundamental idea of my theory is further interpretable in terms of familiar physics.

Of course, there's the obligatory declaration that everything we think we know about physics is wrong:

This lesson from the past seems to be lost on today's scientists who seem once again to be championing an unphysical idea that is supported by widespread observation.   The unthinking acceptance of the observationally supported "strange" and mysterious  idea that mass can warp space or that it can attract other mass has resulted in a preposterous universe where 95% of it is little understood.   This situation does not call for hordes of experimenters spending billions keeping the ancient basic mysterious hypothesis in place.  What it calls for is a lone self-financed theorists working for years the attic trying to come up with an idea that would replace the idea mass can attract other mass or warp space. 

He then goes on to explain what he believes to be the real mechanism causing the pull of gravity, which is that cool air is "attracted to" warm air, causing lift.  To illustrate this, he uses the following diagram, which apparently comes from a middle school Earth Science text, with some added clumsy application of Photoshop:

 Note that he has simply blurred out the return arrows, showing the complete movement of air in the convection cell -- so that it looks like some mysterious force is making the cool air over the ocean move toward the warm air on land.  (For those of you who haven't had any atmospheric science, what's actually happening is that the warm air is rising because of a change in density, and the cool air from the ocean is being pulled in to replace it; the reverse happens at high altitudes, creating an "overturning" of air between the land and the ocean.)

So, what's my problem with this?  A crank has a silly idea.  Big deal.

Well, the big deal is that it was launched two weeks ago and he's already raised almost $500, presumably donated by people whose training in physics ended in sixth grade.  As with the Conspiracy subreddit, wingnuts attract other wingnuts.  Now, I know that he's unlikely to reach his goal ($15,000), and by the policy of Kickstarter, if the goal isn't reached no one loses their money.  But my worry is twofold: first, dumb ideas gain credibility by appearing here; and second, Kickstarter itself loses credibility by hosting them.

Maybe I should temper this, however, with the admission that the same kind of altered approach has changed the publishing industry -- and has allowed me to e-publish my own fiction (note the handsome lineup of book covers on the right of your screen, ready for your Kindle or Nook).  And while this change has, in some sense, opened the floodgates to people publishing garbage, it has offered an entrée to talented writers who became frustrated with the gatekeeping aspect of the old agent/publishing editor route.  And there's a Darwinian aspect to all this; lousy novels can't compete with good ones, and get lost in the morass of self-published manuscripts after having sold copies only to the writer's significant other, parents, and best friend.  Likewise, ideas such as the aforementioned antigravity device simply don't get enough money to launch.

So maybe the fact that the bad ideas on Kickstarter won't get funded is its saving grace.  I have to admit that there have been some cool projects that have succeeded; consider the 3-D Pen (you should definitely watch the video on this one), the workout shirt that changes color to show your muscle activity, and, of course the Cthulhu knitted ski mask:

Also comes in "Slime of R'lyeh green."

So there you are.  Look around at some of the Kickstarter projects -- there are some really interesting ones.  Whatever else you might say about it, Kickstarter is a unique approach to funding innovation, just as e-publishing is to writing, and Reddit is to the formation of intellectual communities.  And if each of those things comes with a downside, what doesn't?  It's just another feature of our technological evolution, an outcome of human intelligence that never fails to fascinate and surprise me.