A Titanic tale

I didn't realize what a fuss there still was over the sinking of the Titanic.

Okay, I know that it has some cachet as one of the biggest shipping disasters in history.  I know it was made into a movie, with heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.  (What, the movie isn't named Jack Dawson's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Really Bad Day?)  I know that the theme music, wherein Celine Dion's heart goes on and on and on and on and on and on, was played an average of 1,389,910 times a day for a year after the movie opened.

But really: what's the big deal?  [spoiler alert]  The ship sinks.  Lots of people drown.  End of story.

But no, that's not all there is to it, some folks say -- and by "some folks" I mean "people with the IQ of a bar of soap."  Because we haven't discussed why the Titanic sank.  And it wasn't because it ran into a great big hunk of ice.

Oh, no, that would be way too logical.

The R.M.S. Titanic in April 1912, just prior to its maiden (and only) voyage [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You can forget about all of that.  No iceberg necessary.  According to a new theory, the Titanic sank because a bunch of time travelers from the future went back to witness the Titanic sinking from on board the ship itself, and the extra weight of the passengers is what caused the ship to sink.

Now, wait, you may be saying, at least after you recover from the faceplant you undoubtedly did after reading this novel claim.  "If the time travelers are what caused it to sink, then how did anyone know it had sunk, since the ship had to sink in order for the time travelers to know to come back in time to watch it sink?"

Well, if you asked that question, all I can say is that you need to watch more episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge is always having to deal with paradoxes such as Tasha Yar's evil twin, who also turns out to be her daughter, coming after the Enterprise with revenge on her mind, because Tasha didn't actually get killed by the Sewage Monster, she was caught in an alternate universe time-warp and ended up having sex with a Romulan and giving birth to a daughter who looked exactly like her except for having pointy ears and wearing what looks like a dry-cleaning bag made of Reynolds Wrap.

So the Titanic really could have been sunk by time travelers.  At least if you believe that our world functions on the same level of scientific plausibility as Star Trek.

But that's not all.  (Oh, how I wish it were.)  Because apparently there are people who believe that not only was the Titanic capsized and sent to Davy Jones' Locker by misguided time travelers, that Jack Dawson was one of those time travelers.

Yes, we have people who have so lost touch with reality that they believe not only in ship-sinking time travelers, but that the movie Titanic is some kind of accurate historical documentary.  Why, you might ask, after recovering from a second, and more severe, faceplant?

Because the character of Jack Dawson in the movie has an anachronistic haircut, mode of speech, and attitude, and apparently somewhere in the movie mentions an artificial lake in Wisconsin that wasn't created until 1915.

That couldn't, of course, be because it was a movie.  And that the script-writers modernized the character for contemporary audiences, and got one miserable little detail wrong.

No, that can't be it.  It has to be that Jack Dawson was not only a real person, he was a time-traveler.

I think I'd better stop here, because like Celine Dion's heart, stupidity seems to go on and on and on, but my patience doesn't, and I'm reaching the point where my forehead won't stand much more in the way of impact stress.  So I'll wind up here, with the hope that no one is currently developing a theory that Game of Thrones is real history, because that would mean that Sean Bean actually was publicly executed, and heaven knows that poor man has been through enough.

Pavlov's curse

I'm sure many of you know about classical conditioning, a feature of learned behavior in which an individual learns to associate two things because of an accidental relationship.  Dogs can be classically conditioned; this was demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov in his famous experiment wherein he trained a dog to associate the sound of a bell ringing with being fed.  (That dogs are so readily conditioned this way is why many dog trainers are now recommending "clicker training" as a quick and reliable method for teaching dogs to obey simple commands.)

Of course, it's not just dogs.  People can be classically conditioned.  One day in my school, the bells malfunctioned, and rang at the wrong time -- and several students started packing up their books, even though we'd only been in class for ten minutes.  It's all too easy to turn off the higher brain and let conditioning take over -- because classical conditioning, after all, does not sit very high on the ladder of intelligence, whatever its utility in training dogs (and children).

This tendency to shut off the prefrontal cortex and let ourselves turn into Pavlov's dog is the source of a lot of superstitious behavior.  You go to watch the Minnesota Twins play, wearing your Twins hat, and amazingly enough, they lose -- so you decide that your hat is unlucky.  You've formed an association in your brain between two things that have no real functional connection, instead of recognizing the truth, which is that the Twins suck.

This, of course, is the origin of curses.  All sorts of things have been thought to hold curses; the pyramids, the Hope Diamond, James Dean's Porsche.  Accidental patterns also create the same response in our brains -- thus the "27 Club" (the superstition that holds that famous rock musicians are likely to die in their 27th year, citing examples such as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, and conveniently ignoring all of the thousands of musicians who safely make it to 28) and "Tecumseh's Curse" (alleging that because of William Henry Harrison's mistreatment of Native Americans, all American presidents elected in a "zero year" would die in office -- a pattern broken by Ronald Reagan in 1980).

And now we have another instance of that phenomenon, in the news yesterday -- a billionaire who is determined to flout "the Curse of the Titanic."

Clive Palmer, a phenomenally rich Australian mining magnate, has for some reason become convinced that he should rebuild the Titanic.  And, of course, being that money talks, the project looks like it's going ahead, with the Titanic II scheduled to take its maiden voyage in 2016.  This, of course, has woo-woos bleating all sorts of warnings, about how the name is cursed and how the ship is going to sink, and how no one in his right mind should consider traveling on it.  One rather hysterical article about the endeavor (here) says, with apparent relief, that at least Palmer "has not called his ship unsinkable."  Because that, obviously, would be the last straw, fate-wise.

Oh, c'mon, people.  Really?  From what I recall of the story, the original Titanic wasn't sunk by a curse, it was sunk by a great big iceberg.  And as far as I can tell, the only other thing that might possibly be attributable to a Titanic-related curse is the fact that radio stations are still for some reason playing Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On."

All I can say is: if I had the money and opportunity, and it was going somewhere cool, I would without hesitation book a trip on the Titanic II, as long as I could be guaranteed that Leonardo DiCaprio was not scheduled to be on board.  There is no such thing as "the Curse of the Titanic," any more than the Hindenburg blew up because of its name, or Janis Joplin died because she was 27, or the JFK was assassinated because he was elected in 1960... or the Twins lost because of your hat.

It's kind of scary, really, when you realize how easy humans are to condition.  Part of becoming a critical thinker is rising above our conditioning, and actually learning the principles of scientific induction -- which remains our best tool for discerning which connections are coincidences, which are correlations, and which represent actual causation.  So there's no need to ascribe luck (or lack thereof) to some random circumstance -- there are always other reasons for the patterns you see.  Such as the fact that icebergs can sink ships, hydrogen is explosive, heroin can kill you (as can a gun in the hands of an assassin)... and the Twins still suck.