Accents and accuracy

When I was in eighth grade, a movie aired called The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  We were encouraged by our English teacher to watch it, and it turned out to be well worth the time, even to a fourteen-year-old who at that point didn't care much about history.  It was based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, and starred the amazing Cicely Tyson, who played a woman born into slavery, who lives to age 110 and sees the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1962.  (And yes, Tyson plays the title character the entire way through -- not only is the makeup incredible, but so is her ability to portray ages between 20 and 110 absolutely convincingly.)

There was only one thing that struck a sour note, and I was far from the only one in my class who noticed it.  One of the characters was the villainous Albert Cluveau, who was identified as "a Cajun."  And this guy had the worst Cajun accent ever.  My mom was 100% pure Cajun, so I know whereof I speak; most of my classmates were Cajun as well, given that I grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, "the heart of Cajun Country."  Cluveau was portrayed by Will Hare, who wasn't even from Louisiana, and I still remember one of my friends saying, "Why didn't they just hire an actual Cajun?  There are plenty of 'em around."

Given how long ago this happened, I don't recall exactly what it was that pinpointed his accent as fake; certainly he was trying his best to make it sound right, but it simply didn't work.  There was something about the pronunciation, but also the cadence -- the "swing" of the language -- that was way off.  And to anyone who grew up in southern Louisiana, it did exactly what movie directors never want to happen; it took the watcher right out of the scene, made them say, "Okay, that's an actor trying to play a role and not doing it all that well."

Sometimes actors can pull it off, of course.  David Tennant is Scottish, but does a convincing English accent as the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who.  And in the episode "Tooth and Claw," there's a scene where he's pretending to be Scottish -- so he's a Scottish guy playing an English guy who's trying to do a Scottish accent badly. 

Strangely enough, it works.

The reason the topic comes up is a study out of Cambridge University that appeared last week in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, which tested various groups of people in the British Isles to see how good they are at detecting fake accents.  And it turns out that people from Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, and Durham are way better at picking it up when someone's faking their regional accent than folks from the southeastern parts of England (including London), and also the area around the city of Bristol.

Glaswegians scored in the high seventies to around eighty percent accurate; people from Essex did the worst, averaging only a little better than chance.  The surmise is that the areas where the scores were lowest tended to be more cosmopolitan, where there's a greater likelihood that residents have moved there recently from somewhere else.  Hearing lots of different variations on an English accent, it appears, might make you less aware of when someone's faking your own.  Another factor is that some of the places that score the highest -- Glasgow and Belfast, especially -- have high amounts of regional pride, and value the local accent as a marker of belonging.

"The UK is a really interesting place to study," said linguist Jonathan Goodman, who led the study.  "The linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time.  Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that's a fascinating side of language evolution...  Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity.  Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect...  I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms.  One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.  How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today."

Which explains why Scottish people roll their eyes when they hear this guy say he's "an old Aberdeen pub-crawler."

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, wasn't Scottish, he was Canadian -- the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland.

I know the whole "cultural marker" thing is why I picked up on Will Hare's terrible Cajun accent so quickly.  Cajuns were for many years a poor and marginalized community, ridiculed as being less intelligent and less cultured than the rich (mostly Anglo) landowners, so it was pretty common for Cajuns to try to unlearn their own accent in an attempt to blend in.  (My mom was painfully aware of her own accent, and in something a little like the Cambridge study turned on its head, adopted a stilted "King's English" accent when she had company -- I don't think anyone was fooled by it, and in any event, it's kind of sad she felt like she had to do that.)

What's interesting is that like the Glaswegians' pride in their own accent, in the last fifty years there's been a resurgence of Cajun pride in southern Louisiana, largely spearheaded by the late Jimmy Domengeaux, who founded CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.  Domengeaux was instrumental in repopularizing Cajun music and in preserving the Cajun French dialect.  They've even appropriated an insult; "coonass" was a derogatory epithet for Cajuns, of uncertain origin but thought to be from an old French slang word for prostitute, and I can remember when I was in high school starting to see bumper stickers saying "Proud To Be A Coonass."  (Nota bene: some southern Louisianans still consider it derogatory, and most people would never use it in polite conversation; and like most words of this type, it comes off completely differently when used by someone who is not Cajun themselves.  So it's still a word to be careful with.)

So that's our excursion into linguistics for today.  The upshot is not to try to fake an accent when you're in Great Britain or Ireland.  Or anywhere else, really.  People will usually figure you out, and it's not a good look.  Just enjoy the richness of variety in human speech -- and talk like you normally do.  They're probably as curious about your accent as you are about theirs.

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Ghost shortage

I sometimes get grief from readers because of my tendency to dismiss claims of the paranormal.

In my own defense, I am convincible.  It just takes more than personal anecdote and eyewitness accounts to do it.  Our memories and sensory-perceptive apparatus are simply not accurate enough recording devices to be relied on for anything requiring scientific rigor.  I find myself agreeing with the hard-nosed skeptic MacPhee in C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength:

"My uncle, Dr. Duncanson," said MacPhee, "whose name may be familiar to you — he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland — used to say, 'Show it to me in the word of God.'  And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.  It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences.  And granting his premises, he was quite right.  I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles.  If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

So it's not that I'm rejecting anything out of hand, nor saying that your story of seeing your Great Aunt Mildred's ghost fluttering about in your attic last week isn't true.  What I'm saying is that thus far, I personally don't have enough evidence to support a belief in ghosts.  Neither the attempts at rigorous study I've seen, nor my own individual experience, would be at all convincing to someone who didn't already have their mind made up.

And, if you believe an article I just ran across yesterday, any opportunities I might have for changing my opinion are waning fast.

According to paranormal researcher/nuclear physicist Paul Lee, the United Kingdom is "running out of ghosts."  Lee, author of The Ghosts of King's Lynn and West Norfolk, has been tracking paranormal activity in Britain since January 2020, and has seen a marked decline in reports.  "I've been contacting all the reportedly haunted locations on my app, and asking if the residents, owners or staff have experienced any unexplained activity," Lee said.  "So far I've had almost eight hundred replies, and even some supposedly highly haunted places like Conisbrough Castle in South Yorkshire, the Ettington Park Hotel in Stratford -- said to be one of the most haunted hotels in the UK -- and Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, say they haven't experienced anything in the last few years."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gallowglass, Medieval ghost, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As far as what's happened to all these spirits, Lee says they may have "moved on."  I guess, like in The Good Place, anything gets boring after a while, and after a few centuries of scaring the shit out of tourists, the ghosts are probably eager for a change of venue.  On the other hand, Lee cautions, just because a particular ghost hasn't been heard from in a while doesn't mean it's gone permanently.  "It may be that ghosts can be recharged," he said.  "You sometimes hear stories of ghosts suddenly reappearing again after many years' absence."

So it could be that this is just a temporary lull, and the ghosts will all come back at some point.  Maybe when the Tories get voted out.

But you have to wonder, of course, if there's something more rational going on here, like the fact that people are wising up to how easy it is to slip into superstition and credulity, and attribute every creaking floorboard to the tread of a spectral foot.  While there are groups that approach these sorts of phenomena the right way (the Society for Psychical Research comes to mind), there are so many more that look at claims of hauntings as a way of turning a quick buck that maybe people are just getting fed up.  Shows like Ghost Hunters can't have helped; week after week, they go to supposedly haunted sites, wander around brushing aside cobwebs and waving their flashlights about in an atmospheric fashion, and like Monty Python's Camel Spotters, every week find conclusive evidence of nearly one ghost.  Despite a zero percent success rate, they always high-five each other for a job well done at the end of the episode, counting on the fact that viewers will already have forgotten that they'd just spent forty-five minutes watching nothing happening.

So maybe there are fewer ghost reports because people are getting smarter about what actually constitutes something worth investigating.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Anyhow, I wish Paul Lee the best of luck.  If the sightings don't pick up, he'll have to go back to nuclear physics to make ends meet, and that would be a damn shame.  And to reiterate my first point, it's not that I'm saying what he claims is impossible; no one would be happier than me if there turned out to be an afterlife, preferably on the beach and involving hammocks, sunshine, the minimum legally-allowable amount of clothing, and drinks with cheerful little paper umbrellas.

In the interim, however, I'll keep looking for hard evidence.  And if tonight I get visited by the spirit of your Great Aunt Mildred and she gives me a stern talking-to, I guess it will serve me right.

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Noises in the basement

A couple of days ago, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia with the message, "Thought you'd be interested... what do you think of this?"

The link was to a story on Wales Online, about a couple in the town of Ammonford who claims that they've been driven from their house by the sounds of ghostly screams, talking, and banging -- all coming from underneath their basement.

The couple, Christine and Alan Tait, are now living in their camper van because they're afraid to stay in their house.  "It was like a flushing noise that I heard first," Christine Tait said.  "I told Alan about it and that I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  He left his phone in the bathroom with the recorder on to try to pick up the source of the noise, and then we could hear a machine running.  We started to record all over the house, and we picked up the sounds of chains, a motorbike starting, and people screaming."

Since then, Alan Tait said, they have heard "a woman screaming, sexual sounds, dogs barking, a printing press running, a motorbike, a car horn honking and what sounds like a police siren," all from beneath their house, which stands on a quiet alleyway.

Haunted House by Hayashiya Shozo, early 1800s [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the link is a recording made my Alan Tait that has some of the sounds he claims he captured by dropping a microphone down a 1.5 meter shaft he dug in his basement.  They're pretty creepy, I'll say that -- although, in context, not really much worse than you'd hear in a busy city (and we have only the word of the article's author, Robert Harries, about how quiet the neighborhood is).

So the people at Wales Online sent a team into the house, after Alan Tait said he'd let them go as long as they were aware that he wasn't responsible for anything that happened to them.  They brought in recording equipment, stayed there for hours, and what happened was...

... nothing.  The only thing the recording equipment picked up was the team themselves, moving around as they packed up to leave.

So it sounds a little fishy to me.  I'm always pretty dubious about evil spirits that magically vanish whenever anyone shows up with a skeptical attitude.  I'm reminded of what the character MacPhee says in That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis: "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

There's also the problem that (despite Wales Online's mention of sending out a team to investigate) the whole thing has a sensationalized tabloid feel about it.  I don't know what Wales Online's reliability is, but on a glance it reminds me of trash like The Daily Mail Fail.

Last, my spidey-senses were definitely alerted by the end of the article, where we find out that Alan and Christine Tait were "not prepared to say where in the UK they currently reside and did not want pictures of themselves published in the press," presumably to protect their privacy -- after giving out their names, ages (62), publishing photographs of their house, and stating that they were "travelling around the country handing out posters and fliers about what we think is going on."

So to me, it sounds like a publicity stunt, although (as a dedicated home-body) I have a hard time imagining wanting publicity to the point that you're willing to abandon your house and live out of a camper van.

But that's just me.

So to the reader who sent the link: thanks, but I'm generally unimpressed.  I guess that was a predictable response, but even so, this is one that doesn't add up to me.  Until I start hearing screams, banging, and "sexual sounds" from underneath my own basement, I'm not buying it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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

Science, the arts, and creativity

'Tis the season for school budget votes, when school districts find out how much they're going to have to cut from the instructional program, and younger, low-seniority teachers find out if they're actually going to have a job in September.

It's a fraught time of year for anyone in education, and I say that even though it's been a very long time since I've had to worry about my job, and as a "core teacher" (more about that in a moment) I've never had any concerns about my subject being cut.  But when I see the effect this has on other teachers and the morale of the school in general, it breaks my heart.

What is even more troubling is the distinction being made between "core" classes and electives, sometimes called "specials."  The attitude is that the "core" -- English, Social Studies, Math, and Science/Technology -- is somehow more important than the other classes.  And calling the other classes "specials" is disingenuous at best; to quote Eric Idle's character in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, "You're not foolin' anyone, you know."  Whenever there are budget cuts, the "specials" are the first to go.  The message is that we can do without art and music and other electives, but everything else is sacrosanct.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mukul urp, CLASSROOM, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's tragic about this is that the opposite is apparently closer to the truth.  Educational researcher Andreas Schleicher just addressed the UK House of Commons last week to bring to light this very issue -- that not only are the arts and music and so on critical because they're creative and fun and are often the high point of students' days, but they give students essential skills for flourishing in today's job market.  And since that's ordinarily the one thing the politicians accuse schools of failing at, this got some people to sit up and take note.

"I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths," Schleicher said.  "We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite...  the true ‘hard skills’ will be your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience."

Schleicher also spoke out against the drill-and-test mode that is becoming the norm in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.  He suggests that our desperation to convert everything into numbers -- what the educational policy wonks call "measurable outcomes" -- has led us to emphasize the subjects in which that's easier.  Math and science, especially, can be focused on "getting the right answer," giving you an easy metric to measure success -- if that's the kind of success you're looking for.

"When you look at the types of tasks that British students are doing better [than other countries], they are more those that are associated with the past than the future – the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test," Schleicher said.  "It is precisely those things that are easy to digitise...  [But] the modern world doesn’t reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know."

In other words, the creativity you can bring to bear upon a problem, and your ability to see connections in disparate realms.  "Lateral thinking," it's often called.  But this is the kind of thing we educators usually fail to teach -- because it's hard to incorporate into your typical lesson, and hard to measure.  Much simpler just to keep students thinking inside the box, thinking that every problem has exactly one right answer, and (to quote another brilliant educational researcher, Sir Ken Robinson), "It's at the back of the book.  But don't look."

The saddest part, for me as a science educator, is that science itself is not usually taught as a creative endeavor.  In many classrooms, science is a list of vocabulary words and standardized solution methods, both of which could be memorized and regurgitated without any real understanding taking place.  But the truth is, the best science is highly creative, and requires a leap, questioning assumptions and looking at every piece of our understanding in the light of curiosity and exploration.

A classic example is Albert Einstein.  Before Einstein's time, physicists had been puzzled that all the experiments done to determine the speed of light found that it was constant -- that its speed didn't vary depending on whether you were moving away from or toward the light source.  How on earth could that be?  No other wave or particle acted that way.  So they came up with convoluted ways around what they referred to as "the problem of the constancy of the speed of light."

Einstein turned the whole thing on its head by saying, "What if it's not a problem, but simply inherent in the behavior of light itself?"  So he started from the assumption that light's speed is constant, in every frame of reference, even if you were heading toward the light source at 99% of the speed of light.

The result?  The Special Theory of Relativity, and the opening up of a whole new realm of physics.

To quote Arthur Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Hard to see how today's educational system, with its mania for the memorize-and-test model, will produce the next generation's Einstein.  The next generation's Einstein will be lucky if (s)he gets out of school with an intact sense of creativity and curiosity.

So Schleicher is exactly right.  We should be increasing arts and music education in schools, not cutting it.  "STEM" curricula and other "core" subjects are important, don't get me wrong; but the emphasis they get is seriously unbalanced.  And for heaven's sake, let's stop considering something real if we can test it and measure it.  I'll end with another quote, this one from writer, researcher, and professor Robert I. Sutton: "To foster creativity, you must reward success and failure equally, and punish inactivity."

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Toddler teleportation

I understand that wild, spooky, improbable explanations are more interesting than prosaic, ordinary ones, but really, people.

Get a grip.

This comes up because of a video that hit YouTube a couple of days ago that alleges to show a toddler teleporting into existence.  With no further ado, here's the clip:

So after watching this, what do you think is more likely?

(1) the editor of the video cut out a piece of the footage, making it look like a kid appeared out of nowhere.

or

(2) Your favorite of the following:

(a) It's a glitch in the Matrix, showing that we're all in an elaborate computer simulation, which works down to the last detail except for occasionally allowing small children to pop into or out of existence.
(b) The child is an alien who did the "energize, Scotty" thing and appeared on a street in Tewkesbury just in time to get caught in a television interview.
(c) The child is from the future.  Why (s)he came back here is a matter of conjecture, but some have suggested that (s)he is here to intervene and save the United Kingdom from Brexit.
(d) Blah blah blah lizard people blah blah Illuminati blah blah New World Order.

Okay, I have to admit to being a little startled the first time I saw it, but "I was a little startled" doesn't mean "I immediately jumped to the most ridiculous, convoluted explanation I can think of, and because I'm a fiction writer, I'm really good at thinking up ridiculous, convoluted explanations, so this is pretty impressive."

My pointing this out is probably a losing battle, however.  The subreddit r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix has, at present, 305,000 subscribers, and it's unwarrantedly optimistic to think that all of them are there just for the shits and giggles.  And there's got to be at least that many subscribers on subreddits and other websites about the Illuminati and New World Order, but I'm not going to go to said websites and find out, because They Are Always Watching and then They will know I'm checking them out and get suspicious and send the Men in Black to take me out and I'll never be heard from again.

You know how it is.

So this is yet another example of grabbing confirmation bias with both hands and running off the cliff with it, and I can say with some certainty that it makes a lousy parachute.  The bottom line is that most everything has a perfectly simple, rational explanation, and there is really no reason to seek out one that demands the existence of Matrices or aliens or time travel or lizard people.

Although Stephen Miller's most recent attempt at simulating a human being by applying paint-on hair does make me wonder about the lizard people.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

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

Brexit conspiracies

Even people over here across the Atlantic have been watching the whole Brexit controversy closely, and wondering whether the powers-that-be in Great Britain will elect to remain part of the European Union, or leave it and steer their own course.  I'm not nearly well-informed enough in global politics and economics to comment either way, but of course I did have to take a look at an article over at Politics that said that there have been conspiracy theories popping up all over the place that have to do with the issue.

Now, I may not be very savvy politically, but I do know my conspiracy theories.  (What that says about  my priorities I would prefer not to consider.)  So naturally I had to check out the article.  The author, Adam Bienkov, says that there are five conspiracy theories that have arisen regarding the Brexit controversy, to wit:

1. The "Remainers" have planted sleeper agents in the "Leave" campaign.
2. The online voter registration site crashed hours before the deadline to register, and the crash was staged by the government to prevent people from registering.
3. The news media is biased toward the "Remain" campaign.
4. The government has been sneakily registering non-British EU citizens who are living in the UK to vote.
5. There is a cadre of academics and experts who are working together to defeat the "Remain" campaign.

So I read all of this, and I'm thinking, "That's it?  That's the best you can do?  Sleeper agents, website crashes, and biased academics and news broadcasters?"

What, no chemtrails?  No government-run execution camps with guillotines for dissenters?  No HAARP-style weather modification stations to unleash chaos?  No claims that every damn thing that happens is a "false flag?"  No shape-shifting Reptilian alien overlords from another planet?  (Not even Nigel Farage?  I'd think that'd be a gimme.  The first time I saw him, he immediately struck me as looking like someone whose facial muscles were being operated remotely by a species that had only recently learned the rule "When expressing interest, raise the eyebrows and open the eyes wide.")

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And not even a single claim that whatever side of the issue you're arguing against is being controlled by an evil cadre of Jews?

C'mon, British people.  You can do better than this.  I'm not normally someone who waves the Stars & Stripes and runs around shrieking "'Murica!  Fuck yeah!", but in this case, I'd say we're kicking your asses.  Okay, you got us with regards to beer quality, humor level in comedy shows, cleanliness of public transport, attractive accent quotient, and overall level of civilization, but when it comes to conspiracy theories, you don't even have a shot at a bronze medal.

I know it's probably galling to have to look to your American cousins for inspiration, but admit it; we got this down cold.  When it comes to dreaming up cockamamie explanations for perfectly ordinary events, the Yanks are the tops.  (Although I must say that the Russians are contenders.  Just in the last couple of years, we've had Russians claiming that a funny-looking rock was a spaceship, that Vladimir Putin attacked the Crimea to get control of a Jurassic-age super-powerful alien pyramid, and that every historical account that occurred before the early Middle Ages is a fabrication by an evil consortium of historians.  Not to mention various reports of Bigfoot, a topic they seem to take awfully seriously.)

So I'm not suggesting that we Americans get complacent, mind you.  It's times like this that I'm glad we have people like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense on our side.  But the recent British attempt to break into the world of batshit lunacy was really kind of embarrassing, and I would encourage any British readers of Skeptophilia to pay close attention to how we do things over here, and follow our model.

I'm confident that you can rise to the occasion.  Any country that produced both Monty Python and Eddie Izzard is definitely not lacking in the quality control department.  So I'm counting on you.  I'll be watching the news over the next few weeks, waiting for words like "Illuminati" and "truther" and "Nibiru" and "police state" to show up in British media sources.  Let's see what you got.

Silencing the experts

First, we had Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper imposing a rule on scientists mandating that their research pass government approval (i.e., not say anything that contradicts the party line) before they could publish it.  That rule was, fortunately rescinded within nanoseconds of Justin Trudeau winning the election last November, once again allowing scientists to speak to the media freely.

Then, here in the United States, we have such intellectual featherweights as Lamar Smith and James Inhofe at the helm of committees overseeing scientific research -- making about as much sense as putting weasels in charge of a henhouse.  The result has been round after round of budget cuts for scientific agencies, a pledge to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, and a campaign of harassment against climatologists researching anthropogenic climate change.

Now, presumably because this has all worked out so well for Canada and the United States, the leadership of the United Kingdom are doing exactly the same thing.

According to an op-ed piece by Robin McKie in The Guardian, the Cabinet Office has decided that researchers paid by government grants will be banned from lobbying for changes in laws or regulations.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm sorry, but isn't science supposed to inform government, and not the other way around?  The universe really doesn't give a rat's ass if you're liberal or conservative; data has no political spin.  The desperation of politicians to muzzle scientists when the science they're working on is inconvenient for the dominant political agenda is maddening at best and dangerous at worst.  Despite forty years of warnings from the scientific community, we here in the United States have sat on our hands with respect to all of the problems that come with runaway fossil fuel use -- environmental degradation from oil drilling and fracking, skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and a global temperature rise that is predicted by mid-century to melt most of the Earth's remaining on-land ice, raising sea levels enough to inundate nearly all of the world's coastal cities.

And why?  Because of a disinformation campaign waged by anti-science politicians who are being funded (i.e., controlled) by the petroleum industry.  (I can't even bring myself to call them "climate change deniers" any more; at this point, the data are so completely clear that in order to disbelieve in climate change, you'd have to ignore the evidence deliberately and completely.)

Despite all of this, the British government is going ahead with its policy of keeping the experts out of the decision-making process.  As Robin McKie writes:

The government move is a straightforward assault on academic freedom...  [C]ritics highlight examples such as those of sociologists whose government-funded research shows new housing regulations are proving particularly damaging to the homeless; ecologists who discover new planning laws are harming wildlife; or climate scientists whose findings undermine government energy policy.  All would be prevented from speaking out under the new grant scheme as it stands.

Cambridge University zoologist William Sutherland agrees.  "If they go ahead with this new anti-lobbying clause – and they are leaving it very late if they are not going ahead – then we will have many more poor decisions being made by government for the simple reason that it will have starved itself of proper scientific advice."

The illogic of preventing the people who know the most from influencing public policy is apparently obvious to almost everyone except the ones in charge.  "Politicians don’t have to agree with scientists, but does anyone believe we will make better decisions without hearing what the evidence says on flooding, climate change, statins and e-cigarettes?" said Fiona Fox, head of Britain's Science Media Centre.  "The anti-lobbying clause will send some of our best researchers back to the relative safety of the laboratory and away from the media fray they already fear.  That will be a victory for ignorance and a blow for the evidence-based policy that our politicians claim to want."

"Claim" being the operative word, here, because as we've seen over and over again, most politicians are only interested in science if it supports the views that are expedient for their political agenda.

So the whole thing is infuriating, and it's to be hoped that the outcry from scientists and science-minded citizens will overturn this decision.  In other words, that they follow Canada's example, and not the United States', where (by and large) the anti-science types are still running the show.  Here in the US, my fear is that it will take some kind of catastrophe to demonstrate that letting the tail wag the dog is a bad idea -- and by then, it will be too late.

Blocking the light

I'm not sure if it's troubling or reassuring that the United States isn't the only industrialized country who has problems with superstitious, hyperreligious wingnuts.

Over here, of course, it's usually about the fact that you can't say anything about evolution without it blowing up in your face.  The issue has become so contentious that a lot of politicians, especially those who are courting conservative voters, won't even go there.  Witness Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's response when someone at a question-and-answer session a couple of weeks ago asked him if he accepted evolution.

"For me, I'm going to punt on that one as well," Walker said.  "That's a question a politician shouldn't be involved in one way or the other.  So I'm going to leave that one up to you."

Saying that "a politician shouldn't be involved" in a discussion about science is diametrically opposed to good sense.  It's the anti-science sentiment that is rampant in the U.S. that has kept us in this mess over climate change, for example.  But Walker's response is disingenuous at best; even if he does accept evolution, he's afraid to say so for fear of alienating his religious voter base.

Other countries have been facing the same sort of thing, and have responded differently.  France has, for example, outlawed the hijab; women can face a 150 euro fine for being in public with a face veil, and possibly be forced to take "citizenship instruction" as well.  This has prompted half the country to laud the Sarkozy government's ruling for supporting French culture, and the other half to cry out against its legislating intolerance and über-nationalism.

Britain is having its problems, too.  Christianity has been on the decline in the UK for some time now; Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain, went on record all the way back in 2001 as saying that "Christianity is almost vanquished in the UK."  Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, agrees, and said last year that "Britain is no longer a nation of believers...  We are a post-Christian nation."

Post-Christian, however, doesn't mean irreligious.  Immigrants now form the most religious sector in both France and Great Britain.  And as France found out, this means that the powers-that-be have to figure out how to respond to demands for acceptance and tolerance of all sorts of beliefs that we less-religious folks find pretty mystifying.  This is what led to the decision by a school in Southall, a suburb of London, to deny schoolchildren the opportunity to see yesterday's total solar eclipse, citing unspecified "religious and cultural reasons" for doing so.

Most people who are knowledgeable about the situation think this was out of deference to the school's large Hindu population.  Many devout Hindus apparently believe that seeing an eclipse makes you impure, and that the only way to combat this is to "bathe immediately after an eclipse and chant the name of god in order to overcome the powers of darkness."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, I recognize my bias here.  But really, people, what century are we in?  A couple of days ago, I wrote about the contingent here in the United States who believe that the eclipse is a portent of the End Times.  Now we have a different bunch who think that the purely mechanical movements of the Sun, Moon, and Earth result in your having to take a shower and do a little chanting so you won't be "unclean."  I'm all for letting people believe what they want, but denying an entire school the opportunity to see a rare astronomical phenomenon because some of them believe in what is (let's be honest, here) a ridiculous superstition is taking political correctness too far.  It's blocking the light in an entirely different way.

And there were some parents who agreed.  Vehemently.  The Evening Standard interviewed Phil Belman, whose seven-year-old daughter attends the school.  Belman said:  "My child went in having spent an hour preparing and making up her pinhole camera.  This is an issue about scientific matters versus religious superstition.  I am outraged - is it going to be Darwin next? We will be like mid America."

Did any of my fellow Americans wince just now?  That's how the rest of the rationalistic, science-accepting world sees us.  If you're a superstitious wingnut, you're "like mid America."

So like I said, I've always been a pretty live-and-let-live kind of guy.  But at some point, don't we need to start calling out goofy superstitions for what they are?  No, I'm sorry, your belief that 666 is an evil number doesn't mean that you will be allowed to flout company policy.  You can't sue someone for calling creationism "superstitious nonsense," because that is, in fact, what it is.  No, you can't expect an employer to hire you even if you don't want to work on Sunday.

And for cryin' in the sink, you shouldn't deny kids the right to learn some astronomy because some of them will want to rid themselves of unclean forces of darkness afterwards.  The appropriate response is, "I'm sorry you believe that, but this is science.  Bathe when you get home.  And when you're a little older, you might want to have a chat with your parents about what possible evidence they have that these beliefs are true."