Out of line

Every so often, I run into a claim that some archaeological site aligns with a particular astronomical object, and all too often, everyone decides that the alignment is why the site was built where and how it was.

Trying to parse the motives of long-dead people who left nothing in the way of written records is a dicey business.  In fact, sometimes it's hard enough even when you're talking about extant cultures.  This was brilliantly lampooned in Horace Miner's rightly famous 1956 article "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," which appeared in American Anthropologist, and took a rigorous and scholarly look at the mysterious "shrines" we all have in our houses...

... better known as "bathrooms."  And, of course, reached the wrong conclusions about the purposes of nearly everything in them.

The problem arises because the human brain is a pattern-finding device, so it's often hard to resist our tendency to see a pattern when there is none there.  This is the origin of the phenomenon of ley lines -- which I wrote about twelve years ago, in one of my earliest Skeptophilia posts -- the claim that towns, cities, and religious sites are laid out along "lines of power" generated by some unknown forces in the Earth itself.  There are a couple of completely prosaic reasons this alignment happens:

1. Populated sites in areas with relatively flat topography are frequently connected by straight lines, because as Papa Euclid taught us, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
2. More interestingly -- and germane to the pattern-finding tendency referenced above -- if you aren't given any constraints about what particular places you're trying to connect, you can almost always find completely accidental correlations that look like deliberate alignment.

The latter is why the whole topic comes up, because of a fun site I stumbled on called Spurious Alignments: Bad Archaeoastronomy At Your Fingertips.  What this site does is allow you to overlay various astronomical benchmarks (e.g. sunrise on the Winter Solstice, the northernmost point on the horizon where Jupiter rises, and so on) on top of particular geographic locations -- and see what correlations you can find.

One of the best ones anyone's found so far is the airport in Palermo, Italy.  Here are a few of the relevant discoveries:

• Runway 07/25 tracks the relative motions of the Moon.
• Runway 02/20 aligns with the rise of the star Capella.
• Taxiways Bravo and Charlie align with the setting of the star Procyon.
• Taxiway Delta points directly toward the setting of the star Arcturus.

From this, we can clearly see that the Palermo Airport is a site built by ancient astronomers, and the whole complex is an observatory, or possibly the center of a sky-worshiping cult.

The difficulty, of course, is some sites were created because of astronomical alignments.  Many of our distant ancestors knew the motions of the skies better than your average person does today.  A good example, not really explainable any other way, is the famous Sun Dagger on Fajade Butte in New Mexico.  A spiral design carved into the side of a rock facing is across from a crack between two stones, and -- only on the Summer Solstice -- this crack allows light from the Sun at midday to form a "dagger" that perfectly bisects the spiral.

The Sun Dagger is pretty clearly a solstice marker, allowing people to keep track of the seasons in a climate that was hostile to say the least.

But as for most of the other "ancient astronomical observatory" claims -- well, maybe.  It's too easy to find spurious correlations and alignments, especially when there are no rules about what you're trying to get the site to align to.

Or, maybe, the people who built the Palermo Airport really were trying to tell us something.  You never know.

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

Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK, Remains of Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury, Somerset (3049676967), CC BY-SA 2.0]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe.  "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some twelfth-century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

[Nota bene: yes, I know twelfth-century monks wouldn't have used the phrase "that's the ticket."  However, considering that they would also have been speaking Early Middle English, I think I'm allowed some poetic license, here.]

Anyway, Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, which led to Much Rejoicing.  The idea that the whole thing might be some twelfth-century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

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

As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

Lines of sight

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.   Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.   Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising.  I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

But what gets me most about this guy is that he doesn't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

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

Falling in line

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising. I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

So this whole thing is an excellent example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the choosing of data points favorable to your hypothesis after the fact.  The name comes from a folk story:

A traveler through Texas passed a barn that had a bullseye painted on the side, with three bullet holes near the dead center of the target.  There were two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and the visitor slowed down his car and said, "That's some pretty good shooting, right there."

One of the old-timers grins, and says, "Why, thank you."

The other one scowls.  "Don't pay any attention to him.  He just got drunk one night and shot the side of his barn, then the next morning painted a bullseye around the bullet holes."

Anyhow, what gets me most about the claim in The Watchman's Cry is that they don't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

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

Inventing Glastonbury

It must come as a shock to woo-woos to find out that some of their favorite wooful phenomena were actually invented by humans for purely down-to-earth reasons.

Take, for example, the Ouija board.  A lot of paranormal enthusiasts claim that the Ouija board is some kind of portal to the spirit world -- and an equal number of religious types think it's the gateway to hell.  Using it, they say, is just asking to be possessed by an evil demon.  Unfortunately for both contentions, the Ouija board was invented as a parlor game by a toy manufacturer named Elijah Bond in 1890.  Even the name is made up -- Bond stuck together the French and German words for "yes" and decided it would make a catchy name.  Which it is.  Better than the words for "no," anyhow, because "Nonnein" sounds kind of silly.

So finding out that the Ouija board was invented purely to make money is a little deflating to those who think it's some kind of tool for accessing the supernatural.  Which makes me wonder how the woo-woos are going to deal with the recent claim by archaeologists that the hype over Glastonbury is a 12th-century fabrication.

Glastonbury Abbey [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If you're not up to date with woo-woo mysticism and don't know what the deal is over Glastonbury, it's a town in England that is considered to be one of the most "spiritual" places in the world, right up there with Ayers Rock in Australia, Sedona, Arizona, and Salem, Massachusetts.  Supposedly, Glastonbury is the place where Joseph of Arimathea fled after Jesus's crucifixion, and when he got there he thrust his walking stick into the ground, where it took root and now flowers every Christmas.

The problem is, the Glastonbury Thorn doesn't flower at Christmas, it flowers in the spring, like most hawthorns.  No, the faithful say; that's because the current thorn isn't the real thing, which was cut down as an idolatrous image during the Puritan era following the English Civil War.  Even so, there are people who take the whole thing awfully seriously, which is why the current tree (planted in 1951) has been repeatedly vandalized.

Then there's the King Arthur connection, because Glastonbury Abbey is supposedly where the Once and Future King was buried after his death at the hands of his cousin Mordred in the Battle of Salisbury Plain.  There's even an inscription on a stone cross in the Abbey that allegedly has an inscription dating back to the fifth century, and which mentions King Arthur by name.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, Glastonbury (or more specifically the hill Glastonbury Tor that stands nearby) has been identified as being the world's most powerful convergence of "ley lines," lines of spiritual force that allegedly encircle the globe. "[T]he landscape as a whole," we're told, "is imbued with a beauty, mystique and numinescence which has made it well loved over many centuries, and the haunt of many advanced souls."

So with all of this romantic folklore surrounding the spot, it's no wonder that people make pilgrimages to Glastonbury every year.  Which makes a recent paper published by a group of archaeologists at the University of Reading all the more devastating.

Because the new study has shown that all of the mystical trappings surrounding the place were the invention of some 12th century monks who were trying to find a way to raise money when their monastery burned down.

Archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and her team have spent years looking at both the documents and the structures that supposedly play into the legend.  And she has concluded that after the fire, which occurred in 1184, some enterprising monks decided to cash in on the increasing popularity of the Arthurian mythology (Geoffrey of Monmouth's seminal Historia Regum Brittaniae had only been completed some 46 years earlier, and was still immensely influential).  So they started a rumor that Glastonbury was where Arthur was buried, and that he'd been buried there because it was where Joseph of Arimathea planted his walking stick.  "Look!" they said.  "There's a hawthorn tree up on that hill!  That's the ticket!"

And thus the legend of the Holy Thorn was begun.

Gilchrist and her team said that the stone cross was also the product of the same enterprising brothers, and had been fabricated to resemble earlier Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses, with the clever addition of an inscription mentioning Arthur by name.  And when they rebuilt the monastery, they made sure to make it of materials, and in a style, that made it look far older than it actually was, so the pilgrims (and the profits) kept rolling in.

As they still do, lo unto this very day.

It's kind of unfortunate, really.  I've always loved the Arthurian legends -- I grew up with tales of Merlin and Gawain and Morgan le Fay and the rest of them, not to mention my discovery during my teen years of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.  The idea that the whole thing might be some 12th century hoax is kind of sad.

You have to wonder how all the woo-woos will respond.  My guess is, they won't.  They'll ignore the current study just like they've avoided anything remotely factual in the past, and keep on claiming that ley lines and the rest are real.  They haven't based anything on evidence yet, so why start now?

Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article a few days ago for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I currently live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'?  Maybe Neptune being in Aquarius is why my one dog woke me up at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of the Sea and guys pouring water out of jars made him need to pee.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets. But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."

But of course, sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect. This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says. Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart.  Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being up since three AM.

Lines of sight

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising.  I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

But what gets me most about this guy is that he doesn't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Further from the intersection, they are further apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffices to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

The ley of the land

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.)

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I ran into the idea of ley lines fifteen years ago on a trip to the UK.  I spent a month in the summer of 1995 hiking in the north of England, visiting old cathedrals and monastery ruins, and while I was at Rievaulx Abbey, I had a chance meeting with an English woman who said that if you connected the positions of holy sites on a map with straight lines, it made a pattern.

"They sited monasteries, cloisters, and cathedrals where they did because they were places of power," she said.  "The ley lines are channels of psychic energy, and where they intersect, it creates a kind of vortex.  The ancients felt this, and that's why they built monuments there, and later churches and abbeys."

Couldn't it, I asked her, also have to do with building in places where there was good access to water, and perhaps pre-existing roads?

"I suppose that also might have had something to do with it," she said, sounding doubtful.

For all her claims of the antiquity of this idea, the concept of ley lines is less than a hundred years old, and at first, it had nothing to do with anything psychic.  Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, noted in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track how often multiple sites of archaeological or historical relevance lay upon the same straight lines, and he coined the term "ley lines" to describe this phenomenon.  He suggested that the reason was for ease of road-building -- especially in the southern half of England, where the terrain is mostly gentle, a straight line connecting several population centers is the smartest way site roads and settlements.  It wasn't until 48 years later that noted woo-woo John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis, took Watkins' ley lines and connected them to the Chinese idea of feng shui and came up with the theory that ley lines were rivers of psychic energy, and the intersections ("nodes") were places of power.

The interesting thing is that Watkins himself wasn't even right, appealing though the idea is.  Mathematician David George Kendall and others have used a technique called shape analysis to demonstrate that the occurrence of straight-line connections between archaeological sites in England is no greater than you would expect from chance.  Put simply, a densely-settled place like England has so many sites of historical relevance that if you are allowed to pick and choose, you can find any number of lines that intersect, or at least clip, interesting places.

Take a look, for example, at the following diagram (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

This image shows 137 randomly-placed points.  A computer program was employed to find all of the straight-line connections of four or more points -- and it found eighty of them!

So, even if you eliminate all of the woo-woo trappings from the idea, it seems like the whole concept of "sacred sites" falling along straight lines is attributable to coincidence.  A pity, really.  I have always wondered if our house was at the intersection of two ley lines.  I was all prepared to use Intersections of Psychic Energy Channels and Nodes of Power Vortexes to explain why my digital alarm clock runs fast and why the dryer keeps eating my socks.

Ley lines redux

Last year I wrote a piece about "ley lines," which are supposedly lines of "Earth energy" that run through sacred sites and places where the ancients built settlements.  The whole thing is immensely popular in the UK, where there have been dozens of books written that claim that the siting of towns, cathedrals, monasteries, and stone circles was based (sometimes unconsciously) on the perception of these "energy lines" that channel psychic power beneath the Earth's surface.  (Ley Lines Across the Midlands, Earth Energy: A Dowser's Investigation of Ley Lines,  and Arks Within Grail Lands, not to mention the book that started the whole phenomenon -- The Old Straight Track -- are all available on Amazon, should you have nothing better to do with your money.)

Myself, I just thought that important places were sited along straight lines because Euclid et al. showed that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points.  Going from Stonehenge to Glastonbury via Cambridge doesn't, perhaps, make quite as much sense.

Having the general idea that the whole thing is a lot of woo-woo nonsense, I was pretty psyched when a friend sent me a link to the site "The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator."  The home page of the site shows a map of England, and has the caption "Ley Lines: mysterious lines of force between ancient monuments.  Are you one of the lucky Britons that lives on a mystical energy highway?"  You are then invited to enter a postal code for your home town, and the site will see if you live on a ley line, or better yet, on an intersection of two or more ley lines, which is supposed to represent some kind of psychic node where the confluence of Earth energy causes all sorts of cool paranormal stuff to happen.

Now, I'm not British and don't know any postal codes -- as far as I can tell, they make even less intuitive sense than the US zip code system -- so I decided to look up a postal code for a town I've been to.  I chose Thirsk, in Yorkshire, because I have fond memories of being there when I was on a walking tour of northern England in the mid-90s.  I found that Thirsk's postal code is YO74LS, so I entered that in the "ley line locator."

And lo, I found that Thirsk is not at the intersection of two, but three, ley lines.  Next to the map showing the ley lines converging on Thirsk was the message: "This is amazing!  We found three ley lines that converge at that location, including one from Stonehenge...  You seem to live at a swirl of ancient energy highways; this may mean that your area is a hotspot for paranormal activity, or even for unidentified flying objects!"

Below this was the statement, "IMPORTANT: to understand these findings and any potential dangers, read this."  So I clicked that link, and the following message came up:

"So here's the truth: ley lines don't exist.  Sorry to disappoint you. The truth is, no matter where in England you are, this site will happily find you three ley lines — including one that goes through Stonehenge!  How?  Simple: there are over 9,000 scheduled monuments in England.  We're running with a smaller database - about 3,000 of the most impressive ones - but that's more than enough to guarantee that hundreds of "ley lines" will pass right through your house.  The site picks a few directions, draws a line, and finds the closest sites of interest. By discarding the misses and showing you only the hits, something that's incredibly common can be made to look spectacular.  That's how ley lines... work -- they take advantage of the fact that the human brain is really bad at statistics."

Well, all I can say is:  Well played.  Up to that moment, I really thought this was a serious woo-woo website.  My day was much improved by finding out that the designer of this website -- Tom Scott (*doffs hat in Mr. Scott's general direction*) -- has created it not to promote the fuzzy thinking that belief in ley lines represents, but to show it up for the foolishness that it is in a particularly elegant fashion.  (He also includes a link to a bit from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, winning him further points in my book.)

So, sorry to disappoint you, but your house doesn't sit on a confluence of Earth energies, and you'll have to look for another reason to explain why your clocks run fast and you keep losing your car keys.  Oh, well, that's the way it goes.  I'll end with my own favorite quote by Carl Sagan, which seems peculiarly relevant to this discussion:  "It is far better to understand the universe as it is than to persist in delusion, however comforting or reassuring."