Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.
Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common. If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?" I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.
Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level." They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious. This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."
The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone. They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows. (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):
Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.
Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc.
Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.
Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.
Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.
Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions
High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense
Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.
Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.
Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.
Okay, this brings up a few questions.
What is it with the lanyards? The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing. Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
What's a "Corporate Death Zone?" I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that? My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?" I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier. But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless. "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
"Cupcake Shops?"
I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.
I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences. The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories. (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers. I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)
Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined. I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems particularly inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself. Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business. And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.
My novel The Scattering Winds is the second of a trilogy, of which the first book (In the Midst of Lions) is scheduled to be out this summer. The setting of the trilogy is the Pacific Northwest. In the first book, there's a worldwide collapse of civilization. In the second, set six hundred years later, what's left of humanity has reverted to a new Dark Ages, mostly non-literate and non-technological. In the third (The Chains of the Pleiades), six hundred years after that, technology and space flight have been re-invented -- along with all the problems that brings.
The main character of the second book, Kallian Dorn, comes from a people have lost the knowledge of reading, committing all of their culture's memory to the mind of one person, called the Guardian of the Word. But when they find a girl from a distant town, a refugee, who knows the rudiments of reading and writing, they recognize what's been lost, and struggle, slowly, to reclaim it. Kallian undertakes a voyage, on foot, to the girl's home town -- and finds there a mostly-intact library from what he calls "the Before Times."
The following takes place when Kallian, who by this time has learned the basics of how to read, discovers a room full of maps in the library:
He went into the first room he encountered. It was labeled “Maps.” Holding the lamp aloft, he passed into a room filled with odd cabinets, most of which had very wide, shallow drawers. The nearest one said, “North America,” and he set the lamp down to open the top drawer.
Sitting on top was a yellowed piece of paper, about an arm’s length wide and tall, with a drawing of… what was it? He peered closer, and read the inscription at the top, written in an ornate, curly script he could barely decipher. It said, “United States of America, The Year of Our Lord 1882.” There were names written in smaller, but equally frilly, lettering, and gave him enough information to conclude that it was a drawing of a land, as if seen from above. The faded blue bits were bodies of water: Lake Ontario. The Caribbean Sea. The Atlantic Ocean. The green parts—well, they were only green in splotches, mostly they had faded to a yellowish-brown—were land. He saw features like “Appalachian Mountains” and “Great Plains” and “Mississippi Delta.” The land was divided by oddly artificial-looking black lines, some dead straight, others following natural features such as the course of rivers. Each of the blocks thus delineated had a strange and unfamiliar name: Massachusetts. New York. Georgia. Kentucky.
Had these been kingdoms of the Before Time?
1882—if he was correct about what the date-numbers signified, this would have been about a century and a half before the collapse, before the floods and plagues that had ended the old world. And a full 750 years before now.
But where was this United States of America, with its bizarrely-named mountains and lakes and kingdoms? Without a referent, without having an arrow on the map saying “You are here,” he had no way to know if it was a day’s march away or on the other side of the world.
He flipped through the maps in those and other cabinets, handling them carefully to keep the age-worn paper from crumbling in his hands. His mind was overwhelmed with how many different lands there were—whole cabinets devoted to maps from places called Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia. But even looking at them, as fascinating as it was, was not like reading the books he’d found, where meaning provided an anchor to keep him fastened to reality as he knew it. Without a key, the maps gave him no way to tell scale or location of anything. Learning to read had unlocked one type of cipher; here was an entirely different kind, one where even though he could read the words, they didn’t make sense.
I was reminded of this scene when I read an article yesterday in Science News about archaeologists who believe they've discovered the oldest-ever aerial-view scale drawings -- in other words, maps. There are structures in the Middle East nicknamed "kites" that were huge stone-walled enclosures used to trap animals like gazelles, funneling their movements toward waiting hunters. And a team of archaeologists working in Jordan and Saudi Arabia have found nine-thousand-year-old engravings on stones that appear to be maps of nearby kites -- perhaps made by people strategizing how best to use them in their game-harvesting efforts.
Map-making, when you think about it, is kind of an amazing accomplishment. It requires changing your perspective, picturing what some thing -- a city, a body of water, a country, an entire continent -- would look like from above. And even if to our modern eyes, when we can see what things look like from the air, old maps look pretty inaccurate, it's important to remember that they did it all by surveying from ground (or sea) level.
And given that, they did pretty damn well, I think.
A map of the world, ca. 1565 [Image is in the Public Domain]
The fact that we were doing this nine thousand years ago is kind of astonishing. Intrepid folks, our ancestors.
So many of the things we do today, and consider "modern," have far deeper roots than we realize. And this ability to shift perspective, to consider what things would look like from another angle, is something we've had for a very long time -- even if to someone like Kallian Dorn, the results look very like magic.
When I was in Calculus II, my professor, Dr. Harvey Pousson, blew all our minds.
You wouldn't think there'd be anything in a calculus class that would have that effect on a bunch of restless college sophomores at eight in the morning. But this did, especially in the deft hands of Dr. Pousson, who remains amongst the top three best teachers I've ever had. He explained this with his usual insight, skill, and subtle wit, watching us with an impish grin as he saw the implications sink in.
The problem had to do with volumes and surface areas. Without getting too technical, Dr. Pousson asked us the following question. If you take the graph of y = 1/x:
And rotate it around the y-axis (the vertical bold line), you get a pair of funnel-shapes. Not too hard to visualize. The question is: what are the volume and surface area of the funnels?
Well, calculating volumes and surface areas is pretty much the point of integral calculus, so it's not such a hard problem. One issue, though, is that the tapered end of the funnel goes on forever; the red curves never strike either the x or y-axis (something mathematicians call "asymptotic"). But calc students never let a little thing like infinity stand in the way, and in any case, the formulas involved can handle that with no problem, so we started crunching through the math to find the answer.
And one by one, each of us stopped, frowning and staring at our papers, thinking, "Wait..."
Because the shapes end up having an infinite surface area (not so surprising given that the tapered end gets narrower and narrower, but goes on forever) -- but they have a finite volume.
I blurted out, "So you could fill it with paint but you couldn't paint its surface?"
Dr. Pousson grinned and said, "That's right."
We forthwith nicknamed the thing "Pousson's Paint Can." I only found out much later that the bizarre paradox of this shape was noted hundreds of years ago, and it was christened "Gabriel's Horn" by seventeenth-century Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, who figured it was a good shape for the horn blown by the Archangel Gabriel on Judgment Day.
There are a lot of math-phobes out there, which is a shame, because you find out some weird and wonderful stuff studying mathematics. I largely blame the educational system for this -- I was lucky enough to have a string of fantastic, gifted elementary and middle school math teachers who encouraged us to play with numbers and figure out how it all worked, and I came out loving math and appreciating the cool and unexpected bits of the subject. It's a pity, though, that a lot of people have the opposite experience. Which, unfortunately, is what happened with me in my elementary and middle school social studies and English classes -- with predictable results.
So math has its cool bits, even if you weren't lucky enough to learn about 'em in school. Here are some short versions of other odd mathematical twists that your math teachers may not have told you about. Even you math-phobes -- try these on for size.
1. Fractals
A fractal is a shape that is "self-similar;" if you take a small piece of it, and magnify it, it looks just like the original shape did. One of the first fractals I ran into was the Koch Snowflake, invented by Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch, which came from playing around with triangles. You take an equilateral triangle, divide each of its sides into three equal pieces, then take the middle one and convert it into a (smaller) equilateral triangle. Repeat. Here's a diagram with the first four levels:
And with Koch's Snowflake -- similar to Pousson's Paint Can, but for different reasons -- we end up with a shape that has an infinite perimeter but a finite area.
Fractals also result in some really unexpected patterns coming out of perfectly ordinary processes. If you have eight minutes and want your mind completely blown, check out how what seems like a completely random dice-throwing protocol generates a bizarre fractal shape called the Sierpinski Triangle. (And no, I don't know why this works, so don't ask. Or, more usefully, ask an actual mathematician, who won't just give you what I would, which is a silly grin and a shrug of the shoulders.)
2. The Four-Color-Map Theorem
In 1852, a man named Francis Guthrie was coloring in a map of the counties of England, and noticed that he could do the entire map, leaving no two adjacent counties the same color, using only four different colors. Guthrie wondered if that was true of all maps.
Oh, but if you're talking about a map printed onto a Möbius Strip, it takes six colors. A map printed on a torus (donut) would take seven.
Once again, I don't have the first clue why. Probably explaining how it took almost a hundred years to prove. But it's still pretty freakin' cool.
3. Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem
In the 1950s, Dutch mathematician Luitzen Brouwer came up with an idea that -- as bizarre as it is -- has been proven true. Take two identical maps of Scotland. Deform one any way you want to -- shrink it, expand it, rotate it, crumple it, whatever -- and then drop it on top of the other one.
[Nota bene: it works with any map, not just maps of Scotland. I just happen to like Scotland.]
It even works on three dimensions. If I stir my cup of coffee, at any given time there will be at least one coffee molecule that is in exactly the same position it was in before I stirred the cup.
Speaking of which, all this is turning my brain to mush. I think I need to get more coffee before I go on to...
4. The types of infinity
You might think that infinite is infinite. If something goes on forever, it just... does.
Turns out that's not true. There are countable infinities, and uncountable infinities, and the latter is much bigger than the former.
Infinitely bigger, in fact.
Let's define "countable" first. It's simple enough; if I can uniquely assign a natural number (1, 2, 3, 4...) to the members of a set, it's a countable set. It may go on forever, but if I took long enough I could assign each member a unique number, and leave none out.
So, the set of natural numbers is itself a countable set. Hopefully obviously.
So is the set of odd numbers. But here's where the weirdness starts. It turns out that the number of natural numbers is exactly the same as the number of odd numbers. You may be thinking, "Wait... that can't be right, there has to be twice as many natural numbers as odd numbers!" But no, because you can put them in a one-to-one correspondence and leave none out:
1-1 2-3 3-5 4-7 5-9 6-11 7-13 etc.
So there are exactly the same number in both sets.
Now, what about real numbers? The real numbers are all the numbers on the number line -- i.e. all the natural numbers plus all of the possible decimals in between. Are there the same number of real and natural numbers?
Nope. Both are infinite, but they're different kinds of infinite.
Suppose you tried to come up with a countable list of real numbers between zero and one, the same as we came up with a countable list of odd numbers above. (Let's not worry about the whole number line, even. Just the ones between zero and one.) As I mentioned above, if you can do a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and the members of that list, without leaving any out, then you've got a countable infinity. So here are a few members of that list:
German mathematician Georg Cantor showed that no matter what you do, your list will always leave some out. In what's called the diagonal proof, he said to take your list, and create a new number -- by adding one to the first digit of the first number, to the second digit of the second number, to the third digit of the third number, and so on. So using the short list above, the first six decimal places will be:
0.242413...
This number can't be anywhere on the list. Why? Because its first digit is different from the first number on the list, the second digit is different from the second number on the list, the third digit is different from the third number of the list, and so forth. And even if you just artificially add that new number to the end of the list, it doesn't help you, because you can just do the whole process again and generate a new number that isn't anywhere on the list.
So there are more numbers between zero and one on the number line than there are natural numbers. Infinitely more.
5. Russell's Paradox
I'm going to end with one I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. This one is courtesy of British mathematician Bertrand Russell, and is called Russell's Paradox in his honor.
First, let's define two kind of sets:
A set is normal if it doesn't contain itself. For example, the "set of all trees on Earth" is normal, because the set itself is not a tree, so it doesn't contain itself.
A set is abnormal if it contains itself. The "set of everything that is not a tree" is abnormal, because the set itself is not a tree.
Russell came up with a simple idea: he looked at "the set of all possible normal sets." Let's call that set R. Now here's the question:
Today's story is more of a puzzlement than anything else. It came to my attention thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a site called What3Words with the message, "People will surely be making up conspiracy theories about the secret meaning of THESE words being attached to THAT place. So I thought you might want to get the jump on them by making up your own."
What3Words turns out to be a "universal addressing system" that divides the entire world into 57 trillion three-meter-by-three-meter squares, and gives each of them a unique address made up of three random words. My pond, for example (or at least one three-by-three bit of its surface) is extras.equine.outsmart. As the "About" page explains it:
The world is poorly addressed. This is frustrating and costly in developed nations; and in developing nations this is life-threatening and growth limiting.
What3Words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3m x 3m square, anywhere on the planet.
It’s far more accurate than a postal address and it’s much easier to remember, use and share than a set of coordinates.
Better addressing improves customer experience, delivers business efficiencies, drives growth and helps the social & economic development of countries.
Which may well be true, but still strikes me as kind of weird. Why do we need that kind of accuracy? My pond, for example, is about eight meters by twelve meters in area. So this means that just in my pond alone, there are on the order of ten different "addresses." If I swim across the pond, I've moved from "extras.equine.outsmart" to "ranch.speculated.dressing." So what does that gain me? If I order a pizza, and the delivery person can't find me when I'm eight meters away, the pizza place needs to hire a new delivery person, not use a better addressing system.
I have to admit the map is fun to play with, though. The assignment of the words seems random to me, although there may be a deeper structure there than I'm seeing. The site explains:
Each What3Words language is powered by a wordlist of 25,000 – 40,000 dictionary words. The wordlists go through multiple automated and human processes before being sorted by an algorithm that takes into account word length, distinctiveness, frequency, and ease of spelling and pronunciation.
Offensive words and homophones (sale & sail) have been removed. Simpler, more common words are allocated to more populated areas and the longest words are used in 3 word addresses in unpopulated areas.
I'm a little disappointed at the removal of the offensive words, because that could create an opportunity for a great deal of barbed hilarity. Just think, for example, if the headquarters of the Church of Scientology were located at "bloody.fucking.nonsense."
And it does offer more precision, especially in areas that lack ordinary street systems (the site says it's already being used by the postal system in Mongolia). But here in the United States, I'm not sure what's to be gained, especially since (most) house numbering systems are pretty logical. You'd expect that 101 South Street would be next to 103 South Street, and across the road from 102 South Street, and most of the time you'd be correct.
What3Words addresses, on the other hand, don't tell you much of anything. Good luck figuring out what "huge.mutant.weasel" is next to, for example. The nuclear power plant, probably.
To be fair, some street addresses are equally bizarre. Not far away from where I live there's a "Gravel Road." It probably goes without saying that it's paved.
There's also the problem of minor misspellings making a huge difference. As I mentioned, one bit of my pond, in Trumansburg, New York, is "extras.equine.outsmart." On the other hand, "extra.equine.outsmart" is in Salem, South Dakota, and "extras.equine.outsmarted" is in southern Peru. At least if you're trying to find 219 East Main Street, Trumansburg, New York, USA, you won't be off by six thousand kilometers.
And since there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the choice of words, I'm afraid my friend is quite right; it's only a matter of time before the conspiracy-minded start "discovering" their own meanings for What3Words addresses. A search for the What3Words address "all.seeing.eye" came up with nothing, as did "new.world.order." Most of the addresses I've seen are simply weird and random. But there are bound to be some combinations that raise eyebrows, and believe me, someone is gonna find them.
Anyhow, that's our news from the "Who Even Thought Of This?" department. So I'll sign off from my comfortable office at "mango.trinkets.embedding," and am heading for a nap in my hammock over at "corresponding.scream.spot," which seems a little misnamed.
Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.
Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common. If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?" I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.
Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level." They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious. This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."
The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone. They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows. (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):
Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.
Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc
Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.
Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.
Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.
Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions
High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense
Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.
Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.
Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.
Okay, this brings up a few questions.
What is it with the lanyards? The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing. Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
What's a "Corporate Death Zone?" I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that? My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?" I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier. But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless. "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
"Cupcake Shops?"
I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.
I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences. The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories. (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers. I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)
Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined. I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself. Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business. And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.
I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health. And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.
Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture. It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
When secular types think of instances of the religious demanding that we treat counterfactual beliefs as if they were real, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the ongoing non-debate over creationism being taught in public schools.
I call it a "non-debate" because there really is no basis for argument. Either you accept the scientific method -- in which case the evidence for the evolutionary model is overwhelming -- or you don't. If you don't, then debate is fruitless, because the two sides aren't even accepting the same basic ground rules for how we know something is true.
But this is hardly the only example. We just got another striking case of the religious claiming that the world is other than it is, and demanding that everyone else simply play along, in the decision by Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of Harper-Collins, to publish maps of the Middle East without including Israel.
I'm not making this up, although I wish I were. A representative for Collins Bartholomew said that if they included Israel on maps in atlases destined for classrooms in the Middle East, it would be "unacceptable to Muslim customers" and "not in line with local preferences."
[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]
In other words: because the majority of Muslims in the Middle East would like it if Israel didn't exist, they not only get to pretend it doesn't exist, they have a major book publisher playing along in the charade.
Apparently, Collins Bartholomew's defense for the decision was that if they'd included Israel, no one in the Middle East would have bought the atlases. Or else, they would only have allowed them in the country if each one of them had the name "Israel" crossed out with a black marker, a practice that apparently really happens.
The first group to object to the expectation that everyone pretend that the world is other than it is was the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which should make it an odds-on contender for the Irony Award 2015. "The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world,” said Bishop Declan Lang, chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs. "It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence."
Which could be a direct quote from the writings of St. Obvious of Duh. I think the Israelis already know that, Bishop Lang.
The question, of course, is whether people in other countries are willing to play along. Yes, we get that a lot of you people in the Middle East don't like Israel. Yes, you can put your hands over your eyes and play let's-pretend. But the rest of the world doesn't have to pat you on the back and say, "Of course, dear, of course bad nasty Israel doesn't exist. I checked under the bed and in the closet, and I didn't see it anywhere. Don't pay attention to the big black mark on the map. It doesn't mean anything."
Now, understand me; I'm not making a statement one way or the other about who is right and who is wrong in the perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East. My general feeling, non-political-type that I am, is that the situation is so complex that assigning blame would be a fruitless task. The whole area is so rife with issues of poverty, territorial claims, religious frictions, ethnic frictions, militarism, and arguments based on hereditary rights, that any attempt to divide the players into Good Guys and Bad Guys is doomed to failure right from the outset.
But the Catholic Bishops' Conference is right about one thing; the situation isn't going to be helped by publishing companies pandering to people's desperation that a counterfactual worldview be reality. The proper response -- both to the Muslims who object to Israel being in atlases, and to the creationists who object to evolution being taught in public school science classes -- is "suck it up and deal."
One of NASA's ongoing experiments is the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE for short), which was launched, both literally and figuratively, in March 2002. GRACE uses data from a pair of satellites to do detailed measurements of the Earth's gravitational field, information that can be used in such disparate fields as plate and mantle tectonics and the study of groundwater flow rates, deep ocean currents, and ice cap melting.
The data is frequently represented visually, using bulges, dips, and colors on the Earth's surface to represent various variables such as measured gravitational strength, temperature, and water salinity. This generates images like the following:
Now, I don't know whether the original poster was a troll, or really believed that what (s)he was posting was true, but you'd think that once it was posted, there would be a Greek chorus' worth of shouts of "Are you a complete moron? Or what?" After all, if there really was something stretching the world into the shape depicted on the map, the folks in Australia would have something to say about it.
But no. The vast majority of the responders thought that this, in fact, showed what the Earth really looks like, and that NASA was covering the whole thing up for their usual evil motives.
Oh, there were voices of reason, but they were the ones being shouted down. Here are some comments that appeared, in order, after the original post.
Could it be since the moon is pulling away from Earth that it is pulling a chunk off Earth with it?
If that is really the current shape of our planet, then we are in deep
shit. This is worse than anyone has thought! The moon is gonna pull a
chunk off the planet. That or planet X's effect on our planet? No wonder
there are so many quakes? The planet is being torn!!!
This is for real folks! This is imaged by GRACE Twin Satellites. This is
so off from past projections. The planet is literally being torn apart.
This explains everything from sink holes, mass animal dies
offs, weird weather, increase in quakes, oil leaks, continent movements,
poles shifting etc...
Something is pulling a chunk off the planet, or the destabilization of the Arctic and Antarctica is distorting the planet.
Then, one person posted the following:
It is a GRAVITY map. For fuck's sake.
But you don't stop a whole herd of Chickens Little that easily, because the outcry continued as if the Voice of Reason hadn't said a word:
Notice the three areas of extreme magnetic pressure and the weak area in
the Indian Ocean. That is going to continue to sink and eventually
break off completely, a chunk off the planet. Maybe it will become our
new moon with an atmosphere to make it habitable.
None of the other planets look like that. The moon sure doesn't.
Seems to me like we are literally splitting ourselves apart.
the bible does say that the earth shall be destroyed including the
heavens and a new heaven and earth shall be born or created. Maybe
there is an earth being born within, black sun? Vril? Or the beast
raising from the deep? Very interesting.
One person even responded directly to the Voice of Reason, implying that (s)he was the one who didn't understand:
No Duh! A gravity map also showing the current shape of our potato planet.
And on it goes:
Even the stretching effect can clearly be seen. It's starting to look like a skull?
Doesn't look normal to me.
After watching that again, I think the planet is rarely anything close
to spherical. How come other planets don't look like that?
Then, we had one other person chime in who evidently has some understanding of what's going on here:
Wow.... I thought for a minute second that ultimate doom has befallen
us.... Finally..... BUT, it's a gravity map. It's NOT a geophysical
depiction... It's based on gravitational data. Kind of like the "hole in
the ozone layer" enhancement maps. This is not the shape of the planet
folks, it's the shape of the planet's gravitational plus and minuses,
which change daily due to moon placement and other factors... Kind of
like an mri if you will... If you remove certain colors from an mri does
that mean you have removed parts of the person's brain?
Unfortunately, no real doom here. As this map will look very different on the next full moon.
But of course, the doomsayers paid no attention whatsoever. They never do, somehow.
What gets me about all of this is how a quick internet search for "GRACE gravity survey" would have turned up websites -- several of them, in fact -- that explain what the image means. So I've often railed against people who want to be able to talk about things like quantum mechanics without doing the hard work of learning what quantum mechanics really is; here we have people who are so catastrophically lazy that they can't even be bothered to do a search on Google before deciding whether or not Australia is being forcibly ripped off the surface of the Earth.
I don't know, folks. I should have some sort of trenchant comment to make about all of this, but at the moment I can't think of anything to do but weep quietly into my coffee, and quote Professor Farnsworth:
Of course, if the people who think that the GRACE map actually represents the real, physical shape of the Earth are correct, I may get my wish sooner than I realize.
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