Disaster relief

Today we have three stories from the "I Swear I Am Not Making This Up" department, all of which revolve around various natural disasters.

In the first, we are featuring a repeat performance by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "Firefighter Prophet."  You may recall that Taylor was in Skeptophilia only two weeks ago, when he claimed that Satan's followers were using chemtrails to stop us from "tuning in to God's frequency."

This time, however, he's outdone himself, which is no mean feat given the fact that most of what he says sounds like he's spent too much time jumping on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings.  Just two days ago, Taylor felt like he had to comment on the outbreak of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and tweeted the following:

Coincidence that Missouri was hit with Tornadoes right after they signed the abortion bill?  That same line of storms had Tornado warning in DC yesterday right before Trump gave ok for declass.  The enemy is trying to intimidate.  It won’t work, your [sic] a defeated enemy!  Victory!

So, Satan is sending tornadoes to intimidate the Christians (and also Donald Trump, who is about as Christian as Kim Jong-Un), and coincidentally sends tornadoes to places that already get lots of tornadoes, during the part of the year that's the peak season for tornadoes?  You know, intimidation-wise, I think Satan would be more advised to do something unexpected, like having a volcano erupt in downtown Omaha, or a blizzard in Miami, or a hurricane in Utah, or something.  Saying, "Fear my wrath!  I will make sure that what always happens to you continues to happen!" really lacks something, evil-wise.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Next we have news out of Kentucky, where the "Ark Encounter" museum, designed to convince children that the mythological explanations of a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders somehow supersedes everything we know from modern science, has run into a legal snafu.  Apparently they are suing their insurance carriers because of refusal to pay out a claim...

... for damage from flooding.

I like to think of myself as a compassionate guy, but my exact reaction when I read this was:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, snort, choke* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

So you need help covering the expenses of damage from a two-day rainstorm?  I thought this particular design was good for at least forty days and forty nights.  And besides, don't they call natural disasters like this "Acts of God?"

Seems a little presumptuous to expect compensation from something like that.

Or maybe, if you apply Mark Taylor's "logic" to this situation, it was just Satan trying to intimidate Ken Ham et al.  In which case Ham should just yell, "Your [sic] defeated, Satan!  Victory!" and call it good.

Last, we have an actual warning sent out by the Lawrence (Kansas) Police Department, that you should not try to stop a tornado by shooting at it.

Which you would think would be obvious.  After all, air is pretty impervious to bullets, and a tornado is basically just a big spinning blob of air.  Plus, there's the problem that since it's spinning really fast, if you shoot into it, you're likely to find that five seconds later, the tornado has flung the bullet right back at you.  After all, tornadoes are capable not only of massive devastation, but of whirling quite heavy objects up into the air, which is why if your house is hit by a tornado, it not only has to withstand the strength of the wind, but being hit by an airborne Buick.  Whipping a little thing like a bullet around, and hurling it right back at Bubba and his friends, would be child's play.

It's kind of amazing to me that anyone would have to make a point of telling people not to do this.  What's next?  "If you're trapped by a flood, beating the rising waters with a stick is not going to help."  "Do not attempt to stop a lava flow by spraying it with insecticide."  "You should seek medical help rather than trying to cure your diseases by drinking bleach."

Wait.  People actually did have to be warned about the last one.  Never mind.

You know, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I do not recall bizarre stuff like this happening when I was a kid.  I'm thinking that once again we have evidence we're living in a giant computer simulation, but the aliens running it have gotten bored and/or drunk and now are just fucking with us:

"Let's see what happens if we make a narcissistic, nearly illiterate reality TV star lose the popular election, but win the presidency anyhow!" 

*aliens laugh maniacally and twiddle a few knobs* 

"Oh, hell yeah!  That was great!  How about, let's have people in England attempt to generate popular support for left-wing candidates by throwing milkshakes at politicians!" 

*aliens do tequila shots, more knob-twiddling, more laughter* 

*Ha!  Did you see Nigel Farage's face?  Oh, hey, I've got one.  Let's come up with a song that's super annoying, more annoying even than "Copacabana" and "The Piña Colada Song" put together.  Only we'll target it to kids, but we'll get everyone to play it because there'll be a really stupid video to go with it.  It'll be called "Baby Shark."  That and "do do do do do" will be about the only lyrics." 

*aliens fall off their chairs laughing*

Well, I suppose as long as someone is amused by how absurd humans are.  On the other hand, our species's reputation for idiotic behavior probably wouldn't be harmed any if Mark Taylor would just shut the hell up.

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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!]

Divine message recognition module

Superstition in general leaves me a bit mystified.  As long as I can remember, I've never understood how people can believe in good luck charms and actions that will curse you to its opposite, or that some purely natural phenomenon is a sign from god... or a message from his infernal counterpart.

This is why I responded with frank bafflement at people's reaction to the photograph that went viral this week in the aftermath of the tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma.

The photo was reposted tens of thousands of times on social media, usually with messages like, "God is with us even in difficult times!" and "Praise the Lord!  He is here!"  This elicited two main questions in my mind:  (1) Aren't telephone poles always shaped like a cross?  And (2) if the Almighty wanted to send the people of Oklahoma a sign of his presence, wouldn't it have been more considerate to do it without smashing the shit out of the town first?

This last question is especially pertinent, given that Moore has been hit by tornadoes seven times in the past twenty years, with the ones in 1999 and 2013 being particularly devastating (the tornado in 1999 cut a 38-mile-long swath of destruction, and resulted in the highest windspeed ever measured on the Earth's surface -- 301 miles per hour).  So my guess is that given the choice between receiving a cross-shaped sign from god, and not being blasted to smithereens by a tornado again, most of the citizens of Moore would choose the latter.

So I found people's responses to the photograph pretty perplexing.  Of course, I had the same reaction to the kerfuffle over the cross-shaped chunks left in the wreckage after 9/11:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because, after all, this is what the intersection of two girders looks like.  But this one resulted in a war of words between people who wanted to clear away the debris and people who saw this as a holy message from god and wanted it left as-is.  In the end, it was installed on a pedestal at Ground Zero, and has become an object of devotion by the religious.

[image courtesy of photographer Samuel Li and the Wikimedia Commons]

Once again, I find this kind of incomprehensible.  You'd think if god wanted to send a sign to the faithful, a bunch of writing in the sky an hour earlier saying "THERE ARE CRAZIES WHO HAVE HIJACKED AIRPLANES AND ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTROY THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, GET OUT NOW!" would have been more to the point.

Note that this is a completely separate question from the question of whether an all-powerful deity exists in the first place.  My only point here is that if there is a deity, then leaving behind cross-shaped debris after something has wreaked destruction, ruin, and death is a pretty peculiar way to communicate with his followers.

On the other hand, I guess if it brings people solace after a tragedy, there's some benefit to it.  It's better than despair, after all.  But while I went through times in my life when I desperately wanted to believe in the supernatural -- during my teens and early twenties, I was pretty much constantly casting about for evidence of such phenomena -- the whole "Sign from God" thing never made sense to me.  Which is probably why it used to piss me off no end in English Lit classes when the teacher would tell us that in chapter 3, the Clouds In The Western Sky were foreshadowing the horrible events that would unfold for the Main Character And His Doomed Lover in chapter 7.  "Oh, come on," I recall thinking.  "They're clouds.  As in big blobs of condensed water droplets.  They don't give a rat's ass about the Main Character And His Doomed Lover."

Nor, I suspect, does the broken telephone pole in Moore, Oklahoma have anything to do with a divine message.  It's a striking photograph, yes, but no more than that, especially given that telephone poles are already more-or-less shaped that way.

Or maybe I'm just missing the Divine Message Recognition Module in my brain.

The twisted world of the Tornado Truthers

If I can sum up the rationalist view of the world in one sentence, it would be: your belief in something does not make it the truth.

If you would like me to agree with you, I need more than hearing that you believe it's so.  I need evidence -- or failing that, at least a good, solid, logical argument in favor.

The problem is, there is a slice of humanity for whom a lack of evidence for a claim becomes some kind of twisted argument for its correctness.  These are the people who become conspiracy theorists -- people whose belief in their warped view of reality is so strong that a complete absence of any support for their views is turned inside out, is used to show that the coverup is real.  They are absolutely convinced, and are damn near impossible to argue with.

And now, of course, they have weighed in on the tornadoes that hit Oklahoma in the last three days.

They call themselves the "Tornado Truthers."  Don't believe me?  Here is a collection of direct quotes, taken from Twitter and Facebook.  [Note to readers who are offended by such things; there's a good bit of bad language in these quotes, but to edit that out would diminish the intensity of these people's feelings on this subject.  In any case, be forewarned.]

255 tornadoes issued today.  43 caused by HAARP.

TORNADO WARNING.  YEAH FUCK YOU TO HELL #HAARP

Government-made tornadoes - HAARP - check out HAARP maybe with one A - can't remember offhand Tesla's work

That tornado pic is insanity, hey government, I know you [sic] watching, TURN THAT FUCKING HAARP MACHINE OFF!!!!

Tornadoes is wild man it's not tornado season... #haarp

Dutchsince on YouTube.com issued a warning for the east coast.  The HAARP induced tornadoes that leveled cities in the midwest is now on its way to the east coast.  East coast get prepared.  Facebook just like Obama refuses to post information to warn America.  Why?

Notice to all these tornados this week are the result of haarp to set the stage for martial law and FEMA camps

30 + People Dead & Thousands of Homes/Towns DESTROYED cuz of The Illuminati & Their Weather Modification Machine (HAARP) ITS A FACT!  LOOK IT UP AND START SPEAKING OUT TO CREATE SOME WEATHER RELATED DISASTER TO FORCE US OUT OF OUR HOMES INTO THEIR NEW HOMES (FEMA CAMPS)

Thank you h.a.a.r.p. for this crazy fucked up weather

HAARP, of course, stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a government-run ionospheric research station in Alaska.  It has nothing to do with weather modification.  It cannot generate tornadoes (or earthquakes, or volcanoes, or hurricanes, or sinkholes, or any of the other hundreds of things it's been claimed to do).

Oh, yeah, and it is tornado season, actually.  The peak of it.  But by all means, "Tornado Truthers," don't let any facts get in the way of your beliefs.

And then Alex Jones, of course, had to weigh in.  Could the recent tornadoes be generated by the US government, a caller asked?  Don't be a ninny, of course they could.  After all, we now know that the insurance companies have been using weather modification to avoid having to pay out to ski resorts during winters when it doesn't snow.  "Of course there's weather weapon stuff going on," Jones said, one eyelid twitching spasmodically.  "We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night.  Turned out it was the Air Force."  Of this week's tornadoes, he admitted that he wasn't sure that it was the government, but that if you saw small aircraft "in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things, if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did.  You know, that's the thing, we don't know."

Heh.  We don't know.  *wink wink nudge nudge*  It's the government.

To Jones and his intrepid band of loony followers, anything constitutes evidence.  In fact, nothing constitutes evidence.  "I haven't seen any aircraft spraying stuff and immediately triggering a tornado" simply becomes, "They've got cloaking technology.  Of course you didn't see anything."  And all you have to do is append the word "Truther" to your particular warped view of the universe, and it becomes de facto Truth, capital T, no evidence necessary.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.

Better, though, to focus on what we should be doing; assisting with the cleanup and rebuilding, donating money if you can't go there to help directly.   (Here's a site that has a list of places to donate.)  Beyond that, focusing on the positive stories that have come out of this tragedy -- of the selfless teachers who tried to save their students' lives, some of them who lost their lives in the process; of the first responders who risked their safety to dig survivors out of the rubble of their homes; of the neighbors, friends, and families who pitched in to help as soon as the funnel clouds lifted.  And of the little miracles, like Oklahoma resident Barbara Garcia, who lost her home but was reunited with her little dog who she thought had been killed when her house collapsed.  (Have kleenex handy if you watch the video on this link.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

 

Focus on what's important, here.  With any luck, the deafening silence that greets the screeching pretzel logic of the "Tornado Truthers" will convince them to crawl back under their rocks where they belong -- at least until the next natural disaster occurs.