Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, it's been a busy week.
First, we have news from far-off Kyrgyzstan, that their attempts to establish a parliamentary democracy have kind of gone off the rails. The new government, elected just last October, has had some difficulty in coming to consensus. In fact, last month a senior government official resigned temporarily in frustration, but was persuaded to return when it appeared that the government was on the verge of collapse.
So, put yourself in their shoes -- they are, for the first time in their history, conducting the noble experiment of a democratic government, and due to factionalism and sheer stubbornness, the whole thing seems to be coming unraveled. What do you do?
What you do, of course, is slaughter some rams to banish the evil spirits.
Which is what they did. Right on the front lawn of the parliament building. Leaving us here at WWW kind of speechless, honestly. My only question is, did they suddenly forget what century it was?
Then, we have news from Italy that a pair of perfume makers, Antonio Zuddas and Giovanni Castelli, are releasing a new line of perfumes that are intended to match your blood type.
"Blood Concept is just a celebration of human life through an interpretation of its evolutionary process," Zuddas said. "To be more accurate, it's an interpretation of the evolution of our most important element, the blood in our veins."
Apparently, each scent is supposed to match the "essence" of the blood type. So, the next time the doctor is doing blood type matching for you, to hell with those silly serum antigens and so on. If they want to know if you're type B, they should simply titer your blood for traces of black cherry, pomegranate and patchouli.
The story, unfortunately, doesn't end there. A fellow calling himself Merticus, who is a founding member of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (I am not making this up) says he is eager to use the perfumes, and is especially fond of type O. He didn't say if he meant the scent, or the actual blood.
Not all vampires are so, um, sanguine, however. Meredith Woerner, a New York City vampirologist, said, "It's cheesy. It's chintzy. It's not their style. I can't imagine a real vampire would be that enticed by fake blood. In fact, if they detected the scent of it, it might make you more of a target for a mercy killing."
Which just leaves me with one question: how do you learn to become a vampirologist? Do colleges have departments of vampirology, from which you could get a degree? It's not like vampires actually exist, with apologies to Merticus and the other wingnuts at the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. So could you become a unicornologist? A centaurologist? A dragonologist? On the other hand, Woerner seems to take the whole thing pretty seriously, so maybe I shouldn't scoff, or make bad puns about how spending your time studying vampires would be all in vein.
Okay, right. In other news of beverages, we have a story in from China that a tea plantation in Gushi is advertising for buxom virgins to harvest tea using only their lips. Prospective harvesters have to have "large breasts, no sexual experience, and no visible scars or birthmarks."
You would think that any newspaper advertisement looking for women with the aforementioned characteristics wouldn't be wanting them to harvest tea. But strangely enough, that's exactly what they are after.
Li Yong, a spokesman for the Jiuhua Tea Plantation, said: "It is much harder work than it looks. They have to cleanse themselves completely before they start working and perform a special exercise program to build up their necks and lips."
I have to admit to some curiosity about how you do exercises to "build up your lips," but Mr. Li was not forthcoming about that aspect of the job.
The tea thus harvested, which is understandably very expensive, is supposed to invoke fairies, which rise to the sky when the tea is brewed. (Fairyology as a career? Nah, never mind.) The tea is then supposed to cure diseases, including, presumably, the curse of having too much money and too little brains.
Lastly, if blood or "lip tea" don't do it for you, we are finding advertisements for a relatively new health fad, and that's drinking "ionized" or "alkalinized" water. You buy a machine (they run upwards of $40 at most of the sites I looked at) which runs an electrical current through the water, and this is supposed to "apply electromagnetic forces" to the water molecules, "ionizing them, and activating them as a powerful antioxidant." The sites claim that "drinking acidic water is known by medical science to cause many ailments, such as obesity, heart problems, and high blood pressure."
Funny, I thought obesity was caused by eating too much and exercising too little, but what do I know?
One of many problems with this claim is that you can't ionize pure water. If you run a current through it, it will break down (very slowly, because pure water is a crummy conductor of electricity) into hydrogen and oxygen. Since any pH change (alkalinity or acidity) is caused by having an imbalance of hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, you can't do it by electrolysis; you're getting rid of the oxygen and hydrogen at the same rate, so when you're done, you still have pure water (pH = 7).
Secondly, if "drinking acidic water" is dangerous to health, you have to wonder why I don't drop dead after having my morning orange juice (pH = 5 or so). And because our stomach juices are highly acidic (pH = 1.5), we should all just immediately melt, or something.
So once again, this seems to simply be a way to relieve the gullible of their cash, which has been something of a theme in today's post.
And that's all the news here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. How fortunate for you that you have WWW's vigilant investigative staff (made up of myself and my extremely vigilant dogs, Doolin and Grendel) to ferret out breaking stories! As always, our watchword around here is: All The News That's Fit To Guffaw At.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
It's not in the cards
I own two decks of Tarot cards.
I hasten to explain, before I have to (in the words of a friend of mine) turn in my Skeptic Badge, that these cards combine being a relic of the credulousness of my Foolish and Misspent Youth with a pure love of the artistry of the cards. They're beautiful, especially my Art Nouveau deck, whose images remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.
A Tarot deck, for those of you not acquainted with these tools for using The Psychic Interconnectedness of Being to extract money from the gullible, is comprised of 78 cards. There 56 minor arcana, which are broken up into suits, numbers, and face cards, rather like a regular deck of playing cards, but with different suits (cups, swords, pentacles, and wands) and with an additional face card (kings, queens, knights, and pages, the last-mentioned of which corresponds to the jack of a standard card deck). There are also 22 major arcana, each of which has a name and an image -- The Magician, The Fool, The Moon, The Sun, The Coffee Maker, etc.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of the other ones are just as weird. How about "The Falling Tower?" "The Hanged Man?" "Judgment?" This last one shows people crawling out of open graves. So I'm to be excused, I think, if I prefer the image of a Coffee Maker.
Anyhow, the whole idea is, the cards are dealt out face down in a cross-shaped affair, and then turned up one at a time and interpreted. The position of the card in the cross determines what facet of your life it applies to -- the past, the present, the future, your work life, your worries, your love life, and so on. It matters whether the card is right side up or upside down (unlike standard playing cards, these cards are not reversible).
And of course, you can't just have any old person analyze them for you. The reader has to somehow be attuned to you psychically. According to a website I looked at called The Tarot Explained, "As the reader lays down the cards they also receive ideas and impressions in their subconscious that helps them answer your question. They are not simply looking at the pictures and giving you the answers. It is through special combinations that they are able to give you the information you seek."
The problem is, there's our old friend the Dart-Thrower's Bias at work here; during readings, people are very much more likely to notice the hits and ignore the misses when they are given such "information," especially if the reader has an air of authority (which in this case might consist of flowing purple robes and a turban). Interestingly, there was a study done on Tarot readings by Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French in 2004, and test subjects were unable to tell the difference between "real" Tarot readings and readings done from cards randomly selected by a computer. Most tellingly, people who believed in Tarot divination fared worse in this test than the average background population did.
So anyhow, it looks like accuracy-wise, Tarot readings fare no better than dowsing and crystal balls and palmistry and so on. It's a shame, because the images in some decks are really quite mysterious and beautiful. Except for "Judgment." Try as I might, I'm still not into the whole open grave thing.
I hasten to explain, before I have to (in the words of a friend of mine) turn in my Skeptic Badge, that these cards combine being a relic of the credulousness of my Foolish and Misspent Youth with a pure love of the artistry of the cards. They're beautiful, especially my Art Nouveau deck, whose images remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.
A Tarot deck, for those of you not acquainted with these tools for using The Psychic Interconnectedness of Being to extract money from the gullible, is comprised of 78 cards. There 56 minor arcana, which are broken up into suits, numbers, and face cards, rather like a regular deck of playing cards, but with different suits (cups, swords, pentacles, and wands) and with an additional face card (kings, queens, knights, and pages, the last-mentioned of which corresponds to the jack of a standard card deck). There are also 22 major arcana, each of which has a name and an image -- The Magician, The Fool, The Moon, The Sun, The Coffee Maker, etc.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of the other ones are just as weird. How about "The Falling Tower?" "The Hanged Man?" "Judgment?" This last one shows people crawling out of open graves. So I'm to be excused, I think, if I prefer the image of a Coffee Maker.
Anyhow, the whole idea is, the cards are dealt out face down in a cross-shaped affair, and then turned up one at a time and interpreted. The position of the card in the cross determines what facet of your life it applies to -- the past, the present, the future, your work life, your worries, your love life, and so on. It matters whether the card is right side up or upside down (unlike standard playing cards, these cards are not reversible).
And of course, you can't just have any old person analyze them for you. The reader has to somehow be attuned to you psychically. According to a website I looked at called The Tarot Explained, "As the reader lays down the cards they also receive ideas and impressions in their subconscious that helps them answer your question. They are not simply looking at the pictures and giving you the answers. It is through special combinations that they are able to give you the information you seek."
The problem is, there's our old friend the Dart-Thrower's Bias at work here; during readings, people are very much more likely to notice the hits and ignore the misses when they are given such "information," especially if the reader has an air of authority (which in this case might consist of flowing purple robes and a turban). Interestingly, there was a study done on Tarot readings by Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French in 2004, and test subjects were unable to tell the difference between "real" Tarot readings and readings done from cards randomly selected by a computer. Most tellingly, people who believed in Tarot divination fared worse in this test than the average background population did.
So anyhow, it looks like accuracy-wise, Tarot readings fare no better than dowsing and crystal balls and palmistry and so on. It's a shame, because the images in some decks are really quite mysterious and beautiful. Except for "Judgment." Try as I might, I'm still not into the whole open grave thing.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
"Many people" report alien sightings in Siberia!
Apparently, if you're an alien, Siberia is the place to be. Who'da thought? Me, if I was an alien, capable of traveling through interstellar space in my flying saucer and presumably landing wherever I wanted, I'd pick somewhere rather nicer, not to mention warmer. Availability of margaritas would also be a consideration, as would the presence of scantily-clad women. So I find it a bit peculiar that you never see aliens in, for example, Cozumel.
But for whatever reason, Siberia seems to be the happenin' place, for aliens. Back in 2007, there was the discovery of some quartz rocks with "mysterious inscriptions" on them, near the site where the Tunguska meteorite hit the ground in 1908. Now, it must be mentioned at this juncture that many people think that the Tunguska event wasn't a meteorite at all, but the explosion of an interstellar spacecraft. (By "many people" I mean "people who have waffle batter where most of us have brains.") The quartz rocks with the inscriptions disappeared shortly after the claim was made; and there has never been a single metal fragment recovered from the site that could be, for example, a catalytic converter from a spacecraft. Further, there is no trace of radioactivity at Tunguska, indicating the use of some sort of nuclear propulsion device. But this just makes our aforementioned "many people" say, "they're pretty wily, these aliens! Even when they crash and blow up and presumably all die, they still remember to cleverly erase all the evidence! Including suspicious quartz rocks!"
Then, last month, air traffic controllers in Siberia took a break from a highly critical nap time to log a flying craft, moving at an estimated 1000 km/hour near the city of Yakutsk. The object changed directions several times. When the air traffic controllers tried to contact it, all they heard was "a female voice" saying "meow meow all the time." The object finally vanished off the radar screen. There's a video of the event on YouTube, but to my disappointment you never get to hear the meowing. All you hear are some people chattering in Russian, and you see some blips on a screen. But what crossed my mind was, "Someone had a hand-held videocamera in an air traffic control tower?" Because that is clearly what the video was made with. It's not an official-looking video at all. In fact, it pretty much screams "hoax" at me, but I don't have much to support that other than a hunch. I hope I'm right, though; I have enough trouble with the cats that are already here, clawing up the sofa and jumping on the dinner table and leaving dismembered dead rodents on the carpet and so on. The last thing we need are superpowerful alien kitties who have learned how to fly.
Last, we have a report only a couple of days ago of an alien corpse found near the village of Kamensk. (Check out the video here). The video captioning asks how some poor Russians could afford to fake something this convincing, which is certainly a question worth considering. The alien is admittedly creepy looking, lying there in the snow. One of its legs is missing, which "many people" are saying is because it died in a horrific spaceship crash. There's only one problem with this theory, and that is that when a spaceship crashes, you'd think that somewhere nearby you'd have a crashed spaceship, but all there is is this dead naked alien lying in the snow.
And that brings up another point: why would anyone, especially a presumably intelligent alien, want to be naked in Siberia? I'm fully supportive of wearing as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather is warm, but being naked in Siberia seems to be just asking for freezing off critical body parts. Not that this alien appears to have any of the critical body parts I was thinking about, if you catch my drift. They never do, do they? All of the alien-dissection videos seem to show these alien bodies, stark naked, but with no reproductive organs whatsoever. "Yes, well," respond "many people," "that's because they're so highly evolved that they reproduce a different way." Myself, I'm kind of fond of the old way, and if that's where evolution is heading, I'll just take a pass, okay?
In any case, it turns out that this one is a fake, not that there was another option. The guys who "found" the alien admitted under questioning that they made it out of a chicken skin and some bread. This answers our earlier question of how poor Russians could afford to make such a fake. I'm impressed, actually; it's pretty damn scary-looking, and I admire their artistic skill. I know I couldn't do anything near as clever with a chicken skin and bread.
So, it looks like our Siberian alien sightings are 0 for 3. It's just as well. If there was really a serious claim of evidence for aliens in Siberia, I'd feel obliged to go there to investigate, and I hate the cold. Even if I have all of my critical body parts well insulated. So, I guess we'll just need to wait and see what happens. If you hear any more reports coming in from "many people," do let me know.
But for whatever reason, Siberia seems to be the happenin' place, for aliens. Back in 2007, there was the discovery of some quartz rocks with "mysterious inscriptions" on them, near the site where the Tunguska meteorite hit the ground in 1908. Now, it must be mentioned at this juncture that many people think that the Tunguska event wasn't a meteorite at all, but the explosion of an interstellar spacecraft. (By "many people" I mean "people who have waffle batter where most of us have brains.") The quartz rocks with the inscriptions disappeared shortly after the claim was made; and there has never been a single metal fragment recovered from the site that could be, for example, a catalytic converter from a spacecraft. Further, there is no trace of radioactivity at Tunguska, indicating the use of some sort of nuclear propulsion device. But this just makes our aforementioned "many people" say, "they're pretty wily, these aliens! Even when they crash and blow up and presumably all die, they still remember to cleverly erase all the evidence! Including suspicious quartz rocks!"
Then, last month, air traffic controllers in Siberia took a break from a highly critical nap time to log a flying craft, moving at an estimated 1000 km/hour near the city of Yakutsk. The object changed directions several times. When the air traffic controllers tried to contact it, all they heard was "a female voice" saying "meow meow all the time." The object finally vanished off the radar screen. There's a video of the event on YouTube, but to my disappointment you never get to hear the meowing. All you hear are some people chattering in Russian, and you see some blips on a screen. But what crossed my mind was, "Someone had a hand-held videocamera in an air traffic control tower?" Because that is clearly what the video was made with. It's not an official-looking video at all. In fact, it pretty much screams "hoax" at me, but I don't have much to support that other than a hunch. I hope I'm right, though; I have enough trouble with the cats that are already here, clawing up the sofa and jumping on the dinner table and leaving dismembered dead rodents on the carpet and so on. The last thing we need are superpowerful alien kitties who have learned how to fly.
Last, we have a report only a couple of days ago of an alien corpse found near the village of Kamensk. (Check out the video here). The video captioning asks how some poor Russians could afford to fake something this convincing, which is certainly a question worth considering. The alien is admittedly creepy looking, lying there in the snow. One of its legs is missing, which "many people" are saying is because it died in a horrific spaceship crash. There's only one problem with this theory, and that is that when a spaceship crashes, you'd think that somewhere nearby you'd have a crashed spaceship, but all there is is this dead naked alien lying in the snow.
And that brings up another point: why would anyone, especially a presumably intelligent alien, want to be naked in Siberia? I'm fully supportive of wearing as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather is warm, but being naked in Siberia seems to be just asking for freezing off critical body parts. Not that this alien appears to have any of the critical body parts I was thinking about, if you catch my drift. They never do, do they? All of the alien-dissection videos seem to show these alien bodies, stark naked, but with no reproductive organs whatsoever. "Yes, well," respond "many people," "that's because they're so highly evolved that they reproduce a different way." Myself, I'm kind of fond of the old way, and if that's where evolution is heading, I'll just take a pass, okay?
In any case, it turns out that this one is a fake, not that there was another option. The guys who "found" the alien admitted under questioning that they made it out of a chicken skin and some bread. This answers our earlier question of how poor Russians could afford to make such a fake. I'm impressed, actually; it's pretty damn scary-looking, and I admire their artistic skill. I know I couldn't do anything near as clever with a chicken skin and bread.
So, it looks like our Siberian alien sightings are 0 for 3. It's just as well. If there was really a serious claim of evidence for aliens in Siberia, I'd feel obliged to go there to investigate, and I hate the cold. Even if I have all of my critical body parts well insulated. So, I guess we'll just need to wait and see what happens. If you hear any more reports coming in from "many people," do let me know.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
"Slender Man" and the persistence of belief
A recent article by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones, which you should all read in its entirety (here), considers the mysterious phenomenon of why people believe things for which there is no factual evidence. The most perplexing thing in Mooney's article, which he does an admirable job explaining but which I still can't quite comprehend, is the well-documented phenomenon of people's beliefs actually strengthening when they are presented with persuasive evidence contrary to their ideas.
I won't steal Mooney's thunder by repeating what he said -- he said it better than I could, in any case. But do want to give a brief example, described more completely in Mooney's article. He tells about a doomsday cult whose leaders were convinced that the world was going to end on December 21, 1954. A researcher went to join the cult members on the fatal day, waiting to see what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight. What you'd think -- that they'd all kind of blink, and look around them, and laugh and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong. What a bunch of goobers we are," didn't happen. They came up with a cockamamie explanation of why the world hadn't ended -- that their faithfulness and belief had caused the alien overlords to issue Earth a reprieve. What it didn't do, amazingly, was cause anyone to question their root assumptions.
I came across a perfect, if rather maddening, example of this phenomenon yesterday. I'm always on the lookout for any news in the cryptozoology world, and yesterday morning I bumped into one I'd never heard of before. Dubbed "Slender Man," it's a tall, thin humanoid, dressed in black, with no facial features -- just a shiny, smooth, white face. Allegedly, it has been associated with a number of mysterious disappearances, often of children, and there is even a short documentary (also worth taking a look at, here) which contains video and audio footage showing appearances of Slender Man. It's quite creepy -- not recommended for watching at night. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
The problem is, it's a fake. Not just the documentary; the entire story. A certified, up-front, yeah-okay-we-admit-that-we-made-the-whole-thing-up fake. Back in June of 2009, there was a "paranormal photograph" contest on the Something Awful forums, a site devoted to pranks, digitally altered photographs, and hoaxes. A fellow named Victor Surge sent in a submission, with the description of his creation, whom he dubbed "Slender Man." The original thread on the forum is still going, and runs to 46 pages. If you can bear to go back through it, you can read how the story developed, starting with a single digitally altered photograph, and finally blossoming into a whole cryptozoological "phenomenon," complete with a history.
The difficulty, of course, is that when you make up something convincing, people are... convinced. Lots of people. If you Google "Slender Man" you'll pull up hundreds of websites, and amazingly, many of them consider him a real paranormal phenomenon. (Upon realizing what I just wrote, I had a momentary thought of, "Implying that there's a difference between real and unreal paranormal phenomena? I'm losing my marbles." But I hope that my readers will understand what I meant by that phrase, and not think that I've turned into some kind of Sasquatch Apologist, or anything.)
At first, I thought that the owners of these websites simply hadn't heard that it was a hoax -- or actually, not even a hoax, because Surge had never really intended for anyone to believe him. The most astonishing thing is that a number of these websites state that they know all about Surge and the Something Awful contest -- and they believe that this story was invented, after the fact, to cover up the "research" that Surge had done on Slender Man and to keep the phenomenon a secret, to stop the public from panicking!
After reading that, and recovering from the faceplant that I experienced immediately thereafter, I thought about Mooney's article, and the desperation with which people cling to beliefs that are contrary to known fact. Why on earth does this happen? Aren't we logical beings, imbued with intelligence, rationality, and fully functional prefrontal cortices?
Sadly, Mooney's answer seems to be "only sometimes." Again, I won't go into tremendous detail -- you should simply read Mooney's article. But the basic claim is that when we've infused a belief with emotion, we meet contrary evidence with a physiological and neurological reaction that mimics our fight-or-flight response -- we either decide to fight ("what you're saying isn't true!") or we flee ("I won't listen."). What almost none of us do is to take that evidence, think about it clearly, and revise our basic core beliefs to fit.
All of which makes it abundantly clear to me that humans are, in fact, animals, and that we often respond to new situations with no more "higher thought" than your typical fluffy woodland creature does. It makes me wonder why we still see a fundamental divide between "human" and "animal" -- but of course, looking that assumption in the face is pretty likely to generate a fight-or-flight response, too.
I won't steal Mooney's thunder by repeating what he said -- he said it better than I could, in any case. But do want to give a brief example, described more completely in Mooney's article. He tells about a doomsday cult whose leaders were convinced that the world was going to end on December 21, 1954. A researcher went to join the cult members on the fatal day, waiting to see what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight. What you'd think -- that they'd all kind of blink, and look around them, and laugh and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong. What a bunch of goobers we are," didn't happen. They came up with a cockamamie explanation of why the world hadn't ended -- that their faithfulness and belief had caused the alien overlords to issue Earth a reprieve. What it didn't do, amazingly, was cause anyone to question their root assumptions.
I came across a perfect, if rather maddening, example of this phenomenon yesterday. I'm always on the lookout for any news in the cryptozoology world, and yesterday morning I bumped into one I'd never heard of before. Dubbed "Slender Man," it's a tall, thin humanoid, dressed in black, with no facial features -- just a shiny, smooth, white face. Allegedly, it has been associated with a number of mysterious disappearances, often of children, and there is even a short documentary (also worth taking a look at, here) which contains video and audio footage showing appearances of Slender Man. It's quite creepy -- not recommended for watching at night. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
The problem is, it's a fake. Not just the documentary; the entire story. A certified, up-front, yeah-okay-we-admit-that-we-made-the-whole-thing-up fake. Back in June of 2009, there was a "paranormal photograph" contest on the Something Awful forums, a site devoted to pranks, digitally altered photographs, and hoaxes. A fellow named Victor Surge sent in a submission, with the description of his creation, whom he dubbed "Slender Man." The original thread on the forum is still going, and runs to 46 pages. If you can bear to go back through it, you can read how the story developed, starting with a single digitally altered photograph, and finally blossoming into a whole cryptozoological "phenomenon," complete with a history.
The difficulty, of course, is that when you make up something convincing, people are... convinced. Lots of people. If you Google "Slender Man" you'll pull up hundreds of websites, and amazingly, many of them consider him a real paranormal phenomenon. (Upon realizing what I just wrote, I had a momentary thought of, "Implying that there's a difference between real and unreal paranormal phenomena? I'm losing my marbles." But I hope that my readers will understand what I meant by that phrase, and not think that I've turned into some kind of Sasquatch Apologist, or anything.)
At first, I thought that the owners of these websites simply hadn't heard that it was a hoax -- or actually, not even a hoax, because Surge had never really intended for anyone to believe him. The most astonishing thing is that a number of these websites state that they know all about Surge and the Something Awful contest -- and they believe that this story was invented, after the fact, to cover up the "research" that Surge had done on Slender Man and to keep the phenomenon a secret, to stop the public from panicking!
After reading that, and recovering from the faceplant that I experienced immediately thereafter, I thought about Mooney's article, and the desperation with which people cling to beliefs that are contrary to known fact. Why on earth does this happen? Aren't we logical beings, imbued with intelligence, rationality, and fully functional prefrontal cortices?
Sadly, Mooney's answer seems to be "only sometimes." Again, I won't go into tremendous detail -- you should simply read Mooney's article. But the basic claim is that when we've infused a belief with emotion, we meet contrary evidence with a physiological and neurological reaction that mimics our fight-or-flight response -- we either decide to fight ("what you're saying isn't true!") or we flee ("I won't listen."). What almost none of us do is to take that evidence, think about it clearly, and revise our basic core beliefs to fit.
All of which makes it abundantly clear to me that humans are, in fact, animals, and that we often respond to new situations with no more "higher thought" than your typical fluffy woodland creature does. It makes me wonder why we still see a fundamental divide between "human" and "animal" -- but of course, looking that assumption in the face is pretty likely to generate a fight-or-flight response, too.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Swash yer bucklers, laddie!
Last week, two students came into my classroom after school. One of them asked me, "I'm wondering if you know what a swash is, and how you buckle it?"
It is probably not a coincidence that the student who asked the question was wearing a pirate hat at the time.
This led to a highly amusing, and as it turns out, completely irrelevant conversation about how pirates had to not only check to make sure that their flies were zipped, but that their swashes were securely buckled.
Actually, the word "swashbuckler" has been in use since the sixteenth century, and (according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology) comes from the verb "to swash," meaning "to clash together noisily," and the noun "buckler," meaning "a small round shield." Apparently "swashbuckler" didn't begin as a noun at all, but as a verb meaning "to clash a sword noisily against your shield so as to intimidate your foe." A highly appropriate action for a pirate to engage in, but this means that "swashbuckling" is a truly lovely example of one of my favorite linguistic phenomena -- that of back formation.
Back formation occurs when a word is treated as if it contains a common inflection -- such as the -er ending meaning "someone who does a particular action," -ing meaning "currently doing something," or -ed meaning "this action occurred in the past" -- when in fact the apparent inflection is just a coincidental part of the word itself. Then, someone "undoes" the fake inflection, and a new word is born. The classic example of back formation is "to burgle," which is a back formation from "burglar." Even though the -ar ending in "burglar" sounds like the usual -er ending (as in "farmer" and "teacher") by pure coincidence only, the word was verbified in the nineteenth century by following the logical pattern: farmers farm, teachers teach, so burglars must burgle. Others include "to gel" (or "jell"), originally from "jelly," which is a cognate to the French word gelé, meaning "frozen" or "congealed;" "to lase" (from "laser," which is an acronym having nothing to do with the -er morpheme -- it stands for Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation); and "to loaf" (from "loafer," which comes from the German landlaufer, meaning "hobo").
A fairly obscure, but awfully funny, example of back formation is "to maffick," meaning "to cause trouble, to riot." It originated during the Siege of Mafeking (pronounced like "maffick-ing") during the Boer War in what is now South Africa -- a siege that lasted 217 days and apparently involved large quantities of troublemaking and riot. Someone evidently decided that Mafeking was the present participle of a verb (in fact, it's the name of a town, and is of Dutch origin), and decided that the people in Mafeking must engage in mafficking. It prompted the British satirist Saki (H. H. Munro) to write the couplet,
Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around, and hinder traffic?
It seems that "swashbuckler" works the same way. "Buckler" comes from the French boucle, meaning "shield;" so like "burglar," its ending in -er is entirely a coincidence. In fact, as a composite, the "swash" part is the verb and the "buckler" part is the noun; so instead of "swashbuckling," it should probably be "bucklerswashing," but that sounds silly and unbefitting of a pirate.
So fear not, lads and lassies; go forth and be swashbucklers to yer hearts' content, and ye needn't worry about having to buckle yer swashes. Ye should still probably make sure yer flies are zipped. Arrrr.
It is probably not a coincidence that the student who asked the question was wearing a pirate hat at the time.
This led to a highly amusing, and as it turns out, completely irrelevant conversation about how pirates had to not only check to make sure that their flies were zipped, but that their swashes were securely buckled.
Actually, the word "swashbuckler" has been in use since the sixteenth century, and (according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology) comes from the verb "to swash," meaning "to clash together noisily," and the noun "buckler," meaning "a small round shield." Apparently "swashbuckler" didn't begin as a noun at all, but as a verb meaning "to clash a sword noisily against your shield so as to intimidate your foe." A highly appropriate action for a pirate to engage in, but this means that "swashbuckling" is a truly lovely example of one of my favorite linguistic phenomena -- that of back formation.
Back formation occurs when a word is treated as if it contains a common inflection -- such as the -er ending meaning "someone who does a particular action," -ing meaning "currently doing something," or -ed meaning "this action occurred in the past" -- when in fact the apparent inflection is just a coincidental part of the word itself. Then, someone "undoes" the fake inflection, and a new word is born. The classic example of back formation is "to burgle," which is a back formation from "burglar." Even though the -ar ending in "burglar" sounds like the usual -er ending (as in "farmer" and "teacher") by pure coincidence only, the word was verbified in the nineteenth century by following the logical pattern: farmers farm, teachers teach, so burglars must burgle. Others include "to gel" (or "jell"), originally from "jelly," which is a cognate to the French word gelé, meaning "frozen" or "congealed;" "to lase" (from "laser," which is an acronym having nothing to do with the -er morpheme -- it stands for Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation); and "to loaf" (from "loafer," which comes from the German landlaufer, meaning "hobo").
A fairly obscure, but awfully funny, example of back formation is "to maffick," meaning "to cause trouble, to riot." It originated during the Siege of Mafeking (pronounced like "maffick-ing") during the Boer War in what is now South Africa -- a siege that lasted 217 days and apparently involved large quantities of troublemaking and riot. Someone evidently decided that Mafeking was the present participle of a verb (in fact, it's the name of a town, and is of Dutch origin), and decided that the people in Mafeking must engage in mafficking. It prompted the British satirist Saki (H. H. Munro) to write the couplet,
Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around, and hinder traffic?
It seems that "swashbuckler" works the same way. "Buckler" comes from the French boucle, meaning "shield;" so like "burglar," its ending in -er is entirely a coincidence. In fact, as a composite, the "swash" part is the verb and the "buckler" part is the noun; so instead of "swashbuckling," it should probably be "bucklerswashing," but that sounds silly and unbefitting of a pirate.
So fear not, lads and lassies; go forth and be swashbucklers to yer hearts' content, and ye needn't worry about having to buckle yer swashes. Ye should still probably make sure yer flies are zipped. Arrrr.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Give Rex food. Give Sonya money.
Whenever I drive, I listen to satellite radio. I revolve through four or five stations, mostly alternative rock, but an occasional announcement by the DJ clues me in to how much more is actually on satellite radio than I am aware of.
Which is how I came to find out that on Tuesday evenings from 6-8 PM Eastern Time, on Sirius channel 102, you can hear a call-in show with a pet psychic.
Sonya Fitzpatrick claims to be able to communicate telepathically with animals. She states that she discovered this ability as a child, when she lost a great deal of her hearing because of an illness, but found that she could still communicate with animals. She temporarily lost her ability due to the trauma of finding out she'd eaten a goose she'd raised for Sunday dinner, but regained it later, and for a time had a show on Animal Planet called The Pet Psychic.
Some people swear by her. In one case, a veterinarian brought his four-year-old mutt, Ernie, to Sonya to determine why he barks continuously. (Ernie, not the veterinarian.) Sonya communed psychically with Ernie for a moment, then clapped her hands to her face.
"He can't open his mouth," she whispered, her voice strained with emotion. "They put something over his nose and mouth ... taped his nose up."
She then told Ernie's owner not to worry about the barking, that he was now barking "because he can" and that they were "yips of joy."
In another case, she told a dog's owner that her dog wanted to meet "a black dog," and was "worried because her owner's back hurts."
I don't know about you, but the whole thing makes me wonder a little. First, there's the obvious problem that Sonya Fitzpatrick can say whatever she wants; it's not like with a regular psychic, where there's any fear of contradiction. The dog isn't going to say, "Um, no, actually that's not what I was thinking." So it's not that this is a verifiable fake; it's not even potentially verifiable at all.
Second, I've been around dogs all my life, and I'm pretty sure that what is going on in their minds most of the time is: Not Much. We own two dogs at the moment, and mainly what they seem to think about is the concept of "Food." During dinner preparation, both dogs sit watching me make dinner, their eyes focused on me like two pairs of laser beams, trying to induce me, presumably through some sort of canine telekinesis, to drop the food on the floor. If Sonya did some kind of Vulcan mind-meld with my dogs, I think she wouldn't come up with much more than "I'M HUNGRY FEED ME NOW."
And I don't even want to think about what it'd be like to try to get into psychic contact with a cat. I strongly suspect that our cats' minds are mostly filled with evil plots involving shredding the furniture and tormenting the other pets. I also think, given the smug way they look at me sometimes, that they frequently have sardonic thoughts about my general appearance.
"You call that a hairstyle?" they seem to say. "You look like a wilted dandelion. And you're not thinking of wearing that shirt, are you? Dear god, yes, it appears that you are. Well, at least iron it, will you? No? I can't bear to watch." And then they turn away and close their eyes, every whisker radiating disapproval.
So even if Sonya could communicate with my cats, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to know what they're thinking. But the whole thing does demand the question of what level of brain is required in the pet for Sonya to be able to get in touch. Could she contact a hamster? A snake? A pet frog? A goldfish? One specific ant in an ant farm? I don't know about you, but I'd certainly enjoy watching her try.
Not that I'll ever have the chance; it's not like she makes house calls. But she does do personal readings, on the telephone, if you're willing to wait for months (she gets hundreds of requests a day).
They cost $300. For a thirty-minute reading.
Yes, folks. There are thousands of people out there who are willing to spend $300 of their hard-earned cash to have a woman who claims to be a pet psychic tell them over the phone that Rex would like some extra gravy on his kibble tonight. Which proves a variety of things, including (1) there are a great many gullible people in the world, (2) many people are more willing to spend their money on stuff like psychic readings than are willing to support a tax increase to fund frivolous things like public education, and (3) Sonya Fitzpatrick is a very smart, and very rich, businesswoman.
Which is how I came to find out that on Tuesday evenings from 6-8 PM Eastern Time, on Sirius channel 102, you can hear a call-in show with a pet psychic.
Sonya Fitzpatrick claims to be able to communicate telepathically with animals. She states that she discovered this ability as a child, when she lost a great deal of her hearing because of an illness, but found that she could still communicate with animals. She temporarily lost her ability due to the trauma of finding out she'd eaten a goose she'd raised for Sunday dinner, but regained it later, and for a time had a show on Animal Planet called The Pet Psychic.
Some people swear by her. In one case, a veterinarian brought his four-year-old mutt, Ernie, to Sonya to determine why he barks continuously. (Ernie, not the veterinarian.) Sonya communed psychically with Ernie for a moment, then clapped her hands to her face.
"He can't open his mouth," she whispered, her voice strained with emotion. "They put something over his nose and mouth ... taped his nose up."
She then told Ernie's owner not to worry about the barking, that he was now barking "because he can" and that they were "yips of joy."
In another case, she told a dog's owner that her dog wanted to meet "a black dog," and was "worried because her owner's back hurts."
I don't know about you, but the whole thing makes me wonder a little. First, there's the obvious problem that Sonya Fitzpatrick can say whatever she wants; it's not like with a regular psychic, where there's any fear of contradiction. The dog isn't going to say, "Um, no, actually that's not what I was thinking." So it's not that this is a verifiable fake; it's not even potentially verifiable at all.
Second, I've been around dogs all my life, and I'm pretty sure that what is going on in their minds most of the time is: Not Much. We own two dogs at the moment, and mainly what they seem to think about is the concept of "Food." During dinner preparation, both dogs sit watching me make dinner, their eyes focused on me like two pairs of laser beams, trying to induce me, presumably through some sort of canine telekinesis, to drop the food on the floor. If Sonya did some kind of Vulcan mind-meld with my dogs, I think she wouldn't come up with much more than "I'M HUNGRY FEED ME NOW."
And I don't even want to think about what it'd be like to try to get into psychic contact with a cat. I strongly suspect that our cats' minds are mostly filled with evil plots involving shredding the furniture and tormenting the other pets. I also think, given the smug way they look at me sometimes, that they frequently have sardonic thoughts about my general appearance.
"You call that a hairstyle?" they seem to say. "You look like a wilted dandelion. And you're not thinking of wearing that shirt, are you? Dear god, yes, it appears that you are. Well, at least iron it, will you? No? I can't bear to watch." And then they turn away and close their eyes, every whisker radiating disapproval.
So even if Sonya could communicate with my cats, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to know what they're thinking. But the whole thing does demand the question of what level of brain is required in the pet for Sonya to be able to get in touch. Could she contact a hamster? A snake? A pet frog? A goldfish? One specific ant in an ant farm? I don't know about you, but I'd certainly enjoy watching her try.
Not that I'll ever have the chance; it's not like she makes house calls. But she does do personal readings, on the telephone, if you're willing to wait for months (she gets hundreds of requests a day).
They cost $300. For a thirty-minute reading.
Yes, folks. There are thousands of people out there who are willing to spend $300 of their hard-earned cash to have a woman who claims to be a pet psychic tell them over the phone that Rex would like some extra gravy on his kibble tonight. Which proves a variety of things, including (1) there are a great many gullible people in the world, (2) many people are more willing to spend their money on stuff like psychic readings than are willing to support a tax increase to fund frivolous things like public education, and (3) Sonya Fitzpatrick is a very smart, and very rich, businesswoman.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Elegy for a dying language
In the news last week was a story about a pair of grumpy old men, who live in the village of Ayapa in southern Mexico. The two old men don't much like each other, and despite the fact that they only live 500 meters away from each other, they haven't spoken in years. One, Manuel Segovia, is described as being "a little prickly;" the other, Isidro Velazquez, is said to be stoic and a bit of a recluse.
All of which would be nothing more than a comical vignette into small-town life, except for the fact that they are the last two fluent speakers of the Ayapaneco language.
Ayapaneco is one of 68 indigenous languages in Mexico. It is from the Mixe-Zoque family of languages, which are spoken by people of Olmec descent. It survived the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, but was finally done in by the institution of compulsory Spanish education in the 20th century and has been dwindling ever since.
My question of the day is: should we care?
Current estimates are that there are about 6,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (which excludes languages such as Latin, that are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker). A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are spoken only by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent. It's an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.
Run that one around in your head for a while.
On the top of the list is Mandarin, the most widely-spoken language in the world. English, predictably, follows. Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Hindi, Spanish, Russian, or some dialect of Arabic. Most of the rest of the world's languages? Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.
Linguists, obviously, care deeply about this. Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind. It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."
Is he right? The argument for preserving languages is mostly derived from a cultural knowledge perspective; language is a way of encoding knowledge, and each different sort of code represents a unique body of that knowledge. That argument has its points, but it is also specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Ayapaneco dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge. We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.
The analogy to biodiversity is also a bit specious. Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled. In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of mutually incomprehensible native languages in Australia) can actually prevent cultural communication and understanding. Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in Haiti and Madagascar. It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.
Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop. It's just sad -- the fact that the number of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like. I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint abut why this is a bad thing. It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool. The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes. But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are more often visited by starlings than by indigo buntings.
All of which would be nothing more than a comical vignette into small-town life, except for the fact that they are the last two fluent speakers of the Ayapaneco language.
Ayapaneco is one of 68 indigenous languages in Mexico. It is from the Mixe-Zoque family of languages, which are spoken by people of Olmec descent. It survived the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, but was finally done in by the institution of compulsory Spanish education in the 20th century and has been dwindling ever since.
My question of the day is: should we care?
Current estimates are that there are about 6,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (which excludes languages such as Latin, that are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker). A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are spoken only by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent. It's an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.
Run that one around in your head for a while.
On the top of the list is Mandarin, the most widely-spoken language in the world. English, predictably, follows. Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Hindi, Spanish, Russian, or some dialect of Arabic. Most of the rest of the world's languages? Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.
Linguists, obviously, care deeply about this. Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind. It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."
Is he right? The argument for preserving languages is mostly derived from a cultural knowledge perspective; language is a way of encoding knowledge, and each different sort of code represents a unique body of that knowledge. That argument has its points, but it is also specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Ayapaneco dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge. We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.
The analogy to biodiversity is also a bit specious. Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled. In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of mutually incomprehensible native languages in Australia) can actually prevent cultural communication and understanding. Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in Haiti and Madagascar. It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.
Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop. It's just sad -- the fact that the number of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like. I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint abut why this is a bad thing. It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool. The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes. But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are more often visited by starlings than by indigo buntings.
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