Warning: zombie apocalypse ahead

I'd like to wish you all a happy Zombie Awareness Month.  Yes, I know its already the 14th, and therefore it's already almost half over, but my rather pathetic excuse is that I was myself unaware until yesterday.

Zombie Awareness Month is the brainchild of Matt Mogk, who founded the Zombie Research Society in 2007.  (See his website, if you're curious or especially if you think I'm making any of this up, here.)  Their motto is "What You Don't Know Can Eat You."  At first, I thought that the Zombie Research Society and the rest of it was a spoof site, but I have this grim suspicion that Mogk is serious.  Even his photograph on the website seems to say, "I am one serious badass, and if you even try to insinuate that zombies aren't real, I might just get my undead minions to eat your brains."

Actually, Mogk claims that zombies don't eat brains, that that was an invention of Hollywood.  I'm a little disappointed about this, because one of my favorite songs is Jonathan Coulton's "Your Brains."  If you've never heard this song, you absolutely must watch this link, but I would advise not trying to drink anything while listening, because you are likely to laugh so hard you'll choke and could end up being really dead instead of undead.

Even though Mogk doesn't think zombies eat brains, as is commonly claimed, he does believe that there will be a zombie pandemic, and looks upon Zombie Awareness Month as a way to spread information about how to avoid being zombified yourself.  Zombie outbreaks have happened before, Mogk claims; and as evidence he has on his site a world map labeled with numbers to indicate historical zombie outbreaks.  Curious, I took a close look at the map, and it turns out that his historical zombie outbreaks refer to events like the Mary Celeste incident, the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Mayan civilization, and an outbreak in the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador "of unknown date" which explains why there are tribes there that practice headhunting.  (As everyone knows,  you can kill a zombie by decapitation.  The fact that you can kill a regular human that way, too, apparently never occurs to Mogk; and he's evidently also never heard of the concept of a "hunting trophy.")

Mogk, for his part, claims he's really trying to help people.  He's particularly concerned about places like New Jersey, which in a zombie apocalypse would face traffic jams even worse than usual, and this would result in a lot of people being caught while trapped in their cars.  He recommends that if you're trying to avoid getting zombified, you should move to a place with low population density, like Wyoming.  In order to spread the word at all levels, Mogk has also written a children's book, called That's Not Your Mommy Any More, which features verses like:

When she's clawing at the kitchen door,
That's not your mommy any more.
When her face looks like an apple core,
That's not your mommy any more.

So, as you can see, he's quite serious about the whole thing, as, he states, we should be.  Mogk claims to have spent time training with the French Foreign Legion, so that explains his focus on survival, as well as possibly suggesting that he spent way too much time cooking his own brains in the desert sun.  But far be it from me to advise a lack of caution, a breezy insouciance, a happy-go-lucky Pollyanna-ish outlook.  Remember, in the movies it's always the people who have those kind of attitudes who are the first to get eaten.  So wear your twist of gray ribbon on your lapel for the rest of May, and spread the word.  The brains you save may be your own.

The Church of St. Vladimir of Nizhny Novgorod

New from the Some Guys Have All The Luck Department: there is an all-female sect in Russia that worships Vladimir Putin as a saint.

A woman who goes by the name Mother Fotina (apparently her real name is Svetlana Frolova) has founded a religion in the town of Nizhny Novgorod that claims that Putin is a reincarnation of the Apostle Paul.  What you would expect to happen -- that the people of Nizhny Novgorod would say to her, "Svetlana, you seriously need to lay off the vodka" -- apparently didn't occur.  Instead, she found herself surrounded by eager female devotees, who were ready to go live in a communal house with her as leader, pray to the blessed St. Vladimir, and worship his image daily.  They are also willing to subsist on a diet of turnips, carrots, peas, and buckwheat, which by itself calls into question their general mental health.

"In his days in the KGB, Putin also did some rather unrighteous things," Mother Fotina said, as reported in the London Telegraph (you can read the whole story, and verify that I am not making this up, here).   "But once he became president, he was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and just like the apostle, he started wisely leading his flock. It is hard for him now but he is fulfilling his heroic deed as an apostle."

Reporters spoke with Father Alexei, who is the Russian Orthodox priest for Nizhny Novgorod.  "Her so-called teachings are a nonsensical mixture of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the occult, Buddhism and political information," he said.  "But Fotina does not come across as a mad person."

No, of course not!  Worshiping Vladimir Putin as a reincarnated saint is perfectly normal!  In fact, maybe there are other reincarnated bible figures out there!  Maybe Barack Obama is John the Baptist!  That would cast Ann Coulter in the role of Salome, wouldn't it?  By that line of thought, it seems likely that Osama bin Laden was a reincarnation of Judas.  In one life, the guy hangs himself and his "bowels burst asunder," and then in the next he gets mowed down by some Navy SEALs.  You'd think he'd eventually learn to play nice, wouldn't you?

Oh, and what about Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's chief political rival?  You have to wonder how the sect handles this guy.  Is he some sort of AntiPutin, or something?  I wouldn't be surprised, given the status they've accorded Putin, if they spend at least a little time during their worship services ill-wishing Medvedev.

As for Putin himself, his reaction to finding out about his status as saint was said to be "bemused."  "This is the first I've heard of such a religious group," said Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman.  "It is impressive that they think so highly of the prime minister's work but I would like to recall another of the main commandments: thou shalt not worship false idols."

Yeah, I guess that one covers it, given that there's no commandment that says, "thou shalt not espouse views that make thee appear to be a raving wingnut."  I'm frankly rather impressed that Putin hasn't made, um, "political capital" out of the whole thing, given that he's said to be something of a ladies' man, and is frequently seen running about shirtless and flaunting what are said to be fairly impressive biceps and pecs.  But thus far, he's behaving himself, as are Mother Fotina and her acolytes.

So, for the time being, all's quiet out in Nizhny Novgorod.  I suppose this is a good thing.  Given all the trouble the Russians have had lately with UFO sightings and chicken carcasses dressed up to look like alien corpses, it's probably best that they don't have nubile young religious wackos tackling their prominent political figures. 

Of course, it's this sort of thing that keeps Skeptophilia in business, so I do have to confess to some measure of ambivalence.

A question about intercessory prayer

There are many things I don't get about religion, but one of the ones I understand the least is the idea of intercessory prayer.

The bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of god's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the divine ear.  In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), god apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea.  Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.

All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if god could change his mind.  The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, god is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing.  As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what god wants is a little silly.  God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why on earth would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on earth simultaneously, change that?

So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis.  Even if I often disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject.  Here's what I found:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will...

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility. (from an essay called "Does Prayer Work?")

Interestingly enough, such an experiment has been done, and not with "poorly trained parrots" but with entire church congregations who were honestly desirous of a positive result, despite Lewis' objections (and despite verses such as Deuteronomy 6:16, "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test."). A well-publicized experiment in 2006 called STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Efficacy of Prayer) tested the medical outcomes of over 1800 coronary bypass patients, who were sorted into three groups. Group 1 and Group 2 were both told they might or might not be prayed for; only Group 1 was. Group 3 was told that they would be prayed for (and were). The thirty-day serious complication or mortality rate was nearly identical between Group 1 and Group 2 (51% and 52%, respectively); Group 3 had a significantly higher rate of complications or death (59%).

I won't go into the possible confounding factors for the higher death rate among Group 3; what interests me is more how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, Group 1 didn't show a lower risk of complications.  "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" sounds good, but my thought is, if ever there was an opportunity for god to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it.  You would think that if presumably god wants people to believe, and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.

You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point.  He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me."  Again, I have to wonder how this would work.  How on earth would praying for something, to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen," and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me?  Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."

While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage.  But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the bible says we have to -- never mind why."  Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it -- which I would welcome -- but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.

Today's forecast: planetary alignment, with a slight chance of catastrophe

This month, four planets will seem to meet in the night sky -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter will twice form "trios," a relatively rare event in which three planets are all within five degrees of each other.  The first one occurs today; Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter will all be a little over two degrees apart.  The second will be on May 21, when Mercury, Venus, and Mars will be just a hair further apart.  Then, at the end of the month, the four planets will be stretched out in a straight line near the horizon.

All of this has an assortment of people leaping about making little squeaking noises.  Astrologers, of course, think this is some pretty heavy stuff, of huge significance to people on Earth, and of even greater importance to anyone born on those days.  I could probably find more details regarding what they think it all means, but every time I read astrological predictions a few more of my brain cells die, and heaven knows I can't afford to lose many more, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Then we have the Rapture crowd, who point out that it's significant that one of these Cosmic Convergences occurs on May 21, the day when Harold Camping believes that the Good Guys will be assumed bodily into heaven, and the Bad Guys will be left behind to face months of tribulations before Satan comes and eats us all for lunch.  Never mind that trios have occurred many times in the past, and Satan hasn't shown.  This time, they assure us, it's really gonna happen.  Me, I'm waiting for May 22, which I'm guessing will show that unfortunately Camping et al. are still alive and well and living on Earth, albeit presumably somewhat embarrassed.

Then we have the woo-woos who think that it has something to do with the Mayan calendar, a topic I'm frankly getting fed up with.  One website says that it will be "one of the most exciting, powerful and transformative celestial events of our millennium, according to astronomy and astrology experts."  Others think it is the first sign of the impending chaos that will peak on December 21, 2012.  A website I looked at states that "the combined gravitational effects of this alignment will wreak havoc with Earth's systems."

When I read that last one, I thought, "finally, a statement we can try to apply some science to!"  What would be the combined gravitational pull of those four planets, if they were in alignment?  Let's just look at the gravitational pull that would come from Jupiter, since it's the most massive planet (by far) and therefore should be the biggest contributor of this force.  I used Newton's law of gravitation, and the value given for the closest approach between Jupiter and the Earth (the time at which this force would be the greatest).  I calculated the force Jupiter would exert on a 1 kg mass on the surface of the Earth.  And I came up with a value of...

...one ten-millionth of a Newton.  For purposes of comparison, this is a hundred million times smaller than the force that the Earth itself is exerting.  As noted earlier, the contributions of Mars, Venus, and Mercury would all be significantly less than that.  So, I think we're safe from the alignment suddenly creating a gravitational imbalance that might cause people to trip over curbs or fall headlong out of their Barcaloungers right in the middle of Jersey Shore.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the talk.  Nor, apparently, has it stopped the aliens, who you would think would understand physics better given that they have interstellar spaceships, from trying to warn us of the presumed impending catastrophe.  A crop circle that appeared on Milk Hill in southern England, way back in June 2009, tried to warn us about the planetary alignment, but would we listen?  Nooooooo.  Here's a photograph of the crop circle:

My favorite part of the caption is where they say that the hieroglyphs were "clearly" alien-made, since humans are obviously incapable of producing bunches of illegible marks.  (I think the next time one of my students submits a paper with horrid handwriting, I'm going to write on it, "I think you got help from superpowerful extraterrestrials on this assignment, as these are clearly alien hieroglyphs.")

Anyway, what this crop circle supposedly shows is a sextant and a schematic of the aligned planets, and was a portent of doom that the aliens were kind enough to provide for us.  I wonder what we are supposed to do with this information, however?  It's not like we can stop a planetary alignment, and getting out of the way is just a wee bit impractical.  So as an advance warning, it's a remarkably pointless one, a little like telling someone who has fallen off a cliff, "Watch out for the ground."

If you'd like for some reason to read the entire explanation of how that crop circle is an alien warning, go here.  Me, I'm done thinking about it.  I might get out my binoculars to take a look at the planetary lineup, but I'm not going to get all worked up about it.  I'm suspecting that the month of May will come and go without anything much happening, and the planets will come into alignment and wander away as they've done for millions of years, and no catastrophe will occur.  Unless you count the fact that Harold Camping and crew will still be around afterwards.

Schizophrenic software and "that's what she said" jokes

If you have any doubt that we are well on our way to emulating a human mind within a machine, two stories in today's news should go a long way toward convincing you.

First, we have a program called DISCERN, developed by Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas at Austin.  DISCERN is able to learn language naturally, through being shown examples and stories.  When DISCERN is told a story, it is assimilated into memory not as a string of text, but as a set of statistical relationships between words.  This is very similar to the way small children learn; as a simple example, when children hear combinations of words like "big dog," "black cat," "good food," and so on, their brains eventually induce the rule "adjectives come before the nouns they modify."  DISCERN learns the same way.

Importantly, DISCERN is also programmed to forget.  Words or relationships that occur with a low frequency are eventually deleted from memory.  Again, this is very similar to our brain's way of processing.

After being fed many stories, DISCERN could communicate quite convincingly with its creators.  It is, apparently, a candidate for passing the Turing Test, which is the metric for gauging artificial intelligence.  The Turing Test, formulated by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, states that basically, if a computer program can fool a human, it's intelligent.  That DISCERN is getting close to passing the Turing Test is impressive enough, but I haven't even gotten to the most amazing part.

Miikkulainen and his student, Uli Graesemann, ran DISCERN, but changed one parameter -- the rate at which it forgot old information with low statistical relevance.  And when they reduced the rate at which DISCERN forgot, the program...

... wait for it...

... developed schizophrenia.

I am not making this up.  As the "forget rate" decreased, DISCERN's output became increasingly erratic; the output began switching back and forth between first and third person, making statements that were syntactic gibberish, digressing abruptly while conversing, and claiming to be responsible for various bad things (natural disasters and terrorist bombings) that had been in the stories DISCERN had been fed.   These language outputs were so suggestive of schizophrenia that Miikkulainen and Graesemann feel that they've hit on something that is emulating what happens in the brains of actual schizophrenia victims.

"We basically simulated what would happen in the brain if there were an excess of dopamine in the memory centers of the brain," Graesemann said.  "The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance -- the salience -- of experience.  When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."  Graesemann stressed that the idea that schizophrenia comes from impairment in the mechanism of forgetting is still unproven, but believes that the experiments with DISCERN support the hypothesis fairly convincingly.

On a happier note, two researchers at the University of Washington, Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, have taught a computer to understand dirty jokes.

Well, specifically, one kind of dirty joke -- the "That's What She Said" joke.  Double entendres have been around for years, and in fact what is now called a "That's What She Said" joke in the US was known for years in Britain as "... said the actress to the bishop."  (An example:  a student of mine was describing being nervous about getting a vaccination.  Apparently the nurse was taking a long time getting the needle ready, and he said, "I was just sitting there thinking, 'Hurry up, just stick it in and get it over with!'"  At this point, about fifteen of his friends chimed in, "THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.")

So, anyway, Kiddon and Brun characterized the double entendre as a "hard natural language understanding problem," and set about to try to see if they could teach a computer to "get the joke."  They started by analyzing sentences and evaluating them for erotic or non-erotic content, and rated words for their "sexiness quotient" -- presumably a good gauge of how promising a particular phrase might be for a TWSS joke.  After a lot of training, the software got a hit rate of 70%, which is pretty impressive, given that my ex-wife doesn't get jokes nearly that often.

However, it does mean that 30% of its jokes didn't work, and resulted in knee-slappingly hilarious output like "The Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871...  That's what she said."  So they have some work still to do.  On the other hand, humor is definitely a higher-level brain function; it requires the ability to map two concepts onto one another, often in unexpected ways.  The makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation understood that -- in making Data humorless, they identified one thing that is somehow quintessentially human.

Not that I think it will be impossible to emulate; Kiddon and Brun have taken the first steps.  I think it's only a matter of time before we have computers that are convincingly intelligent, that could pass the Turing Test with one megabyte of RAM tied behind their CPUs.  And Miikkulainen and Graesemann have shown that when that occurs, we will have to worry about the same kinds of neural net breakdowns that occur in humans, a prospect I find distinctly scary.  (Did HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey just come to mind for you?  Yeah, me too.)

The direction that computer science is taking is sounding increasingly like science fiction, and one has to wonder about the potential dangers -- the fictional universe is densely populated with computer networks that have gone insane and started murdering people.  But that notwithstanding, I think it's worth pursuing, if for no other reason, for increasing our understanding of how our own minds work.

My evil twin

One of the creepiest of psychological phenomena is the Capgras delusion.  Sometimes associated with schizophrenia, the Capgras delusion is the conviction that your friends and family have been replaced by perfect doubles.  It also occasionally occurs with acute prosopagnosia ("face blindness"), usually caused by a stroke that affects the limbic system.  In this case, the part of the brain that usually recognizes faces (the temporal lobe) is functioning normally, but the part of the brain that associates faces with emotions (the limbic system) is not, so you have the impression of seeing someone whom you recognize... but they don't "feel right."

This idea has been riffed upon in a number of works of fiction, most famously The Body Snatchers, the Jack Finney novel which was the basis of the movie(s) The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I still remember what for me was the most shudder-inducing moment in the book.  The town doctor is seeing a patient for something minor, and she (the patient) remarks that her cousin Wilma is acting oddly, that Wilma thinks that "Uncle Ira isn't Uncle Ira any more."  The doctor decides to talk to Wilma about it:

Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense.  "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.  "Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did."  Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper.  "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck, he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it.  You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut.  But when his neck is shaved, you can.  Well, today -- I've been waiting for this! -- today, he got a haircut..."

 I sat forward, suddenly excited.  "And the scar's gone? You mean..."

 "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing.  "It's there -- the scar -- exactly like Uncle Ira's!"

And you sense, of course, that however foolish it sounds, Wilma's right; her uncle actually isn't himself any more.  That someone could be replaced, down to the detail of a tiny scar -- well, it gave me what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  And later, when Wilma sees the doctor again, and laughingly tells him that she'd been acting so silly, of course Uncle Ira is the real Uncle Ira, I shivered even harder.  Because that meant that they had gotten her, too.

The concept is also reflected in the legend of the doppelgänger, or "double walker," an individual out there lurking in the shadows who looks exactly like you.  It's interesting how many cultures have a myth based upon this concept.  The vardøger of Norse myth, the etiäinen in Finland, the ka of the Ancient Egyptians -- all were physical copies of your body, down to the last freckle, and if you happened to run into it, it could result in anything from bad luck to replacement to death.  Even in the changeling myths of Ireland we see this concept; that the Elves could replace a normal human infant with an Elvish copy.  The changeling, they said, would grow up wild and uncontrollable, and would have violent reactions in certain situations (especially in church during the sacraments).  I've often wondered if this last story, however, was invented to explain chronically unruly children.  "He certainly can't be my real son, any son of mine wouldn't act this way.  I know... it was those damned Elves!"

It's also interesting to note that a number of famous people, including Goethe, John Donne, Percy Shelley, and Abraham Lincoln, all reported that they'd seen doppelgängers at some time during their lives (Donne's vision was of his wife, who was bedridden at the time). 

So, what could cause such a pervasive myth?  Once again, what we're probably looking at is a brain-wiring issue.  A paper in Nature, published in 2006, described how a sensation of being in the presence of your double could be induced by electrical stimulation of the left temporal-parietal junction.  This was discovered quite by accident -- the patient in question was receiving the procedure as a treatment for epilepsy (she was otherwise mentally completely normal).  While the stimulation was being applied, she had the sudden, and unpleasant, sensation of having a duplicate of herself immediately behind her.  As soon as the stimulation was ceased, the sensation vanished.

Our sense of identity is so wrapped up not only in our knowledge of our own minds and bodies, but in our feeling of uniqueness, that it is profoundly unsettling to consider even in a fictional setting that there might be someone who was our exact duplicate.  That such a duplicate could replace us, and fool even our friends and family, is one of the creepiest ideas I know of.  Our recognition of people we know is based on a mental network of knowledge, impressions, and emotional responses, both conscious and subconscious -- and when any bit of that network isn't working, it can result in one of the most disturbing and frightening delusions known to medical science.

All shook up

As if we needed something else to worry about, given that the Rapture is going to occur two weeks from now; there is a massive earthquake scheduled to hit Rome on Wednesday.

Many Italians are in a lather about the alleged prognostications of Raffaele Bendandi, who supposedly could predict earthquakes.  The story is that in 1923, Bendandi warned of an earthquake that would strike along the Adriatic coast.  He was off by two days, but afterwards newspapers published front-page stories entitled "The Man Who Forecasts Earthquakes," and Benandi's reputation was born.  He was even awarded a knighthood by Mussolini.

His theory, if you can call it that, is that earthquakes are not caused by motion of tectonic plates; in fact, plate tectonics was not even discovered until the early 1960s.  Bendandi thought that earthquakes were caused by the position of the earth relative to the positions of the moon and the other planets.

So, what we have here is basically tectonic astrology.

Add this to the fact that even the followers of Bendandi's ideas aren't clear as to whether he forecast an earthquake in Rome on May 11.  Paola Lagorio, president of the Benandi Association of Italy, has made an official statement that Bendandi's writings don't mention an earthquake in Rome in 2011.  We can't ask Bendandi himself, because he's been dead for 32 years.

This hasn't stopped a lot of people in Rome from getting all shook up.  Reporters have interviewed a number of people, and their responses have varied from "Meh" (the minority, if the reporting is accurate), to asking for the day off so as to be with family, to fleeing the city for the safety of the countryside.

A chef, Tania Cotorobai, was quoted as saying, "I don't know if I really believe it, but if you look at the internet you see everything and the opposite of everything, and it ends up making you nervous."  She is one of the ones who plans to leave Rome when the fateful day approaches.

And this is why we, and apparently the Italians, should do a better job teaching critical thinking in public schools.  Yes, you will find "everything and the opposite of everything" on the internet.  However, to quote Richard Dawkins:  "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."  Our brains are perfectly capable of using facts, evidence, and logic to ascertain the truth.  The problem is, people are seldom taught to do so.  And given that lack of training, many of us fall back on emotions and hunches -- which are notorious for feeling highly persuasive, but often giving us the wrong answer.

So it probably won't be business as usual in Rome on Wednesday, all because a long-dead tectonic astrologer may or may not have predicted a devastating earthquake for May 11.  Given the response that the people of Rome are having, I wonder what May 21 (Rapture Day) and December 21, 2012 (the Mayan World Destruction Festival) will be like.  I might just stay home myself, but not because I think the world's going to end -- more that I don't want to be outside while the loons are migrating.