The members of the Westboro Baptist Church have been having a hard time lately.
You probably already know that these folks are the followers of the ultra-religious Fred Phelps, who preaches that every bad thing that happens to an American anywhere, any time, happens because we support gays and lesbians. So they show up at the funerals for soldiers killed in Afghanistan with charming signs like "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God For Dead Soldiers." You'd think, if god was so vehemently opposed to homosexuality, he'd smite the homosexuals directly instead of smiting soldiers and hoping we'd get the message. Maybe god has bad aim, or something.
A suit against Phelps made it all the way to the Supreme Court last year, trying to block him from picketing -- and Phelps won. The decision was made on the basis of the right to free speech. This infuriated almost everyone. Even though most of us grudgingly recognize that the right to free speech has to include free speech we disagree with, I suspect that a lot of us would have been secretly thrilled if the Supreme Court had passed down a decision mandating that Every Time Fred Phelps Pickets At A Funeral, A Homosexual Gets To Punch Him In The Mouth.
Of course, where there's a will there's a way. People have been getting increasingly fed up with the antics of these hate-filled lunatics, and have been finding ways to stop them from harassing mourning families at the funerals of their loved ones. In one case, in Mississippi, Phelps and his people showed up in a small town to picket at a funeral, and got up in the morning to find all of their cars mysteriously blocked into parking places by other cars. The police were called, and promised to find the owners or get tow trucks. But you know how hard it is to get anything done quickly. The owners of the cars showed up, apologizing profusely, and moved their cars... after the funeral was over.
So now, Phelps decided to move his sideshow to a venue even more in the public eye -- Arlington National Cemetery. On Memorial Day.
The guy's got balls, you gotta admit. It takes a peculiar kind of guts to show up at an event attended by large numbers of tough, muscular, heavily armed military men and women with a sign saying "I'm Praying For Soldiers to Die." But that's what he did. And his protest generated a counter-protest by...
... wait for it...
... the KKK.
I'm not nearly creative enough to make this up. Members of the Knights of the Southern Cross, a Virginia-based branch of the KKK, showed up to give Phelps and his crew what-for. Which they did.
"It's the soldier that fought and died and gave them that right to free speech," said Dennis LaBonte, the "Imperial Wizard" of the Knights of the Southern Cross. Which made a lot of us shout "Right on!" and then immediately wince because we just agreed with a KKK member. And then LaBonte made it even worse, because he couldn't resist taking the opportunity to trumpet his own brand of craziness. He told reporters that he believes that the white race is "slowly being degraded."
Abigail Phelps, Fred Phelps' daughter, responded that the KKK "had no moral authority." "People like them say it's white power, white supremacy," she told reporters. "The Bible doesn't say anywhere that it's an abomination to be born of a certain gender or race."
Police were on site to keep the two groups of hate-filled wingnuts from getting violent, but you have to wonder if it might not have been better for humanity if the police had simply handed them sharp sticks and told them to go at it.
Me, I just watched the whole thing with my jaw hanging open slightly. I would think that anyone who rejects Phelps' brand of vitriolic homophobia would have to have something going for him, but here's a group who rejects Phelps and espouses violent racism. "Hating homosexuals is obviously immoral!" they seem to be saying. "You should spend your time and effort hating people who aren't white!"
The whole thing is more than a little baffling. It brings to mind the African saying, "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of good sense."
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Meaning, nonsense, and the Voynich Manuscript
Walter Miller's post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz begins with the discovery by monks of a precious and holy relic; a piece of paper with a message from the Blessed St. Leibowitz. The relic is brought back to the monastery, where it is ensconced in a reliquary and becomes the object of great devotion. Furthermore, the writing on the paper is analyzed, discussed, and prayed over, because surely any message from the Blessed Saint must have some deep meaning.
The message, in its entirety, was: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma."
Humans have a tendency to confuse the words "mysterious" and "deep." If we don't understand something, especially something to which we have attached an aura of religion, intrigue, or romance, we seem to conclude automatically that it has great significance. While some texts that have yet to be deciphered are likely to contain interesting information, just by the law of averages we'd expect that some of them... don't.
My sense is that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the latter. It is a bound volume, allegedly from the 15th century, with colored drawings of plants, astronomical objects, mythical animals, and a host of other fanciful items. (You can see images of it, and read more about it, here.) The writing is in a set of characters that has yet to be deciphered, and has been the source of much speculation, from the ridiculous (that it is an alchemical manual whose contents contain magical knowledge of such power that it had to be hidden) to the pragmatic (it's a hoax).
The manuscript itself was named for Wilfred Voynich, who owned it in the early 20th century. After his widow's death in 1960, it was donated to Yale University, where it currently resides.
Recently, scientists were allowed to snip tiny pieces off of four different pages in the manuscript, and it was conclusively carbon-14 dated to between 1400 and 1438. Note that this only tells us the age of the parchment, not the age of the writing. The antiquity of the parchment has reawakened interest in the manuscript, both by legitimate scholars and by woo-woos who think that they'll be the one to translate it -- and acquire its secret knowledge.
Of the many hypotheses of its origins, the one that seems to be the likeliest is that it was produced by Edward Kelley. Kelley was a self-styled alchemist during the reign of Elizabeth I, who became friends with the famous alchemist and mystic John Dee. Dee was apparently duped by Kelley's fantastic claims, which included a purported ability to transmute copper into gold using a powder he'd obtained by grave-robbing a Welsh bishop's tomb. Apparently finding this scientifically plausible, Dee invited Kelley to accompany him to Prague, and Kelley became Dee's "scryer" -- Kelley would stare into a "shewstone" (the Elizabethan ancestor of the crystal ball) and have conversations with angels. The angels spoke a language that Kelley called "Enochian," but Kelley translated what they said, and Dee dutifully wrote it all down. Many scholars suspect that Kelley, in order to make his story more convincing (and probably to make money by selling the manuscript), turned out the Voynich Manuscript in "Enochian" to make his story more plausible.
But how do we know it isn't a cipher, or an actual language? There are a few features of the Voynich Manuscript that seem to indicate that it's nonsense. The first is that the best cryptographers in the world have been unable to crack it, even using computer algorithms designed for the purpose. Writing in ciphers was a common practice in medieval and Renaissance times, especially among the alchemists, and all of these passages have quickly fallen to cipher-breaking techniques. Given the length of the Voynich Manuscript (240 pages), it's extremely unlikely that these techniques wouldn't have cracked the code -- if there was anything sensible there in the first place.
Second, there are some very "un-language-like" features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript. There are a number of places where words are repeated two or even three times in a row -- something that is not at all common in written language. The distribution of word lengths is also suspect -- most of the words are between five and eight characters long, and there are very few extremely short words. This, again, is unlike virtually every written language currently in existence. Given the success of linguists in decoding written languages for which they had no spoken referent (e.g. Linear B in Crete), I'd say they're pretty good at recognizing what a real language looks like -- and, by extension, what a non-language would look like.
Most damning is a statistical study done in 2003 by Gordon Rugg, followed up by a 2007 study by Andreas Schinner, which showed that the frequency and patterns of syllables in the Voynich Manuscript was consistent with gibberish -- i.e., they were random. Schinner used a computerized analysis of the text from the Voynich Manuscript and showed that it could have been produced by a completely stochastic method -- one in which syllables were chosen in a non-meaningful manner, to give the appearance of language.
Of course, none of this will stop the woo-woos from claiming that the Voynich Manuscript contains the Secrets of the Ancients. As Casaubon found out in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum, the more you deny that there is any meaning in something, the more the true believers become convinced that there must be -- otherwise, why would you be so desperate to deny it? It's hard for us to accept the possibility that there is no meaning in something as fanciful, and stirring to the imagination, as the Voynich Manuscript. Given that Miller's monks tried to find meaning in "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home to Emma," we shouldn't be surprised if the controversy over the Voynich Manuscript is not over any time soon.
The message, in its entirety, was: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma."
Humans have a tendency to confuse the words "mysterious" and "deep." If we don't understand something, especially something to which we have attached an aura of religion, intrigue, or romance, we seem to conclude automatically that it has great significance. While some texts that have yet to be deciphered are likely to contain interesting information, just by the law of averages we'd expect that some of them... don't.
My sense is that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the latter. It is a bound volume, allegedly from the 15th century, with colored drawings of plants, astronomical objects, mythical animals, and a host of other fanciful items. (You can see images of it, and read more about it, here.) The writing is in a set of characters that has yet to be deciphered, and has been the source of much speculation, from the ridiculous (that it is an alchemical manual whose contents contain magical knowledge of such power that it had to be hidden) to the pragmatic (it's a hoax).
The manuscript itself was named for Wilfred Voynich, who owned it in the early 20th century. After his widow's death in 1960, it was donated to Yale University, where it currently resides.
Recently, scientists were allowed to snip tiny pieces off of four different pages in the manuscript, and it was conclusively carbon-14 dated to between 1400 and 1438. Note that this only tells us the age of the parchment, not the age of the writing. The antiquity of the parchment has reawakened interest in the manuscript, both by legitimate scholars and by woo-woos who think that they'll be the one to translate it -- and acquire its secret knowledge.
Of the many hypotheses of its origins, the one that seems to be the likeliest is that it was produced by Edward Kelley. Kelley was a self-styled alchemist during the reign of Elizabeth I, who became friends with the famous alchemist and mystic John Dee. Dee was apparently duped by Kelley's fantastic claims, which included a purported ability to transmute copper into gold using a powder he'd obtained by grave-robbing a Welsh bishop's tomb. Apparently finding this scientifically plausible, Dee invited Kelley to accompany him to Prague, and Kelley became Dee's "scryer" -- Kelley would stare into a "shewstone" (the Elizabethan ancestor of the crystal ball) and have conversations with angels. The angels spoke a language that Kelley called "Enochian," but Kelley translated what they said, and Dee dutifully wrote it all down. Many scholars suspect that Kelley, in order to make his story more convincing (and probably to make money by selling the manuscript), turned out the Voynich Manuscript in "Enochian" to make his story more plausible.
But how do we know it isn't a cipher, or an actual language? There are a few features of the Voynich Manuscript that seem to indicate that it's nonsense. The first is that the best cryptographers in the world have been unable to crack it, even using computer algorithms designed for the purpose. Writing in ciphers was a common practice in medieval and Renaissance times, especially among the alchemists, and all of these passages have quickly fallen to cipher-breaking techniques. Given the length of the Voynich Manuscript (240 pages), it's extremely unlikely that these techniques wouldn't have cracked the code -- if there was anything sensible there in the first place.
Second, there are some very "un-language-like" features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript. There are a number of places where words are repeated two or even three times in a row -- something that is not at all common in written language. The distribution of word lengths is also suspect -- most of the words are between five and eight characters long, and there are very few extremely short words. This, again, is unlike virtually every written language currently in existence. Given the success of linguists in decoding written languages for which they had no spoken referent (e.g. Linear B in Crete), I'd say they're pretty good at recognizing what a real language looks like -- and, by extension, what a non-language would look like.
Most damning is a statistical study done in 2003 by Gordon Rugg, followed up by a 2007 study by Andreas Schinner, which showed that the frequency and patterns of syllables in the Voynich Manuscript was consistent with gibberish -- i.e., they were random. Schinner used a computerized analysis of the text from the Voynich Manuscript and showed that it could have been produced by a completely stochastic method -- one in which syllables were chosen in a non-meaningful manner, to give the appearance of language.
Of course, none of this will stop the woo-woos from claiming that the Voynich Manuscript contains the Secrets of the Ancients. As Casaubon found out in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum, the more you deny that there is any meaning in something, the more the true believers become convinced that there must be -- otherwise, why would you be so desperate to deny it? It's hard for us to accept the possibility that there is no meaning in something as fanciful, and stirring to the imagination, as the Voynich Manuscript. Given that Miller's monks tried to find meaning in "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home to Emma," we shouldn't be surprised if the controversy over the Voynich Manuscript is not over any time soon.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Remembrance of music past
I just got back home last night from Folk College, a yearly get-together of music and mayhem in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. It's such a treat to get together with like-minded folks, who don't think less of me for playing the bagpipes and liking music in demented time signatures like 25/16.
I was fortunate enough to have company on the four-hour drive there and back, with my friends Kathy and Deb who also taught classes at Folk College this year. (In fact, Deb and I co-taught a class in Eastern European Music, which was a blast - she contributed the Klezmer tunes, and I contributed the Balkan ones.) Kathy is a Cornell physics professor, and teaches (amongst other things) a class called The Physics of Musical Sound. Deb teaches music theory and sight singing at Ithaca College.
As you might expect, the conversations in the car were fairly interesting.
It was on the way back that the discussion turned to muscle memory, a subject near and dear to the heart of any instrumentalist. I was commenting that there are a couple of tunes, most notably the English dance tune "Knole Park," that contain passages for which I rely almost entirely on muscle memory -- the progression is so unexpected or counterintuitive that if my fingers don't keep ahead of my brain, I screw up.
"I felt that way about the passage in 'Knole Park' until I realized that it was just a series of descending sixths," Kathy said.
"How on earth does that help?" I asked.
A lively discussion ensued regarding how we store and access musical memory, and resulted in the intriguing discovery that the three of us all seem to approach it differently -- despite the fact that we all have fairly similar backgrounds musically (classically trained, moved on to folk music later in life).
I will try to describe what each of the three of us said -- if either Kathy or Deb reads this, and I've misrepresented your views, please accept my sincere apologies, and chalk it up to the fact that while I was participating in this conversation I was suffering from music-induced cumulative sleep deprivation.
Kathy seems to recall music visually. Given a tune she knows, she can recall what the notes on the page look like; and even when she doesn't picture the written notation, she pictures tunes as having spatial contours (she visualizes the descending sixths figure in "Knole Park" as looking like a zigzag). In tunes with repeated phrases, she sees the phrases as blocks -- she even described teaching, in her Easy Scottish Tunes class, a particular tune as having a phrase ("let's call it the red block") followed by a new phrase ("the green block"), and then the red block again, and then an end phrase ("the blue block").
Of the three of us, Deb seems to have the most highly cognitive approach to music. Being an expert in music theory, she groks the whole structure -- and has the vocabulary to put labels on it, giving her a mental hook to hang the music on. ("This tune is in D mixolydian mode." "The B part begins with an ascending third.") Now, she's not hung up on exactly what you call it; it's the concept that counts, because the concept is what allows her mind to see what the music is doing. A deep understanding of the structure creates space for the music to be understood, recalled, and played. If you have a grasp of what a tune's structure is, the rest becomes a matter of creating sounds that fit that structure.
If Deb was the most cognitive of the three of us, I'm definitely the least. For me, music recall (and playing) is almost entirely auditory and intuitive in nature. I hear music in my head, and neither picture it as a sonic space nor do I usually have any particular sense of what the music is doing structurally. I understand a little music theory -- enough to where if I sat down and thought about it, I could figure out that the interval between the second and third notes of "Kopanica" is an augmented second. But I don't ever in performance think about that, and even if I did, it wouldn't help me -- if I thought, while playing "Knole Park," "Okay, remember that the next part is a figure of descending sixths," it would make me no more or less likely to flub it. Music is stored in a completely different part of my brain, I think, than any kind of verbal or spatial memory -- which is probably why I find it so difficult to remember the names of tunes, even ones I can play fluidly.
I commented that I would be really interested to see what a fMRI of our heads while we're learning a tune, thinking about a tune, or playing a tune. I'd bet that you'd see some significant differences between the three of us -- despite the fact that we're all folk musicians, with relatively similar backgrounds, playing in similar traditions. All of which makes me want to spend more time playing, thinking about, and discussing music -- especially with two such fascinating, talented, and deep-thinking people.
I was fortunate enough to have company on the four-hour drive there and back, with my friends Kathy and Deb who also taught classes at Folk College this year. (In fact, Deb and I co-taught a class in Eastern European Music, which was a blast - she contributed the Klezmer tunes, and I contributed the Balkan ones.) Kathy is a Cornell physics professor, and teaches (amongst other things) a class called The Physics of Musical Sound. Deb teaches music theory and sight singing at Ithaca College.
As you might expect, the conversations in the car were fairly interesting.
It was on the way back that the discussion turned to muscle memory, a subject near and dear to the heart of any instrumentalist. I was commenting that there are a couple of tunes, most notably the English dance tune "Knole Park," that contain passages for which I rely almost entirely on muscle memory -- the progression is so unexpected or counterintuitive that if my fingers don't keep ahead of my brain, I screw up.
"I felt that way about the passage in 'Knole Park' until I realized that it was just a series of descending sixths," Kathy said.
"How on earth does that help?" I asked.
A lively discussion ensued regarding how we store and access musical memory, and resulted in the intriguing discovery that the three of us all seem to approach it differently -- despite the fact that we all have fairly similar backgrounds musically (classically trained, moved on to folk music later in life).
I will try to describe what each of the three of us said -- if either Kathy or Deb reads this, and I've misrepresented your views, please accept my sincere apologies, and chalk it up to the fact that while I was participating in this conversation I was suffering from music-induced cumulative sleep deprivation.
Kathy seems to recall music visually. Given a tune she knows, she can recall what the notes on the page look like; and even when she doesn't picture the written notation, she pictures tunes as having spatial contours (she visualizes the descending sixths figure in "Knole Park" as looking like a zigzag). In tunes with repeated phrases, she sees the phrases as blocks -- she even described teaching, in her Easy Scottish Tunes class, a particular tune as having a phrase ("let's call it the red block") followed by a new phrase ("the green block"), and then the red block again, and then an end phrase ("the blue block").
Of the three of us, Deb seems to have the most highly cognitive approach to music. Being an expert in music theory, she groks the whole structure -- and has the vocabulary to put labels on it, giving her a mental hook to hang the music on. ("This tune is in D mixolydian mode." "The B part begins with an ascending third.") Now, she's not hung up on exactly what you call it; it's the concept that counts, because the concept is what allows her mind to see what the music is doing. A deep understanding of the structure creates space for the music to be understood, recalled, and played. If you have a grasp of what a tune's structure is, the rest becomes a matter of creating sounds that fit that structure.
If Deb was the most cognitive of the three of us, I'm definitely the least. For me, music recall (and playing) is almost entirely auditory and intuitive in nature. I hear music in my head, and neither picture it as a sonic space nor do I usually have any particular sense of what the music is doing structurally. I understand a little music theory -- enough to where if I sat down and thought about it, I could figure out that the interval between the second and third notes of "Kopanica" is an augmented second. But I don't ever in performance think about that, and even if I did, it wouldn't help me -- if I thought, while playing "Knole Park," "Okay, remember that the next part is a figure of descending sixths," it would make me no more or less likely to flub it. Music is stored in a completely different part of my brain, I think, than any kind of verbal or spatial memory -- which is probably why I find it so difficult to remember the names of tunes, even ones I can play fluidly.
I commented that I would be really interested to see what a fMRI of our heads while we're learning a tune, thinking about a tune, or playing a tune. I'd bet that you'd see some significant differences between the three of us -- despite the fact that we're all folk musicians, with relatively similar backgrounds, playing in similar traditions. All of which makes me want to spend more time playing, thinking about, and discussing music -- especially with two such fascinating, talented, and deep-thinking people.
Friday, May 27, 2011
People are strange
Belief in an afterlife is an almost universal part of religion, be it the heaven-and-hell scenario of traditional Christianity, the idea of reincarnation from Buddhism and Hinduism, or the "energy merging with the cosmos" thing you hear so often from New Age types. A lot of atheists simply disbelieve in any sort of afterlife. Myself, I don't bother speculating. First, we have no hard evidence of any kind, which I think you'd probably expect if there was an afterlife, and you'd certainly expect if there wasn't. Second, I figure I'll find out for sure sooner or later in any case.
Of course, there are the anecdotal reports of ghosts to account for. I tend to discount most of them, largely based on the fact that the human perceptual apparatus is so easy to fool. Plus, a lot of people gain notoriety (and money) from claiming that there are cases of spirit survival -- witness the popularity (and therefore the lucrativeness for sponsors) of shows like Ghost Hunters. If you add in the money that is made by so-called mediums such as Sylvia Browne and James van Praagh, you can see that the afterlife is big business.
Still, you have to wonder why some people make weird claims when they seemingly have nothing to gain from it. As an example, a woman named Rhonda Baron, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, just made the news yesterday by claiming that the ghost of Jim Morrison keeps getting in bed with her.
Baron lives in a house on 28th Street in which Morrison had lived as a child. She had only lived there for a few months, she says, when Morrison's spirit began to visit her at night. "I was lying in bed," she said, in a television news interview. "The spirit lay down on the bed beside me on his back, and turned and looked at me. It was like a haze, you could look through it." She claims that Morrison's ghost has returned there because he led an unhappy life, and his childhood home is one place that had happy memories for him.
Which would indicate that apparently, Morrison never did break on through to the other side.
So here we have a person who apparently has little to gain from telling this story but her five minutes of fame on public television, and could lose a great deal if her friends and neighbors decide she's a raving wingnut. From her interview, she doesn't have the air of someone who is lying, or deluded; she seems to believe vehemently that what she is saying is the truth.
Now, please understand that I'm not implying that I'm in doubt myself; I have no reason to think that Baron is really being visited by Jim Morrison. I am more curious as to why an apparently rational person would make such an outlandish claim unless she really had experienced something out of the ordinary. I suppose one could make a case that she's doing it for the attention, but it does seem like a pretty peculiar way to get attention.
Morrison, of course, is not the only famous person whom people have claimed to see in spirit form; some of the more frequent ones are Harry Houdini, Elvis Presley, Anne Boleyn (often wi' her head tucked underneath 'er arm), Marilyn Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln. In one of the most famous anecdotes of a ghost sighting, Winston Churchill was on a state visit and staying in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, and allegedly saw Lincoln climbing out of the bathtub, stark naked, with a cigar in his mouth.
"Mr. President, you have me at a disadvantage," Churchill said, at which point the ghost smiled at him and vanished. Churchill, so the story goes, refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom after that.
I wouldn't have, either.
Be that as it may, I'm still skeptical about the whole thing. I still think that experiences such as Churchill's, and Baron's, are too easily explained as vivid dreams in light sleep (so-called "hypnogogic experiences"), a hallucinatory state that is not uncommon and apparently frighteningly realistic. It just seems a much easier explanation -- dare I mention Ockham's Razor again, without being thought predictable? -- than claiming that Abraham Lincoln saw fit to visit Winston Churchill in the all-together, and that Jim Morrison regularly visits Rhonda Baron in bed, perhaps in an attempt to light her fire. I can't decisively rule out the possibility of an afterlife, but I think that from the data we have, other explanations are clearly adequate.
Of course, there are the anecdotal reports of ghosts to account for. I tend to discount most of them, largely based on the fact that the human perceptual apparatus is so easy to fool. Plus, a lot of people gain notoriety (and money) from claiming that there are cases of spirit survival -- witness the popularity (and therefore the lucrativeness for sponsors) of shows like Ghost Hunters. If you add in the money that is made by so-called mediums such as Sylvia Browne and James van Praagh, you can see that the afterlife is big business.
Still, you have to wonder why some people make weird claims when they seemingly have nothing to gain from it. As an example, a woman named Rhonda Baron, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, just made the news yesterday by claiming that the ghost of Jim Morrison keeps getting in bed with her.
Baron lives in a house on 28th Street in which Morrison had lived as a child. She had only lived there for a few months, she says, when Morrison's spirit began to visit her at night. "I was lying in bed," she said, in a television news interview. "The spirit lay down on the bed beside me on his back, and turned and looked at me. It was like a haze, you could look through it." She claims that Morrison's ghost has returned there because he led an unhappy life, and his childhood home is one place that had happy memories for him.
Which would indicate that apparently, Morrison never did break on through to the other side.
So here we have a person who apparently has little to gain from telling this story but her five minutes of fame on public television, and could lose a great deal if her friends and neighbors decide she's a raving wingnut. From her interview, she doesn't have the air of someone who is lying, or deluded; she seems to believe vehemently that what she is saying is the truth.
Now, please understand that I'm not implying that I'm in doubt myself; I have no reason to think that Baron is really being visited by Jim Morrison. I am more curious as to why an apparently rational person would make such an outlandish claim unless she really had experienced something out of the ordinary. I suppose one could make a case that she's doing it for the attention, but it does seem like a pretty peculiar way to get attention.
Morrison, of course, is not the only famous person whom people have claimed to see in spirit form; some of the more frequent ones are Harry Houdini, Elvis Presley, Anne Boleyn (often wi' her head tucked underneath 'er arm), Marilyn Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln. In one of the most famous anecdotes of a ghost sighting, Winston Churchill was on a state visit and staying in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, and allegedly saw Lincoln climbing out of the bathtub, stark naked, with a cigar in his mouth.
"Mr. President, you have me at a disadvantage," Churchill said, at which point the ghost smiled at him and vanished. Churchill, so the story goes, refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom after that.
I wouldn't have, either.
Be that as it may, I'm still skeptical about the whole thing. I still think that experiences such as Churchill's, and Baron's, are too easily explained as vivid dreams in light sleep (so-called "hypnogogic experiences"), a hallucinatory state that is not uncommon and apparently frighteningly realistic. It just seems a much easier explanation -- dare I mention Ockham's Razor again, without being thought predictable? -- than claiming that Abraham Lincoln saw fit to visit Winston Churchill in the all-together, and that Jim Morrison regularly visits Rhonda Baron in bed, perhaps in an attempt to light her fire. I can't decisively rule out the possibility of an afterlife, but I think that from the data we have, other explanations are clearly adequate.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Area 51, mutant teenagers, and flying bunnies
As a general bit of advice to woo-woos and conspiracy theorists out there; if people think that a particular explanation for a mysterious event is ridiculous, contrived nonsense, the appropriate response is not to come up with one that is even worse.
For example, suppose a clump of animal hair is found snagged on a bush in a forest in the Cascades. Someone says, "Wow! Sasquatch hair!" If you then snort derisively, and say, "Sasquatch hair? Are you kidding me? This is clearly hair from the Giant Carnivorous Flying Bunny of the Pacific Northwest," people will think you've lost your mind.
Apparently no one ever gave advice of this sort to Annie Jacobsen, to judge by her recent book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Jacobsen, an investigative reporter, used "74 sources, 32 of whom lived and worked at Area 51 for extended periods of time." In the course of her research, she took advantage of the recent declassification of formerly top-secret government documents to study US covert activities in the 1940s and 1950s. "In many previously classified documents relating to activities at the base, the words 'Area 51' are conveniently blacked out," Jacobsen said. "There's always a euphemism for it -- like 'the test facility' or 'the base' -- but never Area 51."
So basically, she has two sources: government documents with all of the important stuff covered up, and anecdotal reports from people of uncertain veracity. And from this, she cooks up quite a story.
You know how the Roswell Incident, which happened in the summer of 1947, allegedly involved the crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico? And that alien corpses were dissected in top-secret US military installations in Area 51 in Nevada? And the spacecraft remnants were analyzed and formed the basis of US radar-evading aircraft technology, such as the Stealth bomber?
Bah, Jacobsen says. Don't be a gullible ninny. None of that is true.
What really happened is that after World War II, Josef Stalin and Dr. Joseph Mengele (the Nazi "Angel of Death") got together and used experimental genetic techniques to create mutant hairless human children with gigantic heads and tiny bodies, and put them aboard a flying saucer that was powered remotely from Moscow, so that they could fly it and land it in the United States to create another War of the Worlds-style panic over an alien invasion. What Stalin and Mengele would do then, how they planned on capitalizing on the ensuing chaos, she never says. Maybe she thinks that given their status as two of the world's most evil human beings, it would have been sufficient for Stalin and Mengele to watch the whole thing from their Top Secret Command Center and cackle maniacally, and the US would be so demoralized that we would capitulate immediately.
Or maybe she thinks that being divebombed by a flying saucer with huge-headed hairless teenagers would have softened our defenses, and opened the way for attack by the Giant Carnivorous Flying Bunnies. I dunno.
I think what amazes me is that the media are taking what she has to say seriously. Take a look at an interview she got on MSNBC. The interviewer, first of all, clearly believes all of the alien nonsense, and seems completely bowled over by her chance to talk about it on public television. So, you're immediately set up to think that there are going to be some mind-blowing revelations. Listening to Jacobsen, however, I was immediately struck by how completely unremarkable her information was. The US was working on radar-evasion technology back during the Eisenhower administration! If you can imagine! And I outright guffawed at the part about Area 51 being connected by underground tunnels to other military bases. Does she have any idea how impossible this is? Let's say that somehow, there is a tunnel connecting Area 51 to say, Hill Air Force Base, right next door in Utah. This is a distance of about four hundred miles. So, we're to believe that without anyone knowing, the US government built four hundred miles of tunnels through solid rock, just so they could avoid having to get on the Interstate?
Oh, but she has proof! She says that she knows of a military base where the work stations are underground and they are connected by "a tunnel that is above ground." Myself, I thought that the concept of "tunnel" implied "underground," and therefore that an "above-ground tunnel" would basically be a "hallway." But what do I know? Those US Government Guys are pretty damn tricky.
Anyhow, here's another book for your collection. You can put it on your bookshelf right next to Nick Redfern's The Real Men in Black. It does, however, make me think that I've missed my calling. If Annie Jacobsen can become rich and famous, and get interviews on MSNBC, for writing this kind of tripe, then maybe there's more money to be made from that sort of thing than there is from writing about skepticism and critical thinking. So, look for my new bestseller, Hare-mogeddon: The Upcoming Flying Bunny Invasion, and What You Can Do To Avoid Being Eaten. Soon in bookstores everywhere. I'll be waiting for MSNBC to contact me.
For example, suppose a clump of animal hair is found snagged on a bush in a forest in the Cascades. Someone says, "Wow! Sasquatch hair!" If you then snort derisively, and say, "Sasquatch hair? Are you kidding me? This is clearly hair from the Giant Carnivorous Flying Bunny of the Pacific Northwest," people will think you've lost your mind.
Apparently no one ever gave advice of this sort to Annie Jacobsen, to judge by her recent book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Jacobsen, an investigative reporter, used "74 sources, 32 of whom lived and worked at Area 51 for extended periods of time." In the course of her research, she took advantage of the recent declassification of formerly top-secret government documents to study US covert activities in the 1940s and 1950s. "In many previously classified documents relating to activities at the base, the words 'Area 51' are conveniently blacked out," Jacobsen said. "There's always a euphemism for it -- like 'the test facility' or 'the base' -- but never Area 51."
So basically, she has two sources: government documents with all of the important stuff covered up, and anecdotal reports from people of uncertain veracity. And from this, she cooks up quite a story.
You know how the Roswell Incident, which happened in the summer of 1947, allegedly involved the crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico? And that alien corpses were dissected in top-secret US military installations in Area 51 in Nevada? And the spacecraft remnants were analyzed and formed the basis of US radar-evading aircraft technology, such as the Stealth bomber?
Bah, Jacobsen says. Don't be a gullible ninny. None of that is true.
What really happened is that after World War II, Josef Stalin and Dr. Joseph Mengele (the Nazi "Angel of Death") got together and used experimental genetic techniques to create mutant hairless human children with gigantic heads and tiny bodies, and put them aboard a flying saucer that was powered remotely from Moscow, so that they could fly it and land it in the United States to create another War of the Worlds-style panic over an alien invasion. What Stalin and Mengele would do then, how they planned on capitalizing on the ensuing chaos, she never says. Maybe she thinks that given their status as two of the world's most evil human beings, it would have been sufficient for Stalin and Mengele to watch the whole thing from their Top Secret Command Center and cackle maniacally, and the US would be so demoralized that we would capitulate immediately.
Or maybe she thinks that being divebombed by a flying saucer with huge-headed hairless teenagers would have softened our defenses, and opened the way for attack by the Giant Carnivorous Flying Bunnies. I dunno.
I think what amazes me is that the media are taking what she has to say seriously. Take a look at an interview she got on MSNBC. The interviewer, first of all, clearly believes all of the alien nonsense, and seems completely bowled over by her chance to talk about it on public television. So, you're immediately set up to think that there are going to be some mind-blowing revelations. Listening to Jacobsen, however, I was immediately struck by how completely unremarkable her information was. The US was working on radar-evasion technology back during the Eisenhower administration! If you can imagine! And I outright guffawed at the part about Area 51 being connected by underground tunnels to other military bases. Does she have any idea how impossible this is? Let's say that somehow, there is a tunnel connecting Area 51 to say, Hill Air Force Base, right next door in Utah. This is a distance of about four hundred miles. So, we're to believe that without anyone knowing, the US government built four hundred miles of tunnels through solid rock, just so they could avoid having to get on the Interstate?
Oh, but she has proof! She says that she knows of a military base where the work stations are underground and they are connected by "a tunnel that is above ground." Myself, I thought that the concept of "tunnel" implied "underground," and therefore that an "above-ground tunnel" would basically be a "hallway." But what do I know? Those US Government Guys are pretty damn tricky.
Anyhow, here's another book for your collection. You can put it on your bookshelf right next to Nick Redfern's The Real Men in Black. It does, however, make me think that I've missed my calling. If Annie Jacobsen can become rich and famous, and get interviews on MSNBC, for writing this kind of tripe, then maybe there's more money to be made from that sort of thing than there is from writing about skepticism and critical thinking. So, look for my new bestseller, Hare-mogeddon: The Upcoming Flying Bunny Invasion, and What You Can Do To Avoid Being Eaten. Soon in bookstores everywhere. I'll be waiting for MSNBC to contact me.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
For sale: one skull. Slightly used.
New from the No Way Am I Creative Enough To Make This Story Up Department: the severed head of the patron saint of genital diseases is for sale in Ireland.
St. Vitalis of Assisi was a monk and hermit who died in 1370. During his early years he was known for being a ladies' man, but realizing the error of his ways, he went on a pilgrimage. When he returned to his native Italy, he became a hermit at St. Maria di Viole, near Assisi, and lived in complete poverty. Perhaps because of his overuse of those organs when he was a young man, he became the patron saint of genitals.
All of which makes me wonder: how do you get appointed patron saint of anything? I know there are plenty of patron saints of things other than bodily organs. My grandmother used to pray to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, which always struck me as being a little on the pointless side; why would you expect a lot of help from a guy whose philosophy seems to be "it's hopeless?" St. Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of knife sharpeners. St. Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of clowns. St. Matthew is the patron saint of accountants. St. Florian is the patron saint of soap boilers. St. Frank the Flatulent is the patron saint of Taco Bell.
Okay, I made the last one up. But according to the official Catholic Patron Saints List, there are some that are even weirder. There is a patron saint of button makers, pigs, football, earaches, urologists, reformed prostitutes, and hemorrhoids. And I don't think they're joking, either. The Catholic powers-that-be take their saints pretty seriously, even if it leaves the rest of us trying not to laugh.
But I digress.
You might wonder how the head of the patron saint of naughty bits, who was Italian, ended up in Ireland. When a family representative was asked how they acquired the skull, they basically shrugged and said, "We're not sure." Apparently the story is that when a member of this family went on a tour of Europe in the 19th century, he came back with the skull. Instead of asking questions, the family had a wooden case built for it, and displayed it in the main hall.
Me, I think this is a pretty peculiar reaction. I'm trying to picture what my reaction would be if one of my kids returned from a trip to Europe with a human body part. I'm thinking that, "Cool! Let's build a shrine for it and put it up on the mantelpiece in the living room!" would not be the first thing that would occur to me.
Anyway, should you yourself not be subject to such scruples, the head of St. Vitalis of Assisi is being auctioned by the County Louth family that owns it. It is given a recommended price of between $1,100 and $1,700, and comes with its own really nice Queen Anne case. The day of the auction is May 29, so you still have time to go there if the idea appeals to you.
I think I'm gonna pass. For one thing, I doubt Carol would be all that happy about my blowing over a thousand bucks on a used skull. For another, I think I'm going to wait until the skull of Saint Sebaldus goes on sale. He's the patron saint of protection against cold weather. Now there is a guy whose help I could use.
St. Vitalis of Assisi was a monk and hermit who died in 1370. During his early years he was known for being a ladies' man, but realizing the error of his ways, he went on a pilgrimage. When he returned to his native Italy, he became a hermit at St. Maria di Viole, near Assisi, and lived in complete poverty. Perhaps because of his overuse of those organs when he was a young man, he became the patron saint of genitals.
All of which makes me wonder: how do you get appointed patron saint of anything? I know there are plenty of patron saints of things other than bodily organs. My grandmother used to pray to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, which always struck me as being a little on the pointless side; why would you expect a lot of help from a guy whose philosophy seems to be "it's hopeless?" St. Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of knife sharpeners. St. Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of clowns. St. Matthew is the patron saint of accountants. St. Florian is the patron saint of soap boilers. St. Frank the Flatulent is the patron saint of Taco Bell.
Okay, I made the last one up. But according to the official Catholic Patron Saints List, there are some that are even weirder. There is a patron saint of button makers, pigs, football, earaches, urologists, reformed prostitutes, and hemorrhoids. And I don't think they're joking, either. The Catholic powers-that-be take their saints pretty seriously, even if it leaves the rest of us trying not to laugh.
But I digress.
You might wonder how the head of the patron saint of naughty bits, who was Italian, ended up in Ireland. When a family representative was asked how they acquired the skull, they basically shrugged and said, "We're not sure." Apparently the story is that when a member of this family went on a tour of Europe in the 19th century, he came back with the skull. Instead of asking questions, the family had a wooden case built for it, and displayed it in the main hall.
Me, I think this is a pretty peculiar reaction. I'm trying to picture what my reaction would be if one of my kids returned from a trip to Europe with a human body part. I'm thinking that, "Cool! Let's build a shrine for it and put it up on the mantelpiece in the living room!" would not be the first thing that would occur to me.
Anyway, should you yourself not be subject to such scruples, the head of St. Vitalis of Assisi is being auctioned by the County Louth family that owns it. It is given a recommended price of between $1,100 and $1,700, and comes with its own really nice Queen Anne case. The day of the auction is May 29, so you still have time to go there if the idea appeals to you.
I think I'm gonna pass. For one thing, I doubt Carol would be all that happy about my blowing over a thousand bucks on a used skull. For another, I think I'm going to wait until the skull of Saint Sebaldus goes on sale. He's the patron saint of protection against cold weather. Now there is a guy whose help I could use.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
We'll discuss this at the meeting
Dave Barry once said, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings'."
To which I say: amen. I loathe meetings almost as much as I loathe grocery shopping. Note that I am not talking about quick, to-the-point meetings, where vital information is conveyed in an efficient fashion. I wouldn't classify those as "fun," but I recognize that they're important. No, I'm referring to meetings such as "educational training seminars," often run by professional seminar-runners (they probably have a fancier sounding job title, but don't deserve it). Words cannot describe how much I detest these things. I hate having my time wasted, I hate being expected to pretend I'm vitally interested in something that is pointless, and I hate being spoken to in a patronizing fashion. And training seminars usually combine all three.
I thought that this type of meeting was unique to the world of education, but I found out I was wrong. I was discussing this with Carol over dinner last night, and it seems that nursing training seminars are run pretty much the same way as educational ones are. Here's the way a typical training seminar runs. If you've never attended something like this, and you think I'm exaggerating, ask a teacher or nurse and they'll happily corroborate what I'm saying.
"Hi! I'm Penelope Farklewhite-Smythe, and today's program is called 'Making Schools Better.' We'll be brainstorming some ideas in just a minute, but first, we'll do an icebreaker activity. On your table are some stickers with blue, red, green, or gold stars. Pick up a sticker, and stick it to your forehead. And then find three people with different color stars than you have, and tell them what you ate for breakfast today!"
*five minute pause to mill around discussing eggs, bacon, and breakfast cereal*
"There, wasn't that fun? I'm glad no one asked me what I had for breakfast, because I was so excited to come to today's training seminar, I couldn't eat breakfast!"
*brief pause to wait for laughter, which doesn't come, except for the one person in the front of the room who feels sorry for the presenter and feels like she needs the support*
"Today we'll start by brainstorming some ideas. I've assigned five people to each table. Each of you has a job. One of you will be the Scribe. Once we've brainstormed some ideas for 'Making Schools Better' the scribe will write down each table's ideas on a piece of butcher paper. Write in red for ideas that Help Students Succeed, green for ideas that Make Teachers Happy, and blue for ideas that Keep Parents From Voting Down The Budget. Two of you are the Evaluators. The Evaluators will critique the ideas. They will rate each idea with five stars for the Most Important down to one star for the Least Important. The last two people will be the Presenters, and will present the ideas to the rest of the faculty. But to make it fun, you'll present each idea using only interpretive dance, and we'll all try to guess what the idea is."
You'd think that at this point, there would be guffaws of laughter, followed by the entire faculty (except the supportive person in the front of the room) standing up and leaving. Astonishingly, this never happens. Being obedient little sheep, we all follow right along, bleating softly, writing on the butcher paper and giving ideas four stars and doing the interpretive dances. Never once have I seen anyone stand up and say, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I refuse to participate."
Which brings us to Skeptophilia's Two Questions of the Day:
1) Does anyone actually enjoy these sorts of meetings?
2) Do the seminar-runners actually think that this is the best way to train professionals? Or are they really sadists who enjoy annoying the absolute shit out of everyone?
No one I have ever talked to thinks these meetings are interesting, or enjoyable, or productive. I, and most of my colleagues, leave such training seminars so pissed off that we spend the rest of the day looking for a small furry woodland animal to kick. I also happen to know that the training seminars our school district has participated in have cost significant amounts of money -- some of these professional seminar-runners make upwards of a thousand dollars for a full day's presentation. Which, incidentally, answers question #2 -- I doubt they really care if it's the best way to train professionals. I might not care, either, if I could make a thousand bucks by ordering a bunch of presumably intelligent adults to wander around in a room with stickers on their foreheads talking about breakfast.
I find it frankly baffling, however, that the professional seminar-runners remain in business, given that the general consensus is that these seminars accomplish nothing and are therefore a gigantic waste of money and time. So someone, somewhere, thinks that these things are productive. Maybe it's the same people who came up with the idea of "paperwork" as being the best and most efficient way of keeping track of information.
To which I say: amen. I loathe meetings almost as much as I loathe grocery shopping. Note that I am not talking about quick, to-the-point meetings, where vital information is conveyed in an efficient fashion. I wouldn't classify those as "fun," but I recognize that they're important. No, I'm referring to meetings such as "educational training seminars," often run by professional seminar-runners (they probably have a fancier sounding job title, but don't deserve it). Words cannot describe how much I detest these things. I hate having my time wasted, I hate being expected to pretend I'm vitally interested in something that is pointless, and I hate being spoken to in a patronizing fashion. And training seminars usually combine all three.
I thought that this type of meeting was unique to the world of education, but I found out I was wrong. I was discussing this with Carol over dinner last night, and it seems that nursing training seminars are run pretty much the same way as educational ones are. Here's the way a typical training seminar runs. If you've never attended something like this, and you think I'm exaggerating, ask a teacher or nurse and they'll happily corroborate what I'm saying.
"Hi! I'm Penelope Farklewhite-Smythe, and today's program is called 'Making Schools Better.' We'll be brainstorming some ideas in just a minute, but first, we'll do an icebreaker activity. On your table are some stickers with blue, red, green, or gold stars. Pick up a sticker, and stick it to your forehead. And then find three people with different color stars than you have, and tell them what you ate for breakfast today!"
*five minute pause to mill around discussing eggs, bacon, and breakfast cereal*
"There, wasn't that fun? I'm glad no one asked me what I had for breakfast, because I was so excited to come to today's training seminar, I couldn't eat breakfast!"
*brief pause to wait for laughter, which doesn't come, except for the one person in the front of the room who feels sorry for the presenter and feels like she needs the support*
"Today we'll start by brainstorming some ideas. I've assigned five people to each table. Each of you has a job. One of you will be the Scribe. Once we've brainstormed some ideas for 'Making Schools Better' the scribe will write down each table's ideas on a piece of butcher paper. Write in red for ideas that Help Students Succeed, green for ideas that Make Teachers Happy, and blue for ideas that Keep Parents From Voting Down The Budget. Two of you are the Evaluators. The Evaluators will critique the ideas. They will rate each idea with five stars for the Most Important down to one star for the Least Important. The last two people will be the Presenters, and will present the ideas to the rest of the faculty. But to make it fun, you'll present each idea using only interpretive dance, and we'll all try to guess what the idea is."
You'd think that at this point, there would be guffaws of laughter, followed by the entire faculty (except the supportive person in the front of the room) standing up and leaving. Astonishingly, this never happens. Being obedient little sheep, we all follow right along, bleating softly, writing on the butcher paper and giving ideas four stars and doing the interpretive dances. Never once have I seen anyone stand up and say, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I refuse to participate."
Which brings us to Skeptophilia's Two Questions of the Day:
1) Does anyone actually enjoy these sorts of meetings?
2) Do the seminar-runners actually think that this is the best way to train professionals? Or are they really sadists who enjoy annoying the absolute shit out of everyone?
No one I have ever talked to thinks these meetings are interesting, or enjoyable, or productive. I, and most of my colleagues, leave such training seminars so pissed off that we spend the rest of the day looking for a small furry woodland animal to kick. I also happen to know that the training seminars our school district has participated in have cost significant amounts of money -- some of these professional seminar-runners make upwards of a thousand dollars for a full day's presentation. Which, incidentally, answers question #2 -- I doubt they really care if it's the best way to train professionals. I might not care, either, if I could make a thousand bucks by ordering a bunch of presumably intelligent adults to wander around in a room with stickers on their foreheads talking about breakfast.
I find it frankly baffling, however, that the professional seminar-runners remain in business, given that the general consensus is that these seminars accomplish nothing and are therefore a gigantic waste of money and time. So someone, somewhere, thinks that these things are productive. Maybe it's the same people who came up with the idea of "paperwork" as being the best and most efficient way of keeping track of information.
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