Dream job

By this time in the school year, I'm always reminded of what a coworker of mine said, after a particularly harrowing day in the classroom.  "This job is like the guy who bangs his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops."

So, I'm perhaps to be forgiven if lately I've been thinking, "What else could I do besides teach?"  And lo and behold, what happens yesterday but that I find an advertisement for my dream job:

Docent in the International Cryptozoology Museum.

Consider the qualifications listed:

• Are you well organized?
• Do you work well with others?
• Would you enjoy working shoulder-to-shoulder with experts in the field?
• Do you have the skills to sort and catalog artifacts?
• Can you lead a tour with enthusiasm?
• Do you have a passion for cryptozoology?

So, I'm reading this, and thinking, "hell yeah, I could do that."  Of course, there is probably one critical qualification that they didn't list, to wit:

• Can you take all of this stuff seriously enough to talk about it without guffawing?

And I suspect I might have trouble with that one.  My tour through the museum would probably end up sounding like, "And here we have *snicker* an artist's depiction of *chortle* Mothman.  Note the wings and the *snork* demonic red eyes.  BUA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.  Um, sorry about that, folks."

So that might be a problem.  But hey, bosses can't expect that a candidate will have everything they're looking for.  So I got all excited, until I got to the bottom of the webpage and found that there were two downsides:

• I would have to move to Portland, Maine.
• The yearly salary for the job is zero.

Which are some pretty serious downsides.  But otherwise, the whole thing sounds pretty attractive.

Actually, my friend Dan and I are already planning our post-retirement second career: leading cryptozoology expeditions.  Dan is, if anything, even more passionate about cryptozoology than I am, and plus, he's a geography professor.  So the guy knows everything there is to know about topographic maps, tracking, landforms, and so on.  My thought is, we'd make a hell of a team -- a geographer and a biologist.  We'd take groups of people off into the exotic places of the earth -- the Congo basin, the Cascades, the Himalayas, the lochs of Scotland, the Everglades -- looking for cryptids.  And, of course, raking in huge amounts of money doing it.

The only difficulty with this plan is the one that beset the camel-spotter in Monty Python.  After three years' camel spotting, he'd spotted "nearly one camel."  Eventually, you have to wonder whether our clientele would look at our track record, and stop signing up.  "Take a Dan and Gordon Cryptid Tour!  Ten years' experience, and nearly one cryptid sighted!"  As an advertising tag line, you have to admit that it kind of lacks that certain je ne sais quoi.

So, I guess my threats to quit teaching are, for the moment, empty ones.  A pity, because the docent job sounded like it was right up my alley.  And even more of a pity is that it means I actually have to go to work today, and try to keep students productively occupied on the last full day of class.  Which has the effect of making tracking yetis in the Himalayas sound like a snap by comparison.

Coffee, hallucinations, and Bing Crosby

A recent study, done by Dr. Simon Crowe of La Trobe University in Australia, has found that coffee is hallucinogenic.

That it is psychotropic falls into the "Tell Me Something I Didn't Already Know" department.  I am barely civil before I've had at least two cups of coffee.  (Some days I'm barely civil afterwards, either, but that's another matter.)  For me, it's not the alertness I'm after; being a nervous, high-strung type to begin with, who gets up at five in the morning every day whether I have to or not, it's not like I really need anything to make me more wired than I already am.  Coffee seems to have the same effect on me that turning the focus wheel on a pair of binoculars does.  Everything suddenly seems to brighten up, have sharp outlines, make sense.  I feel like I'm seeing things clearly.

Now, I'm told, I might be seeing things that aren't there.

Dr. Crowe's team tested 92 people with varying levels of caffeine.  The test was billed to the subjects as a hearing test, who were told that they'd be listening to a three minute clip of white noise, in which there might or might not be snippets of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."  They were instructed to press a buzzer when they heard a piece of the song.  In fact, the clip had no music in it at all.  The non-coffee drinkers did occasionally imagine that they heard Crosby's voice; but the coffee drinkers were three times as likely to press the buzzer.  The effect was even more pronounced with people who described themselves as "stressed" and who drank coffee.

"If you are stressed and have a high level of caffeine, you are more likely to notice things that aren't there, see things that aren't there," Dr. Crowe said.

Me, I wonder.  I suspect that part of it is that after the caffeine equivalent of five cups of coffee (the standard for "heavy coffee drinking" used in the experiment), the test subjects' hands were simply shaking so badly that they kept setting the buzzer off.  Or, perhaps, sitting still and listening to white noise for three minutes was simply beyond their capacities.

I tend to be a little frustrated by the way that popular media presents medical (and other scientific) research findings.  Let's be clear about what Dr. Crowe found: he found that people who drank the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee were likely to think they were hearing music when they really weren't.  The headline, of course, didn't say that -- it said "Coffee Causes Hallucinations," which might lead the less careful reader to conclude that your average businessman stopping at Starbuck's for a cuppa joe in the morning was suddenly going to flip out on the bus and start seeing flying monkeys. 

Frankly, I'm skeptical that caffeine is bad for you at all, at least when taken in reasonable amounts.  In the brain it acts as an antagonist to adenosine, a neural suppressant and signal for metabolic stress.  In studies, caffeine has been shown to decrease reaction time, increase endurance, reduce the risk of heart disease and kidney stones, increase short-term memory and ability to focus, and decrease the likelihood I'll strangle someone in my first period class.  These are some pretty significant benefits to health and happiness, and if because of it I occasionally hallucinate that I'm hearing clips from Bing Crosby songs, I guess I consider than an acceptable tradeoff.  (Now, if I started seeing Bing Crosby, that would be another matter entirely.)

In any case, I'm going to wind up this post with some general advice not to jump to conclusions based upon sensationalized reports of medical research in the press.  First, if you took every piece of medical advice that shows up in the media, you'd be living on bread and water (or just the water, if you're gluten-intolerant).

Second, the coffee's done brewing, and if I don't have a cup soon, I'm going to hurt someone.

And today in the news...

Your vigilant investigative reporters here at Worldwide Wacko Watch have had a busy week.

First, we have reports in of a drunk werewolf in Ohio. 

Thomas Stroup, 20, was arrested last week after fighting with people at a campground.  When police arrived, they found Stroup passed out on the ground, and when they tried to rouse him, he growled at them.  Stroup later explained that he'd been scratched by a wolf, and afterwards he "goes on the attack when the moon is out."  Apparently unimpressed, the police charged Stroup with underage drinking. 

Interestingly, this incident occurred only about twenty miles from the place where, last year, a 21-year-old whom police nicknamed "Count Drunkula" was arrested after telling police he was a "centuries-old vampire" who wanted to drink their blood and eat their kidneys.  So, all of you Twilight fans -- the hell with Forks, Washington, it looks like Ohio is the place to be.

Then, we have reports from New Farm, Brisbane, Australia, that the face of Jesus has appeared on a  pizza. 

Posh Pizza owner Maree Phelan calls the appearance of Our Lord and Savior in the patterns on a three-cheese pizza baked last week "a miracle" and is currently offering the pizza on eBay to the highest bidder.

"It certainly isn't a fake," Phelan told reporters.  I'm not sure what she means by this.  How could you tell the difference between a fake vague, blurry face and a real vague, blurry face?  In any case, I'm not convinced this looks all that much like Jesus.  (You can see the pizza here.)  Myself, I think it looks a little... grim to be the Son of God.  The expression is a little too, well, zombie-like.  Maybe it's not an apparition of Jesus, at all, but a warning of the upcoming zombie apocalypse?

Which brings us to the next story, which is about a "Concerned Citizen" in Leicester, England who is apparently worried that the Leicester city officials are not taking proper steps to prepare for a zombie invasion.

Mr. Citizen, apparently in all seriousness, has sent the Leicester City Council a letter that says in part, "Can you please let us know what provisions you have in place in the event of a zombie invasion? Having watched several films it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for." 

Lynn Wyeth, head of information governance, told reporters that she was unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan; however, some elements of it could be applied if the situation arose.  Which seems to me to be a calm, measured response, just the kind of cool thinking we'll need when the zombies arrive.

Which is not the sort of reaction air traffic controllers had to reports of a pair of UFOs flying in formation near Wichita, Kansas.  The UFOs, spotted by Wichita resident Ken Pfeiffer and his wife while out taking their dog for a walk, "had both solid and blinking lights" and were colored "a deep, saturated yellow."  They watched them until the lights "disappeared behind some trees" and were lost to view.

Alarmed, the couple returned home, where Pfeiffer began to call around to see if anyone could explain the lights.  Finally, he called the control tower at Wichita Airport, where they treated him very brusquely.

If you can imagine.  Like those air traffic controllers had anything better to do than discuss UFOs with some random guy.  So, of course, their reluctance to admit that they knew anything indicates that of course they knew something, because that's the way conspiracies work: anyone who is in on it would deny knowing what's going on, so if someone denies what's going on, they must be in on it.  So the logical conclusion is that we are in the midst of an alien attack, with the beachhead of the invasion in Wichita.

Of course, you have to wonder why super-powerful aliens, who presumably could land anywhere, would pick Wichita.  I've been to Wichita, and frankly, it's kind of a boring place.  If I was an alien, I'd pick somewhere that had palm trees, margaritas, and scantily-clad women, and frankly, I doubt if any of the three are all that common in Kansas.  But oddly, you never hear of alien invasions in, for example, Maui.  It's odd.  That's definitely where I'd invade, if I was an alien.

So, that's about it for today's news, here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  Drunk Werewolves, Lord Jesus of the Cheeses, British Zombie Invasions, and Lights over Wichita.  We're always striving to live up to our motto:  all the news that's fit to guffaw at.

J. R. R. Tolkien's History of the World

There are times I can almost believe in synchronicity.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a student of mine.  This particular student is an outspoken atheist, and had been in an argument with a friend over the veracity of the bible.  The friend had commented that the bible was a complex, interlocking belief system, with a consistent history, and was far too intricate to be fiction.

My student responded, "The Lord of the Rings is a complex, interlocking set of stories with a consistent history, and no one believes that The Lord of the Rings is true."  Which I thought was a pretty good response.

But then, quite by accident, just this morning I found out that no, there are people who believe that The Lord of the Rings is true.

The leader of this intrepid band of wingnuts is a fellow named Dirk vander Ploeg, and his website (here) is called "The Quest for Middle-Earth."  He has, in fact, written a book (available for $14.95, should you not have better uses for fifteen bucks, which in my opinion would include using it to start a fire), and he asks the following provocative question: what if J. R. R. Tolkien had secret knowledge of the Earth's early history, and used that knowledge in writing his books?

My initial response to this was, "What if C-A-T spelled 'dog'?"  But maybe I'm being a little hasty, here, to quote prominent historical figure Treebeard the Ent.  Let's look at vander Ploeg's line of reasoning:

1)  Tolkien, a professor of Old English and Anglo-Saxon linguistics, learned Finnish and studied the myths in the Kalevala extensively.

2)  Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and yet he peopled his universe in Lord of the Rings with various god-like figures.

3)  On the Island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago, scientists have found the bones of a small hominid that apparently coexisted with modern humans until about 12,000 years ago, or possibly later.  Named Homo floresiensis, these hominids have been nicknamed... Hobbits.

4)  There are some big eagle species in Southeast Asia.

5)  The Atlantis myth shares some of the same features as Tolkien's stories of the doomed island of Númenor.  Therefore, the Atlantis myth proves that the stories of Númenor are true.  And vice-versa.

This is about as far as I got with it, because my pre-frontal cortex was begging for mercy.  (Actually, the point where I quit was when he started talking about how the Eye of Sauron still existed in the form of the US government's network of spy satellites.)  But as a logical sequence, I think we have to admit that "Finnish + demigods + tiny hominids + big eagles + Atlantis = The Lord of the Rings is all true" is a pretty persuasive piece of reasoning.  It's right up there with "HAARP causes earthquakes" and "the Nazca lines are a UFO landing strip" in terms of logical validity.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'd think it was pretty cool if Aragorn and Gandalf and the rest had all existed.  (Well, maybe not Denethor.  He was kind of an asshole.  But most of the rest of 'em.)  It certainly has a grandeur that our own, real history lacks.  I mean, compare the Thirty Years' War with the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, for cryin' in the sink.  I bet no one in the Thirty Years' War ever did anything nearly as cool as standing up and saying, "I am not a man!" and stabbing a Nazgul right between the eyeballs. 

But unfortunately, truth matters.  This means, I'm afraid, that you history students will have to continue learning about the Thirty Years' War -- and The Lord of the Rings will have to remain where it is, in the "Fiction" section of the library.

Planet Cupcake

We've had a good bit of geological activity lately, here on the Earth.  Most scientists attribute this to plate tectonics, the shifting of Earth's geological plates relative to one another.  Their attitude is that these processes have been going on throughout Earth's history, and that any apparent clustering of tectonic events is simple coincidence, insignificant in the bigger picture.

Neal Adams disagrees.

Adams calls our attention to recent phenomena such as the following:

• The formation of a three-kilometer-long crack in the ground in Huakullani Chukuito, Peru, following an earthquake
• The opening of a wedge-shaped, 500-meter-long, 60-meter-deep rift in Ethiopia, along the Great Rift Valley
• The sudden creation of a crack in the ground in Iceland, and the subsequent draining of Lake Kleifarvatn into the fissure
• The presence of a deep hydrothermal vent in the Mid-Cayman Rise, a spreading center in the middle of the Caribbean Sea
• Increasing tension along the San Andreas Fault, causing cracks and fissures to form

Adams takes these stories, and many others like them, and has decided that the conventional explanation -- that all of these places are on plate margins, so cracks in the ground are to be expected -- is wrong.  And in a classic case of adding two plus two and getting 113, he has deduced the following:

The Earth is expanding.

Yes, just like a cupcake in the oven, the Earth is getting bigger, and as it does, its surface cracks and splits.  The tectonic plates are a mere side-effect of this phenomenon, and are basically the broken up surface of the cupcake, pulled apart as the inside swelled.  Now, a cupcake, of course, is only increasing in volume, as the air bubbles in the batter get bigger; its mass remains the same.  Is that what's happening here?  Some kind of planetary dough rising?

No, says Adams -- the Earth is actually gaining mass.

Wait, you might be saying; what about the Law of Conservation of Mass, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions?  Simple, Adams says.  No problemo.  Physicists have demonstrated that empty space can give rise to electron/positron pairs without any violation of physical law, because of the presence of "vacuum energy."  "Empty space" is actually, they say, a roiling foam of particles and antiparticles, most of which annihilate each other immediately.

So, Adams says, this sort of pair-production is happening inside the Earth.  So it's gaining mass.  And expanding.

Of course, Adams conveniently ignores the fact that half of the mass thus produced would be antimatter; if the Earth's middle was producing matter and antimatter fast enough to pop open cracks on the surface, the antimatter would follow the E = mc2 rule (also strictly enforced) and blow us to smithereens.  After all, you may recall from scientific documentaries such as Star Trek what happens when antimatter containment is lost -- Captain Kirk strikes a dramatic pose, usually with his shirt ripped open, and they break to a commercial.  And heaven knows we don't want that to happen.

So there are some problems with Adams' theory.  But this hasn't stopped websites from popping up supporting the Cupcake Earth Hypothesis, and in fact Adams himself has made a video to illustrate the idea.  The video, which you should only watch if you are willing to risk your IQ dropping significantly, must be true because (1) it has cool animation of the Earth shrinking and the continents fitting together as you go back in time, and (2) uses dramatic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Notwithstanding those points in its favor, it raises a few key questions:

• What happened to all of the oceans?
• If the Earth really was (let's say) a quarter as massive, 100 million years ago, it would have had a quarter of the gravitational pull.  Which would have resulted in a good bit of our atmosphere leaking out into space, not to mention herds of enormous dinosaurs bouncing about the landscape in the fashion of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon.  So where did our atmosphere come from?
• Why am I spending so much time and effort addressing this moronic theory?

As far as the last question, I recognize that I can't debunk every goofy idea in the world, and in fact originally intended to write about marginally more reasonable claims, such as sightings of Sea Serpents off the coast of England.  But then I saw that the Expanding Earth theory actually had a Wikipedia page, and I thought, "I guess I'd better investigate."  So I did, at the cost of thousands of valuable brain cells.  It's a sacrifice, and one most of my friends would say I can ill afford, but I'm all about selfless acts for the benefit of my loyal readers.

The Red Menace of "Les Schtroumpfs"

It's been a rough year for cartoon characters.

First, we had a Muslim cleric ranting about how Mickey Mouse was an Unclean Agent of Satan.  Then, the Seal-the-Borders cadre began to howl that Dora the Explorer was an illegal alien.  Not to be outdone, the Catholic church contributed their own little piece of surrealism with the claim that the Simpsons were clearly Roman Catholics.

And now, Antoine Buéno, a university lecturer in Paris, is claiming that the Smurfs are communists.

His treatise, entitled "Le Petit Livre Bleu: Analyse critique et politique de la société des Schtroumpfs," brings up two immediate questions:

1)  Did you know that the French for "Smurfs" was "les Schtroumpfs?"  I didn't.  I also defy you to say "les Schtroumpfs" without laughing.  It makes it even better if you say it with a fruity, Pépé le Pew accent.

2)  Is this guy kidding?  Or what?

In answer to the second question, let's look at his evidence:

• Smurfs take their meals in a communal dining hall.
• They have a single leader, who is a father-figure that they never refer to by name.
• Every effort is done collectively; they rarely strike out on their own, or show private initiative.
• Papa Smurf looks like Stalin.
• "Smurf" could be an acronym for "Small Men Under Red Force."

Well, I think we all have to admit that as evidence goes, that's pretty freakin' persuasive.  When you add the fact that Brainy Smurf looks a little like Leon Trotsky, I think we have what detective agencies call "an airtight case."

Thierry Culliford, son of the late Pierre Culliford, creator of the Smurfs, is outraged, and referred to Buéno's thesis as "grotesque."  Pierre Culliford, who went under the pen name "Peyo," was "not political," his son told reporters.  "When there were elections, he would ask my mother, 'What should I vote?'"

Buéno, of course, dismissed that, saying that Peyo was expressing communist themes in The Smurfs "unconsciously."  Because all cartoonists do that, you know.  Even comic strips are not free from it.  For example, don't you think that "Nancy" in the comic strip of the same name looks like Kim Jong Il?  Let's compare:

So, I think we can safely assume that cartoonists are unconsciously channeling all sorts of scary political themes in their work, and that from now on you should read the funny pages with that in mind.  Who knows what kind of dreadful political ideologies could be creeping into your subconscious while you're looking at "Marmaduke," "Blondie," or, god forbid, "Garfield?"

Buéno, for his part, is not backing down.  He says that his paper is "rigorous and thorough and documented."  About his claim of The Smurfs as having communist overtones, he told reporters, "It's so obvious I didn't think I'd have to spell it out."

So, anyway, there you have it.  Another tour de force from the halls of academia.  And we wonder why people think the members of the intelligentsia are a little bit cracked.

Linear streak artifacts and "BioStation Alpha"

So now, an "armchair astronomer" has used a satellite imaging map to zoom in on what he thinks is a secret alien base camp on Mars.

The video, made by David Martines, can be viewed here.  At last check, it had been viewed over 850,000 times.  Martines is unequivocal; he calls the feature "BioStation Alpha," and thinks it is clearly of alien manufacture.  "It's over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide. It looks like it's a cylinder or made up of cylinders," Martines said.  "I'm just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it."

Actual, non-armchair astronomers disagree.  "It looks like a linear streak artifact produced by a cosmic ray," said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona.  "[W]ith space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it's very common to see these cosmic ray hits.  You see them on optical images and a lot of the infrared images too."  The cylindrical appearance of the feature is because as you zoom in, the image pixillates, so the light streak is exploded into rows of "cylinders."

None of this, of course, is convincing the general public, which tends to look upon scientists as being either Dopey Out-of-Touch Pointy-Headed Pocket-Protector-Wearing Nerdlings or as Evil Super-Genius Conspirators Bent On Destroying Civilization.  Or possibly both at the same time.  So the "BioStation Alpha" story has gone viral, with people even speculating about which of the many alien races built it, how it's being used, whether the aliens have peaceful or malevolent intentions, and if this has anything to do with, god help us, December 21, 2012.

Even the normally reliable Space.com couldn't resist jumping on the bandwagon, with a headline that said, "Did an Amateur Astronomer Spot a Secret Mars Base?"  I clicked on the link, hoping that the entire article would be the single word, "NO" in 96-point font, but it wasn't.  They arranged the article in a rather sneaky fashion, putting Martines' testimonial about how he spotted "BioStation Alpha" right below a still image of the feature, then putting some ads, and then placing a full-size link to the YouTube video.  So you get to the video, which of course you have to watch.  If you then come back to the article, and scroll down even further, you finally get to Professor Pointy-Head's explanation about how cosmic rays + pixillation = Mars base -- but only after you've waded through all of the woo-woo stuff first.

The whole thing just makes me sigh heavily, because I just know that today I'm going to get about four hundred questions from very earnest students about how there is an alien staging platform on Mars.  And I'll have to go through the cosmic ray explanation, which they won't like because as explanations go it's not nearly as cool as an alien staging platform, and I'll get the "well, it could be an alien base, right?" question.  And at that point I'm going to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.