Down the drain

A friend of mine, also a blogger, is doing a post about the weirdest Google search keywords that get people to our blogs.  I know I've thought about that before -- how do people find me?  (My submission: I had one person find Skeptophilia after searching "I saw a light with a vapor."  I still have no idea how that worked.)

In any case, I saw that another contender was that several people had found me after searching "huge whirlpools in Atlantic," which linked them to my post from a few weeks ago about the wingnuts who think that Comet Elenin is going to cause the end of the world.  Mark Sircus, who made the original claim, had made a passing reference (which I had quoted) to the formation of huge Atlantic whirlpools, and that's why the keywords pointed them at my site.

So, this morning, I started thinking, "what huge Atlantic whirlpools?  I haven't heard about any huge Atlantic whirlpools."  So I did a search of my own.  Besides finding a link to my own site, I found a number of references to whirlpools off the coast of Guyana and Suriname.  The original source of the story seems to have been Pravda:

According to Brazilian scientist Guilherme Castellane, the two funnels are approximately 400 kilometers in diameter. Until now, these were not known on Earth. The funnels reportedly exert a strong influence on climate changes that have been registered during the recent years.

"Funnels rotate clockwise. They are moving in the ocean like giant frisbees, two discs thrown into the air. Rotation occurs at a rate of one meter per second, the speed is sufficiently large compared to the speed of oceanic currents, on the border hoppers [sic] is a wave-step height of 40 cm," Castellane said.

I have no idea what the phrase "on the border hoppers" means, and can only assume that it is a mistranslation of some sort -- that phrase appears in every article I looked at that quotes Castellane.

When people read this sort of thing, they typically arrive at several wrong conclusions.  First, they picture these sorts of "whirlpools" as looking like water going down a bathtub drain, and worry that ships might get sucked down to the bottom.  In fact, these rotating discs of water aren't uncommon at all; they're called gyres, and there are two huge ones that have been extensively studied, one in the North Atlantic and one in the Central Pacific.  Gyres are thought to be caused by the flowing of currents in opposite directions on either side of the oceanic basin -- the drag ultimately causes a layer of water in the center of the ocean to rotate.  Unfortunately, these gyres tend to become filled with floating trash, and are a major concern to environmental scientists.

Pravda, however, disagrees that the newly-discovered Atlantic gyres are caused by drag and differential water movement.  The article states that instead, these phenomena might have something to do with the magnetic field of the Earth:

Why do those whirlpools exist for such a long time?  This is partially the effect of Earth's magnetic field. In addition, marine water contains many charged ions, Na and Cl for example.  To crown it all, water molecules are dipoles that are charged both positively and negatively.

Any dipole starts spinning when moving in the magnetic field.  An oceanic ring gathers millions of billions of molecules together.  That is why the giant circle movement triggered by the vertical movement of water may last for months and years mechanically. Ions also give more power to the craters.  Natrium and Chlorum [sic] are charged as well, and their movement in the magnetic field of the Earth also leads to the appearance of the circle movement.

Well, at the risk of angering my Russian comrades, this is patent horse waste.  Water is diamagnetic, which means that it creates a magnetic field in opposition to any applied external magnetic field, but only on a molecule-by-molecule basis.  It's a weak effect; in an extremely powerful magnetic field (such as would be generated by a large electromagnet), the surface of a container of water will dimple slightly.  There is no way that water, even salt water, would generate enough of a magnetic field in response to Earth's that it would move significantly.

But of course, you have to know some science to realize that, and you also have to have some degree of skepticism regarding woo-wooism in general.  Otherwise, you know what happens when someone mentions "giant whirlpools" and "magnetic fields" in the same paragraph?  All of the end-of-the-world loonies remember their ninth-grade Earth Science teachers mentioning something about how the Earth's magnetic field reverses periodically, and they add that to any other nutty ideas they may have heard (2012, the Rapture, conspiracies), and pretty soon you have people running around in circles themselves, but not because they're Experiencing Magnetic Forces on the Natrium and Chlorum ions in their blood.

To illustrate this, here are a few of the more interesting comments I saw on some of these websites, most of which referenced the Pravda article as their source:

"This just blows my mind.  I would love to see a giant whirlpool like this.  I wonder where all the water is going?"

"This just shows that all of the so-called laws of science will be broken as the End Times approach, to show that there is just one law:  the Law of God."

"I heard that this is because of a geomagnetic storm going on right now, a high-speed solar storm.  Basically, spaceweather."  (This reminds me of how the people on Lost In Space were always having to run and hide because of "cosmic storms.")

"Is this near where the Hopi mystics predicted that the Earth would birth a new Moon?"

"This could be the water draining into the Earth.  But remember that water vapor has to condense somewhere.  What if it's just going into the core and staying there because of gravity?"


After that last one, I have to stop, because major sectors of my brain are whimpering in agony.  In any case, if you're planning a Caribbean cruise, I wouldn't worry about huge whirlpools pulling your cruise ship down to the bottom.  I am also not losing any sleep about spaceweather, new Moons, or the End Times.  My general sense is that everyone should just calm down, not to mention learn a little science before you write articles about it.

The false hope of Facilitated Communication

Despite the scorn I frequently heap upon woo-wooism of various types, I honestly feel that most of it is pretty harmless.  Hunting ghosts, chasing Bigfoot, messing with Tarot cards or numerology or astrology -- about all that's really at risk is your bank balance, and if you're willing to pay for your own particular brand of pseudoscience, well, that's your choice and no real damage done.

Not so with Facilitated Communication.

I bring this up because MIT is hosting a conference on Facilitated Communication, starting today and running through Friday, a move that gives me further reason to question the judgment and critical thinking abilities of our educational leaders.  If you have never heard of FC, let me give you a brief rundown.

In the late 1980s, a woman named Rosemary Crossley had an idea.  This idea was that non-communicative children -- especially those with severe retardation, cerebral palsy, and severe autism -- might not lack intelligence, despite their inability to express themselves.  So she developed a technique by which a "facilitator" could use hand gestures and tiny changes in the affected individual's facial expressions and body language to "interpret" what the person was really thinking.

Despite a large number of controlled studies showing that FC doesn't work -- that the outcome is based upon the thoughts, wishes, and desires of the facilitator, not the patient -- FC has caught on, and for a very good reason.  It gives the family members and caregivers of non-communicative individuals a false sense of hope.  And because of this, it has proven to be very lucrative.  In 1992 a Facilitated Communication Institute was founded, under the aegis of Syracuse University.  (Largely because of the bad press FC has gotten, the institute was recently renamed "The Institute for Communication and Inclusion" and FC renamed "supported typing.")  Crossley herself has become famous for a book called Annie's Coming Out, with co-author Annie McDonald -- a severely retarded girl with cerebral palsy, who allegedly communicated her thoughts to Crossley via FC and helped to write the story.  The book later became the basis of an award-winning movie.

It's not that it's impossible that there are non-communicative individuals who still have highly active brains; consider Stephen Hawking, whose decades-long fight with ALS has still not stopped him from writing scores of books and academic papers.  But with FC, the "facilitators" are taking the easy way out, injecting their own knowledge, thoughts, and feelings into the "messages" that are supposed to come from the patients' minds.  More than thirty controlled studies of FC have shown that the practice has no value, and yet Crossley and her partner Chris Bothwick continue to rake in money, charging $250 for a six-part video series on how FC works and what it can do for non-communicative patients.  Practitioners of the technique charge hundreds of dollars an hour to create messages that are alleged to come from the patients, and of course Crossley and Bothwick are kept busy (and well-paid, not to mentioned wined and dined) on the world-wide academic lecture circuit.

It's bad enough that Syracuse University has bought into the whole thing -- their FC Institute (pardon me, the "Institute for Communication and Inclusion") continues to thrive -- but now MIT, traditionally a bastion of peer-reviewed science, has given its tacit approval to the whole thing by hosting the FC conference this week.

I am appalled, and it's not just at their embracing pseudoscience -- as if they were hosting a conference on telepathy, or something.  I am appalled mostly because this technique, which has failed every test that would be necessary to establish it as rigorous science, bilks people out of their money using the lever of the desperation of thwarted hope, love, and compassion -- by giving family members the promise of communicating with a loved one who is locked inside a hopelessly non-functioning body.  It makes them think, falsely, that children whose brains are damaged beyond repair are actually experiencing high-level thoughts.  It rips people off by providing them with false hope -- and as such, should be scorned by professional psychologists and educational institutions (and even more important, prosecuted by the legal system), just as we would scorn and seek to prosecute quacks who give patients with terminal illnesses useless medications.

And the administrations of Syracuse University and MIT should be ashamed of themselves.

News round-up

Things have been busy here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.

From Chatham, Illinois we have a report of a Bigfoot print in a man's back yard.  Michael Patrick, a resident of Chatham, was having his pool liner replaced one day when the workmen noticed a huge footprint underneath a nearby apple tree.  The print turned out to be eighteen inches long, which is literally a Big Foot -- Shaquille O'Neil's size 23 shoes accommodate feet about fifteen inches long.

Apparently, the previous evening, Patrick had become aware of something bumping around outside.

“My neighbor has a German Shepherd, and it heard something that night that spooked him.  The dog went outside to investigate, but came back cowering, now it won’t leave its owner’s side,” Patrick said.

Bigfoot expert Stan Courtney was called in, and said that Patrick wasn't the only person to have odd experiences in or near Chatham -- that there had been about a half-dozen reports of noises, including bumps, footsteps, and howling.

As far as why Bigfoot picked Patrick's back yard, Courtney speculates that it is because Bigfoot likes apples.  "The apple tree might have somehow been interpreted as a gift of food," Courtney said.  "A creature such a Bigfoot will usually return the favor if offered food, and present a gift of its own as a show of appreciation in the form of a dead animal or a strange arrangement of flowers."

So, Bigfoot's approach is kind of like that of the creepy guy in the apartment down the hall, when he asks you for a date.  I'm not sure if that's reassuring, or just disturbing.

Next, we have a report in from Asia, that populations of geckos in the Philippines are crashing because poachers are catching them, drying their bodies, and selling them to purveyors of traditional medicines in Malaysia and Thailand as an aphrodisiac and a cure for impotence.  Apparently, an 11-ounce gecko can bring in more than a thousand dollars.

Authorities are trying to do what they can to stop the trade, as geckos are valuable for keeping down populations of harmful insects.  Environment Secretary Ramon Paje earlier warned that collecting and trading geckos without permit can be punishable by up to four years in jail and a fine of up to 300,000 pesos ($6,900).

So, if you have trouble in the romance department, you might want to think twice about snacking on local lizards.  The same advice applies if you would like to save 15% on your automobile insurance.

And of course, we just couldn't call the day complete without an appearance of Jesus' face somewhere.  The latest appearance of the Lord and Savior was on a Walmart receipt in Anderson County, South Carolina.  Jacob Simmons and his fiancée, Gentry-Lee Sutherland, had just returned from a shopping trip to Walmart, and the receipt for their purchases fell to the floor.  A couple of days later, after a church service, they happened to notice the receipt, and found that there were dark markings in the shape of a face on the slip of paper.

"The more you look at it, the more it looked like Jesus, and it was just shocking, breathtaking," Simmons said.

Sutherland agreed, and referenced the sermon they had heard at church that Sunday.  "We had a message on knowing God, abiding in him," Sutherland said.   "(The preacher asked) 'If you know God, would you recognize him if you saw him?'"

Evidently the answer is yes.  See if you agree.  Below is a photograph of the receipt:

Me, I'm not seeing Jesus here, but I do see a fairly strong resemblance to the character Torgo from the abysmally awful 60s horror movie Manos: The Hands of Fate.  In fact, I keep expecting him to say, in a creaky voice, "Master... doesn't like... children."

So, anyway, that's the wrap-up for today from Worldwide Wacko Watch.  Bigfoot in Illinois, geckos in Malaysian love pills, and Jesus on a Walmart receipt.  As usual, our motto here is:  All the news that's fit to guffaw at.

Sheep of unusual size

News has arrived here that there have been sightings of a new kind of cryptid in southern Virginia.

A woman identified only as "Teena" contacted Lon Strickler, owner of the website Phantoms & Monsters, with the following story:

I hope you can give me an idea of what I saw a few weeks ago while hiking with a friend in Fairy Stone State Park in Virginia.  We had been on one of the trails for about an hour when we stopped for a brief rest and drink.  This was my first visit to this park and I was pleased that the area we were in was secluded.

After a few minutes of rest we continued to walk along the trail when my friend suddenly stopped and pointed towards the right at large group of rocks.  Something was moving around but it was about 50 yards away so we didn't get a very good look.  We could see that it was light in color and was quite bulky.  We stood frozen wanting to know what this creature was though I was getting more frightened by the second.  As we started to walk the creature moved onto a rock where we got a good look at it.  It looked like a medium sized bear but the fur was very light in color, almost a yellowish gray.  The head was very strange also.  There was a snout like that of a bear but the dark round eyes were set lower on the head.  It was looking in our direction and we had no intention on sticking around to see what it was going to do.

Mr. Strickler's answer was that this animal has been seen in southern Virginia before, and is said to be "white and woolly," with "long, saber-like teeth and single-point horns," "a long and hairless tail," and "a smell like sulfur."  The name of the beast?

Sheepsquatch.

I kid you not.  I can barely type this word without guffawing.  The best part was that the article had an artist's rendition of Sheepsquatch, which I will include here (apologies for not crediting the artist, but the source of the drawing was not given):

All I can say is, that's one freakin' scary-looking sheep.  I'll bet he's a real baaaaadass.   (ba-dump-bump-ksssh)

One person who posted a response to the original article suggested that Sheepsquatch could be a relic population of giant ground sloths.  Well, I've seen giant ground sloth skeletons in museums, and artists' recreations of what they original animal looked like, and my impression is that one of the only things that Sheepsquatch looks less like than it does like a sheep is a giant ground sloth.  To me, what Sheepsquatch looks like is one of the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride. 

I'm also wondering if adding "-squatch" after animal names is going to become a trend, the way adding "-gate" after the focal points of scandals has.  You pick some real animal that your cryptid looks vaguely like (really vaguely, in the case of Sheepsquatch), and add "-squatch" at the end, and there's the name of your cryptid.  For example, a long, slinky kind of cryptid with brown fur could be a Weaselsquatch.   My dog Grendel, who looks like the result of a canine genetics experiment gone horribly wrong, will hereafter be referred to as a "Dogsquatch."  I hope they don't extend the trend too far, however - if they ever found a giant flightless bird cryptid, they shouldn't call it Ostrichsquatch because it's impossible to say that without spitting all over yourself.

In any case, I encourage you all to go down to southern Virginia and see if you can find Sheepsquatch for yourself.  Keep an eye out for other kinds of squatches while you're at it.  Also be careful if you happen to see any Rodents of Unusual Size.  I hear they have a nasty bite.

Sealed with a kiss

In further inquiries into religions that I don't begin to understand, I'd like to relate the story of how I recently bumped up against the Mormon practice of "sealing" during some of my genealogical inquiries.

I'm somewhat obsessed with family history.  I guess you could call it "collecting dead relatives."  Those who know me well know that I rarely do things by half-measures -- my database is rapidly approaching 90,000 names of ancestors and cousins and cousins-by-marriage, collected over the past 30 years of research.

In any case, I was looking into one of my lines on my dad's side of the family last week.  My dad, despite his French surname, had a good bit of Dutch and Scotch-Irish ancestry, and I was poking about in online records of one of his Dutch lines, the Bogards.  The Bogards came from Holland in the early 1600s, settled in New Amsterdam, moved to Albany, and thence to West Virginia, and finally my dad's branch of the family tree made their way to Opelousas, Louisiana in the late 1700s.   In any case, one of the Bogard cousins, one Cornelius Bogard of Hampshire County, West Virginia, showed up in an online database I was perusing.  And there I saw something that made me frown, a bit.

On the webpage for old Cornelius, it showed him as married to Sarah Skidmore.  Further, there was a note that said, "Sealed, Salt Lake City Temple," followed by a date.

What this means is that the Mormons, following their religious practices, have held a ceremony "sealing" Cornelius and Sarah in the afterlife.  Without so much as asking the permission of the dear departed, or inquiring as to whether their marriage was a happy or an unhappy one, the Mormons have locked them together permanently.

There's only one tiny problem with this particular example of post-mortem wedded bliss; Sarah Skidmore didn't, in fact, marry Cornelius Bogard.  This bit of so-called information was the result of a piece of spectacularly bad research carried out in the early 20th century, and which contained errors that have been accepted as fact, lo unto this very day, by genealogists who don't question their sources.  After studying the primary records, however, more diligent researchers have come to the incontrovertible conclusion; the real Sarah Skidmore died as a child.  As for Cornelius, he married a Sarah Something-Else (possibly Westfall).

So the dilemma is, if you believe in all of this Traditional Family Values In The Afterlife stuff, apparently Cornelius is now sealed to some poor ghostly child who probably never even met him, leaving his actual wife standing on the sidelines, probably jealous as hell.  And I wish I could say this was the only error I've found in LDS-endorsed records, but the truth is, since these records were compiled by (fallible) researchers, largely from secondary sources written by other (fallible) researchers, there are thousands of errors in their files.   I'm now visualizing the Mormon version of heaven as being filled with millions of very happy and very wealthy ghostly divorce lawyers, making tens of millions of dollars unhitching couples who were mistakenly sealed by well-meaning, but ill-informed, LDS researchers here on earth.

And I won't even get into how the Mormon practice of baptism of the dead has pissed off the Jews and the Catholics.

Now, I hasten to add that I don't actually believe any of this.  Once I'm gone, if the Mormons want to baptize me, they can knock themselves out.  If anything remotely close to the Christian god actually exists, I doubt it'll help much in any case, given how many years I've spent disbelieving.  My actual question is, if you do believe in sealing of marriages for those already gone on to meet their maker (or not, as the case may be), how do you account for errors in research and people being sealed to the wrong person?

Now, I can imagine certain cases where such errors might be welcome.  For example, if any LDS member wants to seal me in the afterlife to Penelope Cruz, I won't object too strenuously.   However, for the record, I have never been, nor will ever be, romantically involved with Britney Spears, and if somehow I get hitched to her in the spirit world, I am going to be pissed.

Just so you know.

Time is running out

Today I was going to tell you about the conference of exorcists meeting in Poland to tackle the worldwide problem of vampires, but a much more pressing issue has arisen that I need to discuss while I have the time.

The issue is that time is speeding up.  I'm sure we've all noticed this.  It's becoming harder and harder to get everything done that needs doing, and there just seem not to be enough hours in the day.  Well, according to a story that popped up in my news feed today... there aren't.

The article, entitled "Is Time Speeding Up?", begins with the following paragraph:

Time is actually speeding up (or collapsing).  For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of the Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second.  The military have used this as a very reliable reference.  However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising.  It is now over 12 cycles per second!  This means there is the equivalent of less than 16 hours per day instead of the old 24 hours!

Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"  The Schumann resonance is an atmospheric phenomenon, an electromagnetic resonance caused by lightning discharges in the ionosphere.  And even if the frequency of the resonance is increasing (which I could find no credible evidence of in any case), there's no way we could know if it's been stable "for thousands of years," because it was only discovered in 1952.  And anyway, why would this have anything to do with how fast time is passing?

Then I decided to do a little research, and it turns out that this is only scratching the surface of the "accelerating time" theory.  There was one article from a guy whose proof that time is speeding up was that all the clocks in his house are running fast.  Another guy, Terrence McKenna, whose name keeps coming up in threads on this topic -- so he must be an expert -- says that the rate of increase in time is such that it will become on infinite on...

... wait for it...

December 21, 2012.

Admit it, you knew there'd be a Mayan calendar reference in here somewhere.

By far my favorite post I saw on the topic came from a guy who evidently thinks that time is like a giant cosmic game of tetherball.  (You can read his entire post here.  I recommend drinking a couple of shots of tequila first.)  He gives this convoluted explanation of a ball hanging on a string tied to a rotating pole, and as the string winds around the pole, the ball spins faster (i.e. time speeds up), and the string gets shorter and shorter and the ball spins faster and faster and then finally SPLAT the ball hits the pole.

At that point, he says, "Weird shit happens."

Very scientifically put, and of course the poster thinks that the Great Temporal Tetherball Collision is going to occur in December 2012.  Afterwards, he claims that the ball will start to spin the other way, and the universe will be reborn, and will be "nicer."

Well, that sounds like a happy thought.

Interestingly, the whole subject has even permeated discussions on physics forums.  In one thread I looked at, once again titled "Is Time Speeding Up?", there were a bunch of woo-woos who blathered on for a while about the expansion of the universe and how time would have to speed up to "compensate" for the expansion of space, and so on, and finally one reputable physicist responded, in some exasperation, "Most of the responses above are gibberish.  No one has even asked the question, 'Speeding up relative to what?'  General Relativity established that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, but these posters seem to think that time as a whole is speeding up -- which is a meaningless proposition, since there is nothing outside of time against which you could detect such a change."

Well.  I guess he told them.  Of course, it won't make any difference, because people who think this way are never going to believe some dumb Ph.D. in physics when they've got the whole internet to rely on.  Besides, this physicist is probably a reptilian alien Man-in-Black from the Planet Nibiru who is part of the Bilderberg Group and works for HAARP, and is trying to spread disinformation.  You know how that goes.

So anyway, I guess that's today's heaping helping of pseudoscientific absurdity.  I think I'll wrap this up, because (1) if I read any more websites like the ones I had to peruse to write this, my brain will turn into cream-of-wheat, and (2) I'm running short on time.

Exopolitical science

Are you a recent college graduate with a major in political science?  Are you looking for a job, but afraid of the wheeling and dealing, smoke-filled-room culture that still pervades the political scene?  Would you like to learn how to apply your skills to dealing with tense situations that don't, technically, exist?

Then a career in exopolitics may be for you.

This whole subject comes up because of a headline that popped up in my news feed, "Do Aliens Get a Fair Deal in the Media?"  It turns out that the article was about a conference coming up in August in Leeds, England, on the subject of exopolitics -- how governments, militaries, and so on should be handling interactions with extraterrestrials.  My first thought was that the opening keynote address would read, in its entirety, "Um.  Well.  There haven't been any.  Thank you very much."  But no, the conference is going to go on for three days (August 5 through August 7), so they must be planning to say more than that.

So I started looking into it, and it turns out that the Leeds conference is only the tip of the iceberg, exopolitically speaking.  There's an Exopolitics Institute, whose website states, "Exopolitics is defined as an interdisciplinary scientific field, with its roots in the political sciences, that focuses on research, education and public policy with regard to the actors, institutions and processes, associated with extraterrestrial life, as well as the wide range of implications this entails through public advocacy and newly emerging paradigms."  Okay, then, that explains that.  Any definition that has that many subordinate clauses, and includes the words "newly emerging paradigms," has got to be taken seriously.

Then, there's Exopolitics.com, which seems to act not only as a focus group for studying exopolitical issues, but also as a clearinghouse for wingnuts, to judge by the following graph that is featured prominently on their website:

What does it mean?  Damned if I know.  But supposedly it proves that March 9, 2011 through October 28, 2011 are going to be part of the "Ninth Wave" and are going to be "Days of Significance."  We're in the middle of that period right now, and I'm not seeing all that much Significance happening around me personally, but maybe that's just because of where I live.

We also have Exopolitics Radio, a weekly radio talk show with a nifty home page; the Exopolitics World Network; and an Exopolitics Wikipedia page, which of course proves that it's all real.

Upon looking at all of this stuff, my first question is: how do these people pay their mortgages?  I mean, if I decided to chuck teaching biology and move on to, say, founding the Unicorn Research Institute, it's not like I could actually bring in any big research grants.  Who is paying these people?  Is it supported by the National Endowment for Woo-woos, or something?

Secondly, I wondered how the whole thing could last longer than a few months, given that there's effectively nothing there to study.  But some of these folks have been in business for over a decade.  Michael Salla, who coined the term "exopolitics" and has been one of its most ardent supporters, has tried to influence political leaders (to little apparent effect, except in the case of Michele Bachmann, some of whose statements are clearly beamed in from Neptune).  But then I saw that the exopolitics nonsense is all wound up with various conspiracy theories (HAARP, the Reptilians, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati) and other kinds of wingnuttery (UFOs, psychics, cosmic convergences, and, heaven help us, the Mayan calendar).  So, I guess they have a lot of material out there.  In fact, when the Washington Post interviewed Michael Salla, they maneuvered him into admitting with some reluctance that he was getting his information solely "from the internet."

So, anyhow, if you're going to be in England in the first week of August, you should definitely plan on attending.  It could be entertaining.  I'm guessing that black trench coats and sunglasses will be de rigueur.  You might also want to consider bringing along a tinfoil hat.

After all, you can't be too careful.