Don we now our gay apparel

I am constantly amazed at the capacity of the human mind to engage in wishful thinking, even when contrary to fact -- to conveniently explain away, or ignore, mountains of evidence in favor of a cherished (but wrong) idea.

Today's example of willful self-delusion comes from Traverse City, Michigan, where a music instructor at Cherry Knolls Elementary School took exception to the words of the Christmas carol "Deck the Halls."  In particular, the teacher was bothered by the third line of the first verse:

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la
'Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la
Don we now our gay apparel, fa la la la la, la la la la
Troll the ancient yuletide carol, fa la la la la, la la la la.

The teacher was evidently repulsed by the idea of a bunch of little kids singing about people putting on "gay apparel," and so she changed it to "don we now our bright apparel."  Apparently she seriously thought that the third line would be construed as encouraging an approval of the "gay lifestyle," as if singing a Christmas carol would somehow induce all the little kids to consider being gay when they grew up.  Maybe she really felt like this line would make all of the little boys go home after the Christmas concert with homosexual inclinations, and late that night the parents would get up and find their sons dressed in leather pants and watching Queer as Folk.

This isn't an isolated incident.  Schools in Tennessee earlier this year passed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which makes it illegal to mention any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality in public schools prior to ninth grade.  The unspoken assumption here is that if we can just get kids to hit puberty without ever having heard about homosexuality, it will never occur to the kids to be attracted to the same sex, and homosexuality will go away.

Well, I'm sorry.  That isn't  how it works.  Thirteen-year-olds don't sit down one evening, and think, "Hmm, let's see... shall I be attracted to boys or girls?  Oh, wait... I remember back in third grade, singing about 'gay apparel.'  That gives me a great idea...!"  While we still have an incomplete understanding of where sexual orientation comes from, it is clearly a question to be resolved by the developmental geneticists -- not psychologists, and certainly not teachers, politicians, or ministers.  Homosexuality is a naturally occurring construct of human genes, and is not produced by a timely suggestion.  Homosexuality can no more be prevented by ignoring it than you could change a person's blood type by pretending that everyone was AB+.

And neither, for the record, can anyone be "cured" of homosexuality, despite the repeated claims by Michele Bachmann and her husband.

What these homophobic efforts accomplish, then, is only to marginalize further a group of teenagers who already have a staggeringly high incidence of depression, victimization by bullies, and suicide.  Being that the motivation for these actions can't be that they're based in the truth -- they're not -- they can only be explained as a desire on the part of bigots, whether from fear or simple cruelty, to repress a group of people they would eliminate if they could.

And given that the vast majority of these people are motivated by their religion, it kind of makes you wonder how they reconcile this with the concept of "Christian charity."

Not to mention with the phrase, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

A city on Mars, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Borg cube

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch we are closely watching three stories this morning, all sent to us by faithful readers of Skeptophilia.

The first one is an article written by frequent flyer Dirk Vanderploeg, and tells us that NASA scientists have discovered (and are covering up) a city on Mars.

The alleged alien city is located in Tithonium Chasma, a valley at 89.62 W longitude and 4.96 S latitude, and is visible in the Google Earth maps of Mars.  It's so easy to identify as an artificial construct, Vanderploeg says, that "even children can spot them on photographs immediately."  The video link provided states that there are "parallel lines, rectangles, and virtual squares," and that several of the buildings have "flying buttresses."  There's also a "huge monument, shaped like a reclining human with its arms folded."  Thus, we have evidence that there's an extraterrestrial colony on Mars.

Or, possibly, we have the same thing we've dealt with here many times; the tendency of people to superimpose structure on natural objects that have an accidental resemblance to human constructs.  Often, those similarities turn out not even to be as striking as they'd appeared at first when the light is coming from the other direction -- our minds were tricked by patterns of light and shadow.  (Remember the "Face on Mars?")

So, we'll leave Mars behind, and head back to nice comfortable Earth, where things are about to get a whole lot scarier, to judge by the other two stories we're following.

The first of these (read it in its entirety here) is that some monks are about to risk a repeat of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein several Nazis were variously melted and/or batter-fried to a deep golden brown for messing with the Ark of the Covenant.  Much to my surprise, the article claims that Indiana Jones did not, in fact, find the Ark, and then chase the Nazis via submarine to an island in the Indian Ocean; the Ark has all along been in a church in Ethiopia.  Who knew? 

In any case, some monks in Ethiopia have apparently claimed for years that the Ark, along with the original Ten Commandments, reside in the Chapel of the Tablet in Aksum.  But now the chapel roof has started to leak, and the monks don't want to take the chance of the Ark getting damaged by rain.  The Old Testament god was always smiting the crap out of people for stuff like that, as I recall, so I understand their concern.  In any case, they need to move the Ark, which will be problematic because only the head monk is ever allowed to look at it, and he can't lift it alone. 

So, it's a quandary.  The devout are thrilled because this will necessitate bringing the Ark out of the chapel, and it will give them the chance to take a look at what's been hidden for all of these years.  Skeptics are excited for much the same reason.  In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

That is, if we don't get assimilated by the Borg first.

This is the concern of Alex Collier, noted Canadian wingnut who has appeared in Skeptophilia before.  You may recall that he was the originator of the theory that there was a giant human/alien war in the 1930s, but we don't recall it because we've somehow gotten pushed into an alternate timeline, and we need to try to get back through the rip in the space-time continuum to return home.

If the whole thing sounds a little like a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, you ain't heard nothin' yet.  Because now Collier is claiming that Comet Elenin, which even most of the world's woo-woos have already forgotten about, is still heading toward us (won't this damned comet ever give up and go away?), and furthermore, it is shaped exactly like the Borg cube from TNG.  (Read the whole story here.)

Not only that, but this cube, which Collier calls a "Galactic Obliteration Device" -- or "G.O.D." -- is the god of the Old Testament.  This thing is heading toward us, with the intent to destroy life on Earth, as predicted in such prophetic holy texts as the Book of Revelation and the script for the TNG episode Best of Both Worlds.  I guess that after that we'll have the Second Coming of Locutus, or something.

As far as when all this is supposed to happen, Collier hasn't said.  Maybe of that day and hour knoweth no man, not even the angels of heaven.  Me, I'm not going to worry about it.  I've heard that resistance is futile, and in any case, it's so often cloudy where I live that I probably wouldn't see them coming.

So, that's our news for today: a city on Mars, the Ark of the Covenant to make a public appearance, and the Borg ship is coming to town, as revealed in the scripture.  And keep those cards and letters coming, folks.  Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're always interested in any new developments out there, even ones that put us at risk of being melted, fried, or assimilated.

Ancient Egyptian helicopters

I find it amusing to note how often woo-woo headlines are phrased as questions, e.g. "Did Aliens Build Stonehenge?"  "Does A Plesiosaur Live In The Hudson River?"  "Is Graceland Haunted By Elvis' Ghost?"

I live in constant hope that one day, I'll open one of these articles, and the entire article will consist of one word: "NO."  It hasn't happened yet, but it's this sort of cheery thought that keeps me going.

I thought for sure that would be the case this morning, when I took a look at an article entitled "Did They Really Have Helicopters In Ancient Egypt?"  The article, sadly, was serious, and featured the following photograph, a close-up of a panel from the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt:

There then follows some fairly hysterical (in every sense of the word) descriptions about how the Ancient Egyptians apparently spent a great deal of time zooming about in helicopters, because there is clearly one depicted here.  There is, according to the author, also a submarine and a Back to the Future -style hoverboard shown on the panel, as well as several other "futuristic craft."

Now, at first I was optimistically certain that this had to be an isolated phenomenon; no one, with the exception of the author of the article, could possibly take this seriously.  Sadly, I was mistaken.  I did a bit of research, and was appalled to find that this panel is one of the main pieces of "evidence" used by the von Däniken Descent Of The Gods cadre to support their conjecture that the Earth was the alien version of Grand Central Station three thousand years ago.  Amongst the ancient-aliens crowd, the Abydos helicopter is apparently hugely popular, not to mention amongst those who think that Stargate is a historical documentary.

Which may well be the same people.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing was adequately explained years ago; a French UFO aficionado named Thierry Wathelet took the time to query some Egyptologists about the panel, and put together a nice explanation (which you can read here).  Several of the Egyptologists, evidently fed up with all of the nonsense that has grown up around Egyptian archaeology, told Wathelet to piss off, but a few of them were kind enough to give him detailed information about how the panel had been created, and what it meant.  The simple answer: the apparent helicopter is a palimpsest -- a place where a written text was effaced or altered to make room for new writing.  The "helicopter" is a combination of (at least) two hieroglyphs, and the fact that it looks a bit like an aircraft a complete coincidence.  Wathelet quotes an email he received from Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama:

It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II.  With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence. 

Well, hallelujah, and kudos to Wathelet for putting the whole thing together, and on a UFO site, no less.  Now, if a UFOologist can summon up this kind of skeptical facility, it shouldn't be that hard for the rest of us, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "no," and I base this on the fact that my perusal of the first few pages of the 787,000 hits I got from Googling "Abydos helicopter" seemed to be mostly in favor of the theory that the ancient Egyptians spent a good bit of their time sightseeing from the air.  So I guess my search will have to continue for an article whose headline asks a question, and the article itself just says, "No" (or even better, "What are you, a moron?  Stop screwing around on the internet and go learn some critical thinking skills.").  Until then, at least one more ridiculous woo-woo theory has been laid to rest -- at least for the seeming minority of folks who take the time to evaluate the evidence skeptically and scientifically.

Voynich Manuscript redux

This past May, I did a post on the history of the mysterious and beautiful Voynich Manuscript, which you can read here.  My conclusion was that based on the fact that the world's best cryptographers (and cryptographic software) had failed to crack the code, and the presence of various rather un-language-like features in the character strings contained in the manuscript, the whole thing was likely to be a hoax.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a headline yesterday, "Mysterious Manuscript's Code Has Been Cracked."

Whatever else you can say about me, I'm never one to shirk my responsibility in admitting when I'm wrong, so I eagerly clicked the link.  The article starts out describing Finnish businessman Veikko Latvala's success at cracking the cipher.  "The book is a life work and scientific publication of medicine that would be still useful today," Latvala's associate, Ari Ketola, told FoxNews reporters.  "The writer was a scientist of plants, pharmacy, astrology and astronomy.  It contains ... prophecy for some decades and hundreds of years ahead from the time it was created."

He then goes on to give a sample of the fruits of his labor:

The name of the flower is Heart of Fire.
It makes the skin beautiful when made as an ointment.
The oil is pressed from the buds.
This ointment is used for the wrinkles.
Is suitable for the kidneys and the head,
as the flower prevents inflammations, is antibiotic.
Plant is ten centimeters by its height.
It grows on hot and dry slants.
The plant is bright green by its color.

My first thought was "That's it?  It's a medieval Golden Guide to Medicinal Plants?"  Then I thought, well, okay, the medievals were pretty concerned with the mystical properties of plants, and after all, the Voynich Manuscript is loaded with drawings of flowers.  So I kept reading, wondering, "How did Latvala do it, when it stumped some of the best cryptographers in the world?"

And that's when I got to the punchline: Latvala didn't actually use any kind of cryptographic method to decipher the code; he had the correct translation piped in directly from god.

"Mr. Latvala said that no one 'normal human' can decode it, because there is no code or method to read this text, it's a channel language of prophecy," Ketola told FoxNews reporters.  "This type of persons are most rare to exist, yet they have always been on face of the Earth through millenniums up to today ... and Mr. Veikko Latvala has had this gift of mercy last twenty years."

So, after a little digging, I found that Mr. Latvala calls himself "a prophet authorized by god," and for a while had a Twitter account where he'd post his prophecies.  (I tried to follow his Tweets, but sadly, the account appears to have been taken down -- maybe god told him that social media were evil, or something.)

And I'm thinking: this is news?  Some wingnut in Finland announces that he's channeled a translation of the Voynich Manuscript, and does a press conference to release this bombshell -- and people don't guffaw directly into his face?  No, it becomes a headline in one of the world's major news outlets.  What, weren't there any pressing stories about Lady Gaga and the Kardashians to report on?

The reluctance that reporters have to calling irrational nonsense "irrational nonsense" is partly to blame for why so few members of the general public seem to have the ability to recognize it.  The coverage that self-styled psychics get is a good case in point.  The healthy dose of skepticism that I was taught to bring toward everything I see, hear, or read never seems to come into play; when a famous psychic comes to town, it becomes front-page news, instead of editors saying, "Why should I give free publicity to someone who is almost certainly a fraud?"

I'm not foolish enough that I don't realize what the motive is, of course.  Irrational nonsense, whatever else you can say about it, is damned lucrative.  People eat up stuff like the story of Veikko Latvala outwitting trained cryptographers because he has an open chat line with god.  But the dulling of the public's intellectual facilities -- the subtext that if it made it into the news, it must be true, to hell with critical thinking -- is a mighty big price to pay.

Pattern finding, the 188-day seismic cycle, and E8

I'm fascinated by patterns.  I remember the first time I heard about the Fibonacci sequence, in elementary school -- I felt like I'd touched something fundamental, something grand and beautiful and mysterious in how the universe worked.  And when I learned, in high school, the connection between the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Section, I was dumbfounded.  Those sorts of elegant patterns still seem to me to be amongst the loveliest features of nature.

Maybe that's why the numerologists piss me off.  In trying to force everything -- even arbitrary human constructs like the alphabet -- to have a Deep Mathematical Significance, they cheapen the beauty of the patterns that actually exist and are relevant to our understanding of nature.

Consider, for example, the matter of the "188 day seismic cycle."  Don't consider it too long, however, because your cerebral cortex will turn to Play-Doh.  (If you are really desperate, you can watch this YouTube video -- I made it through nine minutes of fifteen before I couldn't bear it any more and had to turn it off.)  Here's a capsule summary:

The Earth revolves around the Sun, and therefore traces out a circular path against the apparent "dome of the sky."  This gives rise to the zodiac -- the set of constellations that the Earth's path crosses.  Whenever the Earth is in Leo or Aquarius, it lines up with a Heavy Mass Object that is currently heading toward the Earth, and this causes earthquakes.  The Chile earthquake (February 27, 2010), the New Zealand earthquake (September 4, 2010), the Japan earthquake (March 11, 2011), and the Fiji earthquake (September 15, 2011) are each 188 days from the ones adjacent, and represent the alignment between the Earth, the constellations, the galactic plane, the Heavy Mass Object, some "magnetic portals" in the Earth's orbit, the Comet Elenin, Atlantis, a supermassive black hole, and a Giant Radioactive Bunny From Outer Space.

Okay, I made a couple of those up, but other than the Bunny, I defy you to figure out which ones.  Honestly, I don't remember for sure myself, because I spent much of the video with my mouth hanging slightly open and my eyes glazing over.  The argument -- if I can dignify it with that term -- was such a hash of pseudoscience and confirmation bias that I was amazed that the narrator didn't break into guffaws.  (To take one simple objection, look at the seismic records of the last couple of years, and find a week in which an earthquake didn't occur.  I dare you.)

But the video is still a triumph of the scientific method, nearly Nobel-prize-winning research, as compared to this site.  This one throws in the Rapture, Numerology, and the Mayan calendar, as if the zodiac and the galactic plane weren't enough.  Starting with the fact that the first earthquake in the "sequence" was the Chile earthquake which was 8.8 on the Richter scale... omigod first = 1, and 8.8!  Get it???  Do you get it??? 188!

And that's only the beginning.  Then, we have the fact that according to Revelation 7, the four angels at the "four corners of the Earth" will stir up trouble, and northern California has an active fault, and if you draw lines connecting the epicenters of the Chile, New Zealand, and Japan quakes, and use northern California as the fourth point, you get a "perfect funny slanted square."  (This is a direct quote.  Even I couldn't make up something this ridiculous.)  Notwithstanding that I have no idea what a "perfect funny slanted square" is, and the fact that somehow Fiji is no longer in the mix here for some reason, these people think this "discovery" has some sort of predictive power, and that the folks in northern California should brace themselves for The Big One when the next 188 day interval comes around on March 22, 2012.

But this is still small potatoes as compared to one of the comments on the above site, which I reproduce here (nearly) intact, with only some of the "gee-whiz-golly-jeepers" intensifiers removed in the interest of brevity:

Scott, last night and this morning I crunched some numbers using our dear sister Lennie’s number of 11192. And for our purpose here, in one of the steps I did, I mirrored her number to 29111 and multiplied it by 3, for the 3 earthquakes you mentioned above.

29111 X 3 = 58222.

Put this 58222 on the back burner and slowly turn your oven setting to low heat.

Ok Scott….take your 188 days + 915, for the possible date 9-15 this year for another Great Earthquake + 974 for the numerical value in the Greek for “Great Earthquake” and add these together and we get 2077.

Then…take 2077 and multiply this by the number in the Scriptures for Departure…29 and we get a big number of 60233.

Now…remove the warmed up number from the back burner mentioned above…58222 (Lennie’s 11192 numbered mirrored to 29111 X 3 for the 3 earthquakes) and subtract this from the 60233 number and we get a very interesting number that we immediately recognize…2011! 

...I believe that March 29, 2010 is a very important "watcher mile marker."  This date, 3-29-2010 was a Passover Eve.

When I took the March 29 date and the September 15 date and converted it to numbers of 329 and 915 and added them together I got 1244.

1244 + 4421 = 5665 X 2 = 11330 minus Lennie’s 11192 = 138 + 831 = 969 X 2 = 1938 + 8391 = 10329.  A numerical connection to March 29, 2010 and September 15 with the numbers 329 and 915.

From Passover Eve, Thursday, March 29, 2010 to Thursday, September 15, 2011 is 536 days including 9-15-2011.

From the M8.8 Concepcion Chile earthquake February 27, 2010 until and including, Thursday, September 15, 2011 is 566 days.

When we add the 536 and 566 days we get 1102...the mirror of 2011!

One more…when we take the 566 days above and multiply it by our Lord’s number for judgment which is 11, we get 6226.

6226 X 2 = 12452 minus Lennie’s 11192 we get 1260...Echo…1260 days or 42 months (42 months X 30 day months = 1260) of the first half of the tribulation period.

If you're like me, at this point your brain has probably begun to resemble library paste, so I'll stop here, but suffices to say that this stuff goes on for pages.

I know that humans are pattern-finders.  We're amazingly good at it.  But imposing patterns on random events, to make them seem to have significance, is just intellectual masturbation -- it keeps your hands busy for a while, but doesn't really accomplish much.

I'll end on a hopeful note.  If the preceding has made you despair for the intelligence of humanity, watch this -- one of the TED talks, by Garrett Lisi, which was recommended to me by a student.  Lisi is a theoretical physicist who is working on finding striking patterns in the properties of subatomic particles, and is convinced that "the most beautiful mathematical pattern there is," an eight-dimensional Lie group called E8, underlies all of reality.  Lisi's work represents that pattern-finding component of human intelligence at its best -- and shows up the numerologists for the hacks that they are in a particularly subtle manner.

ConCERNed

Two days ago, Yahoo! News ran a story about troubles at CERN, the high-energy physics lab in Switzerland.  It seems like the Large Hadron Collider has been having problems.  The LHC is designed to accelerate protons to incredible velocities -- 99.9999991% of the speed of light -- and then slam them into targets.  At that speed, the energy of the collision generates cascades of subatomic particles, which then can be analyzed as a way of getting a picture of the deepest structure of matter.  In particular, physicists are trying to prove the existence of the Higgs boson -- the "God Particle," that gives everything the property of having mass.

But something keeps getting in the way of the beam, draining its energy and resulting in less spectacular crashes.  Scientists think it's probably dust; at that velocity, even ultramicroscopic dust particles could cause problems.  This is "one of the major known limitations for the performance of the Large Hadron Collider," according to Tobias Baer, one of CERN's physicists.  Scientists at the LHC have documented over 10,000 cases of unexplained energy loss, some of them so great that the beam automatically shut down (it has a failsafe in case of intensity fluctuations).

Okay, so far, so good.  But then the media got involved.

The headline of the article referenced above was, "UFOs Disrupting Search For The God Particle."  And I'm thinking, "UFOs?  What the hell?"  Then, in the article, they coyly define "UFOs" as meaning, in this case, "Unidentified Falling Objects."  Of course, that's not what anyone thought when they saw the headline, so once again we have the media slyly giving the wrong impression in a headline to get you to click the link -- a phenomenon I've commented on before.

Then the woo-woos got involved.

Here are just a few quotes I found in posts on the phenomenon, from a variety of woo-woo websites.  It's only a sampling, and represents the number I could read before my brain turned to cream-of-wheat.

"It isn't a coincidence that stuff keeps getting in the way.  It's the universe's way of protecting itself.  If the God Particle is produced, it could make a chain reaction that would generate another universe inside this one, and that would tear this one to pieces.  Or make a black hole that would swallow everything.  The LHC is never going to succeed, because it would destroy the universe if it did."

"Odd that the Large Hadron Collider keeps shutting off just as scientists get close to discovering the God Particle.  Remember in the Bible that God didn't want Moses to see His face.  The same will be true here.  Those physicists keep trying to find the God Particle, but whenever they get close, God will stop them.  There are some mysteries that will remain mysteries."

"There's something they're not telling us here.  Don't tell me that these Ph.D.s in physics don't suspect that something fishy is going on.  10,000 instances of 'something' interfering with the beam, and they think it's dust?  I'm not buying it.  They're on to something, and it's something big -- no way would they have 10,000 times of the beam being damaged and just shrug their shoulders and say, 'It's dust.'  Mark my words: we're on the verge of something big and dangerous."

"Its [sic] not surprising that the Large Hardon [sic] Collider is scheduled to reboot in 2012.  The title of the article say's [sic] it all.  The big catastrophe is scheduled in 2012, when the Large Hardon [sic] Collider will be the final step that will bring the extraterrestrials here to keep us from destroying ourselve's [sic], and the New Age the Mayans predicted will begin."


Okay.  I'll give you my responses in a moment, after I clean up the coffee I spit all over the monitor when I read about the "Large Hardon Collider."

Better now.  In any case, I find it interesting how fascinated the woo-woos are with the LHC.  I think it goes beyond just the wonder that most of us feel when we read this stuff -- the thought of, "Wow, how complex and beautiful the universe is!"  What explains the desperate curiosity they seem to feel about this particular scientific tool?

I think part of it is the nickname of the particle that the scientists are after.  You have to admit that "the God Particle" does have a certain cachet.  The nickname is the fault of physicist Leon Lederman, who coined it in the title of his book, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question?  Lederman, who has many times expressed regret for coining the nickname, said, "I wanted to call it 'the goddamn particle' but my editors wouldn't let me."

So, there's that.  Somehow, "physicists are trying to generate the Higgs boson" has become morphed into "physicists are trying to create god."  Thus, I suppose, being the power of names.

Then, there's the fear most of us feel when there's something we don't understand.  And frankly, almost none of us understand what the LHC is really trying to do.  I have a B.S. in physics, and when I read scholarly papers on subatomic physics, my eyes cross.  (I found that even the Wikipedia article on the Higgs boson is beyond my understanding, which was a little humbling.)  So, what are the scientists doing, over there in Switzerland?  We're not really sure.  And for a lot of people, "not really sure" means "potentially dangerous," and for those of us who spent too much time watching science fiction movies, "scientists doing potentially dangerous stuff" translates to "starting a chain reaction that will destroy the universe, or at the very least generate a monster that will eat Tokyo."

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that it's impossible that something could go badly wrong, and I'm not even sure what that would cause.  But I'm also fairly certain that the physicists themselves would be strongly in favor of not destroying the universe, being that they live in it and all.  So I'm guessing that if they really thought that what they were doing was going to generate a black hole that would swallow the Earth, they would stop.

Anyhow, that's our news from the Large Hadron Collider.  (Hadron, you'll note.  Hadron.)  I will be eager to see what discoveries the LHC generates, and I hope that they fix their dust problem.  Being rather a failure at housekeeping, I know how annoying dust can be, and they should be thankful that they don't have pets there at CERN, because once you add dog hair into the mix, it's all over.

"The Sun Pyramid" and the invention of truth

I keep thinking that I've heard of every crackpot idea out there, that we must have reached the end of the litany of bizarre ideas the human brain is capable of devising.

I keep being wrong.

Yesterday, a student of mine asked me if I'd ever heard of the conjecture that the ancient Egyptians had built some pyramids in Bosnia.  I hadn't, and after a little research, I found that there's a whole subset of woo-woo-ism that I was unaware of.

Northwest of Sarajevo, near the town of Visoka, stands Visočica Hill.  It's clearly a pretty strange-looking hill; vaguely pyramid-shaped, with unusually flat sides and a pointed top, it certainly suggests a man-made structure.  However, a geological team, led by Dr. Sefjudin Vrabac of the University of Tuzla, concluded that it was a natural structure, composed of clastic sediments dating from the Miocene Era.  Vrabac states that however odd it appears, Visočica is not a unique geological form, and that "there are dozens of similar morphological formations in the Sarajevo-Zenica mining basin alone"

So, clearly, we are dealing here with something like the Giant's Causeway of Ireland -- a structure whose peculiar regularity suggests human construction, but which actually has a completely natural explanation.

Enter Semir Osmanagić.

Osmanagić is a Bosnian author and metalworker, and makes claim to expertise on archaeology, but I'm a tad skeptical, frankly.  Osmanagić says that Visočica Hill is a human construct, and was produced by Ancient Egyptians, who evidently didn't have enough to do with building enormous pyramids back home.  He has renamed Visočica Hill "The Pyramid of the Sun," which apparently has not caught on with the folks who live in Visoka, at the foot of Visočica.  (Nearby pyramid-shaped hills he has called "The Pyramid of the Moon," "The Pyramid of the Earth," and "The Pyramid of Love.")  He has assembled an "international team of archaeologists," who made it clear that their actual intent was not to do any real archaeology, but to reshape Visočica Hill to make it look like a Mayan step pyramid.

All of which follows a well-known principle of scientific research; if your data doesn't fit your theory, alter the data.

People like Osmanagić rarely just spout off their theories alone, though; they always try to draw others in.  An especially common technique is to claim support from legitimate researchers in the field.  Many of these researchers are quite surprised to find their names mentioned in connection with some crackpot theory or another, but that never seems to discourage the woo-woo from making the claim.  In this case, the unlucky victim was Zahi Hawass, noted Egyptologist and former Egyptian Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs.  Osmanagić claims that Hawass supports his "theory," and in fact recommended an expert to work with Osmanagić's team, Ali Abdullah Barakat.

Poor Hawass responded by denying any involvement whatsoever, and in fact said that he'd never been contacted by Osmanagić, and in any case "Barakat knows nothing about pyramids."  But that hasn't stopped Osmanagić from repeating the claim.

Now, with all of this, you'd think people would be ignoring Osmanagić into obscurity, wouldn't you?

You'd be wrong.

Two weeks ago, Osmanagić was the keynote speaker at the International Metaphysical Conference, in Little Rock, Arkansas.  His talk was packed -- over 500 people attended his lecture on the "energy fields" and "underground labyrinth" at Visočica.  And at the end, he got a standing ovation.

I find all of this incredibly discouraging.  Don't these people ever question their assumptions, consider bias, look at evidence?  The answer, sadly, appears to be "no."  A theory that makes people say, "Wow, it would be cool if that were true," plus a charismatic speaker, plus scattered references to scientific principles and other scientists, is all it takes to convince, and after that the idea is no longer questioned.  Then, once it becomes ensconced in a critical mass of brains, it takes on a life of its own -- a Google search I did for "Bosnian pyramids" had over ten thousand hits.  It becomes some weird variant of "truth" -- an idea so widely reported, and cited, that for many people it is no longer subject to the usual standards for assessing validity.

And it all reminds me of a quote from David Babenkian:  "Trying to argue with someone who doesn't understand the principles of scientific induction is like trying to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on a ukulele."