Uncivil discourse

A few months ago, I was friended on Facebook by a gentleman whom I didn't know, but who shared with me an interest in history and genealogy.  I accepted his request, figuring that in this day of electronic social media this could be a way to meet new friends.  (And in fact, there are Facebook friends of mine that I've never met in person, and who over time have become friends in the older, conventional definition of the word.)

A couple of days ago, this gentleman posted a photograph of a sign that said, "Merry Christmas!  One Nation Under God.  Disagree?  Don't Let The Border Hit You On The Ass On Your Way Out."  I posted a comment underneath saying, "Seriously?  We atheists should just leave?"

He responded only by making the photograph his profile picture.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to this.  "Unfriending" him seems justified, but doesn't that just make it even less likely that he'll ever see what the problem is?  His seeming unwillingness to engage -- the fact that he didn't even respond to my comment -- is probably indicative of the fact that had he responded, it probably would have only been to tell me to go to hell in any case.

I find it disturbing how hard it can be for people of all stripes to remain civil these days.  Maybe it's always been this way, I don't know; but it seems, although admittedly I have no factual basis for this, to be getting worse and worse.  My general feeling is that most Christians are tolerant and moderate, and have no particular wish to dictate other people's beliefs; and most agnostics and atheists would respond to a hearty "Merry Christmas!" from a store clerk with a smile and a thank you, giving back the kindness based on its intention and taking no offense at some imagined assumption of religiosity.  A small but growing minority, on the other hand, seem determined to make this into some sort of war, and everyone is getting increasingly skittish.

Much has been made about whether the United States was founded as a "Christian nation," and with amazing facility people dredge up quotes from the Founding Fathers supporting their contention that clearly George Washington and the rest intended the USA to be a theocracy.  Or didn't.  Or didn't have any intention of addressing it at all.  In my opinion, however, all of this historiography misses the point; it's largely irrelevant what the Founding Fathers believed regarding this issue.  Consider some of the other things that the Founding Fathers believed -- that women should not be allowed to vote, that slavery was acceptable (and that slaves, for census purposes, counted as "3/5 of a person"), and that it was justified to appropriate land from the Native Americans.  We have abandoned all of those beliefs as unethical, immoral, and inappropriate for our day and age, with no yammering on about the fact that "the USA was founded as a nation where women couldn't vote!"  (Ladies, don't let the border hit you in the ass on your way out!)

The relevant question, here, is only whether the USA should be run as a theocracy now.  Should there, given the diversity of beliefs (and non-belief) we currently have, be prayer in schools?  A religious test for holding public office?  Should we be expecting that public officials mention their relationship with Jesus at every opportunity?  Or should we accept the fact that we are now, and have been for quite some time, a patchwork quilt of Christians (of denominations liberal to conservative), Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and probably a hundred others, where to mandate belief, even tacitly, would be not only unjust but an impossibility?

How about this instead: let's focus on tolerance.  Despite my reputation as a militant atheist, I honestly don't have a problem with what you believe or don't believe -- until you start using those beliefs to change public policy, to create laws that force those beliefs on others, or to justify acting like a boor.  Diversity of thought should enrich, not impoverish, a nation, and the War on Christmas foolishness only further divides us, cementing the "if you're not one of us, screw you" mentality that has done us nothing but harm in the past.

As far as my Facebook "friend:" I think I'll just let him be.  Maybe after reading this, he'll unfriend me -- who knows?  But until that point, I'll wish a Merry Christmas to all of my readers who celebrate it, a Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends, Happy Holidays to anyone who prefers that mode of address, and to the rest of you, a simple wish for Peace on Earth, and Good Will Toward... Everyone.

Cloaked Romulan spacecraft and the strength of Ockham's Razor

It is an inevitable danger of being a self-styled rationalist skeptic that I may not recognize credible evidence for something bizarre when I see it, because I'd already be looking for ways to dismiss it before the dust even settled.

It's a charge that's been levied at me with some regularity.  You don't believe in ghosts, eh?  All of the photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts are just natural anomalies and human senses being fooled?  You wouldn't accept a ghost as real if one bit you on the ass.  How about Bigfoot?  All of the accounts of Bigfoot are fakes?  Seriously?  And the psychics... just because some psychics have turned out to be frauds, you have decided that all of them are?

"Skeptic?  Pfft.  You're just as stuck in your own worldview as the rest of us."

I have to admit that these comments do give me some pause, every time I receive one.  I lean pretty hard on the ECREE principle -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  But what, then, constitutes "extraordinary" evidence?  Suppose something really, truly paranormal was going on -- would I even recognize it as such?

Take, for example, the claim that's been all over the news -- that NASA released a photo of the planet Mercury that contained the faint image of a giant cloaked spaceship.  (You can read an article about this, and see images, here.)  The individual who found the image, a YouTube poster with the handle "siniXster," states that NASA's STEREO imaging satellite took a photograph of a coronal mass ejection, and that the particles emitted by the CME washed over Mercury -- catching in its wake an object of equal size that was hovering, invisible, nearby.  This disrupted the CME and rendered the object temporarily visible.

"It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," siniXster said in his YouTube video about the image.

Okay.  All Star Trek references aside, my first reaction was, "An invisible spaceship as big as a planet?  Really?"  But then I thought, "Well, I've always said that it was entirely possible that there was life out there in the universe... what if there was a superpowerful alien species, with a giant ship, out near Mercury watching us, and they'd rendered their ship invisible to us using some advanced technology.  Might I just be overdoing the rationalist skeptic thing, and missing something amazing?"

Well, that possibility does exist, and I'd be a pretty poor skeptic if I didn't realize that my perceptual apparatus and brain are just as flawed as the next guy's, and my capacity for such inherent problems with inference as dart-thrower's bias is just as great.  How, then, do I decide for sure if they've stumbled upon something earthshattering?

Besides ECREE, a rule of thumb I tend to trust more often than not is Ockham's Razor; that all other things being equal, the explanation that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions is probably the correct one.  In this case, is there a simpler explanation that addresses all of the evidence?

Unfortunately for siniXster and others who think that we're being monitored by the Romulans, the answer is yes.  Russ Howard, head researcher in solar physics at the Naval Research Laboratory provided a nice little explanation of the photograph.  The Mercury-sized object hovering in Mercury's orbit isn't a cloaked spacecraft, Howard says.  Actually... it's Mercury:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible.  They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day.  Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME.  The remaining light is then enhanced.  When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.

But... how do I know that this is right?  Am I just trying to be superskeptic here, and leaping at the Official Explanation because it means I don't have to revise my worldview?

Answering that question as honestly as I know how, I think I still have to say "no."  Being a skeptic doesn't mean that you reject paranormal explanations out of hand just because they're paranormal; but it does mean that you have to evaluate the evidence as best you can, and accept the best explanation that's out there on the market.  My frequent critics notwithstanding, I do think I'm open-minded enough that I wouldn't be blind to evidence of something weird should it eventually happen along.  I just don't think that this is it.  Ockham's Razor is a statement about how the universe behaves, and how we can come to understand it; and in my experience, it works pretty damn well, even if it does preclude a huge cloaked Romulan spaceship, which honestly would be kind of cool if it were true.

Ockham's Razor is not a law, however; convoluted and wildly improbable events do occur, and it may well be that there are phenomena out there that lie outside the purview of our conventional scientific explanations.  If this is true, I would love to experience some of them first hand, and I hope that I would be accepting of their veracity despite my preconceived conviction that they don't exist.  Perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

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.