Despite being rather adamant about wanting evidence for everything, I've always had a hunch that the universe is inhabited, probably rather thickly. I am aware that it's just a hunch, however. I'm not translating a gut feeling into anything like certainty. But given what I know about the conditions necessary for generating organic molecules, and the power of natural selection even on the molecular level, I'd be mighty surprised if Earth turned out to be the only inhabited planet.
It does, however, demand a question -- one I remember my son asking a while back. Why is there any necessity that life (however we define that term, and it's far harder to define comprehensively than you'd think) has the same chemistry that it does here on comfortable old Earth? I still remember the first time I ran into that idea, back on the old Star Trek -- if you're my age, you probably remember the famous episode "Devil in the Dark," in which the intrepid crew of the Enterprise ran into the Horta, a creature whose biochemistry was based upon silicon instead of carbon. This is not as outlandish as it might seem. Silicon, like carbon, has four valence electrons, allowing it to form sheets, chains, rings, and other complex molecules rather readily. Most silicates don't dissolve much in water, which would require that any silicon-based life form have a different carrier in its vascular system; in the case of the Horta, it was hydrofluoric acid (which doubled nicely as a defensive weapon in dissolving any unfortunate red-shirted security officers it happened to run into).
My point here, and I'm hardly the first to make it, is that a life form with a dramatically different biochemistry might well be hard to recognize as life. In our search for extrasolar planets, we tend to get most excited about the earthlike ones, because of a sense that those are the only ones that could harbor life. But is this necessarily true?
The whole topic comes up because of a recent statement, by Russian astronomer Leonid Ksanformaliti, that he has discovered evidence of life on Venus. Now, Venus was one of the first solar planets that was ruled out as possible site for life when it was discovered exactly how inhospitable is is. Clouds cover the surface, the discovery of which led many to speculate that it had liquid water, oceans, and possibly a breathable atmosphere (H. P. Lovecraft and C. S. Lewis both wrote stories about an inhabited Venus), but now it is known that the clouds are largely made up of sulfuric acid, and the surface temperature is a balmy 850 degrees Fahrenheit, with a barometric pressure 92 times higher than Earth's. The conditions are so hellish that the first probes dropped onto the surface fried before they returned much useful data back to scientists here at home.
So, Ksanformaliti, who made his claim in Russian journal Solar System Research, is making what appears to most scientists a pretty outlandish claim. Ksanformaliti and his team analyzed photographs from earlier missions, some dating back to 1982, and found what he calls "biological forms" -- he nicknames three of them "black flaps," "disks," and "scorpions." “What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?" Ksanformaliti told reporters for The Daily Caller. "Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.” (See a photo of one of them here. Don't get your hopes up about the video clip, however -- it's just a gradual zoom-in on the object in the still, along with hyperdramatic music.)
Of course, this makes most of us raise our eyebrows. Organic compounds as we know them fall apart when subjected to conditions like those on Venus, so life should be impossible there. But we are, of course, basing that judgment on the life we know. Is it possible that even considering the high-pressure inferno that is Venus, that something may be down there that qualifies as life?
Possibly -- but I need more than a bunch of fuzzy photographs before I'm ready to join Team Leonid. As I've had reason to comment before, humans are just too prone to attribute lifelike qualities to non-living objects to trust that we would recognize life here on such flimsy evidence. And, for the record, I still think our best bet for life in our own solar system is one of the larger moons of either Jupiter or Saturn.
But I will maintain that regardless, if Ksanformaliti makes us reconsider our assumptions about life, that's all to the good. If SETI and other projects like it have a prayer of a chance, it will only come from thinking outside the box -- and from being willing to redefine what we mean by the words "life," "organism," and "intelligent."
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Fake out
Woo-woos will fool you, sometimes.
Last night I was doing my typical evening's scouring of news stories for this morning's post, and I bumped into an article about the alleged recent spate of "weird noises" that seemed like about the most reasonable thing I've read on the topic. (See the article here.) Now, I don't know if you've heard about the whole issue with the noises, but to make a long story short there have been about a dozen reports from places as widely separated as England, Costa Rica, and Arnaudville, Louisiana (a stone's throw from my home town), mostly of booming or thunder-like noises, and one of "loud, trumpet-like noises." (The article linked above includes links to YouTube videos purporting to be recordings of the noises. Others can be easily found with a quick YouTube search.)
Well, the author, Tony Elliott, does a pretty good job of taking apart the whole phenomenon, and unhesitatingly calls it a hoax. He lays the blame at the feet of the Mayan calendar enthusiasts and other apocalyptic wingnuts, who (he says) are trying to build up the tension as the Big Year arrives, and also bolster their contentions that Things Are Happening. Apart from the author's conjecture that the origin of the "noises" phenomenon can be traced back to one man, a Baptist minister from Indiana named Paul Begley -- it is seldom, I think, that hoaxes like this are attributable to one person's efforts -- Elliott makes a pretty good case for the side of skepticism. In fact, the article ends:
In today's world, we must all become aware of how to determine fact from fiction. This can only be done through the research of topics, in finding the evidence needed to either legitimize a claim or toss it, because it is baseless.Not bad, eh? Particularly given that his article appeared on the online site UFO Digest!
So, anyway, I'm feeling pretty good at this point, and made it all the way to the end of the article wondering how something so logical made its way onto a website usually devoted to wild woo-woo speculation. Even Elliott's "About This Author" was impressive; he has (he says) worked for several newspapers in Oregon, and most recently was a political columnist for the Cimarron News Press in Cimarron, New Mexico. All sounds pretty reasonable...
... and then I read the list of "Other Articles By This Author." To wit:
I looked at the first one, at the cost of thousands of valuable brain cells I will never ever have again, and found claims such as the following:
- The human race was created when beings from Mars came to Earth and integrated dinosaur DNA into their own to make them more suited to Earth's environment.
- Mars lost most of its atmosphere when its planetary neighbor exploded (the cause of this explosion wasn't mentioned); this catastrophe generated the asteroid belt.
- Insects have reptilian DNA because they both have "scales."
- Octopuses and birds are related because both of them have beaks.
So, I'm reading this, my jaw hanging lower and lower, and I'm thinking, "Wait... wait! What about 'separating fact from fiction?' What about 'finding the evidence needed to legitimize a claim?' Why would you fake me out like this, Tony? Why?" So I closed the link, a sadder, wiser skeptic.
I didn't even look at the one about the "Sinister Global Warming Plot," or the one about "ghost rockets."
It is a mystery to me that someone can (on the one hand) be so reasonable, so logical, so completely sane sounding, and (on the other) write articles that are filled with claims that are ridiculous even by comparison to your typical woo-woo. Don't people have one consistent standard for evaluating claims? If one set of conjectures falls because of the poor quality of evidence, how can another succeed based on an even poorer quality of evidence?
No, I don't know, either.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Alone again, naturally
Apparently, there's some reasonable conjecture that the more socially connected we are, the unhappier we get.
The rise of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and all the rest would, you'd think, leave us feeling more certain of our place in the world, and (being social primates) you'd think that'd lead to a greater sense of happiness. Two studies, one old and one new, seem to indicate exactly the opposite.
The older is a fascinating idea that, despite its publication twenty years ago, I only ran into recently. It's called the Friendship Paradox (here's a recent article about the idea), and is the discovery that the statement that "most of my friends have more friends than I do" is apparently statistically true. Sociologist Scott Feld noted the commonness of this claim, and wondered if it was just a perceptual bias related to inaccurate self-image, or was actually a real phenomenon.
It turned out to be the latter, and the proof of it requires abstruse mathematics that I am incapable of understanding, much less explaining, but an example might suffice to illustrate the idea. Let's say we have 50 people in a (rather artificial) social group. One of the 50 knows all of the others; two of them know half of the others; and the remaining 47 only know two of the others, each. What is the perception of each person's friends, regarding the number of people each of them knows?
Well, of our 47 subjects who only know two people each, all of them know the top dog who knows everyone, and the other person each of them knows has to be one of the two people who know half of the group. Therefore, for those 47, it is literally true that both of their friends have more friends than they do -- by a large margin. Even the two who know half of the group know each other, and the guy who knows everyone. So in this admittedly unrealistic scenario, almost everyone's mean number of friends of friends is greater than their number of friends.
It works any time you have a network with multiply interconnected nodes. Chances are, your professional contacts have more contacts than you do; the people you've had sex with have had more partners than you have; your connections in social networks have more connections than you have; and so on. But it has nothing to do with being a loser (as the title of the article humorously implies) -- it's a purely statistical phenomenon.
The other study, that just came out last week (described here), was done by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, and involved people's perceptions of their own happiness, vis-à-vis social networks. They took 425 students, and asked them to rate their level of agreement or disagreement with a variety of statements like, "I am usually a happy person," "Life is fair," and Many of my friends have a better life than me." And they analyzed the results as a function of how many "friends" each of the student had on Facebook, and how many hours a day each of them spent on the site.
The rather interesting result is that the more "friends" on Facebook you have, the more you tend to rate your own life as substandard. "Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives," Chou and Edge wrote. "Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook 'friends' agreed more that others had better lives."
The speculation is that because of the fact that most people's photographs on Facebook show them doing happy, fun, social things, the more you look at those photographs, the more you tend to think your own life sucks. I wonder, though, if this explanation is right, or might be committing that cardinal sin of mistaking correlation for causation -- it may be that unhappier, more socially awkward people may take the avenue of socializing online rather face-to-face, thus leading to the result that heavy Facebook users, especially those who friend relative strangers, are less satisfied.
In any case, the whole thing had a painfully personal touch for me, because in the last year I've been trying to market my e-published fiction (available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, if you're interested) through such social networking sites as Twitter, and my continual sense is that all of the other authors I've bumped into this way, and there have been a lot, (1) have had way more success than I have, (2) have more contacts than I do, and (3) get way more responses from people when they post than I do. This has elicited many bouts of highly unbecoming self-pity on my part, so I suppose it's a comfort to know that what I'm experiencing is hardly unusual. My perception of the numbers of contacts that these other authors have is just another example of the Friendship Paradox; and my perception of their success is due to the Facebook-photograph phenomenon, to wit, you wouldn't likely post on Twitter, "Wow! My book didn't sell any copies at all this week! Yay!", preferentially weighting Tweets toward messages that are more positive than what most of us are feeling most of the time.
I guess this might pull me out of the Slough of Despond to some extent, but maybe what I really need to do is what the Chou and Edge article suggests -- turn off the damn computer and go visit some friends.
The rise of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and all the rest would, you'd think, leave us feeling more certain of our place in the world, and (being social primates) you'd think that'd lead to a greater sense of happiness. Two studies, one old and one new, seem to indicate exactly the opposite.
The older is a fascinating idea that, despite its publication twenty years ago, I only ran into recently. It's called the Friendship Paradox (here's a recent article about the idea), and is the discovery that the statement that "most of my friends have more friends than I do" is apparently statistically true. Sociologist Scott Feld noted the commonness of this claim, and wondered if it was just a perceptual bias related to inaccurate self-image, or was actually a real phenomenon.
It turned out to be the latter, and the proof of it requires abstruse mathematics that I am incapable of understanding, much less explaining, but an example might suffice to illustrate the idea. Let's say we have 50 people in a (rather artificial) social group. One of the 50 knows all of the others; two of them know half of the others; and the remaining 47 only know two of the others, each. What is the perception of each person's friends, regarding the number of people each of them knows?
Well, of our 47 subjects who only know two people each, all of them know the top dog who knows everyone, and the other person each of them knows has to be one of the two people who know half of the group. Therefore, for those 47, it is literally true that both of their friends have more friends than they do -- by a large margin. Even the two who know half of the group know each other, and the guy who knows everyone. So in this admittedly unrealistic scenario, almost everyone's mean number of friends of friends is greater than their number of friends.
It works any time you have a network with multiply interconnected nodes. Chances are, your professional contacts have more contacts than you do; the people you've had sex with have had more partners than you have; your connections in social networks have more connections than you have; and so on. But it has nothing to do with being a loser (as the title of the article humorously implies) -- it's a purely statistical phenomenon.
The other study, that just came out last week (described here), was done by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, and involved people's perceptions of their own happiness, vis-à-vis social networks. They took 425 students, and asked them to rate their level of agreement or disagreement with a variety of statements like, "I am usually a happy person," "Life is fair," and Many of my friends have a better life than me." And they analyzed the results as a function of how many "friends" each of the student had on Facebook, and how many hours a day each of them spent on the site.
The rather interesting result is that the more "friends" on Facebook you have, the more you tend to rate your own life as substandard. "Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives," Chou and Edge wrote. "Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook 'friends' agreed more that others had better lives."
The speculation is that because of the fact that most people's photographs on Facebook show them doing happy, fun, social things, the more you look at those photographs, the more you tend to think your own life sucks. I wonder, though, if this explanation is right, or might be committing that cardinal sin of mistaking correlation for causation -- it may be that unhappier, more socially awkward people may take the avenue of socializing online rather face-to-face, thus leading to the result that heavy Facebook users, especially those who friend relative strangers, are less satisfied.
In any case, the whole thing had a painfully personal touch for me, because in the last year I've been trying to market my e-published fiction (available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, if you're interested) through such social networking sites as Twitter, and my continual sense is that all of the other authors I've bumped into this way, and there have been a lot, (1) have had way more success than I have, (2) have more contacts than I do, and (3) get way more responses from people when they post than I do. This has elicited many bouts of highly unbecoming self-pity on my part, so I suppose it's a comfort to know that what I'm experiencing is hardly unusual. My perception of the numbers of contacts that these other authors have is just another example of the Friendship Paradox; and my perception of their success is due to the Facebook-photograph phenomenon, to wit, you wouldn't likely post on Twitter, "Wow! My book didn't sell any copies at all this week! Yay!", preferentially weighting Tweets toward messages that are more positive than what most of us are feeling most of the time.
I guess this might pull me out of the Slough of Despond to some extent, but maybe what I really need to do is what the Chou and Edge article suggests -- turn off the damn computer and go visit some friends.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Asstrology
I bet, if I gave you a thousand guesses, you'd never be able to figure out what Sylvester Stallone's mother does for a living.
Go ahead, guess. You'll be wrong.
You give up? Okay. Here it is:
She does psychic readings for people from seeing pictures of their butts.
See? I told you you'd never guess. And, for the record, I'm not making this up.
Stallone, apparently not one to skimp on patting her own, um, back, calls herself "America's foremost Rumpologist." (I'd like to think she's America's only rumpologist, but chances are she can't be the only one who does this.) So, you send her a photograph of your butt, along with a hefty check for her services, and she tells you what your personality is like, what's going to happen in your future, and so on.
So I guess when Stallone says she's "getting a little behind in her work," she means it.
As far as how this could possibly work, she gives a wonderful explanation on her website, to wit:
BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*
She also says that your butt crack has a lot to do with your personality. I'd like to be able to tell you what, but when I got to the part about "lawyers having unusually long butt cracks," I was laughing so hard that I don't think I remember much of what I was reading.
But that's not the only thing that Stallone does; and I guess it would be kind of a pain in the ass if all you did all day long was to look at photographs of people's butts. She is also the "Dean of the University of Astrology" (accreditation pending), and describes it here, a webpage wherein we are subjected to music that sounds like the unholy bastard child of Pachelbel's Canon and "The Wind Beneath My Wings." On this page are two photographs of Stallone, one in which she is blonde and smiling, and the other in which she is brunette and in which, to put it politely, the resemblance to Rambo is fairly obvious. You can purchase her videos, in which you learn about things like the "Love Scale of Compatibility," for $99.95.
She also requests that you call her "Dean Jackie."
So there you have it, folks: astrology, and asstrology. The latest from the world of the woo-woo. You know, I keep thinking that I've found the wackiest belief possible -- putting holographic stickers on water jugs to "alter the water's health resonance field," using crystal pendulums to diagnose disease, treating those diseases by giving the patient pills from which all the marginally useful molecules have been diluted out of existence. But people always seem to be one step ahead of me.
Which, if I was Jacqueline Stallone, would be exactly the vantage point I'd want.
Go ahead, guess. You'll be wrong.
You give up? Okay. Here it is:
She does psychic readings for people from seeing pictures of their butts.
See? I told you you'd never guess. And, for the record, I'm not making this up.
Stallone, apparently not one to skimp on patting her own, um, back, calls herself "America's foremost Rumpologist." (I'd like to think she's America's only rumpologist, but chances are she can't be the only one who does this.) So, you send her a photograph of your butt, along with a hefty check for her services, and she tells you what your personality is like, what's going to happen in your future, and so on.
So I guess when Stallone says she's "getting a little behind in her work," she means it.
As far as how this could possibly work, she gives a wonderful explanation on her website, to wit:
Rumpology is sometimes called butt reading in modern parlance. It is the art of reading the lines, crevices, dimples, and folds of the buttocks to divine the individual's character and gain an understanding of what has occurred in the past and get a prediction of the future... Jacqueline has discovered that the left and right cheeks reveal a person's past and future, respectively. The right buttocks represents the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, while the left buttocks represents the right hemisphere. It is similar to palmistry -- where the left palm represents the past and the right palm represents the future.So, wait... let me get this straight... your left butt cheek is connected to your right brain, so it tells you your past, and your right butt cheek is connected to your left brain, so it tells you your future? I can't tell you how anxious I am to bring this up in my neurology class! I think there's only one thing I will add, when I tell them about it, which is:
BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*
She also says that your butt crack has a lot to do with your personality. I'd like to be able to tell you what, but when I got to the part about "lawyers having unusually long butt cracks," I was laughing so hard that I don't think I remember much of what I was reading.
But that's not the only thing that Stallone does; and I guess it would be kind of a pain in the ass if all you did all day long was to look at photographs of people's butts. She is also the "Dean of the University of Astrology" (accreditation pending), and describes it here, a webpage wherein we are subjected to music that sounds like the unholy bastard child of Pachelbel's Canon and "The Wind Beneath My Wings." On this page are two photographs of Stallone, one in which she is blonde and smiling, and the other in which she is brunette and in which, to put it politely, the resemblance to Rambo is fairly obvious. You can purchase her videos, in which you learn about things like the "Love Scale of Compatibility," for $99.95.
She also requests that you call her "Dean Jackie."
So there you have it, folks: astrology, and asstrology. The latest from the world of the woo-woo. You know, I keep thinking that I've found the wackiest belief possible -- putting holographic stickers on water jugs to "alter the water's health resonance field," using crystal pendulums to diagnose disease, treating those diseases by giving the patient pills from which all the marginally useful molecules have been diluted out of existence. But people always seem to be one step ahead of me.
Which, if I was Jacqueline Stallone, would be exactly the vantage point I'd want.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Music, DNA resonators, and mind control
Every once in a while I'll run into a woo-woo whose determination, creativity, and style evoke in me some grudging admiration. Such is Leonard Horowitz, whose theories are so out there that they read like well-crafted fiction (which, in fact, they are).
Horowitz himself was a dentist, who despite the medical training that is required for the field, evidently never absorbed much in the way of standard biological information, nor (for that matter) common sense. He claims, for example, that flu vaccines cause sterility, which I know will come as a great shock to the millions of presumably fertile individuals who get flu shots yearly. Instead of getting a flu shot, Horowitz says, you should merely dose up on vitamin C and D, and purchase from his website (c'mon, you knew he was selling something) "alkalanizing water" and "covalently-bonded silver hydrosols" that will render you invincible.
Two other wonderful Horowitz creations are the "Water Resonator" (a sticker you apply to the water jug in your fridge) that "displays the precise sound frequencies of universal creation to restore nature's resonance energy and electromagnetic purity of water," and the "DNA Enhancer," another sticker that you place on your acupuncture points, which works because "DNA is nature's bioacoustic and electromagnetic (that is, 'spiritual') energy receiver, signal transformer, and quantum sound and light transmitter."
But by far my favorite Horowitz claim is that the standard musical tuning of A = 440 hertz is gradually turning music listeners into mindless zombies. The problem, apparently, is that the "natural" tuning of A = 444 hertz was suppressed by the Rockefellers, who realized that tuning orchestral instruments to 440 would allow them control the minds of anyone exposed to music. The whole thing involves the Illuminati, the Federal Reserve, Lucifer, Muzak, the Manhattan Project, Elvis Presley, Pat Robertson, the Nazis, Pythagoras, Nikola Tesla, and the Beatles. Which, I believe, makes it the single most comprehensive conspiracy theory ever invented, needing only a mention of HAARP to make it a shoo-in for the Gold Medal of Woo-Woo.
To prove to you that I'm not lying, here's a link to Horowitz's paper on the subject, which you really should read in toto, because just the illustrations alone make it one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I've ever read. But in case you don't have the time, inclination, or spare brain cells to kill, here's the abstract (yes, it's set up like a traditional scientific paper, with an abstract, introduction, background, methodology, and so on):
His "About the Author" bit at the end of the paper (in case you didn't get that far) also makes for good reading, and includes a mention of various accolades he's received: "Dr. Horowitz has been honored as a 'World Leading Intellectual' by officials of the World Organization for Natural Medicine for his revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism that are impacting the fields of metaphysics, creative consciousness, sacred geometry, musicology, and natural healing according to his life’s mission―to help fulfill humanity’s Divine destiny to actualize world peace and permacultural sustainability."
Whoooo. Those are some credentials, dude. You had me at the "revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism" part, not to mention the whole "sacred geometry" thing, which always makes me picture people worshiping equilateral triangles and chanting Euclid's Postulates while burning incense.
Anyway. That's our woo-woo of the day, and one of my particular favorites. Whatever else you can say about Dr. Horowitz, he's certainly earnest, and one should never discount the humor value of some of these people. So thanks for the chuckles, Lenny. Keep up the good work.
Horowitz himself was a dentist, who despite the medical training that is required for the field, evidently never absorbed much in the way of standard biological information, nor (for that matter) common sense. He claims, for example, that flu vaccines cause sterility, which I know will come as a great shock to the millions of presumably fertile individuals who get flu shots yearly. Instead of getting a flu shot, Horowitz says, you should merely dose up on vitamin C and D, and purchase from his website (c'mon, you knew he was selling something) "alkalanizing water" and "covalently-bonded silver hydrosols" that will render you invincible.
Two other wonderful Horowitz creations are the "Water Resonator" (a sticker you apply to the water jug in your fridge) that "displays the precise sound frequencies of universal creation to restore nature's resonance energy and electromagnetic purity of water," and the "DNA Enhancer," another sticker that you place on your acupuncture points, which works because "DNA is nature's bioacoustic and electromagnetic (that is, 'spiritual') energy receiver, signal transformer, and quantum sound and light transmitter."
But by far my favorite Horowitz claim is that the standard musical tuning of A = 440 hertz is gradually turning music listeners into mindless zombies. The problem, apparently, is that the "natural" tuning of A = 444 hertz was suppressed by the Rockefellers, who realized that tuning orchestral instruments to 440 would allow them control the minds of anyone exposed to music. The whole thing involves the Illuminati, the Federal Reserve, Lucifer, Muzak, the Manhattan Project, Elvis Presley, Pat Robertson, the Nazis, Pythagoras, Nikola Tesla, and the Beatles. Which, I believe, makes it the single most comprehensive conspiracy theory ever invented, needing only a mention of HAARP to make it a shoo-in for the Gold Medal of Woo-Woo.
To prove to you that I'm not lying, here's a link to Horowitz's paper on the subject, which you really should read in toto, because just the illustrations alone make it one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I've ever read. But in case you don't have the time, inclination, or spare brain cells to kill, here's the abstract (yes, it's set up like a traditional scientific paper, with an abstract, introduction, background, methodology, and so on):
This article details events in musical history that are central to understanding and treating modern psychopathology, social aggression, political corruption, genetic dysfunction, and cross-cultural degeneration of traditional values risking life on earth. This history concerns A=440Hz “standard tuning,” and the Rockefeller Foundation’s military commercialization of music. The monopolization of the music industry features this imposed frequency that is “herding” populations into greater aggression, psychosocial agitation, and emotional distress predisposing people to physical illnesses and financial impositions profiting the agents, agencies, and companies engaged in the monopoly. Alternatively, the most natural, instinctively attractive, A=444Hz (C5=528Hz) frequency that is most vividly displayed botanically has been suppressed. That is, the “good vibrations” that the plant kingdom obviously broadcasts in its greenish-yellow display, remedial to emotional distress, social aggression, and more, has been musically censored. Thus, a musical revolution is needed to advance world health and peace, and has already begun with musicians retuning their instruments to perform optimally, impact audiences beneficially, and restore integrity to the performing arts and sciences. Music makers are thus urged to communicate and debate these facts, condemn the militarization of music that has been secretly administered, and retune instruments and voices to frequencies most sustaining and healing.Myself, I like the "greenish-yellow good vibrations" part the best, and will now immediately re-tune my flute to A = 444 hertz. (I'd also attempt to do the same with my bagpipes, but given that "soothing psychosocial agitation" is really not something most people associate with bagpipe music, I probably shouldn't bother.)
His "About the Author" bit at the end of the paper (in case you didn't get that far) also makes for good reading, and includes a mention of various accolades he's received: "Dr. Horowitz has been honored as a 'World Leading Intellectual' by officials of the World Organization for Natural Medicine for his revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism that are impacting the fields of metaphysics, creative consciousness, sacred geometry, musicology, and natural healing according to his life’s mission―to help fulfill humanity’s Divine destiny to actualize world peace and permacultural sustainability."
Whoooo. Those are some credentials, dude. You had me at the "revelations in the musical mathematics of creationism" part, not to mention the whole "sacred geometry" thing, which always makes me picture people worshiping equilateral triangles and chanting Euclid's Postulates while burning incense.
Anyway. That's our woo-woo of the day, and one of my particular favorites. Whatever else you can say about Dr. Horowitz, he's certainly earnest, and one should never discount the humor value of some of these people. So thanks for the chuckles, Lenny. Keep up the good work.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
The mathematician and the Bible decoder
One of my besetting sins is riffing continuously on the same themes, and if I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again in different guises, I hope I can be forgiven on the grounds that there is so much work to do in the realm of getting people to think critically.
I feel the need to start with this disclaimer because once again I've bumped into a wonderful example of how good humans are at assigning meaning to random patterns. Our minds are really pattern-finders; we are constantly, and mostly subconsciously, looking for relevance in what we experience, because (as I've commented before) we evolved in a context where a rustle in the grass might or might not have been a hungry lion, and far better to assign that meaning to it and be wrong than to fail to assign that meaning to it -- and be wrong. The result is we often invent meaning where there is only randomness, only chaos.
Enter Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible Code, The Bible Code II: The Countdown, and The Bible Code III. Drosnin is the fellow who took the Hebrew original of the Torah (Genesis, Leviticus, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) and purported to find hundreds of encoded messages predicting the future -- everything from the Holocaust to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. His technique, if you can dignify it by that name, involved running all of the letters in the Torah in a string, and then finding patterns -- taking every nth character, or characters that formed straight lines (including diagonal ones) when the text was assembled in lines of X letters long. He generated hundreds of diagrams like the following, which supposedly predicts the attacks of 9/11:
Well. This whole thing got various mathematicians and statisticians in a lather, because the general rule is, if you're allowed to assemble a string of characters of sufficient length any way you want, and apply the rules of character selection any way you want, you can create any message you want. The whole thing seems self-evident to me, not to mention my general skepticism that prediction of the future is possible however you might want to go about it. Mathematician David Thomas was more blunt than that, saying, "The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax."
And Drosnin responded, "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."
As the saying goes: be careful what you wish for; you may get it.
Mathematician Brendan McKay rose to the challenge, and took the text of Moby Dick, applied Drosnin's technique to it, and found "predictions" of the assassination of:
None of this is recent news; but on the other hand, none of it seems to be discouraging Drosnin from continuing to Bible Code like mad. His most recent book (The Bible Code III) was just released a year and a half ago, and the word is he's working on a fourth book (tentatively titled The Bible Code IV). And, of course, his books still sell like hotcakes, which I have to admit bugs me for a variety of reasons. It galls me that someone who is so obviously using spurious reasoning to make ridiculous, illogical claims is making money by taking advantage of the credulity of the book-buying public. It also bothers me when someone just won't quit when they're debunked; we've seen it with such luminaries of the woo-woo world as Erich von Däniken, Uri Geller, and Immanuel Velikovsky, not to mention apocalyptic religious fanatics like Harold Camping. Arguments, facts, and evidence pile up, you're shown to be a misguided wingnut at best and a deliberate hoaxer at worst -- and you don't do what most of us would do in this situation, which is to turn bright red, mumble an apology, and vanish -- you keep going.
Unfortunately, the fact is that there are still enough people who believe all of this stuff that the money still flows, even after the theories are debunked and disproven. So whatever else you can say about woo-woo bullshit, it's lucrative. And if I can be allowed to make a rather depressing prediction of the future myself -- I'm sure that The Bible Code IV, V, and VI will all be raving successes.
I feel the need to start with this disclaimer because once again I've bumped into a wonderful example of how good humans are at assigning meaning to random patterns. Our minds are really pattern-finders; we are constantly, and mostly subconsciously, looking for relevance in what we experience, because (as I've commented before) we evolved in a context where a rustle in the grass might or might not have been a hungry lion, and far better to assign that meaning to it and be wrong than to fail to assign that meaning to it -- and be wrong. The result is we often invent meaning where there is only randomness, only chaos.
Enter Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible Code, The Bible Code II: The Countdown, and The Bible Code III. Drosnin is the fellow who took the Hebrew original of the Torah (Genesis, Leviticus, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) and purported to find hundreds of encoded messages predicting the future -- everything from the Holocaust to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. His technique, if you can dignify it by that name, involved running all of the letters in the Torah in a string, and then finding patterns -- taking every nth character, or characters that formed straight lines (including diagonal ones) when the text was assembled in lines of X letters long. He generated hundreds of diagrams like the following, which supposedly predicts the attacks of 9/11:
Well. This whole thing got various mathematicians and statisticians in a lather, because the general rule is, if you're allowed to assemble a string of characters of sufficient length any way you want, and apply the rules of character selection any way you want, you can create any message you want. The whole thing seems self-evident to me, not to mention my general skepticism that prediction of the future is possible however you might want to go about it. Mathematician David Thomas was more blunt than that, saying, "The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax."
And Drosnin responded, "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."
As the saying goes: be careful what you wish for; you may get it.
Mathematician Brendan McKay rose to the challenge, and took the text of Moby Dick, applied Drosnin's technique to it, and found "predictions" of the assassination of:
- Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India
- President René Moawad of Lebanon
- Soviet exile Leon Trotsky
- Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss of Austria
- Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel
- John F. Kennedy
- Robert F. Kennedy
- Princess Diana
None of this is recent news; but on the other hand, none of it seems to be discouraging Drosnin from continuing to Bible Code like mad. His most recent book (The Bible Code III) was just released a year and a half ago, and the word is he's working on a fourth book (tentatively titled The Bible Code IV). And, of course, his books still sell like hotcakes, which I have to admit bugs me for a variety of reasons. It galls me that someone who is so obviously using spurious reasoning to make ridiculous, illogical claims is making money by taking advantage of the credulity of the book-buying public. It also bothers me when someone just won't quit when they're debunked; we've seen it with such luminaries of the woo-woo world as Erich von Däniken, Uri Geller, and Immanuel Velikovsky, not to mention apocalyptic religious fanatics like Harold Camping. Arguments, facts, and evidence pile up, you're shown to be a misguided wingnut at best and a deliberate hoaxer at worst -- and you don't do what most of us would do in this situation, which is to turn bright red, mumble an apology, and vanish -- you keep going.
Unfortunately, the fact is that there are still enough people who believe all of this stuff that the money still flows, even after the theories are debunked and disproven. So whatever else you can say about woo-woo bullshit, it's lucrative. And if I can be allowed to make a rather depressing prediction of the future myself -- I'm sure that The Bible Code IV, V, and VI will all be raving successes.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Birds, ancestors, and intellectual honesty
Last week I was messing about with a genealogical search engine called RootsWeb. RootsWeb indexes, and allows you to search, the submitted databases of thousands of genealogical researchers, and can be a valuable tool for finding out bits and pieces of information that other folks have uncovered.
It's also a fine way to perpetuate error. When I was using it last week, for example, I came across a database in which a researcher had identified one of the early residents of Louisiana as having been born four years before his father was.
Now, having done genealogical research for years, I can tell you that this kind of mistake is easier to make than it would seem. Genealogical software allows you to link up people quickly and easily, and while some (mine, for example) has features which give you an error message if you try to link two people who can't possibly be parent and child (or husband and wife), not all of them do. So, my point is, not all errors of this type are careless research; many are probably just the genealogical equivalent of a typo.
In any case, the point of all this is that the RootsWeb server allows you to place an electronic post-it on others' databases, asking questions, giving additional information, or whatever. So I posted, "How can this be _____'s father when he was born four years before his father was?"
The following day, I got a very snarky email from the owner of the database. The gist of it was that I was finding fault with research that she had identified on her site as "tentative," and it ended with, "... you should have read my website notes before you posted your rude commentary, which clearly wasn't intended to be helpful."
Now, leaving aside the presumptuousness of thinking you can discern a total stranger's motives from a single sentence on a post-it, I find this attitude baffling. I felt like writing back, "you 'tentatively' thought a person could be born prior to his father? Are you ignorant of biology, or just generally stupid?" But of course, I didn't; I sent a quick note apologizing, saying I hadn't meant to offend. But really; why would any researcher object to having an obvious, simple error pointed out?
I ran afoul of the same attitude years ago, with a cousin of mine who wanted our mutual great-grandmother's family (the Iams family) to be descended from royalty. He proposed a scheme for descending them from the kings of Scotland, which (upon delving into it a little) I found to be impossible. In this case, I was a little more tactful right from the get-go, sensing that he was pretty happy to have royal blood - I sent him a letter gently breaking the news to him, and providing photocopies of the records I'd found that disproved his cherished hypothesis.
He never spoke to me again.
It's all about intellectual honesty, really. I have had some theories of mine run headlong into the stone wall of factual evidence, and it's not pretty when that happens. It's hard to go in, and where you had answers, put back in those blank-looking question marks. But otherwise, what's the point? Why would you engage in a pastime like this if you're satisfied with perpetuating falsehoods?
I have another hobby in which intellectual honesty plays a part, and that's birdwatching. I'm what some birdwatchers derisively call a "twitcher" or a "lister;" I keep track of my sightings and actively search for birds I've never seen. Now, anyone who's ever watched wildlife will know that the word "seen" isn't as clear-cut as you'd think.
A good example was the first time I "saw" a Ruffed Grouse, a bird which had eluded me for years. I heard it first -- anyone who knows the fauna of the American Northeast will attest that this is generally the case, the call of a Ruffed Grouse carries for miles but the birds themselves are remarkably elusive. Anyway, I'd been trying for nearly an hour to get a glimpse of the bird I heard calling, and suddenly there was a flurry of wings and a brownish blur took off through the trees and disappeared.
So, the dilemma: should I count it? I knew what it was; I heard it, and was sure that this was the same bird I'd heard. But by the rules I'd set for the game, that wasn't good enough -- to count it, I actually had to see it well enough to recognize it. It was another year before I saw a Ruffed Grouse well enough to tick it off my list.
But I've met birders who don't have the same standards -- if they see a speck flying away, and someone else in the group is sure it's a particular species, they'll count it. My question is, how is that honest record-keeping?
I know these are both just hobbies, and that I'm getting all serious about something that is just lighthearted recreation, but I still think the question is a valid one. I find myself wondering about this when I read about intellectual dishonesty in other, far more serious venues -- when politicians will lie, or be selective with the truth, to achieve their political ends; when scientific researchers will falsify or ignore data to create an appearance of support of their favored theories.
Just last week, a story broke about allegations that Dr. Dipak Das, whose research was responsible for the widespread contention that drinking red wine increases longevity and improves general health, had engaged in fraud. His papers, which had appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and whose findings became part of the conventional wisdom on health and nutrition, were found to have 145 instances of "fabrication and falsification of data." Das has, over the years, been the recipient of millions of dollars of federal grant money; the University of Connecticut just announced that they were returning to the government the last two grants, totaling $890,000.
Das, of course, has been "unavailable for comment." But it is clear that these allegations are valid, and it is highly probable that his career is over.
What would possess someone to do such a thing? How could someone, steeped in the honesty-at-all-costs tradition of the scientific method, not at least realize that sooner or later, he was bound to get caught?
I wonder if people like Das start small, like my genealogical acquaintances, and the cheating birders; if once you've become anesthetized to the effects of lying about small things, it becomes increasingly easy to lie about large ones. It may seem silly, but it's the same thing; the only difference is scale. We have a favorite theory, an outcome we really desire to be true, and we tell ourselves that it won't matter if we stretch the truth.
And like anything, it becomes easier the more we practice.
It's also a fine way to perpetuate error. When I was using it last week, for example, I came across a database in which a researcher had identified one of the early residents of Louisiana as having been born four years before his father was.
Now, having done genealogical research for years, I can tell you that this kind of mistake is easier to make than it would seem. Genealogical software allows you to link up people quickly and easily, and while some (mine, for example) has features which give you an error message if you try to link two people who can't possibly be parent and child (or husband and wife), not all of them do. So, my point is, not all errors of this type are careless research; many are probably just the genealogical equivalent of a typo.
In any case, the point of all this is that the RootsWeb server allows you to place an electronic post-it on others' databases, asking questions, giving additional information, or whatever. So I posted, "How can this be _____'s father when he was born four years before his father was?"
The following day, I got a very snarky email from the owner of the database. The gist of it was that I was finding fault with research that she had identified on her site as "tentative," and it ended with, "... you should have read my website notes before you posted your rude commentary, which clearly wasn't intended to be helpful."
Now, leaving aside the presumptuousness of thinking you can discern a total stranger's motives from a single sentence on a post-it, I find this attitude baffling. I felt like writing back, "you 'tentatively' thought a person could be born prior to his father? Are you ignorant of biology, or just generally stupid?" But of course, I didn't; I sent a quick note apologizing, saying I hadn't meant to offend. But really; why would any researcher object to having an obvious, simple error pointed out?
I ran afoul of the same attitude years ago, with a cousin of mine who wanted our mutual great-grandmother's family (the Iams family) to be descended from royalty. He proposed a scheme for descending them from the kings of Scotland, which (upon delving into it a little) I found to be impossible. In this case, I was a little more tactful right from the get-go, sensing that he was pretty happy to have royal blood - I sent him a letter gently breaking the news to him, and providing photocopies of the records I'd found that disproved his cherished hypothesis.
He never spoke to me again.
It's all about intellectual honesty, really. I have had some theories of mine run headlong into the stone wall of factual evidence, and it's not pretty when that happens. It's hard to go in, and where you had answers, put back in those blank-looking question marks. But otherwise, what's the point? Why would you engage in a pastime like this if you're satisfied with perpetuating falsehoods?
I have another hobby in which intellectual honesty plays a part, and that's birdwatching. I'm what some birdwatchers derisively call a "twitcher" or a "lister;" I keep track of my sightings and actively search for birds I've never seen. Now, anyone who's ever watched wildlife will know that the word "seen" isn't as clear-cut as you'd think.
A good example was the first time I "saw" a Ruffed Grouse, a bird which had eluded me for years. I heard it first -- anyone who knows the fauna of the American Northeast will attest that this is generally the case, the call of a Ruffed Grouse carries for miles but the birds themselves are remarkably elusive. Anyway, I'd been trying for nearly an hour to get a glimpse of the bird I heard calling, and suddenly there was a flurry of wings and a brownish blur took off through the trees and disappeared.
So, the dilemma: should I count it? I knew what it was; I heard it, and was sure that this was the same bird I'd heard. But by the rules I'd set for the game, that wasn't good enough -- to count it, I actually had to see it well enough to recognize it. It was another year before I saw a Ruffed Grouse well enough to tick it off my list.
But I've met birders who don't have the same standards -- if they see a speck flying away, and someone else in the group is sure it's a particular species, they'll count it. My question is, how is that honest record-keeping?
I know these are both just hobbies, and that I'm getting all serious about something that is just lighthearted recreation, but I still think the question is a valid one. I find myself wondering about this when I read about intellectual dishonesty in other, far more serious venues -- when politicians will lie, or be selective with the truth, to achieve their political ends; when scientific researchers will falsify or ignore data to create an appearance of support of their favored theories.
Just last week, a story broke about allegations that Dr. Dipak Das, whose research was responsible for the widespread contention that drinking red wine increases longevity and improves general health, had engaged in fraud. His papers, which had appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and whose findings became part of the conventional wisdom on health and nutrition, were found to have 145 instances of "fabrication and falsification of data." Das has, over the years, been the recipient of millions of dollars of federal grant money; the University of Connecticut just announced that they were returning to the government the last two grants, totaling $890,000.
Das, of course, has been "unavailable for comment." But it is clear that these allegations are valid, and it is highly probable that his career is over.
What would possess someone to do such a thing? How could someone, steeped in the honesty-at-all-costs tradition of the scientific method, not at least realize that sooner or later, he was bound to get caught?
I wonder if people like Das start small, like my genealogical acquaintances, and the cheating birders; if once you've become anesthetized to the effects of lying about small things, it becomes increasingly easy to lie about large ones. It may seem silly, but it's the same thing; the only difference is scale. We have a favorite theory, an outcome we really desire to be true, and we tell ourselves that it won't matter if we stretch the truth.
And like anything, it becomes easier the more we practice.
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