Well, it's Friday, and "TGIF" is the slogan of the day here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. But before we kick back for the weekend, there are a few stories we need to put to bed, all contributions by regular readers of this blog.
The first one, which comes from Hebei Province, China, is a tawdry story of bigamy -- a girl playing fast and loose with the hearts of two young swains. Worse still, the parents of all three were aware, even complicit in, the affair. (Source)
Worst of all, all three of the participants were dead at the time.
Apparently in this region of China, it's considered adding insult to injury if you die single. Presumably being dead is bad enough, but being dead and not getting any is just intolerable. So if a single family member dies, it's considered the only reasonable thing to do to find a nearby eligible person (eligible in the sense of being approximately the same age, unmarried, and also dead), and marry them to each other post-mortem. The dowry, paid to the young woman's family, can run over 30,000 yuan ($4,700).
In this case, however, another young man's family wanted the same for him, so they hired grave robbers to dig up the woman's body, and married her off to their young bachelor, again at a cost of 30,000 yuan.
You have to wonder how the spirit world will handle all of these three-way goings-on. Bigamy is illegal in China, so presumably the best thing to do would be to find a dead lawyer who is willing to write up divorce papers. On the other hand, maybe the rules are different in the afterlife, so perhaps we should leave well enough alone if the happy, um, trio is okay with it.
Speaking of leaving well enough alone, we now travel to the town of Totnes (Devon), England, where a war is being fought over some gnome statues that were placed, by the approval of town officials, in a local roundabout. (Source)
Well, to be more accurate, they're not your typical, quaint garden gnomes. What they are is statues of the Seven Dwarfs, spray-painted bright blue. The overall effect is that they look like the love children of Dopey and Smurfette.
Many Totnesians are not amused.
"Please assure me I haven't been imbibing an illegal hallucinogenic substance and that the shiny blue monstrosities on the roundabout in Totnes are not a figment of my fevered mind," said Hazel Fuller, of Dartington.
Another Totnes resident, Chris Keleher, said, "The offending gnomes may be appropriate in Las Vegas or in Disneyland but to claim that they enhance the image of Totnes in any way is to insult the values of what Totnes is supposed to stand for."
Apparently, a few folks have even called for the resignation of the mayor, Judy Westacott, for "a breach of public trust and humiliation."
Others have defended the gnomes (and the mayor). In what may be one of the oddest non sequiturs I've ever heard, Ann Rutherford, of Totnes in Bloom (the organization that sponsored the gnomes in the first place), said, "Real Totnesians have fallen about with laughter at the blue gnomes. They are great fun. It is only uptight, humorless incomers who object. Do we constantly have to go round in hair shirts eating organically grown food?"
So there you have it, Totnes: your choices are (1) fall about with laughter at the spray-painted Disney dwarfs, or (2) wear hair shirts and eat organically-grown food. The choice, I think, is clear.
Speaking of choices, our last story brings us back to the US, where all of the furor over the 2012 presidential election is about to be resolved in a singularly spectacular fashion.
Some of you probably have heard about UFO Phil, and in fact I did a post on him last October (here) describing his plans to build a UFO refueling station on Alcatraz Island. Now, he's back in the spotlight, for a different reason -- he says that by the power invested in the aliens from another galaxy who he's been talking to, he's going to assume the US presidency in November regardless of who wins the popular vote or the ballots cast in the electoral college. (Source)
Now, before you say that this is impossible, remember that this is essentially what George W. Bush did in 2000, if you replace "aliens from another galaxy" with "his brother Jeb and other cronies from the state of Florida."
In any case, UFO Phil is content to let the debates and all continue for the time being. "I'm going to become your new president," he said, brimming with his usual ebullient confidence. "Don't worry, Obama, Mitt Romney and whoever else can still have their little election. That's not going to affect me."
As far as what his platform is, he says that the first thing he'll do as president is to establish a "Senate for Terrestrial Relations," whose purpose would be to prepare for the arrival of "our brothers from space." He would then decommission the military, and replace all of the airplanes and so on with spaceships. Last, he would take down the Statue of Liberty, and replace it with a monument to Zaxon, the leader of the friendly aliens.
"He has very nice skin and will look phenomenal as a statue," UFO Phil told reporters.
Me, I'm okay with it. It can't be much worse than what some of our other government leaders are currently doing. So UFO Phil would have my vote, as long as he promises not to sing at his inauguration, because I've heard some of his songs (you can find plenty on YouTube), and I have to say that if I had a choice between listening to UFO Phil sing and removing both ears with a belt sander, it would be a tough call.
Anyhow, that's our news for Friday here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. Chinese dead bigamists, blue dwarf statues in England, and UFO Phil destined for the presidency. So thanks to all who submitted links, and a happy TGIF to all of you.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Spinning away the rough edges
Is it too much to ask to have an honest political debate?
I'm not referring to any particular candidate having lied; I'm more referring to the entire spectacle. All the candidates are coached to a faretheewell, told by their strategists and tacticians what to say, when to smile, when to get angry, and where to look. As a result, what we see has little to do with the reality of any of the candidates' personalities or approaches to leadership, and more to do with what their handlers think would be expedient apropos of getting elected.
Really, did we -- or more to the point, could we -- learn anything about the Republican candidates from last night's GOP debate in Arizona? Santorum and Romney both spent most of their time jockeying for the position of Least Liberal Man On Stage; Gingrich seemed mostly to smile paternally, and when asked for a one-word description of himself, said, "Cheerful," as if that were a qualification for public office; and Paul continued to sound his "small government" mantra. We didn't learn a single new thing about any of them, and given the way debates are run (and analyzed afterwards), I doubt we could have.
I think the last time that I saw any real authenticity in a debate was during the Bentsen/Quayle vice presidential debate, when Quayle compared himself to JFK and Bentsen shot back with the now-famous quip, "Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. And senator, you are no Jack Kennedy." Pow! Zing! Can you think of any moment in a more recent debate when a candidate has actually responded, in an unscripted and honest fashion, to anything?
Oh, for the times when there was a real exchange, when you could actually learn something about a politician's personality, views, articulateness, and quickness of mind from watching him or her speak. It's not that it was always (or even often) polite; more than once, such debates drew blood (figuratively, if not literally). Possibly the most brilliant retort ever recorded was the exchange on the floor of the British Parliament between the Earl of Sandwich and the redoubtable John Wilkes. Sandwich was so infuriated by something Wilkes had said that he blurted out, "Wilkes, I predict that you will either die on the gallows or else of some loathsome disease!" Wilkes coolly responded, "Which it will be, my dear sir, will depend entirely on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Zing!
Can you honestly imagine anything of the kind occurring in one of today's "debates?"
Winston Churchill has a well-deserved reputation for thinking on his feet, and few could best him in an intellectual argument. There's the famous exchange between him and Lady Astor ("Sir Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee!" "Lady Astor, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.") But there were others. Churchill was doing a public speech, in front of hundreds, and a man came up to one of Churchill's aides and handed him a sealed envelope. Thinking it was a crucial message, the aide went up to Churchill (still on the stage) and handed him the envelope. Churchill paused in his speech, and opened the letter, only to find a sheet of paper with the word "IDIOT" scrawled on it in huge, black letters.
Totally unflustered, Churchill showed the paper to the audience and said, "I've often received letters where the sender forgot to sign his name, but this is the first time I've received one where the sender signed his name but forgot to write the letter."
Pow!
It's not just in public speaking events that politicians used to feel freer to express their views; knowing that every time a public figure speaks, his or her words could be recorded, excerpted, and broadcast on the internet, leaders today have to be constantly on their guard. It didn't used to be that way. Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge knew how to use his tongue, when he chose to. After watching a particularly dreadful opera performance, President Coolidge was cornered by a reporter while leaving the theater. "What do you think of the singer's execution?" the reporter asked.
Coolidge responded, "I'm all for it."
Zap!
It's not that people like Wilkes, Churchill, and Coolidge didn't prepare, didn't write scripts, didn't have advisers. It's just that in those days, before the terms "spin" and "sound bite" had been coined, speakers were not hesitant about letting their personalities (rough edges and all) show. Even Ronald Reagan, much as I hate to admit it, was more authentic than any of today's candidates are; although I usually disagreed with what he said, I had no doubt that what we were seeing was the real Reagan.
Today, I wonder. And I also wonder how far today's Wilkeses and Churchills could get in the political arena without being tamed, muzzled, or simply swept aside by the media and the party machinery.
It's also why I tend to pay attention to the candidates' pasts. What they said when they were less watched, less guarded, is often more telling than what they're saying now, where an unfortunate word choice can lead to a drop in the all-important polls. It's why, for example, I think it's critical that we think carefully about declarations like the ones Santorum made in his 2008 "America is under attack by Satan" speech. When the media resuscitated this speech, made at Ave Maria University, Santorum at first defended himself by saying that he simply "believes in good and evil," but finally added with some annoyance that the comments he'd made were from an "old speech" and so were "not relevant." On the contrary; they're extremely relevant, mostly because there's no way in hell he'd admit to any such thing in what currently passes for presidential debate. Old stump speeches, made to people whose views the candidate shares, are the best way to get a window into what the candidate's views actually are. It may, unfortunately, be the only way.
Evidently, glib but unimaginative scripted responses, rather than speaking from the heart, are now the currency of debate. How sad for American politics; how sad for us all that we cannot be allowed to see who we are actually voting for.
I'm not referring to any particular candidate having lied; I'm more referring to the entire spectacle. All the candidates are coached to a faretheewell, told by their strategists and tacticians what to say, when to smile, when to get angry, and where to look. As a result, what we see has little to do with the reality of any of the candidates' personalities or approaches to leadership, and more to do with what their handlers think would be expedient apropos of getting elected.
Really, did we -- or more to the point, could we -- learn anything about the Republican candidates from last night's GOP debate in Arizona? Santorum and Romney both spent most of their time jockeying for the position of Least Liberal Man On Stage; Gingrich seemed mostly to smile paternally, and when asked for a one-word description of himself, said, "Cheerful," as if that were a qualification for public office; and Paul continued to sound his "small government" mantra. We didn't learn a single new thing about any of them, and given the way debates are run (and analyzed afterwards), I doubt we could have.
I think the last time that I saw any real authenticity in a debate was during the Bentsen/Quayle vice presidential debate, when Quayle compared himself to JFK and Bentsen shot back with the now-famous quip, "Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. And senator, you are no Jack Kennedy." Pow! Zing! Can you think of any moment in a more recent debate when a candidate has actually responded, in an unscripted and honest fashion, to anything?
Oh, for the times when there was a real exchange, when you could actually learn something about a politician's personality, views, articulateness, and quickness of mind from watching him or her speak. It's not that it was always (or even often) polite; more than once, such debates drew blood (figuratively, if not literally). Possibly the most brilliant retort ever recorded was the exchange on the floor of the British Parliament between the Earl of Sandwich and the redoubtable John Wilkes. Sandwich was so infuriated by something Wilkes had said that he blurted out, "Wilkes, I predict that you will either die on the gallows or else of some loathsome disease!" Wilkes coolly responded, "Which it will be, my dear sir, will depend entirely on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Zing!
Can you honestly imagine anything of the kind occurring in one of today's "debates?"
Winston Churchill has a well-deserved reputation for thinking on his feet, and few could best him in an intellectual argument. There's the famous exchange between him and Lady Astor ("Sir Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee!" "Lady Astor, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.") But there were others. Churchill was doing a public speech, in front of hundreds, and a man came up to one of Churchill's aides and handed him a sealed envelope. Thinking it was a crucial message, the aide went up to Churchill (still on the stage) and handed him the envelope. Churchill paused in his speech, and opened the letter, only to find a sheet of paper with the word "IDIOT" scrawled on it in huge, black letters.
Totally unflustered, Churchill showed the paper to the audience and said, "I've often received letters where the sender forgot to sign his name, but this is the first time I've received one where the sender signed his name but forgot to write the letter."
Pow!
It's not just in public speaking events that politicians used to feel freer to express their views; knowing that every time a public figure speaks, his or her words could be recorded, excerpted, and broadcast on the internet, leaders today have to be constantly on their guard. It didn't used to be that way. Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge knew how to use his tongue, when he chose to. After watching a particularly dreadful opera performance, President Coolidge was cornered by a reporter while leaving the theater. "What do you think of the singer's execution?" the reporter asked.
Coolidge responded, "I'm all for it."
Zap!
It's not that people like Wilkes, Churchill, and Coolidge didn't prepare, didn't write scripts, didn't have advisers. It's just that in those days, before the terms "spin" and "sound bite" had been coined, speakers were not hesitant about letting their personalities (rough edges and all) show. Even Ronald Reagan, much as I hate to admit it, was more authentic than any of today's candidates are; although I usually disagreed with what he said, I had no doubt that what we were seeing was the real Reagan.
Today, I wonder. And I also wonder how far today's Wilkeses and Churchills could get in the political arena without being tamed, muzzled, or simply swept aside by the media and the party machinery.
It's also why I tend to pay attention to the candidates' pasts. What they said when they were less watched, less guarded, is often more telling than what they're saying now, where an unfortunate word choice can lead to a drop in the all-important polls. It's why, for example, I think it's critical that we think carefully about declarations like the ones Santorum made in his 2008 "America is under attack by Satan" speech. When the media resuscitated this speech, made at Ave Maria University, Santorum at first defended himself by saying that he simply "believes in good and evil," but finally added with some annoyance that the comments he'd made were from an "old speech" and so were "not relevant." On the contrary; they're extremely relevant, mostly because there's no way in hell he'd admit to any such thing in what currently passes for presidential debate. Old stump speeches, made to people whose views the candidate shares, are the best way to get a window into what the candidate's views actually are. It may, unfortunately, be the only way.
Evidently, glib but unimaginative scripted responses, rather than speaking from the heart, are now the currency of debate. How sad for American politics; how sad for us all that we cannot be allowed to see who we are actually voting for.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
A democracy of ideas
Lately I've been doing something I probably shouldn't do, to wit: reading the reader responses to articles in the Yahoo! News.
I realize that this is a skewed sample -- but I will say, and I know it sounds harsh, that the average IQ of the responders seems to be in the range more commonly associated with shoe sizes. And they seem to have no particular problem with trumpeting their stupidity in an international public forum. I know that there are many, many topics about which I am ignorant, but I try my best not to make moronic pronouncements about them. There's that well-known quote, variously attributed to Confucius, Mark Twain, and others -- "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."
Well, that lesson has yet to sink in for many. Take, as an example, the article that appeared today, regarding the fact that this is (thus far) one of the warmest winters on record, worldwide, despite some regional lows (such as the viciously cold winter eastern Europe has had). Here are a sampling of responses, which I'm paraphrasing from memory, because if I have to go back and re-read the actual responses, I'll scream and wake up my sleeping family:
"Warmest winter my ass. I looked up the record high temperature in my city, and it hasn't been broken since 1960. If it's not happening to me, it isn't global!"
"It's all a lie made up by Obozo and company to get you to lie down and let them walk over you with their stormtrooper boots."
"So what if it is global warming. The Arctic Ocean will be free of ice and we can use it for shipping. It'll inconvenience the polar bears and penguins and the rest of us won't give a damn. Bring it on."
And so on, for pages and pages. I could go on, but I won't; I think I lost several dozen brain cells just typing those three out. However, I have to man up and write out one other one, which stood out for an interesting reason:
"Will you people wake up. Global warming IS A LIE made up by the liberal tree-huggers to get you to buy into their agenda. Wise up, or I hope you'll be happy walking everywhere you go, with no electricity for your house and the American economy destroyed."
I find this one interesting because I think it's illustrative of a tendency I see in a lot of areas; "I don't like this idea" = "this idea isn't true." Clearly, this individual thinks that the result of a drastic decrease in fossil fuel use would be bad -- no gasoline for cars, no coal for electrical plants, and the hit on the economy from the collapse of the petrochemical industry. From this, (s)he has inferred that global warming isn't happening.
I have no particular issue with someone questioning, from a scientific standpoint, the evidence for global warming (although I really wish people could get into their heads the difference between "climate" and "weather" in these discussions). I also have no problems with debating whether the cure (reduction in petrochemical use) might be worse than the disease. However, I didn't think it took a particularly advanced brain to recognize that the two aren't connected, except insofar as the disproof of global climate change would obviate the need to do something about it. The point is, just because you don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you engage in that sort of thinking, you're just doing the adult version of "la la la la la, not listening."
In any case, I don't intend to get into the evidence for climate change here. I really meant this more as a commentary on the way people think, and their tendency to feel that it's their god-given right to bloviate about topics regardless of whether they actually know anything about them. Maybe that's the problem; people have the misapprehension that the word "democracy" extends to ideas. Democracy is all well and good in politics; everyone has a say, and it tends to blend out the voices of the extremes. However, "your vote is equal to mine" and "your rights are equal to mine" does not imply that "your ideas are equal to mine." Your ideas might be better than mine, if you're an expert and I'm not. If I jumped up and said to Stephen Hawking, "You need to listen to what I have to say about quantum mechanics!" I wouldn't be exercising my rights as a citizen of a democratic country, I would be a moron.
To quote Richard Dawkins: "If there are two opposing ideas, it is not always true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is possible that one person is simply wrong."
I realize that this is a skewed sample -- but I will say, and I know it sounds harsh, that the average IQ of the responders seems to be in the range more commonly associated with shoe sizes. And they seem to have no particular problem with trumpeting their stupidity in an international public forum. I know that there are many, many topics about which I am ignorant, but I try my best not to make moronic pronouncements about them. There's that well-known quote, variously attributed to Confucius, Mark Twain, and others -- "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."
Well, that lesson has yet to sink in for many. Take, as an example, the article that appeared today, regarding the fact that this is (thus far) one of the warmest winters on record, worldwide, despite some regional lows (such as the viciously cold winter eastern Europe has had). Here are a sampling of responses, which I'm paraphrasing from memory, because if I have to go back and re-read the actual responses, I'll scream and wake up my sleeping family:
"Warmest winter my ass. I looked up the record high temperature in my city, and it hasn't been broken since 1960. If it's not happening to me, it isn't global!"
"It's all a lie made up by Obozo and company to get you to lie down and let them walk over you with their stormtrooper boots."
"So what if it is global warming. The Arctic Ocean will be free of ice and we can use it for shipping. It'll inconvenience the polar bears and penguins and the rest of us won't give a damn. Bring it on."
And so on, for pages and pages. I could go on, but I won't; I think I lost several dozen brain cells just typing those three out. However, I have to man up and write out one other one, which stood out for an interesting reason:
"Will you people wake up. Global warming IS A LIE made up by the liberal tree-huggers to get you to buy into their agenda. Wise up, or I hope you'll be happy walking everywhere you go, with no electricity for your house and the American economy destroyed."
I find this one interesting because I think it's illustrative of a tendency I see in a lot of areas; "I don't like this idea" = "this idea isn't true." Clearly, this individual thinks that the result of a drastic decrease in fossil fuel use would be bad -- no gasoline for cars, no coal for electrical plants, and the hit on the economy from the collapse of the petrochemical industry. From this, (s)he has inferred that global warming isn't happening.
I have no particular issue with someone questioning, from a scientific standpoint, the evidence for global warming (although I really wish people could get into their heads the difference between "climate" and "weather" in these discussions). I also have no problems with debating whether the cure (reduction in petrochemical use) might be worse than the disease. However, I didn't think it took a particularly advanced brain to recognize that the two aren't connected, except insofar as the disproof of global climate change would obviate the need to do something about it. The point is, just because you don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you engage in that sort of thinking, you're just doing the adult version of "la la la la la, not listening."
In any case, I don't intend to get into the evidence for climate change here. I really meant this more as a commentary on the way people think, and their tendency to feel that it's their god-given right to bloviate about topics regardless of whether they actually know anything about them. Maybe that's the problem; people have the misapprehension that the word "democracy" extends to ideas. Democracy is all well and good in politics; everyone has a say, and it tends to blend out the voices of the extremes. However, "your vote is equal to mine" and "your rights are equal to mine" does not imply that "your ideas are equal to mine." Your ideas might be better than mine, if you're an expert and I'm not. If I jumped up and said to Stephen Hawking, "You need to listen to what I have to say about quantum mechanics!" I wouldn't be exercising my rights as a citizen of a democratic country, I would be a moron.
To quote Richard Dawkins: "If there are two opposing ideas, it is not always true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is possible that one person is simply wrong."
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Six impossible things before breakfast
Yesterday's post, about the ridiculous aspects of conspiracy theories, prompted a regular reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link that indicated how deep the pools of craziness go.
The link was to a paper (you can download the entire thing here) by Michael Wood, Karen Douglas, and Robbie Sutton that appeared in the January 2012 issue of Social, Psychological, and Personality Science. Called "Dead and Alive: Belief in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories," this paper describes an experiment supporting a fantastic conclusion -- that people who believe in conspiracy theories are likely to believe simultaneously in different versions of them, even if those versions are mutually exclusive.
The set-up, which is positively brilliant, is that the three researchers asked 137 participants to take a survey ranking a variety of scenarios from "extremely unlikely" to "extremely likely." The scenarios included various tropes from conspiracy theories, including:
Thinking this couldn't possibly be a valid conclusion, the researchers tried the experiment again, with a different set of test subjects, and this time using Osama bin Laden as their example. Again, the subjects had to rank such statements as "Osama's death was falsely reported by the Obama administration; he is still alive" and "Osama was already dead by the time of the raid" -- and the researchers found a strong correlation between belief in both statements.
Well. I hardly know what to say that the study doesn't make abundantly clear on its own. Mostly, I find myself wondering if belief in conspiracy theories should be considered a mental illness, given that it so obviously derails rational thought. Here is the conclusion of Wood, Douglas, and Sutton's paper:
The link was to a paper (you can download the entire thing here) by Michael Wood, Karen Douglas, and Robbie Sutton that appeared in the January 2012 issue of Social, Psychological, and Personality Science. Called "Dead and Alive: Belief in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories," this paper describes an experiment supporting a fantastic conclusion -- that people who believe in conspiracy theories are likely to believe simultaneously in different versions of them, even if those versions are mutually exclusive.
The set-up, which is positively brilliant, is that the three researchers asked 137 participants to take a survey ranking a variety of scenarios from "extremely unlikely" to "extremely likely." The scenarios included various tropes from conspiracy theories, including:
- 9/11 was an inside job by the US government
- The moon landing was faked
- The CIA was behind the JFK assassination
- Global warming is a hoax
- Diana was killed by a rogue cell of the British Intelligence
- Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed were killed by Al-Fayed's relatives, who disapproved of their relationship
- Diana was killed by agents of the royal family to prevent her marrying an Arab
- Diana faked her own (and Al-Fayed's) deaths in order to escape from the notoriety
- If you believe in any conspiracy theories at all (e.g. 9/11 was an inside job), you are likely to believe in all of them; and
- The higher you rank a particular version of a conspiracy theory, the higher you rank others -- even if those alternate explanations are self-contradictory.
Thinking this couldn't possibly be a valid conclusion, the researchers tried the experiment again, with a different set of test subjects, and this time using Osama bin Laden as their example. Again, the subjects had to rank such statements as "Osama's death was falsely reported by the Obama administration; he is still alive" and "Osama was already dead by the time of the raid" -- and the researchers found a strong correlation between belief in both statements.
Well. I hardly know what to say that the study doesn't make abundantly clear on its own. Mostly, I find myself wondering if belief in conspiracy theories should be considered a mental illness, given that it so obviously derails rational thought. Here is the conclusion of Wood, Douglas, and Sutton's paper:
In any case, the evidence we have gathered in the present study supports the idea that conspiracism constitutes a monological belief system, drawing its coherence from central beliefs such as the conviction that authorities and officials engage in massive deception of the public to achieve their malevolent goals. Connectivity with this central idea lends support to any individual conspiracy theory, even to the point that mutually contradictory theories fail to show a negative correlation in belief. Believing that Osama bin Laden is still alive is apparently no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Conspiratorial conspiracies
I have once again been thinking about conspiracy theories. This time, the culprit is "College Humor," the occasionally brilliant perpetrators of countless YouTube videos. This particular one, called "Deceptive Deceptions," definitely falls into the "spot-on hilarious" range of the spectrum (see the clip here). It makes wonderful fun of the Zeitgeist mindset, which is desperate to find clues and hints everywhere of a global conspiracy. (And if you've never seen "Zeitgeist," my recommendation is "don't bother." Just sit down, close your eyes, and spend five minutes contemplating the idea that the Illuminati are running the world and that a coalition between Monsanto and the Vatican is pulling the strings of everyone from Barack Obama to Quentin Tarantino, and try not to let the rational part of your mind interrupt with any busybody-comments about how unlikely it all is. Then go sit on your couch and have a cold beer and give thanks for the forty-five minutes of your life that you didn't waste watching this ridiculous video.)
Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of people who believe this stuff. We've discussed conspiracy theories in my Critical Thinking class, and the discussion has often centered around the idea of Ockham's Razor -- if there are two (or more) theories to explain something, and all of them account for the known facts, the simplest one is the most likely to be true. Ockham's Razor is, of course, only a rule of thumb -- there have been times when some incredibly convoluted series of events turns out actually to have happened -- but in my experience, it works pretty damn well.
This still hasn't stopped websites like "Conspiracy Planet" from cropping up. This website, which once again I would caution you from spending too much time with lest your brain turn to cream-of-wheat, is a bit of a clearinghouse for wingnuts. Some of the high points:
Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of people who believe this stuff. We've discussed conspiracy theories in my Critical Thinking class, and the discussion has often centered around the idea of Ockham's Razor -- if there are two (or more) theories to explain something, and all of them account for the known facts, the simplest one is the most likely to be true. Ockham's Razor is, of course, only a rule of thumb -- there have been times when some incredibly convoluted series of events turns out actually to have happened -- but in my experience, it works pretty damn well.
This still hasn't stopped websites like "Conspiracy Planet" from cropping up. This website, which once again I would caution you from spending too much time with lest your brain turn to cream-of-wheat, is a bit of a clearinghouse for wingnuts. Some of the high points:
- The ultimate aim of the Illuminati is to have Arnold Schwarzenegger become president. Evidently, the Illuminati are unfamiliar with the fact that you have to have been born a United States citizen in order to run for president, but hey, ultra-powerful black-robed secret world leaders need never let paltry things like facts stand in their way. Another entry on the page for Ahnold states that he is the third Antichrist. I didn't even know that we'd already had two, did you?
- A crop circle, shaped like a human with butterfly wings, is a sign that evolution is speeding up. It has -- and this is a direct, word-for-word quote -- "accelerated evolution on a quantum level, sending out ripples of transformative energy." Reading this made me have to decide between guffawing and doing a face-plant directly into my desk, and the whole thing is leaving me wondering about my choice of spending over two decades attempting to educate children in the principles of scientific induction.
- The whole, tired, "NASA faked the landing on the moon" malarkey, reworked and revisited and regurgitated.
- Chemotherapy actually causes cancer. This will no doubt come as a great shock to my friend who is currently recovering from leukemia after intensive chemotherapy.
- Cold fusion actually is true.
- You don't need flu shots to prevent flu. There is a new therapy which uses "resonant frequencies" to "shake viruses to pieces." Flu shots, in fact, are completely ineffective and were developed in order to keep money flowing into the pharmaceuticals industry.
And so on. I can only take so much of this. Believing in this sort of stuff seems to take a combination of factual ignorance, a desire to believe, and a huge dose of confirmation bias. It's amusing to read about, but I keep coming back to the fact that for these websites, magazines, and so on to exist, someone actually finds it plausible. I really should stop thinking about it, because despair isn't a healthy state of mind.
I'll just finish up with a quote by H. L. Mencken, which seems fitting:
I'll just finish up with a quote by H. L. Mencken, which seems fitting:
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Stonehenge and the sound of silence
Scientists understand the world through the use of models. These models, most often mathematical systems, are an attempt to describe how the world works, and (with luck) make predictions that then can be supported (or not) by experimental data.
It is an all too common error, however, to then decide that the model is the reality. We see this in the realm of simple analogy, where the analogy is substituted for the real phenomenon (as in my student who began one of her AP exam essays with the sentence, "Antibodies are trash tags."). On a more sophisticated level, we have people like Stephen Wolfram, the iconoclastic mathematician and theorist whose book A New Kind of Science (2002) makes the claim that because some processes in the universe resemble a mathematical construct called a "cellular automaton," the universe is, in fact, just a bunch of interacting, interlocking cellular automata. This conjecture led Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg to state, "It's possible, but I can't see any motivation for these speculations, except that this is the sort of system that Wolfram and others have become used to in their work on computers. So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood."
An interesting example of mistaking the model for the reality was just published recently, and was the subject of a talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Archaeologist Steven Waller has proposed, apparently seriously, that Stonehenge was built to resemble the interference pattern that develops when two nearby instruments play the same note continuously.
He studied the phenomenon of acoustic interference by connecting two flutes to air pumps so that they played the same note, and then observing the areas of reinforcement (where the sound waves add together, resulting a louder tone) and interfere (where the waves cancel out, resulting in silence). He took blindfolded volunteers, and had them walk around the room, and then draw what they experienced -- and came up with a pattern that looked a little like Stonehenge.
"If these people in the past were dancing in a circle around two pipers and were experiencing the loud and soft and loud and soft regions that happen when an interference pattern is set up, they would have felt there were these massive objects arranged in a ring," Waller stated. "It would have been this completely baffling experience, and anything that was mysterious like that in the past was considered to be magic and supernatural. I think that was what motivated them to build the actual structure that matched this virtual impression. It was like a vision that they received from the other world. The design of Stonehenge matches this interference pattern auditory illusion."
Well. I have a variety of objections to this conjecture, and I have to hope that someone in at the AAAS meeting brought them up as well (the article describing Waller's findings doesn't mention any questions asked after Waller's talk). The first one is that the position of the "nodes" (places where interference causes sound cancellation) depends on the pitch being played. It's interesting that he chose an instrument in his experiment (the flute) and in his talk (the pipes) that are both instruments I play, because I happen to know a bit about those instruments and how they produce sound. The flute was a convenient choice for his experiment, because it produces fairly pure tones, with few overtones, and therefore a pair of flutes playing the same note would create a simple, stable interference pattern. The bagpipes, however -- being a double-reed instrument, it has lots of overtones (resulting in the, shall we say, distinctness of its sound). This would make any perfect cancellation and resulting "areas of silence" a near impossibility, crushing any hopes you may have if you ever happen to be unfortunate enough to be trapped between two bagpipers.
There's also the problem that no musicians, either then or now, are going to simply stand there and play the same note for hours on end. They were presumably playing an actual tune, which means that the pitches would be shifting all over the place -- shifting any nodes produced all over the place, as well.
But the fundamental problem is one of mistaking appearance for reality. Stonehenge might very well look like the pattern of nodes in an acoustic interference pattern, but that doesn't mean that it is one, any more than antibodies are trash tags or the universe is a cellular automaton. I find it interesting that this research even made it past the peer review stage, especially given Waller's seemingly incessant focus on sound as a motivator for prehistoric art and architecture (his website, for example, describes his conjecture that sound echoes were the motivators for cave paintings -- notwithstanding that most cave paintings are representational, depicting ordinary things like horses, cattle, bears, and people). It's possible, of course, that the acoustic characteristics of a particular place may have led prehistoric people to attribute magical properties to the locale; but to go from there to the conjecture that Stonehenge was built to mimic an acoustic interference pattern is a stretch indeed.
Of course, given that the whole thing centers around Stonehenge, I'm sure there will be a lot of buzz surrounding this paper for some time to come. If you want to get attention from the woo-woo crowd, Stonehenge is a sure-fire winner. But as far as scientific validity goes -- I'm afraid I'm not convinced.
It is an all too common error, however, to then decide that the model is the reality. We see this in the realm of simple analogy, where the analogy is substituted for the real phenomenon (as in my student who began one of her AP exam essays with the sentence, "Antibodies are trash tags."). On a more sophisticated level, we have people like Stephen Wolfram, the iconoclastic mathematician and theorist whose book A New Kind of Science (2002) makes the claim that because some processes in the universe resemble a mathematical construct called a "cellular automaton," the universe is, in fact, just a bunch of interacting, interlocking cellular automata. This conjecture led Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg to state, "It's possible, but I can't see any motivation for these speculations, except that this is the sort of system that Wolfram and others have become used to in their work on computers. So might a carpenter, looking at the moon, suppose that it is made of wood."
An interesting example of mistaking the model for the reality was just published recently, and was the subject of a talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Archaeologist Steven Waller has proposed, apparently seriously, that Stonehenge was built to resemble the interference pattern that develops when two nearby instruments play the same note continuously.
He studied the phenomenon of acoustic interference by connecting two flutes to air pumps so that they played the same note, and then observing the areas of reinforcement (where the sound waves add together, resulting a louder tone) and interfere (where the waves cancel out, resulting in silence). He took blindfolded volunteers, and had them walk around the room, and then draw what they experienced -- and came up with a pattern that looked a little like Stonehenge.
"If these people in the past were dancing in a circle around two pipers and were experiencing the loud and soft and loud and soft regions that happen when an interference pattern is set up, they would have felt there were these massive objects arranged in a ring," Waller stated. "It would have been this completely baffling experience, and anything that was mysterious like that in the past was considered to be magic and supernatural. I think that was what motivated them to build the actual structure that matched this virtual impression. It was like a vision that they received from the other world. The design of Stonehenge matches this interference pattern auditory illusion."
Well. I have a variety of objections to this conjecture, and I have to hope that someone in at the AAAS meeting brought them up as well (the article describing Waller's findings doesn't mention any questions asked after Waller's talk). The first one is that the position of the "nodes" (places where interference causes sound cancellation) depends on the pitch being played. It's interesting that he chose an instrument in his experiment (the flute) and in his talk (the pipes) that are both instruments I play, because I happen to know a bit about those instruments and how they produce sound. The flute was a convenient choice for his experiment, because it produces fairly pure tones, with few overtones, and therefore a pair of flutes playing the same note would create a simple, stable interference pattern. The bagpipes, however -- being a double-reed instrument, it has lots of overtones (resulting in the, shall we say, distinctness of its sound). This would make any perfect cancellation and resulting "areas of silence" a near impossibility, crushing any hopes you may have if you ever happen to be unfortunate enough to be trapped between two bagpipers.
There's also the problem that no musicians, either then or now, are going to simply stand there and play the same note for hours on end. They were presumably playing an actual tune, which means that the pitches would be shifting all over the place -- shifting any nodes produced all over the place, as well.
But the fundamental problem is one of mistaking appearance for reality. Stonehenge might very well look like the pattern of nodes in an acoustic interference pattern, but that doesn't mean that it is one, any more than antibodies are trash tags or the universe is a cellular automaton. I find it interesting that this research even made it past the peer review stage, especially given Waller's seemingly incessant focus on sound as a motivator for prehistoric art and architecture (his website, for example, describes his conjecture that sound echoes were the motivators for cave paintings -- notwithstanding that most cave paintings are representational, depicting ordinary things like horses, cattle, bears, and people). It's possible, of course, that the acoustic characteristics of a particular place may have led prehistoric people to attribute magical properties to the locale; but to go from there to the conjecture that Stonehenge was built to mimic an acoustic interference pattern is a stretch indeed.
Of course, given that the whole thing centers around Stonehenge, I'm sure there will be a lot of buzz surrounding this paper for some time to come. If you want to get attention from the woo-woo crowd, Stonehenge is a sure-fire winner. But as far as scientific validity goes -- I'm afraid I'm not convinced.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Linguadiversity
Yesterday I finished reading the amazing book The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison, which chronicles a Yale-educated linguist's travels to Siberia, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and South America to study and try to record some of the world's most endangered languages.
The central theme of the book is the idea that language diversity is analogous to biodiversity -- that having a great many languages is a sign of a stable, healthy, rich "cultural ecosystem." His claim is that language becomes the lens through which a person sees, describes, and understands the world, and therefore when a language dies, that cultural knowledge is gone forever, because other languages could never encode the same knowledge as deeply and thoroughly.
As a language nerd (my own MA is in linguistics), it's subject I think a lot about. Current estimates are that there are 7,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (so excluding languages such as Latin, which are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker). A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are only spoken by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent. It is an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.
Run that one around in your head for a while.
Top of the list is Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-spoken language in the world. English, predictably, follows. Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Spanish, Russian, Hindi, or some dialect of Arabic. Most of the rest of the world's languages? Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.
The open question is "should we care?" Harrison clearly does; his passion for protecting the world's languages comes through with every word. His view is echoed by Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind. It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."
Are they right? I will admit that their argument has its points; but it also is specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Eyak dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge. We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.
The comparison to biodiversity is also a bit of a false analogy. Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled. In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of native languages in Australia) can actually prevent cultural communication and understanding. Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in the Amazonian rain forest. It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.
Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop. It's just sad -- the fact that the numbers of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like. I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint about why this is a bad thing. It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool. The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes. But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are visited more often by starlings and house sparrows than by indigo buntings.
The central theme of the book is the idea that language diversity is analogous to biodiversity -- that having a great many languages is a sign of a stable, healthy, rich "cultural ecosystem." His claim is that language becomes the lens through which a person sees, describes, and understands the world, and therefore when a language dies, that cultural knowledge is gone forever, because other languages could never encode the same knowledge as deeply and thoroughly.
As a language nerd (my own MA is in linguistics), it's subject I think a lot about. Current estimates are that there are 7,000 languages in daily use by native speakers (so excluding languages such as Latin, which are in daily use in schools but of which no one is a native speaker). A great many of these are in danger of extinction -- they are only spoken by a handful of people, mostly the elderly, and the children aren't being raised fluent. It is an eye-opening fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of the world's people, and the other 96% of the world's people speak the other 4% of the world's languages.
Run that one around in your head for a while.
Top of the list is Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-spoken language in the world. English, predictably, follows. Of the people who speak neither Mandarin nor English, a substantial fraction speak Spanish, Russian, Hindi, or some dialect of Arabic. Most of the rest of the world's languages? Inconsequential -- at least in numbers.
The open question is "should we care?" Harrison clearly does; his passion for protecting the world's languages comes through with every word. His view is echoed by Michael Krauss, professor emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has stated, "... it is catastrophic for the future of mankind. It should be as scary as losing 90% of the biological species."
Are they right? I will admit that their argument has its points; but it also is specious in the sense that most languages can encode the same knowledge somehow, and therefore when the last native speaker of Eyak dies, we won't have necessarily lost that culture's knowledge. We may have lost the ability to figure out how that knowledge was encoded -- as we have with the Linear A writing of Crete -- but that's not the same as losing the knowledge itself.
The comparison to biodiversity is also a bit of a false analogy. Languages don't form some kind of synergistic whole, as the species in an ecosystem do, where the loss of any one thread can cause the whole thing to come unraveled. In fact, you might argue the opposite -- that having lots of unique languages in an area (such as the hundreds of native languages in Australia) can actually prevent cultural communication and understanding. Species loss can destroy an ecosystem -- witness what's happening in the Amazonian rain forest. It's a little hard to imagine language loss as having those same kinds of effects on the cultural landscape of the world.
Still, I can't help wishing for the extinction to stop. It's just sad -- the fact that the numbers of native speakers of the beautiful Irish Gaelic and Breton languages are steadily decreasing, that there are languages (primarily in Australia and amongst the native languages of North and South America) for whom the last native speakers will die in the next five to ten years without ever having a linguist study, or even record, what it sounded like. I don't have a cogent argument from a utilitarian standpoint about why this is a bad thing. It's aesthetics, pure and simple -- languages are cool. The idea that English and Mandarin can swamp Twi and Yanomami is probably unavoidable, and it even follows the purely Dawkinsian concept of the competition between memes. But I don't have to like it, any more than I like the fact that my bird feeders are visited more often by starlings and house sparrows than by indigo buntings.
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