Space cubes

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that we survived (1) the Rapture, (2) the Mayan apocalypse, and (3) the 2012 Christmas shopping season.  The bad news is that the Borg are on their way.  [Source]

At least, that is the claim of such pinnacles of rationality as David Icke and Alex Collier, both of whose names you may have seen once or twice in Skeptophilia before.  Icke, you may recall, is the one who believes that American public schools are being run by aliens; Collier, on the other hand, claims that there was a giant alien/human war back in the 1930s, which none of us have heard about because the war propelled us through a rip in the space-time continuum into an alternate timeline, and now we have to try to get back into our correct timeline, without even being able to consult Geordi LaForge for advice.

Now, because two minds of this caliber are clearly better than one, Icke and Collier have teamed up to analyze the data coming in from NASA's SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), and have come to the terrifying conclusion that the Borg cube has arrived, and is hovering menacingly just inside the corona of the sun.

So, let's just take a look at some of the photographs in question, whatchasay?

Spokespeople for NASA say that these images aren't of a giant cubical spacecraft; they're basically just blank spots where there's missing data.  Icke and Collier aren't convinced, however.  They take the evidence from the photograph, which consists solely of a couple of blank squares, and come to the only conclusion you could draw from this:

The cube is a "GOD" (Galactic Obliteration Device) launched by an evil alien race, which is coming to Earth to destroy it as per the Book of Revelation Chapter 21, wherein we find out that the "City of God" that is supposed to descend during the End Times is square in shape, and since squares are kind of like cubes, this thing is going to come to Earth and the Borg are then going to annihilate the human race in the Battle of Armageddon, which fulfills the scriptural prophecy even though I've read the Book of Revelation and I don't remember any mention of the Second Coming of Locutus.

Apparently, this idea didn't originate with Icke and Collier, but was the brainchild of the LLF (Luciferian Liberation Front).  Which gives it ever so much more credibility, given that this is the same group of wingnuts who believe that the biblical story is literally true, except that Jesus was actually a superpowerful cyborg from another planet.

Of course, Icke, Collier, and the LLF aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the anomalous squares in the SOHO photographs.  Scott Waring, of UFO Sightings Daily, thinks that the cube is a giant spacecraft, but that it doesn't have anything to do with either the Borg or the Book of Revelation.  No, Waring said, don't be a loon.  There are two other, much more likely, possibilities: "Such huge objects are present either because the sun is hollow or because energy is being harvested from the sun."

Oh.  Okay.  That makes all kinds of sense.

My own personal opinion is that NASA should hire someone whose sole job is to scan their photographs, looking for ones with glitches, dead pixels, missing data, and so on, and make sure that those flawed photographs never make it online.  We rationalist skeptics have enough trouble keeping everyone's eye on the ball without goofed-up pics from NASA making it worse.

Of course, if NASA did hire someone to do this, Icke, Collier et al. would eventually find out about it, and then there's be allegations of a conspiracy and coverup designed to keep all of us from finding out about the impending alien invasion.  Accusations would be leveled.  The word "sheeple" would be used.

You can't win.

Santa Claus is comin' to town

Well, a very happy Christmas Eve to all of you who celebrate it.  I'm sure that many of my readers are eagerly awaiting tomorrow morning, for the joy of seeing what Santa brought for yourself and your loved ones.

I mention St. Nick deliberately, because, you know, I can never be certain if someone who's reading this blog believes in Santa Claus or not, and far be it from me to burst anyone's bubble.  And I'm not just talking about little kids, here.

A recent piece in the Boston Globe (read it here) describes "paranormal expert" Stephen Wagner's fascination with "Santa sightings."  Yes, folks, I'm talking about presumably sane, intelligent adults who have seen the Big Guy for real on Christmas Eve.  For many of these people, it was a life-changing experience.  I know it would be for me; my life would change from "living at home" to "living in a psychiatric ward."

But that's not how most of the people who got to see the Jolly Old Elf in person feel.  Sarah, a 41 year old Californian who saw Santa Claus back in 1975, said the experience was transcendent.  "Seeing Santa changed my outlook forever," she told Wagner, "to the point that I am comfortable with tattooing ol’ Big Red onto my body.  It means that much to me."

Others report confirmation of many items from Santa's familiar accoutrement.  "We [were] driving by a lonely McDonald’s and we [saw] something dashing through the clouds," said one of Wagner's respondents.  "We could all make out Santa’s sleigh and nine reindeer including Rudolph’s nose."  "He was in full Santa attire," Sandra, a 51-year-old Missourian, told Wagner, recounting a sighting from the 1960s.  "He was bent over, then he stood up and took a puff from a pipe." 

It may be uncharitable of me, but in this last case I suspect that Santa might not have been been the one smoking the pipe, if you get my drift.

Wagner, for his part, seems simply to recount the experiences without trying to interpret them or weigh in on their veracity.  Not so Loyd Auerbach, who teaches a parapsychology course at Atlantic University.  "I've never even heard of people seeing Santa," Auerbach scoffs.  "The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa."

Because, after all, the Grim Reaper is orders of magnitude more real than Santa Claus, for heaven's sake.  Everyone knows that.

Auerbach goes on to state that these Santa sightings might have a common origin, though.  "The only reason this could be real," he states, "is if it's an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa."

This is why I could never be an investigative reporter.  I would, on occasion, guffaw directly into people's faces while interviewing them.  I suspect that this would put people off, somehow.

 So given that I'm not especially taken with Auerbach's explanation of Ghost Santa or Alien Santa, I think I'm going with "suggestible people with overactive imaginations."  This is the position of Rebecca Knibb, a reader in psychology at the UK's University of Derby.  Knibb attributes St. Nick sightings to people who are "fantasy-prone," and whose daydreams were already colored by the imagery and mythology of the Christmas season.  At another time or place, Knibb suggests, these same people would be seeing ghosts.

If you are one of the people who have seen Santa Claus -- or any other weird, unexplainable occurrence, for that matter -- you should report it on Stephen Wagner's site, Paranormal Phenomena, wherein you will find a link to the original Santa Sightings report, as well as sightings of Christmas Angels, Christmas Ghosts, and a paranormal explanation for the Star of Bethlehem.  As for me, I'm just going to go wrap a few last presents, because I think the likelihood of Santa showing up in the flesh for someone like me is slim to none.  He knows if you've been bad or good, after all, and I suspect that frank disbelief would fall clearly into the "bad" column.

Thermal undies

New from the "How Can Anyone Actually Fall For That?" department, we have a story today from Australia that an entrepreneur with more creativity than ethics is getting rich selling "fat-burning underwear."  [Source]

Brazcom Imports, a company based in South Australia, has sold over 500,000 pairs of "Scala Shapewear" undergarments, which (according to their website) contain "Active BioCrystals" that emit "far infrared" rays.  This "kick starts something called the BioPromise effect," and "melts fat away."  And they seem to mean melt in the literal sense; the "Active BioCrystals" supposedly liquify fat cells, in the fashion of bacon grease melting in a frying pan on your stove, and then the body... I dunno, does something with it, I guess.  They never mention where the melted fat goes, so I suppose it just goes "away."

I should mention at this point that Brazcom's managing director, Tim Nielsen, is apparently a Ph.D. in biochemistry.  I'm not surprised, frankly; it would take someone with a considerable background in science to invent pseudoscience this idiotic.  I mean, if you didn't have a thorough understanding of how the natural world really works, you might include something in your advertisements that was true by accident.  To successfully avoid all of the facts requires that you know what the facts actually are.

Brazcom and Nielsen came under fire recently from Dr. Ken Harvey, associate professor of public health at LaTrobe University, who wrote an exposé of the product (and their sales pitch), identifying the claims as pseudoscience.  "It's classic pseudoscience, with words that look like they might mean something," Dr. Harvey said, in an interview with News.Com.Au.  "It's ludicrous."  He goes on to explain what I would have thought anyone with an IQ of at least double digits would realize; that if your underwear were emitting enough heat to melt subcutaneous fat, they would leave significant burns on parts of your body that most of us would prefer to remain unscorched.  Oh, yeah; and there's no such thing as the "BioPromise effect" or "Active BioCrystals."

Brazcom, of course, heatedly denies that they're hoodwinking their customers.  It's all science, Nielsen claims, and has been "clinically proven."  (Their use of this phrase will be a central piece of Dr. Harvey's case against Brazcom, which is due to be heart by the Therapeutic Products Advertising Complaints Resolution Panel next month.)  Nielsen's defense of the company took an unintentionally humorous turn, however, when he stated that the fat-melting underwear's amazing sales was a "testament to its effectiveness."

Because, of course, you know that overweight people never purchase fad diet stuff unless it's been proven to work by reputable scientists.

It will be interesting to see how Australian officials handle the whole thing.  Here in the United States, the oversight of "nutritional supplements" and other such products of dubious effectiveness -- including all sorts of nutty ways to lose weight -- are barely regulated at all, as long as (1) no one dies from using them, and (2) the words "Not intended to treat or cure any medical condition" appear somewhere on the product, usually in a font so small you would need a scanning electron microscope to read it.  You have to wonder how many millions of dollars are wasted each year on bogus diet pills, fad weight loss programs, and bizarre procedures like "colon cleansing."

In any case, it's to be hoped that the case of the magic thermal fat-melting undies will be resolved in favor of rationality and science.  And that all of the people who were hoping literally to melt off a few pounds will return to doing the only thing that has been shown to take weight off and keep it off; eating less and exercising more.

Apocalypse not

Well, here we are, the day you've all been eagerly awaiting; December 21, 2012.  So far, nothing very apocalyptic has happened, as far as I can see from my limited perspective here in upstate New York.  Everything is pretty much cornfields and cow pastures, like it always has been.  The only thing of note is that my dog started barking at 2:30 AM, and when I got up to see what was bugging him it turned out that the emergency was that he had had a sudden uncontrollable urge to play tug-of-war with someone.  After I told him to put the damn rope toy down and go back to bed, he did, although he gave me a rather reproachful look as he did so.  I'm thinking that if the zombies come for me today, he's not going to intervene.

On the other hand, my lack of sleep means that we're going to have some serious Armageddon happening in my classroom today, if any of my students give me a hard time.

What's funny about all of this doomsaying is that the whole idea of the world ending (or being transformed, or whatever) didn't originate with the Mayans.  They Mayans knew the Long Count had cycles, and like every cycle, it started anew when the old one was done, like any good calendar does.  So the fact that the "13th b'ak'tun" supposedly ends today -- which the most skilled experts in Mayan language and culture don't even agree on -- doesn't mean we're about to be devoured by a black hole, or anything.  In fact, the first clue should be that the Mayans thought we'd already had twelve of the things, so you'd think someone would have said, "Hey, you know, if the world didn't end the first twelve times, it probably won't end this time."

But that's not how these people think, unfortunately.  The origins of the 2012 phenomena can be traced back to a few books and a lot of hallucinogenic drugs that were widely shared about in the 1970s.  José Argüelles' The Transformative Vision mentions 2012 as a "year of transformation," although it never mentions a date; the same is true of The Invisible Landscape, by noted wingnut and psychotropic drug enthusiast Terrence McKenna, who is living proof that when you screw around with your neurotransmitters, what you observe might be entertaining but it isn't necessarily real.

But in the 1980s, research by Robert J. Sharer and others into the Mayan language and calendar provided Argüelles and McKenna a finer brush with which to apply woo-woo principles to actual legitimate archaeology and linguistics, and they became convinced that December 21, 2012 was the day of days.  But it seemed a long time to wait, so they decided to arrange for an earlier transformative event to occur.  A sort of pre-apocalypse, as it were.  It was called the "Harmonic Convergence," and was scheduled for August 16, 1987.  A whole bunch of woo-woos showed up at Mount Shasta on August 16, and chanted and waved crystals about and did all sorts of other mystical stuff, but they all went home on the 17th when no converging, harmonic or otherwise, happened.

None of this discouraged Argüelles and McKenna, however, and they said that the really big stuff was going to happen... Today.  As in, right now.  Because the Mayans said so.  Never mind that when people talked to some actual, real Mayans, and asked them if the world was going to end because their calendar was going to run out, the Mayans said, "What do we look like, morons?  That's not how calendars work."

None of that has stopped the woo-woos from believing, nor has it stopped entrepreneurs from cashing in on their gullibility.  Tour companies sold out on excursions to Central America for the Fatal Week two years ago, just proving that there's no belief so ridiculous that some clever person can't exploit it to turn a quick buck.

Anyhow, it looks like December 21, 2012 will come and go without anything like what was predicted in the phenomenally bad movie 2012.  The Himalayan Mountains have not, last I heard, been washed away, and there have been no giant earthquakes, volcanoes, or other such cataclysms.  I'm guessing that we'll all wake up tomorrow and pretty much go about our business as usual.

Until, that is, the next forecast of doom, gloom, and/or global spiritual transformation.  You know there'll be another one.  Woo-woos just don't give up that easily.  It takes more than a 0% success record to discourage them.  It's a pity they can't turn this kind of persistence and dogged determination onto something that needs solving, like world hunger.  Because man, with that kind of single-mindedness, we'd have food to every starving child on the planet in no time flat.

The fire-breathing vegetarian velociraptor of doom

I am frequently impressed by the tortuous, knotted rationalizations some people will invoke in order to explain their favorite weird, counterfactual idea.  The funny thing is, they often couple this with a sneering derision of people who disagree with them -- and in fact, frequently accuse their detractors of engaging in rationalization themselves, of accepting ideas without evidence, of believing in "fairy tales."

You have to be impressed with a blind spot that huge.

I ran into a stunning example of this just yesterday, when a student said to me, "Did you know that some biblical literalists believe that dinosaurs could breathe fire, and that's why fire-breathing dragons are part of mythology?"  I scoffed at first, but he directed me to this site, a page from the Creation Worldview Ministries website.

If you are understandably reluctant to go there and read it for yourself, allow me to summarize their argument here.  I am not, for the record, making any of this up.

1)  Evolution is a big fat fairy tale, for which there is no evidence.  Evolutionary biologists like myself are being deluded by Satan and are lying to you, with the goal of stealing your children from the church.

2)  Fire-breathing dragons were mentioned in the bible, so they must have been real.  They cite Job 41:15, 18-21:  "His strong scales are his pride, shut up as with a tight seal... His sneezes flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.  Out of his mouth go burning torches; sparks of fire leap forth.  Out of his nostrils smoke goes forth, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.  His breath kindles coals, and a flame goes forth from his mouth."

3)  Okay, now that we've established that fire-breathing dragons are real, what are they?  Well, we have dinosaur bones, which are kinda dragon-like, so those must be our Smaug wannabees.  Especially, the site says, the duckbilled dinosaurs, which had "very large nasal cavities, much larger than needed for smell."  Obviously, big noses = breathing fire, which is going to make me a hell of a lot more careful the next time I sneeze.

4)  All animals, including dinosaurs, were originally vegetarians.  Animals only started to eat each other after the Fall.   The big, nasty, pointy teeth of the Velociraptor, for example, were used for munching on especially tough carrots.

5)  Many herbivores have fermentation chambers in their digestive tracts, and fermentation of plant materials can produce methane.  This is why, for example, cow farts are flammable.  You are cautioned on the website that it isn't nice to light cow farts "because it will scare the poor cow half to death."

6)  Along the way, the website points out as an aside that global warming is a myth, and that anyone who believes in it is an "environmental terrorist."

7)  So anyway, dinosaurs may have burped methane gas.  If you couple this with a mechanism for igniting the gas, you get an instant T-Rex flamethrower.

8)  But what could ignite the gas?  There are three ways:  the dinosaurs' teeth could have clicked together and created a spark, "like a flintlock rifle;" they could have had an electrical ignition system in their throats; or they could have a chemical ignition process, similar to the one that "makes fireflies light up the night skies."

Ergo: fire-breathing dragons are real.  This, in fact, explains the story of St. George and the Dragon, wherein a Christian man (emphasis theirs) rescues a fair maiden from one.  "What better way," the writers of the website ask, "to impress a woman of your courage and strength than to slay a fierce dragon on her behalf?"  They then go on to say that the dinosaurs may have become extinct because of overhunting, possibly by desperate men trying to impress their girlfriends, a motivation that continues lo unto this very day.


Well.  First of all, I have to say that my overall reaction to this is:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

I can't get out of my mind the strangely compelling mental image of Bessie the Dairy Cow clicking her teeth together, and suddenly spouting flame from her mouth and nose.  Being that I live across the road from a farm, I must say that if this were true, I would be very much in favor of it just from the entertainment value alone.

But anyway, let me get this straight.  You say that (1) evolution is a "fairy tale," and (2) global warming is a "myth," but you do believe in fire-breathing dragons?  Really?  Really?

I have to admire these people, in one sense; at least they play fair.  They're starting from the standpoint that every last word in the bible is the literal truth, even the bizarre, self-contradictory, or inconvenient bits (of which there are lots).  They don't shy away from the wacky parts, like some biblical apologists do.  But if you're going to do that, you have to come up with some twisted logic to get it all to work out, don't you?

Flammable vegetarian dinosaur burps.  I mean.

In any case, I would like to thank Creation Worldview Ministries for starting out my day with a good belly laugh.  I guess it's only fair to admit that they'd probably find my views equally ridiculous, although they're unlikely ever to come across them (I'm doubtful that these people frequent skeptic websites).  In any case, let's end with a photograph of how one of my personal heroes dealt with a fire-breathing dragon, when he ran into one:

So, there you are.  Source corroboration.  The Book of Job, and Bugs Bunny.  Independent sources, and of equal credibility.  I believe this is what we in the scientific world call "an airtight case."

The Round-footed Sea Serpent of Koh Mai Pai

Seems like it's been a while since we've had a good cryptozoological report, so it's with great pleasure that I bring you news of a sea serpent invading Thailand.  [Source]

At least that's what they're claiming.  On the morning of December 15, workers at the school on Koh Mai Pai (Bamboo Island), near Phuket, arrived to find what appeared to be a line of tracks that came from the direction of the ocean, meandered its way through the school grounds, and then returned from whence it came.  The "tracks" were circles, twenty centimeters in diameter, leading one school official to speculate that they were made by a "sea serpent fifteen meters in length."

Koh Mai Pai village chief Anan Sansamuth stated that at 11 PM the previous evening, he had heard some "ducks quacking frantically," but had thought nothing of it until he saw the tracks.  He is now recommending that the village's electricity generator be run all night, and that villagers "prepare implements to catch the creature."

What implements might be handy to catch a fifteen-meter-long sea serpent were not specified.

Of course, there's no weird story that can't be made even crazier, and it was Koh Mai Pai teacher Mrs. Pannee Atwaree who added that extra-special nutty sauce to this seafood dish.  "The islanders’ fear is ratcheted up by theories that the appearance of the tracks might be an omen of a great disaster," Mrs. Atwaree said.  "Perhaps the one some have been predicting for next Friday (December 21) when the Mayan calendar – and possibly the world – comes to an end."

Because, after all, that's what the Mayan calendar predicts, right?  When the Great Cycle ends, sea serpents will visit schools in Thailand and do nothing except scare a bunch of ducks.  That's how awful this apocalypse will be.  What will it be next time?  Alarming some goats?  You can see how quickly this sort of thing could escalate.

In any case, there are several problems with this story.  The first is that I've never seen any animal tracks that look even remotely like the alleged Thai sea serpent tracks.  They're far too regular, too clear in outline, and show no signs of the blurring you'd expect if a fifteen-meter-long (and presumably extremely heavy) animal were dragging itself across the sand.  Plus, they're kind of closely spaced, don't you think?  I'm trying to picture a gigantic sea serpent, sort of mincing delicately along on its perfectly circular feet, and the image is strangely hilarious.

So, unfortunately, this whole thing just screams "hoax."  What I think is that some prankster made these tracks, using something circular to press into the sand (the bottom of a large bucket looks just about the right size).  Along the way, he freaked out some ducks.  And there you are.  No need to get out your sea-serpent-catching implements, no need to run the generator all night, and especially no need to invoke the Mayan calendar.  What with the various groups of apocalyptoids descending on mountains in France, Serbia, and (most recently) Argentina, each hoping to be the lucky ones that the returning aliens decide to save, the last thing we need is folks rushing off to some beautiful island off the coast of Thailand trying to catch the Stumpy-Legged Sea Serpent of Doom.

The University of Iowa underwear-snitching ghost

I think one of the hardest things for me to understand about the woo-woo mindset is how quickly they're willing to jump to a supernatural explanation.

It's not that I don't have the impulse myself sometimes, mind you.  When I hear a bump in my attic, when I see something out of the corner of my eye, I (like most people) get a shiver up my spine.  But I don't follow that up by saying "Oh, it must be that pesky ghost again."  The first thing I look for is a natural explanation.  And you know what?  When I look for a natural explanation, I generally find it.  The bump in the attic was my cat knocking something off a bookshelf; the motion I saw was leaves being blown past the window.  In my 52 years, the number of things I've been left with that I haven't been able to satisfactorily explain from a completely ordinary perspective is exactly zero.

Apparently, though, I'm in the minority.  Consider the case of the University of Iowa baseball team, who have made some strange enough claims that their story was written up on the New England Sports Network.  (Read the story here.)  Members of the team have contacted ghost hunters after several of their number reported seeing apparitions, and having a variety of other strange experiences in their living quarters.

"We've lived here over the past two years," pitcher Aaron Smit told reporters.  "But over the past few months, we've noticed things getting a little bit weird.  We had a kid in here who thought he saw a ghost -- a shadow in the form of a human."

Others have reported "poltergeist-like" phenomena, with objects moving around, doors being slammed, and television channels spontaneously changing.  One player said he saw a "little girl in his bedroom."  Another, first baseman Brian Niedbalski, says there's an old man ghost living in the house as well, and the team has nicknamed him "Tim."  (The ghost, not the first baseman.)  "I'm on Tim's good side," Niedbalski said.  "I want to leave it that way."

Then, there's the incident in which two of the players' girlfriends, who were spending the night, woke up to find their underwear had been removed, and was elsewhere in the room -- although they were still wearing pants at the time.

Oooookay.  So, what do we have here?

First, of course, we have the complete lack of actual hard evidence.  Doors can slam because of drafts -- I lived in a house in Seattle where that used to happen regularly -- and the "corner of the eye" phenomenon is something that happens to everyone, whether there's a ghost there or not.  I see nothing here that can't be explained through a combination of suggestibility, natural phenomena, and ordinary human perceptual errors, with possibly the contribution of alcohol in the case of the teleporting panties.  None of this seems to me to be especially convincing, and you have to wonder if this may not be a few superstitious guys who convinced the whole team that something ghostly was going on, following which every additional stray noise just added to the team's conviction that they were living in a haunted house.

Of course, I have to admit that I'm drawing all of these conclusions long-distance.  I've never been to the team's living quarters to check out the claims for myself.  Spending a night in a haunted house is one of my bucket-list items -- and who knows, maybe if I get my wish I'll be convinced.  But at the moment, all of the natural explanations for the University of Iowa underwear-stealing ghost just seem to me to be much more plausible.