Water of life

I bet you think that water is healthful.  I bet you buy the silly old scientifically-supported contention that plain, ordinary, clean water, direct from your tap, is the best thing for you, and that consuming enough water has been shown to reduce your likelihood of everything from high blood pressure to kidney stones.

Ha.  A lot you know.

There's been a whole industry that's arisen whose motto is, "My water is better than your water."  We have all of the bottled water companies, trampling each other to prove that their brand is the most Natural Clear Clean Mountain Spring Water you've ever drank, and everyone else's is the equivalent of drinking sewer effluent.  (You may want to know that four-year study, released in 2000 by the National Resources Defense Council, showed that in general, bottled water has poorer quality with regards to chemical and bacterial contamination than typical municipal tap water.)

Then you have your vitamin-enhanced water, your fruit-flavored water, your aroma-essence-infused water.  Many of these have enough sugar added that you risk type 2 diabetes just from walking past the display in the grocery store.  And every year, new brands crop up.

But the silliness doesn't end there.  Just yesterday, in rapid succession, I ran across two new, special kinds of water, and the wackiness of these two outstrips the claims of all of the other kinds of water put together.

Let's start with "Pi Water."  I don't recommend clicking on the link, because the website is equipped with some sort of extremely annoying graphic device that makes the text blink, and I wouldn't want anyone having a seizure because of me.  But anyhow, what is "Pi Water?"  At first, I expected it to have something to do with 3.14159 etc., but no:

Pi Water is the water that is very similar to your body water (Living Energy). Living energy means “the energy to live.” Do you know anyone who rarely gets sick or recover quickly when they get hurt? These people have strong living energy. Pi Water has the same function (energy) that your body water has.

My favorite part of this is the definition of "living energy."  It reminds me of the entry in the glossary of my favorite science spoof, Science Made Stupid:   "reasoning, circular (n.) -- see circular reasoning."

So, how was this "living energy water" discovered?  It turns out that a guy was researching plants, and just kind of stumbled on it:

Pi Water was discovered in 1964 during the study of physiology of plants by Dr. Akihiro Yamashita, a professor at the Agricultural Department, Nagoya University. He was studying about FLORIGEN. What makes the bud become a flower? Researchers thought it might be related with hormones. They had named the phenomenon FLORIGEN and studied it.

During the study, Dr. Yamashita discovered “body water,” which affects the difference of the bud change instead of hormones. He also discovered that the body water contains a very small amount of Ferric Ferrous Salt (Fe2Fe3) and the water has the function to control our body function normally. After that, through many studies and research, Dr. Yamashita succeeded to make the water that has the same function with your body water artificially and named it Pi Water.

So... if you give humans something that makes plants flower, we'll blossom too?

How might this work, you're probably asking?  I know that's what I asked.  Well, the site tells you, in great detail.  I apologize for the length of this passage, but you really should read the whole thing:

Pi Water is compounded with Fe2Fe3, which is effective when its quality becomes very small (2 x 10^-12 mol). At this level, Fe2Fe3 is an elementary particle, such as an electron, a proton and a neutron, and it works like a conductor of a medium to transmit energy and information to other substances. The following is the assumption of Pi Water principles at the present time:
Generation cycle of electron energy.

Substance generally consists of a group of molecules and a molecule is a group of atoms. An atom consists of atomic nuclei and electrons, and an atomic nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. The electrons circle, while spinning, around an atomic nucleus on a certain orbit. When the atom receives undulation of cosmic energy, the electrons start to spin faster and circle on farther than the usual orbit, causing the electrons to have high energy called, "erected state". However, the electrons cannot keep their erected state/high energy condition for too long, and they tries to get back to the usual orbit. In Pi Water, we believe that such energy creating cycles by the electrons are happening, and that the transmission of energy and information is very actively taking place.

Oh.  Okay.  What?

I have to admit that I may be having trouble understanding this because I was too busy laughing about electrons being in an "erected state."  I guess that in some sense, an erection is a type of excitation.  Given that today is Valentine's Day, it does open up whole new possibilities for geeky come-hither lines:  "Hey, baby, I'm in a highly energized quantum level tonight.  You want to help my electrons return to the ground state?"

After this, the site goes on to blather on about how the "Pi Water" process infuses water with the subatomic particle called a "pi meson," and at that point, I gave up.  (Go here to find out what a pi meson actually is.)

But we're not done here yet.  Because I found a second site, a site that makes "Pi Water" look like Nobel Prize material.  This site tells you how to make "Sun and/or Moon Water:"

Water was designed to carry the Sun’s sub-atomic nutrients (sound and color vibrations) to all living things. It was also meant to carry the cosmic energy of the moon, stars, and planets. This is referred to as The Music of the Spheres.  Structuring the water first (as described in Chapter 11 of Dancing with Water) makes it more receptive to imprinting but simply placing water in the Sun or Moon will imprint the water to a certain degree.

One more bit will suffice:

When making water in the sunlight, place it in a glass container directly on the Earth. This way, the gentler Earth frequencies will balance the strong solar energy. Depending on the position and strength of the sun, leave it exposed for no more than 10-30 minutes. (Direct sunlight on standing water will eventually rob it of its energy.) Drinking water that has been placed in the sunlight is a wonderful way to get the vibratory energy of the complete color spectrum. It is also very energizing...  Setting water out on the night of the full moon creates water that carries the feminine energy of the full moon. If you want to lengthen the influence of the full moon (or of a particular full moon) in your life, this is a good way to do it.  To program your water with the energy of the moon, stars, and planets, choose a clear night (it does not have to be a full moon). Place your covered, glass or egg-shaped clay container directly on the Earth in a place where it will receive the full night sky. (Glass allows the light of the moon and stars to penetrate the water better but the shape of the egg gathers cosmic frequencies just as efficiently—if not more so.)

There also a part later about how you can enhance your sun and/or moon water by using crystals, copper triskelions, and "tensor rings."  Just reading it made me pretty freakin' tense.

So, we're back to my usual question: how can anyone with an IQ higher than that of road salt believe any of this horse waste?  An average middle-school student knows enough science to recognize this as ridiculous.  But evidently this kind of woo-woo foolishness is becoming increasingly popular, and because of that, is big business.  Big lucrative business.  (Google "structured water" and see how many hits you get.  I dare you.)

I recognize that I'm probably shouting in a hurricane, here.  The people who fall for this kind of claptrap are not the ones who are going to be reading skeptical websites.  But still.  "Pi Water?"  Now with more pi mesons?  Sun water with the sun's "vibratory energy of the complete color spectrum?"  Egg-shaped containers to "gather cosmic frequencies?"

The whole thing just makes me want to give up water entirely.   I'm thinking of switching to scotch.

Papal prophecies

Well, it's begun.

I knew that as soon as Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, the wingnuts would have a field day with it.  And sure enough, the woo-woo websites were hopping yesterday.  The words "conspiracy" and "prophecy" and "antichrist" and "apocalypse" were used.  Obviously, it couldn't be just what the Vatican said it was -- that Benedict was retiring because he was too pooped to pope.  No.  It had to be something much bigger than that.

Let's start with the fact that shortly after the pope announced his resignation, lightning struck St. Peter's Basilica in Rome:

According to a story in USA Today, experts have analyzed the photograph and found that it's actually not a fake (which was my first thought when I saw it).  On the other hand, I'm not ready to say it's a sign from god, either.  After all, according to lightning expert Martin A. Uman, there are over eight million lightning strikes in the world every day, which is a crapload of signs from god if that's what they are.  Maybe god's "smite" button is stuck on, or something.

But that's not where the nonsense stopped, unfortunately.  According to the site International Tribunal Into Crimes of Church and State, the pope's resignation was because "a European government" was planning on issuing a warrant for his arrest.  The upshot was that the "European government" had its sights set on the Vatican because "...Pope Benedict's complicity in criminal activities of the Vatican Bank (IOR) was compelling his eventual dismissal by the highest officials of the Vatican."

Because that's plausible.  We all know how much the Vatican complies with the demands of other governments.  If the president of, for example, Bulgaria were to ask for the pope's arrest, the Vatican would have no choice but to turn him over.  (Chaos would then ensue as other world leaders gave their two cents' worth, with Hugo Chávez demanding that everyone in Vatican City subscribe to Socialist Worker's Monthly, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad requiring that nuns switch to wearing burqas, and Kim Jong Un asking the College of Cardinals to adopt a "really sexy new hairstyle.")

Then the apocalyptoids began to chime in.  There was a prophecy, they said, made back in 1139 by a guy named Saint Malachy, who either received a vision from god or else had a really bad acid trip, and who claimed that each of the popes was fulfilling a prophecy.  Saint Malachy listed 112 popes, and said that the last one, "Petrus Romanus" (Peter the Roman) would reign throughout the Tribulation, and his reign would end with Jesus returning to judge us all.

Pope Benedict XVI was number... 111.

Dun-dun-DUNNNNN.

Of course, most modern scholars think that the "Prophecies of Saint Malachy" are a late 16th century forgery; even Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, an 18th century Spanish monk, thought the whole thing was ridiculous, noting that the "prophecies" prior to 1600 are extremely accurate, and the ones thereafter seemed like wild guesses.

There are a couple of hits, though, if you squinch your eyes up and look at the prophecies juuuust right.  For example, the prophecy for John Paul I is that he came from "the midst of the moon," and his month-long reign began during a half-moon.  (Okay, I know that half-moons happen twice a month.  Just play along, okay?)  Then we have his successor, John Paul II, whose line has to do with the "labor of the sun," and he was supposedly born during a solar eclipse and buried during a solar eclipse.  But even if eclipses aren't as common as lightning strikes, they're still pretty damn common, with between two and five occurring somewhere in the world every year.  So some date relevant to John Paul II would be bound to occur near an eclipse, no matter what.  The prophecy of Benedict himself requires yet a further reach; his is "gloria olivae," the "glory of olives."  And the best they could do with that was that Benedict was named after St. Benedict of Nursia, who founded the Benedictine Order, which has as its emblem a picture of St. Benedict holding an olive branch.

So, anyway.  Saint Malachy (or whoever forged all of this nonsense in the 16th century) says that the next guy, Petrus Romanus, will have a bit of a rough go:

In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, & Judex tremêdus judicabit populum suum. Finis.

In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations: and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the terrible judge will judge his people.  The End.

So the College of Cardinals had better be careful.  If I were a cardinal, I'd made sure to vote for a guy named "Steve" just to be safe.

Anyhow, that's the latest from the world of crazy quasi-religious prophecy.  It'll be interesting to see what happens next.  Myself, I'm guessing that the College of Cardinals will vote in a new pope, who will pretty much keep doing what they've always done, and everything will settle down, with no further lightning strikes, arrest warrants, or tribulations.  But who knows?  Maybe Saint Malachy was right.  The whole "terrible judge" thing sounds pretty dire.  Maybe I ought to invest in a smite-proof bunker. 

Fast modules, slow modules, and ghost photographs

So, yesterday, I was looking at photographs of alleged ghosts, and completely creeping myself out.

Just so I can share the experience with you, here are a few that I found especially shiver-inducing.

First, from a security camera in a library in Evansville, Indiana, comes this image of a hunched, shadowy creature creeping across the floor... of the Children's Reading Room:

Or how about this one, an old photograph from the 1940s that shows a screaming ghost reaching out towards an unsuspecting young couple:

 
Or this shot of a stern man standing behind an elderly woman -- a man who supposedly wasn't there when the photograph was taken:

Or the shadow in the kitchen -- a shadow cast by no object visible in the photograph (this one immediately reminded me of the episode "Identity Crisis" from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- one of the flat-out scariest episodes they ever did):

So, anyway, there I am, getting more and more weirded out (and still, for some reason, not simply switching to a website with cute pictures of puppies, or something).  And I thought, "Why am I freaking out about all of this?  Not only have I never had a single experience of anything supernatural, I don't even believe in any of this stuff.  I am morally certain that all of these photographs were either deliberate hoaxes, or were camera malfunctions/artifacts, or are examples of pareidolia -- some completely natural explanation must be responsible.  So why am I scared?"

And my mind returned to a book I just finished last week, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.  Kahneman's specialty is why humans make irrational decisions; his research into how that applies to economic decision-making is why he won the Nobel.  More interesting to me, though, is the facet of his research that shows that human thinking is split into two discrete modules -- a fast module and a slow one.  And those two modules are frequently at odds with one another.

The fast module is what allows us to take quick stock of what's around us.  It is, for example, what allows us to do an immediate assessment of the following photograph:

No "rational thinking" is needed to come to the conclusion that this woman is angry.  On the other hand, the slow module is invoked when doing a math problem like, what is 223 x 1,174?  The vast majority of us could solve that problem, but it would take time and concentration.  (The fact that there are savants who can solve problems like that nearly instantaneously makes me wonder if their brains are somehow wired to do math with the fast module of the brain; merely a speculation, but it's suggestive.)

As an example of how the two modules can be at odds, consider the "Linda Problem."  Participants in a study were told a story about Linda, a single woman, intelligent and outspoken, who was very concerned with issues of social justice.  The participants were then asked which of the following possibilities was more likely:  (1) Linda is a bank teller; or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.  By a vast majority, participants chose option 2.  (Did you?)

The problem is, option 2 is wrong.  Not just maybe wrong, it's flat-out wrong, as in impossible.  How could the likelihood of Linda's being a feminist bank teller exceed the likelihood of her being a bank teller?  All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers; adding an extra detail to the description can only have the effect of decreasing the probability.  (To make this clearer, how can there be more brown dogs than there are dogs?)  But the fast module's quick assessment of the situation was that from the information given, she was very likely to be a feminist; the likelihood that she was a bank teller was equal in both possibilities; so it jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that the combined probability was higher.

So, you can see how the fast module, however useful it is in making the snap judgments that are essential in getting us through the day, is not, at its basis, rational.  It is primed by previous experience, and is inherently biased toward finding the quickest answer possible, even if that answer is completely contrary to rationality.

And that, I think, explains why a diehard skeptic can still be completely weirded out by ghost pictures.  The slow module in my brain thinks, "Okay, pareidolia.  Or the photo was doctored.  No way is this real."  My fast module, on the other hand, is thinking, "Good lord, that's terrifying!  Time for some adrenaline!"  And no amount of soothing talk from my slow module seems to make any difference.

Especially that one with the creeping thing in the library.  That one is freakin' scary.

Invisible lung gorillas

In recent posts, I've made the point more than once that eyewitness testimony is inherently flawed because of built-in inaccuracies in our perceptual apparatus.  Put simply, we are just poor observers.  Not only do our brains sometimes make stuff up, we also remember events inaccurately, and given appropriate priming, interpret things based on what we thought was happening. 

None of this is meant to malign our brains, honestly.  They are extraordinarily good at a great many things, and evolution has crafted them into a data-processing device that is orders of magnitude more complex than the best computer in the world.  The fact that they fail sometimes is only to be expected.

You can't be good at everything, after all.

However, a recent experiment, done by Trafton Drew, Melissa Vo, and Jeremy Wolfe of Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston, has delivered yet another blow to our opinion of the brain's accuracy.  And this one is not just humbling, it's downright scary -- especially to anyone who has had to rely on the skills of medical professionals.  [Source]

The trio recruited a group of 24 trained radiologists as volunteers, and an equal number of average, non-medical types.  The volunteers were given a set of lung CT scans from five different patients to look at on a computer, and were instructed to click on any anomalous nodules they saw.  (The untrained group were given a brief description of what they were looking for.)  The nodules were small, and there were only ten of them in the hundreds of scans analyzed.

What they didn't tell any of the volunteers, however, was that hidden in the slides of the final patient was an image of a gorilla.  (The gorilla was chosen because of the seminal study of inattention, by Simons and Chabris -- see their famous video here.)  The gorilla image was huge by comparison with the nodules -- an estimated 48 times larger than the typical nodule size.

Twenty of the 24 radiologists, and all of the untrained volunteers, didn't see the gorilla.

And it wasn't hard to see.  Every single one of the people who didn't see the gorilla were shown the slide in question afterwards, and asked, "What is that?" and they all answered, "That's a gorilla."  Nevertheless, the vast majority of people who had analyzed the image closely didn't see what was right in front of their faces.  (The phenomenon has been named "inattentional blindness.")

Now, to their credit, the radiologists, who presumably would know that a gorilla in your lungs is abnormal, were better at spotting the anomaly than the average guy.  They were also (reassuringly) way better at finding the nodules.  But this once again punches a hole in our certainty that what we notice (and remember) is what is actually there.

I'm often asked -- usually apropos of UFO sightings, and less commonly about phenomena such as hauntings -- why I am so skeptical, when eyewitnesses report thousands of encounters every year.  It's not, honestly, that I think it's impossible that there is something weird out there; especially in the case of UFOs, I think that the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe is near 100%, and I'd be mighty surprised if some of it didn't turn out to be intelligent.  (Why they'd want to come here, though, is a bit of a mystery.)  So, my beef isn't that I think the claim is impossible.  My problem is that eyewitness testimony is so inherently flawed that I need more than just your claim of having seen a UFO in order to believe it myself.  (In fact, I need more than just "I saw it," as well.  I don't trust my own brain any more than I trust yours.)  Our perceptual systems are simply too easy to fool, and too poor at remembering details, to be reliable recorders of data.

So, anyway, that's the latest from neuroscience.  More evidence of the inaccuracy of the human brain.  Makes me wonder what I'm missing, as I wander through my day -- all the stuff I'm not noticing.  Probably most of it is trivial, and it's just as well that my brain dismisses it -- but you have to wonder how many times something truly marvelous crosses your path -- the equivalent of an invisible lung gorilla -- and you don't see it.

Noah goes to Hollywood

There's no pleasing some people.

When I heard that Darren Aronofsky was making a movie, due out in 2014, about the Great Flood -- and starring such Big Names as Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Anthony Hopkins -- I thought that the über-Christians would be delighted.  After all, they mostly seem to be wildly in favor of movies like The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Passion of the Christ.  Even Ben Hur was one of my extremely Catholic mother's all-time favorite movies, despite the most literal reading of the bible turning up very few chariot races.

But no.  Noah, with Russell Crowe in the title role, is stirring up a lot of controversy amongst the literalist crowd.  And it's not just because, in producer Scott Franklin's words, "Noah is a very short section of the Bible with a lot of gaps, so we definitely had to take some creative expression in it.  But I think we stayed very true to the story and didn't really deviate from the Bible, despite the six-armed angels."

To get a flavor for why fundamentalists are howling about this movie -- and also to understand how far out of the realm of reality they've gone -- take a look at a webpage, courtesy of BeginningAndEnd.com,  a website for and about literalist/Christian apocalyptic ideas.  Entitled "Russell Crowe's Noah -- A Warning for Christians," this website makes the following claims:

1)  The movie pushes a liberal, pro-environmental message.  Apparently we don't want to conflate sea-level rise from global warming with sea-level rise from god sending rain to smite the wicked.

2)  The main wicked guys that god was aiming to smite were the Nephilim, who were a race of evil giants that were born when fallen angels had sex with human women.  God didn't want "the entire human gene pool to be corrupted by fallen angels," so he decided to kill everyone.

3)  Well, almost everyone.  Noah and his family, of course, were "righteous" so he saved them.

4)  So god was "us(ing) the flood to preserve the human gene pool."  No, I'm not making that quote up.

5)  The whole "raining for forty days and forty nights" thing was really a big deal, not only because that is a crapload of rain, but because prior to the Great Flood it had never rained.  "The moisture in the environment came from geysers in the ground...  A mist from underground pressure provided water for plant life.  The pre-flood word in short had a hyperbaric environment.  (Some Christian researchers have theorized that this environment contributed to the long life spans of the people before the flood, where some people lived over 900 years. However, after the flood, there is a sharp decrease in life spans down to the lengths seen today.)"  Because we all know how higher atmospheric pressure makes people live longer.  And no, I didn't make that quote up, either.  And if you don't think that there are people who seriously believe that the long life spans reported in the bible were due to higher atmospheric pressure, take a look at this website, which is inadvertently hilarious in its attempt to explain the biblical account "scientifically."  You know, with math and graphs and all.  It's amazing.

6)  It's a serious problem that the movie shows that on the Ark, Noah had an "animal hospital" to take care of injured animals.  This is non-biblical, the website tells us.  Nowhere in the bible does it say that Noah had an "animal hospital," despite the fact that given that he had only two of each kind of animal, having one of them die would be pretty awful.  (Maybe that's what happened to the unicorns, which by the way are mentioned in the bible as being real -- check out Job 39:9-12.)

7)  So, all in all, the movie Noah is a wicked and evil film.  "Pray for the makers of this movie to repent and believe the Word of God, rather than abusing it," we're told.  "And spread the Word to other Christians to not support such a blasphemous, anti-Christian film."

So, yeah.  Yikes.  It's hard to know where to start.  For me, being a science teacher, the best part was when they started talking about how before the Great Flood plants were watered by "geysers."  But really, the whole thing is worth reading, if for no other reason to get a feeling for the twisty anti-logic fundamentalists use to explain the parts of the biblical account that couldn't possibly have happened.  Of course, all they have to do is to fall back on "anything is possible with god," and also, "if you don't believe this, down to the last word, you are going to be doomed by the god of mercy to eternal hellfire ha ha ha ha."  Which, you have to admit, are pretty persuasive arguments.

Anyhow, like I said, some people are impossible to please.  You'd think that just the fact that Hollywood is giving a nod to the biblical account would have been enough, but no.  They didn't do it the right way.  Can't have Noah appearing to be an eco-wacko.  Can't have any mention of anything that wasn't mentioned in the bible.  Got to include lots of naughty angel/human sex.

Of course, it's not like I'm going to go see the movie anyhow.  I'm not into biblical epics.  If I want to watch a movie based in mythology, I'll take Lord of the Rings any day.  All in all, it's a hell of a lot more moral a story.

Tax return of the Beast

Well, it's happened again.  Another person has refused to handle a piece of official paper because it was stamped with the number 666.

In November 2011 we had the story about Georgia factory worker Billy E. Hyatt, who refused to wear a badge that said "666 Days Without An Accident."  He was fired, but basically claimed that his soul was more important than his job -- apparently he really, truly thought that if he pinned the badge on, then Satan would have burst upward though the floor, spurting flame and laughing maniacally, and dragged him off to hell.  (You have to wonder how he explained that this didn't happen to all of the hundreds of other workers who were cheerfully wearing the Mark of the Beast for the day.)

Hyatt, incidentally, was eventually rehired with back pay, after a court found that the company he worked for had infringed upon his religious freedom.

Now, though, we have federal law involved, and you have to wonder how this will play out.

Just last week, Clarksville (Tennessee) maintenance worker Walter Slonopas quit his job and is saying he will refuse to file his taxes after receiving a W-2 form stamped with the number 666.  [Source]  Slonopas, a born-again Christian (as if I even needed to mention that), said that the choice was go to work, or go to hell.

"If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil," he said in an interview with The Tennessean.

Interestingly, this isn't Slonopas' first encounter with the Number Of Evil.  When he was hired in April 2011, and was given a number to use to clock in, he was supposed to be given the number 668, but the human resources department at his company (Contech Casting, Inc.) miswrote it as 666.  Slonopas complained, and was reissued a new number.

Man, Satan must really want this guy.

Unlike in the Hyatt case, Slonopas says that he doesn't want his job back, because if he took it it would appear that he valued his job more than his faith.  "God is more important than money," he said, and added that he was sure that god would take care of him and his wife until he could find a new job.

As usual, I'm of two minds as to how to respond to all of this.  On the one hand, I'm all for the basic rule of "don't be an asshole."  Don't go out of your way to upset people, just on principle; respect others' rights to think differently than you do.

But there comes a time, I think, that people have to stop caving in to the crazy demands of zealots that everyone has to handle their Bronze Age mythology with kid gloves, that we all have to act as if it were true.  When will we start simply demanding that people act rationally?  "I'm sorry, Mr. Slonopas, if you don't file your taxes, you will be fined, just like any other American -- just because your W-2 was stamped with a number that gives you the heebie-jeebies doesn't mean that superstition trumps US tax law."

But my fear is that we, as a society, are still too afraid of religion to let that happen.  Courts, although designed to be as fair as possible, are run by humans and are subject to cultural and societal pressures.  If I were a betting man, I'd bet that any challenge to Mr. Slonopas' stance in the legal system will be found in his favor, on the basis of "religious freedom."

Which, despite my general "don't be an asshole" philosophy, leaves me feeling like this:

The Loch Ness crocodile

At the risk of repeating myself, popular media makes me crazy sometimes.

Yes, I know that its primary function is to sell subscriptions, and thereby to make money for the stockholders.  Yes, I know that it is under no obligation to avoid sensationalism.  Yes, I know that readers should be smart enough to tease apart fact from fiction for themselves.

Still.

My most recent bout of media-fueled facepalming happened because of an article in Scotsman, entitled "Loch Ness Monster: New Species Linked to Sightings."  Being an aficionado of all things cryptozoological, I checked it out eagerly, and at the beginning I found the obligatory famous Nessie photograph:

This was followed up by a description of a newly-named fossil animal, Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos, whose remains were found a hundred years ago in a clay pit near Peterborough.  Instead of telling us much about the fossils, the article's author, Will Cooper, immediately leaps off a cliff into WooWooLand:

Edinburgh University’s recent discovery of a new blood-biting super predator species could shine new light on the Loch Ness monster say Loch Ness experts...  Adrian Shine from the Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition has spent around forty years studying the Loch, and believes that the newly discovered prehistoric predator could fit in with sightings of the famed Loch Ness monster.

We then see a reconstruction of the "blood-biting super predator," which I include below:

Well, this put me on notice right away; is it just me, or does this look nothing like the Loch Ness Monster?

Even Cooper seems to realize that he's gone a little off the beam, but he waits until the very end of the article to admit it:

However, suggestions of a link between this new blood-biting predator to Loch Ness have been discounted by a leading authority on dinosaurs... Angela Milner is a retired research associate with the Natural History Museum, she said: "Crocodiles do not like our climate. We’re talking about things that have been perhaps seen in Loch Ness — no way could a crocodile survive."

Oh, really?  That's the strongest objection you could think of?  How about the fact that the Nessie photo that opened the article was proven to be a fake in 1993?  How about the fact that Tyrannoneustes lived 163 million years ago, and has about as much relevance to whatever might be living in Loch Ness today as brachiosaurus has to the deer eating your vegetable garden?  How about some mention of the fact that Scotland was completely covered by a big freakin' glacier 1.5 million years ago, so any surviving pleisiosaurs would have been converted to pleisiosaur popsicles?

So, basically, we have what could have been an interesting news story -- scientists figuring out how a prehistoric animal fits with our understanding of vertebrate evolution -- and it turns into a ridiculous hash about the Loch Ness Monster.  (For a much better look at the story, and an example of popular media actually doing something right, go here.)

Being a science teacher, the whole thing makes me especially frustrated, because (unfortunately) kids are the most susceptible to the "I read it in the newspaper, it must be true" mentality.  I try to combat this in my Critical Thinking class -- almost the very first thing we talk about is that there is no such thing as unbiased media, and so any time you read, listen, or watch, you should keep your brain engaged.  But many, many children in this world reach adulthood without ever being taught to question what they're exposed to.

So I know that you can't take what you read in an online news source as gospel.  I also know that I shouldn't take this stuff so seriously.  I just wish that the people who write this tripe would try a little harder to represent science correctly.

But if any of my students come in and tell me today, "Hey, did you hear that they found fossils in Scotland that prove that the Loch Ness Monster is real?" I'm gonna want to find Will Cooper and shake him till his teeth rattle.