The Vampire Beast of Bladenboro

So, today we're going to investigate a topic that I know is weighing heavily on all of your minds: is the Vampire Beast of North Carolina back?

Yesterday, in the delightfully wacky weird news outlet Who Forted?, writer Dana Matthews tells the tale of a bizarre beast that troubled the good citizens of Bladen County, North Carolina in 1953.  Matthews says, about the first round of attacks:

In 1953 the Bladenboro Newspaper covered a story about a strange creature that had blamed for the deaths of numerous dogs, draining them of their blood. Local eyewitnesses who spotted the beast claimed it possessed the body of a bear, the head of a cat, and that when it opened its mouth to growl it made the sound of a woman screaming.

The creature then proceeded to vanish for fifty years.  Attacks didn't begin again until 2003.  This makes you wonder what it was eating all that time, doesn't it?  Be that as it may, the second round of deaths sounded pretty much like the first:

The bizarre animal exsanguination began again in 2003, only this time it seemed the creature had broadened his horizons and was now killing in a 150-miles radius beyond Bladenboro.  During its second blood-run, the Vampire Beast of North Carolina was managing to slay even the bulkiest of Pit Bulls with ease and many Bladenboro residents claimed to have found strange tracks around their dead pets that even wildlife biologists couldn’t explain.

Pretty scary stuff.  So imagine the terror of the residents when, just last week, the Vampire Beast got hungry this time after only a ten-year hiatus, and it all started up again:

According to a report by paranormal investigator Thomas Byers, on June 15^th 2013, Bladenboro, NC resident Misty Turner and her son Tyler contacted local police after something visited their farm in the dead of night, killing three of their horses and a large Bull Mastiff dog. Misty’s son Tyler found the horses after the barking dog had alerted the family to the fact that something was skulking around the property. The dog continued to bark for quite some time, obsessed with the dense wooded area alongside the farm.

Arriving police and veterinarians were shocked to discover that the horses had died from very deep puncture wounds to the neck. Even more shocking was that it seemed that the purpose of the marks was to allow the blood to be drained from the animals. The horses were also reported to have been wet with sweat, almost as if they had been running hard to avoid whatever was chasing them down.

The following evening, much to the Turner’s display, their dog was also killed in the exact same fashion, with two puncture marks to the neck, found with its blood drained. Misty claims to have seen the thing that had killed her animals as it was running from the lifeless body of her pet. Her description of the creature matched the same eyewitness reports of the Vampire Beast reported in 1953.

We are also treated to an artist's rendition of the Vampire Beast, in case your imagination hadn't been sufficiently stirred by the eyewitness description:

I'm guessing that the bats are artistic license and don't actually follow the Vampire Beast around, but I could be wrong.

Well, no offense to the people of Bladenboro, but I tend to be doubtful about all of this.  The whole story -- reports of animal killings and exsanguination, strange wounds, unnamed veterinarians and wildlife biologists admitting bafflement, a mysterious beast that is supposedly responsible -- sounds much like the alleged depredations of El Chupacabra, coupled with all of the cattle mutilation stories you hear (variously attributed to satanists, aliens, or monsters).  And I suspect that if anyone really does do a thorough investigation, the whole thing won't hold water, at least not as an "unexplained monster attack."

The problem is that ordinary animal attacks often lead to rather oddball wounds.  A study done by the Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff's Department, in response to claims of bizarre livestock mutilation, found the following [Source]:

They placed a dead cow in a field and had observers watch what happened over the next 48 hours. When they reported that bloating led to incision-like tears in the skin and that blowflies and maggots had cleaned out the soft tissue so that the carcass looked exactly like those that had been attributed to aliens or satanic cultists, they were generally ignored by the community of true believers.

Claims of exsanguination -- removal of all of the blood from a dead or dying animal -- have never been substantiated.  According to Benjamin Radford, whose book Tracking the Chupacabra: the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore was a finalist for the ForeWord Review Book of the Year and was called a "slam-dunk debunk" by The Skeptical Inquirer, the apparent exsanguination has a completely natural cause:

The apparent loss of blood could be explained by internal hemorrhaging and pooling of blood at the bottom of the corpse.  The attribution of the attacks on livestock to a vampiric entity can be explained by the puncture wounds resulting from the canine teeth left by most predators, who often instinctively go for the neck, according to taxidermist Jerry Ayer.

Put another way, once the heart stops pushing the blood around, the blood settles downward due to gravity, and the upper parts -- the parts immediately accessible to anyone investigating the case -- appear to be completely devoid of blood when cut open.

So, sorry to puncture your scary, monster-shaped balloon, but it looks like the Vampire Beast is just a plain old beast of some kind.  Not that this should go uninvestigated, mind you; if I had my horses killed by some large predatory animal, I'd want to do something about it.  Horses were attacked by rabid bobcats in Florida in 2010 and again in 2011 -- if I had to place a bet on what was responsible for the Bladenboro attacks, it'd be that.

Anyhow, that's our news from the cryptozoological world.  At least this story was more interesting that the latest from Melba Ketchum, who is once again blathering on about how she really did know what she was doing, there really is a Bigfoot, and all of the people who are criticizing her are big ol' poopyheads.  Given the choice, I'd rather face a Vampire Beast than a delusional geneticist any day of the week.

The creation of Adam

I am absolutely fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence.

Now, let me be up front that I don't know the first thing about the technical side of it.  I am so low on the technological knowledge scale that I am barely capable of operating a cellphone.  A former principal I worked for used to call me "The Dinosaur," and said (correctly) that I would have been perfectly comfortable teaching in an 18th century lecture hall.

Be that as it may, I find it astonishing how close we're getting to an artificial brain that even the doubters will have no choice but to call "intelligent."  For example, meet Adam Z1, who is the subject of a crowdsourced fund-raising campaign on IndieGoGo:

Make sure you watch the video on the site -- a discussion between Adam and his creators.

Adam is the brainchild of roboticist David Hanson.  And now, Hanson wants to get some funding to work with some of the world's experts in AI -- Ben Goertzel, Mark Tilden, and Gino Yu -- to design a brain that will be "as smart as a three-year-old human."

The sales pitch, which is written as if it were coming from Adam himself, outlines what Hanson and his colleagues are trying to do:

Some of my robot brothers and sisters are already pretty good at what they do -- building stuff in factories and vacuuming the floor and flying planes and so forth.

But as my AI guru friends keep telling me, these bots are all missing one thing: COMMON SENSE.

They're what my buddy Ben Goertzel would call "narrow AI" systems -- they're good at doing one particular kind of thing, but they don't really understand the world, they don't know what they're doing and why.

After getting what is referred to as a "toddler brain," here are a few things that Adam might be able to do:

PLAY WITH TOYS!!! ... I'm really looking forward to this.  I want to build stuff with blocks -- build towers with blocks and knock them down, build walls to keep you out ... all the good stuff!

DRAW PICTURES ON MY IPAD ... That's right, they're going to buy me an iPad.  Pretty cool, huh?   And they'll teach me to draw pictures on it -- pictures out of my mind, and pictures of what I'm seeing and doing.  Before long I'll be a better artist than David!

TALK TO HUMANS ABOUT WHAT I'M DOING  ...  Yeah, you may have guessed already, but I've gotten some help with my human friends in writing this crowdfunding pitch.   But once I've got my new OpenCog-powered brain, I'll be able to tell you about what I'm doing all on my own....  They tell me this is called "experientially grounded language understanding and generation."  I hope I'll understand what that means one day.

RESPOND TO HUMAN EMOTIONS WITH MY OWN EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS  ...  You're gonna love this one!  I have one heck of a cute little face already, and it can show a load of different expressions.  My new brain will let me understand what emotion one of you meat creatures is showing on your face, and feel a bit of what you're feeling, and show my own feeling right back atcha.   This is most of the reason why my daddy David Hanson gave me such a cute face in the first place.  I may not be very smart yet, but it's obvious even to me that a robot that could THINK but not FEEL wouldn't be a very good thing.  I want to understand EVERYTHING -- including all you wonderful people....

MAKE PLANS AND FOLLOW THEM ... AND CHANGE THEM WHEN I NEED TO....   Right now I have to admit I'm a pretty laid back little robot.  I spend most of my time just sitting around waiting for something cool to happen -- like for someone to give me a better brain so I can figure out something else to do!  But once I've got my new brain, I've got big plans, I'll tell you!  And they tell me OpenCog has some pretty good planning and reasoning software, that I'll be able to use to plan out what I do.   I'll start small, sure -- planning stuff to build, and what to say to people, and so forth.  But once I get some practice, the sky's the limit! 

Now, let me say first that I think that this is all very cool, and if you can afford to, you should consider contributing to their campaign.  But I have to add, in the interest of honesty, that mostly what I felt when I watched the video on their site is... creeped out.  Adam Z1, for all of his child-like attributes, falls for me squarely into the Uncanny Valley.  Quite honestly, while watching Adam, I wasn't reminded so much of any friendly toddlers I've known as I was of a certain... movie character:

I kept expecting Adam to say, "I would like to have friends very much... so that I can KILL THEM.  And then TAKE OVER THE WORLD."

But leaving aside my gut reaction for a moment, this does bring up the question of what Artificial Intelligence really is.  The topic has been debated at length, and most people seem to fall into one of two camps:

1) If it responds intelligently -- learns, reacts flexibly, processes new information correctly, and participates in higher-order behavior (problem solving, creativity, play) -- then it is de facto intelligent.  It doesn't matter whether that intelligence is seated in a biological, organic machine such as a brain, or in a mechanical device such as a computer.  This is the approach taken by people who buy the idea of the Turing Test, named after computer pioneer Alan Turing, which basically says that if a prospective artificial intelligence can fool a panel of sufficiently intelligent humans, then it's intelligent.

2) Any mechanical, computer-based system will never be intelligent, because at its basis it is a deterministic system that is limited by the underpinning of what the machine can do.  Humans, these folks say, have "something more" that will never be emulated by a computer -- a sense of self that the spiritually-minded amongst us might call a "soul."  Proponents of this take on Artificial Intelligence tend to like American philosopher John Searle, who compared computers to someone in a locked room mechanistically translating passages in English into Chinese, using an English-to-Chinese dictionary.  The output might look intelligent, it might even fool you, but the person in the room has no true understanding of what he is doing.  He is simply converting one string of characters into another using a set of fixed rules.

Predictably, I'm in Turing's camp all the way, largely because I don't think it's ever been demonstrated that our brains are anything more than very sophisticated string-converters.  If you could convince me that humans themselves have that "something more," I might be willing to admit that Searle et al. have a point.  But for right now, I am very much of the opinion that Artificial Intelligence, of a level that would pass the Turing test, is only a matter of time.

So best of luck to David Hanson and his team.  And also best of luck to Adam in his quest to become... a real boy.  Even if what he's currently doing is nothing more than responding in a pre-programmed way, it will be interesting to see what will happen when the best brains in robotics take a crack at giving him an upgrade.

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try. 

Naveena Shine and the revision of worldviews

Being a woo-woo apparently means never having to admit that you're wrong.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly remember my post last month about "Naveena Shine," a Seattle guru who wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was possible to live on nothing but sunlight and water.  Shine, who is evidently under the impression that she is a house plant, finally discontinued her month-long fast last week after losing 33 pounds.

But did Shine do what any sensible person would do in this situation, namely, to say, "Wow, I guess I was wrong!  Humans do need food after all!  What a goober I was!"?

Of course she didn't.  Oh, she starts out sounding uncertain enough.  Shine wrote on her Facebook page:

After 47 days [actually, the post was written after 44 days] I still feel really good, weight loss is slowing and all seems well.  However, I still have no evidence that I am actually living on light and it could well be slow starvation.  Now that I am ending the experiment I will never know.

But soon afterwards, she turns positively militant:

A doctor can't see living on light because he looks through different lenses...  From the feedback I am getting, it is becoming patently clear that most of the world is by no means ready to receive the information I am attempting to produce.  Even if it were true that a person can 'live on light' and I were successful in demonstrating that, I see that it would be synonymous with putting a non-driver behind the wheel of a huge truck.  It would be an accident in the making.

About her decision to end her fast, she says:

There are many, many complex reasons for ending this experiment...  I received a simple message from the universe that it is time to stop.  Because I'm closing it doesn't mean to say there's any failure here.  I'm looking healthy, I feel healthy, bouncing with energy, none of those dire predictions that people were saying were going to happen happened.

No, obviously everything is completely A-OK with you!  Losing 33 pounds in four weeks is perfectly normal!

So, this ended the way all of us thought it would; she finally realized that she couldn't go through with it.

What always interests me in these sorts of situations whether the person in question actually knows that what (s)he is saying is false -- i.e., whether (s)he is lying or simply delusional.  I wonder the same thing about "Psychic Sally Morgan" who, appallingly, just won a £125,000 libel case in England against The Sun, who had called her out for receiving information at a "psychic reading" through a headset.  "I got lots of loving care from my family and fans and that’s the only thing that got me through," Morgan said in an interview with the very paper she sued, excerpted in an article that was just published two days ago.  "Now, when I look back at how I felt, I think it wasn’t such a bad thing. I have even more empathy for the people I give readings to now. I really feel like I’m one of them."

 There is, apparently, a fairly thin line between belief, self-delusion, and outright charlatanism, and it can be awfully difficult to tell the difference between them.

What bothers me about all of these sorts of beliefs is how difficult they are to challenge.  In science, it's a case of The Best Model Wins; if your theory fits the available evidence better than mine does, mine simply has to be scrapped.  I may not be happy about it, but that's the way it goes. 

Here, though, there's always an argument, always a rationalization, always a way around admitting that you're simply deluding yourself and your followers.  Naveena Shine gets ample evidence that she can't live on light and water?  It's not that she's wrong; the doctors who advised her to give up and have a cheeseburger are "looking through lenses."  It's the fault of the unenlightened masses who aren't "ready to receive the information she is attempting to produce."  Tell Sally Morgan that she is a skilled cold reader who is defrauding her fans?  She sues you for libel.  Anything but revise their worldviews; anything but publicly admit that what they are claiming is simply false.

In the case of Shine, the damage is minimal.  Almost no one took her seriously, even at the beginning.  In the case of other woo-woo claims -- psychics, mediums, homeopaths, astrologers -- the cost, both literally and figuratively, is far higher.  These people take your money and give you nothing in return (especially the homeopaths!).

And if you challenge them, you can be sure of one thing; they will never, ever admit that they were wrong.

Footprints, skulls, real estate, and musical theater

My prognostication earlier this year that Melba Ketchum's failure to demonstrate that she had a sample of Bigfoot DNA would be an end to squatchery was apparently wildly wrong.

Ketchum's embarrassment of a scholarly paper, and her subsequent meltdown, evidently discouraged no one in the cryptozoological world, although it did generate a number of highly witty comments (my two favorites were "I guess she didn't Ketchum" and "Melba is toast").  But judging by four stories this week, the folks who believe that our hairy cousins populate the remote areas of the world are still undaunted.

First, we have a report from Malaysia that a set of 200 footprints belonging to a Southeast Asian Sasquatch were reported from the village of Kampung Kepis Baru.

Now, my first thought was: I was just in Malaysia last August, and the Bigfoot waits until now to show up?  There I was, chasing birds, and I could have been chasing proto-hominins.  Best of all, it would have been chasing proto-hominins in the tropics, which is definitely preferable to freezing my ass off in the Himalayas.  But sometimes you don't get this kind of break, however richly you deserve it.

Be that as it may, the guy who discovered the footprints, a rubber plantation owner named Adnis Pungut, took the following photograph:

So, my next thought was: really?  That's your evidence?  Couple that with the following quote from the article:

The footprints were all the same size and according to reports from Pungut based on the prints it could be assumed the creature who made them had two legs and weighed more then [sic] 100kg or about 220lbs.

220 pounds?  Wow, that is one impressive creature.  I can't think of anything that could be an upright, bipedal creature that weighs 220 pounds except for a Malaysian Bigfoot.  Unless, possibly, it could be an overweight American tourist wearing flip-flops.


Next, we have a real estate company called Estately, Inc., which has compiled a list of the best and worst states for Sasquatch to live.  Unsurprising that Washington comes first, especially given that Olympia Beer Company is offering a million-dollar reward for anyone who captures a Bigfoot alive.  This is followed by Oregon and California, but the fourth state is kind of mystifying.

Ohio?

Apparently, according to the article, Bigfoot has been sighted in Ohio 234 times, making it rank fourth.  Who knew?

If you're interested, Florida came in dead last, probably because of the general "if it moves, shoot it" attitude of a significant percentage of Floridians.

But I do have a question about all of this.  What earthly purpose can a real estate company have for compiling such a list?  Is it trying to attract cryptozoologists?  It seems like kind of a small target audience.  Selling real estate to Sasquatch himself also seems to me to be a losing proposition.  So however you cut it, it's kind of bizarre.


But not nearly as bizarre as our third story, which comes out of Ogden, Utah, where a retired private detective named Todd May claims to have found a fossilized Bigfoot skull.  May apparently has had Bigfoot sightings while hiking many times, according to the article:

May says he found the item about six weeks ago near the mouth of Ogden Canyon while he was on a dig looking for fossils. He said he was sort of drawn to something he could see sticking out of the ground and it seemed like just a rock but he went ahead and began to dig it out. He said at first he couldn’t tell exactly what it was because it was face down but once he got it completely dug out he could see the face perfectly. May believes this 70 lb object that he has recovered is a fossilized Bigfoot skull and says he has also had Bigfoot sightings in the same area on multiple occasions.

So, without further ado, here's a picture of May with his prize:

Um, Mr. May?  I hate to break it to you, but that is not a Bigfoot skull.  That is a rock.  I have to admit that it looks like a very sad rock, but it is a rock nonetheless.  You can now join Melba Ketchum in the "Sorry, I Don't Think So" department.


Our last story, though, is an encouraging one.  Just because the evidence for Bigfoot is pretty much nonexistent doesn't mean that he can't have his very own musical.

Yes, folks, Sasquatched: The Musical opens on July 9 at the New York Musical Theater Festival.  Billed as a heartwarming story about "about a Sasquatch named Arthur who gets lost in Columbia National Park and befriends a young boy named Sam," the play tells the tale of how they "encounter oddball locals, dodge a TV crew on the hunt for Bigfoot, and bust out into songs to help move the story along."

The songs include "Shake the Camera and Run" and "Eight Feet Tall and He Smelled Like a Skunk." And, for the record, I didn't make either of these titles up.   Arthur the Sasquatch does have some solos, but according to playwright Phil Darg, they are "dignified" and "not really show tunes."

I know I'm relieved about that.  This sounds like it's all about dignity.

So, anyway, that's the news from the world of cryptozoology.  And I thought squatching was a dying pastime.  Little I knew.  Apparently there are plenty of Sasquatch enthusiasts out there, still misinterpreting evidence, hyping Bigfoot for publicity, and writing musicals.  And I guess if it keeps you entertained, there's nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't have a Melba-style freakout if people laugh at you.

Water-tight compartments in the brain

Today's topic is compartmentalization, a psychological phenomenon that is defined thus:

Compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.

Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self states.  [Source]

While I'm sure that we all engage in this defense mechanism to one extent or another, in more extreme cases it does result in stances that (from the outside) look completely ludicrous.  It explains, for example, two of my former students, both brilliantly successful in my AP Biology class, both of whom were Young-Earth Creationists.  One of them, when I asked how she could accept the rest of science and reject evolutionary biology, answered -- without any apparent rancor -- that the rest of science was just fine, and she believed it to be true, but when science and Christianity conflict then the science has to be wrong, because she knew that the bible is true.  The other student seemed more conflicted about the whole thing, but ended up with basically the same solution.

One of these students, by the way, is now a medical doctor, and the other an environmental lawyer.

The whole subject of compartmentalization is on my mind today because of something that President Obama said this week with regard to climate change.  In a speech given at Georgetown University (excerpted and reviewed here), Obama stated that the United States needs to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to manage anthropogenic climate change, and outlined steps that he believes would accomplish what needs to be done.  About climate change deniers, he had the following to say: "I am willing to work with anybody…to combat this threat on behalf of our kids.  But I don't have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real.  We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society.  Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm."

Which is a pretty good line... but, unfortunately, generated a response from the Daniel Shenton, president of the Flat-Earth Society, who said that actually, he believes in anthropogenic climate change.

"I accept that climate change is a process which has been ongoing since beginning of detectable history, but there seems to be a definite correlation between the recent increase in world-wide temperatures and man’s entry into the industrial age," Shenton said, in an email to Salon.  "If it’s a coincidence, it’s quite a remarkable one. We may have experienced a temperature increase even without our use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, but I doubt it would be as dramatic as what we’re seeing now."

To which I can only respond: but you think the Earth is flat?  What the hell?

I mean, I've seen compartmentalized brains before, but Shenton may win the prize.

Not only does Shenton believe that the Earth is flat, but he believes that:

1)  Photographs from satellites are "digitally manipulated."  Why scientists are so desperate to convince people that the Earth is a sphere isn't certain, but they sure seem determined.  They're an evil bunch, those scientists.

2) The view of the Earth from space by the astronauts is explained by the fact that the space program is a lie, neatly tying up this nonsense with the Moon-landing-is-faked conspiracy theory nonsense.

3)  The seasons are caused because the Sun moves in circles over the North Pole (the center of the disk) and "shines down like a spotlight."  (Hey, don't yell at me.  I don't believe this stuff, I'm just telling you about it.)

4)  The Earth's gravity is created because the flat disk of the Earth is accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s^2.  This acceleration, while it would create an apparent gravitational pull (consistent with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity), has as its cause a mysterious "aetheric wind."  Put a different way, they are making shit up.

 

Oh, but the rest of science is just fine, and we have no problem with accepting anthropogenic climate change.

I wish I was joking, here.  But these people, hard though this may be to believe, are completely serious.

The problem is, once you have your brain this compartmentalized, you become impossible to argue with.  Just like my long-ago student, anything that brings up an internal contradiction or logical flaw is immediately dismissed as simply wrong.  It's like the old joke, strikingly relevant here, about the man who thought that the Earth was a flat disk resting on the back of a giant turtle.

"What is the turtle standing on?" asked a friend.

"Another turtle," the man said.

"But what is that turtle standing on?" the friend persisted.

The man smiled.  "You can't catch me that way," he said.  "It's turtles all the way down."

I live in hope that one day, the water-tight compartments will begin to leak -- and that the resulting cognitive dissonance will require these folks to reevaluate their position.  But unfortunately, rationalism doesn't always win -- not with evolution, not with climate change, and not even with the Earth being an oblate spheroid.

Spinning statues and rational explanations

Sometimes I run into the objection that my acceptance of rationalism is as much of a faith-based statement as anyone's declaration of belief in a religion.

In one sense, this is true.  I have concluded that the world is explainable through rational means not by any rational argument.  The only way that would work is if you've already accepted that rational arguments lead to the truth, tying you up in a neat little bit of circular reasoning.  On the other hand, we rationalists do have one thing going for us; scientific rationalism has a pretty good track record of making accurate predictions about how the world works.  Say whatever else you like about it, science certainly does provide consistent explanations that line up well with whatever evidence we have.  As Tim Minchin put it, "Out of all of the great mysteries ever solved, none of them have ever turned out to be magic."

It's telling, I think, that even the most diehard religious folks accept most of science's conclusions and technology's innovations -- except the specific few that happen to contradict their religious convictions.  Interesting, isn't it, that the scientific method can lead to right answers in the case of airplanes, computers, and modern medicine, and wildly wrong ones when it comes to, for example, evolution?

In any case, my main argument for rationalism is: it seems to work.  This is why, when I am presented with a mystery, I immediately jump to one conclusion -- there has to be a rational explanation.  I may not know what it is; I might never figure it out.  But I am certain that there is a reasonable, scientific explanation for what we're seeing.

Take, for instance, the case of the spinning Egyptian relic.  

Here's how the story was reported in the Manchester Evening News:

An ancient Egyptian statue has spooked museum bosses – after it mysteriously started to spin round in a display case.

The 10-inch tall relic, which dates back to 1800 BC, was found in a mummy’s tomb and has been at the Manchester Museum for 80 years.

But in recent weeks, curators have been left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way.  Experts decided to monitor the room on time-lapse video and were astonished to see it clearly show the statuette spinning 180 degrees – with nobody going near it.

The statue of a man named Neb-Senu is seen to remain still at night but slowly rotate round during the day.

Now scientists are trying to explain the phenomenon, with TV boffin Brian Cox among the experts being consulted.

Scientists who explored the Egyptian tombs in the 1920s were popularly believed to be struck by a ‘curse of the Pharaohs’ – and Campbell Price, a curator at the museum on Oxford Road, said he believes there may be a spiritual explanation to the spinning statue.

Egyptologist Mr Price, 29, said: “I noticed one day that it had turned around. I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key.

“I put it back but then the next day it had moved again. We set up a time-lapse video and, although the naked eye can’t see it, you can clearly see it rotate on the film. The statuette is something that used to go in the tomb along with the mummy.

“Mourners would lay offerings at its feet. The hieroglyphics on the back ask for ‘bread, beer and beef’.

“In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.”

Oh, come on.

First of all, if this is a curse, it's a pretty pathetic one.  Can't you see Neb-Senu, back almost 4,000 years ago, saying as he's on his deathbed, "If my statue ends up on a museum shelf in England, and no one brings me bread, beer, and beef, I hereby pronounce the following curse: my spirit will go there, and make the statue slowly turn round and round!  Ha!  That will sure show them!"

I mean, come on.  If this is some sort of "Mummy's Curse" kind of thing, you'd think he could do better than that.

Second, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for the statue's movement, which was outlined in some detail on the site Metabunk.  Here's a brief quote that sums up what's going on:

The statue is hard uneven stone, and the glass shelf is very hard and perfectly flat. When two hard substances are in contact with each other, then there's not much friction because there are limited points of contact. I suspect that the base of the statue is uneven, which allows it to tilt and pivot very slightly from the vertical vibration from people walking by. The shelf is very slightly tilted towards the front, so the statue rotates until the center of gravity is at the lowest point, and then it stops.

This, by the way, also explains why the statue only rotates during the day, and not at night -- when the museum is empty.

Now, am I certain that this is what is going on?  No, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Campbell Price's conjecture that Neb-Senu's wandering ghost is slowly turning his statue around.  And the nifty thing about a scientific explanation is that it's testable.  The whole thing could be settled once and for all by putting a rubber mat between the statue and the shelf.  If the vibration theory is correct, the statue should stop moving -- whereas there's no reason to suspect that a rubber mat would foil a sufficiently determined ancient Egyptian ghost.  ("Dammit!  They brought out the rubber mat!  My curse is useless!  Useless, I tell you!  Now what will I do?")

So, my general feeling is: rationalism wins again.  But, of course, you knew I'd say that.