Math, nature, nurture, and effort

The Atlantic ran a story last week by Miles Kimball and Noah Smith called "The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math.'"  In it, we get the hopeful message that people who have claimed all along that they are "bad at math" may not be, that ability at mathematics comes from hard work, not genetics.

(Photograph courtesy of AdamK and the Wikimedia Commons)

They cite a number of sources (and their own experience with educating students) in supporting their assertion.  The most interesting evidence comes from a study at Columbia University by Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski, and Carol Dweck, which showed that students who agreed with the statement "You can greatly change how intelligent you are" achieved higher grades than those who agreed with the statement "You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can't really do much to change it."  Further, convincing students who agreed with the second statement that intelligence was actually under their control had the effect of raising their grades -- and their self-confidence.

On one level, this is hardly surprising.  No one seriously believes that intelligence, or even a more limited slice of it -- like mathematical ability -- is entirely inborn.  We all know examples of people who seem to have a great deal of talent but who are lazy and never develop it.  They cite the Japanese culture as one in which hard work is valued above innate talent, and imply that this is one of the reasons Japanese children score, on average, better than American children on math assessments.  Kimball and Smith state, in their closing paragraph,

Math education, we believe, is just the most glaring area of a slow and worrying shift. We see our country moving away from a culture of hard work toward a culture of belief in genetic determinism. In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined. We want to bring it back, and we think that math is the best place to start.

And while I agree with their general conclusion -- that everyone could probably do with putting out a great deal more effort -- I can't help but think that Kimball and Smith are overstating their case.

I have a 27-year-long baseline of watching students attempting to master technical concepts, and there is a difference in the native ability students bring to bear on the topics they are trying to learn.  I still remember one young lady, in one of my AP Biology classes years ago, who spent many frustrated hours attempting to master statistical genetics, and who failed fairly catastrophically.  Her habit of hard work, and an excellent ability with verbal information, led to success in most of the other areas we studied -- in which a capacity for remembering names of things, and the connections between them, matter more than a quantitative sense.  But in statistical genetics, where you have to be able to understand how numbers work on a very fundamental level, that combination of hard work and verbal ability didn't help.

I recall her saying to me one day, after an hour-long fruitless attempt to understand how the Bateson-Punnett method of mapping genes works, "I guess I just have a genetics-proof brain."

In no activity during the year in my introductory biology class do I notice this dichotomy between the math brains and the math-proof brains more than the one we did last week.  It's a common lab, and I bet many of you did it, when you were in high school.  Cubes of raw potato (or some other absorbent material) of different sizes are soaked in iodine solution (or some other dye), and after a given time, they're cut in half to see how far the dye has diffused into the cubes.  After a series of calculations, the far-reaching (and rather counter-intuitive) conclusion is arrived at -- that small cubes have a much larger ratio of surface area to volume than big ones do, and as a result, diffusion is way less efficient for big cubes.  This is one of the reasons that the cells of a whale, a human, and a mouse are all about the same size (really freakin' small) -- any larger, and transport would be hindered by their low surface-area-to-volume ratio.

The calculations aren't hard, but I see many kids losing the forest for the trees.  Quickly.  Which kids get lost seems to have little to do with effort level, and almost nothing to do with verbal ability.  I can typically divide the class into two sections -- the group that will get the concept quickly and easily (usually with a delighted, "Oh!  Wow!  That's cool!"), and the group that after slogging their way through the calculations, still don't see the point -- sometimes, not even after I explain it to them.  Which are in which group seems to have nothing to do with their grades on prior tasks -- or with the effort they exert.

It's ironic that nearly simultaneously with the article in The Atlantic, a paper was published in PNAS (The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) by Ariel Starr, Melissa Libertus, and Elizabeth Brannon, of Duke University.  Entitled "Number Sense in Infancy Predicts Mathematical Ability in Childhood," the study by Starr et al. tells us something fascinating -- that a "preverbal number sense" in infants, who have never manipulated numbers before, predicts their score on standardized math assessments three years later.

Here's how Rachel Nuwer of Science Now describes the experiment:

The researchers showed the babies opposing images of two sets of dots that flashed before them on a screen. One side of the screen always contained 10 dots, which were arranged in various patterns. The other side alternated between 10 and 20 dots, also arranged in various patterns. The team tracked the infants’ gaze—a common method for judging infant cognition—to see which set of dots they preferred to watch. Babies prefer to look at new things to old things, so the pattern of dots that flashed between arrays of 10 and 20 should appear more interesting to infants because the dots were changing not just in position, but in number. Both screens changed dot position simultaneously, so in theory, the flashing pattern changes were equally distracting. If an infant indicated that she picked up on the difference in dot numbers by preferentially staring at the 10- and 20-dot side of the screen, the researchers concluded that her intuitive number sense was at work.

Three years later, the children who achieved the best scores on preschool math assessments were, to a great degree, the ones who had shown innate mathematical sense as infants.

Now, I don't want to imply that hard work isn't important; there's a lot to be gained by effort, and I suspect that even my long-ago student with the "genetics-proof brain" would have gotten it had she persisted.  But Kimball and Smith's assertion, that hard work can trump innate ability, may simply be factually incorrect.  The bottom line may be that perhaps everyone can learn differential calculus, but the hard-wiring of our brains is probably different enough that for some of us, the effort and time that would be required would probably represent the limit of an exponential function as t approaches infinity.

Virile as the mighty... kangaroo?

New from the "What The Hell Are They Thinking?" department, today I found out that the Chinese are marketing a new "alternative medicine" treatment for impotence: a supplement made from powdered kangaroo balls.

I wish I was making this up.  Here's an advertisement for the product:

Well, I'm convinced.  That guy has a bottle of "Essence of Red Kangaroo K-max 3000" pills the size of a garbage can, and he is clearly about to get laid.  Or possibly, because judicious photo cropping leaves us unable to be certain, he may already be in the process.  What more evidence do we need?

None, apparently, because John Kreuger, owner of a company that processes kangaroo meat, is now sending over a ton of testicles to China every month.  In fact, he said that in order to separate the testicles from the scrotum, he has had to build a special custom "de-nutting machine," a phrase that I have a hard time imagining any male uttering without immediately going into a protective crouch.

Be that as it may, the dehydrated and powdered roo balls are then put into capsule form in Chinese traditional medicine manufacturing plants, and can fetch $165 for a bottle of 300 once it reaches the market.  The selling point, apparently, is that male kangaroos have been observed to mate with as many as forty females, and "the capability to produce the spermatic fluid of the male kangaroo is twice that of the adult bull," which is a direct quote from the advertisements for the capsules.

I really hoped that the days of sympathetic magic were over -- the ancient idea that two things being similar means that one can be used in place of the other.  It's the origin of the myth that walnuts are good for the brain (they kind of look alike) and that beets "strengthen the blood" (both are red).  Traditional Chinese medicine is rife with these ideas, where both rhinoceros horn and dried tiger penises are consumed as aphrodisiacs.  But given that tigers and rhinos are now both seriously endangered species -- in part, due to the lucrative nature of the use of their parts for this kind of nonsense -- desperately horny Chinese men have had to turn to a more readily accessible source of completely useless supplements.

I guess that if you really do buy into this, though, it's better to go after kangaroos than tigers.  Kangaroos are common, to the point that a good many Australians consider them pests, and they're raised commercially for meat.  May as well use the testicles for something, I guess.

The downside, though, is that people like Kreuger are turning a quick buck based upon the gullibility of people with more money than sense, and perpetuating an irrational belief in the process.  Because, after all, the placebo effect is a powerful thing -- a guy who took his powdered roo ball pill and thinks he's going to have a really good erection is more likely to be, um, successful than a guy who is worried because he ran out of pills, and now is pretty sure he won't.

So on the whole, it's absurd, and kind of annoying that people in this day and age are still falling for this stuff.  But the same might be said for most woo-woo beliefs, even those that are more pleasant to talk about because they do not involve the phrase "de-nutting machine."

Cows are from Mars, wheat is from Venus

There are some types of woo-woo thinking that I can at least understand.

Let's take one of my favorites, which is Tarot card divination.  While my general attitude toward it is that there is no possible way it can work, you can see why someone might think that it does.  If you enter a Tarot card reading with the opinion that it's going to tell you something mystical and important, you will tend to interpret whatever the cards show in that light, giving greater weight to information that supports your assertion and less weight to information that contradicts it.  This confirmation bias, then, leads you to stronger and stronger belief in an incorrect model, unless you are consistently on guard against the natural human tendency toward it.

Add that to the fact that most divination is done, for pay, by people who are skilled at reading their clients' body language, and tailoring their spiel based upon the reaction they're getting -- so it's no wonder that they come off sounding convincing.

So these sorts of things might be wrong, but at least they're understandable.

What I don't get at all is when people take a bit of real information, and derive from that information a completely ridiculous explanation.  This Ockham's-Razor-in-reverse approach, as I've commented before, is the basis of a lot of conspiracy theories.  But just this past weekend, my cousin in New Mexico, who has been the source of many wonderful topics for Skeptophilia, told me about an example of this phenomenon that may be the best I've ever seen.

Health and nutrition magazines, books, and websites have seen a great deal of buzz lately about the dangers of gluten in food, and not just for people who have the devastating (and easily diagnosed) condition called celiac disease or celiac sprue.  There is a contention, gaining ground especially amongst the proponents of the so-called "paleo diet," that gluten is bad for everyone, and that we all would benefit from eliminating it completely from our tables.

The trouble is, there's no good diagnostic test for "Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity" (NCGS), which leads to the problem that it's hard to separate it from other disorders with rather vague, diffuse symptoms, not to mention chronic hypochondria.  Look, for example, at this article at Natural News called "Six Signs You Might Have Gluten Sensitivity."  Damn near all of us have some of the symptoms on the list, so without critical consideration, we might assume that we were gluten sensitive.

Now I hasten to add that I am quite sure that NCGS is a real thing; two recent controlled studies (available here and here) looked at the phenomenon closely, and although neither was able to determine a usable clinical diagnostic protocol for it, remember that the same was true for years for such disorders as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, both of which are now fairly well accepted as valid diagnoses.

But because NCGS is still out of the reach of conventional medicine to diagnose, it does leave people free to decide for themselves what the reason for it might be.  Which is why there is an increasing number of claims out there that we shouldn't eat gluten -- or drink milk, either, for that matter -- because wheat and cows are from outer space.

I'm not making this up.  For example, take the following, that showed up on the Starseed Network:

Aliens gave us cows and wheat?

I've been researching. From what I can find, cows just showed up about 10,000 years ago. There were similar species before then but were too wild and twice as big.

Wheat, too, just appeared about the same time.

I'm just getting into all this.

Has anyone else ever heard of/know anything about this? I'd like to do a blog post about it and I'm having a hard time finding anything. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Anyway, anything anyone's got would be great!

And while there were a couple of derisive responses, as you might expect, more of them were entirely in support of this bizarre contention.  One of them suggested that goats might be aliens, too, because they have slit pupils.  And then there was this:

In my spirit quests I have been told that cows were on mars. Wheat was brought by ET to be farmed by mankind. Have you ever heard of Operation MindFuck? The author of Illuminatus (Robert Anton Wilson) and Cosmic Trigger, talks about an instance where a man, Joseph Simonton, had an extraterrestrial encounter and the alien being presented him with a plate of wheat germ pancakes. 

Well, there you are, then.

I suppose that this would explain one thing, namely, the fact that the aliens when they come here seem intent on stomping out patterns in wheat fields and mutilating and/or abducting cows.  If you are doubtful about the latter, you should visit the wonderful site Cow Abduction.  Once it loads, pass your cursor over the image of Bessie, contentedly munching grass in a field, and then tell me that's not the most awesome thing you've ever seen.

Be that as it may, I'm doubtful that aliens are responsible for any of this, especially not the origins of cows and wheat.  Cattle have been around for a long, long time, and their domestication from the wild bovine called the aurochs has been thoroughly studied by paleontologists and archaeologists.  As far as wheat goes, its origin lies in the (natural) hybridization of two species of wild grasses, followed by artificial selection by early humans [Source].

So, much as you might like to attribute the bellyache you got after eating a bagel with cream cheese to the extraterrestrial origins of gluten and lactose, it doesn't really hold water.

But if you're looking for a terrestrial species that might have been seeded here by aliens, my vote would go to the carrot.  In my mind, carrots have no redeeming features, with the possible exception of carrot cake, which only works because the carrot flavor is swamped by large quantities of cinnamon and ginger.  Otherwise, carrots (1) taste disgusting, especially when cooked, and (2) if eaten in sufficient quantity, will turn your skin orange.

Sounds like an evil alien plot to infiltrate our dinners, to me.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Just to conclude: even though gluten and lactose sensitivity are real phenomena, there is no need to leap to the further conclusion that wheat and cows are from outer space.  If you doubt that, you should probably consult your local Tarot card reader, whom I am sure will confirm what I'm telling you.

The turning of the tide

Sometimes writing this blog seems like whispering into a windstorm.

There are so many loopy ideas out there that attacking them is like taking on the Hydra -- cut one down, and there are nine more lurching up to take its place.  Now, to be fair, they're not all equally destructive; my attitude is that if you'd like to believe in Bigfoot, or ghosts, or astrology, there's no real harm in it as long as you don't mind people like me laughing in your general direction sometimes.

On the other hand, there are some crackpot ideas that cause direct harm, and to me, this crosses a line.  At that point, I tend to stop poking gentle fun, and start getting hostile.  These include homeopathy, anti-vaxx, and treating mental illness as if it were demonic possession (and, of course, as if demons themselves were real).

But nothing makes my blood boil like attacks on education.  Not only are we talking about my career, here; we're talking about the children.  We're talking about the young people who will grow up to lead our country, our next generation of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, scholars, and lawyers.

The whole battle has become increasingly heated lately, to the point that the powers-that-be on the state and federal level are feeling a little... beleaguered.  And they should be.  They have sold out to corporate interests, to the likes of Pearson Education and the Educational Testing Service.  They have ceded our nation's future to a group of men and women who believe that only that which is quantifiable is real, who value test scores above creativity and depth of understanding, and who believe that it is fair to hook the evaluation of educators to these same meaningless streams of numbers.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.  Parents are, in increasing numbers, opting their children out of high-stakes standardized tests.  No, I'm sorry, my child won't be in school today.  He's sick.  Oh, he has a standardized test today, and it'll have to be rescheduled for three weeks from Tuesday?

I'm sorry, he's going to be sick that day, too.

Teachers, too, are fighting back, where they can.  Unfortunately, school districts' hands are often tied by capricious laws that link funding to cooperation with poorly-thought-out state mandates.  But our voices are getting louder.  Just last week, a New Jersey teacher named Melissa Tomlinson confronted New Jersey governor Chris Christie at a rally, asking him, "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?"

He shouted at her, "Because they are!"

Tomlinson, undaunted, threw back at him his record of defunding public education, a record that included cuts of over one billion dollars in his first year in office.  At this point, Christie lost it completely, screaming at her, "I am tired of you people!  What do you want?  Just do your job!"

Another teacher, Mark Naison, had the following to say about the encounter:

What do I want? What do 'we people' want? We want to be allowed to teach. Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth. This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education.

Christie's not the only one who's under siege for his support of destructive educational policy.  Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin has come under criticism from several fronts over her support of a teacher assessment model that gives each school a grade of A through F based solely upon students' performance on standardized tests.  Schools scoring in the D to F range can be closed, the entire teaching staff fired (with a maximum 50% rehire rate), and then reopened -- under state control.

This, despite a joint study by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University found that what schools are doing is only responsible for 20-30% of student achievement -- the remainder being accounted for by factors outside of school control, such as socioeconomic status and parental support.  A spokesperson for the governor, Alex Weintz, said that he was "dismayed" to find that teachers' unions were using the report to discredit the A-F evaluation model, and that the governor "does not support" the findings of the report.

"It’s not helpful to anyone’s cause," Weintz said.  "It seems to be some opponents are absolutely bent on undermining the credibility of the entire system.  The fact of the matter is this grading system, regardless of whether or not you believe it should have been put together differently, is the law."

Regardless, apparently, of whether or not the grading system actually reflects anything real.

Then, just two days ago, Dr. Gary Johnson, Director of Special Education Advocacy and Instruction at the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center in Utah, testified before the Wisconsin State Legislature -- and said that the tests associated with the new Common Core Learning Standards amount to "cognitive child abuse."  The exams, he said, have little in the way of norming or peer review, and no validation studies -- meaning that using the scores to evaluate anything would be questionable, but using them to draw conclusions on the success or failure of schools is downright absurd.  "The US Department of Education's testing policies are like The Wild Wild West," Johnson said.  "They are doing what they want with no accountability, no constraints, and no oversight."

Here in my home state of New York, the backlash against the people who put us in our current predicament has been so strong that there have been demands that Commissioner of Education John King resign -- the latest from the New York State Allies for Public Education.

Troubled times, these.  It's easy to lose hope, and heaven knows my morale lately has been at its lowest since I can remember.  But there are signs that the tide might be turning.  My post last week about the lack of trust in educators got hits from all over New York State, and beyond -- and responses that included support from principals, superintendents, and school board members.  As a result of what I wrote, I've been invited to be part of a regional panel that will look at the teacher evaluation model, and other current issues in education.  All around me, I see people organizing, participating in peaceful resistance, speaking their minds and refusing to be silenced.

And perhaps this will, finally, be enough to turn things around.  Maybe we can break the stranglehold on education wielded by the top-down micromanagers, the b-b stackers in the state and federal departments of education who have never taught a day in their lives, but who think they know best how to educate children and evaluate teachers.  This is not a fight against accountability, as it has been characterized by the besieged politicians who still support the current model, and who are (sadly) still in charge of crafting educational policy; this is a demand for reasonable accountability, for an approach to education that gives every child a chance to excel, for assessments that generate statistics which actually mean something.

So I'm trying to stay optimistic, here, and toward that end I keep telling myself, over and over, that wonderful quote from Mohandas Gandhi:

Waving away the facts

I always get a kick out of the tactics-switching employed by science deniers when presented with hard data.

The young-earth creationists are an especially good example of this, because hard data supporting evolution abounds, and hard data supporting the conjecture that the Earth is 6,000 years old is basically non-existent.  So every time a new bit of evidence comes in that contradicts the Adam-and-Eve story or the Noah's Ark story, they have to engage in what a college professor of mine called "waving your arms around in the hopes that it will distract the person you're arguing with long enough that he forgets what the question was."

A good example is the recent discovery of relatively intact blood cells inside a 46-million-year-old fossilized mosquito, which the folks over at the Institute for Creation Research claim is evidence for a young Earth because we know that tissue can't last that long.  In fact, they claim (falsely), evolutionary biologists are ignoring "the protests of biochemists," implying that the biologists are stubbornly clinging to a model that the rest of science has discarded.

In no area has this hand-waving been more elaborate than in the world of the climate change denier.  First, of course, there were people who simply thought that the world wasn't warming.  Some people still don't, including noted climatologists Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck.  But as the data has poured in -- including the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated, and I quote, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century," and supported that statement with hundreds of pages of data -- the naysayers have had to tone down their rhetoric some.

This change, however, is far short of "sorry, we were wrong."  We still have nutjobs like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Beck, bloviating on Fox News and in The Blaze that the climate scientists are lying.  More interesting, though, are the ones who finally admit that the Earth is warming up -- but want it to be something other than carbon dioxide emissions that's causing it.

It's not the carbon, they say.  It's the sunspots.  Or an increase in solar output.  Or solar flares.  Or shifts in the jet stream.  Or, in a statement that should be recorded forever in the Annals of Wingnuttery, it could be... god.

I'm not making this last bit up.  In an interview on Reverend Kenneth Copeland's evangelical talk show Voices of Victory, rumored Texas senate candidate David Barton admitted that okay, the Earth might be getting warmer, but it's not because of carbon dioxide emissions, it's because god is smiting us for being naughty:

Floods are under the curse, tornadoes are under the curse, murderers, pedophiles.  Abortion was a seed to it that has grown into a murderous, bloody crop of child death. And it doesn't stop with abortion.

Whether that killing is through abortion or drugs or suicide or anything else, you open the door to the killing, it's got a lot of different manifestations.  But if you choose leaders who support killing, we've opened the door to all of it.

The Founding Fathers said, when does God judge nations?  Because he doesn't resurrect nations in the future.  He judges it right now.  There is no future for any nation.  When a nation does something bad, it gets judgement or it gets blessings right now in the present.  On the spot.  Which is why policies matter.  Because if you take a bad policy, you get judged for it on the spot.  If you take a good policy, you get blessed for it on the spot.

A door has been opened and we have said, 'You know, we embraced a wicked policy.'  Okay, then I'll take my hand of protection off your nation and whap, here comes storms like we've never seen before.  And here comes floods like we've never seen before.  And here comes the climate stuff that we can't explain.  All the hot times and all the cold times.  Too much rain and not enough rain.  And we're flooding over here and we've got droughts over here.

And today, we're saying, 'Oh, no, it's global warming.' No, we opened the door that lost God's protection over our environment and that's our choice.

So. Yeah. The climatologists "can't explain" it. The scientists have no idea what is going on. Instead, it's god going "whap."

I think what gets me about all of this is that so many Americans, listening to this nonsense, just seem to nod their heads and accept that what people like Barton are saying is true.  In my class, I see more teenagers bristling when I mention "climate change" than I do when I mention "evolution;" from what I've seen, the negative press on climate change has actually outpaced that on evolution.  (I'd like to think that this may be because the anti-science crowd has given up fighting evolution because they've recognized that it's a losing proposition, but that's probably premature.)

In any case, it's maddening.  But the data just keeps pouring in, such as the study just published yesterday in Science that concludes that the current rate of oceanic warming is greater than at any time during the previous 10,000 years.

Kind of hard to argue that one, isn't it?  Unless it's just god "whapping" us again.

Lights out

I am frequently amazed by how quickly the research for this blog gets me into the deep, uncharted waters of the Great Wingnut Ocean.

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if I'd heard the contention that the government (for "government" read "evil superpowerful Illuminati overlords") was planning a days-long shutdown of the electrical grid, nationwide, in November.  I said that I hadn't -- and, of course, that I doubted that there was any such plan.

But I thought that this might be fertile ground for a blog post (which was, in fact, my friend's suggestion), so I did a Google search for "planned electrical grid shutdown."  On the plus (i.e., real) side, I did find that various electrical suppliers had run simulations of shutdowns -- essentially, drills that allowed them to develop strategies for coping with the outcome should a real grid breakdown occur.

On the minus (i.e. wacko) side, I found that yes, there are people who believe that the government is planning on turning off the electricity.  There are hundreds of such claims.  Why, you might ask?  What could such a shutdown accomplish?  Well, that's not clear; most of the claims seem to stop at the "see how evil government is?" stage.

What is most amusing about all of this is that since Google pulls out not only recent links but older ones, there were a number of sites claiming that there'd be a grid shutdown on dates that have already passed.  I found several from 2011 and 2012, as well as May 2013, August 2013, and September 2013.

Did I miss it, or was there electricity pretty much continuously through all of those?

But far be it from woo-woos to admit they were wrong just because their predictions have failed a dozen times before.  This time, they say, it's gonna happen.  November 13 and 14, folks -- this is it.  Back up your computer files, make sure you have bottled water and propane for your Coleman stove, make sure you have firewood ready to go -- because They are going to shut down the whole nation.

Still wondering (1) what possible reason people could have to make that claim, and (2) what on earth they think the government could be trying to accomplish by shutting off the power, I started to dig around on such sites, starting with a page called "Will There Be an Electrical Grid Blackout on November 13-14, 2013?", hosted on Etheric.com.  There were hints that this was gonna be some kind of "false flag" event, meant to distract the citizenry while the Bad Guys went off and did something even worse elsewhere, but no particular mention of what this even-worse-thing was going to be.  But I kept running into the name Paul LaViolette, so I figured he might be an interesting source of "information" (using the word fairly loosely) on the topic.  So I started doing some research on LaViolette himself.

Well, it turns out that Etheric.com is more or less run by Paul LaViolette, who is either a wacko crank (generally the view of the skeptics at the James Randi Educational Foundation), or an amazing genius who has made earthshattering discoveries in physics (the view of LaViolette himself).  LaViolette has a theory of "galactic superwaves" -- colossal explosions of cosmic radiation from the galactic core -- and has expounded upon this topic over at none other than Etheric.com.

Now, I'm not an astronomer, and am unqualified to weigh in on LaViolette's contention that the galactic core is sending particle blasts our way every 10,000 or so years, but alarm bells went off when I read his publications list, which included books called Decoding the Message of the Pulsars, Subquantum Kinetics, and The Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion, the latter of which got a one-star review on the Barnes & Noble website that said, "This is the worst so-called science book I have ever read."

But by this time, I was getting a bit far off the track of finding out about electrical grid shutdowns, or what (if anything) they could have to do with galactic core blasts.  So I swam back to shore, and continued my research...

... and then got instantly launched back into deep water, with a contention that the November electrical grid shutdown was to stop Americans from seeing that Comet ISON would be "interacting with the planet Mercury."

This made me say, first, "What the hell?" and second, "Wait a minute; if the power went out, wouldn't people be more likely to go outside and look up into the sky?  If the power's on, then 90% of America will be inside watching Real Housewives of New Jersey and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo."

So maybe this is the plan, but if so, it's a really stupid one.  If this is the best they can do, I think the current Illuminati seem to have the sophistication level of Boris Badinov and Natasha Fatale, and they need to step down and let some people take over who can really run a conspiracy right. 

But I decided to give it one more try, and swam back to shore again, and this time found that the religious whackjobs were claiming that the government was shutting down the grid on November 13 & 14 because the government is in league with Satan, and this will be the start of the End Times.

At that point, I just stopped struggling, figuring that drowning wasn't looking so bad, after all.

Lord Dufferin and the man in the garden

For better or worse, being a skeptic doesn't mean that you don't find stories of the paranormal interesting -- nor that you can't react to them on an emotional level.

I mean, I'm the guy who thinks that television programming went into a nosedive the day The X Files was cancelled.  I am also the guy who would love to spend a night in a haunted house, but would be likely to piss my pants and then have a stroke if anything untoward happened.  So while I'd be a good guy to have on a team of ghost hunters, from a scientific and rational perspective, I'd be a bad choice from the standpoint of practical application and laundromat charges.

I still recall many of the ghost stories of my childhood.  My uncle was a grand storyteller, and had lots of tales (usually told in French) of the scary creatures of the Louisiana bayou, including the Loup-Garou (the Cajun answer to a werewolf) and Feu Follet (the "spirit fire," or will-of-the-wisp, which would steal your soul if you saw it -- unless you could cross running water before it caught you).  Later, I voraciously read Poe and Lovecraft, and dozens of books with names like True Tales of the Supernatural.

It was in one of the latter that I ran into the story of Lord Dufferin, a 19th century British statesman who spent most of his career shuttling all over the world -- from Canada to Syria to Russia to India to Burma.  His actual name was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin, and his life coincided almost perfectly with Queen Victoria's -- she lived from 1819 to 1901, Dufferin from 1826 to 1902.

Dufferin was, by all accounts, well known in the social circuits of high society.  His biographer calls him "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile."  He also was an excellent storyteller, and there was one story he became famous for -- mostly because to his dying day, he swore that it was true.

One night, Dufferin said, he was visiting a friend who owned an estate in Ireland.  For some reason, he was unable to sleep, and after tossing and turning for a while, he finally got up and went out through a door and onto the balcony overlooking the estate gardens.

He became aware that there was a figure moving down in the garden, and as he watched, the figure got closer.  It was a man, carrying something on his back, but he was in shadow and it was impossible to tell anything about the man or his burden.  But after a moment, the man stepped out into a patch of moonlight, and looked up at Dufferin.

Dufferin recoiled.  The man was the most hideously ugly individual Dufferin had ever seen -- and the object on the man's back could be clearly seen to be a coffin.

Terrified, Dufferin retreated to his room.  The next morning, he told his host about what he'd seen, and Dufferin's friend brushed him off -- there was no one in the garden the previous evening, the friend said.  It must have been a nightmare.

Dufferin more or less forgot about the incident.  But many years later, when he was British Ambassador to France in the early 1890s, he was in Paris for a diplomatic meeting and was about to step onto an elevator when he glanced at the elevator operator, and saw that it was the same memorably ugly face as the man he remembered from his vision in the garden.  Alarmed, he backed away, and the door closed.  He was standing there, trying to make sense of what he had just seen, when there was a tremendous crash -- the elevator cable had broken, sending the elevator compartment hurtling down the shaft.  Everyone inside, including the operator, was killed.

Dufferin sought out hotel officials to ask about the elevator operator -- but the officials said that the man had just been hired that day, and no one knew anything about him.

Dufferin lived for another ten years, and enjoyed many a glass of brandy over the telling of this tale.  And you can see why; it's got all of the elements -- a terrifying vision that turns out to be a warning of danger, a scary-looking guy carrying a coffin across a garden at night, a near brush with death.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I doubt very much if the supernatural aspects of this story are true.  Human memory is a remarkably plastic thing, and I strongly suspect that most stories of precognition rely on imperfect recollection of the original premonition, be it a dream or (as in this case) a vision.  That Dufferin saw something in the garden that night is possible; that he had a nightmare is also possible.  That it was true precognition, I seriously doubt.  It is far more likely that, years later, a shock like seeing an ugly guy in an elevator, and narrowly escaping being killed when the elevator cable broke, would have conflated in his mind the incident with the earlier nightmare (or whatever it was).

But you have to admit that despite all of that, it makes a hell of a good story -- even one that a diehard skeptic might read with a cold shudder twanging up the spine.

And with that, I'll wish you all a very spooky and fun-filled Halloween.