Biblical corn

One of the things I find amusing about people who argue over the meaning of passages in the bible is that so few of them seem to recognize that they're working from a translation.

A few -- very few, in my experience -- people are true biblical scholars, and have worked with the Aramaic and Greek originals (and I use that word with some hesitation, as even those were copies of earlier documents, copied and perhaps translated themselves with uncertain accuracy).  Most everyone else acts as if their favorite English translation is the literal word of god, as if Jesus Christ himself spoke pure, unadulterated 'Murican.

It does give rise to some funny situations.  We have the argument over whether the forbidden fruit that Eve gave Adam was an apple, a fig, or a pomegranate.  We have the claim (Micah 5:2) that the Messiah would be descended from David, and both Matthew and Luke go to great lengths to show that Joseph was a descendant of David (although they disagree on his descent, so they can't both be right) -- and Jesus wasn't Joseph's son in any case.  We have one person who has argued that the creation story was translated wrong, and that god didn't create life, he "separated" humans from everything else, presumably by giving them souls.

We even have some folks who claim -- tongue-in-cheek, of course -- that the line from Leviticus 20 about "if a man lies with another man, they should both be stoned" as biblical support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization simultaneously.

All of which strikes me as funny, because no matter how you slice it, you're still arguing over the meaning of an uncertainly-translated text that has been recopied with uncertain precision an uncertain number of times, and reflects the beliefs of a bunch of Bronze Age sheepherders in any case.  Notwithstanding, you still have people arguing like hell that their translation is the correct, god-approved one, and all of the others are wrong.

And then you have this guy, who takes things a step further, declaring that the translation of one word is correct, and that means that... pretty much everything else we know about the history of the Middle East is wrong.

That word is "corn."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The word occurs 102 times (in the King James Version, at least) -- mostly as a translation of the Semitic root dagan.  The problem, of course, is that corn is a Mesoamerican plant, and did not exist in the Middle East until it was brought over after the exploration of the New World.  It's very easily explained, though; not only did dagan mean "grain" (not, specifically, corn), the word "corn" itself just meant "grain" in early Modern English -- a usage that persists in the word "barleycorn."

But this guy doesn't think so.  He thinks that the use of the word "corn" means... corn.  As in the stuff you eat at picnics in the summer with lots of butter and salt, the stuff cornmeal and popcorn and corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup are made from.  And therefore, he thinks...

... that everything in the bible actually happened here in the Western Hemisphere.

I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

The difficult situation with CORN in the BIBLE is that most people, due to the brainwashing that has been handed down through generations, firmly believe that the Biblical events happened in the Middle East.  After much research I can PROVE that the Middle East has absolutely NOTHING to do with the history, geography, and genealogy of the Holy Scriptures.  Nothing!...  CORN is in the Bible because the PEOPLE, PLACES, and EVENTS of the Biblical narratives were in the AMERICAS!

The "true history" of the events of the bible, he says, have been "hidden for over 500 years."  He has proof, which he will tell us when his book is released, and it's gonna overturn everything you think you know about history.

Oh, yeah, and the Crusades happened over here, too.  Apparently the Crusaders didn't trek to Jerusalem, they were trying to retake Peoria or something.

'Murica!  Yeah!

I'm not making this up, and the guy who wrote it seems entirely serious.  But it does highlight what can happen when you decide that any human-created document is the infallible word of a deity, or even (as I've heard) that god guided the translators and copiers so that it still is inerrant even after the inevitable Game of Telephone that translating and copying usually entails.  Not many people go as far as the Corn Dude does -- but it does bring up the question of whether any translation of the bible is good enough that we should even entertain using it as a guide to behavior or (heaven forfend) science.

So that's our exercise in eye-rolling for today.  Me, I'm done with the topic, so I'm going to go get breakfast.

For some reason, I'm in the mood for cornbread.  Funny thing, that.

Shrouded in pseudoscience

I hate to break it to you, LiveScience, but in the interest of accuracy, it's probably time to take the word "Science" out of the name of your website.

What you're promoting isn't really science, any more than The History Channel has anything even remotely to do with history.  You're passing along to the public the idea that science is this mushy, hand-waving pursuit, where you can do an "experiment" to support an idea you'd already decided was true, generate essentially nothing in the way of data, and then claim that your results support whatever your original contention was.

I say this in light of a recent story called "Shroud of Turin: Could Ancient Earthquake Explain Face of Jesus?"  If the very title makes you suspicious, then good; you're starting out from the right vantage point.

Let's begin with the facts.  The Shroud of Turin is a piece of linen cloth that has been preserved for centuries as a holy relic -- supposedly the sheet that covered Jesus' body after the crucifixion.  It shows the image of a naked man, with wounds similar to those described in the bible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, the linen cloth was carbon-14 dated -- a step that the religious powers-that-be resisted for decades -- and it was conclusively shown to date to around 1350 C.E.  It is, put simply, a fake.  So you'd think that would be that.

As we've seen before, that is never that when religion enters the picture.

The article in LiveScience tells about a study headed by Alberto Carpinteri of the Politecnico di Torino, in Turin, Italy, which discovered that when you crush rocks using a mechanical press, it can cause a brief emission of neutrons.  From that single piece of information, he concludes the following:

• Earthquakes can therefore be associated with neutron emissions.
• The neutrons could interact with nitrogen atoms in the linen cloth (or in anything else, presumably), and mess up the carbon-14 dating protocol, causing it to give a wrong answer.
• The neutrons could also have burned a pattern into the cloth as they passed through it.  Because the cloth was wrapped around a human body, it would have caused an image to appear on it, much like an x-ray.
• The bible says that there was an earthquake around the time of Jesus' resurrection, and the "stone rolled back from the tomb."  [Matthew 28:1-2]
• So: the Shroud of Turin is actually the burial cloth of Jesus.  Therefore god and the Catholic Church and all of the rest of it.  q.e.d.

Oh, come on, now.  This qualifies as science?  It's about as bad an example of assuming your conclusion as I've ever seen.  And if earthquakes interfered with carbon-14 and nitrogen-14 levels, then radiocarbon dating would never work, since earthquakes happen basically all the time, all over the Earth.  And yet carbon-14 dating has been shown to be extremely accurate, over and over again.

Funny thing, that.

So you have to wonder why Carpinteri et al. don't just say, "It was magic, and I believe it," and be done with it.  Why all of the scientific trappings?

Well, I know the answer, of course; people these days are getting a little iffy in the firmness of their religious convictions, and science is beginning to hold more sway over people's minds than religious authority does.  If you can convince folks that the science supports religion, you've pulled 'em right back in.

To LiveScience's credit, at least they took the time to talk to an actual scientist, geochemist Gordon Cook of the University of Glasgow.  Cook, unsurprisingly, was dubious.  "It would have to be a really local effect not to be measurable elsewhere," Cook said.  "People have been measuring materials of that age for decades now and nobody has ever encountered this."

However, even though they quoted Cook, the fact that LiveScience chose to publicize this non-science means that they're giving it unwarranted credence, and that's just irresponsible.  A "study" like this wouldn't make it through the first round of peer review.  Carpinteri and his team are relying on press statements -- and sites like LiveScience -- to publicize what is, at its heart, a religious statement of faith.

So the whole thing is a little frustrating.  It won't change anything, probably; the scientists will almost certainly just roll their eyes and go back to what they were doing, and the religious people who want to believe in the Shroud's relic status will continue to believe.

But I maintain: LiveScience, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and other popularizers of a pseudoscientific worldview are not doing science any favors by convincing the public that this sort of foolishness deserves to be considered seriously.  I'd almost rather that they stick to Bigfoot, UFOs, and pieces about how the Vikings were alien time-travelers.  At least that stuff is mildly entertaining.

Brazilian werewolf alert

Every once in a while, I'll run into a story that just gives me the shudders, despite my generally rationalistic approach.  All this does, of course, is to highlight a truism about the human condition; when it comes to a fight between logic and emotion, emotion usually wins.  We like to flatter ourselves, and think that our highly-developed prefrontal cortices make us smarter than our non-human cousins, but when it comes to a real throw-down match between the parts of the brain, I'm putting my money on the limbic system every time -- the part of the brain that, along with the hypothalamus, governs the "four F's" of behavior: feeding, fighting, flight, and... mating.

A story this week out of Brazil highlights the third "F" -- which stands for the flight response.  It could also stand for "fear," because that's what usually motivates an animal running away.  The story, which comes out of the town of São Gonçalo de Campos, near Feira de Santana, in the state of Bahia, is about a rather terrifying cryptid that has been sighted more than once in local neighborhoods.

Even the government officials are taking it seriously.  Apparently, for the last two weeks there's been a curfew in the town; no one is to be outside after 9 PM.  It started when a man identified only as "Pingo" described seeing a five-foot-tall black monster, which ran at him; Pingo turned and fled, escaping (he said) only by the narrowest of margins.  At first, the other villagers made fun of him -- until others had similar encounters.  Locals are calling it a "werewolf."

All of this would have been nothing more than another tale of "I saw something real, really I did" if it hadn't been for the footage captured on a home security camera.  Watch it for yourself:

Here's a still:

Okay, yes, I know.  There are no such things as werewolves.  There's no reason why this couldn't have been faked.  It probably is a guy in dark clothes jumping around in front of the homeowner's security camera, in order to keep the whole scare going.  Who knows?  Maybe it's even "Pingo," who dreamed the story up to have his fifteen minutes (or in this case, more like two weeks) of fame.

But I have to admit that watching this video gave me some very irrational shudders right up the spine.  There's something about the way the creature moved that just doesn't look... human.  I'm probably being suggestible, I realize that; our fight-or-flight responses have been programmed through millions of years of evolution to shriek at us, whenever we see a shadowy shape in the dark, "DEAR GOD IT'S A PREDATOR RUN FOR YOUR LIFE OR YOU WILL BE MESSILY DEVOURED."  The chances of it being anything other than a hoaxing human are very small.

Even so, if I lived in São Gonçalo de Campos, I would definitely abide by the curfew.  I probably would also deadbolt my doors shut at night.  Maybe it is only Pingo playing a prank; that's what my prefrontal cortex is telling me.  But if I lived anywhere near where this thing had been seen, my limbic system would outshout my prefrontal cortex without even breaking a sweat.

End of the world, episode #452

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we're all gonna die.

Again.

I mean, what is this?  This 452nd time this has happened, or something?  Between Mayan apocalypses and Christian End Times predictions and the planet Nibiru and plagues and pandemics and the Harmonic Convergence and the Yellowstone Supervolcano (which is still overdue for an eruption!), it's kind of surprise we're all still here.

This time, the world is going to end because we're going to be destroyed by a rogue planet that is hurtling in toward the inner Solar System at a speed of 200 kilometers per second.  So says a report on Turner Radio Network, which claims that "Dr. Kaplan, a Professor in the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin" has discovered a large object that is heading toward us -- and that even if it doesn't hit us directly, "the gravity will affect the Earth in terrible ways long before it gets here."

[image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Kaplan made a video (linked on the website) wherein he projected the planet's arrival time as August 2014, which is the only thing I find that is cheerful about this prediction.  It gives me the summer to recover from the progressive hypothermia I've experienced this winter, so at least I'll finally be comfortably warm by the time I get vaporized.  And it also means that whatever else happens, I won't have to endure another upstate New York winter, because interaction with the planet will cause "shifting of the tectonic plates on a massive scale."  I can only hope that our tectonic plate will shift toward the equator.  If that's an outcome of a planetary collision, then all I can say is, bring it on, because I have had it with the snow.

Of course, the other predictions are more dire.  "(I)f Kaplan's scenario is true, the problems Earth will experience would begin with weather anomalies and tidal anomalies, will increase to earthquakes then volcanic eruptions as Earth's magma is pulled by the gravity of the approaching planet," the Turner Radio Broadcast report said.  "The experts went on to tell us the troubles would increase further to horrific tsunamis 1000 meters high, moving at 1200 kilometers per hour striking coastal regions around the Earth...  One expert even claimed that depending upon the size and gravity of the planet, and its angle of approach, the gravity of this other planet could actually STOP the Earth from rotating on its axis.  He likened it to a vehicle traveling at 1,000 miles per hour, and having the brakes slammed on; the resulting inertia of all objects on earth would cause them to continue moving while the earth was stopping; sort of like what happens in a car wreck when the car suddenly stops, but the passengers fly forward from their own inertia."

So that kind of sucks.  And after the article goes into all of that, they ask a few pertinent questions, such as "Could a planet be moving this fast?" (Yes), "Can gravity affect things at large distances?" (Yes), and "Isn't all of this pretty damn scary?" (Yes).

But then, after all of this terrifying talk, Turner Radio Network posted an update that suggested that a few teensy details about the foregoing story might be factually inaccurate.  First, (Kyle) Kaplan is a graduate student, not a professor of astronomy.  Second, he posted a second video in which he retracted what he'd said in the first, saying it was "a joke."

The most amazing part of all of this is that Turner Radio Network printed Kaplan's retraction, and posted a link to the video, and then said that they didn't believe his retraction.  Yes, you read that right; given the choice between (1) there being a huge rogue planet heading toward Earth, which was only observed by one graduate student amongst all of the astronomers in the world, and (2) some dumb college guy decided to play a prank and it got out of hand, they decided that scenario #1 was more likely.  "Who would want it retracted and why?" the TRN writer said, his eyebrows wiggling in a significant fashion.  "Well, if people think they're doomed, they may stop paying their taxes and their bills; there may be widespread panic and a breakdown of social order to the point of chaos.  The powers that be can't have any of THAT, can they?"

No.  They can't.  So our only other option is that a giant planet is going to hit the Earth this August.  q.e.d.

They end, though, with asking the right question: "Is this a HOAX?????? That's easy for all of you to verify: Grab a telescope and look at the coordinates yourself.  If there's a planet there, and you see it getting larger (i.e. closer) over a few nights, then this is real and we've got potential problems."  They give the planet's position -- at least as of a couple of days ago -- as Right Ascension: 04 hrs. 08 Min. 08 Sec.; Declination: 60 degrees 56 arc min. 43 arc sec.  So it should be easy enough to check.  It's sort of like the joke:  "I asked myself, 'Why is the baseball getting bigger?'  Then it hit me."

Me, I'm not losing sleep over it.  If there really were a planet heading our way, one or two other astronomers would have had a thing or two to say about it by now.  I'm just adding this as line #452 on the list of End of the World Predictions Wherein the World Did Not End, and sitting back and having a beer and waiting for #453.  I think the next one is gonna be zombies.  We haven't had a good zombie apocalypse lately.

The error of their ways

I recently started teaching the unit on evolution in my introductory biology class, and that always gets me thinking.  The conflict between evolutionary (i.e. scientific) views of the universe and young-earth creationist (i.e. unscientific) models can cause a great deal of stress in students' minds.  Children of evangelical parents are often put in the intensely uncomfortable position of either having to contradict a teacher they may like and respect, or else betray the ideals by which they were raised (and in that view, perhaps jeopardizing their standing with god in the process).

Of course, it's not the only subject I teach that is controversial.  Climate change is at least as hackles-raising as evolution is, these days, and there is a small but highly vocal minority in our community that bristles at any mention of the value of vaccination.  And therein lies the problem; to what extent is it incumbent upon a science teacher to be straightforward about his/her stance with regards to controversial topics about which the scientific world is at consensus?

It's different for teachers of politics and government.  There, the fairest of us strive to keep our own views out of things, because (in the words of a former principal I worked for) we need to remember that children are a captive audience, and the line between teaching and proselytizing can be crossed awfully easily.  I have no difficulty keeping my opinions to myself when I teach the ethics unit in my Critical Thinking class; my stock line is that my views on the questions we discuss are irrelevant.  It is my job instead to needle everyone, and get all the students to consider their stances in a thoughtful manner regardless of whether or not they resemble my own.  "If you are really that interested in what I think," I tell them, "I'll answer any question you like... after you graduate."

The situation is different in science.  Science is, at its basis, not about opinions, it's about facts and inferences.  When an anti-vaxxer says that the MMR shot is linked to autism, (s)he is making a statement that either lines up with the available evidence, or else not.  And in this case, it clearly does not.  So to what extent should I respect a student's right to persist in an erroneous belief out of a desire to keep the peace, and to abide by my long-ago principal's dictum to keep in mind that we are not supposed to proselytize?

As I've grown older, I've become less and less cautious about this -- due, in part, to a feeling of "I've done this job long enough to know what I'm doing," and in part to a sense that to allow false beliefs to go unchallenged is exactly the opposite of what a science teacher should be doing.  I have no doubt that if our chemistry teacher was faced with a student who thought that atoms were made of tiny balls of cream cheese, she would not hesitate to say, "I'm sorry, but you're wrong."  Why are we so afraid to do this in the case of evolution, climate change, and the efficacy of vaccination?

The answer, of course, lies in the deep emotional charge that these topics carry.  There's a feeling that by so doing, we've crossed the line into dictating a student's politics and religion.  And while I do my best to keep my political beliefs to myself -- I steadfastly refuse to get into political discussions with students -- I'm well known in my school and community as being an atheist, and the last thing I want is to be seen as having some kind of axe to grind apropos of tearing down some poor kid's dearly-held religious beliefs.

But still.  The statement "the Earth is 6,000 years old" is simply factually incorrect.  So is "the Earth's climate is not warming up."  Is my reluctance to come out and say that to my students, to leave those erroneous beliefs unchallenged, effectively allowing them to remain willfully ignorant?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, yes.  Yes, it is.  There are probably kinder and gentler ways to say it, but in these cases, "I'm sorry, you're wrong," is a literal statement of fact.  We're not doing kids any favors by pretending along with them that they can hold a counterfactual worldview without being challenged.  It does put them in a bind, though; most of the kids I've known who were young-earth creationists, climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers have learned those beliefs from their parents.  But consider: if these kids can't be steered in the right direction by science teachers -- on topics where scientists have come to near 100% agreement -- haven't we failed to do the job we have been entrusted with?

It is not our responsibility to convince those children who won't be convinced, just as it is not our responsibility to ensure that every child studies and does his/her assignments.  That same principal I mentioned earlier also used to say, "Every kid has the right to fail."  It applies just as well here.  Faced with facts, logic, and rational argument, kids are perfectly within their rights to reject them.  But science teachers have to be brave enough to present those facts, logic and arguments, and weather the backlash that might result.  What I say to my Critical Thinking students could well apply to every student entering every science class we teach: "You may leave this class with your ideas unchanged.  You may not leave this class with your ideas unchallenged.  After that, it's up to you."

Flipping over "Flappy Bird"

I am astonished, sometimes, at how little it takes to generate a conspiracy theory.

Of course, at the bottom of it always has to be someone who is (1) delusional or (2) lying.  Or possibly (3) both.  In some few cases, we are able to figure out where the whole thing started (and as I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's frequently either The Daily Mail or The Weekly World News).  But more often, it's a random comment, claim, tweet, or Facebook posting by a random person, which somehow... improbably... gets picked up, is considered to be true, and goes viral.

That seems to be the case with the most recent conspiracy theory -- one that is only days old.  And wait till you hear what this one is about.

"Flappy Bird."

Yes, Flappy Bird, the new app that induces you to waste inordinate amounts of time trying to maneuver a deformed-looking bird through a set of steel pipes.  The game that generates nearly homicidal rage in completely ordinary, mild-mannered individuals when they almost complete level 8 only to run smack into a pipe because they tapped one too many times on the screen.

Flappy Bird was, for some reason, wildly successful, at its peak bringing in $50,000 of revenue a day.  This, by itself, caused suspicious narrowing of the eyes amongst the serious conspiracy theorists, who see dastardly plots wherever they look; but the real crazy talk didn't start until the news two days ago that Flappy Bird's creator, Vietnamese game designer Dong Nguyen, had removed the app from the market.

Within hours, rumors started circulating about why Nguyen had pulled such a lucrative game.  After all, having a blockbuster app is to game designers what having a bestseller and a movie contract would be to us novelists; "success."  It seemed impossible to believe that Nguyen had done it for the reason he stated, which was that he was overstressed by the game's wild success and "needed some peace."  Another suggestion was that "a major game manufacturer" had put pressure on Nguyen because the game resembled apps that they owned the rights to -- also possible, but at this time unsubstantiated.

But that was only scratching the surface, and both of those read like scientific text, plausibility-wise, compared to the claims currently zinging around the internet.  Here are just a few rumors I've seen:

• Flappy Bird was a Trojan Horse; while you are focused on guiding birds into steel pipes, it's stealing personal information from your computer.  Nguyen pulled it when Interpol realized what he was doing, and he's now on the run from the law.
• Flappy Bird has code in it that includes subliminal messages, rendering you a mindless automaton.  Given some of the behavior I've seen of students playing it, I'm not sure this is far off the mark.  But the game was withdrawn because the Illuminati threatened Nguyen, apparently because we can only have one set of Evil Brain-Stealing Overlords in the world at a time.
• Flappy Bird is a coded message having to do with the apocalypse.  Nguyen was trying to warn us of the arrival of the Antichrist, for some reason using a bizarre bird and pipes.  The order of the heights of the pipes can be decoded to tell us the date of the opening of the Gates of Hell.  Nguyen withdrew the game when he realized that the Minions of Satan had figured out what he was up to.

Then, the whole thing took an even more surreal turn when the rumor started flying about that Nguyen had not only withdrawn the app from the market, but had withdrawn himself as well, via a self-inflicted pistol shot to the head.  I was told this by some students this afternoon, and already there is an International Business Times article declaring that the story about his suicide is untrue, and further tweets and Facebook posts stating that either (1) yes, it is so true, or (2) okay, so it isn't true, but he's on the run so it could be true soon, or (3) Nguyen has disappeared, so we don't know if it's true or not.

And the whole time I'm reading this, I'm thinking: what the hell is wrong with you people?  How about let's see if we can find out some facts before we make pronouncements about why Nguyen withdrew the app, and whether or not he's still alive?

But as to Flappy Bird's purpose: as far as I can tell, it mostly exists to irritate the bejeezus out of everyone who attempts to play it.  I have yet to hear anyone say, "Wow, that is a fun game!"  Mostly what people say after finishing a game is unprintable, and is often followed by a wireless internet device flying across a room and crashing into a solid object, much like the bird did on the second pipe of Level 1 during my one and only attempt to play the game.

So I doubt if any of the other stuff is true, and my intuition is that Dong Nguyen is probably still alive.  But myself, I'm willing to wait to find out.  And until then: just calm down, okay?

And next time, can you spin a conspiracy theory around something more plausible?  Because this one kind of sucked.  If you people are right, and the Illuminati and/or the Antichrist have sunk to communicating via coded messages in idiotic computer games, then I'd just as soon throw my lot in with InfoWars and have done with it.

R.I.P. Nessie

I have sad news for anyone who is, like me, considers cryptozoology to be one of their favorite guilty pleasures:

Nessie is dead.

Yes, Nessie, a.k.a. The Loch Ness Monster.  That coy pleisiosaurid, featured in countless blurry photographs, many of them outright fakes.  That long-necked Scottish dinosaur who has starred in movies, has been the basis of a huge tourist industry, and was mentioned as a disproof of evolution in a biology textbook used in some Louisiana charter schools -- a textbook that turned out to be written by "Accelerated Christian Education, Inc."

R.I.P., Nessie.  In so many ways, we hardly knew ye.

The claim that Nessie has gone to that Big Jurassic Park in the Sky originated, as so many dubious claims do, in The Daily Mail.  The Daily Mail is, honestly, second only to The Weekly World News in providing the public with prizewinning journalistic coups running under headlines like "Miley Cyrus Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love-Child."  (Okay, I have to admit that I've never actually seen an article with that headline, but if there was one, I bet it would be in The Daily Mail.)  The Daily Mail is so often wrong that its numerous detractors call it The Daily Fail.

So, why, you might ask, are we mourning Nessie's untimely demise?  Did someone find bones?  Did a giant carcass wash up on the rocky shore of Loch Ness?

Of course not.  That would constitute hard evidence.  The reason that people have come to the conclusion that the Loch Ness Monster has joined the Choir Eternal is...

... that nobody has seen her lately.

I'm not kidding.  Gary Campbell, a "veteran Nessie spotter" who keeps a register of sightings, says that her death is the only possible explanation of the lack of sightings.  "It's very upsetting news, and we don't know where she's gone," Campbell said, in a quote that I'm not nearly creative enough to make up.  "The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn't seen at all.  Pretty much everyone now carries a camera with them in their Smart Phone - this allows then to snap what they're seeing and means that we don't just have to rely on eyewitness evidence.  As last year has shown, all the pictures and videos taken can prove to the expert eye that it wasn't Nessie that was being filmed."

Right.  The fact that since digital photography has improved, along with the ability to detect faked digital photography, we haven't had a single photograph of Nessie, means that she died?  You can't think of another reason, such as the possibility that in our day of everyone carting around cameras, it's becoming increasingly difficult to create convincing fakes?

Another Nessie enthusiast, Rupert Adams, added that it's not that there have been no photographs submitted for consideration:  "Although we had three entries, one was a wave, one a duck and the other wasn't from Loch Ness."

Whooo.  That certainly leaves me feeling the need for an explanation.  The Truth Is Out There, y'all.

 Skeptical Dog is unimpressed by your argument.

And if that wasn't enough, the article in The Daily Mail went on to suggest, in all seriousness, that maybe Nessie wasn't dead, she was just "on holiday in Australia," because someone took a photo of a bay in Queensland showing a creature in the water that screams "Fake!" so loud that my ears are ringing.  (The photograph is copyrighted, so if you want to see it, you'll just have to throw caution to the wind and go to the story in The Daily Mail, linked above.)

So that's our venture into deep water, both literally and figuratively, for today.  Me, I'm wondering what they'll come up with next.  I hope that it's about Bigfoot's Love-Child.  At least that's more cheerful than a cryptozoological obituary.