Tales of the Black Knight

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, yesterday's post about crazy stories growing by accretion prompted an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asking me if I'd heard about the "Black Knight satellite."

At first, I thought it was some kind of obscure Monty Python reference, and asked if I was going to end up getting my arms and legs chopped off.  He said no, it had nothing to do with Monty Python, and expressed surprise that I hadn't heard of it, and provided me with several relevant links to explore.  Once again proving that trying to sound the bottom of the ocean of wacky bullshit ideas out there is an exercise in futility.  No matter how much nutty stuff I write about on a daily basis, there is always more out there.

So pop some popcorn, sit back in your recliner, and let me tell you about what I learned today in school.

Ham radio buffs know about the phenomenon called a long-delayed echo, which is when a radio transmission is bounced back to its origin a significant amount of time after it is sent.  There is, of course, a completely natural explanation; that the signal becomes trapped between two layers of the ionosphere, and travels around the Earth many times until it finally "falls out" through a gap in the bottom layer, to be picked up by receivers on the Earth's surface.  This idea isn't proven -- and there are some examples of LDEs that don't seem to be explainable through this mechanism -- but it's thought that this probably accounts for the majority of them.

Okay, so that's the first piece of the puzzle.  Add to that the radio signals that Nikola Tesla picked up, that I wrote about only last week.  As I pointed out in that post, there's something about Tesla's name that ups the woo-woo quotient significantly, so we'll just leave that there.

Next, put in a report from February 1960 from the United States Navy, of a "dark, tumbling object" that was showing up on radar.  It had an odd and highly eccentric orbit -- inclined at 79° from the equator, with a period of 104.5 minutes, an apogee of 1,728 kilometers, and a perigee of 216 kilometers.  Mysterious -- until the Navy stated that it was a casing from the Discoverer VIII satellite, which had been lost while following a similar strange orbit.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *cue scary music*

That brings us to 1973, when Scottish science fiction writer Duncan Lunan revealed that he had been looking through old radio transmission logs from Norway and the Netherlands from the 1920s, and had come across a radio message in a LDE that could be translated as follows:

Start here. Our home is Upsilon Boötes, which is a double star.  We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two.  Our sixth planet has one moon.  Our fourth planet has three.  Our first and third planets each have one.  Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.

The report evidently carried enough weight that it was published in Spaceflight, the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, and eventually in Time magazine and on the CBS Evening News.   Lunan later withdrew his support for the claim, stating three years later that the evidence didn't support it -- once again making the conspiracy theorists wiggle their eyebrows significantly.  How could a message have been translated, resulting in such precise information, and then later the man who broke the story simply backs off from it?

Someone must have... gotten to him.  *music gets even scarier*

Of course, there's the problem that Lunan is still alive and kicking, and still periodically churns out weird claims (such as his stating that the "Green Children of Woolpit" were alien children who were transported to Earth by a malfunction in a Star Trek-style matter transporter.  But that's a story for another post).  So if They got to Lunan, they didn't do a very thorough job of silencing him.

But even that's not all.  We have an incident in 1998, where an object photographed during the STS-88 space shuttle mission was alleged to be the same object that the Navy had seen on radar in 1960, even though NASA said that it was just a piece of a thermal blanket that had been lost during an EVA "spacewalk."

But that was it.  By this time, the accretion had reached a critical mass.  All of this stuff, people said, must be connected.  You can't just have random echo messages, lost satellite casings and thermal blankets, allegations of alien messages, and the name "Nikola Tesla," and not have it mean something.

So what does it mean, you're probably asking?  Here we go.  You ready?

It's a 13,000 year old extraterrestrial Mayan spacecraft called the "Black Knight satellite" that is still up there and relaying messages back to its home base on Upsilon Boötes.

At this point in my research for this post, I gave a quizzical head-tilt look at my computer, rather the way my dog looks at me when I try to explain a complex concept to her, such as why she can't bring the squirrel she just killed inside.  "Extraterrestrial Mayans?" I said to my computer.  "The Mayans aren't extraterrestrials.  They're just... people."

So I began to investigate this, and I found out how wrong I was.  There was this Mayan dude, K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who had his own spaceship, if you can imagine.  Here's a picture of him flying in it, a drawing of the design from the lid of his sarcophagus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But who says that this is a guy in a spacecraft?  Who says it's not just a Mayan dude leaning back in some kind of Mesoamerican easy chair?

Erich von Däniken, that's who.

Yes, the whole thing leads us to none other than the venerable Swiss author of Chariots of the Gods?, a book that reads like a bible of Ancient Alien Wingnuttery.  The guy who Giorgio Tsoukalos and the rest of the raving wackmobiles on the This Really Has Nothing To Do With History Channel consider to be nearly a god himself.

So here we have another good example of crackpot idea accretion, not to mention an illustration of the fact that if you could get Erich von Däniken, Alex Jones, and The Weekly World News to shut the hell up, the world would be a significantly less interesting but a significantly saner place.

Anyhow, there it is: another nutball claim that I hadn't heard of.  Once again, a hat tip to the reader who sent it along -- it was a fun bunch of threads to follow, although I must say that the headdesk I did when I found out that von Däniken was involved is going to leave significant bruise.

Accretion, eruption, and paranoia

Astrophysicists talk about the process of accretion, where microscopic particles of dust and ice stick together (largely through electrostatic attraction), leading to the formation of disks of matter around the parent star than can eventually form planets.  As the clumps of dust get larger, so does their gravitational attraction to nearby clumps -- so they grow, and grow, and grow.

Conspiracy theories also grow by accretion.

One person notices one thing -- very likely something natural, accidental, minor, insignificant -- and points it out.  Others begin to notice other, similar phenomena, and stick those to the original observation, whether or not there is any real connection.  And as the number of accreted ideas grows, so does the likelihood of attracting other ideas, and soon you have a full-blown gas giant of craziness.

It seems to be, for example, how the whole nonsense about "chemtrails" started.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) in 2007 was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

It seems like in the last couple of months, we're seeing the birth of a new conspiracy theory, as if we needed another one.  Back in 2011, I started seeing stories about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and how we were "overdue for an eruption" (implying that volcanoes operate on some kind of timetable).  At first, it was just in dubiously reliable places like LiveScience, but eventually other, better sources got involved, probably as a reaction to people demanding information on what seemed like a dire threat.  No, the geologists said, there's no cause for worry.  There's no indication that the caldera is going to erupt any time soon.  Yes, the place is geologically active, venting steam and gases, but there is no particular reason to be alarmed, because volcanoes do that.

Then, last month, we had people who panicked when they saw a video clip of bison running about, and became convinced that the bison had sensed an eruption coming and were "fleeing the park in terror."  And once again, we had to speak soothingly to the panicked individuals, reassuring them that bison are prone to roaming about even when not prompted to do so by a volcano (cf. the lyrics to "Home on the Range," wherein the singer wishes for "a home where the buffalo roam," despite the fact that such a home would probably face animal dander issues on a scale even we dog owners can't begin to imagine).

[image courtesy of photographer Daniel Mayer and the Wikimedia Commons]

But the accretion wasn't done yet.  The bison were too running from the volcano, people said.  So were the elk.  And then the real crazies got involved, and said that the government was already beginning to evacuate people from a wide region around Yellowstone, and relocating them to FEMA camps where they are cut off from communicating with anyone.  And when there was an explosion and fire at a gas processing plant in Opal, Wyoming two weeks ago, 150 miles from Yellowstone, and the whole town was evacuated, the conspiracy theorists went nuts.  This is it, they said.  It's starting.  The government is getting people out, because they know the whole freakin' place is going to explode.

Never mind the fact that the residents of Opal were all allowed back two days later, once the fire was under control.  Facts never seem to matter much, with this crowd.

So once again, the scientists are trying to pour oil on the waters.  An article in Wired yesterday describes recent research by an actual geologist (i.e. not just some crank with a videocamera) that has shown that the magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is mostly a semisolid, and is far below the threshold of 40% liquefaction that most volcanologists think is necessary for an eruption.  And we're not talking about some hand-waving layperson's "the volcano is overdue for an eruption" foolishness; this is a peer-reviewed technical study that merited publication in the prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters.  And about the conspiracy theorists, the article in Wired minces no words at all:

As usual, people are trying to rabble rouse when it comes to the Yellowstone Caldera. All these rumors that the government is trying to hide evidence of an impending eruption are pure fantasy, but that doesn’t stop some people from acting out their delusions to the detriment of others who fall prey to this misinformation. Yes, the Yellowstone Caldera is a massive volcano that has the potential to produce huge eruptions, but no, there are no indications right now that any sort of eruption will happen any time soon — and I’d be surprised if we see an eruption in our lifetime (just like any volcano that hasn’t had a confirmed eruption in the last ~70,000 years).

Of course, this will probably turn out to be shouting into a vacuum, as arguing with conspiracy theorists usually turns out to be.  Witness the fact that despite all of the research and debunking of chemtrails, the whole thing still has a considerable cadre of true believers, who claim that anyone who argues to the contrary is a blind fool at best and an evil shill at worst.

So look for more Yellowstone paranoia to be zinging about the interwebz over the next few weeks.  As for me, I'm grabbing the fleeing bison by the horns and going to Yellowstone in July.  We'll see if there's anything to all the hype.  I'm hoping to do some sightseeing and birdwatching and hiking, and simultaneously hoping not to be killed in a massive volcanic eruption or shot by a FEMA operative or hustled away into some godforsaken refugee camp.

Always the optimist, that's me.

My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art).

After discussing this with my friend, I got to thinking about the phenomenon, and I decided that I had to see what all the buzz was about.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

The lure of young blood

You hear a lot about how we're a youth-obsessed culture, but really, humans have always been.  The ancient Greeks had a real mania for youth and beauty.  Witness the myth of Endymion and Selene, for example.  Selene, the goddess of the moon, saw the shepherd Endymion asleep one night, and thought he was so drop-dead handsome that she asked Zeus to keep him perpetually youthful -- and perpetually asleep.  So he did, proving that sometimes being blessed by the ancient Greek gods was as bad as being cursed.

On a darker note, we have the lovely figure of Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary, who has been called the "most prolific female serial killer in history" -- the number of her victims perhaps being as high as 650.  Besides being a psychopath and (to put not too fine a point on it) crazy as a bedbug, Báthory allegedly liked to bathe in the blood of young women as a way to preserve her own youth and vitality.  It was this practice that she's best remembered for, and why she apparently was (along with Vlad the Impaler) the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Portrait of Countess Elizabeth Báthory [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I bring the whole blood thing up deliberately, because some research published just this week seems to indicate that there might be something to the whole youthful-blood thing after all.  Not bathing in it, however, or any other sort of superstitious nonsense, so don't start laying plans for beating the Blood Countess's record, or anything.

Researchers at Harvard have shown that there is a protein in blood that apparently functions to maintain physiological youthfulness.  More interesting, especially to us middle-aged folks, is that introducing that protein into the blood of an older animal seems to reverse the effects of aging.

Amy Wagers and Lee Rubin of Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology did a pioneering experiment in aging by first surgically fusing the circulatory systems of a young and an old mouse, and second, injecting an old mouse with a blood protein called "GDF11."  Both procedures had the effect of reversing the symptoms of aging in the heart, skeletomuscular system, and brain.

"I cannot recall a more exciting finding to come from stem cell science and clever experiments," said Doug Melton, co-chair of HSCRB.  "This should give us all hope for a healthier future... We all wonder why we were stronger and mentally more agile when young.  And these two unusually exciting papers actually point to a possible answer: the higher levels of the protein GDF11 we have when young.  There seems to be little question that, at least in animals, GDF11 has an amazing capacity to restore aging muscle and brain function."

Human trials of GDF11 are scheduled to commence in three to five years.

I find the whole thing simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.  I'm no great fan of aging; I'm getting to the "gray hair," "way too many smile lines," and "forgetting what I was about to say" stage myself.  And the one thing I'm truly afraid of is debility.  I can honestly say that I'd rather be dead than bedridden and dependent.  So the idea that I might be able, with a simple injection of a protein, to restore some of my youth and vitality is pretty attractive.

On the other hand, aren't there some ethical issues here?  Not least the idea that we're already, as a species, using up far more than our fair share of Earth's resources, largely because of our explosive population growth in the past two hundred years?  A population surge that was caused by our eradication of childhood diseases and increased life span because of improved medical care?  If we really could reverse the effects of aging -- and likely further extend human life span, at least amongst the privileged individuals who could access this treatment -- would that not exacerbate the problem?  Is doing something that would allow the rich greatly extended life spans truly a ethical thing to do?

I'm not sure I know the answer to this.  Nor, if someone came up to me right now with a nice little syringe filled with GDF11, whether I'd have the moral backbone to say, "No, thank you."  It seems to me to fall into that scary realm of something that looks extremely attractive but is ultimately destructive.

Which brings to mind yet another Greek myth -- the story of the goddess Eris and the Apples of Discord.

So maybe the capricious and smite-happy Greek gods might have something to teach us, after all.

The bully pulpit

Bully (v.) -- to use superior strength or influence to intimidate someone who is in a weaker position of power, typically to force him or her to do what one wants.

There.  I just thought we could clarify that from the get-go, because there are evidently people who need a refresher on the definition of the word.  I'm thinking in particular of Buddy Smith, executive vice president of the American Family Association, who apparently doesn't get it -- especially the "superior strength or influence" part.

Smith showed evidence of his poor understanding of simple English words last week, because of a discrimination issue in (surprise!) Mississippi.  You probably have heard that a few weeks ago Mississippi governor Phil Bryant signed into law a bill that allowed business owners to refuse service to LGBT individuals on the basis of "freedom of religion" (prejudice and bigotry evidently being constitutionally protected rights, or something).  Well, besides the challenges that the bill will rightfully face in the courts, fair-minded shop owners came up with a tactic of their own; to tell LGBT individuals that they were welcome in their shops.  If other stores wanted to lose business, that was fine, but they were willing to serve anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

So these stickers started to appear in business windows across the state:

Well, far be it from the American Family Association to take such a stance lying down.  Nosiree.  If you won't stand by us in discriminating against gays and lesbians, well... well...

You must be a bully.

I'm not making this up.  Smith said:

It’s not really a buying campaign, but it’s a bully campaign.  And it’s being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture. 

They don’t want to hear that homosexuality is sinful behavior — and they wish to silence Christians and the church who dare to believe this truth.

And as for the shopkeepers who put the stickers in their windows, Smith has the following to say: "If you do that, you are agreeing with these businesses that Christians no longer have the freedom to live out the dictates of their Christian faith and conscience."

Right.  Because selling a gay man a Snapple is exactly the same as saying that Christians have no right to live by the rules of their faith.

The choice of the word "bully" is especially trenchant in this context, because as a high school teacher, I see instances of bullying with sorry regularity.  And I can say that in my 27 year career, the single most bullied group of teenagers I have seen has been gays and lesbians.  Far from being (in the words of the definition) "(of) superior strength and influence," LGBT teens are picked on, discriminated against, and teased, and as a result have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts of any demographic in the United States.

Then there's the issue of the sticker campaign being an attempt to "trample the freedom of Christians."  The fact is, of course, is that no one is trying to tell Christians they have to be gay; what they're saying is that you can't discriminate against other people because they're gay.  Christians have every right to think that being gay is sinful, and that gays are going to be condemned to the fiery furnace to be tortured for all eternity by the God of Love.  Christians can choose to eat meat on Fridays, or not, or drink alcohol, or not, or get a divorce, or not.  Hell, they can decide that god wants them to superglue feathers to their face and cluck like a chicken all day if they want to.

What they are not allowed to do is to refuse service to people who choose not to cluck along with them.

What always gets me is that these people don't seem to have any sense that what they are doing is precisely the same thing that was done to African Americans by the Jim Crow laws, and in a previous generation, what was done to Chinese immigrants by the Chinese Exclusion Act.  Each time, there were demonstrations against the practice of legislating bigotry, and each time, the government finally caved in and halted it (at least by law; no one is under any illusion that it halted the prejudice itself).  The phrase "ending up on the wrong side of history" comes up frequently in these discussions, but people like Smith don't seem to see the parallels.

They are too busy fretting about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms than they are living by the words that Jesus said that even we atheists can agree on -- "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Especially the "thou hypocrite" part, Mr. Smith.  Especially that part.

Despite all of this, I still have the feeling that in general, we're headed in the right direction as a nation.  At least this kind of thing is making the news; thirty years ago, no one would have even considered this newsworthy, and most LGBT people were still safely in the closet.

Thirty years before that, there were still widespread lynchings and beatings of African Americans in the Deep South.

Progress is incremental, and quicker in some places than in others.  But progress is still being made, despite the efforts of people like Buddy Smith and his pals in the American Family Association to turn the United States into a Christian version of Iran.  We are not a theocracy -- which means that each of you is free to follow whatever religion you want, or none at all.

Other than that -- as my dad used to say, your rights end where my nose begins.  And if you are open for business, you have no right to refuse me service based on my skin color, hair color, religion, ethnic origin -- or sexual orientation.

Girding your loins

In the latest from the False Sense Of Security department, we have guys' underwear that contains a mesh of tiny silver threads to protect your privates from electromagnetic radiation.

It's not like this doesn't have precedent, I guess.  When you get a dental x-ray, the technician always drapes your torso with a lead apron to protect the rest of you from being irradiated.  The difference, of course, is that x-rays are high-energy ionizing radiation, while the radiation that Wireless Armour inventor Joseph Perkins is trying to protect us from is low-energy EM radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, which has not been shown to cause ill health effects (at least not in the intensity that most of us are exposed to).

Perkins, who in his promotional over at IndieGoGo says he has a background in physics, states that there has been a 59% drop in sperm count in men exposed to the EM radiation from a standard laptop, a number I seriously question -- the studies I've seen haven't shown any such thing, although there is some indication that proximity of the testicles to a cellphone in call mode for an hour can cause a decrease in sperm motility.  A study in Norway of guys working near radio transmitter aerials did show that they had lower than expected fertility, but this is a level of radio wave exposure that most of us never see.  There doesn't seem to be any connection between using a laptop or cellphone in ordinary ways and a drop in sperm count, or even an overall lower fertility level.  I mean, think about it.  Given the ubiquity of laptops and cellphones and so on these days, if they were actually causing this kind of drop in fertility, we'd be seeing a pretty serious crash in the number of pregnancies.

And I don't think that there's any evidence for that.  People, even here in the tech-crazy industrialized world, still seem to be making babies just fine, regardless of what kind of underwear we guys prefer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that doesn't stop Perkins.  His silver-wire-mesh boxer briefs are critical to "keep your troops from getting fried," a phrase that I didn't make up and plays off of every guy's worst nightmare.  The underwear works on the principle of a "Faraday cage," a mesh of conducting wires that blocks electromagnetic radiation, as long as the holes through the mesh are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

So Perkins' Wireless Armour would work for radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, as advertised.  The problem with the whole concept, though, is that the radiation that strikes our bodies under normal circumstances is of extremely low intensity -- according to Lorne Trottier, writing for The Skeptical Inquirer in 2009, "The photon energy of a cell phone EMF is more than 10 million times weaker than the lowest energy ionizing radiation."  Citing a great many controlled studies (and mentioning a few poorly-controlled ones), The Skeptic's Dictionary states, "(T)he likelihood that our cell phones, microwave ovens, computers, and other electronic devices (cause negative health effects) is miniscule."

There is, of course, the problem with laptops causing skin burns -- not from the EM radiation, but from the fact that the heat from the underside isn't dissipating well.  An article from the National Institute of Health warns against having a laptop against your skin for long periods of time with no heat insulation between it and you.  They describe "(a) 24-year-old man (who) presented with an asymptomatic reddish brown pigmentation on the thighs...  After an extensive work-up, burning caused by use of a laptop was observed...  Burning was induced in 3 days by using laptop for 4 h daily."

But silver mesh boxer briefs aren't going to protect you from heat.  Silver is quite a good heat conductor, so if anything, having silver threads in your underwear would make the problem worse.

That's not to say that Perkins's original claim is wrong, of course.  His Faraday-cage skivvies would protect you from the effect of high-intensity radio or microwave radiation, should you ever be exposed to such.  If you were, for example, standing in front of a high-output radio transmitter, and were wearing your Wireless Armour boxer briefs, your "troops would not fry."  The rest of your body, however, would heat up in the manner of last night's leftovers in the kitchen microwave, until you were piping hot on the inside.

Your junk, however, would remain nice and cool, if that's any consolation.

If you'd like, though, Perkins's IndieGoGo page has a place where you can contribute, and receive your very own pair of anti-EMR underwear.  The price varies between £14 (about $23) for a pair with mesh in the front only,  and £24 (about $32) for "360º protection."  This seems steep, but remember that they do contain woven silver thread, so I guess they're not cheap to manufacture.

The whole thing strikes me as unnecessary, though, and I think I'll stick with my previous three-pairs-for-ten-dollars boxers from J. C. Penney.

Computerized essay, computerized grade

Honestly, I didn't need another reason to hate the increasing barrage of standardized tests that has come to characterize the American approach to public education.

I've seen enough of its ill effects already.  Demoralized kids, who daily face curricula that have turned into a hodgepodge of minutiae and generalities, with little emphasis on connections or critical thinking.  The "teach-to-the-test" mentality becoming abundant amongst teachers and administrators -- driven, it must be said, not by laziness or ineptitude, but because they are now being evaluated by how well the students perform on these metrics.  Writing that is graded on meeting a set of bullet-point rubrics that often have little to do with depth of understanding, creativity, nuance.

But just yesterday, I found yet another reason to despise the direction our educational system is going.  Because apparently, the latest push in the educational assessment world is to take essays -- the last bastion of expressive thought in an increasingly fill-in-the-bubbles world -- and score them by computer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up.  There is now software out there -- Intellimetric, eRater, and Project Essay Grade, for example -- that developers claim can take an essay written by a student on a computer and come up with a score that matches to a high degree the score that would be given by a trained human reader.  There's also "WriteToLearn Automated Language Assessment" -- offered by none other than Pearson Education, who seems to be becoming to the educational world what Monsanto is to the environmentalists.

Proponents say that humans are fallible, biased, tire easily, can be sloppy, can cheat.  Which is all true, of course.  But the people who are using machine scoring of essays are confident to the point of hubris: "ETS has been at the forefront of research in automated scoring of open-ended items for over two decades," reads the description of the use of automated scoring protocols on the Educational Testing Service website, "with a long list of significant, peer-reviewed research publications as evidence of our activity in the field.  ETS scientists have published on automated scoring issues in the major journals of the educational measurement, computational linguistics and language testing fields.  Their work has also resulted in 19 U.S. patents related to applying NLP in assessment, significantly more than any other organization."

And it's already in use.  The GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) essays are at least in part machine scored, and the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) assessments are supposed to be following suit in the 2014-2015 school year.  So evidently, the ETS people and their pals at Pearson and other educational software development corporations have done their public relations jobs well.  The educational establishment, it seems, is sold on automated essay scoring.

Which puts them in a kind of awkward position apropos of a piece of research published in Phys.org just yesterday, which showed that a simple piece of software called "BABEL" (Basic Automated B.S. Essay Language), developed by programmer Les Perelman at MIT, can produce a high-scoring essay, according to the automated scoring software -- despite the fact that the output of BABEL is meaningless gibberish.

Which implies that students could do the same.  Further implying that what the automated scoring programs are detecting is not writing quality.

Given the prompt to write about "privacy," BABEL produced an essay that scored a 5.4 out of a possible 6, according to the automated scoring software, despite the fact that it contained the sentence, "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent."  The whole essay was written that way, i.e., complete and utter bullshit, composed of random words strung together into fancy-sounding complex sentences with lots of commas and subordinate clauses. Since the automated scoring software was looking for complexity of sentence structure, word length, and word commonness as some of its criteria for the overall score, and could not actually discern the meaning (or lack thereof) of the passage, the program was fooled.

Which means, of course, that there's no reason that humans couldn't similarly game the program.  Learn how to string some ten-dollar words together, put in a few cool phrases like "will certainly be, despite suggestions to the contrary," and figure out how to do parallel construction, and apparently it doesn't matter if you're saying anything that's meaningful.

Look, I know I'm a bit of a Luddite, but it's not that I don't trust technology per se.  I just think that thus far, it has some significant limitations.  We are not yet -- and chances are, won't be for some time -- within hailing distance of a sentient computer, that would be able to understand the nuance and connotation of written or spoken language.  All of the apps and programs and bells and whistles that seem to be taking the educational world by storm are no replacement for a truly engaging teacher.  Even if the software improves dramatically, I would question its utility as anything more than a clever teaching tool, and something that a skilled teacher really can get along just fine without.

But I find the idea that we are further mechanizing the act of teaching -- an act that is, when done well, far more an art form than it is a science -- profoundly repulsive.  As of two years ago, we were told by the state of New York that we teachers are not trusted sufficiently to grade our own final exams, so we have to give the exams to other teachers to score.  Now, apparently, we're moving to taking the assessment of our students out of human hands entirely.

Next, I fear, we will see the teachers themselves replaced by software -- with the ETS and Pearson and so on lauding the changes as visionary, and describing the "peer-reviewed research" the scientists on their payroll are doing, that shows how effective it all is.  "Students learn best with an interactive computer-based tutorial," I can see the press release saying.  "We have been at the forefront of non-teacher-based instruction for decades!"

No teachers necessary, right?  Just some low-paid aides to keep the kids pointed at the computer screens.  Consider the savings to the taxpayer!

More and more we are seeing an emphasis on processing children through factory-model schools, as if they were little automata that could be tweaked and turned and programmed and all come out identically "career and college ready."  There is scant emphasis on creative, original thought, because, after all, how could you assess that, turn it into a number?  And you know, if you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist.

And I suspect that Perelman's result with BABEL will be met with a thunderous silence.  The educational establishment has a sorry history of ignoring research that would cause them to have to make a shift in the status quo, especially when said status quo is making a lot of money for the corporations that are now holding the purse strings.

Easier, apparently, to brush off a 5.4/6 on a nonsense essay than it is to admit that the entire system is headed in exactly the wrong direction.