A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, caffeine, and various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, which misleadingly does not list "demons" on the ingredient list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no.  Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost... People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks. Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal.  Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just yesterday saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive. 

Unique, just like everyone else

There's this idea that the creationists just love, and it's called the Strong Anthropic Principle.  The idea of the Strong Anthropic Principle is that there are a lot of seemingly arbitrary parameters in the universe, all of which appear to be underivable from other basic principles, and which are uniquely set to generate a universe in which stable matter and life can exist.  The speed of light, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the fine structure constant, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force -- all of them are at values which, if you tweaked them a little bit in either direction, would result in an uninhabitable universe.

The problem is, the Strong Anthropic Principle seems to breeze right past two inherent flaws in reasoning.  The first is that the fundamental constants seem underivable from first principles -- emphasis on the word seem.  In other words, the conjecture that they are arbitrary, and that their value is an example of an intelligent deity's fine tuning, rests on our current state of ignorance about physics.

The second, of course, is that it's a completely untestable proposition.  Unless you're assuming your conclusion (that a creator exists) you can't tell anything from the fundamental physical constants except that they are what they are.  After all, we only have the one universe accessible to study.  It could equally well be that other universes are just as likely as this one, and have other physical constants (and thus are uninhabitable) -- and that we can ask the question only because if the constants in this universe were other than they are, we wouldn't be here to consider it.  (This latter framing of the problem is called the "Weak Anthropic Principle," and is usually the stance taken by non-theists.)

The general weakness of the Strong Anthropic Principle hasn't stopped it from being embraced wholeheartedly by people who are trying to bolster the creationist worldview, and it's the essence of the article that appeared on Answers in Genesis a while back called "Not Just Another Star."  The whole thing, really, can be summed up as "Aren't we special?"  Here's a sampling:

While the sun has many characteristics similar to stars, the Bible never refers to it as a star. This suggests that the sun may have some unique characteristics. Could that refer to its composition? The sun’s composition is a bit unusual—it has far less lithium than most stars do. Lithium isn’t very common in stars anyway, but the sun is among the most lithium-poor stars. Though this statistic is interesting, it isn’t clear whether it is significant... 

By God’s gracious design, the earth has a protective magnetic field that prevents the sun’s flares from disrupting life. The particles racing from the sun interact with the magnetic field, which deflects most of the particles. Yet we are periodically reminded about such imminent danger when the flares overload the ability of the earth’s magnetic field to protect us. Astronauts on the Space Station must enter protected sections of the station after a solar flare. 

Not all planets have strong enough magnetic fields to protect living organisms on their surfaces. Even on planets that do, the situation would be dire if the star’s magnetic activity were far higher than the sun’s. The much more frequent and far more powerful flares probably would compromise any reasonable magnetic field that a planet would have. Because this particle radiation would be harmful to living things, even secular astronomers recognize that variable stars probably can’t support living things... 

Our sun is just a tiny yellow star in a vast collection that could support life. You’ll hear this more and more. Don’t believe it. The minimum requirement of a life-supporting star is missing from all the other stars. Our God-given sun appears to be unique.

What makes this wryly amusing that the creationists are choosing this week to post the article all over the place (it was actually written a few months ago, but I've just seen it on evangelical websites in the last week or so) -- because two days ago, a study appeared over at Phys.org that suggests that not only might the Earth not be unique, we might be one of (get this) 100 million inhabitable planets in the Milky Way alone.

That, friends, is a lot of places to look for alien life.  And a pretty strong blow to anyone's impression that the Earth is The Chosen Place.  Here's what one of the paper's authors, Alberto Farién of Cornell University, had to say:

This study does not indicate that complex life exists on that many planets. We're saying that there are planetary conditions that could support it. Origin of life questions are not addressed – only the conditions to support life.  Complex life doesn't mean intelligent life – though it doesn't rule it out or even animal life – but simply that organisms larger and more complex than microbes could exist in a number of different forms.  For example, organisms that form stable food webs like those found in ecosystems on Earth.

Add that to the fact that as nice as the Earth is, even here we have a great many places that are pretty hostile to human life -- Antarctica, large parts of the Great Rift Valley, Australia's Nullarbor Plain, most of the Sahara -- not to mention 71% of the surface area of the Earth (i.e. the oceans) -- and the Strong Anthropic Principle is looking weaker and weaker.

So, yeah.  Nice try, but not so much.

It's been a continuous move out of the center for us, hasn't it?  First Copernicus knocks down geocentrism; then Kepler says that the planets don't move in perfect circles.  Darwin punches a hole in the uniqueness of Homo sapiens with The Ascent of Man, and various geneticists in the 20th century show that all life, down to the simplest, pretty much encodes information the same way.  Now, we find out that there may be 100 million places kind of like the Earth out there in space.

Some people may find that depressing, but I don't.  I actually think it's awesome.  For one thing, it would mean we're almost certainly not alone in the universe.  For another, I think that a lot of humanity's missteps have come from a false sense of superiority -- over the environment, over other species, even over other human groups.  Maybe this kind of thing is good for us; there's nothing wrong with adopting a little humility as a species, not to mention perspective.

Tuesday shorts

So it's summer, at least for us folks here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Living as I do in the Frozen North (better known as upstate New York), summer is a time to celebrate the fact that it is finally warm enough most days to go outside without risking freezing off critical body parts.

And in honor of the better weather, we're gonna have some shorts here on Skeptophilia.

[image courtesy of photographer Tinou Bao and the Wikimedia Commons]

No, not those kind of shorts, not that I don't approve thereof.  I'm talking about a brief survey of wacky stories around the world. 

We'll start in China, whence came yesterday's story about setting your crotch on fire to improve your sex life, so it's not surprising that we can find other loony ideas there.  From a story on the BBC News we find out that a zoo in Chengdu has forbidden its resident panda cubs from predicting the winner of the World Cup.

My first thought was: if you believe not only in psychic stuff, but in non-human animals being able to do psychic stuff, how would you go about forbidding it?  Would you stand in front of the pandas' enclosure, and say in a stern voice, "No clairvoyance allowed!  I mean it!"?  Would you watch for signs of mental telepathy from the pandas, and withhold their bowls of bamboo shoots when they do it, so as to discourage panda ESP?

But it turns out that they're actually not forbidding the pandas from speculating amongst themselves, they're simply forbidding them from cluing their handlers in on what they're picking up from the aether.  You might remember the whole Paul-the-Octopus nonsense a few years ago, wherein an octopus in a sea life center in Oberhausen, Germany gained worldwide notoriety when it would select the winner of various World Cup matches by taking food out of containers labeled with the flags of the competing teams' countries, and seemed to do so with great accuracy.  And people took him seriously.  His prediction that Germany would beat Argentina -- which turned out to be correct -- prompted an Argentine chef to post octopus recipes online.

But of course, the whole thing didn't pan out, either literally or figuratively, and his incorrect prediction that Germany would beat Spain in the final game turned out to be wrong, which kind of ended his popularity in his home country.

So the Chinese basically put the quietus on a plan to have the Chengdu panda cubs predict the match outcomes a similar way, that is, by selecting food from containers with flags.  The Chengdu research facility simply said that the "authorities had stepped in and halted the plans," without further explanation.  Meaning that any conversations, telepathic or otherwise, that the pandas have about sports will have to remain amongst their own kind.

Next, we have a story from Canada that gives us the good news that in the afterlife, everyone gets to be happy and contented and blissful.  Somewhat less good, at least in my mind, is that "everyone" includes "psychotic genocidal dictators."

Canadian psychic Carmel Joy Baird has sparked something of a tempest in a teapot by her claim that even Adolf Hitler has mellowed since his bad old Nazi days.  "He's with great-granny on the other side," Baird said in a television interview, in a quote that I swear I'm not making up.

Well, of course this didn't sit well with most fair-minded folks.  "Ms. Baird is entitled to her opinion about what happened to Hitler in the next world," said Len Rudner, director of community affairs and outreach at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Toronto.  "We are much more concerned with what he did in this world, which was to attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.  This is far more important to remember.  The souls that deserve our attention are the souls of the people that were murdered during Hitler's genocide and the souls of those who grieve them."

Which is certainly fair enough, although no one is addressing the point that Baird herself appears to be a fruitcake.  I mean, do people really think this woman is able to find out about the post-mortem status of major world figures?  If so, we should put it to the test.  For example, it'd be nice to know what actually happened to Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and D. B. Cooper.  I don't care so much if they're happily chatting with their great-grannies, but it'd be kind of cool to know what became of them during their last days on Earth -- a matter that Baird should easily be able to clear up for us.


Finally, we'll head to England, where some Shropshire sheep farmers are claiming that "aliens in UFOS" are "lasering" their sheep.

Apparently, the sheep have been found dead, with "neat holes" in their bodies, and also missing important organs such as brains and eyes.  The deaths came to the attention of Phil Hoyle, who has investigated other cases of strange livestock mutilation, and who came to the farm near Radnor Forest where the sheep were killed.  The area, says Hoyle, is also a hotspot for UFO sightings -- and the two are connected.

"The technology involved in these attacks is frightening," Hoyle said, in an interview with The Sun.  "These lights and spheres are clearly not ours.  They are built by technology and intelligence that's not from here."

About the UFO sightings, Hoyle said, "For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle."  He interviewed farmers after the incident, and said that "all but one had some type of unusual disappearance of animals or deaths with strange injuries."

Which of course raises the question of why superpowerful, ultra-intelligent aliens from another planet would use their awesome technology to zip light years across the galaxy, visit Earth, and then come away with nothing but some sheep brains.  Can't you just picture when the captain of the ship returns to his home world?

Captain of alien ship:  "Look, your exalted excellency!  At the cost of millions of bars of Ferengi latinum, we have traveled to the third planet around the star Sol, and we have come back with... this."

*captain holds up three sheep brains and assorted eyes*

Leader of alien planet:  "That's it.  Guards, feed the captain to the Rancor."

(Okay, I know, I mixed my science fiction universes up.  So shoot me.)


So anyway, there we have it:  some summer shorts for your perusal.  Psychic pandas, Adolf in the afterlife, and Shropshire sheep slayings.  I hope you enjoyed them.  As for me, the weather's nice, so I think it's time for a nap in the hammock.  Wearing shorts, of course.

Goodness gracious...

Are you feeling like your love life is a little cooler than you'd like?  Are you lacking in the ardor department?  Does it seem like you just don't have the romantic sizzle you once had?

If so, I have the solution.

All you have to be willing to do is to have someone set your crotch on fire.

I'm not making this up, and I wish I was, because after researching this I now feel like I need to spend the rest of the day in a protective crouch.  I picked up this story from Sharon Hill's always-reliable site Doubtful News, wherein we find out that in China, there has been a surge in the popularity of treating waning sex drive by placing towels soaked with alcohol over guys' privates, and then setting them on fire.

If the description wasn't enough, we have photographs:

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine that my reaction to having flames spouting from my reproductive region would be just to lie there, hands behind my head, with a blissful expression on my face.  Now that I come to think of it, I can think of no circumstance in which I'd allow anyone to come near my reproductive region with flames in the first place.  But apparently, the guys in China love this.  The article quotes a 33 year old banker, Ken Cho, who says, "It is all about keeping blood flow moving rapidly.  The warmth from the burning towels speeds the blood through the body and it makes me perform 50% better in bed.  I have tried all sorts of therapies in the past to keep my sexual performance up to speed but this is by far the best."

Which, of course, raises several questions.  With guys, the issue isn't with getting the blood to flow rapidly, it's more with getting the blood to stay put.  If you get my drift.  And the whole "50% better" statistic just makes me think he's making shit up.  50% better for whom?  Did he query his girlfriend one night, asking her to rate his performance, and then he went to get the Great Balls Afire Treatment, and they did the deed again, and she said afterwards, "Yes, dear, that was at least 50% better than last time?"

Somehow I don't think this is the kind of thing that lends itself to a controlled study.

What I really wonder, though, is how anyone thought of this to begin with.  Because, after all, some poor schmuck had to be the first to try it.  Can't you picture it?  Dude goes to his doctor, and says, "Doc, I've been experiencing low sex drive lately," and the doctor says, "Oh, we can treat that.  All we have to do is set your penis on fire."

I don't know about you, but I would run, not walk, out of the office.  Even if many of us would fancy being a Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love, this is not the way to do it.

So what we have here is a combination of the placebo effect, self-delusion, wishful thinking, and high tolerance of risk.  If there was any doubt.

Anyhow, that's our contribution from the Extremely Alternative Medicine department for today.  Bringing up yet again my contention that every time I think I have found the most completely idiotic idea humanity is capable of, someone breaks the previous record.

The war over tenure

I know how to fix the educational system.

It's so simple, I can even put it in a bulleted-list form.  Here's what you do:

• Shorten the time between teaching the material and giving the test.
• No make-ups or reteaching allowed.  If the kid doesn't get it the first time, (s)he deserves to fail.
• A student's progress will be measured by standardized, quantifiable assessments only.
• If a student fails the test for two units in a row, (s)he will be required to drop the course.
• The teacher has the last word about whether a student is dropped.
• Studies show that between 1-3% of students are "grossly stupid."  Because this is clearly the students' fault, and is unremediable, they will be expelled from school.

Pissed off yet?  I hope so.  But you might want to consider that all I did was to take the results of last week's alteration in teacher-tenure law in California, and stepped it down from teachers and administrators to students and teachers.

Okay, I know that I might not have played fair, and that the comparison between teachers and students is a bit of a false analogy.  But consider what the core of the changes have accomplished; shifting the balance of power entirely into the hands of administrators, ramping up the anxiety (especially for new teachers and teachers in poor schools), and gauging effectiveness solely by numerical measures that consider nothing but the all-powerful standardized test.  If we really did do something analogous in our classrooms, parents would rightfully be howling for blood.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But do it to teachers, and a lot of people just nod and smile.  Damn slacker teachers, getting union protection even if they're incompetent, plus two months off in the summer.  'bout time we tighten the screws, hold them accountable for the job they're (not) doing.  Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools, was thrilled by the ruling, and said, "The union's job is to protect the rights, privileges, and pay of their members.  They want their members to be able to keep their jobs regardless, and what this judge is saying is that we have to look out for the interests of children, first and foremost -- that we have to ensure that there's a high quality teacher in front of every child every single day."

Because clearly, teachers themselves have no particular concern about the interests of students.

I've been a teacher for 27 years, and yes, I've met some terrible ones.  But even the judge in the California case, Los Angeles County Judge Rolf Treu, says that "grossly incompetent" teachers account for only 1-3% of the teachers out there.  So how do you fix the problem?  Surely it's not by removing the legal right to due process from all teachers.  Put simply, you do not create good teachers by firing bad ones.

In my own school system, we've had staff cuts, increasing class sizes, and reduced budgets for supplies, equipment, and textbooks for the last ten years in a row.  We've had a steady decrease in instructional time -- this year, we've had once-a-month half-day "staff development days" that have accomplished nothing worth the loss of student contact time, not to mention foolishness like the state-mandated "field tests" that pull kids out of their classes for several periods in a row to take a pilot exam simply because the Department of Education wants more numbers to crunch.  It seems like on the middle and elementary school level, they're having some sort of standardized test every other week.  And now we're basing teachers' end-of-the-year score on these metrics, despite its being demonstrated over and over again that standardized test scores are inaccurate measures of understanding, and that other factors outside of teachers' control can have as big an effect as what happens in the classroom (most importantly, poverty, which no one wants to talk about).

Couple that with the lack of trust that upper administration, and society as a whole, has for teachers.  I know that I've said it before, but it's worth a reminder: did you know that in New York State, teachers are not allowed to grade their own final exams, because the NYSED is so afraid we'll cheat?  In several classes I teach, I've had to go to an all multiple-choice format for the final, because to do otherwise would require my training another teacher in the curriculum I teach so that (s)he could grade the exam fairly.

So: do more with less.  Less money, less supplies, less time.  Increase the penalty for failure to meet the benchmarks, up to and including losing your job.  Remove the protection of due process for all teachers, and simultaneously treat them with distrust and suspicion, so as to create a work environment that has maximal risk and maximal stress.

Yup, that should work just fine.

The cynical side of me is becoming convinced that these people want public schools to fail -- that the biggest social experiment the world has ever seen, that all children can and should receive a broad education in liberal arts and sciences, should be replaced by a merit-based system of charter schools.  It boils down to "break the system to show that it's broken."

Understand me: I'm not in favor of protecting bad teachers.  The whole "rubber room" phenomenon is idiotic.  For the truly incompetent -- and I think that even 1% is a high estimate for that category -- the road to dismissal should be short.  Just as with other professions, there are some people who simply shouldn't be teachers.

But for the rest, and especially for those teachers who are struggling, how about these suggestions, to counterbalance the tongue-in-cheek ones I started with?

• Increase the support that teachers get, and not just by useless "staff development."  Have young teachers, or those who are struggling, mentored by excellent educators.  And... pay those mentors well for their time and expertise.
• Use metrics other than standardized tests for measuring teacher effectiveness.  Especially in the upper grades, those should include evaluations by students.  After all, they're the clientele -- they know best of all if a teacher is doing his or her job well.  And in my experience, students are, for the most part, fair and articulate evaluators.
• Likewise, evaluate students using something other than corporate-developed standardized tests.  Teachers supposed to be the experts in instruction and assessment; let them do their jobs.
• Revise the current school funding system, that has bled school districts dry, resulting in staff cuts, programatic losses, and bigger class sizes.
• Trust that, for the most part, teachers know what they're doing.  Let's turn Judge Treu's numbers around; if 3% of teachers are incompetent, then 97% are doing their job in a competent fashion.  Doesn't sound so bad if you put it that way, does it?

I know that the war isn't over yet, not by a longshot.  The unions are already challenging the California ruling, and the battleground is being set in other states.  But we need to think through what we're doing, here, because the stakes we are playing for are the highest of all: the futures of our children.

A confluence of bad luck

I don't know if you are aware of this or not, so let me make sure you know: today we are having a full moon that falls on a Friday the 13th, and you know what that means.

Well, it doesn't mean anything, really, except that it's Friday the 13th and the moon is full.  And the latter isn't going to matter where I live because we're in the official upstate New York Cloudy Season (scheduled this year from January 1 till December 31), and the weather forecast says we're under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch all day long.  So the full moon will just have to rise without me watching, because I'm going to be safely inside, attempting not to get struck by lightning.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the coincidence has the woo-woos engaging in a  mini-freak-out, to judge by sites like this one:

Friday the 13th has been a taboo that has been carried for generations.  Usually, Friday the 13th brings many symptoms from fear, anxiety, and panic attacks.  It dates back in Christianity as the 13th guest at the last supper was Judas who betrayed Jesus but also it was also on Friday that Adam and Eve were tempted.  However, identified in a positive sense, is that there are 13 states of the afterlife in the Egyptian philosophies and 13 black cats are a symbolism of femininity. 

But for many 13 has been a very lucky number; people have won lotteries, have had their business change, and even opened businesses during that day.  Therefore, your perception and your thought will drive the root of existence and a full moon always brings endings to prepare for new beginnings.

So, basically, it'll be good if you think it's going to be good, and bad if you think it's going to be bad, bringing the concept of confirmation bias to whole new levels.  "Whatever happens to you that day, you can attribute it to the moon being full on Friday the 13th if you want to!"  Pretty convenient, that.

But add to the mix the fact that Mercury is currently in retrograde, and you have an astrological confluence that might well leave the gullible unwilling to step outside the safety of their houses.

Of course, there's nothing mystical, or even all that interesting, about any of this; whenever you have cyclic occurrences (as all of these are), eventually all of them will line up.  The Mercury-retrograde thing has been going on for twelve weeks, now; it's supposed to end on July 1.  Fridays the 13th occur between one and three times a year, and full moons once a month, so we're bound to see them come together sooner or later.  In fact, the site Universe Today did a piece on how common it was to have a full moon land on Friday the 13th, and it turns out it's way more frequent than you might have guessed.  Counting today, it's happened nine times since 1992, and will happen another six times by 2030, including a highly unusual two full moons on Fridays the 13th in the year 2025.  (I can barely wait to hear what the astrologers have to say about that one.)

So the whole thing is nothing more than an interesting pattern coincidence, and really doesn't tell you anything about what might or might not happen to you today, or whether it will be (for example) a good day to buy a lottery ticket.  (Actually, my considered opinion is that there is no good day to buy a lottery ticket.  I tend to agree with a friend of mine, who says that the lottery is a tax on people who don't understand statistics.)

So anyhow, that's the latest from the astrologers, which turns out to be the usual vague generalities that could apply to anything you want them to.  Myself, I'm not going to worry about it.  On the other hand, if I end up getting struck by lightning today while walking to my car after work, I'll give you my express permission to say "Toldja so" at my funeral.

Curing premature annunciation

As a science teacher, I get kind of annoyed with the media sometimes.

The misleading headlines are bad enough.  I remember seeing headlines when interferon was discovered that said, "Magic Bullet Against Cancer Found!" (it wasn't), and when telomerase was discovered that said, "Eternal Life Enzyme Found!" (it wasn't).  Add that to the sensationalism and the shallow, hand-waving coverage you see all too often in science reporting, and it's no wonder that I shudder whenever I have a student come in and say, "I have a question about a scientific discovery I read about in a magazine..."

But lately, we have had a rash of announcements implying that scientists have overcome heretofore insurmountable obstacles in research or technological development, when in fact they have done no such thing.  Just in the last two weeks, we have three examples that turn out, on examination, to be stories with extraordinarily little content -- and announcements that have come way too early.

The first example of premature annunciation has hit a number of online news sources just in the last few days and has to do with something I wrote about a year and a half ago, the Alcubierre warp drive.  This concept, named after the brilliant Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, theorizes that a sufficiently configured energy source could warp space behind and ahead of a spacecraft, allowing it to "ride the bubble," rather in the fashion of a surfer skimming down a wave face.  This could -- emphasis on the word could, as no one is sure it would work -- allow for travel that would appear from the point of an observer in a stationary frame of reference to be far faster than light speed, without breaking the Laws of Relativity.

So what do we see as our headline last week?  "NASA Unveils Its Futuristic Warp Drive Starship -- Called Enterprise, Of Course."  Despite the fact that the research into the feasibility of the Alcubierre drive is hardly any further along than when I wrote about in in November 2012 (i.e., not even demonstrated as theoretically possible).  They actually tell you that, a ways into the article:

Currently, data is inconclusive — the team notes that while a non-zero effect was observed, it’s possible that the difference was caused by external sources. More data, in other words, is necessary. Failure of the experiment wouldn’t automatically mean that warp bubbles can’t exist — it’s possible that we’re attempting to detect them in an ineffective way.

But you'd never guess that from the headline, which leads you to believe that we'll be announcing the crew roster for the first mission to Alpha Centauri a week from Monday.

An even shorter time till anticlimax occurred in the article "Could the Star Trek Transporter Be Real? Quantum Teleportation Is Possible, Scientists Say," which was Boldly Going All Over The Internet last week, raising our hopes that the aforementioned warp drive ship crew might report for duty via Miles O'Brien's transporter room.  But despite the headline, we find out pretty quickly that all scientists have been able to transport thus far is an electron's quantum state:

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were able to move quantum information between two quantum bits separated by about 10 feet without altering the spin state of an electron, reported the New York Times. 

In other words, they were able to teleport data without changing it. Quantum information – physical information in a quantum state used to distinguish one thing from another --was moved from one quantum bit to another without any alterations.

Which is pretty damn cool, but still parsecs from "Beam me up, Scotty," something that the author of the article gets around to telling us eventually, if a little reluctantly.  "Does this mean we’ll soon be able to apparate from place to place, Harry Potter-style?" she asks, and despite basically having told us in the first bit of the article that the answer was yes, follows up with, "Sadly, no."

Our last example of discoverus interruptus comes from the field of artificial intelligence, in which it was announced last week that a computer had finally passed the Turing test -- the criterion of fooling a human judge into thinking the respondent was human.

It would be a landmark achievement.  When British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the test as a rubric for establishing an artificial intelligence, he turned the question around in a way that no one had considered, implying that what was going on inside the machine wasn't important.  Even with a human intelligence, Turing said, all we have access to is the output, and we're perfectly comfortable using it to judge the mental acuity of our friends and neighbors.  So why not judge computers the same way?

The problem is, it's been a tough benchmark to achieve.  Getting a computer to respond as flexibly and creatively as a person has been far more difficult than it would have appeared at first.  So when it was announced this week that a piece of software developed by programmers Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko was able to fool judges into thinking it was the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman, it made headlines.

The problem was, it only convinced ten people out of a panel of thirty.  I.e., 2/3 of the people who judged the program knew it was a computer.  The achievement becomes even less impressive when you realize that the test had been set up to portray "Goostman" as a non-native speaker of English, to hide any stilted or awkward syntax under the guise of unfamiliarity.

And it still didn't fool people all that well.  Wired did a good takedown of the claim, quoting MIT computational cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum as saying, "There's nothing in this example to be impressed by... it’s not clear that to meet that criterion you have to produce something better than a good chatbot, and have a little luck or other incidental factors on your side."


And those are just the false-hope stories from the past week or so.  I know that I'm being a bit of a curmudgeon, here, and it's not that I think these stories are uninteresting -- they're merely overhyped. Which, of course, is what media does these days.  But fer cryin' in the sink, aren't there enough real scientific discoveries to report on?  How about the cool stuff astronomers just found out about gamma ray bursts?  Or the progress made in developing a vaccine against strep throat?  Or the recent find of exceptionally well-preserved pterosaur eggs in China?

Okay, maybe not as flashy as warp drives, transporters, and A.I.  But more interesting, especially from the standpoint that they're actually telling us about relevant news that really happened as reported, which is more than I can say for the preceding three stories.