Order out of chaos

As regular readers of this blog know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates people to buy into irrational worldviews.

Some of them, of course, can be explained from wishful thinking.  The belief in an afterlife -- at least the more pleasant sorts -- is likely to stem from some desire to assuage the fear of death.  And the idea of divination, that you can predict what you're in for through supernatural means, may well come from a need for reassurance that the future isn't going to suck.

It's more of a mystery, however, why people would gravitate toward the less cheerful models of how the world works.  Conspiracy theories, and punitive sorts of religions, and belief in black magic and curses -- how can those be appealing?  I've wondered for some time if it may not be some kind of compensatory mechanism for feeling powerless, or because even a horrible meaning for the universe is better than no meaning.  But I've had no evidence for this other than "it seems reasonable."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But now, Jennifer A. Whitson of the University of Texas' Department of Business Management, has co-authored a paper with Adam D, Galinsky (of Columbia University) and Aaron Kay (of Duke University) that puts a lens on these sorts of beliefs.  Entitled, "The Emotional Roots of Conspiratorial Perception, System Justification, and Belief in the Paranormal," the paper appeared in the Journal of Social Psychology earlier this year -- and it sheds some fascinating light on this rather dark facet of human understanding.

Whitson et al. designed an experiment to see if what was going on was a response to something ramping up our emotional state.  The authors write:

We predicted that experiencing emotions that reflect uncertainty about the world (e.g., worry, surprise, fear, hope), compared to certain emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, disgust, contentment), would activate the need to imbue the world with order and structure across a wide range of compensatory measures... It has long been known that people experiencing uncertainty engage in processes intended to reduce that uncertainty... We propose that emotions which embody an underlying appraisal of uncertainty about the world will instigate processes of compensatory control, e.g., attempts to regain a sense of perceived control over the uncertain landscape.  When people are gripped in the emotional vise of uncertainty, regardless of the valence of that emotion, they will engage in mental gymnastics to imbue the world with order — from putting faith in external sources of control like the government... to seeing illusory patterns, i.e., identifying a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of unrelated stimuli.

So they tested 251 people, and and set up a situation where particular emotions would be heightened.  Different people were asked to focus on different kinds of emotions:

They were randomly assigned to one of eight emotions: happiness and contentment (certain and positive emotions), anger and disgust (certain and negative emotions), surprise and hope (uncertain and positive emotions), and worry and fear (uncertain and negative emotions).  Consequently, the design was 2 (certainty: certain, uncertain) × 2 (valence: positive, negative) between-participants, with two emotions in each cell... 

Participants were asked to, “Please recall a particular incident in which you were very [emotion]. What made you feel [emotion]? Recall this situation as vividly as you can. Please describe this situation in which you were [emotion] — what happened, how you felt, etc.”

The idea was that memories of situations in which strong emotions were experienced would create a re-experience of those emotions, and would change the test subject's perceptions of the world -- and thus, their confidence about how the universe operates.  And it worked:

When participants recalled an uncertain emotion, regardless of its valence, they demonstrated evidence of compensatory control in the form of greater government defense...  We further tested the robustness of the link from uncertain emotions to compensatory control by looking at a different means of imbuing one's world with structure and non-randomness — belief in conspiracies and paranormal activity (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008).  While beliefs in the existence of paranormal phenomena or vast conspiracies do not on their face appear comforting, they are appealing because they provide structure to the world, making it appear less random.  Indeed, there is evidence that even threatening beliefs which provide structure are preferred to believing that the world is made up of unpredictable and chaotic forces.  For example, individuals reminded of uncontrollable hazards in their environment will attribute increased influence to focal enemy figures (Sullivan, Landau, & Rothschild, 2010), and reduced control increases preferences for structured yet pessimistic outlooks on the progression of a disease versus less structured but more optimistic outlooks (Rutjens, van Haneveld, van der Pligt, Kreemers, & Noordewier, 2013).  Similarly, conspiracies simplify complex and unpredictable social environments by attributing events and behavior to one organized, malevolent force (Hofstadter, 1965 and Zonis and Joseph, 1994).  In general, “conspiracy theory gives causes and motives to events that are more rationally seen as accidents. By attributing motives to chance happenings, believers gain control of the uncontrollable” (Pipes, 1997).

So the Whitson et al. study confirms what I'd always suspected; beliefs in the paranormal, and in religions (even harsh, punitive ones), and in conspiracy theories, are attractive because they give answers and meaning in a universe that otherwise would be a random, chaotic hash.  Even in the absence of evidence, people who feel uncertain or fearful will gravitate toward something that makes sense of things -- even if that something is unpleasant, or makes no particular sense in and of itself.

For myself, I'd like to know the world as it is.  A reassuring falsehood is still a lie, and approaching the universe with honesty is more important to me than telling myself stories.  As Carl Sagan put it, in his essay, "A Universe Not Made For Us":

What do we really want from philosophy and religion?  Palliatives?  Therapy?  Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances?  Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish.  You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print.  The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science. 

Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. 

Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of Nature... and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants.

Meddling with science

Something I find really peculiar is the selectiveness with which people apply the tenets of their own religion.

Take, for example, staunch Catholic and Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum, who last month opined that Pope Francis was out of his depth to speak on climate change:

He’s someone who is as committed to the nuclear family as I am.  I’m a huge fan of his and his focus on making sure that we have a healthier society. 

I understand and I sympathize and I support completely the pope’s call for us to do more to create opportunities for people to be able to rise in society, and to care for the poor.  [But] the church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists. 

I think when we get involved with controversial political and scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.  And I’ve said this to the bishops many times when they get involved in agriculture policy or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the church’s main message is.

Some people have responded with comments like, "Don't you people think the pope is infallible?"  Now, even an atheist like myself knows that the official church policy is that the pope only invokes papal infallibility when he is "speaking ex cathedra;" in the words of Catholic Encyclopedia author P. J. Toner, "When, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church."  But shouldn't his word still carry weight, even when he's not claiming to be infallible?

I mean, he is the pope, right?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And as far as Santorum claiming that we should "leave science to the scientists" -- well, it's not like the politicians are scientists, either.  Hell, they don't even listen to the scientists.  So what it seems like is that the policy is "people speaking with authority should be believed as long as it's politically expedient and I already agreed with their position."

Even more striking are the comments this week from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who said that Catholics don't have to follow the pope's call to environmental stewardship because God has no specific opinions thereof:

The pope has the authority to speak on matters of faith and morals. Once you get beyond that, can you speak to other issues?  Of course you can speak to other issue, but I don’t care whether it’s Pope Francis or his predecessors or his successors some day, once you get outside the domain of faith and morals, be careful.  Be careful and be careful particularly when you get into the weeds and get very specific. 

For example, are we God’s stewards?  Are we supposed to take care of the Earth?  Of course, that’s out of the Old Testament, it’s out of the New Testament, it’s totally unobjectionable... 

The problem is, the more specific you get [on issues like climate change], Catholics will scratch their heads and say he's a very nice man. 

His encyclical on climate change will come out later this month, and he's going to speak to the UN, so we'll see more at that time.  And Catholics will offer him respect, but in terms of accepting what he has to say as guiding their thoughts, no, it’s not going to happen.  We know, for example, that even on issues as the death penalty, for example, or on gun control or on helping the poor, there’s a lot of different issues where Catholics can disagree on.  When it comes to things that are non-negotiable -- I'll give you two quick ones, abortion and euthanasia -- it's not my opinion, it's in the catechism, it says that these are intrinsically evil.  No one has ever said that air pollution is intrinsically evil.  So, people need to get up to speed on this.

So, basically, god is vehemently against the killing of one person at a time, but has no problem with the killing of lots of people at the same time -- such as in Beijing, where the estimates are that over 400,000 people die yearly from the effects of air pollution?

Of course, that's not the only place where the "word of god" kind of misses the boat.  Interesting how there are all sorts of commandments about worshiping god, and honoring your mother and father, and all that sort of thing, but never once does the bible say, "Slavery is bad.  It's immoral to claim that you own another human being."  No prohibitions against rape, either.  No, we're just given rules regarding how badly we can beat our slaves (Exodus 21:20-21) and rules requiring a rapist to marry his victim "and never divorce her as long as he lives" (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).

What Donohue and his ilk are doing is the usual; cherry-picking what they like from the bible and the catechism and the pope's declarations, and ignoring the rest.  So once again, what it sounds like is that we have someone who's making god in his own image.  Abortion and euthanasia -- which, allow me to point out, weren't mentioned in the bible, either -- are "non-negotiable," but the pope's commentary on climate change is nothing more than the musings of "a very nice man."  So take your own opinions and political biases and put those in the mouth of god, and dismiss anything else.

The whole thing reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell.  A fire-and-brimstone preacher was intoning to his congregation a litany of the evils they needed to avoid in order to escape being sent to hell.  Old Mrs. Jones, sitting in the front pew, was listening with rapt attention and great appreciation.

"And who can argue," the preacher thundered, "about the evils of strong drink?  Liquor is the devil's own brew!  Every sip scorching its way down your throat should remind you of the hellfire waiting for you!"  And Mrs. Jones took a pinch of snuff, and said, "Aaaaaaamen, Brother!"

"And immorality of the flesh!" the preacher continued.  "Fornicating and thinking lustful thoughts may make you burn inside, but that is nothing to the burning your body will experience in the fiery furnace!"  And Mrs. Jones took a pinch of snuff, and again said, "Aaaaaaamen!"

"And evil rock music, all that hootin' and hollerin' and chantin' of unholy words!  You must close your ears, brothers and sisters!"  Another pinch of snuff for Mrs. Jones, and a rolling, "Aaaaaamen!"

Then the preacher said, "And the horrors of the use of that evil weed, straight from the pits of hell... the evil scourge of tobacco..."

And Mrs. Jones said, "Wouldn't you know it?  He's stopped preachin' and started meddlin.'"

A visit to the holy construction site

Is it just me, or is Ken Ham sounding a little... desperate these days?

I suppose it's understandable.  Just last year his discriminatory hiring practices lost him $18 million in tax write-offs for his Ark Encounter project, and that's gotta sting.  He's challenged the decision in court, but seems unlikely to win given that he has made a practice of only employing fundamentalist Christians like himself, and the project's website states right up front, "The purpose of the Ark Encounter is to point people to the only means of salvation from sin, the Lord Jesus Christ, who also is the only God-appointed way to escape eternal destruction."

So not much wiggle-room there.  And with the funds drying up, Ham has to start being a little creative with revenue-producing strategies, or the Ark is likely to founder on the rocks and sink.

Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat (Simon de Myle, 1570) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now, Answers in Genesis, Ham's website, is promoting a new money-maker -- you can visit the site where the Ark Encounter is going to be for only $20 a head ($10 if you're a member of the Creation Museum).  Here's how it's described:

Visitors will have the thrill of witnessing firsthand the historic construction of Noah’s Ark, being built according to the biblical proportions described in Scripture. Our guests will safely observe the Ark from a viewing spot just outside the actual hard-hat area.  It will be their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see an Ark being built, which will become the largest timber-frame building in the world... 

From this vantage point, Ark visitors will be able to watch the crews assemble the support towers this month, and over the next few months see the placement of lumber and timbers in sections called bents (or “ribs”) on the Ark foundation.

Who could resist that?  $20 a person to see a construction site!  People must be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first for a vacation opportunity like that.  Can't you just hear the conversation in the car?

"Daddy, when are we gonna get there?" 

"Soon, son.  Pretty excited, aren't you?" 

"Yeah!  I can't wait to see the concrete posts!  And the steel I-beams!  And piles of dirt!  This is gonna be the best vacation ever!  I'm so glad we cancelled our plans to go to Disneyland!"

*Dad grins at his son proudly* 

So, yeah.  Thrill-a-minute.  I bet they'll make nearly $20 off of this promotion.

You know, what gets me most about all of this is that Ham et al. are spending millions of dollars, employing a crew of hundreds of workers, and taking years to accomplish building an Ark in order to prove that a five-hundred-year-old man and his three sons did the same thing using only hand tools and the materials available in the Middle East in the Bronze Age, like "pitch" and "gopher wood."  Whatever the hell "gopher wood" is.  But you have to wonder if Noah ran into the same sorts of problems that Ham has:

"Hey!  I'll let you see the pile of lumber that we're building the Ark from if you'll give me twenty shekels!  Another ten and you can come visit the kangaroos we just brought back from Australia!  For only fifty, you can be a Gold Star Donor and have your name inscribed on one of the timbers!  For a hundred, I'll... hey, wait, where are you all going?  Get back here!  I mean it!...  I hope you like drowning!  Bastards!"

So that's the latest from the Forty Days And Forty Nights crowd.  The sad part is that there are a good many people with more money than sense who are backing the project, so I'm guessing that Ham will eventually build the thing and pronounce it a triumph for the biblical literalist viewpoint.  He certainly seems determined to keep going -- come hell or high water.

Naked tectonics

Sometimes I think I don't understand my fellow humans very well.

I try my hardest -- in fact, you might think of this blog as a five-year experiment in parsing how people think.  And sometimes, I think I've got it, that I have Homo sapiens pretty much figured out,

But then, something will happen, and I'm back to wondering if I might not be some kind of changeling.  Because a lot of the stuff people do is just flat-out weird.

Let's start with an incident that happened on May 30 in the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Some tourists, who appear to have been from Canada and various European countries, had climbed with a guide to the top of Mount Kinabalu.  And once they got to the top, they decided to take off all their clothes for a naked group-shot.

Now, so far, I have nothing particular to criticize here.  When the weather gets hot, I tend to wear the legally-prescribed minimum amount of clothing, and back in my reckless 20s I would have been an odds-on contender for the Olympic Co-ed Skinnydipping Team.  That said, it bears reminding that we're talking Malaysia here, a country known for its conservative attitudes toward showing skin.  When I was in Malaysia two summers ago, I noticed some scantily-clad tourists in Taman Negara National Park getting the stink-eye from the locals, so I decided to keep my shirt on -- despite the fact that it was 95 F and so humid that you could just about drink the air.  I probably would have gotten away with it, but I figured that I had no special need to offend local custom, so I did what the natives did and kept all my clothes on.

But Mount Kinabalu is remote, and the only ones up there at the time were the guides and the tourists, so the ten tourists stripped down to the skin.  One of the guides objected, and he was told to "go to hell."

That would have been that, except for the fact that five days later there was an earthquake near Mount Kinabalu that killed eleven people.  And you guessed it -- a local government official has said that the earthquake was due to the naked tourists having offended the mountain.

The Deputy Chief Minister of Sabah, Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, said, "To me, when something like this happens, it is a clear connection of the incident to the earthquake that has brought about so much damage and loss of lives...  There is almost certainly a connection.  We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected...  It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly."

Right.  Because earthquakes have nothing to do with plate tectonics, or anything.  They are caused by naked people.  Which makes you wonder how the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America, the Anchorage earthquake of March 1964, happened, because I find it highly unlikely that there were many naked people outside in Alaska in March.  

But anyway, Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan said he vowed to have the tourists brought to justice, and was trying to find ways to prevent them from leaving Sabah.  And to further illustrate how serious he was, he mentioned that he'd known something bad was going to happen that day, because he and his wife saw a flock of swallows that morning.  

"At first I didn’t think anything of it, but after it went on for more than half an hour I knew something was not well," Kitingan said.  "I brought it up with my wife and we both agreed that something bad was going to happen."

So we have the beginnings of a scientific formula here, something like "swallows + naked people = bad."

But the story's not over yet.  Because in another weird filigree, one of the tourists, Canadian Emil Kaminski, decided to post one of the photos on his Facebook page.  Here's a screengrab, with the naughty bits blurred out in case (1) Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan reads this blog, or (2) the upstate New York hill gods are considering having an earthquake, or (3) there are any suspicious-looking flocks of swallows near my house:

Kaminski added, "It is not based in logic, but superstition.  I utterly do not care for superstition.  If local religion prohibits certain actions, then local believers of that religion should not engage in it, but they cannot expect everyone to obey their archaic and idiotic rules."

When someone responded that Kaminski and the others should respect local culture, he responded, "Fuck your culture."

Which is an attitude I can't really get behind.  I mean, I like being naked as much as the next guy, but if you go to another country, deliberately setting out to give offense seems like bad policy. 

On the other hand, I have to agree with Kaminski that the Deputy Chief Minister's statement is patently ridiculous.  When I read what Kitingan had to say, I said, "What century are we in, again?"  But then I remembered what Glenn Beck said last week -- that the torrential downpours in Texas were due to Governor Rick Perry's request that the devout pray that god end the devastating drought that the state had been suffering through.  And really, how is that any more sensible than what Kitingan said?

If the Texas storms were god's will, though, you have to wonder what kind of twisted sense of humor the guy has.  Because the rains and subsequent flooding have caused millions of dollars in damage, and killed at least 23 people.  "You want the drought to end?" god seems to have said, grinning in a nasty sort of way.  "I'll end your drought for you."

Be that as it may, I don't see the difference between Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan's claim that a bunch of tourists taking off their clothes on a mountain top caused an earthquake, and Glenn Beck's claim that a bunch of people praying caused a catastrophic flood.  What's next?  Major world figures deciding that thunder is caused by Zeus and Hera having a bowling tournament?

Oh, and in unrelated developments: senior Islamic clerics working with ISIS in Syria and Iraq have outlawed pigeon breeding as a hobby because "the sight of the birds' genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam."  Violators of the ban will be fined and publicly flogged.

All of which returns me to my initial point, which is that I don't really understand people at all.  Because if the members of my species really think it's logical to think that naked people cause earthquakes, and naked birds are offensive, then I'm back to wondering if I might be some sort of changeling.

Fracking, the EPA, and slanted journalism

Popular media make me crazy sometimes.

It's intensely frustrating to see science misrepresented by news outlets, and people unquestioningly accepting that misrepresentation as fact.  Some copy writer with who-knows-what background in actual science is given the task of summarizing scientific research, and then it's headlined with a catchy phrase that not only doesn't reflect the story accurately but simply reiterates whatever political slant that media corporation has.  Readers then take away from that inaccurate summary whatever they got from it -- sometimes only by reading the headline -- and interpret it via whatever biases they came equipped with.

Any wonder why the average American's knowledge of science is so skewed?

Take, for example, the recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency regarding hydrofracking and its effect on drinking water.  Here's a brief excerpt:

From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources. These mechanisms include water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.

So far, kind of an equivocal finding.  There has been some well contamination... but it doesn't seem to be very frequent... but it does sometimes happen... but there could be several reasons for that including "inaccessibility of information" -- i.e., the natural gas corporations not releasing said information when contamination happens, or maneuvering the people affected into silence via gag orders.

Understandable, of course, that the EPA wants to keep a low profile these days, considering the number of legislators who would like to see it defunded or dismantled completely.  So it's unsurprising that they're taking a "maybe so, maybe not" approach and trying to fly under the radar.

But that, of course, is not how the media spun the report.  The day the report was released, The Washington Times and The New York Post both had articles headlined, "EPA: Fracking Doesn't Harm Drinking Water."  The Times later amended their headline to read "EPA Finds Fracking Poses No Direct Threat to Drinking Water" after enough people wrote in to say, "Did you people even read the report?"  Which is marginally better but still not reflective of the waffling language in the report itself.  Even Newsweek went that way, with an article headlined, "Fracking Doesn't Pollute Drinking Water, EPA Says."

But lest you think that the conservative, pro-fracking media sources were the only ones who gave the report their own unique spin, the liberal, anti-fracking sources were just as quick to jump in and claim that the report proved that fracking was highly dangerous.  Common Dreams, an online progressive news source, ran it as "EPA Report Finds Fracking Water Pollution, Despite Oil and Gas Industry's Refusal to Provide Key Data."  Nation of Change had the story headlined with, "Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water," along with the following photograph:

So the conservative outlets told the conservative readers what they wanted to hear, and the liberal outlets told the liberal readers what they wanted to hear, and neither one reflected accurately what the original report said, which was virtually nothing of substance.

Add to that the fact that what little the EPA's report did say was immediately called into question, in one of those examples of weird synchronicity, by the resignation of Mark Nechodom, director of the California Department of Conservation, the day after the report was released -- over allegations that he had looked the other way while natural gas companies disposed of fracking wastewater by injecting it into central California agricultural and drinking water aquifers.

"Nechodom was named this week in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of Kern County farmers who allege that [California Governor Jerry] Brown, the oil and gas division and others conspired with oil companies to allow the illegal injections and to create a more lax regulatory environment for energy firms," an article in The Los Angeles Times said.  "Nechodom's resignation was unexpected, although he had increasingly been called upon by state officials to explain problems in the oil and gas division’s oversight of the oil industry and a parade of embarrassing blunders."

Not only that, a criticism levied against the EPA report itself appeared in EcoWatch, claiming that the writers of the report cherry-picked their data to ignore cases of contamination, including 313 documented cases of well contamination in a six-county region in Pennsylvania.  You have to wonder how much damage there'd have to be before the EPA did consider it "widespread."

So once again, we have government agencies waffling and misrepresenting the data, special interests and slanted media obscuring the real situation, and hardly anyone checking their sources, resulting in everyone pretty much thinking what they thought before.

And, of course, doing nothing about the actual problem.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.  Because what we need is responsible media, giving accurate and comprehensive reporting on issues like this -- not more shallow and skewed blurbs that do nothing but muddy the water (as it were).  And we need readers who are willing to follow the first rule of critical thinking -- check your sources.

And we also need government agencies that are willing to bite the bullet and tell people the truth, come-what-may.

And because none of that is likely, what I need is a couple of ibuprofen and another cup of coffee, because all of this depressing stuff has given me a headache.

Speculation, conjecture, and the Sealand skull

One of my attitudes that I've found is remarkably uncommon in other humans is that I don't have the need to have an opinion about everything.

When I don't have enough evidence, one way or the other, I simply don't know -- and that's that.  I find that this response especially annoys teenagers.  When one of my students asks me something like, "Is there life after death?" and I respond, "There's no definitive evidence, so I don't know," I frequently find that they come back with, "Yes, but what do you think?"  When I tell them that if I have nothing to go on, I don't think anything, I often find that they snort in my general direction and walk away.

It's not only a little mysterious that people feel obliged to form strong opinions about things for which they have no data whatsoever, it's mighty puzzling how they come to those opinions in the first place.  In the case of life after death, I suspect that a lot of it is wishful thinking.  The concept of simply being gone is, I have to admit, pretty disturbing, but I've found that the universe seems to be under no particular obligation to present me with reality that I happen to like.  So I'm sticking with "I don't know."  I'll find out sooner or later either way, and until then, I'm content in my state of ignorance.

So when a kid in my Critical Thinking class found a site about the "Sealand skull," and asked me what I thought about it, I had a similar reaction.  The Sealand skull was allegedly discovered by some workers repairing sewer pipes in a house in 2007, in the town of Olstykke on the Danish island of Sealand.  So without further ado, here is the skull in question:

So you can see why the question of "do you believe this?" would come up.  According to the story, the skull was taken to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and radiocarbon dated to between 1280 and 1200 B.C.E.  The skull is supposed to be larger than a typical human skull, and with the outsized eyes, people said that it must be the skull of an alien.

And that's the sum total of what we have to go on.  A photograph.  No hard evidence at all, since none of the sources mention where the skull currently is, who the scientists are who carbon-dated it, or anything else.  There's a brief mention of some group of oddballs called "The Order of the Light of Pegasus" who had a house in Olstykke and were reputed to be "the guardians of objects... believed to be mysterious," but searches for anything related to said Order all bring you back to websites having to do with the Sealand skull.

The whole thing has the hallmarks of a hoax, but do I know it is?  Nope.  To prove that it's a hoax -- or to prove anything else about it -- you'd need to have access to the skull itself.  It certainly seems to be an Extraordinary Claim, the sort of claim apropos of which Carl Sagan said you needed Extraordinary Evidence.  But we not only don't have extraordinary evidence, we don't even have your regular, garden-variety evidence.  We have no evidence at all.  At the moment all we have is an unsubstantiated story -- i.e., a tall tale.

This, of course, hasn't stopped people from spinning out all sorts of speculation about it, because nothing improves a zero-evidence claim like having zero-evidence conjectures derived from it.  So naturally, someone decided to do a facial reconstruction from the Sealand skull photograph, and came up with this:

So apparently, the original owner of the Sealand skull was Gollum.  Which is, honestly, rather surprising.  Didn't Gollum get fried in the lava pit in Mount Doom in the end, along with His Precious?  Because if so, it's hard to explain how his skull could have ended up in a house foundation in Denmark.

Be that as it may, however my intuition is that the Sealand skull is a fake, I know better than to rely on my gut for any kind of reliable approximation of what's real or not.  So I don't really have any conclusion about this, other than to say that if it is real, it'd be a pretty earthshattering discovery, bringing up the inevitable question of why the scientists who studied it weren't trampling each other to death to be the first people to write a paper on it.

But that, too, hardly constitutes proof of anything.  At the moment, the best we can say is that there's no evidence one way or the other for a claim made by an unknown individual about an alleged scientific study by unnamed scientists about a skull that may or may not exist.

So that's that.  Back to speculating about whether or not there's an afterlife, because even that has more going for it, as scientific support goes.

Message for you, sir!

It's an occupational hazard as a blogger that occasionally you get hate mail.

I was thinking about this because I got not one but two emails yesterday informing me that I'm going to hell.  I suppose that's natural enough, too, given my criticisms of religion, but two in one day did seem a bit much.  The first one was succinct enough -- it was in response to a post from earlier this year, in which I described a guy's claims that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster et al. were signs of the End Times, as hath been prophesied by the scriptures.  Here's what I was told, regarding that post:

Scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, "Where is the promise of His coming?"  For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. (2 Peter 3: 3-4)

To be fair, the person who made the comment is the guy who is made the original claim about El Chupacabra being mentioned in the Book of Revelation, so it's understandable that he'd more or less tell me to fuck off.  But it is the first time in my life that anyone has accused me of walking lustfully.

The second was more detailed, if only marginally more coherent, and was in response to a post I did two years ago about the "Quwave Defender," a device that costs hundreds of dollars and is supposed to protect you from "psychotronic manipulation" by the government.  I know from experience that the conspiracy theorists tend to be even touchier than the religious folks, so when you combine the two you get a mixture that makes nitroglycerin look like KoolAid.  Here's what the commenter told me about my opinions apropos of the Quwave Defender:

If someone such as Mr. Skepticism comes "just happens" to come across a site like Quwave and doesn't bother to research Targeted Individual harassment, etc., obviously the writer is guilty of the crime and spreading disinformation.  Entering the phrase, "targeted individuals in the usa" returns 54 million !!! results.  The overwhelming amount of information that is out there on this atrocity is incomprehensible in light of the fact the Mr. Skepticism and his partners in crime continue to get away with their sinister motives.  Don't worry, Mr. Skepticism, your crime ring will reign free....for a while.  Eventually it will fall like a house of cards, you can count on it. Then you will be homeless, hungy [sic], jobless, friendless, and dying...like all your victims.  Then you get to go to hell and be tortured far more terrifying and obscene than what all of you did to innocent victims in your lifetime.

So she sure told me.  It does cross my mind, however, that saying you get "54 million results" from a Google search is no indicator of whether what you're searching for makes sense.  Just for fun, I did a Google search for "magic alien weasel," and got 618,000 hits, which is considerably smaller than 54 million, but still pretty impressive for something that doesn't, technically, exist.  It also netted the following photograph:

So I was curious, in that game of free-association way that internet searches frequently exhibit, to find out where the photo came from.  Turns out it's from a movie I'd never heard of called The Man from Planet X, a 60s-era B-grade science fiction flick which sounds pretty amazing.  But better yet, the search turned up the photo because it had been used in a blog called A Writer's Universe, which at a glance looks absolutely wonderful -- a blend of science and fiction and musings about the universe, and you should all definitely check it out.

So a piece of hate mail threatening me with hellfire led me to a cool blog that I certainly will be coming back to.  One of those weird silver-lining things.

One of the funny things about blogging, and hate mail, is that I never know which posts are going to generate the most vitriolic responses.  Sometimes I'll post something pretty brutal, and when I hit "Publish" I think, "Man, I'm going to get blasted to smithereens over this one."  And... nothing.  Then I'll post something that seems so gentle and conciliatory that I won't give it a second thought, and...

BAM.

This happened just this week with my piece called "Bias Testing," in which I tried to strike a cautionary note and suggest that we all (myself included) need to keep our biases in mind when we react to a news story.  The news story I used as an illustration had to do with a Muslim woman, Tahera Ahmad, who was allegedly denied an unopened can of soda on an airplane, ostensibly because she was wearing a headscarf.  I even said explicitly that we only had Ahmad's side of the story, and that the airline was investigating the incident, but I was still lambasted repeatedly for being (1) a bleeding-heart left-winger who fell for Ahmad's obviously bogus story only because I suffer from white liberal guilt, and (2) a bigoted America-first racist because I mentioned that I didn't like Islam as an ideology, and therefore am complicit in the humiliation Ahmad experienced.

Well, make up your mind.  You can see as how I can't be both at the same time.  But that'll teach me to try to steer a middle course between two extreme (and, allow me to add, biased) views; you end up hitting the rocks no matter what.

So that's today's visit to the mailbox.  I've grown a thick enough skin after five years of blogging that most of the time, these missives don't cause me any more than a momentary bother, but it's still interesting to see what prompts people to respond.  And at least they're delivered via email.  Because even if it wasn't a Mortal Wound, I'd rather not follow in Fair Concord's footsteps and catch an arrow to the chest.