Myths, hoaxes, and Zardulu

Unless you avoid social media entirely, you've probably seen the photograph of a raccoon hitching a ride on the back of an alligator.  It caught on because of its sheer weirdness, and was widely circulated on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.

What you may not know is that it's a fake.  It's cleverly done, I'll admit, but it's an admitted hoax by a woman who calls herself "Zardulu," and who has been responsible for a number of photo and video hoaxes, one of the best known of which is "Pizza Rat:"

She's also responsible for a photoshopped image of a "three-eyed catfish" that was allegedly caught, and started a panic over toxins and/or mutagens in waterways:

"Zardulu," who refuses to give her name or show her face in public, agreed to an interview in The Washington Post a couple of days ago.  In the interview, which you can watch a clip of at the link provided, "Zardulu" appears wearing a creepy-looking bearded mask.  She is also completely unapologetic about suckering people.

These aren't hoaxes, she says, they are "myths," "pearls of merriment for the world to enjoy."  "Why wake the world from a beautiful dream," she says, "when the waking world is all so drab?"

She's even put out a manifesto, which would be an odds-on winner in the Pompous, Self-Righteous Artist's Statement contest of 2016.  Here's an excerpt:

All that once truthfully lived is now a mere effigy.  Images have displaced authentic human interaction.  Before the advent of the Internet, human life was already not about living, but about having.  Those who wished to exploit us produced images to dictate what we needed and desired.  While this continues today, social life has moved further, leaving a condition of having and moving to a state of simply appearing as the image. 

Zardulism is the art of creating and perpetuating myths.  Dramatic images and language created for the purpose of reawakening and following of genuine desires, experiencing the pleasure of life. 

In Zardulism, the imaginary streams into the actual and washes over it, floods it until it has been engrossed.  In a world where nothing is absolutely real, appearance becomes meaningless and our presumption of truth in what we were told is lost.

What I object to about all of this is not that some pretentious artist has found a way to weasel her way into the public eye with a publicity stunt.  She's hardly the first pretentious artist to do that, after all.  What bugs me is that she's blathering on about "living truthfully," when by "creating myths" what she actually means is "manufacturing hoaxes and bamboozling people."

To be fair, she's even-handed about other people's hoaxes.  You've probably heard of the Cottingley Fairies, the photograph that fooled the great Arthur Conan Doyle:

"Zardulu" thinks the Cottingley Fairies are awesome.  She says, "It was decades before anyone used the term hoax, when eventually the girls came forward and admitted what they had done.  I think that it is delightful.  Absolutely delightful to have given the world such a gift.  And it does indeed resonate with me particularly that the truth [did come out.]"

The problem, of course, is that this kind of hoax causes people to doubt everything they see, devaluing media as a whole.  I can't put it any more eloquently than Sharon Hill does, over at her outstanding site Doubtful News:

The fact is, our media system of news and information is already poisoned and rickety.  We have so much bullshit asshattery and hoaxing going on in the world today that affects peoples’ lives – their feelings towards their government, their opinions on policy and law, their choice of medical treatment, what kind of food they buy, and how they vote.  Hoaxing is not generally funny, it makes people feel foolish and angry.  They also do not necessarily learn from being conned because they often lack the foundation and skills to think critically about anything...  This artist is in no sense “brightening the world” by faking charming scenes people like or making people scared of environmental harm (the mutant catfish).  By presenting lies as not untrue, she reveals that people are dark and perverse and what may seem adorable and special is really manufactured and ugly.

To which I can only say, "Amen."  We already have enough people creating fake news to get the advertising revenue, we really don't need someone doing the same thing in the name of art.  If you want to create myths, do it the way that our great modern mythmakers and visionaries do -- people like Neil Gaiman, Alex Grey, Terry Pratchett, and Thijme Termaat -- by creating beauty, and being honest about what they're offering.  They know that the most important role of any creative endeavor is to portray the eternal truths, even in a fictional setting.

Zardulu, on the other hand, would prefer to portray banal frauds and pass them off as the truth.

Sunk cost and treason

There's this thing called the sunk-cost fallacy -- that once a person has put a lot of time, money, effort, or emotional investment into something, they are unlikely admit that it didn't live up to its expectations.

This is the only thing I can come up with to explain why Republican leaders are still sticking with Donald Trump, even after credible allegations that not only did the Russians tamper with the election results, Trump encouraged them to do so.  Giving a foreign power access to our government for malign purposes is, I thought, the definition of treason.  Imagine, for example, if there were evidence that Barack Obama had allowed a foreign government to manipulate election results.  These same people who are giving Trump a pass on this, or ignoring it completely, would be calling for reinstating crucifixion.

To be fair, some Republicans are aghast at this.  Lindsey Graham has been outspoken in his call for an independent investigation of the allegations.  John McCain went even further, saying that if the claims are true, it could "destroy democracy" in the United States.  Even Mitch McConnell, who has been one of Trump's biggest supporters, has joined in the call.  Much as I hate to admit agreeing with Joe Walsh on anything, he hit the nail on the head a few days ago with this tweet:

Which is it exactly.  I would think that anyone, regardless of party affiliation, would be appalled at the idea that the Russians may have influenced a national election, and would want it investigated.

But astonishingly, that isn't what's happening.  Other than a few outspoken conservatives who want the issue looked at -- if for no other reason, to clear Trump's name and get rid of any taint of illegitimacy -- most Republicans are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh.  No biggie."

Now wait just a moment.  These were the same people who were chanting "Lock her up!" because of allegations that Hillary Clinton mishandled some emails.  Instead, what has been the overall response?

An increase in the positive ratings of Vladimir Putin.

I'm not making this up.  In a poll conducted by The Economist, favorable ratings for Putin tripled in the past two years, most of the increase being in the last month.  In fact, Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California made the following astonishing statement: "There’s a lot of negative things about [Putin] that are accurate but there are a lot of negative things about him that have been said that are inaccurate.  At least the other other side of the coin is being heard now...  Finally there’s some refutation of some of the inaccurate criticisms finally being heard."

So instead of people being outraged that Putin and his cronies may have interfered in the election, they're saying, "Well, maybe Putin's not so bad after all."

I can't think of anything but sunk cost as an explanation for this.  These people have already overlooked so much in the way of Donald Trump's unethical behavior, evasions, and outright lies, not to mention his blatant lack of qualifications for the job, that to admit that this finally drives them over the edge would require a huge shift of perspective.  I've never seen a candidate that elicits such an enormous emotional response from ordinary citizens; huge investments of time and energy have been put into seeing him in the White House.  For the pro-Trump cadre to say "Okay, we were wrong about him" is apparently a bridge too far.  Easier to say, "Trump's got to be right, so we were wrong about Putin."

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agrees.  He said, "The Republican base, particularly the Trump part of the Republican base, is going to regard anyone and anything that helped their great leader to win as a positive force, or at least a less negative force."

I hope that wise heads prevail and that the allegations are at least investigated.  And although I don't like Trump, I hope they turn out to be false, because the idea that the Russians (or any other country) are able to manipulate our government so boldly is profoundly terrifying.  But if they are true -- if the evidence supports the Russian hacks -- we have to act.  I'm no constitutional law scholar, but there has to be some provision for invalidating an election's results if the outcome was affected by a foreign power.

Especially if a cold, calculating villain like Vladimir Putin is responsible for it.

The risks of paltering

In Richard Feynman's brilliant autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he tells the story of his experience as an undergraduate practical joker.  One day while his fraternity brothers were asleep, he took one of the frat house doors off its hinges and hid it behind the oil tank in the basement.  Of course, when the theft was discovered, everyone wanted to know which of them had pilfered the door.  Everyone denied it but Feynman:

I was coming down the stairs and they said, "Feynman!  Did you take the door?" 

"Oh, yeah," I said.  "I took the door.  You can see the scratches on my knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was carrying it down into the basement."

Knowing Feynman to be a wiseass, everyone rolled their eyes and assumed he was lying.

The door stayed missing, and still no one confessed.  (Well, actually, someone had, of course!)  Finally the president of the fraternity was so miffed that he called a general meeting at dinner time and asked each member to swear on his word of honor whether or not he'd taken the door:

So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack, did you take the door?" 

"No, sir, I did not take the door." 

"Tim: did you take the door?" 

"No, sir!  I did not take the door!" 

"Maurice, did you take the door?" 

"No, I did not take the door, sir." 

"Feynman, did you take the door?" 

"Yeah, I took the door." 

"Cut it out, Feynman, this is serious!  Sam: did you take the door..."  It went all the way around.  Everyone was shocked.  There must be some real rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor! 

That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back. 

Some time later I finally admitted to taking the door, and I was accused by everybody of lying.  They couldn't remember what I had said.  All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door.  The idea they remembered, but not the words!

I always use this story in my Critical Thinking classes to spur a discussion into the nature of lying.  Was Feynman, by deliberately telling the truth so unconvincingly that no one believed him, actually guilty of lying?

I didn't know until yesterday that this practice actually has a name: misleading by telling the truth is called paltering, and was the subject of a study released just last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Called "Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others," the study (by Todd Rogers, Richard Zeckhauser, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton of Harvard, and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania) shows that paltering works -- but it comes with a cost.

Professor Richard Feynman, palterer extraordinaire [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Their experiment presented volunteers with a variety of scenarios in which people are represented as lying outright, misleading by omission, and misleading by paltering -- telling the truth in such a way as to mislead.  The scenarios included negotiations for a car purchase, negotiations over the sale of a piece of property, and negotiations over the development of a piece of property for commercial use.  The results were strikingly uniform; lying outright was considered the most unethical, but paltering was close -- especially when the palter was made in response to a direct question (as it was in Feynman's case).  The authors write:

Taken together, our studies identify paltering as a distinct and frequently employed form of deception. Paltering is a common negotiation tactic.  Negotiators who palter claim value but also increase the likelihood of impasse and, if discovered, risk harm to their reputations.  This latter finding suggests that those who might view paltering as a (deceptive) strategy for claiming more value in a negotiation must be cautious.  It may be effective in the short-term but harmful to relationships if discovered.

Which is exactly what Feynman discovered.  People are much more likely to focus on the results and the intent -- they care less about the actual words spoken.  So a palterer who says after being found out, "But I told the literal truth!  It's not my fault you interpreted it wrong!" is not likely to gain much in the way of credibility.  In fact, they are generally looked upon as only a tiny notch above someone who told a bald-faced lie.

This does open up an interesting question, though; to what extent is it incumbent upon the recipient of information to be smart enough (or do enough research) to detect when lying or paltering is occurring?  I'm not trying to blame the victim, here; but the principle of caveat emptor has been around for millennia, and I have to admit that I tend to lose sympathy with someone who got hoodwinked when a bit of quick research could have uncovered the deception.  As with everything in the realm of ethics, there are no easy, hard-and-fast answers.  But it's nice to have a word to put on lying-by-telling-the-truth,  and it gives us one more thing to be on the lookout for in car negotiations, real estate purchases -- and political discussions.

Mind over matter

Once a week, my Critical Thinking classes are required to find an example in the media of one of the concepts we've covered -- logical fallacies, biases, arguments (good and bad), pseudoscience, and ethical issues.  Over the course of the semester, my students become pretty good at ferreting out bad thinking, not to mention digging up all sorts of goofy stuff in newspapers, magazines, and online.

And this week, one of my students found a doozy.  It's a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time something about the President-elect appeared in the news.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanislawa Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me.  The author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses.  That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't say any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

But anyhow, apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, you can interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it. You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  And sure enough, a year ago I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, as much fun as it could be.  But feel free to give it all a try.  Let me know, though, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

Uncommon sense

One statement that completely makes me crazy -- right up there with "evolution is only a theory" -- is "scientists have been wrong before, so everything science says could be proven wrong tomorrow."

The latest person to make this infuriating pronouncement as a way of ignoring what the science actually does say is Anthony Scaramucci, aide to President-elect Trump and member of his Transition Team Executive Committee.  Here's what Scaramucci said:

I know that the current president believes that human beings are affecting the climate.  There are scientists that believe that that's not happening...  I'm not suggesting that we're not affecting the change.  I honestly don't know. 

There was overwhelming science that the earth was flat and there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world.  We get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community.  You've got a very common-sense oriented president at the top of the chain now.  Some of the stuff you're reading and some of the stuff I'm reading is very ideologically-based about the climate.  We don't want it to be that way...

What I want to do is I want to have a problem solving-oriented, common sense, solution-based administration, because that’s what the president-elect has given us a directive to do here at Trump Tower...  [Y]ou’re saying the scientific community knows, and I’m saying people have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet. 

Scaramucci hastens to add, in case there was any doubt in that regard, "I am not a scientist."

*brief pause to punch a wall*

There are so many wrong things packed into this short statement that I barely know where to begin.  First, as I've said 253,892 times before, the argument over whether climate change is (1) happening and (2) anthopogenic in origin is over, at least among the scientific community.  That's not "ideologically-based," that's as close to a certainty as you want to get.  The only arguments any more among climate scientists are how bad, how much, and how fast.

Then there's the "scientists get things wrong" trope.  First, of course scientists get things wrong.  They're human, so they make mistakes, fall for their own biases, and on rare occasion become so wedded to their theories that they falsify results.  But the point here is that this is why science exists.  It gives us a rigorous way to catch this kind of stuff, to self-correct, to make sure that errors aren't perpetuated.  Some errors do persist -- to pick one that actually did (i.e. not Scaramucci's "the Earth is flat" bullshit, which was disproven in the time of the ancient Greeks and not widely accepted by the learned after that time), there's the geocentric model and its cousin, the idea that heavenly objects move in perfect circles.  That one did take a while to knock to pieces, but it's significant that the resistance didn't come from the scientists, it came from the religious authorities.  But the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and especially Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler left no room for argument.  Confronted with the data, the model has to change.  And far from being a weakness in the scientific approach, its ability to self-correct is its greatest strength.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then there's the subtlest mistake in Scaramucci's statement, which is that Trump's adherence to "common sense" is some kind of virtue, that common sense should win over science.  The problem is that common sense is sometimes wrong -- our intuition doesn't always steer us in the right direction.  Here's a simple example from physics:

Someone shoots a gun held perfectly level/parallel to the ground.  At the same moment that the gun is fired, a bullet is dropped from the same height.  Which bullet hits the ground first?

Intuition -- i.e. common sense -- usually leads people to figure that since the dropped bullet travels a much shorter distance, it must hit the ground first.  It's hard to picture the real situation, which is that the fired bullet actually travels in an arc, and drops vertically at exactly the same rate as the dropped bullet does.  In fact, the two bullets hit the ground at precisely the same time, something that has been demonstrated in every high school physics class in the world (although hopefully using something other than an actual gun).

This is why we need a rigorous system for determining whether a claim is true.  Our common sense is what's flawed, leads us astray.  Science catches its own errors, and has a stepwise process for winnowing out poor data and bad thinking.  It doesn't work 100% of the time -- nothing does -- but it's by far the best thing we've got.

Oh, and about the "5,500 year history of our planet:" *brief pause to punch a wall again*

So I don't recommend that you listen to the clip, which you can access at the link I posted above, both for your knuckles' sake and your wall's.  But if you do, you will be listening to one of the best examples of political doublespeak I've ever heard.

So for fuck's sake, let's listen to the scientists instead of the talking heads like Anthony Scaramucci blathering on about common sense and ideological climate science and the flat Earth.  It's time to trust the people who actually know what they're talking about.

I contain multitudes

One of the things that even folks conversant in the evolutionary model sometimes don't know is the extent to which we are composite organisms.

On the gross level (and I mean that in both senses of the word), there is the sheer number of cells in us that are not human.  The adult human body has about 10 trillion human cells, and (depending on who you talk to) between 1 and 3 times more bacterial cells -- intestinal flora, bacteria hitching a ride on our skin, in our mouths, in our respiratory mucosa.  Most of these are commensals at the very worst -- neither harmful nor helpful -- but a significant number are in a mutualistic arrangement with us, which is one of several reasons why the overuse of antibiotics is a bad idea.

Then there are the little invaders we can't live without -- namely the mitochondria, those tiny organelles that every high school biology student knows are the "powerhouses of the cell."  What fewer people know is that they are actually separate organisms, descended from aerobic prokaryotes that colonized our cells 2.5 billion years ago (give or take a day or two).  They have their own DNA, and reproduce inside our cells by binary fission the same way they did when they were free-living proto-bacteria.

Mitochondria [image courtesy of Louisa Howard and the Wikimedia Commons]

But that's not all.  If you're a plant (I'm assuming you're not, but you never know), you have three separate ancestral lines -- your ordinary plant cells, the mitochondria, and the chloroplasts, which are also little single-celled invaders that now plants can't live without.  But even that's not the most extreme example -- the microorganism Mixotricha paradoxa is a composite being made up of five completely separate ancestral genomes that have fused together into one organism.

But back to humans, if you're not already so skeeved out that you've stopped reading.  Because it's even more complicated than what I've already told you -- geneticists Cedric Feschotte , Edward Chuong and Nels Elde of the University of Utah have just published a paper in which we find out that even our nuclear DNA isn't entirely human.  10% of our 30,000-odd genes and three-billion-odd base pairs...

... came from viruses.

We usually think of viruses as pesky little parasites that cause colds, flu, measles, mumps, and so on, but they're more than that.  Some of them -- the retroviruses (HIV being the best-known example) -- are capable of inserting genetic material into the host's DNA, thus altering what the host does.  Certainly, sometimes this is bad; both AIDS and feline leukemia are outcomes of this process.  But now Feschotte, Chuong, and Elde have shown that some of our viral hangers-on have had their genes repurposed to work in our benefit.

These stowaway bits of DNA are called "endogenous retroviruses" (ERVs), and some of them seem to be associated with cancer.  Others have been implicated in multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.  But what the researchers found is that not all of them are deleterious; the gene that allows us to digest starch, and (even more importantly) the gene that triggers the fusion of the developing embryo to the placenta, seem to have viral origins.

"We think we’ve only scratched the surface here on the regulatory potential of ERVs," Feschotte said.

All of which is pretty amazing.  And it definitely gives one pause when you stop to think of how we define the word "organism."  Am I a single organism?  Well, not really.  Besides my regular human cells, I've got trillions of mitochondria, each with their separate bacterially-derived genome; and 10% of what I think of as "my DNA" came from viruses, at least some of which has then been modified into genes that I depend on to survive.  So humans -- and all living things -- are looking more and more like composite colonies of symbiotic life forms, representing a web of interrelationships that is so complex that it's mind-boggling.

So, to hell with the weird, exotic life forms from Star Trek.  I'm too busy being blown away by how bizarre and cool the life here on Earth turns out to be.

Ghost repellents

For today's topic I owe a hat tip to my friends over at the Society for Psychical Research.  The SPR is a group of people interested (as I am) in claims of the paranormal, and who approach the topic in exactly the right way -- looking at evidence, veracity, and overall logical consistency as the best way to sort the grade-A beef from the bull's other, less appealing product.

As an example of the latter, a couple of days ago they posted a link to the site The Week in Weird wherein we find out about a device someone's invented that is supposed to "blast unwanted paranormal entities out of your home."  The Thailand-based company Super Boondee is selling the "Trisaskri Ghost Repellent," which is supposed to work as follows:

When you’re ready to clear your home of negative entities, you simply flip the switch on the Ghost Repellent box, which activates a low-level electromagnetic field, condenser microphone, and infrared camera that work in unison to detect paranormal activity.  Super Boondee calls this the “phenomenon receptor”.  When the machine detects an anomaly, it automatically fires off a “Wave Killer” radio blast that they claim is enough to force the nasty phantom to abandon its chosen haunt.  Much like those sonic-rodent repellents, the box will simply continue to drive off ghosts no matter how many times they attempt to return.

Because hard-headed skeptics like me always want to know how the thing does what it's supposed to do, I was pleased to see that "Super Boondee" even provided us with a helpful schematic diagram:

Okay, my first question is: what the hell is an "inaudible receptor?"  Not to mention a "phenomenon receptor?"  I have a B.S. in physics, which doesn't make me an expert or anything, but at least I'm fairly confident that I know more about physics than the average guy on the street.  And what this schematic looks like to me has about as much scientific validity as the explanations you hear from Geordi LaForge about how he can't beam up the away team until he realigns the force phase energy conduits so that they are synchronized with the warp field frequency interfaces, which will take at least until right after the last commercial break to fix.

Here's a close-up of what the inside looks like:

So that's pretty impressive.  Colorful wires hooked to stuff, so it has to work, right?

If you're wondering how much it would cost to purchase one of these ghost-chasers to test for yourself, wait no longer: one can be yours for only $1,500, plus another $140 for overseas shipping.  My own opinion is that I can think of many better uses for $1,500, which include using it to start a fire in my wood stove.  I try to remain open-minded and all, but from what I've seen this has "ripoff" written all over it.

But by all means, if you want to put the "Trisaskri Ghost Repellent" on your Christmas wish list, go for it.  And please let me know if you tried it, and whether you got any results in the form of ghosts fleeing from your house like rats from a sinking ship.  My natural state is usually to scoff, but there's nothing that succeeds like success.

And do let me know what an "inaudible receptor" is.  I'm figuring it's sort of the auditory version of a camera designed to take photographs of invisible stuff, but I could be wrong about that.  It certainly never came up in any of my college physics classes.