&$*%^#*@*(

I'm kind of notorious for my inappropriate vocabulary, a habit I can at least in part blame on my dad, who spent 29 years in the Marine Corps.  My dad was a connoisseur of the creative swear word, but my mom (who had many fine qualities but was a bit of a prude) forbade him to use vulgar language when she was around.  My dad's solution was to invent new inappropriate interjections by using innocent English words that (when said with the proper inflection) sounded like swear words.  His favorites were "schist" and "fop."

"Watch your mouth!" my mom would say, after my dad snarled out "Fop!" after bending a nail for the fourth time.

My dad would then, in his Patient Voice, explain that "fop" was not a vulgarity, but meant "a prissy and dandified gentleman."

"Nothing wrong with that, is there, Marguerite?" he'd conclude with an innocent smile.

All of which probably left my mom feeling like swearing herself, not that she ever would have.

So I grew up in a house where swearing was definitely frowned upon.  You can imagine my delight, then, when I read a piece of research supporting the claim that swearing improves your muscular strength, pain tolerance, and stamina.

In an experiment that must have been a riot to conduct, Richard Stephens of the University of Keele led a team that studied two groups of people, each trying to accomplish a task that took power and perseverance.  Some were asked to pedal an exercise bike on a hard uphill setting; others had their grip strength tested.  Half of the test subjects were instructed to utter neutral words, and the other half were told to turn the air blue.

The results were unequivocal.  The individuals who were allowed to swear performed significantly better -- their peak power on the exercise bike exceeded that of the control group by 24 watts, and their grip strength increased by almost five pounds.

"Quite why it is that swearing has these effects on strength and pain tolerance remains to be discovered," Stephens said.  "We have yet to understand the power of swearing fully...  A possible reason... is that it stimulates the body's sympathetic nervous system.  That's the system that makes your heart pound when you are in danger.  If that is the reason, we would expect swearing to make people stronger too, and that is just what we found in these experiments."

Earlier experiments involving keeping your hand submerged in ice water, also run by Keele's team, support the contention that swearing also improves pain tolerance.

"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," Stephens said.  "It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.  Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."

So there you have it.  Bad language as a way of increasing your strength and decreasing your discomfort.  My first 5K race of the season is a week from today, and I'm gonna try it out. 

Next Saturday, if you see a tall skinny blond guy running along, muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck this, fuck it all" under his breath, you'll know it's just me running an experiment.

Thanks for the opportunity

I'm sure that if you're an elected official, it must be a sore temptation to have your success in the public arena convince you you're an expert on everything.  After all, you've been chosen to represent the people who voted for you; that must mean you're brilliant, right?

Well, not only does it take more than people's votes to verify a person's intelligence, it also takes more than a huge and well-stroked ego to generate opinions that have merit.  And as an example of this, let's look at State Representative John Allen of Arizona, who just last week went on record as saying that there's nothing wrong with a system in which teachers have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

In a House floor session, Allen said:

There’s lots of people out there with second jobs.  Most of us in this room have a second job.  Good for them!  I like seeing people try to get ahead in life, when they take their god-given talents and efforts and make themselves better.  That’s America!  The idea that we are somehow torturing somebody if they have a second job is just ridiculous.  And, they have a long summer!  What a great opportunity for people like us and teachers to go and get a second job.  Let’s all go out and get a second job this summer.  I know my wife would greatly encourage that.

 Yes, we have summers off.  Unpaid.  The myth that teachers have "three months of paid vacation a year" is appallingly common -- I still recall the first time I confronted that, and corrected the individual.  "How would you feel if your employer required that you take three months of unpaid leave a year?" I asked, and the response was frank bafflement. I was a little emotional about this issue; this was during a period in my life when I was a single dad, and had a landscaping business in the spring and summer just so I could pay my mortgage and buy groceries.  Starting in April, I would come home from school, change my clothes, head out to some rich person's yard, work until it was too dark to see, and then come home and fall into bed.  I worked seven days a week, and I still was literally down to nickels by the end of the pay period.

"Great opportunity," my ass.  The main "great opportunity" I wanted was not to lose my house or have my sons and I go hungry.

So there was a lot of outcry about Allen's comments, both by teachers and by anyone who knows how hard teachers work (and how little they're paid -- especially in Arizona, where salaries have hovered around the 50th-out-of-50 mark for years).  And in the fine old tradition of politics, where the motto is "Death Before Retraction," Allen simply doubled down on his rhetoric... and made it worse:

They’re making it out as if anybody who has a second job is struggling. That’s not why many people take a second job. They want to increase their lifestyles. They want to improve themselves,  They want to pay for a boat.  They want a bigger house.  They work hard to provide themselves with a better lifestyle.

A boat?  Sure!  I could have afforded a boat:

 But if you're talking about anything more than that, the "better lifestyle" I aspired to was to occasionally be able to afford to by a container of ice cream for my kids and I to have for dessert.

And I'm one of the lucky ones.  Not only do I work in a state where teachers are better paid, I eventually worked my way up the ladder and became, if not wealthy, at least comfortable.  But for Representative Allen to insinuate that teachers -- or any low-paid workers -- are getting second and third jobs because they want luxuries leaves me so angry that I'm nearly speechless, and mostly what I can think of to say in any case is vulgar even by my standards.

What bothers me most of all, though, is the hypocrisy.  Allen, and the rest of his colleagues in the Republican Party, have won elections by claiming that they're in there fighting for the common guy, the middle class, the people who are willing to work long hours to make it -- then they routinely vote down increases to the minimum wage, proposals to offset the costs of health care and insurance, and programs designed to pull people up out of poverty.  Oh, they'll fight like hell to save unborn children; but once those children are born, the general attitude is "you're on your own."  In their eyes, apparently a person's rights begin at conception and end at birth.

So to Representative Allen, and anyone who cheered him on: you have no idea what you're talking about.  If you'd like to follow me around one day and see how hard I work, you are welcome in my classroom any time.  But until the time you're willing to do some leg work to find out how the people you're passing value judgments on actually live, do us a favor and shut the fuck up.

You are also welcome to check my garage for boats.  You won't find any.

Science vs. common sense

A regular reader of my blog commented to me, rather offhand, "To read your posts, you sound awfully sure of yourself.  A little arrogant, even."

I'll leave the last part to wiser heads than mine to answer; I may well have an arrogant streak, and in fact I've remarked more than once that to have a blog at all implies a bit of arrogance -- you have to believe, on some level, that what you think and write will be interesting to enough people to make it worth doing.  But I'd like to leave my own personality flaws aside for a moment, and take a look at the first part of the statement, which is saying something quite different, I think.

In saying that I sound "sure of myself," the fellow who made the comment was saying, so far as I can tell, that I sound like I've got all the answers; that my pronouncements on ghosts and faces on grilled cheese sandwiches and Florida Skunk Apes, and -- on a more serious level -- ethics, politics, philosophy, and religion, are somehow final pronouncements of fact. I come across, apparently, as if I'm the last word on the subject, that I've said fiat lux in a booming voice, and now all is light.

Nothing could be further from the truth, both in fact and in my own estimation.

It's because I have so little certainty in my own senses and my brain's interpretation of them that I have a great deal of trust in science.  I am actually uncertain about most everything, because I'm constantly aware about how easily tricked the human brain is.  Here are five examples of just how counter-intuitive nature is -- how easily we'd be misled if it weren't for the tools of science.  I'll present you with some explanations of commonly-observed events -- see if you can tell me which are true and which are false based upon your own observations.

1. Homing pigeons, which can find their way home from amazing distances, are navigating using visual cues such as the positions of the sun and stars.
2. A marksman shoots a gun horizontally over a level field, and simultaneously drops a bullet from the same height as the gun barrel.  The dropped bullet will hit the ground before the shot bullet because it has far less distance to cover.
3. Flowering plants are temperature-sensitive, and spring-flowering plants like daffodils and tulips recognize the coming of spring (and therefore time to make flowers) when the earth warms up as the days lengthen.
4. Time passes at the same rate for everyone; time is the one universal constant.  No matter where you are in the universe, no matter what you're doing, everyone's clock ticks at exactly the same rate.
5. Herding behavior in collies and other sheepdogs is learned very young; herding-breed puppies reared by non-herding breed mothers (e.g. a collie puppy raised by a black lab mother) never learn to herd.

Ready for the answers?

All of them are false.

1. Homing pigeons are remarkably insensitive to visual cues.  A paper by R. Wiltschko and W. Wiltschko of J.W.Goethe-Universität Frankfurt describes research showing showed that pigeons' tiny little brains allow them to navigate by picking up the magnetic field of the earth -- i.e., they have internal magnetic compasses.  These compasses take the form of magnetite crystals near the trigeminal nerve in the face, and the crystals' movements tells the birds not only what direction is north, but their inclination tell them how far north (i.e., the latitutde).  This ability, called magnetotaxis, is shared with only a few other species, including at least one species of motile bacteria.
2. In this classic thought experiment, the two bullets hit the ground at precisely the same moment.   Vertical velocity and horizontal velocity are entirely independent of each other; the fact that the one bullet is moving very quickly in a horizontal direction, and the other isn't, is completely irrelevant.
3. Temperature has very little to do with the timing of flowering, although a prolonged period of cold can slow down early-flowering plants some.  What actually is cueing plants to flower is the relative lengths of day and night; this response is called photoperiodism.  It used to be thought that flowering plants were timing their flowering cycles using a chemical called phytochrome that oscillates between two different forms in the light and in the dark; this clearly has something to do with it, but the mechanism controlling it is still poorly understood.
4. The General Theory of Relativity, which has been experimentally confirmed countless ways, actually says exactly the opposite of this.  What it does say is that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference, and this has, as one of its bizarre outcomes, that time is completely relative.  Not only might your clock be ticking at a different rate than mine, depending on our relative motion, but events that look simultaneous to you might look sequential to me.  No wonder Einstein won the Nobel, eh?
5. Herding behavior in collies is entirely genetic, not learned (although they refine the skill with training).  Most amazingly, it seems to be caused by very small number of genes (possibly only a single gene, but that point isn't settled).  A dog with a specific genetic makeup can be trained to herd; a dog without it can't.  Scientists are still trying to figure out how such a small chunk of DNA can control a complex behavior like herding ability.  This sheds some interesting light on the nature-vs.-nurture question, though, doesn't it?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

All of this is just to indicate that our intuition, our "common sense," and even our sensory information, can sometimes be very misleading.  Science is our only way out of this mess; it has proven itself, time and again, to be the very best tool we have for not falling into error because of the natural mistakes made by our brains, the fallacies of wishful thinking and confirmation bias, and being suckered by charlatans and frauds.

A charge levied against science by some people is that it changes; the "truths" of one generation may be different from those of the next.  (I call this the "They Used to Believe the Sun Went Around the Earth" argument.)  Myself, I find this a virtue, not a flaw.  Science, by its nature, self-corrects.  Isn't it better to put your trust in a world view that has the capacity to fix its own errors, rather than one which promises eternal truths, and therefore doesn't change regardless of the discovery of contrary evidence?

I realize that this line of reasoning approaches some very controversial thin ice for many people, and I've no intent to skate any nearer to the edge.  My own views on the subject are undoubtedly abundantly clear.  I firmly believe that everyone buys into the world view that makes the best sense of his/her world, and it would be arrogant for me to tell another person to change -- the most I can do is to present my own understanding, and hope that it will sell itself on its own merits.  And for me, the scientific model may not be perfect, but given the other options, it's the best thing the market has to offer.

Faith in the facts

I keep waiting for a day to go by in which someone in the Trump administration doesn't say something completely batshit insane.

The latest person to try to reach the summit of Mount Lunacy is Dr. Mark Green, nominee for Army Secretary, who apparently got his Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.  Because besides such bizarre statements as "the government exists... to crush evil," particularly evil in the form of transgender people who are just looking for a quiet place to pee, Green has gone on record as saying that he not only doesn't accept evolution, he doesn't believe in...

... the Theory of Relativity.

In a speech that focused not on what he would do in his role as Army Secretary, but on The Universe According To Mark Green, he said, "The theory of relativity is a theory and some people accept it, but that requires somewhat of a degree of faith."

No.  No, no, no.  Faith is exactly what it doesn't take.  Although religious folks will probably disagree with me on this definition, faith is essentially believing in stuff for which you have no evidence; and as such, I've never really understood the distinction between "faith" and "delusion."  All that it takes to accept the Theory of Relativity is understanding the evidence that has been amassed in its favor.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming.  Given its staggering conclusions -- weirdness like time dilation, the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit, and warped space -- it is understandable that after it was published, scientists wanted to make sure that Einstein was right.  So they immediately began designing experiments to test Einstein's theoretical predictions.

Needless to say, every single one of the experiments has supported that Einstein was 100% correct.  Every time there's some sort of suspected glitch -- like six years ago, when physicists at CERN thought they had detected a faster-than-light neutrino -- it's turned out to be an experimental error or an uncontrolled variable.  At this point, media should simply have a one-click method for punching in the headline "EINSTEIN VINDICATED AGAIN" whenever this sort of thing happens.

What is funniest about all of this is that the technology Green would be overseeing, as Army Secretary, includes SatNav guidance systems that use GPS coordinates -- which have to take relativistic effects into account.  If you decide that you "don't have enough faith" to accept relativity, your navigational systems will gradually drift out of sync with the Earth (i.e., with reality), and your multi-million-dollar tanks will end up driving directly off of cliffs.

So you need exactly zero faith to accept relativity.  Or evolution, or cosmology, or plate tectonics, or radioisotope dating, or any of the other scientifically sound models that Green and his ilk tend to jettison.  All you need to do is to take the time to learn some science.  What does take faith, however, is accepting that anyone who has as little knowledge of the real world as Mark Green does has any business running an entire branch of the military.

Anyhow, there you have it: our "alternative fact" of the day.  It's almost as good as the "alternative fact" of the day before, which came straight from Dear Leader Trump, to wit: Andrew Jackson was a good guy with a "big heart" who "was really angry about what he saw happening with the Civil War."  Oh, and the Civil War could "have all been worked out," and that "people don't ask the question" about why the Civil War started.

Except, of course, for the thousands of historians who have been writing about the causes of the Civil War for decades.  And Andrew "Big Heart" Jackson was responsible for the forced deportation of fifteen thousand Native Americans from their ancestral homes, in one of the biggest forced relocations ever perpetrated, and in which a quarter of them died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

Oh, yeah, and I don't think Jackson was particularly angry about the Civil War, given that he died sixteen years before it started.

So it'd be nice if our leaders would stop saying things that turn the United States into a world-wide laughingstock.  I'm planning on going to Ecuador this summer, and I'd really like it if I don't have to tell the Ecuadorians I meet that just because I'm an American doesn't mean I'm an ignorant, raving loon.  Thank you.

Aesthetic synchrony

Probably most of you have had the fortunate experience of being in a situation where you were completely engaged in what you were doing.  This can be especially powerful when you are being given the chance to experience something novel -- listening to a lecture by a truly masterful speaker, attending a performance of music or theater, visiting a place of great natural beauty -- when you are having what writer Sir Ken Robinson (speaking of masterful lecturers) calls in his talk "Changing Education Paradigms" "an aesthetic experience, when your senses are operating at their peak, when you're present in the current moment, when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing you're experiencing, when you are fully alive."

When this happens, we often say we are "on the same wavelength" with others who are sharing the experience with us.   And now, a team led by Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that this idiom might literally be true.

Dikker's team had thirteen test subjects -- twelve high school students and their teacher -- wear portable electroencephalogram headsets for an entire semester of biology classes.  Naturally, some of the topics and activities were more engaging than others, and the researchers had students self-report daily on such factors as how focused they were, how much they enjoyed their teacher's presentation, how much they enjoyed the students they interacted with, and their satisfaction levels about the activities they were asked to take part in.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dikker et al. write:

The human brain has evolved for group living.  Yet we know so little about how it supports dynamic group interactions that the study of real-world social exchanges has been dubbed the "dark matter of social neuroscience."  Recently, various studies have begun to approach this question by comparing brain responses of multiple individuals during a variety of (semi-naturalistic) tasks. These experiments reveal how stimulus properties, individual differences, and contextual factors may underpin similarities and differences in neural activity across people...  Here we extend such experimentation drastically, beyond dyads and beyond laboratory walls, to identify neural markers of group engagement during dynamic real-world group interactions.  We used portable electroencephalogram (EEG) to simultaneously record brain activity from a class of 12 high school students over the course of a semester (11 classes) during regular classroom activities.  A novel analysis technique to assess group-based neural coherence demonstrates that the extent to which brain activity is synchronized across students predicts both student class engagement and social dynamics.  This suggests that brain-to-brain synchrony is a possible neural marker for dynamic social interactions, likely driven by shared attention mechanisms.  This study validates a promising new method to investigate the neuroscience of group interactions in ecologically natural settings.

Put simply, what the researchers found is that when the students reported feeling the most engaged, their brain activity actually synced with that of their classmates.  It squares with our subjective experience, doesn't it?  I know when I'm bored, irritated, or angered by something I'm being required to participate in, I tend to unhook my awareness from where I am -- including being less aware of those around me who are suffering through the same thing.

It's no wonder we call this kind of response "disengaging," is it?

So apparently misery doesn't love company; what loves company is engagement, appreciation, and a sense of belonging.  "The central hub seems to be attention," Dikker says.  "But whatever determines how attentive you are can stem from various sources from personality to state of mind.  So the picture that seems to emerge is that it's not just that we pay attention to the world around us; it's also what our social personalities are, and who we're with."

All the more reason we teachers should focus as much on getting our students hooked on learning as we do on the actual content of the course.  My experience is that if you can get students to "buy in" -- if (in my case) they come away thinking biology is cool, fun, and interesting -- it doesn't matter so much if they can't remember what ribosomes do.  They can fit the facts in later, these days with a thirty-second lookup on Wikipedia.

What can't be looked up is being engaged to the point that you care what ribosomes do.

Unfortunately, in the educational world we've tended to go the other direction.  The flavor of the month is micromanagement from the top down, a set syllabus full of factlets that each student must know, an end product that can fit on a bubble sheet, "quantifiable outcomes" that generate data that the b-b stackers in the Department of Education can use to see if our teachers are teaching and our students learning.  A pity that, as usual, the people who run the business of educating children are ignoring what the research says -- that the most fundamental piece of the puzzle is student engagement.

If you have that, everything else will follow.

Poker face

A wag once said, "Artificial intelligence is twenty years in the future, and always will be."  It's a trenchant remark; predictions about when we'd have computers that could truly think have been off the mark ever since scientists at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence stated that they would have the problem cracked in a few months...

... back in 1956.

Still, progress has been made.  We now have software that learns from its mistakes, can beat grand masters at strategy games like chess, checkers, and Go, and have come damn close to passing the Turing test.  But the difficulty of emulating human intelligence in a machine has proven to be more difficult than anyone would have anticipated, back when the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s.

We've taken a new stride recently, however.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at the University of Alberta announced that they had created software that could beat human champions at Texas Hold 'Em, a variant of poker.  Why this is remarkable -- and more of a feat than computers that can win chess -- is that all previous game-playing software involved games in which both players have identical information about the state of the game.  In poker, there is hidden information.  Not only that, but a good poker player needs to know how to bluff.

In other words... lie.

Michael Bowling, who led the team at the University of Alberta, said that this turned out to be a real challenge.  "These poker situations are not simple," Bowling said.  "They actually involve asking, 'What do I believe about my opponent’s cards?'"

But the program, called DeepStack, turned out to be quite good at this, despite the daunting fact that in Texas Hold 'Em there are about 10¹⁶⁰ decision points -- more unique scenarios than there are atoms in the universe.  But instead of analyzing all the possibilities, as a program might do in chess (such an approach in this situation would be, for all practical purposes, impossible), DeepStack plays much like a person would -- by speculating on the likelihood of certain outcomes based on the limited information it has.

"It will do its thinking on the fly while it is playing," Bowling said.  "It can actually generalize situations it's never seen before."

Which is pretty amazing.  But not everyone is as impressed as I am.

When Skeptophilia frequent flier Rick Wiles, of End Times radio, heard about DeepStack, he was appalled that we now had a computer that could deceive. "I'm still thinking about programming robots to lie," Wiles said.  "This has been done to us for the past thirty, forty, fifty years -- Deep State has deliberately lied to the public because they concluded that it was in our best interest not to be told the truth...  What's even scarier about the robots that can lie is that they weren't programmed to lie, they learned to lie.  Who's the father of all lies?  Satan is the father of all lies.  Are we going to have demon-possessed artificially intelligent robots?  Is it possible to have demonic spirit to possess an artificial intelligent machine?  Can they possess idols?  Can they inhabit places?  Yeah.  Absolutely.  They can take possession of animals.  They can attach themselves to inanimate objects.  If you have a machine that is capable of lying, then it has to be connected to Lucifer.  Now we’re back to the global brain.  This is where they’re going.  They’re building a global brain that will embody Lucifer’s mind and so Lucifer will be deceiving people through the global brain."

So there's that.  But the ironic thing is that, all demonic spirit bullshit aside, Wiles may not be so far wrong.  While I think the development of artificial intelligence is fascinating, and I can understand why researchers find it compelling, you have to worry what our creations might think about us once they do reach sentience.  This goes double if you can no longer be sure that what the computer is telling you is the truth.

Maybe what we should be worried about is not a computer that can pass the Turing test; it's one that can pass the Turing test -- and chooses to pretend, for its own reasons, that it can't.

I mean, the last thing I want is to go on record as saying I agree with Rick Wiles on anything.  But still.

So that's our rather alarming news for the day.  It's not that I think we're headed into The Matrix any time soon; but the idea that we might be supplanted by intelligent machines of our own making, the subject of countless science fiction stories, may not be impossible after all.

And maybe the artificial intelligence of twenty years in the future may not be as far away as we thought.

Awoo

Yesterday I was asked by one of my Critical Thinking Students if I'd ever heard of Florida Swamp Apes.  After a brief moment in which I wondered if he were asking about a sports team, I answered in the negative.  He brought out his cellphone, on which he had downloaded an admittedly creepy image, which I include below:

Imagine my surprise when I found out that there's a whole site devoted to this odd beast, also called the "Florida Skunk Ape" for its strong smell.  Considered to be the "southernmost Bigfoot species in the United States," the Florida Skunk Ape has been sighted all over southern Florida, but most commonly in the Everglades region.

As with most of these alleged animals, the claims of sightings are numerous and varied, and the hard evidence essentially non-existent.  There are a lot of photographs, but to borrow a line from the astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson, there probably is an "Add Bigfoot" button on PhotoShop, so we shouldn't consider the photographic evidence to be evidence at all.  Also on the website is an audio clip of a Skunk Ape's howls, which to my ear sounded more like a distant dog, or possibly a guy going "Awoo."  We also have an interview with Dave Shealy, who seems to be one of the people responsible for the whole Skunk Ape phenomenon (he is the director of the Skunk Ape Research Center of Ochopee, Florida, open 7 AM to 7 PM, admission $5, which I am definitely going to visit next time I'm in Florida).  Lastly, we are informed that Skulls Unlimited, a company which sells a virtually unlimited number of skulls (thus the name), is now offering resin models of Bigfoot skulls.   One has to wonder what they cast the mold from, but in the field of cryptozoology it is sometimes best not to ask too many questions.

I thought I had heard of most of the cryptozoological claims from the United States, but this one was new to me.  Of course, the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest is so familiar by now as to elicit yawns, and many of us know of the Boggy Creek Monster of Fouke, Arkansas, which generated not one, nor two, but five truly dreadful movies.  There's Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster in West Virginia, the Dover Demon of Massachusetts, the Enfield Monster of Illinois, Goatman of Maryland, and dozens of others.  But the Skunk Ape is one I'd never heard of before, and I'm finding myself wondering how I missed it.  It did cross my mind briefly that perhaps the Skunk Ape sightings were merely elderly Bigfoots from the north who had moved to Florida when they retired, but apparently this is incorrect, as one site talks about a sighting of a "young and vigorous animal, probably an adolescent" and another refers to "Skunk Ape mating season"  (May, if you're curious; but you might want to refrain from wandering around the swamps of Florida in May, because two female European tourists tell the story of being chased by a "huge male Skunk Ape with an erection."  They got away, fortunately.)

"Not everyone who sees a Skunk Ape reports it," Dave Shealy says.  "They don't want people to poke fun at 'em, or to tell 'em they're crazy. That's not the exception; that's pretty much the rule...  There's never been a documented case of anyone ever being physically attacked by a Skunk Ape.  But also, there's a lot of people that go into the Everglades that never come out." 

Which really isn't all that reassuring.

In any case, the Florida Skunk Ape gives us yet another line in the ledger of Extraordinary Claims Requiring Extraordinary Evidence Of Which There Seems To Be None.  It's just as well, because it's the last week of April, so Skunk Ape mating season is almost upon us, and if there really was evidence that this thing exists I would feel duty-bound to go investigate, and the last thing I want is to be chased around in some godforsaken swamp by a Bigfoot with a boner.  So I think I'll give this one a pass.