Schadenfreude in the morning

I just found out that Alex Jones has lost his platforms on Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.  And although I fully support the right to free speech, my reaction was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, sputter* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

The reason given is that he repeatedly broke their rules against hate speech and the incitement of violence.  The only thing surprising about this is how long it took them to act.  This is the man who claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre never occurred, that no children had been killed, and the parents were "crisis actors" hired by the Left to fake a mass murder.  The result was ongoing harassment of the grieving parents by idiots who believe everything that Jones says.  He said the same thing about the Parkland/Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, adding there that the teenage survivors were being paid by Democrats to agitate against the NRA -- because clearly, articulate and intelligent young people are not able to form opinions of their own without being bought off by cynical politicians.

Jones, who has run InfoWars for many years, has spouted this kind of bullshit for as long as I can remember.  (Check out RationalWiki if you'd like to see a concise list of the insane ideas he's touted on his show.)  People call him a "Right-wing conspiracy theorist," which is an all-too-kind euphemism for "liar."  I'm fully convinced Jones knows exactly what he's doing; he whips up controversy because it gets viewers, gets clicks on his website, gets customers to buy his "male-enhancement" pills (no, I'm not making this up).  If there was any doubt about the fact that he's a con man and not a true believer, it was removed when Jones's lawyer, during the custody trial between Jones and his ex-wife, said Jones was "a performance artist playing a character."  In one of the many lawsuits Jones has faced, the defense attorney said, "No reasonable person would believe what Jones says" -- implying that if people are hoodwinked, it's their own fault.

Maybe.  I am neither qualified, nor interested, in debating the finer points of law surrounding culpability.  All I can say is that giving Alex Jones fewer platforms for spreading his sewage is unequivocally a good thing.  And I'm happy to say that Jones himself is taking it in his usual measured, dignified, thoughtful fashion.  I saw a YouTube clip showing his reaction when he heard the news, and because he also lost his YouTube channel *brief pause to stop guffawing again* I can't post a link to it, so here's the next closest thing.

I think we can all agree that we want Alex to know we're sending him our thoughts and prayers.

I'm not expecting his banishment to have much effect on the fans of InfoWars, or at least not right away.  After all, his claim (and the claims of his lawyers) that he was an actor -- i.e., he didn't actually believe everything he was saying -- hardly made a dent.  But given that these people have the attention span of a gnat -- and, apparently, the IQ of one as well -- it shouldn't take long for them to forget all about Jones and tune into some other conspiracy-touting nutjob.  Maybe Sean Hannity.  Or Ann Coulter.  (She's still around, isn't she?  I keep waiting for someone to dump a bucket of water on her and make her melt.)

But a tremendous amount of the toxic garbage making its way into the narrative of the extreme Right can be traced back to Jones, and if this really is sayonara, I'm glad to see him go.  Notwithstanding that he has been a fertile source of topics for Skeptophilia -- I've lost track of the number of times he's appeared here -- anything we can do to reduce the pollution stream is a good thing.

So there's a little tasty schadenfreude to go with your morning coffee.  Given how desperate I've been for good news, it's nice to be able to pass along some.  I don't really think this means Alex Jones will shut up -- nothing could accomplish that -- but at least it may mean that fewer people will be listening.

************************************

This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Sight unseen

One of the reasons I'm a skeptic -- and rely on science -- is I know how unreliable my brain and sensory organs are.

It's not that I'm not fond of my brain and sensory organs, mind you.  They do pretty well most of the time, notwithstanding my rather crummy eyesight and my brain's fondness for singing "Copacabana" at me at two o'clock in the morning.  We certainly perceive a lot of what's around us accurately enough to get by, or we'd have been heavily selected against when our ancestors were naked apes -- i.e., prey -- faced with lions and cheetahs on the African savanna.

Still, if you're trying to evaluate claims scientifically, "I saw it" simply isn't sufficient.  What we perceive, and (especially) what we remember, is a sort-of-kind-of amalgam of what we actually did perceive, what we thought we were perceiving, and what our preconceived notions about the situation told us was likely to happen.  Add to that the notorious plasticity of our memories, and you get a total that explains why Carol and I frequently recount entirely different stories of the same event -- and are both completely convinced that our own version is the correct one.

Now, a new study by Carlos González-García, Matthew W Flounders, Raymond Chang, Alexis T Baria, and Biyu J He, of the U. S. National Institutes of Health, Ghent University (Belgium), and
New York University, have blown another big hole in our assurance that what we see is actually what's there, and is unaffected by our preconceptions.

I.e., that we all see and interpret the world the same way.

In their paper "Content-Specific Activity in Frontoparietal and Default-Mode Networks During Prior-Guided Visual Perception," published in eLife Neuroscience last week, they show that our brains often can't figure out what we're seeing until we're primed with a hint about it -- and after that, we can't not see it.

I remember running into this rather alarming idea when I first saw the following odd pattern of black and white blotches:

If you've never seen this before, you probably have no idea what you're looking at.  I know I didn't -- until it was pointed out to me that in the upper half of the image is a dalmatian dog.

See it?  Now, can you unsee it -- go back to interpreting the image as a random pattern?

I don't know about you, but I can't.  Once it's a dog, it's always a dog.

The García et al. team went a step further by having people undergo this experience while hooked up to fMRI machines.  And what they found was pretty amazing.  The authors write:

How prior knowledge shapes perceptual processing across the human brain, particularly in the frontoparietal (FPN) and default-mode (DMN) networks, remains unknown.  Using ultra-high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we elucidated the effects that the acquisition of prior knowledge has on perceptual processing across the brain.  We observed that prior knowledge significantly impacted neural representations in the FPN and DMN, rendering responses to individual visual images more distinct from each other, and more similar to the image-specific prior.  In addition, neural representations were structured in a hierarchy that remained stable across perceptual conditions, with early visual areas and DMN anchored at the two extremes.  Two large-scale cortical gradients occur along this hierarchy: first, dimensionality of the neural representational space increased along the hierarchy; second, prior’s impact on neural representations was greater in higher-order areas.  These results reveal extensive and graded influences of prior knowledge on perceptual processing across the brain.

Steven Novella, of the wonderful blog Neurologica, explains it thus:

The researchers used a standard paradigm called Mooney images, which are black and white images degraded so that they are difficult to interpret.  However, when primed with an undegraded grayscale version of the image (called disambiguation), it becomes trivially easy to interpret the Mooney image.  The effects of this priming may last from days to indefinitely. 

The researchers confirmed this priming effect, and that it is very robust.  What this means is that what the subjects saw was determined as much, if not more, by their memories (of the disambiguation image) as by their current visual stimuli.  What you remember is as or more important than what you are seeing, at least when what you are seeing is ambiguous.

So once again, "You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear" has been shown to be substantially correct.  All the more reason that eyewitness testimony, which is the most powerful evidence in a court of law, should actually be viewed with a wry eye -- because not only our memories, but what we think we're actually seeing, is as influenced by our guesses as it is by what we're viewing.

Which should give you pause the next time you're tempted to say, "But I saw it with my own eyes!"

************************************

This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The Skeptophilia YouTube channel is live!

Hi all,

I'm back from the writers' retreat in Arkansas, wherein I got to schmooze with my publisher and other fiction writers, and generally enjoy being around like-minded folks.  I'll be back with a new Skeptophilia post on Monday, but I wanted to do a short announcement today that we've got a new feature...

... drumroll...

The Official Skeptophilia YouTube Channel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Anthony Cramp, Fireworks - Adelaide Skyshow 2010, CC BY 2.0]

You'll get to hear me doing some musing on topics from profound to silly (most of the first ones are silly, for what it's worth), just like I do every day here at Skepto.  We'll try to have a new one up every other Thursday; for now, we've got five videos up as a starter.  If you like them -- and we very much hope you do -- leave us a thumbs-up and/or subscribe to our channel.  As with the blog, if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like me to cover, drop me an email.

Now toddle over to YouTube and check us out.  Hope they cheer up your day.  See you for real in a couple of days!

cheers,

Gordon

A slice of pi

Note to my loyal readers: This will be my last post before a two-week break so I can go to my publisher's annual writers' retreat in the Ozarks.  Please keep sending links & ideas -- I'll be right back in the saddle when I return.  Look for the next Skeptophilia post on Monday, August 6!

***********************************

Sometimes you have to admire the woo-woos' dogged determination to fashion the universe into their own bizarre version of reality.

Most of us, I'd like to think, just see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe, and don't make such a big deal out of it.  If we want to believe in a Higher Power That Guides Everything, we do, and don't spend endless hours crafting abstruse proofs of the conjecture.  We're content to have a beer, watch a hockey game, and let god have some much-needed quiet time.

There are a few people, however, who just aren't content if they're not actively beating the matter into submission.  Such a person is Marty Leeds, Wisconsin-born writer, mystic, philosopher, and the origin of dozens of highly entertaining YouTube videos.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to one of Leeds' creations, entitled, "Number Magic: Gematria."  The link was accompanied by a message stating, and I quote: "Words cannot describe the level of derp in this video."  So of course I had to watch it.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Turns out he has an obsession with the number pi.  Okay, it's a pretty cool number,  being transcendental and all, but he thinks there's... more than that.  Way more, as it turns out.

What you get when you divide the circumference of an apple by its diameter.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matman from Lublin, Apple pie Pi Day 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If you're unwilling to sacrifice an hour and a half of your precious time (and to be honest, I made it through about twenty minutes, and just skimmed the rest), and countless innocent cells in your prefrontal cortex that will die in agony, allow me to present to you the main points of Leeds' argument.

1. There's this thing called gematria that was made up a while back by some Hebrew mystics who had overactive imaginations and way too much free time.   The idea behind gematria is that each letter in the alphabet (whether Hebrew, English, or other) is assigned a number, and when you add up the numbers for a word or name, you get a number that "means something."
2. You get to decide what the numbers mean.
3. If two words add up to the same thing, they are mystically linked.  Leeds uses a form of gematria which takes the English alphabet, splits it into two lists of thirteen letters each (A-M, and N-Z), and numbers each list from 1 through 7 and then back down to 1.  So my first name, Gordon, would be 7+2+5+4+2+1 = 21.  "Sharp" is 6+6+1+5+3, which also adds up to 21.  So you can see that thus far, we have a pretty persuasive theory here.
4. Leeds then does a gematria addition for four words or phrases.  We have "man" = 3, "woman" = 9, "Christian" = 39, and "The Holy Spirit" = 61.  Note that he had to add a "the" to the last one to make it work out the way he wanted.
5. So, let's look at the first thirteen digits of pi.  He picked thirteen because we had split the alphabet into two groups of thirteen letters each, which seems like impeccable logic to me, given the obvious connection between pi and the English alphabet.  Anyhow, we have 3.141592653589. It starts with 3 and ends with 9 -- giving you "39."  So right away, we can see that there's something wonderfully Christian about pi, not to mention having a man on one end and a woman on the other.  Also, 3+9 = 12, and 3x9 = 27, and 12+27 = 39. So you get your 3 and 9 back, so "man + woman" + "man x woman" = "Christian."  Or something like that.
6. Take the middle number in the sequence (2) and the two on either side (9 and 6).  Why?   Because tridents, that's why.  Stop asking questions.
7. If you multiply 9x2x6, you get 108, which is a very holy and important number.  Myself, I just thought it was the most convenient way of getting from 107 to 109, but what do I know?  But the Hindus liked the number 108, and plus, it's the number of stitches on a baseball, so there you are.
8. Now, take the remaining digits of pi, and basically draw a menorah under them.  You then put them together in pairs, flip 'em around, and add 'em together.  I really don't want to go into all of how he does that, because my cortical neurons are already whimpering for mercy, so you'll just have to either watch the video or else just accept on faith that somehow all of the numbers and flipped numbers and all add up to 352.  Then, you add that to the 2 and 6 from the trident bit, and you get 360, which is the number of degrees in a circle.  Get it?  Circle?  Pi?  Are you blown away?  (Okay, he left out the 9. But still.)
9. If you multiply the first through eighth digits of pi, you get 6,480.  If you multiply the eighth through the thirteenth digits, you get 32,400. Subtract them, and you get 25,920, which he says is the number of years for the precession of the Earth's axis to complete one rotation.  Except that according to the Cornell University Astronomy Department's webpage on the precession of the Earth's axis, the length of the precession of the Earth is said to be "about 26,000 years" -- the imprecision being because a motion that slow is almost impossible to measure accurately.   But I think we call all agree that since we're using gematria as our jumping-off point, being off by eighty years or so is plenty accurate enough.
10. Of course, like any good performer, he saves his most amazing bit for the end, wherein we find out that the first thirteen digits of pi add up to 61, which you will recall is the number of "The Holy Spirit."  So pi "encodes" (his word) The Holy Spirit and the precession of the equinoxes.
11. Therefore god.  Q.E.D.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed our little ramble through woo-woo arithmetic. Me, I'm planning on watching some of Leeds' other videos when I have the time.  (Two especially fascinating-sounding ones are "Pizzagate, Symbolism, and Secret Societies" and "Flat Earth Implications, NASA Lies, and Gematria."  Of course he's a Flat Earther.  You're surprised by this?)  However, I think next time I won't launch into this without something to insulate my poor brain against further damage.  I'm thinking that a double scotch might do the trick.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

House of cards

One question that has been raised over and over -- both by me and to me -- is, "what would it take for the diehard core of Donald Trump's base to recognize they'd been had?"

I mean, it's hard to fathom how what's already happened isn't enough.  His disastrous, ill-thought-out punitive tariffs have damaged long-standing trade partnerships and driven exports down and prices up, hurting farming and manufacturing.  Much of what comes out of his mouth is either a calculated lie or else made up on the spot; keeping track of his verifiable falsehoods is very nearly a full-time job.  And then we had his horrifying performance in Helsinki this week, wherein he did everything but kiss Vladimir Putin on the mouth -- along with making statements that, in my opinion, should have resulted in his being arrested for treason the moment he set foot on American soil.

But his base still loves him, and even more bizarrely, the Republicans in Congress do, too.  The criticism the GOP powers-that-be gave him after the Helsinki Summit can be summed up as, "Gee whiz, we wish you hadn't done that.  Oh well."  Worse yet, Senator Bob Corker, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blocked a measure that would have allowed subpoena of the translator's notes from Trump's closed-door meeting with Putin -- a meeting at which, in Trump's own words, "many agreements were made," even though nobody has the slightest clue what those agreements are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Vadon, Mr Donald Trump New Hampshire Town Hall on August 19th 2015 at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, NH by Michael Vadon 07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Oh, and how about the fact that the GOP shot down a demand by Democrats that Congress be allowed to question Maria Butina, the accused Russian spy who allegedly funneled millions of dollars from Russia, through the NRA, and into the Trump campaign.  Devin Nunes, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, wouldn't comment, but the only spin I can put on it is that they were afraid of what Butina would say.  Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois concurs:

The fact that we were shut down, they refused to allow subpoenas to go forward involving the gun rights group she formed in Russia and its connection to the NRA — the fact that there were so many other documents they refused subpoena.  They refused to subpoena anyone and make them answer questions.  They went along with the White House insisting no one has to answer our questions.  That sounds like they wanted to work with the White House to protect it politically and legally not get to the truth.

The GOP leaders don't spin it that way, of course.  They simply say, "We trust President Trump."

Myself, I trust President Trump so little that if he said the front lawn was green, I'd want to go outside to verify it myself.

And of course, Trump himself blames his shameful kowtowing to Putin on... surprise!... the media.  Two days ago, he tweeted, "The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.  I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed."  Because, apparently, the "Fake News Media" is responsible for Trump's siding with Russia, against American intelligence agencies, in full view on television.

In other words, don't believe what you've seen with your own eyes and heard with your own ears.  Believe what I tell you.  Even when I tell you one thing today, and exactly the opposite tomorrow.  I wasn't wrong either time, I wasn't lying either time.  It's the media, trying to confuse matters and make me look bad.

But no group of Trump supporters baffles me more than the evangelicals.  I know I've said it before, but I simply cannot fathom how a group priding themselves on being the Pillars of Morality in America can continue to support a greedy, grasping, lying, narcissistic, ignorant bigot.  "God can work with a broken tool," I had one person tell me.  The fact is, the evangelicals as a whole still believe in Trump without question.  And that belief isn't just strong, it's got the zeal and fervor of a cult.  Consider what evangelical television host Rick Wiles said yesterday on his show:

[Rachel Maddow] was spewing out, last night, calls for revolution.  She was telling the left, ‘Take a deep breath, we’re at the moment, it’s coming, we’re almost there, we’re going to remove him from the White House.  We’re about 72 hours—possibly 72 hours—from a coup.  Be prepared that you’re going to turn on the television and see helicopters hovering over the roof of the White House with men clad in black rappelling down ropes, entering into the White House.  Be prepared for a shootout in the White House as Secret Service agents shoot commandos coming in to arrest President Trump.  That is how close we are to a revolution.  Be prepared for a mob— a leftist mob—to tear down the gates, the fence at the White House and to go into the White House and to drag him out with his family and decapitate them on the lawn of the White House.

I'd laugh if it weren't for the fact that a significant number of Americans believe he's right.

I am seriously afraid of where this country is headed.  Wiles may be right about the armed mobs, but it's not the leftists I'm worried about.  It's the right-wing fanatics -- that 30% who still, after all this, think that Donald Trump is the best man to lead our nation.  Because when this house of cards falls, it's going to fall hard.  The effective half-life of tyranny is always short, however horrible it is for the people who have to live through it.  But there is no way that Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Dana Rohrabacher, and the rest of the people running around propping up the Trump edifice with sticks can succeed for long.

I just hope the damage to our nation isn't irreparable by the time it happens.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Beneath the shroud

One of the most revered, and controversial, relics of the Roman Catholic Church has finally been shown to be an unequivocal fake.

The Shroud of Turin has engendered more speculation, criticism, and questioning than any other relic, and that includes things like the skull of Mary Magdalene.  The Shroud is a 4.4 meter long piece of linen cloth with the impression -- it looks very much like a photographic negative -- of a naked man showing the traditional injuries suffered by Jesus Christ during the crucifixion.

I've always suspected it was a fake, but I have to admit, it's a pretty inspired one.  The image is nothing short of creepy in its realism:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's generated incredible devotion -- not least from an Italian firefighter who dashed into the burning Guarini Chapel in 1997 and risked his life to save it.  While church leaders have not come right out and said it's real, they've made statements that amount to the same thing.  In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved reverence of it as "the holy face of Jesus."  More recently, Pope John Paul II called it "a mirror of the Gospel."

The whole thing began to unravel -- literally -- about thirty years ago, when scientists were finally allowed to do radiocarbon analysis on a tiny snippet of the linen cloth, and dated it to between 1260 and 1390 C.E. with 95% confidence.  Oh, but no, the True Believers said; it had more than once been through a fire, and soot would change the C-12 to C-14 ratio and throw off the dating.  Plus, the yellow-brown dye on the cloth was shown through chemical analysis to be older, and the cloth snippet was from a more recent repair job, anyhow.

So back and forth it went, with the skeptics saying the preponderance of evidence supported its being a hoax, and the devout saying it was the real deal.  But now two Italian scientists, Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli, have presented a paper at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that takes an entirely different approach.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Garlaschelli's name.  He was the one who back in 2016 did a simple little demonstration of how the miraculous "weeping saints" -- statues of saints that appear to cry real tears -- can be faked.  So he's not a man who would be easy to fool.

And what Borrini and Garlaschelli did was to look at the Shroud through the lens of blood-pattern analysis.  Anyone who's fond of the series CSI probably knows that a trained forensic scientist can tell a lot from blood spatter, and this is no different.  The story goes that Jesus's body was wrapped in the cloth after he died, staining it with blood from his various wounds, and that's what created the image.

But the problem is... gravity.  If he was laid on his back (which seems probable), any blood dripping from the wounds would land on the cloth in a distinct way.  (The same is true, of course, if he was laid on his side, or any which way.)  And what Borrini and Garlaschelli found was that the cloth shows a completely random pattern of blood drips.  On the same side of the cloth, drips appear to be coming from a variety of directions, consistent with... a fake.  A clever, highly artistic fake, but a fake nonetheless.  Borrini and Garlaschelli write:

An investigation into the arm and body position required to obtain the blood pattern visible in the image of the Shroud of Turin was performed using a living volunteer.  The two short rivulets on the back of the left hand of the Shroud are only consistent with a standing subject with arms at a ca 45° angle.  This angle is different from that necessary for the forearm stains, which require nearly vertical arms for a standing subject.  The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position while the stains at the back—of a supposed postmortem bleeding from the same wound for a supine corpse—are totally unrealistic.

And yes, you read that right -- they got a volunteer to lie enshrouded in a linen cloth after having nicked his/her wrists to simulate bleeding wounds.  (They didn't, fortunately, flog the poor sucker, or do any of the various other horrible things the Bible says happened to Jesus.)

Hey, all for the good of scientific research, right?

So this should close the book on the Shroud of Turin, but of course it won't.  The Shroud apologists have argued against every other piece of evidence, so I have no doubt that they'll argue against this one, too, especially since Garlaschelli is involved.  The Italian Catholic powers-that-be hate Garlaschelli for his role in the Weeping Mary Caper.  But anyhow, it's good enough for me, and should be good enough for anyone else who is a self-styled skeptic.

But it still leaves me wondering how it was done, because whatever else you can say about the Shroud, it's really realistic.  Take a look at many 14th century paintings of people -- they're stylized, cartoonish, with zero attention to perspective.   This?  It's painfully accurate, down to the last detail.  So say what you will, whoever created this thing had some serious talent.  It's a shame he put it to use creating a fake that has duped people for over six hundred years.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warn my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's pretty solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we didn't all just watch Donald Trump wink at Vladimir Putin and then commit high treason in full view on television, or witness all of the Republicans respond by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog" from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that the US has been renamed the "Amerikan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republik," and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]