Curing premature annunciation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

The visitor from an alternate universe

Making its way around the internet in the last few days we have the strange story of Lerina Garcia, a Spanish woman who is making an extraordinary claim; that she has side-slipped into our world from an alternate universe, where things are similar -- but not identical -- to this one.

This story, which could come straight from a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, would be funny if it weren't for how serious Ms. Garcia sounds about it.  Here's how her plight was described on the site All About Occult:

Lerina Garcia, a then 41-year-old woman from Spain, well-educated, came up with a rather fascinating story.  According to her, as she woke up on an unspecified day in March 2008, her eyes fell upon her bed sheets.  Strangely, they weren't the ones she remembered going to sleep to.  Neither were her pyjamas. As she decided to ignore the minute peculiarities to go to her office, the same she had been working for since 20 years, she found that the department which she called hers didn't have her name on the plate.  First she thought she had got the wrong floor, but no, everything was the same, same floor, same department, except it wasn't hers.  Then she found out she had been working in a different department altogether, for director she didn't even recognize.  Scared, she left the office on sickness grounds.

Understandably.  But the strangeness didn't end there.  In Garcia's own words (translated, obviously, into English; this is verbatim from the site, and I'm aware that some of it seems a little oddly-phrased):

6 months ago I’m not with my partner of 7 years, we left and started a relationship with a guy in my neighborhood.  I know him well, I’ve been 4 months with him and know his name, address, where he works as a child you have and where he is studying. Well, now there is this guy.  It seems that existed before my ‘jump’ but now no trace, I hired a detective to look for it and there in this ‘flat’. 

I went to a psychiatrist and attribute it to stress, believed to be hallucinations, but I know not.  My ex-boyfriend is with me as usual, I’ve never left it seems, and Augustine (my boyfriend now) seems to never have existed here, it lives in the apartment where he lived nor find his son. I swear it’s real, I am very sane.

First of all, I can't imagine living through this.  The terror must be extreme.  From the report, it sounds like Ms. Garcia is entirely sincere (i.e., not a hoaxer), although it certainly can be hard to make that judgment simply from an article.  But going on the assumption that she isn't lying outright, what are our options for an explanation?

Well, it hardly needs saying that I'm not buying that she's a visitor from an alternate universe.  The ad hoc assumptions that would be necessary for us to believe that are simply too numerous.  So I think we can safely cancel the Red Alert Status, and send Geordi LaForge et al. back to their stations.

[image courtesy of artist Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

What I think is most likely here is that Ms. Garcia is a victim of something akin to the Capgras delusion, about which I have written before (read my original post here).  While this isn't classic Capgras -- the most common manifestation of which is a sudden conviction that everyone has been replaced by perfect duplicates -- the similarities are apparent.  And she certainly has what is the most striking thing about Capgras and other delusional disorders, which is that while the sufferer is exhibiting symptoms of serious impairment, at the same time (s)he is absolutely convinced that (s)he is entirely sane.

One of the most terrifying things about such aberrations, I think.  At least for most other disorders, you know you're sick.  Here, you're convinced that you're seeing things correctly -- and therefore, it must be everyone else who is seeing things wrong.

So for all of the people who are citing Ms. Garcia's case as proof of alternate universes and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so forth, I'm not finding it convincing.  It's much more likely that she had a minor stroke, perhaps in the limbic system or temporal lobe, which function together to allow for facial recognition and memory.  Rather than trumpet her case as proof of the paranormal, it might be better to see to it that she has a CT scan, and appropriate treatment for what is almost certainly a neurological disorder, not anything (literally) otherworldly.

Slender Man, violence, and blame

When bad things happen, it seems to be a reflex that people look around for someone or something to blame.  And this week, Slender Man (more recently written run together as "Slenderman") is the convenient target.

I've written about Slender Man before, in a post two years ago in which I pondered the question of why people believe in things for which there is exactly zero factual evidence.  And in the last two weeks, there have been two, and possibly three, violent occurrences in which Slender Man had a part.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this particular paranormal apparition, Slender Man is a tall, skinny guy with long, spidery arms, dressed all in black, whose head is entirely featureless -- it is as smooth, and white, as an egg.  He is supposed to be associated with abductions, especially of children.  But unlike most paranormal claims, he is up-front-and-for-sure fictional -- in fact, we can even pinpoint Slender Man's exact time of birth as June of 2009, when a fellow named Victor Surge invented him as part of a contest on the Something Awful forums.  But since then, Slender Man has taken on a life of his own, spawning a whole genre of fiction (even I've succumbed -- Slender Man makes an appearance in my novel Signal to Noise.)

[image courtesy of an anonymous graffiti artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Wikimedia Commons]

But here's the problem.  Whenever there's something that gains fame, there's a chance that mentally disturbed people might (1) think it's real, or (2) become obsessed with it, or (3) both.  Which seems to be what's happened here.

First, we had an attack on a twelve-year-old girl by two of her friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which the girl was stabbed no less than nineteen times.  The friends, who are facing trial as adults despite the fact that they are also twelve years old, allegedly stabbed the girl because they wanted to act as "proxies for Slender Man" and had planned to escape into Nicolet National Park, where they believed Slender Man lives, afterward.  They had been planning the attack, they said, for six months.

Then, a mother who lives in Hamilton County, Ohio, came home from work a couple of days ago to find her thirteen-year-old daughter waiting for her -- wearing a white mask and holding a knife.  The mother was stabbed, but unlike the Wisconsin victim, escaped with minor injuries.  The daughter was said to have been inspired by an obsession with Slender Man.

Even the shootings two days ago in Las Vegas, Nevada have a connection.  The killers, Jerad and Amanda Miller, were enamored of ultra-right-wing politics and conspiracy theories (allegedly the couple had been part of the Cliven Bundy Ranch debacle, and are fans of Alex Jones); but Jerad Miller had been seen around their neighborhood in costume, including one of -- you guessed it -- Slender Man.

So of course, the links between the cases are flying about in the media, and (on one level) rightly so.  It is a question worth asking, when some odd commonality occurs between such nearly simultaneous occurrences.  But along with the links, there is a lot of blame being aimed at people who have popularized the evil character.

Is it the fault of Victor Surge, or Something Awful, or the site Creepypasta (which is largely responsible for Slender Man's popularity), or Eric Knudsen and David Morales, who administer the Slender Man site on the website, or even of authors like myself who have helped to popularize it?  It's tempting to say yes, because (more than likely) had the girls in the first two cases never come across the idea of Slender Man, it's unlikely they would have committed the crimes they did.  (The Millers clearly had other issues, and Slender Man was hardly a chief motivator for the murders they committed.)

Life, however, is seldom simple, and there is no single source we can point to for the origin of these tragedies.  Nor is there any way we can keep disturbing images and unsettling ideas away from people who are determined to seek them out.  And this is hardly the first time this has happened; Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and various other role-playing games have all been targeted at various times for inciting kids to lose themselves in violent fantasy worlds.  But it needn't be anything even that sketchy to result in obsession.  Back in 2011, a woman in Japan ended up in jail after she discovered that her husband was cheating on her, so she hacked into his online role-playing game and killed his avatar.  The husband was so infuriated that he called the police, who promptly arrested her.

And I still remember -- although I can't find a source online that verifies it -- that in the late 1970s, when the book Watership Down was published, a teenage boy read the book cover to cover and then promptly killed himself.  He left behind a note that his suicide was motivated by his longing to join the world of the book, and he'd become convinced that when he died, he'd be reincarnated as a rabbit.

The sad truth is that even if you remove the triggers -- the role-playing games, the books and movies and online memes with disturbing imagery -- the bottom line is that these are all the acts of people who could not tell fact from fiction, and who (therefore) were dealing with some level of mental illness.  It may be that the girls who stabbed their friend, the daughter who stabbed her mother, and the young man who killed himself over Watership Down would not have committed those acts had they not been spurred to do so by the fictional worlds they had entered.  But the fiction wasn't the root cause.  The root cause was mental illness that (apparently) had never been recognized and treated.

As sad as these acts are, we aren't going to make them go away by eliminating such tropes as Slender Man from our fiction.  For every one we eliminate, there are hundreds of others out there, as disturbing (or more so).  From the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft, to the various horror worlds created by Stephen King, to The X Files, to Supernatural and Dexter and Fringe, we are never going to want for scary imagery to draw from.  It would be nice to think that children are being shielded from these until they are old enough to handle them (and I was heartened to see that Creepypasta now has a "Warning to Those Under 18" on their website), but the unfortunate truth is that mental illness is all too common -- and the world is a dangerous place.  And the real question, the one our leaders don't want to face because it's far tougher than simply pointing fingers, is why access to mental health care isn't universal, accessible, and cheap.

Literature, learning, and the necessity of questioning authority

It will come as no great surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I think the educational system is long overdue for a philosophical overhaul.

We have lost sight of many things, but primary amongst them is the idea that education is supposed to broaden the world of the learner.  In our hoisting the flag of "career and college readiness," we have largely abandoned the goal of expansion of students' worldview in favor of measurable outcomes and a reductionistic approach whose only selling point is its expediency.  Even the origin of the word education should tell us that this is wrongheaded; it comes from the Latin verb educere, meaning "to draw out of."  We have too long looked upon education as a means of putting stuff into minds, where our real task should be to see what can be drawn from them.

Nowhere does this show as much as in the way we so often teach literature.  How many times are works of fiction used as avenues simply for teaching lists of vocabulary words and literary elements, and not to blow open the reader's world?  I know teachers who use literary works as a lens for bringing the Big Questions into sharper focus -- but it happens far too infrequently.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This all comes up because of something that happened last week at Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, Florida.  A summer reading program was planned, in which the goal was to have every student and staff member read the same book for a discussion at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year.  The school librarian, Betsy Woolley, and an English teacher, Mary Kate Griffith, got the whole thing rolling, and everything seemed fine -- until the principal, Dr. Michael J. Roberts, found out that the book that had been selected was Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.

Here's the description of the book, from its page on Amazon:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. 

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. 

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Challenging stuff.  Too challenging, according to Dr. Roberts, who promptly cancelled the entire program, saying that the book painted "a positive view of questioning authority" and had "discussion of sex and sexuality in passing."

I find this extremely troubling, especially the first part.  Since when is questioning authority a bad thing?  Do we really want to teach our children that authority is to be obeyed, regardless of whether or not it is moral?  In canceling the program, Dr. Roberts has reinforced the dogma that the dominant paradigm is to be followed, blindly, whatever it says.  Read what we say you can read; do not read what we forbid.  And whatever you do, don't question.

Doctorow, and his publisher, Tor, have retaliated -- by sending 200 copies of the the book to the school, for free.  It remains to be seen whether the school administration will allow them to be passed out, but at least the fact that this whole thing has become public has sent a message to the students -- that there are always ways to circumvent the people who are trying to keep you from learning.  An important message, and perhaps a bigger one than even the book itself would have taught.

Myself, I think we should deliberately assign books that challenge preconceived notions, especially on the high school level.  If you leave high school with your basic assumptions unexamined, we have failed as educators.  Students should be reading books like Doctorow's.

Lots of them.  Not because they put ideas into students' heads; believe me, those ideas are already there, given that we're talking about teenagers.  They should read these books because it opens up the discussion of such questions as when authority should be rightfully questioned, and what our response should be to it when the authorities are in the wrong.  It takes a skilled educator to navigate something like this -- to launch such a discussion, let the students bounce the ideas around, and not to try to drive it to a particular conclusion, while still steering it toward the central points.  But regardless of the risks, it is an absolutely critical part of education.

I try to do this with my Critical Thinking classes, in our reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's short story The Wall.  In this mind-blowing story, we have a man imprisoned and under a sentence of death for insurrection during the Spanish Civil War, who has been promised his freedom if he'll betray the leader of the rebellion.  I hope you'll read the story -- so I won't give you any spoilers -- but by the end, we're forced to question such things as when a cause is worth a human life, whether a sacrifice means anything if no one knows you've done it, and if an act is moral even if it has the opposite effect you intended.  And as deep as these waters are, it is one of my favorite lessons of the year to teach, mostly because I never know which direction it's going to go beforehand.

And personally, I can't imagine how my mind today would be different if I hadn't stumbled upon, been given, or been assigned to read works of literature that rattled my foundations -- books like Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami), Keep the River On Your Right (Tobias Schneebaum), The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin), Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman), Watership Down (Richard Adams), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor)... and many, many others.  Each one shook some part of my world, made me see things a different way, left me a changed person by the time I reached the last page.  To stop children from approaching literature because we're scared of what questions it might raise is exactly backwards; we need, as educators, to say, "Don't be afraid of questions; be afraid of where you might be led by others, unwittingly, if you fail to ask them."

Or, as Nigerian poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka put it: "Education should be a hand grenade that you detonate underneath stagnant ways of thinking."

Contacting the spirits of the... living?

One of the most important, and least considered, questions about belief is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It is something we should always keep in the front of our brains, whenever considering a claim.  We all have biases; we all have preconceived notions.  These only become a problem when either (1) they are unexamined, or (2) we become so attached to them that nothing could persuade us to abandon them.

I'm very much afraid that for some people, belief in the power of psychics is one of those unexamined, immovable ideas.  I say this because of the response people have had to a catastrophic faceplant performed last week by Skeptophilia frequent flier "Psychic Sally" Morgan.

"Psychic Sally," you may remember, is the performance artist who has thousands of people convinced that she can communicate with the dead.  She bills herself as "Britain's favorite medium," and fills halls with people who have purchased expensive tickets to her shows.  This is despite the fact that in a previous show she was caught "communicating" with a fictional character, and was once accused by a journalist of receiving information from a helper through an earpiece.

None of this diminished her popularity.  The first incident was only revealed in a newspaper article after the fact, and in the second, the journalist was actually sued by Psychic Sally for libel -- and she won.  There was no proof, the judge ruled, that the Sally had cheated.  The journalist, and the newspaper he worked for, were forced to pay reparations.

But this time it is to be hoped that things are different, because Sally did her monumental kerflop right in public.  Here's how blogger Myles Power, who was there that night, describes it:

Sally came to Middlesbrough on Friday night and her show started off very well.  Even though she was getting the vast majority of what she was saying wrong the audience did not seem to mind and seemed to be having a good time.  The point at which the audience became disillusioned with the performance was quite specific.  One aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones, in the hope that Sally will select theirs, and give a psychic reading from it.  Sally pulled out of a box on stage one of these pictures.  She held the picture up to the camera and it was projected on the large screen behind her.  The picture was of a middle-aged woman and by the clothes she was wearing and the quality of the image, I guessed it was taken some time in the 1990s.  Sally immediately began to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby named Annabel……or was it Becky.  Noticing that no one in the audience was responding, Sally asked the person who submitted the photo to stand up.  A rather small chunky woman at the centre of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife.  She was informed that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture.  However the woman in the audience (who was now also projected behind Sally) disagreed and started to look increasingly confused as, presumably, nothing Sally was saying made any sense to her.  Sally then decided to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture had any children who passed and, when informed that that she hadn’t, responded by saying “I will leave that then.” 

Sally then became in direct contact with the woman in the photo who began to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death and that she felt it was very very quick.  She later went on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death and that she either died on a Wednesday or was taken ill that day.  As the woman in the audience was not responding to any thing Sally was saying, she decided to ask how the woman in the photo was related to her.  It turns out the woman in the audience got the whole concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong – and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself.

So there you have it.  "Psychic Sally" has now been caught not only summoning up the spirit of a fictional character, she has gotten into psychic communication with the ghost of a person who is still alive and sitting right there in the audience.

Apparently the hall erupted in laughter when it became evident what had happened, and Psychic Sally never really did recover.  A number of people walked out.  People wouldn't answer her leading questions.  The audience, for that night at least, was a lost cause.

But here's the problem: now we have people rising to her defense, and the defense of psychics as a whole.  Just because Sally got it wrong once, they say, doesn't mean all psychics are frauds.  Here's a sampling of comments:

I know many genuine psychics who are sincere and good people, there are bad plumbers, carpenters etc just as there are good.  I was talking to a person who makes a living by speaking to the dead every week, he was a VICAR if you don’t believe fine but do not decry those who do as you will find out the truth one day as we all do.  The Sally Morgans and tub-thumping stage acts do no service to the genuine ones who just help without rooking people, she was so bad one night according to a TV comedian that they were booing her the following night when he was on.

I get really pee’d off when all people want to do is bad mouth sally make her look like she is some sort of fraudulant [sic] psychic.  Why do people only ever mention that she get names wrong n [sic] so on.  Sally has been doing this since she was 5 yrs old, and she has done show after show how bout [sic] talking about all the messages she has got spot on?  because they would out rule all the messages she may/or may not have got right.  I think personally people forget that because she mentions a name to someoone [sic] & they dont [sic] know who she is talking about that name could relate to a friend who is sitting at home & where they dont [sic] know there friends [sic] extended family it could have been for them, so it’s not that sally gets it wrong its simply because the person who the message is for is not simply sat in the audience.  Also this is not something sally can take a wild guess at, she is being given information from the other side & some people find that hard to except [sic].  Sally time & time again gives actual names of the person she has in spirit & gives names of that persons [sic] family you tell me how sally could have known this or is making it up?

THERE WAS PLANTS IN THE AUDIENCE, CAST NEGATIVE ENERGY ONTO SALLY, THAT IS WHY THE PEOPLE DO NOT SEE THE TRUTH BECAUSE THEY DRINK WATER FROM THE TOWN TAPS WITH HAS FLURECENCE [sic] IN IT TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE AND MAKE THEM THING THINGS THAT ARE NOT TRUE. 

what no-one seems to have realised that psychics do not necessarily work with or communicate with spirit – all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums – there is a big difference!

Okay, that was terrifying.  Especially the part about "flurecence" in the water.

Really, people: if "Psychic Sally," one of the most sought-after mediums in the UK, fails this catastrophically, shouldn't that force you to revisit your assumptions vis-à-vis all psychic phenomena?  I mean, think about it; what if there was a televised launch of a rocket, and right there in the public eye, said rocket went up into space and ran smack into one of the "crystal spheres" that ancient astronomers thought made up the heavens?  Wouldn't that make you want to ask the astronomers a few trenchant questions?

But with Psychic Sally's analogous bellyflop, apparently the answer is "no."  With the exception of the few people who actually saw her epic fail, no one much seems to be convinced who wasn't convinced already.  My guess is that after a few weeks of laying-low, she'll dust herself off -- and her act will be right back out on stage, wowing gullible audiences and raking in the money.

The vegan apocalypse

It struck me today how odd it is that in so many religions, it seems like it's not so much that the believers agree with god, it's that god agrees with the believers.

It's entirely possible that this impression comes from my position as an outsider.  But really: my general sense is that the people who are so vehemently against gay marriage (for example) would still be against it even if they weren't religious.  They are using their religion as justification for their bigotry, not honestly and open-mindedly trying to figure out what their religion demands.  Otherwise, you'd think they'd run into "judge not, lest ye be judged" and "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" at least as often as they read "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

All of which makes it seem to me, as you might expect, very much that man created god in his own image rather than the other way around.  Hard to explain otherwise that our deities share our pettiness, bias, jealousy, rage, and tribalism.

What brings all this to mind is a site I ran across yesterday that would be funny if it weren't so earnest.  Called God, Justice, Vegan Earth 2019, the site tells us that god isn't so much concerned about sex (which, frankly, seems to be an obsession with your typical Judaeo-Christian god) as he is with food.  We are told, in appalling detail, that we all have to become vegans right away...

... or we're gonna be slaughtered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I thought, at first, that this might be some kind of a joke site, but I don't think it is.  They seem awfully serious about the whole thing:

Two conditions should be met then you will survive.  You will live and inherit the whole Earth to own, rule and use.  All other humans will be killed.  This is a clean restart.
1- Faith in God
2- Vegan

So given my status as an atheist, and the fact that I think that a rare t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the truly awesome things in life, I'm pretty much screwed both ways.  We're even given a timetable, presumably so we can have a chance to mend our ways:

19 Jun 2018-All butchers globally will be killed(1)
15 Aug 2018-All hunters will be killed(2)
11 Sep 2018-Los Angels [sic] 380 Decapitation(3)
23 Sep 2018 -Speech on Mt. Sinai
11 Oct 2018-The Judgment Day

The numbers apparently stand for the "three miracles" that the adherents to this religion think are going to happen.  I was going to say something about how massive genocide hardly counts as a miracle, but then I thought about some of the stories from the Old Testament, with god directing the Israelites to hack their way across Palestine, killing everyone in their way, and I thought, "well, at least there's precedent."

At the end of the page, we're given another dire message:

This is not a business.  Our associates never advertise or sell any product and never ask for donation.
 This is an organization to UNITE and prepare all Vegans to establish the Vegan Earth.

WARNING 

God believer Vegans (only) will own the Earth in 2019.
Estimated survival number after genocide of 2018 is very low.  Learn.  Be among them.
Fill the Churches, Mosques and Temples and learn faith for God and become Vegan.
Both conditions should apply or you will be killed.

So that sounds pretty unequivocal.

We're also told that we can download a free pdf of the book The Vegan Earth: Judgment Day, which will supersede the Torah, the Qu'ran, and the Bible.   It was, the site tells us, written by god and Moses, which is a pretty powerful co-authorship.

But honestly: doesn't it sound to you like this site was put together by someone who already was a vegan, and who thought everyone else should be, too, and decided that the message would sound a lot more authoritative if it was the word of god?   We can chuckle, and shake our heads about how silly the website is -- but how is it really any different than Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, claiming that Christians need to strike back against the gay rights movement because people with "biblical views on the sin of homosexuality" are facing "totalitarianism" comparable to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Stalinist regime in the USSR in the1950s?

Both are fact-free rancor and vitriol, from people who want to give their own ugly invective legitimacy by putting it in the mouth of god.  The only difference is that the homophobes are more common, better organized, and richer than the über-vegans. But the message is essentially the same: believe what I believe, because god says so.  And if you don't, you're hell-bound.  We may even expedite your delivery there.

I find the whole thing repellant, and it's not to be wondered at that I'd just as soon be the master of my own moral code, and let others do the same.  For me, starting with the general rule "don't be an asshole" covers a lot of ground, and that includes the biblical dictum -- right from the mouth of Jesus, in fact, in Matthew 7:1-3 -- that we're better off not judging others at all, given that we've all got flaws.  For me, that includes not really giving a rat's ass what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom, as long as no one gets hurt; nor interfering with anyone's taste in food, music, books, art, or clothing, just as I'd prefer that people keep their nose out of my tastes thereof.

But that's apparently not enough of a guiding principle for some people, leading to the kind of thing you hear from bitter, humorless individuals like Tony Perkins, not to mention the various Muslim mullahs still recommending stoning, whipping, and hanging for such "sins" as sex outside of marriage, and declaring fatwas against writers, bloggers, musicians, and actors for "insulting Islam."

The whole thing makes me realize that in a lot of ways, we haven't really come that far from the Bronze Age, the days when the Lord God said unto his people such things as we find in 1 Samuel 15: "This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"

And such things, apparently, still saith the lord, lo up unto this very day.

Answers, ignorance, and mitochondrial DNA

Something I fight continuously, as a teacher, is the idea that the most important thing is THE ANSWER.

It's the fault of the way education is usually conducted, of course.  Whether because teachers were themselves taught that way, or because of expediency, THE ANSWER is always considered to be the critical thing.  It doesn't matter how you got there; process isn't the concern.  As long as you have THE ANSWER in the appropriate space, you get full credit.

The problem is, by the time students get to high school, I'm expecting that they'll be moving beyond that, and it's often a battle.  I've had more than one student say, "Just tell me what to write down," as if somehow that was going to engender understanding.  My frustration on this point is what resulted in the following actual conversation:

Student:  What do I write down for question #7?
Me:  Whatever you think the correct explanation is.
Student:  But what if my explanation isn't right?
Me:  Then I'll mark it wrong.
Student:  But I don't want to write down the wrong answer!
Me:  Then don't.

In my own defense, I wasn't simply trying to be snarky; it just gets tiring to know that my refrain of "I will not think for you" often falls on deaf ears.

I find myself wondering how deep this inclination goes, and if it's because as a culture, we're taught to expect that there always is a single correct answer.  The biblical maxim of "Ask and ye shall receive" is pretty deeply ingrained.  We're uncomfortable with not knowing.

We're even more uncomfortable where there may be no way to know.

I ran squarely into this with my genealogical pursuits a couple of days ago.  There's a pair of sisters who were amongst the founding mothers of Acadia (as people of French descent call Nova Scotia).  Their names are Catherine and Edmée LeJeune, and they show up in Acadia in the early 1600s.  (I actually descend, on my mother's side of the family, from both of them.)

No one knows where they were born, or who their parents were.  The early records simply aren't complete enough.  This has led to speculation that they may have been Natives -- there are numerous records of early French settlers marrying Native women.  Could it be that the LeJeune sisters were members of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, or some other Native tribe of eastern Canada?

The whole thing was a moot point for decades; like I said, the documentation simply does not exist.  This didn't stop rampant speculation on both sides of the question.  Instead of just leaving their origin as "unknown," people seemed to need to fill in the blank with something.

Then, along came mitochondrial DNA analysis.  mtDNA is only inherited through the maternal line, so any matrilineal descendant of either sister should pinpoint their origin.  Matrilineal descendants (several of them) were traced, offered up blood samples, and the results all agreed; Catherine and Edmée were of the haplotype U6a7a, a signature that is characteristic of North African ancestry.

In my mind, this seemed to settle it.  The Moors made significant inroads into southwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, and there are huge numbers of people in Spain, Portugal, and southern France who have North African ancestry.  Catherine and Edmée most likely were born in France.  But that wasn't good enough; the people who had already decided that they were Native weren't content to let it rest.

Enter Dr. Howard Barraclough "Barry" Fell, professional zoologist and amateur archaeologist and linguist, who in 1976 published a book called America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World.  In it, using the cherry-picking lexicography favored by people who aren't actually trained in linguistic analysis, Fell came to the conclusion that the Mi'kmaq orthography, one of the only pre-Columbian North American writing systems, was descended from none other than...

... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Now I hasten to state that most linguists consider Fell to be a well-meaning but misguided amateur.  (For a particularly insightful take-down of his conclusions, check out this site, courtesy of linguist and scholar Richard Flavin.)  But this hasn't stopped sites like "Mi'kmaq/Ancient Egyptian Connection" from surfacing, wherein we find that the ancient Egyptians made it not only to Nova Scotia, but all the way to Illinois and... Australia!

Now, I know the Egyptians were pretty cool.  But if you're gonna make a claim like that, I'm gonna need something more than a few chance correspondences between words and symbols before I buy in.

But the "have an answer at all costs" crowd wouldn't let it lie, especially once the Mormons got involved, and used Fell's so-called research to support their contention that the Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Why can't we just say "we don't know?"  Why can't we focus on the reality -- the Mi'kmaq and other Native groups made their way to North America at some unspecified time in the past, and (more specifically) Catherine and Edmée LeJeune had some North African ancestry somewhere -- and consider how awesome the process of knowing is?  We can actually use blood samples from distant descendants of long-dead individuals to determine the movements of groups of people thousands, or tens of thousands, of years ago.

Cool, no?

Not cool enough, apparently.  We need THE ANSWER.

Now, let me be clear on this: there's something to be said for having a correct picture of what's going on.  But when there's uncertainty, it's critical to be comfortable with a partial answer, and even more critical to understand the whole context of knowledge within which we are working.  In the long haul, I'm happier knowing about mtDNA and the migration of human groups than I would be just to have a final answer to fill in for my distant foremothers' birthplace.

But unfortunately, I appear to be in the minority.