On Halloween, Justin Robert Young and my friend Andrew Mayne tried to raise the spirit of Harry Houdini in a seance at the James Randi Educational Foundation HQ in Florida. The event was live on the intertubez and and the recorded stream is on UStream. The whole thing is over an hour long, but well worth your time! A bunch of people (including Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, Michael Shermer, and me) were asked to send in secret words for Houdini to divine at the seance. This wasn’t a foolproof scientific experiment, but it’s fun.
Here’s the show below. Note: some NSFW language.
They picked my word starting at about 39 minutes into the video. And what was my word? Well, at the risk of generating the ire of Houdini’s shade, it was floccinaucinihilipilification, a word I remembered from when I was a kid and read the Guinness Book of World Records (it was in the list for, duh, longest words). It means "the act of estimating something as being worthless". I didn’t realize they were using a Ouija board at the seance, though, so perhaps choosing a word that’s about 30 letters long may have been a little irritating. However, I really wanted to make sure they wouldn’t pick it by chance. Infinite monkeys, and all that.
The Denver Skeptics divined my word as "shor". I have to count that as a definite hit.
I should have picked pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
Tim is brilliant; his performance at TAM London brought the house down. Jonathan Ross is something of a skeptic himself; he and his family attended TAML as well, and I found them to be funny, intelligent, and totally charming.
I can’t wait to see Tim on the show! I know it’s on YouTube already, but I’d rather wait and see the whole show[Edited to add: the video has been removed]. We’ve been watching it here at Chez BA and it’s really funny.
A couple of weeks ago, thousands of people gathered at Knock Shrine in Ireland, gazing upward, looking for a vision of the Virgin Mary. Why?
Earlier in the week Dublin-based clairvoyant Joe Coleman predicted Our Lady would appear at the old parish church – scene of the 1879 apparition – at 3pm. Quite a number of those present were members of the Travelling community.
OK, still, fine. But what we had here was several thousand people staring at the Sun. That’s a bad idea: it can cause temporary blindness, and permanent damage to the retina (though I know of no cases of both permanent and total blindness).
And of course it can cause you to see things. The retina floods with light and gets saturated, making you see afterimages with illusions of color, movement, and other weird things. And this is just what the pilgrims to Knock reported.
John Tunney, from Islandeady, Castlebar, said: “I’m 53 years old and I never seen the sun go like that before. I witnessed the sun go all different colours, yellow, red and green. Then it completely darkened and began shimmering. Sometimes the sun emitted a clean, bright light, then it would darken again.”
Mr Tunney’s wife, Nina, said: “The sun was spinning in the sky. I experienced a feeling of total happiness. It is a feeling I would love to experience again. It was amazing. I felt marvellous.”
Yvonne Rabbitte, from Dunmore, Co Galway, showed other pilgrims a photograph she had taken on her digital camera which showed vivid rays radiating downwards from the sun at the time the image was taken
The first two anecdotes sure sound to me a lot like illusions that happen when staring at a very bright object. And that last story is telling; that kind of thing will always happen when you take pictures of the Sun! I have lots of pictures with rays coming from the Sun that I have taken on days when a clairvoyant has not predicted the apparition of a religious icon.
As I have said here many times, people have the right to believe in what they want. However, I think they should at least try to educate themselves on the way the Universe works so they don’t leap to the wrong conclusions (as Richard Feymann once said, science is a way of not fooling ourselves)– and certainly the journalists out there have an obligation to do a little research when reporting on such events.
This is a case where I think people came to the wrong conclusion. I don’t know if the clairvoyant really believes what he says or if, like so many others, he’s got a somewhat different agenda. But either way the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: people went outside hoping to see visions, and that’s just what happened.
"An official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent", indeed. What does imminent mean? A year? 10? I’m guessing never. But as long as the antiscience advocates can use words like soon, imminent, and impending, they can keep their believers on the hook.
And why am I not surprised to see Richard Hoagland’s name in that article?
Every now and again I have to do that comical rapid-shaking-of-the-head accompanied by that wugga wugga wugga sound when I think that people actually buy into this, um, stuff. Wow.
Houdini was a hero to James Randi, and he famously said that if there were an afterlife, he would do whatever he could after he died to contact his wife. She held a seance, and… nothing happened. However, when you have people like Randi and magician Andrew Mayne involved, why, anything can happen!
OK, maybe not anything. Like, say, actually contacting a dead spirit. But I bet this will be a very fun event, and I encourage all skeptics and believers — especially believers — young and old to drop in. For more info, stay tuned to Randi.org and WeirdThings.com.
The SETI Institute’s latest episode of the podcast Are We Alone is now up, and I talk with Seth Shostak about the idea that somehow, forces unknown (God? The Universe Itself? The Doctor? Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?) have tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider… from the future!
Personally, I’m not buying it, but it’s an interesting idea. The authors of a published study say that we should perform some sort of experiment before turning the LHC on to see if someone from the future is trying to contact us. But I have a better idea: let’s turn the LHC on and see if it works. If it does, then we’re done with this idea. And if it doesn’t, hand me my sonic screwdriver. There’s work to do!
[Edited to add: Well, the folks at CERN have been injecting particles into the LHC stream since Friday. They'll be ramping it up to full speed in the coming weeks, so we'll know soon enough about all this!]
I have been getting email from people talking about a possible meteorite impact in northern Latvia yesterday. I had a blog post all ready to go saying this whole thing sounded extremely fishy to me, and before I could post it I found out this story has been confirmed as a fake. Here’s the scoop:
Some reports indicated that there were eyewitnesses to a fireball around 17:30 local time yesterday (for example, here and here).
That’s fine, but what had me very suspicious was the report of a crater about 20 meters or so across. In general, small impact don’t leave craters; or atmosphere slows meteoroids down, so anything in the meter or smaller size wouldn’t be moving quickly enough to dig a big crater. Pictures were posted to a blog; while there was nothing initially I could point to that screams "FAKE!" to me, my spidey sense was all a-tingle. Here’s one picture:
It shows the center of the crater, and again, it just didn’t look real to me. The crater is too deep for its width (most impact craters are shallower). Also, the rim is too piled up, and there’s no ejected rock or dirt sprayed out as you’d expect from an impact. Then, better pictures were posted and I could see immediately I was right; the crater simply doesn’t look real. It looks more like what someone thinks a crater should look like than what one actually does look like.
I didn’t believe this video at all. Look at the crater: the rim just looks like it was dug; the grass just outside it isn’t disturbed at all. Wouldn’t a flaming meteor at least singe the ground? And if I didn’t buy the crater, I really super duper didn’t buy the flaming rock sitting in the center. Meteorites tend not to be hot on impact! They decelerate violently as they come in, compressing the air in front of them. That’s why they get hot. But that happens in a few seconds, and stops while the rock is still a hundred kilometers up. It falls at terminal velocity the rest of the way for several minutes before impacting the ground.
So the meteoroid (the name for the solid part of the meteor) is falling through ice-cold air for a while before it hits. That’s why smallish meteorites are not hot. In fact, many are found to be cold right after impact!
So I was almost completely positive the video was a fake right after seeing it, and I’m glad to see my instincts were correct.
There was more reason to be suspicious, too. A rock a half meter for more across would make a fireball so intense that there would be thousands of witnesses especially given that it was late afternoon when it happened. The media reports don’t indicate it was seen by many people. No pictures of the actual fireball came out, either.
And now all of this makes sense because it’s a confirmed fake. So the only questions remaining are: why was this done? To promote tourism, as a joke, to sell tickets? And, of course, was Richard Heene involved?
Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Mihkel Kama and Anna from StarSpace who was the first to tip me off to the story in the first place, as well as let me know it was fake.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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The opinions and ideas expressed in this blog are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Discover Magazine and/or the James Randi Educational Foundation, of which Dr. Plait serves as President.
