Be that as it may. Brutally, I think people are attracted to conspiracy theories because they lack the background to be enthralled by the strange stuff that is real. When you don’t even understand what causes the phases of the Moon, it takes something as crude and obvious as “The Moon is a Spaceship!” to excite you.

Odd, the comment about scientists leaving science at the door. Would that engineers would do that more often! (I grew up around engineers.) Perhaps the problem is that the tool they are most used to using is too precise. To get around in the day-to-day the blunter and more generalized tools of logic, mechanics, first-order effects, and simple math get you further.

Proprio ieri, Kevin Grazier ha riaperto la questione su Science Not Fiction raccontando la cosa dal suo punto di vista di educatore scientifico e difendendo l’insegnamento delle “abilità” nell’utilizzo degli strumenti scientifici. …

In Star Trek: Enterprise, there’s a scene where a Zindi is using an unfamiliar communication device to talk to what he thinks is a member of the race who are encouraging the Zindi to attack Earth. The signal is breaking up, and he steps closer to ask for clarification — whereupon Jonathan Archer, until that moment trapped in the 31st century, materializes in the cylinder of light and punches his lights out.

“A pay phone was ringing, and it just about blew my mind.
When I picked it up and said hello, this foot came through the line.”
– Bob Dylan

You see I’m capable of some wackiness myself.

“Seriously? NOBODY could give an explanation better than that of a time-traveling cell phone user? Well web sites and surfers alike certainly offered up their speculation.

One simple “Where’s the cell tower?” comment (and thankfully there were some of these) in the articles’ talkbacks should have been “End of subject”, at least as far as the object being any kind of communications device, and in too many cases it wasn’t. ”

Once the premise of a time traveller is accepted, it seems illogical to doubt a trans-temporal communication device.

What was surprising, nay a wee bit appalling, was the ratio of conspiracy theories–and just plain “out there” speculation–to critical and/or scientific thought (Though if you read one article, the second post in the talkback, there’s a hilarious example of somebody who tried too hard to apply too much science to the problem, and winds up writing a lengthy discourse, nay manifesto, about Einstein and time and relativity and GPS satellites and the speed of light and… what were we talking about again?).

I take comfort in the thought that blog commenters are not typical of the general population in this respect — that the medium gives them leave to go wacky, perhaps wackier than they are in person.