Posts filed under “Science & Nature”
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: My daughter brought home some cans of something labeled “prebiotic soda.” There are days when I wonder why I took all those English classes in school. Can you explain what “prebiotic soda” is? —Sincerely, A Father Out of His Depth.
Dear Sir: As its name implies, prebiotic soda is soda you drink before you are born. Similarly, postbiotic soda is soda you drink after you have died. From the general tone of your correspondence, Dr. Boli suspects that you fall into neither of those categories.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: To settle a bet, what is the greatest human intellectual accomplishment of the twenty-first century so far? —Sincerely, An Inveterate Gambler.
Dear Sir or Madam: The greatest human intellectual accomplishment since January 1, 2001, has been teaching our AI bots to say “uh” every so often when they call people on the phone to scam them.
UNUSUAL BIRDS AND THEIR BEHAVIORS.
The Tufted Barhop has the shortest regular migration recorded in the avian world, migrating an average of eighteen feet. Its breeding grounds are upstairs from its wintering grounds at Tadsby’s Tavern.
A nesting pair of Sank’s Ochre-Throated Twits will not build a nest until they have “purchased” a “site” from a third Sank’s Ochre-Throated Twit by means of a ritualized real-estate dance.
The male Tarpit Drosshandler advertises for a mate in the personals section of the nearest daily newspaper of general circulation. The decline of printed newspapers has placed the Tarpit Drosshandler on the IUCN Red List.
The New Philadelphia Crow is known to manufacture simple tools with which it vandalizes the automobiles of prying ornithologists.
NERGAL-SHAREZER THE RABMAG INTERPRETS YOUR BLEMISHES.
On the forehead. Your cousin Albert thinks less of you than you realize. Perhaps you ought to send him a big box of those expensive gift pears that come wrapped in foil, so he can see that you have enough money to buy expensive gift pears that come wrapped in foil.
On the left temple. The police are quite mistaken about you and will realize it eventually. On the right temple: the police are quite mistaken about you, and they will never realize it.
On the lip. The price of coconut fiber is about to go down precipitously, and about three days from now would be a good time to stock up for all those hobbies you have that involve coconut fiber. Pay no attention to the reason for the drop in price, as it would only depress you.
Under the chin. Avoid blue or blue-grey automobiles of any sort today.
On the neck. Red roses might improve your relationship with whatsername. Make sure to get them before Tuesday, for reasons that will otherwise become obvious on Wednesday.
On the shoulders. The letter from the IRS is probably only an advertisement for something you don’t want, so go ahead and recycle it.
TEMPORAL CUBISM AND THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT.
This Magazine has run more than one article on the Voynich Manuscript, and in particular about the cranks who have left comments on the Internet Archive scan of the manuscript explaining how they have figured it all out. Whether the fact that Dr. Boli enjoys mocking the cranks so much means that he is a crank himself is a question he will leave the cranks to debate.
Every so often someone stumbles across one of those articles and leaves a comment explaining the Voynich Manuscript, or explaining one of the previous explanations and why it is actually on the right track. It happened just recently with our article “The Voynich Manuscript: Now Even More Figured Out.” One of the many explanations of the manuscript we had quoted was this one:
It’s a little bit religious and astronomical, but it’s main subject is biology. There are numerous ancient books in eastern world that mixing religion and biology, also they mixed religion and astronomy. So my opinion is that the book is describing plant’s biology with many exemplifications and associating them with religion and astronomy, and totalizes them with the help of woman characters to understand them.
Our commenter wrote:
I actually think the fifth interpretation here, that the VM is at least in part a coded reference to “Eastern” (a term I generally dislike but is probably somewhat appropriate for the late medieval period the VM arose from) philosophy and religion, is not totally unreasonable. Diane O’Donovan at voynichrevisionist.com has argued similar things.
The site in the link, incidentally, seems to be remarkably free from obvious crankery, and even shows a considerable respect for scientific method and evidence, both of those observations making us think that perhaps Ms. O’Donovan would not have been as kind to the explanation quoted as our commenter was.
But what arrested Dr. Boli’s attention about the comment was the commenter’s email address, and the commenter is invited to explain it here. The address is the words “Time Cube,” plus enough added characters that no one could guess the rest from the information we have just given out. It is quite clear, however, that the address is meant to refer to the Time Cube theory; and we are now going to follow that rabbit into its hole, because the mere mention of the Time Cube caused Dr. Boli to wallow in nostalgia for the good old days of the early Internet.
The empire of crankdom is a blotchy and disorganized country, like the Holy Roman Empire, with its member states constantly at war with one another as well as with the nations outside the borders. Nevertheless, even in such a mess of an empire, there has to be one emperor; and until his still-lamented death eleven years ago, the emperor of all cranks was Gene Ray, whose site first appeared in 1997, and who at various times offered a thousand or ten thousand dollars to anyone who could prove his Time Cube theory wrong.
Many cranks have done the same. There is no proving them wrong, of course, on the usual grounds that proof against the conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The flat-earther knows that the earth is flat; every bit of scientific evidence to the contrary merely shows that the conspiracy to keep the truth from us is all-pervading and nearly omnipotent.
But there was a fundamental difference that set the Time Cube theory apart from most of the other crankeries. When you argue with a flat-earther, you can understand his assertions: the world, he says, has this shape, not that shape. The idea of a flat earth is comprehensible. Likewise, the man who believes that the world is secretly run by a cabal of reptiles from another planet may be right or wrong, but he is making an assertion that, in itself, can be understood and affirmed or denied. And so with all the other cranks: whether they believe that they have discovered the one root vegetable that cures all known diseases or that the emperor Constantine wrote the New Testament on the back of an envelope, you can argue with them. You won’t win the argument; the crank will shake his head sadly at your naivety and pity you for being such a dupe. But when the crank makes an assertion, you can deny it, and explain why you deny it.
With Gene Ray and the Time Cube, you do not have that luxury. His theory is so incomprehensible that you cannot even deny it. You can only read or listen and say, “Huh?”
Like many cranks, Ray put everything he knew about everything on a single Web page, all centered, with long passages in all caps and many different sizes and colors of text. In time it grew to sequential pages, but all in the same non-format. The site was constantly under revision, but here is how the last version of it began when Mr. Ray died in 2015:
In 1884, meridian time personnel met in Washington to change Earth time. First words said was that only 1 day could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day bible. So they applied the 1 day and ignored the other 3 days. The bible time was wrong then and it proved wrong today. This a major lie has so much evil feed from it’s wrong. No man on Earth has no belly-button, it proves every believer on Earth a liar. Children will be blessed for Killing Of Educated Adults Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous Days Same Earth Rotation. Practicing Evil ONEness – Upon Earth Of Quadrants. Evil Adult Crime VS Youth. Supports Lie Of Integration. 1 Educated Are Most Dumb. Not 1 Human Except Dead 1. Man Is Paired, 2 Half 4 Self. 1 of God Is Only 1/4 Of God. Bible A Lie & Word Is Lies. Navel Connects 4 Corner 4s. God Is Born Of A Mother – She Left Belly B. Signature. Every Priest Has Ma Sign But Lies To Honor Queers. Belly B. Proves 4 Corners.
Well, perhaps that is not the best introduction to his theory, since it seems to assume that we already know what it is. But there are many places in the page where Ray does try to summarize the truth in terms that even stupid people like us can understand.
Hey stupid – are you too dumb to know there are 4 different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth? Greenwich 1 day is a lie. 4 quadrants = 4 corners, and 4 different directions. Each Earth corner rotates own separate 24 hour day. Infinite days is stupidity.
He even gave us diagrams:
This diagram was redrawn from the fuzzy original on the Time Cube site by a heroic Wikimedia contributor with too much time on her hands.
And yet we persist in our culpable incomprehension!
The one thing that we can understand about Ray’s theory is that, whatever is evil in the world, the Jews and Blacks are behind it. The Jews began the 1-day lie; the Blacks are using it to oppress White Americans. It made Mr. Ray very angry.
And that is another thing that distinguished Ray from the ordinary run of cranks. Most cranks simply pity you for not seeing the truth. Ray hated you and told you in no uncertain terms that he was going to kill you when he got the chance.
Since I have informed you of Nature’s Harmonic Time Cube 4-Day Creation Principle, your stupidity is no longer the issue. For now, the issue is just how evil you are for ignoring Life’s Highest Order, and just how long the Time Cube will allow you to plunder Earth before inflicting hell upon you.
And one principle he taught to the young ones, over and over, for the whole time his site was on the Web (as we see from a 1998 capture of the site), was this cheering dogma:
Children are justified in killing adults “refusing” to know Nature’s 4 Day Time Cube Creation Principle.
Now, what has all this to do with the Voynich manuscript?
The only answer Dr. Boli could come up with was the principle of crank magnetism. “Crank magnetism,” says the site FlatEarth.ws, “is the tendency of ‘cranks’ to hold multiple irrational, unsupported, or ludicrous beliefs that are often unrelated.” The idea that essential knowledge is being deliberately suppressed opens one’s mind, in the same way that stepping on the foot pedal opens the rubbish bin in Dr. Boli’s office, and anything can be tossed in.
Incidentally, is it an exercise in crankery to build up a site with dozens of illustrated proofs that the earth is not flat, or is it simply a necessity to belabor the obvious in the age of social media? Here is your essay topic for the day. Meanwhile, Dr. Boli will get to work on his new pro-science site, “GRASS IS REAL,” which will refute the unfounded theory that the existence of the family Gramineae is a botanical hoax foisted upon us by members of the Bhutanese royal family as part of their centuries-long plot to deprive us of the knowledge of the carefree ground-covers used by our ancient ancestors. He was thinking of putting all the information on one page, centered, using multiple sizes and colors of text to emphasize salient points.
THE ROYAL ROAD TO ESPIONAGE.
You probably have to work up a cover story, order a fake ID from the Section of False Documents, put on a disguise, travel to the site, worm your way in somehow, and surreptitiously take several rolls of 16-millimeter film with your little Minox.
Wouldn’t it be more convenient if you could just sit in your comfortable government-issue desk chair and see, without going anywhere, exactly what was going on at those coordinates?
Of course it would be. And there’s wonderful news! Thanks to the science of Coordinate Remote Viewing—or CRV, as it is known to the cognoscenti—you can do exactly that. You can sit in your own chair, psychically tune in on those coordinates, and see and hear eight people slumped in their chairs snoring loudly while a ninth drones on about the substandard materials used in the resurfacing of the 1400 block of Beechwood Boulevard, because those are the coordinates of the City-County Building, and Pittsburgh City Council is in session.
How do you learn this wonderful remote viewing? It’s really quite simple. And because the CIA produced a working paper in 1985 outlining the training method, you can follow along at home and be a CRV professional in just a few easy steps.
We begin, as we did above, with just a set of coordinates.
In Stage I the viewer is trained to provide a quick-reaction response to the reading of geographic coordinates by the interviewer. The coordinates are expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds when possible. The response takes the form of an immediate, primitive “squiggle” on paper. This “squiggle” is known as an ideogram. The ideogram captures the overall feeling/motion of the gestalt of the site (e.g., fluid/wavy for water). This response is kinesthetic and not visual.
These ideograms are accompanied by (A) a “feeling/motion” and (B) an “automatic analytical response.” Or perhaps more than one of each, as in this sample illustration:
As you see, we’re already getting somewhere. Our site at these coordinates is either land or water or rock. Already we have eliminated the possibility of void.
Dr. Boli will not presume to teach the art of CRV when the CIA’s manual is both thorough and accessible. But the potential of the technique should be obvious. Your enemies cannot keep a secret if your agents can simply sit in their offices in Langley and see any arbitrary location in the world.
By Stage VI of the training, the viewer trainee is ready to be issued his modeling clay (or cardboard, or whatever he prefers to work with) and can start constructing a three-dimensional model of the site, using mostly the sense of touch.
That was the stage the research had reached by the time the working paper was produced. But the eye-opening Chapter 10, “Future Stages,” reveals the full brilliance of the scientific minds behind this program (even if they couldn’t spell “affect”).
STAGE X REMOTE ACTION (RA) Stage X would be mind-over-matter, also known as psychokinesis (PK). We have very little understanding of PK, but we do know it exists. If Stage IX is telepathic signals which effect people, it is logical the next stage would be RA signals which effect “things”.
STAGE XI ALTERING THE DIMENSIONALITY AT THE SITE This is the most difficult stage to understand. Time is considered another dimension, but there may be many more. Mathematically it is considered that there are infinite numbers of dimensions. Stage XI would be broken into at least two phases:
PHASE I would be altering time at the site. Time could be frozen, moved forward, or moved back. The implications of this are mind boggling. I believe this is the first stage where we could truly effect (alter) the future (as well as the past and the present).
PHASE II Maybe by the time we reach Stage XI we will understand enough about alternate dimensions to use this phase. I believe there would probably be an additional phase for each additional dimension we discover.
“Mind boggling” indeed! Yet, if you can believe it, the unpatriotic spoilsports in the Clinton administration canceled this mind-boggling program, simply because (according to Wikipedia) “evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information.” The super-secret training techniques for CRV were actually released to the public, so that our enemies now have as much information about it as we ever had.
Still, there is a silver lining. If our government gave up on the program, the release of the working paper at least gave private individuals a chance to pick up where the CIA’s research left off. Using the techniques he learned from the working paper, Dr. Boli decided to try an experiment. At the moment this working paper was being compiled in the CIA, what was going on in the KGB? Having looked up the coordinates of KGB headquarters, he used the most advanced techniques to project himself back to those coordinates in February of 1985, and he began to receive strong impressions almost immediately of a man in his early thirties convulsed in his chair with uncontrollable laughter. There was also a sound associated with the vision: something like poutine, which may refer to something the man had been eating, or may be related to the man in some other fashion.
IN SCIENCE NEWS.
ASK DR. BOLI.
A typical Mason, up to no good.
Dear Dr. Boli: I’ve been worrying about the global Masonic conspiracy lately, and the more I think about it, the more I worry. What can I do to protect myself from Masons if they should come after me? And it seems very likely that they will come after me, since I hold a position of some responsibility in the Grant Borough Department of Public Works. —Sincerely, A Quivering Wreck.
Dear Sir or Madam: The only way to keep yourself safe from Masons is to prepare beforehand. Fortunately it is not expensive to arm yourself against Masonry. Just as Kryptonite can deprive Superman of his superhuman abilities, at least until the writer and artist decide it is time for him to snap out of it, so a Mason can be deprived of his occult powers by Masonite. Go to your local stationer and stock up on clipboards and report covers and suchlike things, and you should be well prepared to fend off any attacks by roving Masons.
HOW TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS LIKE A REAL ARCHAEOLOGIST.
The earliest burials at the site are believed to be located in the conical mound and date back to about 250 BC. Many of the people buried in this mound had copper tools and ornaments buried with them.… People that were buried later did not have this type of artifacts buried with them and some burials do not contain artifacts. This tells us that over the 2,000 years that ancient people used the site, burial practices and ceremonies changed.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: A lot of us here experts have been very concerned about artificial intelligence. These AI companies are training their robot brains on our writing, which took us a whole lot of time to put together and get past peer review, and then they tell people to come to the robot for all their answers. Well, where does that leave us? So, like I said, we’re kind of concerned, and maybe a little hot under the collar about it. But we thought we’d ask you what you thought, because you’re kind of an expert, too, although we had a big argument about what kind of expert you are. —Sincerely, Milfort Quaid, Secretary and Treasurer, Middle American Society of These Here Experts.
Dear Sir: Speaking as the author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation, Dr. Boli has no objection to AI bots training themselves on his writing.