If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed? On average, not just in spring or fall.

–Mimi

It's hard to find good figures, but it's probably about 1 in 40,000.

Before you pick up the phone, you should also keep in mind that there's roughly a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that the person you're calling just murdered someone.[1]Based on a murder rate of 4 per 100,000, the average in the US but on the high end for industrialized countries. You may want to be careful when you hand out blessings.

However, given that sneezes are far more common than murders,[2]Citation: You are alive. you're still much more likely to get someone who sneezed than to catch a killer, so this strategy is not recommended:

(Mental note: I'm going to start saying that when people sneeze.)

Compared with the murder rate, the sneezing rate doesn't get much scholarly research. The most widely-cited figure for average sneeze frequency comes from a doctor interviewed by ABC News, who pegged it at 200 sneezes per person per year.[3]Cari Nierenberg, The Perils of Sneezing, ABC News, Dec. 22, 2008

One of the few scholarly sources of data is a study which monitored the sneezing of people undergoing an induced allergic reaction.[4]Werner E. Bischoff, Michelle L. Wallis, Brian K. Tucker, Beth A. Reboussin, Michael A. Pfaller, Frederick G. Hayden, and Robert J. Sherertz, “Gesundheit!” Sneezing, Common Colds, Allergies, and Staphylococcus aureus Dispersion, J Infect Dis. (2006) 194 (8): 1119-1126 doi:10.1086/507908 To estimate the average sneezing rate, we can ignore all the real medical data they were trying to gather and just look at their control group. This group was given no allergens at all; they just sat alone in a room for a total of 176 20-minute sessions.[5]For context, that's 490 repititions of the song Hey Jude.

The subjects in the control group sneezed four times during those 58 or so hours,[6]Over 58 hours of research, four sneezes were the most interesting data points. I might've taken the 490 Hey Judes. which—assuming they only sneeze while awake—translates to about 400 sneezes per person per year.

Google Scholar turns up 5,980 articles from 2012 that mention "sneezing".[7]Google Scholar search for "sneezing" If half of these articles are from the US, and each one has an average of four authors, then if you dial the number, there's about a 1 in 10,000,000 chance that you'll get someone who just that day published an article on sneezing.

On the other hand, about 60 people are killed by lightning in the US every year.[8]Lightning fatalities by country That means there's only a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 chance that you'll call someone in the 30 seconds after they've been struck and killed.

Lastly, let's suppose that, on the day this article was published, five people who read it decide to actually try this experiment. If they call numbers all day, there's about a 1 in 30,000 chance that at some point during the day, one of them will get a busy signal because the person they've called is, themselves, calling a random stranger to say "God bless you."

And there's about a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 chance that two of them will simultaneously call each other.

At this point, probability will give up, and they'll both be struck by lightning.

We’re back from our short break to find that while our brave Broomistega has found shelter from the harsh elements, the spectre of hunger looms. Whatever creatures survived the rapid climate swings likely found themselves struggling to find food.

As we mentioned before, fossil evidence suggests that the Thrinaxodon found a way to weather out the weather by entering a state of dormancy similar to hibernation. Whether the Broomistega did the same is unclear. It’s more than possible that it entered the Thrinaxodon den out of convenience alone.

If you’re enjoying this series, you’ll be happy to know that I’ll have pins available at PAX Prime this year featuring our two heroes. I’ll post the proofs once I get them, but here are the concept designs in the meantime.

Speaking of pins. Kickstarter Update!

Supporters, Strip Search fans, Elite backers, you have TWO DAYS…until you have one week left to support Sufficiently Remarkable and a host of other projects (including Pineapple Maki Search). I’ll post a giant roundup of all the rewards, designs, and machinations available when we hit the 7 day point. In the meantime, please tell everyone you know!  While it’s unlikely I will make the 80k mark, goshdarnit, we should try.

If this isn’t incentive enough, I don’t know what is.

What's the best app? The hottest hit in the Matsushiro Power Store?

Readers outside the USA! You know the new Bad Machinery book, The Case Of The Team Spirit, is on Amazon, right? You can get it on amazon.co.uk HERE - or check your local version.

In the movie, The Manchurian Candidate, a Korean war POW returns home, but during his captivity he had been “brainwashed” and turned into a sleeper political assassin. The movie is partly responsible for bringing the concept of brainwashing to the public consciousness.

I occasionally am asked something to the effect of, “is brainwashing real?” The problem with this question is that first you need to define “brainwashing.”  The answer depends on that definition.

Brainwashing is the process of altering one’s beliefs and opinions through aggressive influence, and typically without the consent of the individual. Brainwashing combines three techniques – social influence, persuasion, and education.

Social influence is simply altering someone’s beliefs and behavior through emotional appeals and psychological manipulation. Persuasion involves argument – persuading someone that the new beliefs are correct. Education involves propaganda – giving people information selected or distorted to lead them to a set of beliefs.

The problem with the definition of brainwashing is the demarcation issue – where do we draw the line between common everyday interactions, like advertising, political advocacy, and regular education at one end, and malignant brainwashing at the other?

If you include any attempt at manipulating the beliefs of others as brainwashing, then sure, it absolutely exists and works to some degree. If you define brainwashing as only the Manchurian Candidate end of the spectrum – the ability to implant secret commands that can be triggered at a future date – then, no.

Part of the problem is that the term “brainwashing” has entered the vernacular and is now used to refer to any significant attempt at altering the beliefs of others, even on a single issue. It therefore has lost much of its meaning through dilution.

The term is probably better reserved for those situations that go beyond everyday activity, such as advertising, or Fox News.

There are real examples of situations that can be meaningfully called brainwashing. Totalitarian cults, for example, seek to completely control and take over the lives of their members. This includes physical manipulation, such as sleep deprivation, starvation, and control of the environment and even basic bodily functions like going to the bathroom.

Totalitarian cults also engage in extreme emotional manipulation, such as “love bombing” – overwhelming someone with positive attention from the group.

Brainwashing, in other words, requires a high degree of control. Prisoners, therefore, are vulnerable to brainwashing because their captors control their every waking moment. North Korea and China apparently engaged in a brainwashing program of POWs from the Korean War. However, the program was only successful on 21 out of 20,000 POWs to the extent that they chose to live in China after being released.

There were many more collaborators who had been turned while a prisoner. According to released documents, however, the Chinese and Koreans did not use any innovative secret methods of brainwashing. Rather:

The methods included isolation; sleep deprivation; compulsory ideological classes; threats; public- and self-criticism; endless “confessions;” exploitation of anger over U.S. racial discrimination; destruction of the chain of command; sophisticated psychological pressure; bribery and blackmail.

Are the above methods “brainwashing?” Again, it depends on your definition. You might also refer to such techniques as “indoctrination” rather than full “brainwashing.”

Here is also an interesting interview with a North Korean military officer who defected, Kim Joo-Il. He describes a national program of indoctrination through education and propaganda. The article refers to this as brainwashing, showing again how the lines of definition are blurred.

Conclusion

To answer the question of, is brainwashing real, I would say this – techniques for influencing the beliefs, opinions, attitudes, and behaviors of others certainly exist and are variably effective. These techniques exist along a spectrum from simple influence, to indoctrination, all the way to totalitarian control and brainwashing. There are no sharp demarcation lines, but the extremes do exist.

Brainwashing, however, does not involve secret techniques to reprogram the target’s brain without their knowledge, making sleeper assassins or something similar. They are just extreme attempts at influence through manipulation and control.

A recent article in The Guardian has the provocative title, “American man wakes up with amnesia speaking Swedish.” The article itself contains some significant misconceptions about amnesia, and so is a good opportunity to discuss this interesting topic.

In brief, amnesia is a pathological loss of memories (not just normal forgetting). The most common type of amnesia is traumatic – caused by trauma to the brain. Trauma can cause retrograde amnesia, which is loss of memories prior to the injury, and anterograde amnesia, which is loss of memories following the trauma. Contrary to the common movie cliche, these lost memories cannot be recovered by subsequent head trauma (or by any other means).

Another cause of amnesia, especially anterograde amnesia, is drugs. Alcohol and benzodiazepines in particular can prevent the formation of memories while intoxicated.

In The Guardian article they discuss the case of a man who was apparently found unconscious in a hotel room. When he awoke he was speaking only Swedish and believed his name was Johan Ek. Identification on his person, however, identified him as Michael Boatwright, an American. The man does not remember the name Boatwright and reports not to remember any of the photographs of family that were with him.

The Guardian reports that Boatwright was diagnosed with “transient global amnesia” (a claim they derive from an original report in the Desert Sun). This, however, is almost certainly an incorrect diagnosis. I don’t know if the journalists made this mistake, or the treating doctors who reported it to the media.

Transient global amnesia (TGA) has a very specific presentation, which does not fit the story of Boatwright. In TGA a person is suddenly confused as to their location and situation. They know who they are and will typically recognize people who are familiar to them, but will be completely disoriented to current events and be unable to recall recent events. They won’t know where they are or what they are doing. They appear confused to those around them, who typically bring them to medical attention.

The duration of TGA is typically about a day. After they recover from the TGA episode they will have no memories for the time period in which they had TGA. Therefore, during the TGA episode they are not forming any new memories.

The cause of TGA is not completely known. It is sudden event, which raises the possibility of either a migraine-like process, a seizure, or a transient ischemic attack (TIA or brief stroke that does not cause permanent damage), possibly affecting the hippocampus, which is necessary for the formation of new memories. They can sometimes be triggered by emotional or physiological stress. They are typically isolated incidents, rarely recurring in the same person.

At no point during or after a TGA, however, does the sufferer lose their memory for who they are. In fact, there is no neurological condition in which a person has amnesia for their own identity. This makes sense because your personal identity is so connected to your memories that if you have enough brain power to generate consciousness, you will also be able to know who you are.

A profound form of amnesia is Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. The most common cause of this syndrome is thiamine deficiency, often resulting from chronic alcoholism, which results in damage to parts of the brain necessary for memory formation. Patients with severe cases cannot form any new memories. They are living in a three-minute window of short term memory. They also typically have some degree of retrograde amnesia, and so are typically living in the past. (This condition was depicted in the movie Memento.)

What, then, is Mr. Boatwright suffering from if not from any form of amnesia? His clinical presentation, the complete loss of personal identifying memory or memory of one’s previous life, is called a fugue state. This diagnosis exactly fits Boatwright.

A fugue state is characterized by a loss of personal identifying memories, and typically lasts for several days but can last much longer, even months. People in a fugue state will typically have unplanned travel or will wander, and commonly adopt a new persona. Further, the episode is not triggered by drugs, physical trauma, or any neurological event. Fugue episodes typically occur only once, but can recur in the same individual.

Fugue states are purely psychological in nature. This does not mean, however, that the person is “faking” or that they have any insight into what is happening.

Conclusion

Stories of people who suffer from amnesia are fascinating, and scary, which is probably why it is a common theme in movies and fiction. Not surprisingly, the common fictional depiction of amnesia is often inaccurate. I outlined the few basic types of amnesia above. Ironically, what is most commonly depicted as amnesia in fiction is not amnesia, but is a fugue state – the loss of personal biographical memories.

I hope Mr. Boatwright recovers. Most people with a fugue state do, and recovery, once it starts, can be very rapid. I do wonder what effect the media attention is having, if any, on the course of Boatwright’s fugue.

Wikipedia’s current main picture of the new King of Belgium is hilariously non-flattering! Behold your modern monarch, vaguely terrified by life and too wracked with ennui to shave.

Not much difference between what Matzke said and I said! I’ve been telling him that since 2006, and now he finally acknowledges it publicly.

I’ve said that it was creationists (like Linnaeus) before Darwin’s time who lumped humans along with the primates, and the primates along with the mammals, etc. The creationists perceived the “sister groups” with no physical ancestor (which suggests the “parent” was an idea in the mind of God, not a physical common ancestor).

The reason Darwinists have all these phylogenetic conflicts is that the ancestors which would resolve all the conflicts are the very ones they will not admit a priori because those ancestors are conceptual, not physical, and conceptual ancestors are anathema to Darwinsits because conceptual ancestors imply ID.

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 165-166

In this scene, Jerry Jenkins achieves a vivid, palpable realism. The effect is brief, but it is powerful, visceral.

Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d’ of the Global Bistro.

You, the reader, suddenly realize that you are about to be swept along, accompanying Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham for an entire meal. Your fight or flight instinct kicks in, your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. It becomes difficult to articulate your thoughts into anything clearer than a primal, howling Noooo! You wish you were anywhere, absolutely anywhere, other than here, in this restaurant, with these two people.

And that is exactly what this experience would be like in real life. Jenkins has made you feel the very same emotions with the very same intensity that you would be feeling them if you were experiencing this scene in real life. Few writers ever achieve this effect quite so successfully.

I can’t help but respond exactly the way I would if I were there in the flesh. I start examining my surroundings, looking around the restaurant for any blessed distraction from the horror of accompanying these two people on this intensely awkward dinner date.

And here, alas, the spell is broken. The initial emotional realism — the head-to-toe dread and longing to escape — quickly dissipates in a flurry of incongruous and contradictory details. This restaurant, we were told, was the finest in all of New Babylon and a personal favorite of the Antichrist himself. Yet I can’t make any sense of the place. Nor can I reconcile what we’re shown of it with the principles of Nicolae Carpathia’s “Global Community” that it is said to embody.

Rayford and Hattie were welcomed expansively by the maitre d’ of the Global Bistro. The man recognized her, of course, but not Rayford. “Your usual table, ma’am?”

“No, thank you, Jeffrey, but neither would we like to be hidden.”

They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place.

Earlier, Rayford fretted about dressing for dinner, making sure he wore something formal enough to be acceptable at this upscale restaurant. We were led to imagine a fine dining establishment — the kind of place with cloth napkins, real silver, crystal water glasses and maybe even live music played on a harp or a grand piano. The fussy maitre d’ and solicitous staff reinforce that impression. So did the idea that this is where the global potentate himself has a “usual table.”

I don’t generally imagine global dictators eating out regularly. I picture them, instead, usually dining at one of those long tables in a palatial dining hall with chandeliers, high-backed chairs and a dizzying assortment of goblets, glasses and silverware at every setting. I picture them having personal chefs and probably even a food-taster screening for poison back in the pantry. (All of that is probably inaccurate, but I admit that my sense of the dining habits of global elites comes mostly from old movies and New Yorker cartoons.)

So now I’m trying to square this idea of a fancy-schmancy high-class restaurant with being told the Global Bistro is a “noisy place.”

And I’m even more confused by the next bit of detail we learn about our surroundings: Instead of tasteful artwork, Le Bistro apparently has TV sets all over the place.

Televisions throughout the Bistro carried the continuing news of war around the world. Hattie signaled the maitre d’, who came running. “I doubt the potentate would appreciate this news depressing patrons who came in here for a little relaxation.”

“I’m afraid it’s on every station, ma’am.”

“There’s not even a music station of some kind?”

“I’ll check.”

Within moments, all the television sets in the Global Bistro showed music videos. Several applauded this, but Rayford sensed Hattie barely noticed.

So now I’m trying to recalibrate my mental image of the restaurant. “Televisions throughout” makes me think of a TGI Fridays or a Buffalo Wild Wings, but places like that don’t have maitre d’s. And what kind of restaurant has TV sets tuned in to cable news? (Jenkins seems to be confusing restaurants with his preferred setting — airports.) I used to stop for breakfast after work at a diner in Marcus Hook where patrons watched the morning news on a TV behind the counter, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of vibe Jenkins is aiming for here.

This is the Restaurant Vila Tusa, which TripAdvisor tells us is the 14th-best restaurant in Cluj, Romania, Nicolae Carpathia’s hometown. Note the absence of TV sets.

Restaurants with TV sets usually keep them tuned to only one thing: sports. Unlike either the news or music videos, sports can be watched with the sound turned off.

In one sense, it’s a positive change that we’re told the news of World War III is “on every station.” Rayford Steele is so preoccupied reminiscing about his past with Hattie — “when they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind” — that he seems to have completely forgotten about the sort-of-nuclear destruction two days ago of London, Cairo, and a dozen major cities in North America. But in a world anything like the real world, that huge story would, indeed, be on every station — pre-empting all other programming for whatever channels still managed to be on the air, even the ones that only ever show Law & Order re-runs.*

Up until now, though, the world of this story has defied any comparison to the real world. In the world of this story, the obliteration of New York and Los Angeles is a one-day story. The destruction of Chicago does nothing to disturb the daily routine of residents of Evanston. So even though it’s wholly unimaginable and unrealistic to think that sporting events would have resumed two days later, in the context of this story and this book so far, there’s no reason to think that a regularly scheduled game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates wouldn’t be played as though nothing had changed (or a game between the Charlotte Bobcats and the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA, if it’s wintertime — we readers have no idea what time of year anything in this book takes place).

Just thinking about sports, though, leads me to wonder what sort of sports there might be in the “Global Community” of the Antichrist’s one-world government. Nicolae Carpathia has insisted that the entire globe share a single government, a single currency, a single language and a single religion. It makes sense that he should also have imposed a single sport for the entire world.

Soccer seems like the obvious candidate. (And yes, since American English appears to have become the official one-world language, it would be called “soccer.”) But how would that work now that all prior national and ethnic loyalties have been subsumed into a single Global Community? The One World Cup promises to be a sad, one-round affair consisting only of a “final” between GC and Israel. The Global Community squad would be heavily favored, I think, since they’d draw from the very best players of every other former nation on Earth. Plus the Israeli team would need a new place to practice, what with their home stadium having been taken over by Moses and Elijah’s revival meetings. In their favor, though, Israel wouldn’t have lost any players during the disappearances of the Event 18 months ago** — so at least they’d have all their starters still ready to play.

And while we’re musing about this, shouldn’t the harmony-through-uniformity logic of the Global Community mean a single world cuisine as well? I can’t really imagine what that might mean — something as flavorless and uninspiring as Nicolae’s one-world religion, probably. But imagining such a one-world cuisine still seems easier than making sense of the description of the menu that Jenkins gives us here:

Though the Global Bistro had a French-sounding name, Hattie herself had helped conceive it, and the menu carried international cuisine, mostly American. She ordered an unusually large meal. Rayford had just a sandwich.

Sandwiches and unusually large portions, I suppose, is as clear a description of “American” cuisine as one could hope for.

As this post illustrates, I wasn’t joking about the near-physical sensation of revulsion I feel toward sitting down to a long dinner conversation between Rayford and Hattie. Rayford is just too creepy for comfort in these situations.

They were led to a table set for four. But even though two busboys hurried out to clear away two sets of dinnerware, and the waiter pulled out a chair for Hattie while pointing Rayford to the one next to her, Rayford was still thinking of appearances. He sat directly across from Hattie, knowing they would nearly have to shout to hear each other in the noisy place. The waiter hesitated, looking irritated, and finally moving Rayford’s tableware back to in front of him. That was something Hattie and Rayford might have chuckled over in their past, which included a half-dozen clandestine dinners where each seemed to be wondering what the other was thinking about their future. Hattie had been more flirtatious than Rayford, though he had never discouraged her.

Blame the waiter, blame Hattie, nothing is ever Rayford’s fault.

In the past, when they were playing around the edges of an affair of the mind, Rayford had to remind Hattie to order and then encourage her to eat. Her attention had been riveted on him, and he had found that flattering and alluring. Now the opposite seemed the case.

Hattie studied her menu as if she faced a final exam on it in the morning. She was as beautiful as ever, now 29 and pregnant for the first time. She was early enough along that no one would know unless she told them. She had told Rayford and Amanda the last time they were together. At the time she seemed thrilled, proud of her new diamond, and eager to talk about her pending marriage. She had told Amanda that Nicolae was “going to make an honest woman of me yet.”

Hattie was wearing her ostentatious engagement ring; however, the diamond was turned inward toward her palm so only the band was visible. Hattie was clearly not a happy woman, and Rayford wondered if this all stemmed from her getting the cold shoulder from Nicolae at the airport. He wanted to ask her, but this meeting was her idea. She would say what she wanted to say soon enough.

We’ll hear what Hattie has to say next week. Unfortunately though, we’ll only get to hear it filtered through the distorting, condescending lens of Rayford’s point of view.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* Also, if Hattie is right that the potentate wouldn’t want 24/7 coverage of his World War depressing people, then this coverage would not be “on every station.” The Antichrist owns and controls every station. They broadcast whatever he wants them to broadcast.

** Because, in Tim LaHaye’s theology, Jews are just a special sub-category of “the unsaved.” LaHaye, like most premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy” enthusiasts, believes in hard supersessionism — a theology in which real, true Christians replace the Jews as God’s chosen people and the beneficiaries of all the promises God ever made to the people of Israel.

LaHaye’s complicated theology requires this supersessionism for a variety of complicated reasons that we don’t need to explore here. But I also think the illogic of this view is appealing to LaHaye. Just consider another piece of his life’s work — promoting his wife’s anti-feminist lobbying group, Concerned Women for America. Beverly LaHaye and her army of “concerned women” reject feminism because, in their mind, anyone who says women and men should be equal must hate men. Any effort to improve the lives of women is perceived as an attack on men. Take that same logic and apply it to the New Testament’s insistence that Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God. If that is good news for Gentiles, then by LaHaye-logic it must be bad news for Jews. Tim LaHaye makes the same odd leap here that his wife makes with regard to feminism: If Gentile Christians do not need to become Jewish in order to be counted among the people of God, he thinks, then Jews must have to become Gentile Christians.

For the record, I think supersessionism is a really big mistake, but I tend to find the theological arguments about this confusing, so I’m not sure whether that makes me orthodox or a heretic. “Remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” That seems clear enough. I can’t make sense of any theology that sees value in being a wild branch grafted onto what it also says is a dead tree.

In yesterday’s Mid 2013 Report on the status of The Controversy between evolution and creationism, we said:

We’ve never been able to learn what happened with John Oller’s litigation against the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is (or was when the suit was filed) a professor. See Louisiana Creationist Professor Sues University. That wasn’t a case the Discoveroids supported; Oller was too hard-core for them. But he had other supporters — see Ken Ham Supports John Oller’s Lawsuit.

In case you’ve forgotten, Oller filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the university’s Communicative Disorders Department alleging that faculty members discriminated against him and marginalized his position because of his beliefs on creationism and also because he taught about an alleged connection between autism, mercury and vaccinations. Here’s a link to the complaint he filed — it’s a 27-page pdf file.

Essentially he alleged it was a “viewpoint discrimination” case, not only because of his creationism, but also because he’s an anti-vaxxer. Oh, to demonstrate his creationist credentials, our original post about his case also gives links to some articles he’s written for ICR and AIG.

After the suit was filed, we posted a couple of other times about it — he had some letter-to-the-editor support, and WorldNetDaily supported him — but then we could never find any news about the actual litigation. That’s why, in yesterday’s post we also said:

His case may have been settled by now, one way or another. If anyone knows anything about it, please let us know

In answer to our call, one of our clandestine operatives told us about this link to the docket of court pleadings in Oller v. Roussel et al. Most of the pleadings require a subscription, but you can see the answer. It’s not terribly informative (the university denies all liability). And then we learned of a link to an updated docket: Oller v. Roussel et al. Again, most pleadings can’t be seen, but item number 30 can be viewed, and it indicates that a jury trial is scheduled to start on 21 Jan 2014.

Now that we know the case is still pending, we anticipate that we’ll be learning more about it. Meanwhile, thanks to our tireless operative, we’ve learned some more information about Professor Oller. It doesn’t come from the press, or from the university he’s suing. To our surprise, the news is from Trinity Southwest University, a bible college located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Their website reveals this thrilling news: Dr. John W. Oller, Jr., Vis. Prof. He’s described as “Vis. Prof., College of Biblical Representational Research,” and then it gives his résumé. But what’s the “College of Biblical Representational Research”? They provide this link to a description: College of Biblical Representational Research. It says:

We can confidently describe the Bible as a reliable history, the source of doctrine, and as instructions about how to be saved and lead the Christian life. But this Bible is under attack from within Christianity. Representational Research meets those challenges and demonstrates how the Bible is first of all a representation of the mind of God, and also a completely accurate representation of all of reality.

They also say that they help their students answer this question:

How can I challenge and refine my own personal representations of reality, using the Bible only as my guide?

It sounds like a great institution, and Oller seems to have gone to the right place. Anyway, it looks like he’s going to be in New Mexico for a while, and his litigation is still pending in Louisiana. We assume he can handle everything that’s going on in both places.

This is great news for us. Now that the Coppedge case is over, we can write about Oller. But one mystery remains: Oller is suing over viewpoint discrimination, and that’s a big issue with the Discovery Institute — so if they’re true to their principles, why don’t the Discoveroids support him? Maybe they will, who knows? As soon as we learn anything we’ll tell you about it, so stay tuned to this blog.

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

• • • • • • • • • • •

. . Permalink for this article

There are two reasons for yet another SETI post: (1) we like the subject; and (2) it drives the creationists crazy. You know what SETI is. Those initials stand for search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Our post’s title, as most of you recognize, starts with Enrico Fermi’s question, which is what underlies the Fermi paradox. Briefly stated, Fermi was asking this: If there are other Earth-like planets in the galaxy where life evolved, some of it intelligent, with the time to develop interstellar travel, then why haven’t they been here, and why don’t we see any sign of them?

We just found this at PhysOrg: Self-replicating alien probes could already be here. It says, with a bit of our bold font added for emphasis:

Mathematicians in Scotland calculate that “self-replicating” alien probes could already have explored our solar system and may still be here but undetectable to our current technologies.

Drs Arwen Nicholson and Duncan H. Forgan from the University of Edinburgh had previously calculated that if a Voyager-sized probe passing through the galaxy picked up speed using slingshots around stars it could travel 100 times faster than otherwise.

Rockets built with our current technology travel at only about one-tenth of 1% of the speed of light, so they’re talking about goosing that up to 10% of the speed of light. That’s a useful velocity — it would let us travel to other planets in the solar system in mere days instead of years. But the chaps from Edinburgh have loftier goals in mind. They hypothesized self-replicating probes in their computer models to calculate the timescale for such probes to disperse themselves radially across space.

Their published paper is in the International Journal of Astrobiology, but you can read it online here: Slingshot Dynamics for Self Replicating Probes and the Effect on Exploration Timescales. We’ll ignore the details of their acceleration technique (and self replication technique, and inter-probe communications) and focus on the big picture. PhysOrg continues:

In all the scenarios the scientists looked at, exploration timescales were reduced when the probes were self-replicating, and they concluded that a fleet of self-replicating probes could travel at only 10% of the speed of light and still explore the entire Galaxy in the relatively short time of 10 million years. This is a tiny fraction of the age of the Earth and the scientists say the results reinforce the idea of the “Fermi Paradox.”

We’ve seen that estimate of 10 million years before. It was probably in an old Analog article we read years ago. In our more ambitious projection, which you can see here: What Are We Learning from SETI?, we used a hypothetical speed of one-third the speed of light, and estimated that if stars with habitable worlds are plentiful and not that far from each other, then humans could populate the galaxy in only one million years. But who cares about our projections? Let’s read on about the Edinburgh work:

Dr Forgan said that the fact that we have not detected or seen any evidence of alien probes in the solar system suggests there have been no probe-building civilizations in the Milky Way in the last few million years or that the probes are so hi-tech we are unable to detect them.

Those are two possible reasons. The article ends with one more:

Another possibility is that probes could be programmed to make contact only with civilizations that pass a set measure of intelligence, which could be the ability to detect the probes.

So there you are, dear reader. Now you can let your imagination loose. Where are they?

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

• • • • • • • • • • •

. . Permalink for this article

So why is it so hard to find the pub date in the HTML view of PLoS papers? The date needs immediately visible to be somewhere in this space:

BTW, this is not my paper – it’s by the other, much more productive Michael A. White in whose shadow I’ve lived for years. I’ve never met him, but I have received his mail at one point.

The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was
unchanged in June at 34.5 hours. In manufacturing, the workweek
increased by 0.1 hour to 40.9 hours, and overtime was unchanged at 3.3
hours. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory
employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 33.7 hours.

SDCC continues today! I’m going to be there, hawking my wares at the Dumbrella booth, located in the heart of the webcomics pavillion at Table 1337. Won’t you stop by and say hello?

I’m going to have bunnies, stickers, magnets, buttons and lots and lots of books, including a small internationally-expressed bundle of brand-new Goats IV: Inhuman Resources books (while supplies last!) and the also-brand-new SFAM 2: Business Animals.

And thus answers the questions that true scientists may have been wondering since the beginning.

I have no idea what Vonnie is thinking in that back seat.  It doesn't matter, though, because Vonnie is the best.  I need a stuffed Vonnie for my daughter to drag around the house.

We're getting close to the end of the preface!  Almost time for the first chapter!  Woo!

-Dante