Things that visit by night

Annette Taylor has personal experience of a phenomenon that lies behind many tales of ghosts, demonic possession, and alien abduction.

I was asleep. Marley, our cat, was faster asleep by my side.

Suddenly I was awake, at the sound of another cat’s tread in the room. Then something jumped up and landed on the bed, and padded right up to me, wanting under the covers.

I lay absolutely, perfectly still. In fact, I couldn’t move. The cat moved to the end of the bed and settled down. The minutes ticked by, and I worried about an all-out cat fight flaring up. I wondered, for a second, if this could be Willow come a-visiting. The thing was, we’d buried her in the garden not two weeks before (I’m not going to reference Monty Python here), and I was fairly certain it wasn’t poor old Willow, even while half asleep.

Then I came fully awake, groped in the dark for the cat I was convinced was lying there and found only Marley, snoring her head off.

It seemed so real, right down to the whiff of a slightly damp moggy and the pressure of her landing on the bed. A tad confused, I fell asleep. The next morning it had all the weight of a dream.

I was missing my cat and possibly, in a sense, she did come to say hello, but very much in a dream. My dad used to drop by at night after he died, too. We had good chats, but those were definitely dreams. I never thought for a moment he was a spirit hanging about.

This was different. At the time, I was certain there was a cat in the room, on my bed, and I couldn’t move a muscle. In retrospect, I’m deeply disappointed the cat wasn’t unspeakably evil, with glowing coal eyes, yellow fangs and claws of death; that would have ticked every box for being a classic case of sleep paralysis.

No better image conveys the terror this phenomenon can bring than The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli.

The victim lies helpless on the darkened bed, and gleefully perched on her is the terrifying incubus, peering straight out of the picture. I’ll have you too, it seems to gloat.

The work, painted in 1781, is said to have influenced writers such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe and it is still as full of menace today. Hypnopompic dreaming – or more properly Isolated Sleep Paralysis – occurs mainly upon awakening from sleep. It includes a range of visual and auditory experiences:

  • a sense of evil in the room
  • being paralysed or frozen
  • shortness of breath or pressure, as if something or someone is sitting on you
  • being touched

I had all but the first, and the additional olfactory bonus of the smell of damp moggy.

Most people report the experience as being intensely frightening and while mine wasn’t scary, it was definitely disturbing.

Sleep paralysis, also known as night terrors, has been implicated in a lot of things of interest to skeptics, such as alien abductions. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, says it is telling that alien abductions occur mainly on falling asleep or when waking up. “Abduction therapists are puzzled when their patients describe crying out in terror while their spouses sleep leadenly beside them. But isn’t this typical of dreams, our shouts for help unheard?” he writes.

Before we had visits from flying saucers, these vivid dreams were linked with the supernatural – witchcraft, demons, ghosties and things that go bump in the night.

The term hypnopompic comes from 19th century psychic researcher and poet Frederic Myers. He was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research in 1883 and influenced Carl Jung, among others. He believed apparitions were not hallucinations, but really existed in the ‘metetherial’ dream-like world, which lies beyond everyday existence. It’s a good word, even if these days most (rational) people consider such dreams to be normal phenomena, rather than supernatural.

I mentioned my dream to a friend, who made the comment it would be nice to think that the visitor really was my cat Willow. But no. To allow that comforting thought traction ushers in a flood of superstitions which I really have no time for. It was a genuinely interesting occurrence, in and of itself.

Sleep Paralysis is reported very frequently among people with sleep disorders, and otherwise occurs frequently in 6 percent of the population; and occasionally in 60 percent. When it occurs repeatedly it is categorised as Recurrent Sleep Paralysis. But I’m not going to be putting out a saucer of milk any time soon.

School of thought

Adam van Langenberg gives practical suggestions on how to run a high school skeptical society, based on his own successful experience.

In late 2010 I was fortunate enough to see noted US skeptics Rebecca Watson and Brian Dunning speak at the La Notte restaurant in Melbourne. As entertaining as these talks were, what really grabbed my attention was local skeptic Richard Saunders’ demonstration of the Power Balance scam. The more he demonstrated, the angrier I became. Angry because I’m a high school teacher and a lot of my students (and a few of our teachers) were wearing these things. Five minutes earlier I didn’t even know what they were; I had assumed they were one of those charity bands you see everywhere. Now my protective instincts were kicking in and I wanted to help my kids from getting sucked into this scam.

At school the next day I showed several of my classes the applied kinesiology techniques the salespeople were using. The students thought the tricks were very cool and a lot of embarrassed bracelet wearers suddenly started justifying their fashion choices:

“It was a gift!”

“I found it on the footpath!”

Mostly, though, they stopped wearing them.

The success of this led me to create the McKinnon Secondary Sceptical Society. We meet once a week and spend our lunch hour discussing specific pseudosciences, critical thinking techniques and debating the merits of scepticism. A brief speech at a school assembly brought over 100 students to the first sessions (a mass Zener ESP experiment) but numbers are now more stable with 20 – 40 kids on average.

One of the things that has surprised me about the group is how young most of the students in it are. By far, the majority are in year 7 and 8. I typically have around 20 students at those levels each week and about 5 – 10 from other year levels. I was a little worried that this might lessen the amount of deep discussion we could have but, as you’ll read later, I needn’t have been.

Favourite topics so far have included three weeks on logical fallacies and a month spent teaching the children how to cold read. I may have created some monsters here because they turned out to be quite gifted at it.

I truly believe that critical thinking and scepticism belongs in our school’s curriculum. Until that day comes, we are relying on teachers to inject it into their classrooms themselves. Unfortunately I don’t see a lot of this. I know at least one science teacher who fervently believes that aliens have been landing on the Earth for many years and I worry about how many of their students have been taught to believe this.

I think that a sceptical society is the next best thing, as it brings the concept of scepticism into the community. People refer to me as “Mr Sceptic” (and occasionally “the dream crusher”) and many students and teachers have approached me for my thoughts on various ideas. “Sceptical” is now a word being used more and more at my school. My ultimate goal is to have every student understand what scepticism is and just how rewarding it can be.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I consider to be important when running a group like this. What follows are my ideas.

Make the sessions fun and relevant

Hopefully this one is a no-brainer. Children can have very short attention spans and if they’re not enjoying themselves, why would they continue? They’re forced to be in my maths classes so I can be as boring as I like but the sceptical society is totally optional. This is why I try to make my talks funny. It’s why I throw in as many jokes as I can. If you’re being funny, kids will listen because they want to hear the next joke. And if you can sneak in a bit of good stuff between the jokes they’ll probably learn something too.

There are plenty of fun activities around the internet that you can run. There’s an ESP experiment on the JREF site and Richard Saunders has videos up of water dowsing and ‘can you tell if somebody is staring at you?’ experiments. There are lots of astrological ideas as well, such as having astrological descriptors up around the room and asking students to try to guess which one is theirs. Activities like this can be real drawcards and get kids coming along who might not have ordinarily been interested.

That’s a key point – a ‘sceptical society’ probably won’t draw a huge crowd, but an experiment to see if anybody is psychic probably will.

Relevancy is also very important. We talked about Power Balance bands because all of the kids knew about them. They’ll all be aware of psychics, aliens and ghosts so those are topics that come up a lot. The vaccine debate probably isn’t at the front of their minds and it doesn’t come up as often, but it does come up occasionally and you’ll be pleased to know that the anti-vaccination mindset makes them very angry.

It’s important to follow the news and select the things that you think will interest them.

Don’t make it a science club

Be aware that to most teenagers ‘science’ means sitting in a classroom while a teacher talks about a bunch of boring stuff. You might get to do the odd experiment but there often isn’t that sense of mystery and beauty that we know science is all about.

So when I say don’t make it a science club, what I really mean is don’t make it an obvious science club. Sneak the science in. Make it a club about ghost hunting and astrology debunking and homeopathy ridiculing. While you’re doing that, briefly explain how you could use this thing called ‘single blinding’ to make an experiment. Then maybe throw in some ‘double blinding’ to show them how to make it better.

The next thing you know, your kids have learnt a bit of science and they’ve learnt why it’s important. If you’ve done your job right they’ll also have learnt why it’s just so damn cool.

Probably don’t make it a secular club

A few people from the sceptical community have gotten upset with me about this, some suggesting that if I’m not actively turning my students against religion then I’m basically wasting my time. Let me explain why I think this is a bad idea.

First of all, I think it’s a really fast way to get yourself shut down. Sure, a lot of schools have Christian, Muslim and Jewish societies so you could argue discrimination if you came under attack but I don’t think you’d get very far. Sometimes it only takes one angry phone call from a parent to get something cancelled.

More importantly, you don’t want to exclude religious people from your group. A lot of the kids who come along to my club are Christian or Jewish. The last thing I want is for them to feel unwelcome. I steer clear of religious topics for that reason alone. If somebody brings up testable religious claims (such as creationism) I’m always happy to discuss them, but I will never make them the focus of the session.

A lot of my children come from very religious families, who could quickly make a complaint and ban their kids from turning up. My kids all know that I believe in the big bang and the theory of evolution. My kids also know that I can have a respectful conversation with them about it, even if they disagree with me. There are plenty of other topics out there worth discussing.

Prepare to be asked about anything

One day I had an entire session planned around psychics. About five minutes in, a kid asked me if I thought it was alright to tell little kids that Santa exists. Normally I would have told them to wait until the end but most people in the room seemed genuinely interested in my answer. This answer turned into a conversation about the history of Santa, the philosophy of lying and funny Santa stories.

Should I have stopped the discussion and gone back to the psychics? Absolutely not. I knew I could always talk about psychics next week. Children’s minds are so inquisitive and always on the go. The most surprising things can interest them without warning. Go with it. The trick is to have as much knowledge as you can on many different topics. Being a specialist in a particular field is great, but it doesn’t really help when running something like this for kids. In my position, it is better to know a little about a lot of topics, rather than vice versa. Of course, the more I know about as much as possible, the better I can do my job.

Don’t dumb things down

If there’s one thing that never ceases to amaze me about children, it is their almost unlimited capacity for impressively inventive cruelty. If there’s one other thing, it’s how much they actually understand. A couple of months ago a boy in my class started talking about transvestites. He wanted to know whether all transvestites were gay. A few others responded by suggesting that some of them probably are but not all of them. What followed was a wonderfully respectful and inquisitive classroom discussion. I sat back and watched, marvelling at how mature and understanding they were being. What really impressed me was that these children were 12.

Don’t assume that kids can’t handle ‘grown up’ topics. Medical minutiae might go over their heads but it doesn’t mean that they can’t ponder the issues involved. Want to talk about the ethics involved in prescribing placebos? They can handle it. Want to discuss terminally ill people reaching out to alternative medicine as a last resort? Go for it, just be prepared to handle some potentially delicate questions.

Children are easily influenced, so influence wisely

Children pick up everything, from diseases to attitudes. I don’t like angry, condescending adults so I don’t want my kids turning into them. We all know that you don’t change people’s beliefs with ridicule and personal attacks, so why start developing those habits in kids now?

When we discussed homeopathy, some of my students started laughing at people who use it. Obviously, anybody who believes in homeopathy is an idiot and deserves to be ridiculed. I don?t blame them for thinking this way because they are still very young, but it needed to be stamped out immediately. What if the patients were referred to a homeopath by a GP? What if they have no idea how it works? What if they’re at death’s door and are desperately trying something different as a last resort?

If you teach kids to look down on victims of pseudoscience, you are teaching them to be insensitive and arrogant. Kids need to understand that all people should be treated with respect and that everybody is worth listening to. Unless, of course, they’re a filthy scumbag con-artist who is knowingly ripping people off. In that case, go right ahead and tear them a new one.

Newsfront

Psychic and TVNZ join forces to profit from child’s disappearance

When Sensing Murder psychic Deb Webber announced on TV One’s Breakfast show that missing Auckland toddler Aisling Symes was in “a ditch, hole” it raised eyebrows all over the place (NZ Herald, 9 October).

Webber was appearing on the show to plug her upcoming nationwide tour – and also the latest series of Sensing Murder, screening on the same channel. Later that day TVNZ journalist Amy Kelley asked the police at a press conference how seriously they would take Webber’s “information”.

TVNZ then approached a friend of the Symes family and subsequently Webber had met them. The state broadcaster seemed to have far too cosy a relationship with the psychic.

TVNZ spokeswoman Andi Brotherston defended the channel’s role, saying, “You know what they are doing? They are being human. They have a family out there that are desperate to find their child.”

Interestingly, Webber’s Sensing Murder co-star Kelvin Cruickshank said at a public show in Hamilton (see p. 16) that his spirits had told him to keep clear of the case, because the family were devout Baptists who didn’t believe in spiritualism.

It is worth remembering that at the time Webber made these comments (less than 48 hours after Aisling’s disappearance) misadventure seemed the most likely explanation. It was only as time went on that the abduction scenario gained favour. When her body was eventually discovered in a concrete stormwater pipe the Waikato Times (13 October) reported Webber had been “proved correct”.

But “ditch” or “hole” covers almost all the likely options – including a shallow grave. Again, the standard psychic’s ploy of making a vague statement which is then misremembered as more accurate than it was, paid dividends.

Hunt on for ‘panther’

A few years back the annual NZ Skeptics conference heard about reports of big cats in the South Island high country. Now someone has built a trap for the mystery beast (Sunday Star-Times, 13 December).

High country farmer David Wightman says he’s never seen the “panther”, but others on his 9500ha Winterslow Station in North Canterbury have, on at least four occasions. “Too many people have seen it to doubt what it is – without actually capturing it and doing a DNA test on it, one can only assume it is a black leopard or black panther.”

Wightman said he planned to use a live goat to lure the panther into the trap. The panther would be unable to harm the goat because it would be in a separate enclosure, but its bleating should be enough to attract the cat. There was no evidence of a large predator attacking free-ranging stock, however.

We should apply the skeptical adage, when you hear hoofbeats in the night, think of horses, not of zebras. Big cats have been reported very widely, and sometimes are reported as brown or grey, suggesting that breeding populations of at least two species are involved. Black leopards (‘panthers’) are rare within their natural range compared to the more common spotted variety, yet no spotted leopards have been sighted roaming free in New Zealand.

Far more likely that the big cats are just that – big cats. Feral domestic cats can grow remarkably large – I once saw one in the Lewis Pass which must have been almost a metre nose to tail – and people are very poor at judging scale at long distances (hmm, maybe that cat wasn’t so big after all!).

Scientology ‘organised fraud’

The church of Scientology has been branded an “organised fraud” by a French court and fined 600,000 euros ($1.2m) for preying financially on vulnerable believers (NZ Herald, 28 October).

Judges in the Paris criminal court ordered the church to pay for adverts carrying its findings to be placed in newspapers around the world. It is believed to be the first time that Scientology has been declared fraudulent by a court in a large, democratic country, although individual scientologists, including its founder L Ron Hubbard, have previously been convicted of fraudulent activities. The Paris decision went further and declared the core claims of Scientology were “fallacious” and designed to “hook” members into paying large amounts of money.

Two French female plaintiffs alleged that, between 1997 and 1999, the Scientology movement persuaded them to pay the equivalent of 21,000 euros and 49,500 euros for treatments to improve their mental and physical health. The two main Scientology bodies in France were put on trial for “systematic use of personality tests of no scientific value… with the sole aim of selling services and products”.

Scientology spokeswoman Agnes Bron said the verdict was the result of an “inquisition of modern times” and that they would appeal.

Science writer wins ruling in libel battle

Brtiish science writer Simon Singh, who is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, is to fight on after a preliminary judgment against him was opened to appeal (The Guardian, 14 October).

Singh was sued after writing an article in the Guardian criticising the association for supporting members who claim that chiropractic treatments can treat children’s colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying.

Singh described the treatments as “bogus” and criticised the BCA for “happily promoting” them.

In May, Mr Justice Eady in the high court ruled on the meaning of the words, saying they implied the BCA was being deliberately dishonest. Singh was initially refused leave to appeal, but Eady’s interpretation was deemed to be open to argument by Lord Justice Laws, who said Eady had risked swinging the balance of rights too far in favour of the right to reputation and against the right to free expression.

Many scientists and science writers have rallied to Singh’s support, claiming that the freedom of scientific opinion is at stake. “Simon Singh’s battle in this libel case is not only a glaring example of how the law and its interpretation are stifling free expression, it shows how urgent the case for reform has become,” said Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship.

‘Tumour’ thrown at meeting

The hysteria over the Dept of Conservation’s use of brodifacoum to eradicate pests on Rangitoto and Motutapu, reported in last issue’s Newsfront, has continued (NZ Herald, 15 October).

A woman, Donna Bird, was ejected from a 14 October meeting on Auckland’s North Shore after hurling abuse and objects – one of which she claimed was a tumour that had been taken out of her – at DoC speaker Richard Griffiths. The department were “parasites” and “disease mongerers”, she said.

Others at the meeting accused DoC of spreading poison in the gulf, and of being blinded by science. Six dogs died and others became unwell after apparent exposure to tetrodotoxin, a natural marine toxin, on Auckland beaches. Marine organisms, including penguins and dolphins, had also been found dead in the area. Mr Griffiths told the meeting toxicology results ruled out brodifacoum as being responsible. “I’m not sure what else we can say.”

Thief warned of sex change curse

A thief in Auckland may get more than he or she bargained for with a terracotta flower pot taken from a Gulf Harbour home (Rodney Times, 3 December).

The owner says it contains his African witchdoctor grandma’s ashes and is now cursed. In a letter to the Rodney Times, At du Plooy says his grandmother was a sangoma or witchdoctor who died in Africa aged 93. Du Plooy claims to be a medium who keeps in contact with her spirit. While he should be able to trace the pot, through this link, it appears grandma is unfamiliar with the area concerned.

Instead, she has cursed a one kilometre area around the pot with sex-change ions – meaning men may gradually change to women and vice versa. Dumping the contents won’t break the spell, du Plooy says, only its return.

An alien star-child?

Waikato University biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell posts a regular blog on matters biological (sci.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/). Her aim is to encourage critical thinking among secondary students. We think these need sharing.

Last week one of my students wrote to me about something they’d seen on TV:

My friend and I saw this on Breakfast this morning. Although we don’t think it is all true, we are still interested because they talked a lot about the skull’s morphology and how they believe it is the offspring from a female human and an alien. Here’s the website on it: www.starchildproject.com

It would be great to hear your thoughts.”

So I went off and had a look at the website, and wrote back. My first thought is that (following what’s called ‘Occam’s razor’) the simplest possible explanation is likely to be correct, ie that this is simply a ‘pathological’ human skull, rather than a mysterious alien-human hybrid. (Read Armand LeRoy’s book Mutants to get a feel for just how wide the range of potential variation is in humans.)

Happily there are ways of testing this – the skull is reportedly only 900 years old so it should be possible to look at its DNA.

And indeed this has been done – and the data are presented on the Starchild project’s website. Which surprised me more than a little, given that they don’t support the hybrid idea! The skull in question – which certainly has an interesting shape – was found along with the remains of an adult female. The DNA results show that both woman and child were native Americans, not related to each other, and also that the child was male. There is absolutely no indication there of any ‘alien’ DNA. Which is what I would have predicted – if we were to be visited by extraterrestrial individuals, why would we expect them to be a) humanoid and b) genetically compatible with us? ie the likelihood of successful interbreeding is vanishingly small. And that’s a big ‘if’ in any case … Carl Sagan had some sensible things to say on that issue in The Demon-haunted World.

My personal view is that the whole thing should have been examined rather more critically by the programmers before it made it to air. But then, I have ceased to be surprised at the uncritical nature of much that’s presented by our broadcast media (with the honourable exception of the National Programme!).

Superstitious? Me? That depends

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, Vicki Hyde got used as a guinea pig. Part One of her responses was published in the last issue of the NZ Skeptic. This is Part Two.

The Paranormal

Paranormal phenomena are things that cannot be explained and/or proven by current scientific methods. Put a number between 1 and 7 next to each item to indicate how much you agree or disagree with that item.

7 = Strongly agree, 1 = Strongly disagree, 4 = Neutral

Astrology is a way to accurately predict the future.

1 – Having done lots of charts, I know it’s applied psychology – people will read into it what they want to. No accuracy, no prediction.

Psychokinesis, the movement of objects through psychic powers, does exist.

7 or 1 – If you’d said mental abilities instead of psychic powers, I would have agreed. We have a growing number of examples of neurological manipulation of an external environment, such as people able to move cursors around a computer screen by thinking at it. That’s real with the right kind of technology behind it. And pretty darned amazing, not to mention hugely inspiring for people with motor disabilities, given the possibilities for future development.

However, using psychic powers, a la X-Men, to shift things, that’s not been demonstrated.

During altered states, such as sleep or trances, the spirit can leave the body.

1 – Presupposes the existence of the spirit in the first place …

Out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) are fascinating and real in the sense that the people who experience them – me, for one! – feel as if they are real. However, neuroscience is starting to paint a very interesting picture of how these experiences occur and even how to induce them. This does not involve the spirit departing the body, nor have such experiences been able to demonstrate conclusive proof of knowledge gained solely from such a spirit wandering.

The Loch Ness monster of Scotland exists.

1 – Though it would be great if it did. Imagine a plesiosaur living in these times; that would be a magnificent survival story. But you only have to stop and think for a bit to see how unlikely it is. We’ve got much more chance for the Fiordland moose or the moa to pop up here than Scotland’s favourite cryptozoological beastie lurking in the depths.

The number ’13’ is particularly unlucky or particularly lucky

1 – Only if you’re culturally responsive to it. Other cultures don’t like four or seven or NEE!

Reincarnation does occur.

1 – I haven’t seen any good evidence for agreeing with this, and it presupposes a whole host of entities and processes to support it for which there is no evidence.

There is life on other planets.

7 – I’d prefer if it you said “likely to be life on other planets”, as we still don’t have any specific examples, but I’ll take a punt and be definite on this one. It’s a big universe out there and it would be rather presumptuous of us to assume that our planet was the only one to experience the right conditions for life to occur.

Most card-carrying skeptics would agree with this one. Where we tend to demur is the idea that that life must therefore be intelligent and buzzing our planet teasing the natives …

Some psychics can accurately predict the future.

1 – Only if you define accurately to mean “roughly right if you let them reinterpret what they said after the event”. Anything other than their very generalised predictions have failed on a regular basis. Here’s some examples:

For 2001, psychics predicted that:

  • the nine US Supreme Court judges would vanish without a trace
  • the Mississippi River would flood, forming a new ocean in the US heartland
  • Pope John Paul II would die and his successor would be Italian

And the big story they missed – the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

In 2005, professional psychics saw the usual mix of the banal and bizarre, including that:

  • terrorists would start World War III by shooting a nuclear missile into China
  • the winner of a new reality TV show would gain fame by killing and eating a contestant
  • the San Andreas Fault in California would have a massive rupture on June 17 with a death toll reaching 4,568,304

What did they miss – Hurricane Katrina, which made thousands homeless in the southern US, and the devastating earthquake that hit Pakistan and India in October, killing 73,000 people.

There are actual cases of witchcraft.

5 – It depends on your definition of witchcraft, which is a culturally and historically complex concept. Riding on broomsticks, outside the Harry Potter movies, is right out, though there might be a technological fix for that in the future, which could be fun.

In a strong cultural context, makutu, maleficus, pointing the bone, voodoo and a whole pile of other psychological techniques can certainly affect a compliant individual immersed in the belief system.

It is possible to communicate with the dead.

1 – Certainly not going by the current crop of rather banal, self- similar pronouncements by those professionals claiming to have this ability.

Taniwha do exist.

4 – Culturally yes, physically no. And this makes it different to the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti, where people claim such things can be found and photographed.

During the 2002 furore over the Waikato taniwha lurking inconveniently in the path of the main south highway no-one went and actually looked for Karu Tahi. It was understood that the taniwha was a cultural matter, not a physical matter, and that regardless of that, it had a role to play in the debate about development.

Have you ever had a ‘paranormal’ experience – one that can’t be explained scientifically, or ‘proven’ in ways that a scientist would accept? If so, what was it?

Not one that I haven’t been able to think of an alternative non-paranormal explanation for.

You’ve got to remember that, based on general experiences and basic maths, you should experience a million-to-one coincidence roughly every two years – so the world will throw up mysterious experiences from time to time. How we explain those experiences by observation, examination, replication and just plain hard thinking is a lot of fun, and far more interesting than the quick jump to a paranormal pablum.

Lotto

How frequently do you buy a Lotto ticket?

Not in about 10 years.

If you buy one often, do you regularly use the same numbers? (Y/N)

Nope, but I do know what numbers to use to increase my winnings. Send me $10 and I’ll tell you how … 🙂

But seriously, you can improve your winnings by doing the following:

  • select sequences -most people think these can’t come up as they aren’t random, but they are as random as another other set of numbers (don’t choose 1, 2, 3, 4… or …37,38,39,40 as these are more likely to be chosen for sequences).
  • don’t choose any numbers with 7 in them; seven is commonly considered a lucky number, so when the numbers 7,10,17,23,27,33,37 came up in one draw, 21 people shared the first division prize and 80 people took the second division. The average number of winners at that time were 3 and 19 respectively, so any winner of that draw had a much smaller part of the pie.
  • don’t choose double digits or numbers ending in 0 – these are more likely to be picked by people playing numbers.

These strategies do not affect your chances of winning, but can be used to improve the amount you win. This is because you are not playing merely against the machine, but also against everyone who has a Lotto ticket. Pick the more ‘popular’ numbers and you’ll have to share the prize with more people. Select ‘uncommon’ numbers or ‘unlikely’ sequences and you have a good chance of not having to share the winnings.

Who said maths wasn’t useful …

Religion

Do you consider yourself to be a religious/spiritual person? (Y/N)

No. Ethical, yes; moral, yes; honourable yes, but I don’t think you have to be religious or spiritual for any of that.

If so, what religion/teachings do you follow?

I guess the closest I’d get to one would be the Golden Rule, found in many a religion and philosophy – variously described as “do as you would be done by”. Sure there are critiques of this ethic of reciprocity, but it’s not a bad one-liner to start with.

Conspiracy Theories

Below is a list of theories about the causes of important or controversial events. Please read through, and indicate how likely these are as actual explanations.

7 = very likely, 1 = extremely unlikely

The All Blacks were deliberately poisoned before the 1995 rugby world cup final

5 – Put enough people together in a group environment under stress and it’s not unlikely some will fall ill. ‘Course the circumstances can seem more suspicious depending on the situation, and I’d tip this one on the more likely side just because of the circumstances surrounding it. On the other hand, sh*t happens …

Princess Diana was killed by British secret service in order to prevent a Royal scandal

1 – I just don’t think they’re that competent …

A secret cabal of American and European elite control the election of national leaders, the world economy, and direct the course of history in their favour

1 – At some times, in some places, there have been powerful non-elected forces at work behind the scenes, but an all-powerful Illuminati seems very unlikely.

There is a deliberate political conspiracy to suppress the rights of minorities in NZ

3 – Not a conspiracy, but possibly just basic human psychology at work. Never put down to malice what can be achieved through thoughtlessness …

Of course, you could argue that democracy and consensus-building, by their very nature, are going to ride over minorities in their general quest for the greatest good for the greatest number. But I’d need a lot more red wine in me to get into that debate …

NASA faked the first moon landings for publicity

1 – Only the first?

I think the saddest thing about this one is that my kids, and a whole lot of other people, are growing up in a world where they’ve never seen a moon shot to inspire them with a sense of awe at what humanity is capable of achieving. When everyone in my fourth form class had a poster of the Bay City Rollers stuck to their desk-lid, I had the famous shot of Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon. It still makes my heart lift.

The war in Iraq has less to do with promoting democracy than it does with controlling oil production in the East

6 – The reasons for going into Iraq were pretty shonky in the first place. But few things are done for just one reason …

Elvis Presley faked his death to escape the pressures of fame, the shame of his decline, or the unwanted attentions of the Mob

1 – Nope, he just carked it. Now if you’d cited Jim Morrison I might’ve wondered as I think he’d have been smart enough to pull it off …

World governments are hiding evidence that the earth has been visited by aliens

1 – Too big a story, too incompetent a collection to let that one run for any length of time.

The American government was either involved in, or knew about, the September 11 attacks before they happened

2 – I gather they were aware that an attack of some kind was being planned, but the rest of the conspiracy ideas around this are just sickening and demonstrably incorrect in many cases. People want to find an explanation for such things and someone to blame and, for some, governments or Big Business or the MIB or the Gnomes of Zurich serve as the first port of blame.

Superstitious? Me? That depends

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, I got used as guinea pig. Having done a lot of survey design and analysis during the course of my hodge-podge of an academic career, I often end up writing more about the questions than answering them. Add to that the tendency for being, as Margaret Mahy once characterised our group, “a person in a state of terminal caution”, and you can imagine the result.

Well, actually, you don’t have to imagine. Here, from the files of the Chair-entity, is the first half of the response the Star-Times got. See next issue for the rest.

Superstitions

The list below describes actions or events that are often considered lucky or unlucky. Please indicate the extent to which you would try to avoid each one OR make a particular effort to try to make it happen. (7 = I would do this, 1 = I would try hard to avoid this, 4 = Neutral)

• A black cat crossing your path

Not worried about this – 4? Course that might just be the Toxoplasma gondii speaking (a cat-borne parasite that sits inside the human brain making you more prone to car accidents – truly! look it up!)

• ‘Knocking on’ or ‘touching’ wood

5 – for cultural reasons, from time to time to emphasise a point. In much the same way that I’d say “God forbid” without actually expecting the old chap to take a personal hand in things.

• Tossing spilt salt over your shoulder

2 – wouldn’t usually bother, as it’s messy

• Walking under a ladder

2 – if only for safety reasons; I always look up.

When the Skeptics Conference opened one year on a Friday 13th, we had a ladder parked over the entrance doorway and everyone came through under it. We also had a box of mirror glass to break, chain mail letters to ignore, salt to spill, umbrellas to open inside – 13 superstitious activities in all. And it was the one conference where all the speakers ran to time and all the technology was cooperative …

• Throwing a coin into a fountain or well

5 – for cultural reasons (and often because the money is collected for a good cause, also to help future archaeologists have a good time 🙂

• Breaking a mirror

2 – not usually deliberately, though I had fun dropping a large box of mirror glass into the transfer station with suitably satisfying sounds of shattering – should have permanent bad luck as a result!

• Wearing a piece of lucky clothing or uniform to a sports game or an exam

4 – I don’t have anything like that in my wardrobe.

• Thinking about something you really want to happen/are looking forward to

7 – Huh? What’s superstitious about that? You don’t have to enlist the aid of creative visualisation or The Secret (TM) to daydream!

• Wishing on a falling star

7 – Doesn’t stop me from marvelling at the thought of tons of space dust landing on our planet every day, nor wondering what would happen were the thing to be a bit bigger and land in the Pacific …

• Looking at the new moon through glass

Wow, hadn’t heard of this one – what kind of astronomy writer does that make me?!

• Carrying a rabbit’s foot

1 – Kinda gross really. I’d rather wear a half-billon-year-old trilobite fossil (got a silver-mounted one for Christmas), but that’s only ‘cos it’s truly awesome to think it was once wombling around on the ocean floor, not because I think it will bring me luck.

• Standing chopsticks upright in a bowl of food

1 – For culturally sensitive reasons. I lived for five years in Japan, so I would no more do this than put my hat on the table in the wharekai. That said, I once had the most appalling meal of my life in a Japanese restaurant in London and, as a mark of disgust, I stuck the hashi upright when I left. Don’t think the staff noticed – they were French and Korean, which might explain the absolutely awful food …

• Finding a four-leaf clover

4 – Fun in a vaguely interesting way, but not exactly an exciting pastime.

• Crossing your fingers

5 – For cultural reasons or to make a point verbally (see knock on wood above).

Urban Legends – or are they?

Below is a list of (sometimes controversial) theories and beliefs (some of which are definitely true, by the way). Please read through, and indicate how likely these are to be true.7 = Very Likely, 1 = Very Unlikely

• If you go swimming within an hour of eating you’re more likely to get cramp and drown

1 – I’ve researched this one – my son wanted to do it as a science fair project, but we figured getting ethical consent to experiment on his classmates would be difficult!

• The food colourants cochineal and carmine are made from crushed beetles

7 – Cochineal definitely, not so sure about carmine as I don’t know much about that apart from the colour name. Though I daresay these aren’t used much today with synthetic alternatives being available.

• We use only ten percent of our brains

1 – This hoary old one comes up all the time and is a total misinterpretation of the original quote that just doesn’t seem to die.

• Eating carrots improves your eyesight

1 – I love the story of Bomber Command putting this about to try to disguise the development of radar during WWII.

Course, if you want to use this as a metaphor for having a balanced diet and needing some of the vitamins/minerals carrots can give you, then it’s probably better to eat the carrot than not eat it. Don’t overdo it though or you’ll end up looking vaguely jaundiced (there have been cases of that in New Zealand)!

• If you spend too much time at a tanning salon, you can cook your internal organs

2 – Hmm, I’m sure Mythbusters have done something on this but, like so many of their things, I remember them doing it but not the results. I think it unlikely, particularly if the sessions are being run to proper standards. If you just stayed in there it’s possible there many be some low-level thermal damage, but I suspect it would take a long time and/or would not penetrate much.

• Using a cellphone at a petrol station can cause an explosion

2 – Ah, a Mythbusters episode I do remember. They had to go through some highly convoluted situations to get finally an explosion. It doesn’t look like ordinary usage can do this, which doesn’t stop people being told to switch their phones off. Course, they shouldn’t have their phones on in the car in the first place, but that’s another story …

• Pet baby alligators have grown to enormous size in sewers after being flushed down the toilet

5 – For a certain value of enormous which I suspect is pretty small. You can flush a baby alligator down the toilet, depending on the sewerage system you have, and it can grow down there if the rats don’t get it first. Ever read Harlan Ellison’s short piece about the giant albino alligators living on the dope flushed down the sewers of New York? Now there’s an urban legend to conjure with!

• The seasons are caused mainly by changes in the earth’s distance from the sun during its orbit

5 – Not an urban legend as such. Having an elliptical orbit helps, as does having a planet with a 23.5 degree tilt. You could also argue that local variation has as important a role – in Auckland, the oak trees tend to be green one day, then brown and on the ground the next, with hardly any autumn to show for it; in Arrowtown, the autumnal colours are spectacular.

• As long as you pick up a piece of food dropped on the floor within 5 seconds it won’t be contaminated by germs

5-3 – Depends where you drop it of course, as some surfaces are more contaminated than others. I always had the 5-second rule with my kids – helps build the immune system as well as save money!

•There is a giant black cat living wild in the South Island countryside

5 – Fence-sitting on this one. If you’d said ‘panther’ I’d give it a 1 straight away as extremely unlikely – those things are humongous (hip height to an adult, weighing the same as Dan Carter!).

But there could be a ‘giant’ black cat, as in one (or more) larger than the ordinary moggy out there. Feral cats can get very big. That said, none of the videos or photos to date have indicated that the cat/s are particularly large once you take into account distance, scale effects, the cat running etc.

My Habits

How frequently have you done any of the following?

(Answer daily/weekly/monthly/once a year/occasionally/etc)

• Visited an astrologer

Never. Though I used to cast charts while studying astrophysics at university! That’s how I learned it was more a matter of psychology than anything else.

•Looked up your (or someone else’s) horoscope

Occasionally. Not for a long time though. That’s because I got to the point of thinking that being told to be wary of someone simply because they were a Scorpio was as distasteful as being told to be wary of Samoans or Jews. Stereotyping people in the name of entertainment is nonetheless stereotyping them, to all our detriment.

So when someone asks me my star sign, I say I’m an Asparagus.

• Watched a TV psychic (eg, John Edward, Colin Fry)

Sadly, yes, from time to time, but only in a professional capacity in order to make an informed comment.

• Visited a Tarot reader

Once, just to see how they operated.

• Looked up your (or someone else’s) biorhythm profile

Couple of times as a teenager. Seemed to have no relationship whatsoever to what was going on.

• Visited a palm reader

Haven’t encountered one. I’d be intrigued to hear what they think of my lifeline – it doesn’t end but disappears into my wrist skin.

• Prayed to St Christopher to help you find something

No you idiot, that’s St Anthony!

• Visited a psychic

Not personally, but have been to psychic readings and book launches and other promotional marketing activities by the performers involved in this growing industry. Seen the same old dreary parlour tricks time after time, which is sad, ‘specially when you see vulnerable people being ripped off.

• Attended a séance

No.

• Watched ‘Sensing Murder’

Sadly, yes, from time to time, but only in a professional capacity in order to make an informed comment. I find such psychological manipulation ethically objectionable, especially as an excuse for exploitainment. (Isn’t that a fine word – we need to introduce it into the idiom!)

Missing the mark

An article in the Listener makes much ado about very little.

The week after the Listener won Best News-stand Magazine of the Year its cover featured three mug shots of ordinary-looking people and the headline:

6000 NZ cases each year


M I S S I N G

What if someone you love just vanished?

Six thousand people vanish a year? That’s more than 16 a day! Many if not most of us would infer from these words that the people had been missing for a long time and would probably never be found.

I thought, this can’t be true, and my suspicion was soon confirmed as I read the article. The problem was that the writers, Denis Welch and Olivia Kember, had failed to come to grips with a range of differing statistics on ‘missing’, ‘disappeared’ and ‘vanished’ people, and the ambiguities inherent in those terms. Actually the article quoted a figure of 12,000, taken from the police website, but omitted the website’s crucial next sentence: “… within 48 hours most missing persons will either be found safe and well or will have returned home.” Later I was to discover that the figure of 6000 came from a Missing Persons Unit police officer.

This struck a familiar chord. Twice in the past when members of my extended family have been on a motoring tour there has been some misunderstanding over their itinerary, resulting in anxious calls to the police and presumably adding more “missing persons” to the statistics. But no one was really missing: there was just doubt as to whether they were safe, and for a short time they could theoretically have vanished.

So I wrote a letter to the editor, making most of the above points and saying that the statistics were “disgracefully muddled … a mish-mash of confused figures.”

Welch himself replied, saying, “I think you’ve been a bit harsh on us. I agonised a lot over what figure of missing people was correct and consequently feel that you have been rather selective in your own quoting of the article, as I did say ‘All figures should be treated with caution’.”

Yes, he had said that, and no, I hadn’t quoted it. But I thought it was ironic that readers were expected to treat these figures with caution when the journalists had been so careless with them. For one thing, the caveat wouldn’t be read by anyone who just saw the cover at the newsstand. If Welch “agonised” over the missing-persons statistics, why didn’t he make more effort to clarify them?

Welch continued: “I was also careful to refer to ‘cases’ of missing people (I insisted our coverline should use that word) and not to imply that at any given time thousands were missing.” But I couldn’t see how the word “cases” clarified anything-and still I can’t.

There were other things in the article that bothered me too, for example the statement that psychics hadn’t located any missing persons “so far”, and tabloid-style innuendo in the comment on one genuine vanished-person case that “some of the original police files and photographs have gone missing.” There was further innuendo about missing children (“child abduction continues to be rife in the US”) and a man “allegedly a member of a paedophile ring” had been accused of murdering some children “but proof has still to be produced”. Of course, each of these tidbits on its own is minor, but there were more like them and overall I thought this was a sitter for the Bent Spoon.

I wrote back to Welch and said this. He responded by inviting me to write “a new, more balanced letter”, so I did (without quibbling over what was “less balanced” about the first). And he said that he was happy to print it-except for the following:

“Now, of course, the damage is done, and the ‘6000 a year’ figure on your cover will probably become committed to folklore, like ‘one girl in 4 will be molested before the age of 18’, for which we have the promoters of the 1988 Telethon to thank.”

This bit, he said, was “pure sensationalising”.

Nonplussed, I replied that it was the most important point of the whole letter: that the Listener was fomenting an urban myth. It felt as though I was being censored, so I chose not to have my letter published at all, and turned my energies to writing this instead.

And I’ve thought long and hard about where the line lies between abridgement and censorship. I just don’t know. Certainly editors shouldn’t have to publish any old half-baked and ill-informed diatribe (though I think that describes some Listener letters pretty well). But Welch arguably had a personal interest in abridging a letter that criticised not only the magazine, but his own work as well. This perhaps amounted to censorship, and would be all the more deserving of a Bent Spoon.