Category: strange events

A Praying Mantis Matinee?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

This mantis was waiting in line outside a theater where they were having a Heaven’s Gate revival.

Here’s  an awesome scientific experiment you could probably do yourself, if you had the patience and the manual dexterity for it.

Scientists have been showing 3-D movies to praying mantises, to find out whether the insects can see in three dimensions ( http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-praying-mantis-3d-glasses-20160108-story.html ), reports the Los Angeles Times. The purpose, supposedly, is to find some way to build robots that can see in three dimensions.

So far they have only shown the mantises little film clips of potentially edible bugs. But what would happen if you showed a mantis Gigli? Or Star Wars: The Force Awakens? How about a whole theater full of mantises?

And what if you could find out whether the insects liked the movie, or not?

The movie industry needs help. The average feature film costs over $100 million to make, and the makers lose their shirts on a fair number of them.

But in insects Hollywood has a potential audience hundreds of times greater than all of the people in the world. One swarm of locusts, or a couple of attics full of Chinese shield bugs, and you’ve made your money back!

Maybe we could even wind up with movies made for insects and watched by robots.

How much worse could they be than some of the movies we avoid now?

 

Did the Queen Really Say It?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Image result for images of queen elizabeth ii

Here she is–what does she know that we don’t?

Supposedly Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas message that the world heard this past Christmas was most certainly not her original version of it.

According to various “sources,” the Queen, in her first version of the speech, darkly hinted that the royal family had Princess Diana murdered because “she knew too much,” and then delivered this gem: “I hope you enjoy your final Christmas” ( http://bible-storytelling.beforeitsnews.com/terrorism/2015/12/queens-2015-christmas-message-enjoy-your-final-christmas-2456776.html ).

Yowch! What did she mean by that?

Of course, the video of this version of the speech has been “pulled,” so there’s no proof she ever said a word of it. But meanwhile she’s got a lot of people bug-eyed. “What does she know that we don’t know? What does she mean?”

Will they outlaw Christmas? Will Moslems take over and ban Christian holidays? Is the world due to come to an end? Will Britain be vaporized in a nuclear war?

Or was it all just a nice gift to the conspiracy theory community?

Unless someone comes up with the video, we’ll never know. Even then, videos can be doctored and faked. But if you are able to imagine the Queen of England sitting in front of the cameras and microphones and fessing up that she and her family had Princess Diana bumped off, then you have a pretty lively–if unglued–imagination.

Zillionaire to Build Robo-Nanny

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Mark Zuckerberg, the grand panjandrum of Facebook, has vowed to build a robot “to look after his house and keep tabs on his newborn daughter,” The Independent has reported ( http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/mark-zuckerberg-to-build-robot-butler-to-look-after-his-child-as-part-of-2016-new-years-resolution-a6795376.html ).

I’m old-fashioned. I thought your wife did those things. Or you could do them together.

This is a milestone–or will be, if it works out all right and the robot doesn’t wind up shoving assorted Zuckerbergs into the microwave–in the quest to create true Artificial Intelligence: an enterprise that is not even logical, much less potentially successful.

Sinful, fallible, psychologically vulnerable, misinformed, under-informed or even ignorant, wishful-thinking human beings cannot create any kind of intelligence superior to their own. We can build computers that can do certain simple things–like playing chess, for instance–without making bonehead moves of the kind that human players make because they’re tired, distracted, or whatever. But we can’t build a computer that can use chess as a way of thinking about love.

We cannot build robots that are wise.

We cannot build robots that are better than we are.

“Artificial Intelligence” can never be anything but artificial. It is not true intelligence, but an unthinking simulation of intelligence.

But hey, who listens? Go ahead and let the bot mind the baby. How much worse can it be than public school, or television?

Time Traveler Wrecks Two Businesses–and His Car

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

If you can’t get a real time machine, like this one from George Pal’s 1960 movie, don’t try it with your car.

Sorry, but I’ve just gotta post this news item.

This past Sunday, a 40-year-old man–old enough to know better? nah–drove his car into a tax preparers’ office and from there into a casket company’s office in a strip mall in Pensacola, Florida. He told police he was attempting to travel through time by driving his car through a “time portal” ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3373459/Man-trying-travel-time-smashes-car-two-Florida-business.html ).

Might he have consumed a bit more science fiction than was good for him? Or maybe he just missed the portal.

There is a strong suspicion that this driver might be a bit tetched, a few oars short of a trireme, but I have another theory.

I think this guy bought into the post-modern creed, energetically promoted by universities and collidges throughout the land, that reality itself is only a social construct. Reality isn’t really real. It’s only whatever you think it is.

The man’s car would tell you otherwise. Gee, talking cars would fit right into this scheme of things.

As an aside–funny, isn’t it, that businesses dealing with death and taxes were right next door to one another.

And aren’t you glad this had nothing to do with your Christmas week?

Lake Murray, New Guinea: Dinosaur Sightings

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

If you wish to join the search for the Lake Murray monster, here’s where to start.

Does a Tyrannosaurus rex stalk the shores of Lake Murray in Papua New Guinea? ( http://cryptozoologythescienceoftheunknown.blogspot.com/2009/04/murray-monster-papua-new-guinea.html ) A number of people say they’ve seen it?

Gee, how come living dinosaurs don’t show up on the White House lawn or in Central Park, New York City, where we can all see them? And what am I doing, writing pap like this the day after yet another mass shooting in America?

If I don’t turn away from the “real” news from time to time, it’ll destroy me.

And anyhow, what if those stories from New Guinea are true? Hey, a few years ago, the idea that you could find and study dinosaur soft tissue would have seemed like sheer lunacy. Now it’s done all the time. We do not yet have the official and bona fide scientific explanation of how soft tissue can survive 65 million, 100 million, years in the ground. (I see only two possible explanations: either our understanding of how animal remains get fossilized is totally all wet, or else those remains are much, much younger than Official Science will admit.)

Eyewitnesses describe a huge, two-legged monster with long, sharp teeth as inhabiting the environs of Lake Murray. They say they’ve seen it with their own eyes. A couple of the witnesses were Christian missionaries.

It makes me think again of that Wagon Train episode. If Bill Hawks had dropped what he was doing and ridden out among those hills and canyons, not very far away, would he have found Dimetrodons? We’ll never know, because he just did what the script called for and possibly the thought of Dimetrodons never crossed his mind.

But what if somewhere, somehow, someone does discover a living dinosaur and presents it to the world?

Wouldn’t that be something!

Clown on Campus Creeps Out Coeds

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

What are we to make of this story?

Female students at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin, are nervous about a guy who prowls the streets at night in a clown mask and a bright orange jumpsuit ( http://www.wkow.com/story/30593183/2015/11/24/clown-causes-alarm-around-carroll-university ).

Police say they know who it is–a “developmentally delayed” teenage boy. It would appear there is no law against prowling around at night in a clown costume, even if it’s making everybody edgy.

What if the cops are wrong about who it is? Does anyone know where Joe Biden is, lately?

Or have they just launched a new Clown Studies undergraduate degree program?

Seems the only kind of stories coming out of colleges, these days, are clown stories.

The ‘Stone Age Tribe’ That Wasn’t

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Dear Worldly Wisdom–Here we are in our cave, exactly where you expect to find us. Not only do we not have words for “war” or “conflict in our primitive, unspoiled Stone Age language. We also have no word for “sucker.” (signed) Your friends, The Gentle Tasaday

In 1971, Science and the nooze media went into ecstasy over the discovery, in the Philippines, of a “Stone Age” tribe that had apparently been totally isolated from the rest of humanity for over a thousand years ( http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_stone-age_tasaday ).

I remember that, I saw the documentaries: “the gentle Tasaday,” who didn’t have words in their language for war or fighting or conflict, totally unspoiled, front-page news for National Geographic and PBS–proof positive that Rousseau was right about The Noble Savage. Yep, that Fall of Man stuff is for the birds, Christians just invented it to be mean. In reality, man is basically good and pure and noble, and it’s only that stinkin’ Western civilization that corrupts him and turns him into a villain.

Ah, the settled science of those days!

And then in 1986 the Tasaday were denounced as a hoax–just a bunch of Mindanao villagers posing as a Stone Age tribe.

Well, really: from the Tasaday caves to the nearest modern village was only a couple of miles. How isolated could they have been?

Filipino politics is an intimate part of this story, so the controversy goes on to this day. It’s possible the Tasaday had been living in that sector of the jungle for a century or more, having fled their original home. But it is not possible that they’d been there for a thousand years and turned into hippies who wore leaves instead of tie-dyed T-shirts.

The Tasaday population today is reported at 200 or so. It doesn’t seem the gene pool would be large enough to carry them through a thousand years.

You know something? Whenever Science and the nooze media get together on a story, it’s just about gotta be humbug.

Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar… (Romans 3:4)

Bizarre: 25% of Male Brits Think They Have ‘Man Periods’

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

A recent poll has found that a quarter of British men report themselves experiencing “periods” once a month, complete with symptoms of PMS–albeit without the most, ahem, obvious, er, manifestation of menstruation ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/health/quarter-of-men-believe-they-have-man-periods/ ).

Even more odd, the poll found that 58% of these men’s female partners believe them.

No wonder the Moslems think they can easily conquer Europe.

How does this happen? The poll doesn’t tell us that. We must speculate. Too much public school (which in the UK means “private school”)? Too much ballet on television? Not enough iron in their diet? What could possibly cause so many men to think they are, as it were, menstruating? Mere idiocy?

They insist the symptoms are real and that they have simply a dreadful time with them.

If you think this culture’s not in trouble, think again.

Mis-Translation Embarrasses the Living Daylights Out of Spanish Town

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Thanks to a whopping big error by Google, this inoffensive vegetable was the cause of no small embarrassment to a town in Spain.

Here’s another reason why you don’t grant unchecked power to stupid human beings, who then turn it over to computers programmed by other stupid human beings. In other words, a lesson in humility.

A town in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, has an annual “rapini festival.” Rapini is a leaf vegetable, similar to spinach, that’s popular there.

In spreading the word of the festival, Google mistranslated the Galician word for rapini into the Castilian word for “clitoris,” thus advertising that the town was having a “Clitoris Festival” ( http://www.thelocal.es/20151102/galicia-celebrates-its-annual-clitoris-festival-thanks-to-google-translate ).

Oops.

To say that the people of that town are highly cheesed off would be an understatement.

Things like this happen: always have, always will. Hey, it could’ve been worse. The computer could have lumbered the town with a Cholera Festival.

Let us learn from this not to rely overmuch on our technology. Remember: stupid in, stupid out.

[Editor’s Note: Yes, I know this subject matter is a bit beyond what is usual on this blog, or acceptable. But the incident really happened, and the lesson that it teaches is important.]

Incontrovertible Proof of Mermaids

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

This is supposed to be an age of radical skepticism, right? That’s why no eddicated person believes any of that stuff in the Bible. He would rather be scientific, and listen to a lot of tripe about dinosaurs “experimenting with different kinds of body plans,” yatta-yatta.

The flip side of our modern, hi-tech age is ignorance and superstition. Turn away from the real God, and any god will do. You can only keep worshiping celebrities and politicians for so long before you need something more.

Like mermaids, for instance.

Here is the official and bona fide video of a genuine mermaid washed up on a beach somewhere after a hurricane. What beach? What hurricane? Picky, picky, picky!

So if you’re not getting everything you need from lectures about what happened in the first 64th of a second after the Big Bang–well, don’t look a gift mermaid in the mouth.