Out, Damned Spot

There’s a sucker born every minute.
–David Hannum

“Convergence” has been a buzzword in technology circles for a while now. Well, smartphones converged with pustular adolescent skins when two companies independently started to market smartphone apps that claimed to be able to cure acne. AcnePwner (“Kill ACNE with this simple, yet powerful tool!) attracted 3,300 downloads at 99c a pop, and AcneApp sold 11,600 at $1.99.

For Goat’s Sake

(Reuters) – Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

“The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,” Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed told Reuters by telephone.

“We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody. We cannot base our information on something mystical. It is something that has to be proved scientifically, that a human being turned into a goat,” he said.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Residents came to the police station to see the goat, photographed in one national newspaper on its knees next to a pile of straw.

Just for now I have no comment.

Stellar Silliness

I received this offer the other day:

All About Name A Star:

Name a Star is ideal for:

Birthdays – Christmas – Valentine’s Day – Anniversaries – Engagements Weddings – Mother’s Day – Father’s Day – Baby Showers Showing Appreciation – Graduations – Retirements – Memorials

Give a gift that truely lasts forever. Name a Star is the ideal gift for friends and family of all ages and is perfect for those “hard to buy for” people.

Name a Star allows you to express your feelings with this special gift. Anyone is sure to be overjoyed when they receive this unique, personalized certificate.

For just R89 you can dedicate a star in our registry and get a beautiful, personalized certificate to present to your friends or family.

The certificate features the star’s celestial coordinates so it can be located easily using Google Sky.

If you fork over your R89 what are you getting? Do you imagine a couple of centuries hence astronauts setting course for a star system bearing your name? If so, you’re in for a disappointment–all you have bought is a certificate (actually a pdf file that you’ll have to print out yourself) signifying nothing; even though it might look lovely hanging on the wall next to your doctorate from Thunderwood College and your dog’s rabies innoculation certificate.

The truth is that no company can name a star on your behalf. Here’s what the International Astronomical Union has to say on the subject:

The IAU frequently receives requests from individuals who want to buy stars or name stars after other persons.  Some commercial enterprises purport to offer such services for a fee.  However, such “names” have no formal or official validity whatever: A few bright stars have ancient, traditional Arabic names, but otherwise stars have just catalogue numbers and positions on the sky.  Similar rules on “buying” names apply to star clusters and galaxies as well.  For bodies in the Solar System , special procedures for assigning official names apply (see the IAU theme “Naming Astronomical Objects“), but in no case are commercial transactions involved.

As an international scientific organization, the IAU dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of “selling” fictitious star names or “real estate” on other planets or moons in the Solar System. Accordingly, the IAU maintains no list of the (several competing) enterprises in this business in individual countries of the world.  Readers wanting to contact such enterprises despite the explanations given below should search commercial directories in their country of origin.

In the past, certain such enterprises have suggested to customers that the IAU is somehow associated with, recognizes, approves, or even actively collaborates in their business.  The IAU wishes to make it totally clear that any such claim is patently false and unfounded.  The IAU will appreciate being informed, with appropriate documentation, of all cases of illegal abuse of its name, and will pursue all documented cases by all available means.

Thus, like true love and many other of the best things in human life, the beauty of the night sky is not for sale, but is free for all to enjoy.  True, the ‘gift’ of a star may open someone’s eyes to the beauty of the night sky.  This is indeed a worthy goal, but it does not justify deceiving people into believing that real star names can be bought like any other commodity.  Despite some misleading hype several companies compete in this business, both nationally and internationally.  And already in our own Milky Way there may be millions of stars with planets whose inhabitants have equal or better rights than we to name ‘their’ star, just as humans have done with the Sun (which of course itself has different names in different languages).

So think twice before giving this “gift” to a loved one. She may realise that the thought counts for very little.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Rapture II

So, here we are (still). Unraptured, unsubjected to the tortures of hell on Earth we were promised by the grade A, Crackpot First Class Harold Camping. The papers are full of sob stories about the morons who bought into this nonsense and now have to face the consequences.

Last Judgement

Last week I expressed some sympathy for the likes of the Martinez family, but this week, after reading the bleatings of the faithful, I’ve changed my mind.

There are a crowd who rented 50 rooms in an expensive hotel to await Jesus, believing they would never be presented with the bill. How stupid can you get and still go about on your hind legs? These bloody fools deserve nothing but contempt and ridicule, and the more of that that is heaped upon them, the less likely will it be that others will believe the next Camping, or even this self same Camping when he amends his ridiculous calculations again.

Last week I mentioned the fact that yelling “fire!” in crowded auditorium is not protected speech under any sane constitution, and likened Camping’s absurd statements to just that situation. I sincerely hope someone in the US brings a prosecution against him, and a jury finds him responsible for some of the harm he has done.

Then he can finish his days in a lunatic asylum, where he should have been confined a long time ago.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Rapture Rubbish

There have always been a few mentally fragile individuals going about wearing sandwich boards proclaiming the imminence of the end. But they are seldom as specific about it as the latest batch of ditzy doom mongers who say that the rapture will occur at 1800 local time on the 21st May.

Why are they so sure? Well, because it’s exactly 7000 years since the start of the great flood (you know, the one that happened when the only person with a boat was Noah), that’s why. How do they know the exact date of the flood? I don’t know and they aren’t telling, apart from a somewhat cryptic assertion that it is encoded in the Bible. The man who started all this is the well-known crackpot Harold Camping, the founder of a Christian media network called Family Radio. He predicted the day of judgement would come on September the 6th 1994, and when it didn’t his excuse was that he hadn’t actually read the whole thing: “For example, I at that time had not gone through the Book of Jeremiah which is a big book in the Bible that has a whole lot to say about the end of the world.”

Harold Camping

This is all very entertaining, but his nonsense has an adverse effect on the lives of those who are too weak or psychotic to think for themselves. For example: Adrienne Martinez and her husband Joel lived and worked in New York. Adrienne had plans to attend medical school, but when they fell under the spell of Camping, their plans changed. “Knowing the date of the end of the world changes all your future plans. My mentality was, why are we going to work for more money? It just seemed kind of greedy to me. And unnecessary.” So they quit their jobs and moved to Florida. “We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left.” The really sad part of this is that they have a two-year-old daughter and another child on the way, who will be going hungry come the the 22nd because of their parents’ idiocy.

Their story is not unique; there plenty of people who have given up careers to wait apathetically for “the rapture”. On the 22nd of May they are going to be both disappointed and broke.

It’s said that yelling “fire!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire is not protected by any constitutional free speech provisions because the potentially disastrous consequences of panic trump the constitutional free speech clause. Is there not a case to made that Camping is doing the same thing? Even if he actually believes his own bullshit, the feeble-minded dupes who follow him risk destitution as a result of it. I’m not looking forward to the sob stories that will abound as the gullible realize that they have been gulled, but there is no going back to repair the damage.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Computer con

There’s a very old joke which goes like this:

An English professor is enjoying extracurricular jollies with the wife of a colleague. He is atop the lady when her husband enters the room.
“I’m surprised,” exclaims the husband. “No, sir. I’m surprised. You are astonished,” says the professor.

Well, I’m both surprised and astonished at a scam that has been perpetrated in Ireland. Firstly, I’m surprised that anyone attempted this con because no sane criminal could possibly believe it would work. If someone came to me and said, “Hey Mark, I’ve had a brilliant idea for conning suckers out of their money. We take the Dublin phone book, right? Then we ring people up at random and say we’re from Microsoft and we have detected there’s something wrong with their computers. We tell them we can fix it online, but they must pay for a service contract. We get their credit card details and debit them say €100 or €200 and we don’t do a thing to their computers.”

“What do we say when they ask exactly what’s wrong with their computers?”

“We just make something up. Say their analogue navel rectifier’s got an exploit. Nobody who uses Windows knows anything about computers, anyway. If they sound really suspicious we just go into the wrong number routine.”

“Nah. Forget it. Nobody could be stupid enough to fall for something that obvious.”

But fall for it they did. In their droves. This is where the astonishment comes in. There are people who dress themselves in the morning and walk amongst us on their hind legs who are so stupid they would give out their credit card details over the telephone to strangers. A lot of them don’t even realise that they have been conned: they think there was an actual problem with their computers that the helpful folk at Microsoft have fixed for them.

Microsoft Ireland pay a person to be their ‘customer experience manager’. I would rather have the job of licking the mall toilets clean with my own tongue after a hot dog eating contest than fill that role, but it is filled by one Mary Ashe Winton, who has this to say:

Anyone who receives an unsolicited call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft should hang up. We do not make these type of calls, offering a technical support package.

Quite right, Mary. I hope Microsoft pay you top dollar in exchange for your rare gift of common sense.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

A Perminisions of Ancestors

Imagine this situation: you are running a medium-sized business and one of your employees comes to you with an unusual request. She says she has been seeing visions and that she spoke to a priest who advised her to go on a Christian Outreach Revival camp which would last for a month. She has no annual leave left, so she wishes to take unpaid leave. You are in the middle of your busiest season and you can’t spare her for more than a week, which is duly offered. Your employee goes to the camp without permission, and during her absence a disciplinary hearing is held as a result of which the employee is dismissed for being absent from work without leave.

Sangoma

This seems to me to be fair. Why should special allowance be made for an employee in order for her to indulge her superstitions? I’m betting that if this actually happened, the labour court would, rightly, uphold the employee’s dismissal.

However, this did not happen, but something similar did. Johanna Mmoledi was employed as chef de partie by the Kievits Kroon Country Estate. She claimed to have visions and was advised to go on a traditional healer’s course for a month. She duly applied for a month’s unpaid leave, was told she could have a week, took the month and was dismissed. When she returned she gave her employers a letter from a member of the North West Dingaka (traditional healers’) Association which read:

This serves to certify that Mmoledi was seen by me and was diagnosed to have a perminisions of ancestors.

Mmoledi’s union declared a dispute and the case went to mediation. Mmoledi claimed that she was justified in being off work on the grounds that she was sick, or feared that she would become so if she failed to attend the course. Her employers insisted that there were no grounds for believing that Mmoledi was sick, and just what the hell did “perminisions” mean, anyway? The commissioner, bizarrely, found in favour of Mmoledi, saying that the employer lacked empathy and understanding of cultural diversity and that Mmoledi was justified in absenting herself from work “rather than risking the wrath of the ancestors.” Well, this is no great surprise—everyone knows the bizarre and fantastical shapes into which the CCMA will fold itself in order to find for an employee (sorry, wekka.)

The case was taken on review to the labour court where, unbelievably, Judge Ellem Francis upheld the ruling of the commissioner. Finding that Mmoledi was justified in absenting herself, he said, “This case sadly shows what happens when cultures clash in the workplace.” Perhaps the judge considered the culture of actually pitching up for work when you are expected to to be unimportant in the context of this case, or perhaps he thought a belief in the “wrath of ancestors” trumped all other considerations. Or perhaps he didn’t think at all. This was not so much a “clash of cultures”, it was a clash of stupidity and common sense, a clash which stupidity won.

We hear various government ministers and trades union officials whining that despite growth in the economy, employment continues to stagnate. This case is an excellent illustration of why this state of affairs exists. What employer in his right mind would hire someone of Johanna Mmoledi’s ilk when he can possibly avoid doing so? Businesses continue to replace labour with capital wherever it is possible to do so, resulting in high unemployment, poverty, crime, and all the misery that those things bring in their wake.

As usual, our politicians are too stupid to realise that this is a problem of their own making.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Friday Shorts

The deadline for RICAing[1] SIM cards is almost here. What a waste of time and resources! If you were a criminal mastermind would you meekly register the SIMs in your own name and with your own address that you intend using to further your nefarious ends? Of course not. You would use one of the false identities you either stole or obtained from any one of the hundreds of corrupt officials who infest the Department of Home Affairs. I’m making a note in my diary to ask the relevant minister in a year’s time exactly how many criminals have been caught through the use of a RICAed cellphone. My bet is that the answer (in the unlikely event that it is given) will be a large round zero.

[1] Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA). Shouldn’t this be RICPCRIA? Yes, but politicians are too thick to spell it. Errr, Rick prick what?
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An almost perfect description of warfare:

Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
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It is there some movement in South Africa that I can join to do away with the really, really silly public holiday system? Here’s what I think should happen: everyone should be given four ‘floating’ holidays which they can use whenever they like. These are to replace the current Easter and Christmas religious holidays, so Jews could take Passover or Hanukkah or whatever, Muslims could have their break over Eid, Hindus could be off for Divali, devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster could take noodle days and so on. All other holidays should be moved to the Friday or Monday closest to the date on which they occur, doing away totally with these ridiculous midweek holidays which just waste everyone’s time.
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And why can we not implement daylight saving time in South Africa? Or have two time zones, one for the East of the country and one for the West. Our time zone (UTC +2) is based on Pietermaritzburg, which is fine if you happen to live in Pietermaritzburg, but daft if you live (as I do) in Cape Town. In winter we have to get up and travel to work in the dark because the Sun only rises just before 0800. I suspect we don’t have it because our politicians are too dim to understand it.
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Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Book Burning

Why do we feel such an instinctive abhorrence for the act of burning a book? Last week the Reverend Jones, a fundamentalist preacher in Florida, USA, declared that he was going to burn copies of the Koran, allegedly in protest against “fundamentalist Islam.” (As though that is in some ways worse than fundamentalist Christianity.)

He joins the ranks of other noted book-burners down the ages: fine, upstanding folk like Adolf Hitler, Uncle Joe Stalin, and of course we can’t forget Mao Tse Tung and his “cultural revolution” which attempted to destroy Chinese culture in its entirety. Burning books goes back to the third century BC when books were burned by the Qin dynasty in China, and scholars buried alive for dissent. The practice is a long standing Christian tradition—the Spanish Inquisition burned the Koran wherever it was found.

Many people have commented on the Rev. Jones’s planned idiocy, but I haven’t read or heard anyone who actually gets the point. It is generally agreed that whilst burning the Koran is legal, it isn’t desirable for a host of reasons, such as: it will inflame Muslims and increase radicalism; it will be a recruitment wet dream for Islamic terrorist organisations; it will trigger retaliatory action by even moderate Muslims, and so on.

What they miss is the fundamental stupidity of the notion that you can destroy an idea by burning a book that contains it.

I think that what Messrs Hitler, Stalin et al had in common was a shared delusion that by burning a book they could make the ideas contained therein somehow vanish. This, of course, is not what happens. The physical book may be destroyed, but the burning (or banning) draws attention to the ideas rather than destroying them, and those ideas often go on to destroy the book-burners (which is what they were afraid of in the first place.)

The way to destroy an idea is to show that it is not true in matters of fact and its arguments are not logically valid. This is extremely difficult in the case of religious works because they are supposed to be the word of an infallible supernatural being. Pointing out that some of the “facts” revealed by the deity are provably wrong doesn’t phase the faithful in the slightest. They merely move the goalposts and assert that the questioned passages are allegorical and not to be taken literally, and logical inconsistency is an artifact of our poor human brains that are not able to understand the grandeur of God’s plan.

The only way to combat this sort of psychosis is to repeat the obvious to the faithful calmly and often. Perhaps, once in a thousand times, the seed of doubt will sprout and you can convert someone to sanity. I know this works because I was once a devout Christian (at about the age of 13) and now am not. Faith was defeated by critical thinking.

Perhaps we should inundate the moron Jones with emails explaining that snakes can’t talk, the dead can’t walk, and water cannot be turned into wine without the added ingredients of sunshine and a grapevine.

“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” – Heinrich Heine

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

Tummy Ache

Spam is usually a nuisance, but sometimes it can be quite informative and even entertaining. Take this example received from one of my favourite spammers, Antoinette Pombo. She specializes in hawking dubious health products on behalf of an organization called Fleet Street Publications. It was Antoinette—by the way may I call you Toni? Antoinette is a fistful too far for my typing; in return you may call me Grumps—who provided me with first intelligence of the Q-link and the low-down on testicular cancer. Here is the start of her latest dithyramb, this time in praise of an individual called Jonathan V. Wright. I’ll try to preserve her HTML if possible to give you the taste and aroma of the sheer idiocy of her outpourings.

Shattering discovery



Your
body’s worst enemy is…



Your

STOMACH

Suffering from Asthma?


It’s your
stomach…



Are
you losing your memory?


It’s your
stomach…



Are your arteries
diseased?


It’s your
stomach…



Or maybe you have
macular degeneration? Osteoporosis? Chronic Hives? Gallbladder disease?
Angina? Arthritis? Cockrot? Ingrowing Toenails?

It’s
all your stomach…

Here’s one simple
trick to tame your stomach and live healthier than ever

It goes on in much the same vein for another 2,000 words, so I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, but will share with you some of the more amusing quotes. I must state at this point that I had hitherto not heard of the good (or perhaps not) Dr Wright. In the course of my researches I discovered that he is the hero and blue-eyed boy of the arch-crackpot Suzanne Somers, which is not the right foot on which to be starting off. I am not qualified to know whether or not Dr Wright is a quack; I’ll merely point out that he is listed on Quackwatch with a red asterisk, indicating that he may very well be.

Toni begins by offering a series of anecdotes in which the hero, who is at death’s door, goes to see Dr Wright and within a few short weeks is totally cured. Take Hernando, whose legs were so knackered his doctors wanted to amputate. After seeing Dr Wright he was leaping like a hart (whatever that may be). Or John who had angina, or Sam who had macular degeneration, or…

All these people were allegedly suffering from hypochlorydria—too little stomach acid, which Dr Wright apparently knows how to cure.

After the “case studies”, Toni gives a truly boot-licking, sycophantic resume of Dr Wright’s career and qualifications:

“No other doctor of our time has crusaded harder or sacrificed more to bring the healing power of nutrition to ordinary people like you and me than Dr Wright.”

This is one impressive guy: he was awarded “the highest medical honour ever” which I must assume is an honour higher even than the Nobel prize. Well, Toni says it is, so who am I to argue? She is referring to the Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award (LPLAA), of which I have never heard. I have, however, heard of Linus Pauling who is one of only two scientists to win two Nobel prizes, one for physics and the other for chemistry. (There is some speculation that he was in line for the Peace prize as well, but he was passed over.) In the latter part of his life he descended into crackpothood, though, advocating the consumption of staggering quantities of vitamin C.

A search of the internet reveals that the LPLAA is perhaps not what it’s cracked up to be: a google search for “Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award” yields only three results, all of which are about Dr Wright. It seems no one else has ever been the recipient of this mysterious award, or indeed knows anything about it.

Then we are treated to the usual rants against “mafia-style pharmaceutical companies” and “the capitalist institutions that have a death-grip on our health and quality of life”, which Toni always inserts into her pieces. I’m sure she even sticks this stuff into her christmas cards.

And, at last, we get to the punchline. We too can be cured of just about everything if we subscribe to Dr Wright’s publication Nutrition & Healing which will cost a mere R57 per month. As is customary for quack remedies, Dr Wright’s snake oil is marketed as a substitute for not supplemental to science-based treatments, which means people will inevitably be harmed by falling for Toni’s nonsense. It doesn’t really matter though; if you’re dumb enough to buy this tripe, then you deserve your fate.

Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.