THE CYCLONE OF THE EARTH

The Turbo-Encabulator

One of my favourite Facebook sites is The Sceptics Guide to the Universe and I get regular posts from them on my timeline. A few days ago they sent me a wonderful tale about the Turbo-Encabulator.

The Turbo-Encabulator was the brainchild of a graduate student called John Hellins Quick who, in 1944 managed to get a paper published in the British Institution of Electrical Engineers Student's Quarterly Journal. With his paper entitled "the Turbo-Encabulator in Industry", a legend of mechanical engineering was born.

I first heard about it in the mid 1960s and actually learned how to recite the paper in full, which probably tells you more about me than you really want to know.

The Turbo-Encabulator is of course a glorious piece of nonsense and a perfect example of what would later come to be known as "technobabble". What he described is a fantastical device, containing a number of impossible components performing incomprehensible functions by means of scientific laws that do not exist.

It really became famous when it was reproduced by Time magazine in 1946. Most people then were in on the joke, several of them adding other suggestions and advice on making it more efficient.

It then largely disappeared from pubic notice until 1962 which is probably when I first came across it. Since then, it has appeared several times and the example which you can watch below was made as an April Fools joke in 2013 by the otherwise respectable SciShow website.

Back in the old days, anyone reading anything of a scientific persuasion usually was of the scientific persuasion and as such, was unlikely to be fooled by gobbledygook. Sadly, as time has gone on, this is no longer the case and with the invention of the internet and other popular means of communication it's now possible to reach a much wider audience and therefore, makes them easier to fool.

This use of gobbledygook technobabble does have a long history and it brought to mind an incident in my childhood that went like this.

We were on a family holiday, it was the early 1960s and we were staying in a hotel/guesthouse in Herne Bay. In the evenings, we would all sit in the guest lounge and do whatever, (to be honest, I can't remember, so it can't have been very exciting).

This was the time when all the early space missions were taking place and me, as a crazed science kid, thought this was a fantastic time to be alive. Imagine my indignation then when, while waxing lyrical to whoever would listen, about the latest space mission, an elderly lady guest announced that they should stop sending up all those rockets because it was "upsetting the cyclone of the Earth".

Now this old biddy had probably been born in the 1880s so would not be fully up to speed when it came to space technology but what annoyed me most was her use of meaningless terminology to describe what she perceived to be some sort of a threat to her wellbeing.

The expression "cyclone of the Earth" of course, doesn't mean anything, what you have is a consequence of one of the peculiarities of the English language where a sentence may be grammatically correct but the words are semantically confused to the point where the sentence itself becomes gibberish. This is also sometimes called "word salad", more of which later.

You can see how she arrived at it though. A cyclone rotates, the Earth rotates and she is using the word "cyclone" in the wrong context. What she meant was that she though that rocket launches were affecting the rotation of the Earth, they don't of course, but that was what she meant.

There are some who use word salad intentionally in order to confuse and I will talk about some of them.

Back to word salad.

Historically, the term was used in a psychiatric context and describes symptoms of conditions such as dementia and schizophrenia where a sufferer would try to communicate using words in a random or confused manner.

It can also be used deliberately as a method of implying a competence in a subject without the need for any actual understanding.

Consider the genre of science fiction. Science fiction writers (usually anyway) have some understanding of the scientific principals they are describing so, even when using impossible concepts such as faster than light or time travel, they can use scientific terms in their proper context. 

Science fiction film or TV script writers on the other hand often have no such background knowledge, they are just script writers and might just as well be writing a cowboy or detective story. These people rely on the concept of the word salad to get them through an event in the plot where something is supposed to be happening but they don't know how to place it in the story.

Word salad was used regularly in the old TV series of Star Trek. 

Problem: the Enterprise is in a dangerous situation and should be escaping from whatever the threat is but, in order to develop the plot, it has to stay right where it is. How do you arrange this without the story looking clumsy?

Solution: Geordi calls up to the Captain and says, "I'm going to have to take the warp engines off line so I can recalibrate the dilithium matrix that was damaged by the gravimetric distortions".

Sounds good, doesn't it? But it's complete gibberish, it doesn't mean anything at all. 

Another area where word salad rules is in the world of corporate jargon. Here, words or phrases which mean one thing in plain English are used to describe something in an entirely different context. It's possible to construct entire paragraphs of corporate jargon that can mean just whatever you want them to mean according to the situation. There are online corporate bullshit generators where you can construct your own corporate statement from a choice of words or, if you're feeling lazy, it will even do it for you. Here is a good example of one.

If you are one of the unfortunate individuals who have to sit in at meetings which are conducted in corporate bullshit, this should lighten your day a bit. Play the Bullshit Bingo.

Where word salad reigns supreme however is in the world of complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM). It's deliberate use here is to confuse the public into believing absolutely anything at all, usually with the intention of parting them from their money.

There are several genuine masters of the art and I will talk about a couple of them here.

For my first example, step forward Deepak Chopra. Wikipedia describes him as "an Indian American author and public speaker. He is an alternative medicine advocate and promoter of popular forms of spirituality".

I would describe him more as a promoter of himself and living proof of the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted. His business, selling mumbo-jumbo remedies, oils, books and videos, is said to gross around $20 million a year and he has a personal fortune said to be around $80 million. He has more uses for the word "quantum" than you could shake a homeopathic stick at. CAM word salad should always find a place for the word "quantum". He also famously fell out with Professor Brian Cox.

Typical Deepak Chopra word salad quotes include

"good luck is opportunity meeting preparedness." and

“Never forget that you are not in the world; the world is in you. When anything happens to you, take the experience inward. Creation is set up to bring you constant hints and clues about your role as co-creator. Your soul is metabolizing experience as surely as your body is metabolizing food”

He goes on like that all the time.

You can also get an online new age bullshit generator based on Deepak Chopra quotes. You can have lots of fun with your friends and family by getting them to try to tell the difference between the real and the computer generated ones. It's also a handy tool if you are thinking of starting your own new age blog.

For my second example, step forward David Avocado Wolfe. For those of you who haven't heard of him, count yourself lucky. If you have a Facebook account, you almost certainly will have heard of him because it is a good day when you don't get one of his sickly platitudes posted on your timeline by a friend who has shared one of his posts. I always have unkind things to say to people who do this but they still keep on coming.

In the piece below, you can hear David Wolfe describing chocolate as being an octave of the Sun.

You can't have an octave of the Sun any more than you can have a floor space of cheese; the term is meaningless. So how does he get away with it?

The same as my old lady. She thought cyclone and rotation were the same thing. Okay, in a sense, they are but she was still mixing metaphors. In this case David Wolfe is throwing in the word "octave".

Well, an octave is something to do with music, right? Music is notes that are vibrations of the air. We already know about New Agy types and vibrations and although they should ideally be quantum vibrations, ordinary ones will do at a pinch. So, chocolate is a vibration of the Sun.

No, chocolate is not a vibration of the Sun. Even if you allow for the misinterpretation of the word octave, it still doesn't work. Strictly speaking though, what David Wolfe is actually saying is that chocolate is an interval between one musical pitch and another with half or double it's frequency.

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Anyway, enjoy this piece.

FREE THE BONEHEAD ONE

I've just been informed by fellow blogger Arthur Pewty and since confirmed by the BBC that my old friend, champion of free speech and human rights, Joshua Bonehill-Paine, has been sent down for 3 years after being convicted of inciting racial hatred.

He has been inciting racial hatred for years but this is the first time he has actually been convicted of the offence. This followed a series of posts on Twitter containing "vile and anti-Semitic material" ahead of a planned rally in Golder's Green, according to the prosecution. 

He is the same person who was convicted back in 2014 after posting hoax messages about a pub in Leicester, claiming that the pub was banning service personnel in case it offended immigrants.

To be honest, I'm really disappointed with Joshua. He took the trouble to send a threatening email to Arthur Pewty after he reported my campaign against the witty and informative Daily Bale but never tried anything with me. I guess it's because I'm just too scary.

With him now put away for the foreseeable future, I am going to have to find another cause to champion. Fortunately there are plenty to choose from. Britain First is my first choice, (geddit?) closely followed by a scam artist who goes by the unlikely name of David Avocado Wolfe and whose posts regularly turn up on my Facebook page.

TOLD YOU SO

You read it here first.

As predicted by my earlier post, footballing legend Jose Mourinho has finally been sacked by Chelsea Football Club after stating that he "had their full support".

Anyone who follows football, and even those of us who don't, are in no doubt as to the fate of any manager who has the "full support" of his club. Those magic few words that turn "if" into "when" were pronounced by Chelsea in October and started the clock ticking down to doomsday for Jose.

Strangely enough, according to the BBC, other managers are surprised that he has been sacked, citing the fact that he is their most successful manager ever, winning them three league titles, the FA Cup and three League Cups.

How can they be so naive? Being successful has nothing to do with it. Football managers are sacked on a regular basis regardless of their performance and go on the merry-go-round of hiring and firing that is a familiar part of the football tradition. 

You sack your manager due to poor performance and hire someone else who has just been sacked by their team for poor performance. This is the way it has always been done.

It seems that a fellow called Guus Hiddink is in line for the job. Sounds about right. He is well qualified as he has already been sacked by Chelsea once already and has since been leaving a trail of destruction across Europe. Good luck.

I'M NOT SURE I LIKE THIS

Facebook is to introduce a dislike button although quite what this means is not made clear. Do I dislike a post because it contains something I dislike? Do I dislike it because someone has commented on something I dislike? Do I dislike it because I don't like the person who made the post?*

What is really alarming is that it could be used to do someone real harm. Think about it, how many times have you liked a post because it will help a sick child or make Amazon or Microsoft et al to pay for some poor person's operation? 

If you dislike that post, will it make the person sicker? Or make Amazon or Microsoft et al raid your bank account and make you poorer?

Just think, enough dislikes, or even "amen" spelt backwards could kill someone. A dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.

Personally, I think this should be banned on health and safety grounds. In fact, I think I will dislike it as soon as it arrives.

*Thinking about this, perhaps we should have lots of different buttons for all of these. There could be a competition to design them. Personally, I would like a button which says, why are you posting this crap on my page? I would use that a lot, especially on Britain First and David Bloody Avocado Wolfe ones.

THAMESMEAD GOLF COURSE

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed workmen securing the site of the old golf course in Thamesmead. They had already removed the netting alongside the footpath and were installing new fencing around the driving range. They were also securing the windows in the clubhouse with metal screens.

I have never been able to get any response from anybody to enquiries about the fate of the site but one of my regular readers has had more success although there still seems to be no clear decision made.

Part of the problem lies with ownership and responsibility for maintenance. The land is owned by Tilfen, which in turn is part of the Peabody Group who lease it to a company called Parpost Ltd. Parpost are responsible for the maintenance and access issues and their only activity in this regard was to block access to the public footpath with a huge ditch. Perhaps the new fencing is down to them.

Peabody themselves have what they call a "final map" which shows the golf course site as a "large scale sports and leisure park". Let's hope so.

 VERY 21st CENTURY

The latest Pope, who goes by the name of Francis is supposed to be a progressive (whatever that means) and is trying to make the Church more relevant in the 21st century.

In this image, he is seen to be driving out demons possessing a man sitting in a wheelchair. 

The Church later published a retraction saying that it wasn't an exorcism, rather a blessing. In any case, it didn't work as the man says that there are still demons inside him.

He has now decided that he is going to declare Mother Teresa a Saint because she has miraculously cured two people of cancer .

The first involved the bogus claim that an Indian woman was cured of cancer after putting a picture of Mother Teresa on her stomach. This laughably absurd claim which has been dismissed out of hand by rationalists, and more importantly, the Doctors who treated her, had been cited by the Roman Catholic Church as proof of a miracle.

The second miracle supposedly cured a man in Brazil of several brain tumours after his Priest prayed for Mother Teresa's intervention with God. So far, there is no more information about this case that I have been able to find but I would be willing to bet that there is a lot more to the story than we are hearing; assuming that the whole thing isn't fake anyway.

If the Catholic Church is going to continue parading this superstitious medieval nonsense then the 21st century is still a long way away.

DUMB AND DUMBER

Anyone following the campaigns of the Republican candidates for the US Presidential elections will be getting increasingly alarmed at the prospect of Donald Trump winning, and even actually getting his finger on the nuclear trigger. What some of you may not realise is that this American version of our own Nigel Farage is not the craziest of the bunch. 

Amazing as it might seem, there are names on the candidates list that make even him look like a beacon of sanity.

Step forward Ben Carson.

Now if you look at his career as a successful neurosurgeon, he has an impressive track record. He was the Director of Paediatric Neurosurgery at the prestigious John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland with his work being recognised with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

The problem starts when he lets his religious views cloud his judgement; these have the effect of making him look like he is at least a couple of side plates short of a dinner service.

He claims that Charles Darwin proposed his "theory of evolution through natural selection" because of Satan. As far as I am aware, Satan isn't mentioned even once in his book. (I do own a copy, bought from Down House when I visited a couple of years ago, although I haven't gotten round to reading it yet).

When he gets onto the subject of the pyramids though, he stops flying round the ceiling light of sanity and starts bumping into the crackpot window.

According to Ben Carson, the pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain and that the mummies were used as scarecrows to scare the birds away. No mummies have ever been found in the pyramids by the way.

He also believes that the pyramids have pointy tops to prevent blimps from landing on them. The fact that blimps didn't exist at the time just shows how forward thinking the Ancient Egyptians were.

On the Subject of Joseph, he also claims that the "coat of many colours" described in the Bible was in fact only black and white and brown. It seems that in those days black and white were the only colours, as you can see from old television footage, and it was the first time anyone had seen brown.

Vote for Donald Trump anybody?

  

HAPPY FAMILIES

I know I keep posting pictures of Seals on the Thames foreshore but I think they're cute and it's my blog, so there.

This is a small family of Common Seals that have been seen pretty much in the same place now for a couple of weeks. There are two adults and a juvenile who seems to be losing its baby fur. You can spot them on the mud in front of the Power Station water outlet, near the golf course. 

By the way, you can get involved in the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Thames Marine Mammal Survey by going to this page and reporting what you have seen.

Junior having fun in the mud

Playing with Dad

Mum and Dad

Family group

Here they are again