A more scientific study of 'window areas'

I was reading about the book Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events and it occurred to me that a far more scientific study of window areas or hot points for high strangeness is now possible. We have a fairly large sample set in the form of back-issues of The Fortean Times. Were one to take machine-readable copies of all the back-issues, isolate the place names, and plot a point on a map for every mention, we could have an idea of distribution of claims. This self-adjusts for intensity because the stranger the phenomenon the more often it is likely to be mentioned.

Such a map could then be adjusted by population.

If high strangeness is contingent solely on population (in other words, if every person in every place has an equal likelihood of having an experience of a fortean nature) then our adjusted map should be a single fairly solid colour with very little variation, with the exception of places like Point Pleasant, Roswell, Dulce, the Groom Lake Facility, and so on, which are more notorious because of their particular relationship to the mass media.

If high strangeness has an inverse relationship with population (perhaps because loners see things, or because people steer themselves away from places with these phenomena, or for some other reason), we should see the original distribution of points made far more clear.

If high strangeness has a relationship with fault lines, as the authors of Space-Time Transients suggest, then we should see that distribution quite clearly once population is factored out. Likewise with leys, or aboriginal burial sites, or magnetic faults, or changes in gravity, or closeness to radio transmitters, or any of the other suggested explanations whose documented points can be traced on a map.

If I had machine-readable back-issues of the Fortean Times, I could do this in my copious free time. Perhaps I can rely upon the kindness of strangers and/or Fortean Times employees.

Skepticism and the Sincere Anomalist

The typical group 'investigating' a claim of the paranormal (or anything that could be considered 'high strangeness') is well-known to everyone: half the group is the Mulder camp, and half is the Scully camp. In real life, these two types don't get along as well as they do on television, but they exhibit the same characteristics: the Mulder group insists, regardless of evidence to the contrary, that the phenomenon in question is something strange (if not completely supernatural), while the Scully group insists, regardless of evidence to the contrary, that there is a 'rational' explanation (where 'rational' here goes by some definition known only to pseudoskeptics and kept far away from any apparent consistency). But, again unlike television, these two types (both together and on their own) are almost completely incapable of understanding anything legitimately outside of their existing scope of knowledge: they are both varieties of true believers.

In the fortean community, the Scully type is typically called the 'pseudoskeptic'. This is a reactionary type, living to 'debunk' anything that runs counter to his or her existing model of reality. The 'debunking', upon close inspection, loses its thin pretense of rationality and is exposed as a simple mammalian response to threat. In the case of the pseudoskeptic, the threat is typically conflict with whatever they learned in high school science class, and it highly resembles the response of a religious fanatic when dogma is directly conflicted.

In the skeptic community, the Mulder type is typically called a 'woo'. This type is also a reactionary type, living to 'prove' the existence of something that runs counter to the consensus model of reality. This 'proof', upon close inspection, loses its thin pretense of truth-seeking and is exposed as an application of wishful thinking on a large scale: the 'woo' wants to believe, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary.

These two types are actually not terribly dissimilar. They are both true believers, living to validate their own personal views of the universe. The main difference is that the pseudoskeptic has a model of the universe very close to that of the consensus, while the woo has a model of the universe that is very different. It doesn't matter whether or not the models are correct or have predictive value; truth ceases to matter once belief takes the stage. Despite the cries of the pseudoskeptic, neither of these types are skeptical, either. The skeptic actively questions both assumptions and claims, while the pseudoskeptic merely 'debunks' them.

Fortean anomalism is on the fringe of known science, and can be expected to stay there indefinitely; anomalists seek the fringe of the known, and inhabit the borderland between the mundane and the batshit darkness just beyond it. This doesn't make skepticism less important: it makes skepticism more important, and makes belief even more dangerous. There is a tendency for the mind to see what it expects; the mental model affects perception as much as perception affects the mental model. Since the anomalist deals with the unknown, the tendency to see the expected (be it a weather balloon or a piladean missile defense system) has the ability to completely incapacitate the anomalist's ability to see what's really there. Carl Sagan once said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", but that is no more an excuse for pseudoskepticism than it is for woo: the anomalist seeks what evidence exists, and if the anomalist is handicapped by a need to see something either more or less extraordinary than that which is there, who will find such evidence?

The Shadow over Norway

Fortean types have been busy recently, analyzing the odd spiral of light that greeted Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. The skeptics (not in quotes here -- some are real), starting with Bad Astronomy, claimed that it was a broken missile; recently the russians have admitted to illegally launching a broken missile (presumably, Just To Watch It Die). Other groups have called BS on that explanation, and Moscow has its own weirdness to deal with.

To the man on the street, this may seem like a bit of a Warren Report situation -- the official explanation isn't convincing, but the alternates are pretty out-there too. Well, I have here harvested the diamonds in the ash of the other Oswalds, as far as I'm concerned.

First explanation: the Norway Spiral is a thoughtform created spontaneously by a society. Now, if you accept the idea of thoughtforms then this is a prime explanation; ghost rockets and foo fighters were all over Europe during the end of World War II, and between the ripening mainstream already primed for high weirdness and the paradoxical phenomenon of a charismatic and unusual leader being simultaneously getting the Nobel Peace Prize and requesting an increase in troops for fighting a war his nation is terribly divided about being meaningful in the first place, there would be little better place and time in the present day for such a strange phenomenon. The problem is, according to my personal sources, by and large Norway was not "shaken" by this -- most people were paying more attention to Obama's visit and speech than anything funny in the sky.

That said, as the tabloid headlines and tweets indicate, Norway is no longer the business of Norway alone. If we posit that this is some kind of supermassive tulpa shaped like a portal from an alternate dimension, then the manic tweeting and posting and discussion may in fact be changing the form of the entity all along -- overnight a relic of cold war paranoia becomes a real-life reenactment of a Half Life fan video. Let's hope that the men in gas masks don't show up, or else the market for crowbars may experience a bubble worse than that of zombie movies.

Explanation two: something DID come through the LHC, and it wasn't a seagull from the future with a baguette. Quantum mechanics is pretty odd, and non-expert interpretations (as well as some expert interpretations -- for instance, Max Planck's famous bout of solipsism) can be terribly misleading and inspiring. The LHC is running now, and so the God Particle hasn't succeeded in its Grandfather Paradox project -- about as doomed as Skynet, obviously -- but that doesn't mean the quantum weirdness ends here. Recently some scientists unaffiliated managed to teleport some information between atoms faster than the speed of light, supporting Bell's Theorem and paving the way for the now uber-hyped age of quantum encryption (which purportedly can be broken just by the potential for interception), and someone else worked out a model by which negative thermodynamic entropy could exist on the quantum scale and yet still uphold the second law of thermodynamics (hint: the negative entropy is required by the laws of physics to go back in time and erase itself). The LHC is trying to make black holes, and we have very little idea what that singularity (the physical one, not the Kurzweillian one) hides. If the LHC indeed let something through, there would be no real requirement (as far as I am aware) for it to be in the LHC -- nonlocal effects could have transferred it elsewhere.

My personal favourite, though, is partially of my own design. Recently, someone came up with the idea that the past crystallizes out of the future due to waveform collapses -- a waveform that has collapsed is an eigenstate, and so the future is solid in pattern. The 'present' is vaguely where most of the crystallization happens. Now, if some event happens in the near future (a singularity in any given sense, but screwing around with the still-liquid waveforms significantly and violently), the closer we get to it, the more obvious the manifestations of waves of high weirdness will be: things crystallize in a particular way under normal circumstances, but this event would be the quantum equivalent of throwing some ice-nine into a half-melted ice sculpture. It will change the game, and the sudden and abnormally crystallized forms may seem totally out of line with the way things have gone down in the past.

Videos:

Argentinian gnomes

While reading the Gralien Report, I have come across at least three articles about german-style gnomes appearing in Argentina.

Watching the videos, it all looks like a single shot -- no cuts. Likewise, from the way the camera is handled, it looks as though they *are* shot on cell phones. We have two potential explanations, that I can see:

1) It's a hoax.
2) We have physical entities that resemble (or perhaps are) germanic-style gnomes.

In terms of the potential for a hoax, the following has been brought up:

Film in HD, edit, degrade image, compress as shit, upload to Youtube.

Source
It doesn't seem to me that that's particularly likely, unless it was filmed in HD on a *very* small camera. Likewise, shadows and such look alright.

In terms of a hoax with actual props (say, a remote control device of some kind, or -- as Micah of the gralien report suggests -- an actual small or deformed person), the fact that it's a single shot makes this far less likely. Anyone who has filmed and edited videos can tell you how difficult it is to manage without cuts, and anyone who hasn't must only look to Hitchcock's "Rope" to see precisely how well a master director manages it.

The second possibility is that something (which appears to be a gnome) is hanging around Argentina and showing up on cameras. There is, of course, difficulty in using this when you subscribe to any variant of the psychological explanation for fortean phenomena (particularly gnomes and other fae-folk), except perhaps pareidoelia. However, I am hard pressed to think of what else, aside from a gnome, this looks like.

Altogether, these videos appear to pose a problem for everyone who doesn't believe that actual gnomes exist in Argentina.

If anyone has any ideas for other methods by which a hoax like this could be perpetrated, other things that the 'gnome' could be in the video, or other hypotheses for how entities of the non-physical variety could show up on film, please comment and let me know.