Entry 763, on 2008-05-06 at 20:14:15 (Rating 2, Skepticism)
If you read my blog much you will know I am a proponent of rationality, science, free thought and skepticism. I reject superstition, religion, and pseudoscience in all their forms. Actually, that's not quite true because I enjoy all of those phenomena, but only if they are seen as entertainment and aren't taken too seriously. Many religious people get quite offended when I say something like: well belief in God is OK as long as you don't take it seriously.
The general observations above lead me into the main topic for today: a web site I was directed to by a friend who wanted my opinion on if the theory advanced there was likely to be true. This friend sends a lot of material out by email and I enjoy examining the claims and detecting the urban myths, fakes, and pseudoscience they sometimes contain.
I like to test my built-in bullshit meter on this material and I usually recognise a fake as soon as I see it. There have been a few occasions when I thought something was fake when it wasn't (false positives) and there might have been stuff I thought was true but never found that it was fake because I never checked (false negatives) but I think my hit rate is fairly good - much to the chagrin of my friend who often has to email out a retraction!
There are many sites on the Internet which list common urban myths and other fake stories and the best is probably "Snopes". It has descriptions of thousands of stories - both true and fake - and a detailed explanation of their veracity (or otherwise) and origin.
Sometimes a story isn't mentioned there and I have to go further. Probably my greatest triumph was to detect a fake story about a person who travelled in a kayak with a large shark in pursuit (or something similar). I couldn't find anything at Snopes or other similar sites and common Google searches like "shark kayaker" etc failed. So I plugged in the person's name and got a site in Portuguese which I put through a translator. I got a sufficiently good translation to show the original story was mostly untrue. I then emailed my friend and chastised him for not checking sources in Portuguese!
The site I was referred to today was www.divulgence.net which contains a theory that the Earth's axis of rotation has changed over the last 20 years and that it has now moved by about 26 degrees (the normal tilt is 23.5 degrees). There are various claims explaining the evidence supporting the idea, why most people haven't noticed, and how the government is covering up the facts.
The bullshit meter redlines as soon as a government conspiracy is mentioned, of course. If governments spent as much time as conspiracy theorists claimed on covering up UFOs, the real cause of 9/11, the JFK assassination, etc they would have so little time left to govern that they would all be really terrible leaders. Wait a minute! Maybe there's something in that!
Anyway, as an amateur astronomer I immediately recognised this as untrue. If the Earth's axis had moved that much it would be obvious by the changed positions of the Sun, Moon, and stars. And such a large change would require a lot of energy to be released which would probably devastate the Earth. The Earth's axis does move, but only through a circle so that the angle is always the same, plus it is a very slow effect (about 0.01 degrees per year).
I have to commend my friend for at least asking me before distributing this drivel but anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of astronomy should have recognised it as fake straight away. I'm sure that a large percentage of the population wouldn't have the skills necessary to recognise this sort of thing though so I'm really criticising the abysmal state of scientific knowledge in general rather than a single person's inadequacies.
Anyway, the story was a good laugh and while I'm not sure why anyone would set up a theory which is so easily falsified I still enjoyed reading it.
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