Tetherd Cow Ahead

Only From Tetherd Cow Ahead liquor outlets. Refuse all imitations.

One of the interesting aspects of writing a blog is the weft and weave of the ‘conversation’ that it becomes. I write something, people comment, we have a conversation, sometimes we continue that conversation elsewhere. We have in-jokes, and shared memories. We have running gags and traditions and circles of friends who pop up with insights and laughs and just plain ol’ howdy-doodies. It’s kind of like a never-ending cocktail party.

And every now and and then, a very strange person wanders in and sticks their finger in the cheese & onion dip.

You probably won’t have much awareness of what goes on behind the scenes at The Cow at any given time, except maybe for most recent few posts & comments. But sometimes, long after a post has been written, commented on, pinged & trackbacked & faded into blogscurity, a new comment appears. Usually it is just a person who has stumbled on The Cow via a link, or a search for something tangential to the post’s topic – normal people who leave normal (and often, very nice) observations. Sometimes it’s some nutcase with an obsession (check the Peter Popoff posts if you care – they attract loonies like corpses attract flies). And sometimes there are things that are just plain weird.

This morning, Atlas Cerise and I had cause to revisit this post – it’s my dissertation on why clever special effects don’t necessarily add anything to movies. It was the second part of a two-part post and the Cownoscenti had quite a good discussion about the whys and wherefores of moviedom. And if you read down the comments you will see the conversation ends rather naturally after a few days. Then, more than a year later someone who identifies himself* as mnorgovudkka says:

Hy my name is mnorgovudkka
Im from mongolia
Buy

Like a goth wandering through the front gate after the last guests have left, mnorgovudkka stands blinking in the bright porch light for a few seconds before shuffling back off into the shadows.

Mostly, I delete these kinds of daft ‘comments’ (and mostly they are linked to a site that I guess is some kind of spamming deal), but I left mnorgovudkka‘s comment because I thought it was kind of entertaining. It wasn’t linked to anything and it didn’t seem to be meaningful in any way – something wacky and pointless for people to find if they were reading back through the archives (kinda like Malach’s comments). It would have been far more amusing if mnorgovudkka had come from Romania, but hey.

Sure enough, during our conversation this morning, Atlas pointed the comment out to me, and I was kinda glad that he’d stumbled across mnorgovudkka‘s nutty noodling. But then, on a whim I plugged ‘mnorgovudkka’ into a Google search, and bugger me! 7690 hits! And guess what? Pretty much all of them seem to be mnorgovudkka‘s same daft comment. In internet terms, mnorgovudkka is a veritable internet celebrity!

For some reason, though, Google thought I’d made a mistake and helpfully suggested that maybe I didn’t mean to search for ‘mnorgovudkka’, but rather ‘morgovudka’, which makes equally as little sense. OK, I’m game, let’s see… clicking on ‘morgovudka’ returns exactly NO hits! Thank you Google, but where did you GET that name from, if there are no hits for it? WHERE? Did you make it up? Are you in cahoots with mnorgovudkka?

And, now that I’m blogging about this, I expect I’ve completely ruined the whole point of that last question because ‘morgovudka’ will return hits to this page! So the Google search will have become meaningful just because this whole series of bizarre events happened!!!

It’s like some freaky self-referential time warp and I’m trapped in it! SOMEBODY HELP ME!

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*Of course, mnorgovudkka could just as easily be female, but somehow…

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The item above is currently up on eBay for $500. Get in quick!

From the Wikipedia entry on Iridium:

Iridium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust, with annual production and consumption of only three tonnes. However, it does find a number of specialized industrial and scientific applications.* Iridium is employed when high corrosion resistance and high temperatures are needed, as in spark plugs, crucibles for recrystallization of semiconductors at high temperatures, electrodes for the production of chlorine in the chloralkali process, and radioisotope thermoelectric generators used in unmanned spacecraft. Iridium compounds also find applications as catalysts for the production of acetic acid.

~

Annual production of iridium circa 2000 was around 3 tonnes or about 100,000 troy ounces (ozt). The price of iridium as of 2007 was $440 USD/ozt.

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*Note that these applications do not include ‘… the cosmetic decoration of domestic appliances’

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For our first wedding anniversary (traditionally considered the ‘paper’ anniversary), Violet Towne gave me a beautiful book: Visions of Nature: The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel.

Haeckel was a biologist and artist and an early subscriber to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories. Although he famously made many erroneous assumptions about evolution,* his detailed naturalistic drawings, particularly his intricate observations of the microscopic sea creatures called radiolarians, are entirely accurate and strikingly beautiful.

Haeckel was also fascinated by the obvious mathematical influences that he observed in life-forms, and documented many of their geometrical characteristics in his drawings.

His ornate organic renderings were almost certainly one of the influences that came to bear on the Art Nouveau movement. It’s not hard to understand why – take a look at this beautiful collection of high quality pdfs of some of Haeckel’s astonishing work.

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*Haeckel was a staunch believer in the outmoded ideas of Lamarckism and the now discredited recapitulation theory. Creationists love to wave Haeckel’s name about in reference to errors he made in embryonic illustrations that fulfilled his wishful speculation that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In doing so they are demonstrating (once again) the profundity of their ignorance; Haeckel was never a believer of Darwin’s idea of natural selection, and in his zeal to advance his own preconceptions, some of his drawings became a little more ‘inventive’ than they had any right to be. Haeckel’s fabrications were never endorsed by Darwin, and in time succumbed to the scrutiny of rational examination, as all bad science necessarily must.

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WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #5

NOTE: I have replaced the images in this post after a legal challenge from Dr Emoto’s office, on the basis of intellectual property violation. You can read about it here. I note that images of Dr Emoto and his water crystals appear widely across the internet on sites that are supportive of his ideas. I leave it to you to make a conclusion about why he objects to them on my site…

This is Dr Masaru Emoto. You might remember that some time back I had cause to mention Dr Emoto in relation to the improbable H²Om ‘vibrationally charged water’, for whom he may or may not have been some kind of spokesman.* I promised in that post that we’d examine him in more detail at a later date, so here we go.

Dr Emoto believes† that human emotions, through speech or thought, effect the behaviour of water, particularly the way water crystallizes.

To put it in the very simplest of terms (and trust me, there’s not a lot more to it than simple terms): if you think bad thoughts at water while it’s freezing it will make ugly crystals, and if you think good thoughts it will make pretty crystals. Does that sound daft? Yeah, well by any sensible yardstick, it pretty much is.

Dr Emoto has also come to the conclusion that even just the words that we use to convey certain emotions and ideas will affect water! He maintains that simply writing words on the containers used to freeze water will influence the kinds of ice crystals it makes. These are similar to some of the examples to be found on the Hado‡ website (a comprehensive archive of Masaru Emoto’s ideas):

Yes, that’s right – just the written words for the French, Japanese and English language expressions for the concept of ‘thank you’ create crystals as expressively different as those in these pictures. Remarkable! And is it just me, or does the French ice crystal look flamboyant and florid, the Japanese one precise and elegant and the English one ugly, coarse and ill-defined – classic, banal racial stereotypes. I bet ‘danke’ would turn out angular and severe, with no sense of humour.

Dr Emoto, by his own admission, is not a scientist. In his ‘experiments’ with water crystallization, he has suggested that photographers use their aesthetic discretion when choosing examples that endorse his ideas. As far as science goes, then, this is something more akin to an art excursion.

What’s wrong with Dr Emoto having a charming little eccentric idea about water caring what we think about it? Well, the problem is that Emoto’s notions have been picked up by just about every lunatic in existence who has some kind of ‘water therapy’ as their cause, and then been advanced by those people as science, either directly, or just by the omission of salient details. If you were unfortunate enough to have endured the inane ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ you will have seen exactly how Dr Emoto’s ideas are advocated: breathless slack-jawed wonder, without a shred of critical analysis (or even just common sense) in sight. Merchandizers like H²Om, who are selling nothing more than purified water, are quick to flaunt Emoto’s convictions (if it suits them) and homeopaths from here to Asheville NC, who are now clutching at anything that remotely even looks like a straw, are hitching their implausible beliefs to Emoto’s fantastical star.

And, as eccentric and, well, Japanese, as Dr Emoto comes across, it’s hard not to like him. Reading through his website you get the idea that he’s just a nutty old geezer who’s had way more attention than he should have, for an idea that is childlike and appealing in a very undemanding way. Hado is a cute, wide-eyed, uncomplicated view of the way things work – the ‘Hello Kitty’ of science.

Sadly, credulous people with little grasp of what science is actually about find the allure of Dr Emoto’s magical thinking all too seductive, and without even casually examining his process, take seriously what should properly be viewed as a quirky amusement.

As a parting thought, you might like to read Dr Emoto’s Happiness Poem at Hado. Its innocent pining for a simple solution to everything that seems ‘wrong’ with the world (by ‘fixing our broken relationship with water…’) bespeaks a guileless mind that does not want to concern itself even slightly with the complexities of the way things actually are.

If only it was that easy.

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*It was kind of hard to tell. The makers of H²Om seemed to want to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dr Emoto according to the usefulness of the context. A bet each way, it would appear.

†For a change, I really think that Dr Emoto is someone who genuinely does believe what he says, misguided though he may be. That puts him in a very obvious class of people, in my book – he’s just batty. He’s not as shifty and conniving as Jasmuheen, nor as smugly manipulative as Rael.

‡’Hado’, to rhyme with ‘shadow’ – apparently from two Japanese ideograms that mean wave and move.

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Today marks the end of five years since my gorgeous Kate left on that saddest and most mysterious of journeys. I remember her with great love, always.