A little about the man:

Tim Minchin is an Australian, musician, actor, comedian and writer. He has been performing his unique brand of musical comedy in front of appropriately excitable and ever growing audiences since starting out in South Melbourne’s Butterfly Club in 2005. He won the Director’s Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for his break-out show Darkside, and followed this later the same year with one of the most successful debut acts ever at the Edinburgh Fringe – winning the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer. Without wanting to go on and on about it, he’s done some pretty successful live shows since then, often in Australia or the UK, but also on the North American continent (yes that includes you too Canada). But not you Guatemala. Maybe one day.

His current songs span topics such as environmentalism, rationalism, prejudice(ism) and his amour de boobs(ism). In fact it would hardly be over the top to say that his love of boobs would be up there in the back of Plato’s cave in the bit that’s carved out for the most perfect and complete example of the love of boobs. But not in a weird way. During his shows he plays the piano, always nicely and oftentimes wildly and excitingly, whilst looking wonderfully athletic, in a pair of delightfully uncomfortable skinny jeans.

You can get an idea of his act here:

I grew up on fairy tales and fantasy stories and perhaps because of that I always found the idea of belief in fairies a bit ridiculous.  They were always framed as fiction, tales for children, for entertainment purposes only.  Yet in the 1920’s the Cottingley Fairies affair showed that even 20th century adults were still open to the idea of fairies in the garden.  But the fairy tales of Europe are not all stories of happy dancing little people who have fun. Many tell of mischevious, malevolent entities who could be blamed for any number of problems around the home and farm.

Spring dried up? Could be nixies.  Noises in the walls?  Pixies.  Eggs gone bad? Brownies.  And so on.  But the worst thing of all was that fairies (or the fair folk) could steal children and replace them with their own fay-child.  These replaced children were called “changelings” and until a couple of weeks ago I thought this was yet another strange but harmless story of fairy-tale weirdness like Rumplestillskin or the witch from Hansel and Grettel. ¹

A changeling baby

The most common version of the legend is that a family discovers their child suddenly starts behaving oddly so they ask around for advice.  Finally they’re told to do something very unusual – like make stew in an egg or brew beer in an egg.  Upon seeing the  parent doing this peculiar thing, the changeling says, “I am as old  / As Bohemian gold / But I have never seen such brewing.”  And then, having given itself away as a changeling the fairies, little people, or in some versions Satan, will come and restore the real child.

What changed my understanding of the legend of the changeling was the discovery that they were real.

No, seriously.
Look, no less an authority than Martin Luther (this is the protestant reformer, not the villain from Superman) encountered a changeling during his travels.  Read this astonishing account from his Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden .

Eight years ago [in the year 1532] at Dessau, I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy; but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said to the Princes of Anhalt: “If I were the prince or the ruler here, I would throw this child into the water–into the Molda that flows by Dessau. I would dare commit homicidium on him!” But the Elector of Saxony, who was with me at Dessau, and the Princes of Anhalt did not want to follow my advice. Therefore, I said: “Then you should have all Christians repeat the Lord’s Prayer in church that God may exorcise the devil.” They did this daily at Dessau, and the changeling child died in the following year…. Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.”
Source: Martin Luther, Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden (Weimar: Böhlau, 1912-1921), v. 5, p. 9.

Oh, suddenly it isn’t a fairy story!  It is certainly a sinister tale, but upon reading this a couple of weeks ago I instantly realized that I had missed the whole point of the tale of the changeling.  These aren’t fairy tales at all – they’re superstitious minds trying to cope with discovering that their children are in some way mentally abnormal!  Going back through the many changeling tales it is easy to see that they refer to various mental and physical abnormalities.  Behavior issues, food issues, emotional problems, physical deformities, the kinds of things which would make a modern person consult their pediatrician.

It would be ridiculously presumptuous to try to use a 1500’s tale of a changeling, recounted some eight years after it took place, and try to diagnose the afflicted child’s condition.  But among the tales a common theme of a child seeming normal and then suddenly manifesting abnormalities of mind and character runs deep through them all.

How else would someone in a pre-science world explain how their beautiful child suddenly becomes alien to them?  Autism certainly wasn’t a part of their vocabulary.   And reading of Luther’s wish to kill the child has completely tarnished my naive concept of the quaint village idiot.  I now doubt many “village idiots” lived to adulthood after reading about the various cruel and potentially lethal treatments used to deal with these changeling children.

And has science really gotten the general population much farther than labeling their special-needs children as “changelings?”  The ridiculous antics of the anti-vaccination people and their belief that vaccines cause autism is just about the same in my mind.  Parents want to know why their “normal” kid suddenly stopped developing or lost skills – and autism often manifests at the same time that the vaccine schedule happens.  We’re very good at assigning causation even when it is unwarranted.

And some parents think their kids are “star-children” or “indigo kids” ² or any number of things but what they really are – human kids with developmental differences from “the norm.”

So I was wrong about changelings.  They aren’t just fairy tales.  But at least science is working on understanding the diseases and genetics and other factors that can impair, alter or misdirect development.  We now know that fairies don’t replace our kids.  We know that some kids have developmental problems.  And we know that getting vaccinations won’t cause autism.

Science and medicine don’t teleport us to modernity, but they give us a path if we’re willing to follow it.  Maybe someday science will even find some ways to help us get better communication with autistic family members?  One can hope.  But if any of those treatments involve making soup or beer in an egg shell, my next major project will be researching how to spin straw into gold.

Acknowledgements: Matt Crowley shared the Luther quote with me.  I followed up on it and found the excellent essay about changelings by D. L. Ashliman.  It is certainly worth a read and contains much more detail about this fascinating but ultimately ghastly tale of superstitious reaction to developmental issues with children.

These wristbands “work with your body’s natural inner force” and contain “ions that work with your body’s energy to give you confidence from within.” Based on my years of observation, the only ions I have seen reliably giving confidence have been ethanol ions in aqueous solution. And it’s obviously not THOSE ions helping Auburn to such a good season, so this must be something special.

I did further research, and discovered a scientific analysis of the product by its manufacturer (from Guangdong, China). Their homepage is here: http://www.hottime.cn/ but I don’t care enough to find the research page there. On the research page you learn lots of amazing things about them. It’s almost entirely a list of absurd claims for every medical and scientific scam over the last century. They make you more “stable” so you can’t be knocked over (they have pictures to explain this)!

The research page contains this exciting list:

Benefits of energy:

I knew all of this MUST be the secret of Auburn’s astounding football success this year, where the team has the chance to win more games this season than the last two seasons put together. Surely major American university bookstores and athletic departments wouldn’t be selling their name and this product without thoroughly reviewing the evidence supporting these amazing claims!

Auburn’s success is plenty of evidence for me to trust that this product delivers everything it promises! I don’t need to research any more.

Wait, I’ve got one more page open from my google search…Oh, never mind, this page has new evidence that contradicts everything above about Power Force Ion Wristbands and football success.

[Added 12/22/10] This story, about the Australian consumer watchdog group ACCC cracking down on Power Balance bracelets seems relevant, though the company uses a different name. The product looks identical.

The official TAM8 Banner

This year the keynote speaker is Richard Dawkins, author of The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor’s Tale, as well as the book that branded him as one of the four-horsemen of “The New Atheists” movement, The God Delusion.  Dawkins did a Q&A sessions last night moderated by magician Jamie Ian Swiss.  I expect he’ll have much more to say, but he has a kind of nerd Rock Star reception around here. It’s impressive to see.

Even more of a Rock Star, and ushered about by security everywhere he goes, is Mythbusters host Adam Savage.  I’m very much looking forward to hearing what Mr. Savage has to say while he’s here.  Just before I left to fly out here I was watching a “best-of” episode of Mythbusters with my son.  And I told him, “I’m going to see that red-haired man when I go to Las Vegas.”  My son laughed because he thought I was joking.

“Is that why you’re going?” he asked.

Adam Savage channels Jamie Hyneman

It’s not the only reason, but it’s a good one.  Savage is an engaging speaker and has many entertaining things to say about making television that promotes science.  His quixotic quests to reproduce certain Hollywood film artifacts are legendary.

The schedule is pretty full during the day and there are lots of opportunities to mingle and network.  You can check out the full guest list here but even that doesn’t cover the many notable attendees such as life-extension specialist Aubrey de Grey and of course, myself! (I jest…  A bit.)

It is no small thing for me to be out here.  I’m not alone of course, many of the Atlanta Skeptics are out here with me – which is a comfort.  My co-hosts to MonsterTalk Ben Radford and Dr. Karen Stollznow are here too, the first time we’ve all been together since starting our podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity to take part in this and want to say a special thanks to JREF president, D.J. Grothe and my wife Kathleen for helping this to become a reality.

Ammonite - artist's rendition

I think there are probably a lot of educators here.  Definitely a lot of clever, clever folks.  I got to talk paleontology with some scientists last night.  We talked fossils and discussed trilobites and ammonites.  Did you know that much is known about how these extinct animals moved through the waters of the ancient earth because of hydrology experiments done in water-tanks?  Did you know that before they went extinct they were dying out and there is a controversy about whether they died out before – or during – the Cretacious-Tertiary Extinction Event?  I didn’t.  There’s a lot to learn out here in the desert.

Wish you were here.

I’ll post updates as time allows.

The Wem Town Hall Ghost photo - courtesy Fortean Picture Library

In September of 2009 I started an investigation into the Wem Town Hall ghost photo.  This famous photo shows a ghostly girl in the burning wreckage of a fire that took place in the Town Hall of the British town of Wem on November 19, 1995.  The photographer was a man named Tony O’Rahilly and he took several photos of the fire that night.  The last photo on the reel showed a girls face in the doorway of the blazing fire and the photo caught the imagination of many.  Was this girl really in the building?  Fire fighter footage of the same fire showed no such girl.  No body was found, and many speculated that this was a ghost.  Paranormal researchers even came up with a name for the girl, calling her Jane Churm after a little girl who started a fire in Wem back in 1677.

For fifteen years the photo was a mystery which made many top-10 ghost lists.   But now an elderly man in England has identified the source of the ghost girl’s image and brought closure to this case.  Read on past the break to get a history of the case and see the solution.

A paranormal investigation group called the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) investigated the photo and found that it was likely a simulacrum caused by burning debris.  Soon after, a BBC television show called Out of this World investigated the case and came to the conclusion that the photo was a hoax using a digital image as the basis of the ghostly subject.

If you’re interested, the episode is available on YouTube in two parts:

Wem Ghost Girl – pt 1/2

Wem Ghost Girl – pt 2/2

When I decided to look into the case, despite the fairly compelling information in Out of this World, I started by trying to get a copy of the original image.  The Fortean Picture Library gave me two very nice pieces of evidence.  One was a scan of Mr. O’Rahilly’s negatives, and the other was a high definition scan of the original photo.  Unlike the photo in in the documentary, the girls face had no horizontal scan lines.  This was important because the photography expert in the episode said that they were easily detectable in the copy he received.  

I contacted several people involved with the television episode, including the ASSAP team.  My ASSAP contact stated that they felt the lines the photography expert saw were probably an artifact of the reproduction process they’d used to make their copy of the photo for analysis.  This may well be true.

I’d been trying for weeks to contact the photography expert in question when the story containing the solution broke in a UK newspaper, The Shropshire Star.  A previous issue of the paper had run an old postcard from 1922 and one of their readers, a 77 year old man named Brian Lear noticed that the girl in the postcard bore an uncanny resemblance to the girl in the Wem Town Hall photo.  And lets be clear here – it’s not just that she looked similar, but that she’s wearing the same clothes and features match up perfectly to the girl in the ghost photo.  It seems clear that Out of this World was closer to the truth than I’d thought.

Below you’ll see the famous ghost photo, the postcard that the girl’s image was swiped from, and a couple of animated photos to show how perfectly the two images line up.

The Post Card Girl - Detail from 1922 postcard

The postcard which contains the "ghost" girl's image.

An animated overlay to show how the "ghost" and the postcard girl line up perfectly.

It’s not often that such a beautiful and obvious solution arises in these kinds of case, but I’m certainly happy that Mr. Lear was paying attention. A pity that Mr. O’Rahilly didn’t live to see the very specific solution to his hoax be made public, but at least the answer is now out in the public. It’ll be up to skeptics and honest folk to make the solution widely known to the rest of the paranormalist community.

Looking at the size of the hairs in relation to body, I'd say something like mink, agreeing with your identification. Otters also have a thin layer of very dense, dark grey under-fur, and in the picture I can see no sign of that.

If you take that observation and combine it with the findings of Dr. James Patton quoted over at Forgetomori.com:

“[The] mystery critter looks more like a mink than an otter to me (longer fingers, without any evidence of webbing).  It clearly was dead in the water for a prolonged period, hence the defurred face and head, and somewhat swollen appearance”, wrote Patton.

I think we have all the expert evidence converging on Mink as the identity of the mystery corpse of Canada.  However you don’t need to be an expert to know that a rotting dead animal, while monstrously odiferous, doesn’t have to be a monster in fact.]

They say what’s old is new.  Lately the cryptozoology world has been awash (pardon) with creatures found on beaches or near water.  These critters all share some common features.  First, they’re dead.  Second, they’re either hairless or nearly hairless.  Third, they’re photographed and the odd pictures are shared on the Internet.  Then the speculation storm washes all around us.

This is not new, mind.  The history of dead things washed up on shore is long and disgusting.  From a dead shark posing as a plesiosaur to a dead raccoon posing as a mutant experiment these photos apparently capture the imagination of viewers, and that’s all it takes to make good news copy.

This week’s corpse-célèbre washed up near the town of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Ontario and was discovered by a couple of  nurses who photographed it and then shared the photos.  The animal is said to be less than a foot long, with a rat-like tail.

Canadian Mustelid Corpse - Top View

(Read on to find the solution!)

The face of this Mustelid has become bald from decomposition.

However, it is unclear whether the whole animal is less than a foot, or the main part of it – and then the tail is additional length.  Nor is it clear whether that is an estimate or whether actual measurements were made.  It’s no giant, to be sure.

Speculation about the animal has been rampant, but we can tell a few things about it before attempting an identification.

First, it is a mammal.  It has hair and is built along the lines of an otter.

It isn’t very large, based on the eyewitness accounts.

There have been some ridiculous speculative remarks made about the animal.  Claims that it is a kind of baby sea-monster, a chupacabras, or a lab experiment have been posted on message boards around the net.

A more reasonable idea is that it is yet another normal dead animal with the hair worn off as part of the decomposition process.  There are many aquatic mammals that could fit the bill here. Over at Cryptomundo Loren Coleman’s suggesting it might be a muskrat or a river otter.

A muskrat, with its rodent teeth and rat-like tail.

I don’t think the skull matches up with the muskrat very well.  They have very conspicuous rodent dentition.

A muskrat has very large rodent teeth, not canines like the corpse.

The body shape certainly looks like a river otter and the dentition matches better.

A nice illustration showing an otter's skull in situ under a fur outline.

But otters are long animals, sometimes getting as big as three or four feet in length.  Unless this was a pup, I’d say it is too small to be an otter.  But is almost certainly in the same family, Mustelidae.

My money is on a smaller animal that looks a lot like an otter. I think this animal is probably a decomposing mink. The mink only gets to be one to two feet in length, but has many matching characteristics to our fur-challenged friend here.  Take a look and see what you think?  I’m sending off the photos to an Otter specialist I know to see if I can get a positive ID, but I see enough matching details to feel pretty comfortable, assuming the size estimates provided by the witnesses are correct.

I think the stink is from a mink.

If history has taught me anything about cryptid corpses it is that the cryptozoology community usually digs in to find out what they are while the general public sits around and guesses whatever comes to mind or fits their folkloric impressions.   Already I’m hearing stories from the local in the area where the animal was found that this is an animal spoken of in Native American lore, and a bad omen to boot.  Yet it seem clear that what this really represents is a common animal that has been rendered uncommonly ugly by decomposition.  The naked face, the white eyes, the teeth – simply put, this animal is un-fur-get-able.

This is not the giant man-shaped hairy monster of the Himalayas.  It doesn’t look like an animal capable of walking on two legs.  In short, it appears to be  some kind of hairless quadruped mammal.

Seriously? This is supposed to be a Yeti?

To figure out what it was, I did a search on “Chinese Mammals ” and then started scanning the image files.

The first set of images that came back included this helpful picture:

Viverridae - includes the civet-cat.

I’m not a biologist, and pesky old Mr. Evolution makes it tricky to identify a specific mammal when the creature is hairless, since hair coloration is one of the ways we identify animals.  But even though I’m not an expert, I see enough similarity to strongly suggest that the thing in the cage is likely a mange afflicted animal from the family Viverridae.   I posted that conclusion to Twitter.

As cryptid enthusiasts from the states wake up, I expect they’ll endorse the same conclusion.  Loren Coleman at cryptomundo already came to the same finding.

I am normally very polite about how people interpret the things they find in the world.  However, this “news story” isn’t the work of cryptozoologists – it is the work of cryptidiots.

Ms. Information began by stating that her objective was to provide balanced information about vaccines.  At first she presented things objectively, but this deteriorated into the usual abyss of lies, misinformation, and partial information. She said that Americans have the sickest kids in the world. I got the impression that she considers asthma and food allergies to be worse than malaria or yellow fever. She feels that diseases like the measles and whooping cough are childhood rites of passage. That is easy to say for someone who has access to good healthcare, but what about the ones who don’t and then suffer complications form these preventable illnesses? Although she did not overtly recommend that parents not vaccinate, it was certainly heavily implied. Her recommendation not to vaccinate until they’re 5 became don’t vaccinate until they’re 13 at which time it’s too late to prevent the spread of most childhood diseases.  Although she never actually said “don’t vaccinate” she did show show two YouTube videos by Barbara Loe Fisher, head of the National Vaccine Injury Corporation (NVIC) and an all around big fat liar. Ms Fisher was not as delicate about the issue. She was very clear about not getting your children vaccinated…ever. She took special issue with the H1N1 vaccine and Gardasil, saying that the H1N1 vaccine was not safe because of…you guessed it, Thimerosal. I think these videos were included so the clinic could not be accused of advising parents not to vaccinate, and could, therefore, be absolved of any responsibility. Of course, there was the obligatory mention of Big Pharma and government conspiracy which I find highly amusing since Wakefield was found to have been paid about a million dollars by lawyers suing a vaccine manufacturer.

Some people do suffer side effects from vaccines and she gave a list of 8 things that parents should look for such as high fever, seizures, and listlessness. She also advocates parents being educated about the vaccines and I agree, parents should be educated, but there is a difference between being educated and being lied to. She thinks parents should have the right not to get their children vaccinated. Well, I would like the right not to get sick. There are babies too young to get vaccines and people (like me) who have compromised immune systems who depend on herd immunity to protect us.

I found it ironic that at the end of her talk she mentioned the need for good science. I could not agree more. It’s just that when they do get good science, it’s not the right science for them.

An autism diagnosis can be devastating to a parent and I understand the need to find a reason for the disease and a cure. Unfortunately, autism is complicated, and there are no easy answers. I think people have mistakenly gotten the idea that science should give definitive answers to all our medical problems, and if it can’t then they move on to other less reliable and unproven treatments. As skeptics, one of the best things we can do is to educate people about what science is, how it works, and what its limits are. By doing this we might be able to avoid the influences of the Wakefields of the world.

If you want a very good read about how the anti-vax movement got started, I strongly recommend Paul Offit‘s book Autism’s False Prophets.