Aetheric Research, Ltd.

April Fool’s Day is a traditional holiday for the Internet–perhaps the one holiday that is celebrated more on the internet than anywhere else.  The ease with which ‘regular’ websites can be changed out for prank versions, as well as the various subtle ways in which clever hacks can take place, combine to make a holiday that can be enjoyed by both the prankers and the prankees.

Amongst many websites that offer April Fools Day fare, there are certain standouts that reliably serve clever and interesting pranks year after year.  Google is well known for offering several absurd new products and services as pranks, mixed with one new service that is genuine–for instance, GMail was originally offered as a prank.

Thinkgeek offers a front page full of somewhat dubious and zany offerings, though, like Google, they usually end up implementing at least one of them–Canned Unicorn Meat and the iPad Arcade Cabinet, for instance.

Slashdot has traditionally had any number of prank stories on their frontpage, along with dubious ‘features’ and assorted other amusements; just as traditional is the grumbling of the killjoys who decry, every year, the ‘stupid’ practice of engaging in various shenanigans once a year.

XKCD is in 3D today.

Worth noting as an ancillary to the Internet’s celebration is MIT’s tradition of elaborate physical hacks–modifying a rotunda to look like R2D2, for instance.  This year’s appears to be a visit from a certain Doctor.

The military also will occasionally allow a prank or two to be seen in the public domain; this year’s announcement of new headgear for the Army appears to be just such an occasion.  

Keep an eye out for other pranks, and have a happy April Fool’s Day

An ‘urban legend’ is a sort of modern counterpart to the old stories of monsters and dragons and the like.  Designated ‘urban’ to contrast with the folklore of older times (some people may prefer ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’), these stories are transmitted and preserved in the same general fashion–by word of mouth or equivalent personal communication, generally–as the older folklore was.

There’s often some overlap with conspiracy stories; the two are not dissimilar in some fashion–though while the conspiracy story assumes malevolent authorities are causing the event, or covering up the event, the urban legend makes no such overt assumptions.  

Urban legends have a vast breadth of topics; the Snopes website maintains an archive of this mythos, including discussions of which parts of which legends have truth to them–because, after all, the most effective ones are often based partly in fact.  

Generally, as with older folktales, there’s a cautionary interest behind relaying the tale–a friend of a friend made a mistake or saw something happen, and as a result your friend is interested in maintaining your safety, and relays the story to help you.  This relaying generally happens personally:  your friend tells you face-to-face or, especially now, in an email–why not forward a notice of some form of danger?  Regardless of the truth behind the caution, the general thinking appears to be that it’s better to give someone a false alarm than to risk that they might come to harm if not warned.

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a memetic hazard; uncritical forwarding of cautionary email can also forward various security threats–compromised attachments, compromised websites, etc.–and can sometimes create a panic that can lead to actual harm.  

Avoiding this particular memetic hazard is relatively easy: don’t relay any story you hear about some sort of danger or other until you’ve verified it to be a real and present danger.  There are numerous ways to research these things; oftentimes, simply running a search on a key phrase from such an email–”Tyson drops labor day” for instance–can lead you to numerous resources that can clarify the situation.

I would encourage anyone who does receive regular emails that turn out to be urban legends from a single person to speak to that person about evaluating the premise of the email before forwarding it.  While you may not change their habits of forwarding emails, you will likely be taken off the list of people to send them to, and as such at least be exempt from whatever scams or other harm they might pass along.

Urban legends can also make for good entertainment, as it happens–they’re frequent fodder for the Mythbusters, who address many of them during their show to show in as explosion-filled a way as possible whether they’re likely confirmed or, as they say, busted.

ESR’s seminal work on the jargon and culture of the common hacker, The Jargon File, defines a significant chunk of hacker folklore.  Quantum Bogodynamics (a play off of the existing field of quantum chromodynamics, which describes quark interactions) is a folk theory deriving from the inconsistent behavior of hardware and software in the presence of those not sufficiently inculcated into the mysteries of How Things Work.  Usually these would be suits–that is, upper management of dubious technical ability–but often enough those who work on the front lines of the IT world will notice a significant bogon flux around certain users.

The bogon is a notional particle that is a charge carrier for entropy, essentially.  Where there are significant bogon levels, machines break down in various ways–they refuse to boot properly; software may throw various errors; printers will jam.  There are enough anecdotal cases of a simple desk move solving problems with nearby hardware–moving the user away from the machine’s proximity stopped the machine from throwing fits–that variations on this hypothesis are widely believed by significant numbers of technical personnel.  

This may be part of the notional reason behind the aura of competence effect; technical personnel are heavy emitters of antibogons (c.f. ‘cluons’ in the original jargon) and as such can purge a recalcitrant system in short order by being nearby.  This also explains why certain formerly technically competent personnel, when promoted to nontechnical managerial positions, lose the ability to perform these feats; being in meetings with various suits surpresses their antibogon production.  By analogy with a breeder reactor, these meetings may cause a formerly clueful person to begin to emit bogons much like the other suits involved.

Bogon production may be related to emotional intensity, as well; the more upset or angered the bogon producer is at the situation, the more likely it is that some critical component will start to fail.  This explains the prevalence of errors in product demonstrations.

As of yet, there has been no literature regarding bogon shielding, but a 6′ air gap between the bogon producer and any component of the machine under diagnosis or treatment usually appears to do the trick.  The effectiveness of sheet lead has not yet been evaluated.

Various occupations have bits and pieces of folklore associated with their work–gremlins, from last week’s FFF, were originally a tale told by pilots and aircraft mechanics before they were fuzzy creatures with a problem with midnight snacks.  The computer world is no exception; various technical occupations have their own bits and pieces of folklore that are handed down over time and which fill the same kind of explicative niche for these people as the gremlins did for mechanics.

The Aura of Competence is an experience common to most support technicians who have worked in the field for any length of time.  The support tech will show up to fix a problem that the customer has reported, and the simple act of showing up is “enough” to make things run smoothly again.  

Numerous “explanations” for this effect exist–some of which involve notional particles called “bogons” which are charge-carriers for “bogosity,” the principle that makes things break down.  The highly selective nature of this kind of entropy nearly always strikes certain select users, and always at times when they were “not doing anything, [they] swear!”

Presumably, the technician acts much like the moderating medium in a nuclear reactor, then, and inhibits the bogon flux, thus allowing the machine to operate smoothly again.

Another variation is when a process (registering someone on a website, say, or printing a document) continually fails, and no amount of coaxing by the user will make the process successfully complete.  Again, the technician shows up and either performs the “exact same” actions, or watches the user do so–and the process succeeds.  The user will generally protest that it had only “just” started working when the technician showed up.

This variant is rather like the koan of the LISP machine, in that the process will only work when someone of sufficient understanding is present.  

This effect may be found in other sufficiently technical disciplines, whenever there is equipment whose functioning is beyond the ability of a layman to fully understand.  Rationally, the users in all the above cases must not have observed some difference in the machine’s setup or the procedure; however, users are not usually very rational and will seek to rationalize that the technician’s presence must have had some kind of magic effect.  Accordingly, it may be in the technician’s professional best interests to play along; users tend to become more than a little resentful if they’re informed that the problem is all in their head, and some of these users may write the technician’s paycheck.

Gremlins first came to the notice of the public from stories of military pilots who claimed to see small creatures causing mishaps with their machines.  Various media have portrayed these agents of entropy ever since, usually in the context of airplanes but sometimes sinking their fangs into other complex machinery.  

In the Information Age, Gremlins would find that their activities would not impact things quite so much as formerly.  With the variety of sensors and diagnostics available, the old standards of severing cables and cutting hydraulic lines would not be as effective; the activity would not go unnoticed, given the ever-watchful ‘eye’ of various processors that are built into engines specifically to counter any such problems.

However, these very same processors give the Gremlin far more opportunity for their shenanigans; being much smaller scale and more vulnerable to interference, a light touch can go a long way towards interrupting vital processes in a way that is even harder to diagnose and repair than it would otherwise be.

The advent of computers in the office grants them even more opportunity, for the paradigm that the computer enables allows for entire new catagories of chaos.  Viruses and worms could well be their agents of interruption, wreaking havoc with the vulnerable hardware and software and causing more work for the IT analogues of the mechanics of old.  

It may well be that gremlins have infiltrated the offices of Microsoft and other large software vendors–new vulnerabilities come out every week for Microsoft products, but those operating systems based on technology developed before gremlins began to take an interest in computers (and those which are open-sourced and hence have fewer opportunities for a sly tweak of a bit here and there, given the number of eyes watching for that) are less influenced by their attentions.

Given the patterns of virus distribution, it may well be that gremlins’ natural habitat has moved to China, Russia, and other less-industrialized nations–this is perhaps unsurprising, given that the older machinery with which they are familiar may still be in use in some of those locations.  

Perhaps the strongest indicator of gremlin activity may be the Stuxnet worm:  beyond simply infecting systems and slowing or stopping them, the Stuxnet worm caused actual damage to machinery–damage that was difficult to fix and in a location that required deep disassembly, a hallmark of gremlin infestation.  That the worm spread far beyond its “target” is, perhaps, a testament to their other work in finding vulnerabilities–and if it were the work of gremlins, then other examples will be likely to show up in the future.

The internet’s ability to camoflage identity may well assist the gremlins in their work.  Their natural love of mischeif could well result in the sort of childish pranks popularly assigned to ‘hackers’ and the like; their elusive, shifty nature meshing well with the milieu involved.  A large part of Anonymous could well be gremlins, recruiting various regular people to camoflage their operations and to extend their troublemaking to the real world.

Gremlins would mesh quite well with the modern world, so long as they kept up with new technology, and would likely achieve some remarkable successes in troublemaking.

Originally the Romans’ answer to Eros, Cupid is typically represented on Valentine’s Day cards as being a small (often naked) cherubic creature with a themed bow-and-arrow, shooting couples in order to induce them to get together.  

So we already have him bookable on indecent exposure, for a start, as well as assault and battery and unlicensed administration of a controlled substance–those ‘magic’ arrows would likely be classified as a narcotic, nowadays.  Additionally, were it to be proved that he had materially assisted in coercing persons who had no intention of sexual conduct to engage in such, it’s entirely likely that he could be booked as acessory to rape.  

It certainly does not look good for Cupid.

Though his victims are unlikely to press charges–they’re generally depicted as being happy with the results–Cupid would still be regarded as a danger to society.  Getting a conviction might be difficult, given the usual overwhelming support for his mission, but his reckless assaults on various persons would eventually lead to some kind of difficulties–probably from an ex-wife or ex-husband, upset over Cupid’s “theft” of his or her lover.  Even if criminal charges were avoided, the civil suits would be ruinous–there would likely be some kind of class-action suit brought in at least one jurisdiction.  

At the very least, Cupid would end up with hundreds of restraining orders, injunctions, and other legal strictures preventing him from carrying out his job at all.  Given the nature of his crimes, there’s no doubt that he’d end up on the sex offender registries in any state that he made his home.  That would lead to further strictures–no residence within a given number of yards of schools or churches, no unsupervised contact with children, etc.

Were he to actually go to prison, his small stature and youthful appearance would not serve him very well–he would come out very badly if he were in the general population, and would likely have to remain in solitary confinement for his own protection.

All in all, Cupid would not integrate very well in the modern world.

While most of the modern understanding of Lycanthropy is more a product of Hollywood than of folklore per se, the stories of people who could turn into animals are fairly old in basis.  The word itself derives from the Greek, and hearkens back to the days when the mythic cycles told of the Gods descending to the Earth and taking the form of animals for various purposes.  Neither were these stories limited to the Greco-Roman mythic cycles; the Norse had their own versions, as did the Chinese, as did every other civilization–the Tempter taking the form of a snake, according to traditional interpretations of the Genesis story, could be seen as another example of these.  

Generally, the animal transformations could be grouped into voluntary and involuntary types; the involuntary ones–the hollywood Werewolf, the transformation of Actaeon into a deer–being the result of some sort of curse or divine disfavor and the voluntary ones typically the result of some form of magic.

The Hollywood version of the Werewolf, as a myth of modern society, presents some interesting implications.  Various films have described the interactions with society that a typical werewolf would have to handle; in many cases, they are depicted as lonely figures that are required to keep apart from society and associate more with their animal brethren than with humans.

Integrating them into society would not necessarily be too difficult, though.  While there would certainly need to be some regulation–rabies vaccinations and licensing, for a start–many of the ‘savage’ aspects of the lycanthropic transformation could be handled by a good trainer.  The lycanthrope is generally depicted along the same lines as particularly vicious dogs are–slavering, biting, etc.–so the techniques used to establish proper canine behavior could well be put to good use, albeit with some slightly greater hazard to the trainer than the norm.  Given that the lycanthrope may retain some human understanding, though, the training could well proceed faster than it otherwise would; they’ll be more likely to understand the instructions being given than a regular dog would.  

Add to this some therapy for the human side of the equation, in order to counteract the feelings of isolation that would otherwise result, and the situation begins to look even better.  With proper canine conditioning and human understanding, the heretofore savage and uncontrollable lycanthrope could well become a valuable member of society.

There would be significant career opportunities available for a werewolf as well.  Wildlife management of all types could benefit from someone able to see from the animal perspective and communicate from the human perspective.  Wolf pack management in national parks would benefit–who better to manage the pack than someone who is, at least sometimes, a wolf themselves?  Urban areas could benefit, as well–the city of Chicago has a number of coyotes that live inside city limits and act to keep the vermin population down; tracking them could be more easily accomplished by a lycanthrope.  

Then, the immunity to normal weaponry would also help; SWAT would very much benefit from lycanthropic members–until criminals began to produce silver bullets, at any rate.  

There’s really no need for lycanthropes to hide from modern society any more than any other group, nor any call for modern society to discriminate agaisnt their condition.  Their inconveniences can be overcome, and their unique talents used for the betterment and benefit of society and society’s interactions with the natural world.

A mysterious stranger appears in front of an ordinary person–a farmer, let’s say.  They behave in a somewhat odd fashion, and the farmer’s responses to their idiosyncratic behavior determine later rewards or punishments.  Frequently, the farmer is required to keep the interactions secret, or else some dire consequence will come to them.

Is this one of the Greek or Norse myths, or is it a conspiracy theory stripped of all the identifying details?

The structure of conspiracy theories bears a marked resemblance to some of the older myths and legends, and some of the more estoeric tales of saints and demons.  While the exact nature of the mysterious or malign forces which are arrayed against ordinary mortals differ–gods and demons vs. the government, corporations, and “them”–and while the nature of the intervention in ordinary people’s lives is changed, the underlying tropes seem to remain.

Both myth and conspiracy abound with tales of ordinary people happening across extraordinary events and suffering for it–compare the tale of the youth who spied upon Diana with the various tales of persons who supposedly stumbled across mysterious government installations.  There are extraordinary substances that may have benign or malign effect upon the person who consumes them–the waters of the Styx, of Lethe; the golden apples of the Hesperides vs. chemtrails, LSD in the water supply, flouride.  Free will may be removed–consider the <i>geasa</i> put upon various Celtic heroes in the context of government mind control rays.  The Gods can fly across the sky in a day in their chariots of fire; the Government has Aurora.  Odin sits upon his throne and looks down across the world-tree; the Government has spy satellites that can read your license plate.  Zeus threw lightning; HAARP does…something involving the atmosphere.

The conspiracy canon indicates a sort of coherent mythic cycle:  much as those persons who believed in Zeus would concurrently believe in Poseidon, those who believe in one conspiracy are likely to believe in others.  The Gods are not dead; they’ve just evolved into new forms, updated to reflect the reality around the believer.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s difficult to reason with a conspiracy theorist about their beliefs–because, to them, it’s an article of faith that the Government or the Corporations or whatever shadowy Them in question they believe in is a malign entity and is out to cause them harm.  The Devil can take a thousand pleasing forms; They can certainly recruit a thousand agents or patsies or unwitting collaborators.  Combine sincere faith in a certain worldview with the perception that those attempting to change one’s faith are out to cause harm, and you have the basic ingredients of a semi-animistic religion.

What makes this demi-religion interesting is that it’s not prone to exclusivity–you can find conspiracy theory beliefs in persons of very nearly any religion.  Just as prechristian animistic beliefs are sometimes recognized in paralell with Christian worship, so too do the conspiracy beliefs exist alongside more conventional belief systems.  It may prove interesting to see if there’s any overlap between conspiracy theorists and those practising animist beliefs–and what the nature of that overlap might be.

Amongst the traditional beliefs of many European peoples is the concept of a domestic helper spirit–one version is known as the Brownie.  A Brownie, in exchange for a bit of bread and milk, will watch out for and help the family with which they are associated–this includes cleaning and other similar tasks.

Unfortunately, the use of faery labor in one’s household could bring one into conflict with any number of labor laws.  First, bread and milk would not count for sufficient wage; federal minimum wage rules place very strict limits on what proportion of a worker’s pay can be designated by the employer for the purpose of providing meals and housing.  Additionally, traditionally the Brownie has been said to, for instance, warn the family of fire and other hazards by waking them; this watchman function may qualify as overtime work, and demand further compensation.

Further, Brownies are very short, and may qualify for ADA modifications being required to accomodate them.  And then there’s the conflict potential for human workers–exploiting faery labor for kitchen and domestic help would necessarily displace any number of maids and other domestics who currently make a living by cleaning houses and the like; if brownie labor became popular and reliable, then these workers would likely be forced to organize and to lobby for greater oversight in the market.

Additionally, there’s the actions of the brownies themselves when they are displeased with their arrangements–they are said to perform ‘mischevious’ acts (read: criminal mischeif) by breaking plates (vandalism) and driving unwanted people from the house (assault, etc.)–activities which are outside the scope of typically acceptable employer/employee relationships.

Brownies, were they in today’s society, would have great difficulties adjusting–and the people who employ them, typically moreso.

The Christian Science Monitor breaks a story that’s not been news for years–that astrology has little to do with astronomy and a lot more to do with tradition.

The gist of the article is that, over time, a process called precession–the same process that’s responsible for the gradual drift of the pole away from the ‘traditional’ North Star and toward other regions of the sky–has realigned the zodiac to a path other than the ‘original’ one.  Even further, the ‘original’ one had little legitimacy, itself being a bit of fudging by the Babylonians who wanted a nice round, symbolic number for their zodiac, and which was passed down accordingly.  The author publishes a table of dates and signs, including the ‘neglected’ 13th sign (Ophiuchus, aka ‘The Chariot Driver) though no attempt at revision of traits for persons born during those dates is attempted.  

The western tradition is not the only one that’s attempted to chart people’s personality and fortune by way of the alignment of the stars; there are traditions in China and India of similar sorts, and of somewhat greater complexity depending upon the specific tradition consulted.

It’s interesting to note that most civilizations have had, at some point, a desire to correlate a person’s life circumstances with the positions of the stars and planets at the time of their birth; this appearance of a correlation between birthdate (by whatever measure) and personality is still widely believed despite there being no correlation found in many studies.  This seems to be a very early and long-standing form of confirmation bias; no doubt the ‘traditional’ aspect–astrology in various forms has been verifiably practiced as far into antiquity as Babylon–helps to convince people of its usefulness (for why else would people keep believing it if it didn’t work?–this being a funny sort of circular logic).  

That’s not to say that astrology has no use; in antiquity, knowing what ‘sign’ it was was really the only way of reliably keeping track of the calendar and of the planting seasons and the like; to those ancients who first figured out that the stars held repeatable timepieces that related in some way to earthly events, this must have seemed a miraculous and god-given thing–so naturally ascribing other earthly events to the stars would only have made sense.  

Unto whose use the pregnant suns are poised,
With idiot moons and stars retracting stars?
Creep thou between — thy coming’s all unnoised.
Heaven hath her high, as Earth her baser, wars.
Heir to these tumults, this affright, that fray
(By Adam’s, fathers’, own, sin bound alway);
Peer up, draw out thy horoscope and say
Which planet mends thy threadbare fate, or mars. — Sir John Christie, by way of Rudyard Kipling