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More crackpottery ----------------- I don't know that there's anything wrong with being ignorant of the very simplest concepts or subjects. But one who broadcasts utterly wrong proclamations pertaining to the very simplest of subjects while claiming to be an expert is a walking definition of a crackpot. The wrong interpretation of special relativity, the wrong interpretation of ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential contest, the wrong choice of clock-time for a year-round clock system, the wrong interpretation of data regarding police actions.. to name just a few of the more bizarre examples of crackpottery.. and this utterly trivial one: Kensington rune stone --------------------- A few hours of Internet research, back in 2002, which incorporated articles authored by two of the most widely acknowledged authorities (commissioned by the Smithsonian) on the topic -- who attribute the rune stone authorship to Olof Ohman -- yielded only arguments that were every bit as unconvincing as those proffered by those who attribute the rune stone to Vikings. In fact, the statement -- "My epiphany was the realization that the Vikings were sea-farers, not foot-travelers" (as though the Vikings could not also have been land expeditioners), was the closest any of those experts came to offering up a convincing argument to support their position. Rather than seeking better evidence, they simply looked for ways to defend their weak arguments as a means to preserve their reputation as experts. Bizzarely, there are a plethora of arguments those crackpots could have used to strongly attribute the rune stone to Olof Ohman: (First, just to separate the stone material itself from the rest of the discussion: The realistic-looking ancient weathering is meaningless. Simply consider the fact that geologists and materials scientists have been baffled right up to our modern era as to whether Mayan pyramids were made of natural stone or cement. That should indicate to anyone the extent to which one can fake a stone's history. And actually, the inscription carving has serious geological shortcomings regarding its age.) 1. The children of John Gran had ultimately stated publicly that their father had confessed to helping Ohman fabricate the stone as a prank. 2. The inscription -- ".. came home and found ten men red with blood.." on the rune stone is a verbatim (based on a translation of broadest consensus) copy of a frontpage headline in a newspaper from just a few years prior [to the "finding" of the stone] in a town just ten miles from where Ohman lived. 3. Every rune on the stone can be accounted for by the combination of formal and common forms in the vicinity where Ohman grew up and a book in his possession prior to the finding of the rune stone. 4. The rune stone contains runes, diacritics, forms.. that are of 18th and 19th century origins. Only a handful of true believers, using tortured (impossible) logic claim otherwise. They seem to succeed in fooling only each other. 5. No artifacts other than the rune stone had ever (or has yet) been found. Yet we should believe that the sole artifact discovered was unearthed at the end of the expeditioners' 3000-mile-long land journey by a man who had all the above (items 2, 3, 4) conveniently working for him? It's inexplicable that those crackpots could not come up with any of the above. And the whole thing is too dumb to spend substantial time on. Footnote: I had the bizzare experience, back in 2003, of witnessing -- in person across the table -- a self-proclaimed philologist (who claimed to be a rune stone expert) declare (in a screaming voice) that the rune stone "was made either by Vikings or by scholars", and was absolutely not made ("NO! IT WASN'T!") by Olof Ohman. Such certainty is idioticly untenable. Happily, in this case, he is the only person I've encountered -- in person or online -- who has made such a proclamation of certainty. (For that matter, he is the only person I've encountered in person who had anything to say about the rune stone.) At any rate, it's yet another example of a crackpot who is a crackpot for all time, re-demonstrating it on multiple occasions on other topics. (Unsurprisingly, such crackpots also provide us with the most extreme possible examples of social artifice behavior.) |