Fake Pandemic News in Brazil

Vanessa Barbara reports in the Times that Brazil is still awash in fake news stories about the pandemic. Despite hundreds of debunkings of hydroxychloroquine, many people still believe:

After all, just the other day a friend’s cousin forwarded a headline on WhatsApp claiming that all I.C.U. beds in the city of Miracatu are empty because the mayor adopted President Jair Bolsonaro’s “early treatment” — consisting of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and azithromycin — for Covid-19. OK, Miracatu does not have a hospital. But still: How can we be sure?

That’s just one of dozens of fake news stories about Covid-19 treatments circulating on social media — including one that advocates “nebulized” hydroxychloroquine, Mr. Bolsonaro’s new obsession. Well over a year into the pandemic, false claims still swirl. Is it true that face masks reduce the flow of oxygen to the lungs and can cause cancer? Is the coronavirus a biological weapon created by China? What about the involvement of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros?

Even now, after the death of half a million citizens, Brazilians are forwarding delirious claims that hospitals are empty and people are being buried alive to inflate coronavirus statistics. Last year, as daily deaths soared, stories about empty coffins and staged burials abounded. It’s almost as if Brazilians couldn’t — wouldn’t — accept that things could really be so bad and took refuge in paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy. In this, of course, they had a guide: Mr. Bolsonaro, at every turn, has sought to spread mischief and misinformation.

In my better moods I believe the US will survive the flood of false news stories on social media. The real danger is in other places; after all, India and Sri Lanka have already seen flash mob attacks on innocent people accused on Twitter of kidnapping and the like. Could there one day be a flash mob revolution, inspired by a fake story, that succeeds?

Awesome plot for a thriller, anyway. Too bad I'm busy writing a different one.

Things One Didn't Know were Real

Three sailors stranded on a small island in Micronesia were rescued after a passing plane spotted the giant S O S they had scrawled in the sand.

A Villain for your Next Thriller

In a story about Russian intervention in Syria, the Christian Science Monitor quotes a Russian foreign policy expert named Yegeny Satanovsky.

Buying a Sumerian Mystery

This Sumerian "administrative tablet", dating to 2200 to 2100 BCE, is up for online auction, opening bid $9500. The best part is it has never been translated. So, you know, it might say 500 bushels of barley from Field A, 400 from Field B, only 200 from Field C so give that overseer 10 lashes. But then again it might be a list of tribute from previously unknown cities, a list of payments made to the temples of mysterious gods, or even a list of ingredients provided to alchemists for their work on the transmutation of lead to gold. You never know.

The Środa Treasure

Środa is a medieval town in Silesia, southwestern Poland. In 1985 a worker doing some renovation in an old house on the town square smashed into an urn filled with about 3,000 silver coins. This was "secured by the authorities," as accounts say -- keep in mind that Poland was still communist at the time -- and most people thought that was that.

But then three years later more gold and silver started turning up. These finds were kept quiet for a while and most people think that much of the discovery vanished into private hands. So much was found that somebody thought to scour the municipal dump, turning over piles of rubble taken from renovation projects in the area. More treasure was found there, including jewelry. The government first launched a program to buy back the treasure from the people who had it, and some pieces were recovered. Then they turned nasty and started searching people's houses and threatening them with arrest. They also sent in archaeologists to do a thorough search of the building most of the loot had come from; they dug up some pieces from the basement with a backhoe.

Most of the more than 4,000 pieces in the treasure are coins, but they also include the crown, brooch and pendant shown here. Crowns are rare and distinctive items, and it was this crown that allowed historians to pin down the treasure's origins:

It is now agreed that the treasure belonged to the King (later Emperor) Charles IV of the House of Luxembourg. Around 1348, needing funds to support his claim to the King of the Romans, Charles pawned various items to the Jewish banker Muscho (Moshe, Mojżesz) in Środa . . . Soon afterwards, the black plague visited Środa. Muscho was not heard of again and it is believed that he either fled from the plague-struck town, died of plague, or perhaps fell victim to pogroms as Jews were blamed for spreading the plague. What is certain is that no one ever reclaimed the treasure, which was left hidden somewhere in the town for hundreds of years.

The crown probably belonged to Charles' first wife, Blanche of Valois; the crow and some of the other pieces have wedding motifs, so they may have parts of her trousseau.

What an astonishing story -- so much like an adventure movie that it is hard to believe it happened. But it did.

Ghost Towns Emerge from Folsom Lake

 Because of California's historic drought, the water in Folsom Lake has fallen to its lowest level in decades. The ruins of Red Bank, a Gold Rush-era ghost town, have emerged, and people have been out exploring and photographing them.

I always thought this would be a great plot for a mystery; lake behind a dam built in the 70s falls so low that an old town emerges, and an archaeologist exploring the town finds a skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull. . . .

King Elizabeth I

As much time as I have spent in my life reading weird historical theories, I find it startling that I never heard until today about the theory that Queen Elizabeth I was really a man. It's an old idea, featured in one of Bram Stoker's lesser-known potboilers. It goes like this:

the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire. The king, Henry VIII, was due at any hour. He was travelling from London, in great discomfort — for the 52-year-old monarch was grossly overweight and crippled by festering sores — to visit his daughter, Elizabeth. The young princess had been sent there that summer from the capital to avoid an outbreak of plague.

But she had fallen sick with a fever and, after weeks of bleeding, leeches and vomiting, her body was too weak to keep fighting. The night before the king’s arrival, his favourite daughter, the only child of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, had been dangerously ill. In the morning, Elizabeth lay dead. Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Kat Ashley, and her guardian, Thomas Parry, had good reason to fear telling the king this awful news. It would cost them their lives. . . .

So they did what anyone would do; found a substitute and dressed her up as Elizabeth!

Their only chance of concealing the truth, and perhaps buying themselves a few days to flee the country, was to trick the king. Kat Ashley’s first thought was to find a village girl and dress her up in the princess’s robe, with a mantle, to fool the king. Bisley was a tiny hamlet, however, and there were no female children of Elizabeth’s age. But there was a boy, from a local family called Neville. He was a gawky, angular youth a year or so younger than Elizabeth, who had been the princess’s companion and fellow pupil for the past few weeks. And with no time to look further afield for a stand-in, Parry and Lady Ashley took the desperate measure of forcing the boy to don his dead friend’s clothes. 

You're thinking, wait, if this his Henry's favorite daughter, wouldn't he recognize the deception?

Remarkably, the deception worked. Henry saw his daughter rarely, and was used to hearing her say nothing. The last time she had been presented in court, meeting the new Queen Catherine Parr, she had been trembling with terror. The princess was known as a gentle, studious child, and painfully shy — not a girl to speak up in front of the king who had beheaded her mother. So when ‘she’ stood at Bisley manor, in the dimness of an oak-beamed hall lit by latticed windows, it was not so surprising that the king failed to realise he was being duped. He had no reason to suspect his daughter had been ill, after all, and he himself was tired and in pain. But after he left later that afternoon, the hoax began in earnest. Parry and Lady Ashley realised that if they ever admitted what they had done, the king’s fury would be boundless. They might get out of the country to safety, but their families would surely be killed.

So much is explained! No wonder Elizabeth never married! No wonder she was always making those comments about having a man's heart and what all!

This also explains how the attractive, feminine young Elizabeth (top) somehow evolved in the ugly, mannish Elizabeth of later years (above), why she always wore a ruff (to hide her adam's apple), why she wore all that white makeup (to hide her stubble) and so on. It all fits!

Sadly, it ignores, the basic reality of royal life in the Renaissance, which that kings and queens were never, ever alone. They were attended every minute by a flock of servants who tended to their most intimate bodily functions; their stools and urine were minutely inspected by royal physicians. Elizabeth's monthly bleeding was the subject of much discussion as she aged, among men wondering if she could still bear a child. Not to mention the three years she spent in the Tower, imprisoned there by her sister; does it seem likely that this secret could have survived three years of closely watched confinement? And that picture at the top was painted when Elizabeth was 13, three years after the alleged body switch.

So I think I'll stick to my own view, which is that Elizabeth was a woman but a complete weirdo.

The Taman Shud Cipher

Here's another puzzle to think about during your free time over the holidays:

What makes a cipher inherently more interesting is when it's found in the pocket of a dead man. On Dec. 1, 1948, the body of a well-dressed but unidentified person – popularly known as the Somerton Man – was found near a beach in Adelaide, Australia, with no discernible signs of trauma. It's unknown how he died to this day, and he was in excellent physical shape. (He was possibly killed by an undetectable poison.) His clothes had no tags. For all practical purposes, he did not exist. This led to speculation that the Somerton Man may have been mentally disturbed and committed suicide, or even a Soviet spy who was discovered and assassinated.

 Now it gets even weirder. Within a smaller pocket – a fob pocket inside one of the man's larger pants pockets – was a scrap of torn paper with the words "Taman Shud," meaning "ended" in Persian. The scrap was later traced to a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, itself discovered in the back seat of an unlocked car on the presumed night of the murder, near a location where the dead man is believed to have visited before his death. In the back of the book were five lines of coded letters, written in pencil. Even worse, "[it's] a short cipher, so statistical analysis doesn't reveal very much," explains Knight. "You would hope that the cipher could be connected with text in The Rubaiyat book."

From a good feature at Wired on seven famous unbroken codes.

The Gates of Hell

In Turkmenistan, in 1971, geologists drilling a test well tapped into a cavern filled with natural gas. The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a hole 230 feet (70 meters) across. To protect themselves from the poisonous gas, the geologists set it on fire. It's still burning. Locals call the spot the Gates of Hell.

From World of Mysteries.

Evil Cannibals Step out of the Cartoon

Nothing says "evil cannibals" like human skulls on stakes. But did anyone ever actually put human skulls on stakes? Yes! Here, from an 8,000-year-old Mesolithic site in Sweden, are two human skulls mounted on stakes. Fragments of nine other skulls were also found at the site. So now you can include skulls mounted on stakes in your anime/fantasy novel/adventure movie without fear of being called inaccurately sensationalistic.

Underground Soviet Submarine Base

This Ukrainian base was abandoned after the USSR collapsed, and now part of it is a museum. From English Russia. I was trying for a while to figure out what this looked like, and then it hit me: it looks like a post-apocalypse video game.

Floating Forever in the Depths

Many Victorians, including some scientists, believed that the density of sea water increased with depth. (Actually it does not, or only a little.) They therefore believed that things would sink into the sea only to the depth at which their density matched that of the surrounding water. So all objects with the same density -- say, wooden sailing ships, or human bodies -- would sink to about the same depth and hover there. They also believed that life was impossible in the crushing pressure of the deep ocean. So they imagined that things sinking into the depths would float forever in the dark, and that some parts of the ocean would be so crowded with flotsam, especially sunken ships, that this would be a real obstacle to (for example) laying undersea telegraph cables.

I learned this from Simon Winchester's Atlantic, which is a disorganized and at times tedious book but does include the occasional gem.

DARPA Super Soldier Program

Via Danger Room, this initiative from DARPA -- the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency -- looks like a lot more than just battlefield medicine:

DARPA seeks to define the spatio-temporal instructive components encoded in cells in the context of their biological systems, through the application of advanced principles from evolutionary biology, genomics, mathematics, algorithm development, data mining, and the physical sciences. DARPA is soliciting research proposals for the Biochronicity program that will identify common spatio-temporal instructions or "clock signatures" in the genome, epigenome, proteome, and/or transcriptome across prokaryotic and eukaryotic species. The focus of the program will be on unraveling biological clock systems in prokaryotes and eukaryotes and the efforts of this initiative will contribute to the understanding and management of disease, trauma, human combat performance, and emerging infectious disease countermeasures. Additionally, a greater understanding of molecular oscillators and the evolution of biological clocks will lead to fundamental advancements in developmental science, drug development, aging, and cell death. These fundamental advancements in the understanding of timing in biology can be translated into major breakthroughs in trauma care on the battlefield by accessing the mechanisms that control biological time to improve patient outcomes, for example, by lengthening the window of opportunity for medical and treatment interventions.

Once we control cellular clocks, we will begin to construct super soldiers who experience no fatigue or aging. . . .

La Hogue Bie

On the island of Jersey, a 12th-century chapel, dedicated to Notre Dame de la Clarté (Our Lady of the Light) on top of a Neolithic passage grave. The Neolithic tomb is aligned with the summer solstice. In the 16th century a new priest, Richard Mabon, extensively restored the chapel and added a window that is aligned with the grave passage, and thus approximately (but not, 4500 years later, exactly) with the summer solstice.

Note to would-be writers of Dan Brown-type religious adventure novels: here is the perfect place to begin your book! Your narrator will become intrigued and try to look up Richard Mabon in the local library. Nothing available. He will search harder, only to be threatened by a mysterious man with a tattoo of the sun on his left hand. . . .