Month: January 2005

X-Files Roundup–Or–The Agent Scully In Me

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy,

Out of curiosity, what do you think about the whole UFO phenomenon,
including reports of alien abductions, crop circles, etc.? It seems to
me that there are several possible explanations:

(1) Delusions
(2) Hoaxes
(3) Demonic activity
(4) Some combination of the above
(5) Genuine extra-terrestrial activity

My own opinion is that #4 is probably the most likely explanation. I
would be interested to hear your thoughts if you have time to comment.

Well, let’s see, these are just my suspicions rather than what I can prove, and I go back and forth on the percentages I’d ascribe to things, and anyone who wants is welcome to disagree with me as we’re outside the realm of Church teaching, but . . .

Crop circles (of the modern, complex variety): Total hoaxes. (Though I did like the Invader Zim episode where they found a crop circle being formed by a cow rolling around on its back in a field.)

UFO activity (meaning unidentified flying objects of extraterrestrial, extradimensional, or extratemporal origin): Some outright hoaxes, but usually the product of wishful thinking or misidentification of mundane phenomena, including experimental and classified aircraft that we (or other nations on Earth) have made. For example, I’m virtually certain that the famous "black triangles" that UFO enthusiasts were so hot up about a few years ago are just some kind of stealth technology we’ve got.

Sometimes plausible UFOs are not anything that exotic, though. Here in San Diego, the company Sanyo has (or had) a blimp that was white, had a company logo on it, and lit-up from the inside at night. I saw it one night and, in the distance you couldn’t see the company logo (certianly not as anything but indistinct "markings"). It looked like a floating white oval of light, clearly far too big to be a star, but not shaped like an airplane or helicopter. If I hadn’t seen the Sanyo blimp in the day before (and if I were a passionate UFO believer and if it hadn’t come close enough to identify the logo), I might have interpreted it as a UFO.

Alien abductions: A mix of hoaxes, psychosis and something that I would call "belief-influenced misinterpretation of experience." Lemme ‘splain:

As I am using the term, a psychosis is where a person is deprived of rationality on a particular point due to a pathological condition (e.g., they have a mental illness that leads them to have visions of being abducted by aliens, or they passionately believe that they have been adbducted even though there is nothing in their experience that could plausibly be interpreted as evidence of abduction).

Belief-influced misinterpretation of experience (BIME) is something less than that, and I suspect it is far more common than full-blown psychosis.

BIME does not involve a pathological condition. It involves interpreting an actual event (or events) in one’s experience, based on a (faulty) set of beliefs about how this event should be interpreted, and then coming to an erroneous conclusion.

Consider: Many people have trouble at times telling whether they’re lying awake in bed or whether they’re dreaming about lying awake in bed. (This happened to me yesterday morning, in fact. I had woken up and was trying to get back to sleep and wasn’t sure at certain points if I was still awake or asleep again yet.)

When this happens, the person may in fact be asleep and dreaming about lying in bed. When that happens, they may be unable to move because the brain’s sleep module has turned off voluntary motion of the body (so that we don’t physicalize what’s going on in our dreams, e.g., by sleepwalking). The person may thus dream about trying to move but being unable to do so. This is especially likely if he is in the twilight zone between true sleep and true wakefulness.

Since the dream module in his brain is still partially engaged he may, for example, dream about sinister people moving about in the other room or–if he is a passionate UFO enthusiast–he may dream about aliens in his own bedroom.

I’ve never had the latter dream (not being a passionate UFO enthusiast), but I have dreamed about lying awake in bed, being unable to move, and thinking there were sinister people moving in the other room.

Not being a passionate UFO enthusiast, when I woke up later on, I interpreted this experience as what it was: Just a dream. There never were any sinister people in the other room. It was just my dream module giving me a low-grade nightmare.

But if I had been a passionate UFO enthusiast, my alien abduction lore would have told me to interpret nighttime paralysis with sensing a presence of some kind as evidence of alien abduction.

Upon waking, I might conclude that I had been abducted by aliens. I might further examine my body and turn up little scars and "scoop marks" that I had never noticed before (or had forgotten) and see this as confirmatory evidence. I might then go to a hypnotist to do regression hypnosis on me and, since regression hypnosis is (in my opinion) nothing but a guided fantasizing experience that consists almost entirely of confabulation, I might come away with recovered "memories" of an abduction experience.

I would be wrong but, given my pre-existing passionate UFO beliefs (and belief in regression hypnosis), this would be a reasonable (in the sense of non-psychotic) interpretation of my experience.

I think many people who think they’ve been abducted by aliens are the victims of belief-influenced misinterpretation of experience. Some are psychotic. Some are liars.

The above represent my best guesses (based on some familiarity with the field). I can’t rule out demonic activity in some cases, but I tend to think that physical/visible manifestations of the demonic are rare (tricking people into BIME is another matter, however).

Not being omniscient or infallible, I can’t say actual extraterrestrial visitation is impossible, but I am deeply, deeply skeptical of it.

CAL -> .MP3?

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!

CAL -> .MP3?

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!

July 15, 2004 Show

LISTEN TO THE SHOW.

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW.

Highlights:

  • What is a hermaphrodite and should they do anything to change their condition?
  • Does Jn 7:16 or Jn 6:38 prove that Jesus wasn’t divine?  Did Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, or Clement of Alexandria teach that Jesus wasn’t divine?
  • How does one handle being disheartened or discouraged by constantly interacting with people who oppose the Church?
  • Clarify the USCCB statement "Interim Reflections of the Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians"?
  • When Jesus became man was there a change in God?
  • Do the different beliefs of Catholics negate our description of the Church as "One" and suggest that we are as divided as Protestants?
  • Considerations in voting for someone whose moral stance on important issues is okay but has previously broken the law?
  • Should stillborn babies be baptised?
  • What happens with infants or fetuses at the Resurrection of the Dead when our souls are reunited with our bodies?
  • How to respond to Atheists who deny the necessity of a first mover?
  • Biblical evidence that those invincibly ignorant of Jesus Christ can still be saved?

Cold & Flu Threedux

A reader writes:

Jimmy,

How could anyone catch a cold or the flu from the blood of Christ.

I have never had any fear of getting sick from the Precious Blood of Jesus.

You need not have any fear of getting sick from the Precious Blood. However, you do have reason to be feaful  of getting sick from the germs deposited on the chalices/fingers/etc. of those distributing Holy Communion.

The sacred species are not a threat, but any germs attached to them are threats.

Cold & Flu Threedux

A reader writes:

Jimmy,

How could anyone catch a cold or the flu from the blood of Christ.

I have never had any fear of getting sick from the Precious Blood of Jesus.

You need not have any fear of getting sick from the Precious Blood. However, you do have reason to be feaful  of getting sick from the germs deposited on the chalices/fingers/etc. of those distributing Holy Communion.

The sacred species are not a threat, but any germs attached to them are threats.

Michael Crichton Will Be Hacked!

Crichton has already written about the nebulous, non-scientific values ascribe the the variables in the Drake Equation.

Despite not having a whit more evidence, a group of scientists who aren’t going to be listened-to seriously, have decided tha the chance of a nearby extraterrestrial civilization is much higher than most think.

GET THE UNSUBSTANTIATED STORY.

Conspiracy-oriented minds might wonder if this the beginning of the "disclosure" that precedes The Facade.

The UFO community will certainly wonder about that.

This Isn't Exactly News But . . .

HITLER ORDERED PIUS XII TO BE KIDNAPPED.

Fortunately, the general ordered to do it didn’t carry out the order.

Pius XII was aware that he was likely to get kidnapped by Hitler, and (so I’ve read in books about him) left instructions that he was to be considered to have resigning the papacy as soon as he was abducted, so that he couldn’t be used (as well) as a political tool by Hitler and so that a new pope could be elected.

Fortunately, those contingency plans never had to be activated.

This isn’t exactly news, but I’m glad it’s getting attention in the press, as it puts the kibosh on the idea that Pius XII was sympathetic to or in league with Hitler. In fact, the two men despised each other.

I wonder if this story has anything to do with John Cornwell’s recent retraction of his charge that Pius XII was "Hitler’s Pope."