Turning Your Crank

I have a bit of a guilty pleasure I’ve been indulging in lately. Behaviour like this is usually frowned upon by polite society as nice people just aren’t supposed to stoop to that level. In the privacy of your own home though, with no one to ‘tsk-tsk’ to your face…

…nobody can stop you from teasing and gawking at the Usenet cranks.

Usenet is a *huge* community; imagine your favourite web board but with thousands of people actively posting and tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people reading. And, like all communities, it has its various types of residents. The clueless newbies posting in the wrong group, the over-sensitive know-it-alls who will flame you at the slightest provocation, the l33t d00dz incomprehensible to everyone but themselves, the rabid pro-whatever/anti-whatever ideologues whose battles are never ending, and ordinary people just looking for information or chat.

Of special interest though, are those people that just don’t seem to live in the same reality as the rest of us. These people are so impervious to reason, so adamant in their delusions, that any kind of dialogue with them is completely pointless. You’d think that they’d eventually give up and move on, yet they often somehow manage to trap a few people into talking to them, or simply keep reposting their views over and over again, so they never fully disappear.

Here are a few of my personal favourite cranks that I’ve been running across:

• Robert McElwaine

Now here’s a classic crank. Not only is there apparently some Galactic Federation with explicit Judeo-Christian overtones he communicates with, but he also goes on and on about how pregnant women have some kind of soul-repelling aura if they’re going to have an abortion, how the earth is hollow and there are people living on the inside too, how 9/11 was actually plotted by a conspiracy within the government, how black holes are really just big hurricanes, and just way too much more nuttery.

He’s also not doing too well when making political predictions and, of course, knows the true reason why people are homosexual.

• Mathew Orman

Most cranks aren’t quite so obviously raving loonies though, and are primarily just obstinate in their refusal to accept their own failures and shortcomings.

Mathew has made the amazing discovery of how to send data faster than the speed of light over ordinary wires. An amazing technical triumph indeed! Or it would be if he actually had anything to show us… Instead it’s being tested by some unknown laboratory and the results will be available Real Soon Now. Really. Honest. Of course he said the same thing back in March, too…

It’s also not encouraging that in the meantime he’s demonstrated that he has no idea how to set up a proper experiment, that nobody else seems to care, or that Hewlett-Packard has told him to stop mentioning them on his web site.

Will we ever see those faster-than-light cables? I’m not holding my breath…

• Spaceman

Often seen along with Mathew, Spaceman is an anti-relativist. Despite all of the advances in electronics, quantum theory, particle acceleration, timing, and so on that could only have happened due to relativity, Spaceman is one of those that remains convinced that Newton’s laws were good enough and that everything done since has been a big sham. That’s not really interesting by itself; there’s always some small group of dissenters against any theory, and their presence is healthy to a degree as the establishment should always be poked, prodded, and questioned.

What makes Spaceman stand out is his utter incoherence in his unusual posting style. More often than not, it’s extremely difficult just to make out what in the world he’s trying to say.

It’s also hard to take him seriously when he can’t grasp basic mathematics like negative numbers or paths on a sphere. A physics expert he is not. His major objection to relativity seems to be his claim that time dilation is really just due to clocks malfunctioning though he has yet to explain how, or why the amount of time they ‘malfunction’ by just happens to always match up with what relativity predicts…

For hours of fun, somebody has written a program that generates random posts in the Spaceman style. Can you tell them apart from the real thing? :-)

• Ed Conrad

Ed’s story starts out innocently enough — he apparently discovered what he believes to be human fossils in a coal mine near where he lives. That would be an interesting find since fossils that deep would be very old. making the human species around 200-300 million years old instead of the 1-3 million currently theorized. (Or, as Ed likes to put it “MAN AS OLD AS COAL!”)

However, his ‘fossils’ don’t really seem to resemble much of anything, and some geologists informed him that plain old rocks could easily develop in such shapes. Ed though, had already decided that it was definitely fossilized human bone no matter what. When he sent it to specialists at the University of Calgary for testing and the results came back that the sample was just a rock, he accused them of tampering with the results.

They’re part of a conspiracy against Ed, you see. The experts were so humbled and humiliated by his discovery that they *must* have had to cover it all up to protect their own reputations. Harvard’s in on it too, according to that post. And The Smithsonian! In fact the WHOLE DAMN UNIVERSE seems to be conspiring against him! Or so he likes to think, anyway.

Nobody’s really certain exactly what he has in his possession as he has plenty of other samples left, but he refuses to let anyone personally examine them anymore and would probably just accuse them of being part of the conspiracy anyway. Still, he continues to rant on and on and on and on and on… Often in the form of awful poetry or ‘seances’ with people kookier than he is, for that extra bit of wacky appeal.

• J. Harris

Mr. Harris almost seems out of place here, as at first glance all he seems to be engaged in is some debate over finer points of advanced mathematics, which is difficult to grasp so there’s certainly room for error and correction. There’s no profanity, no incoherent rambling, no ALL CAPS, or anything else you would normally associate with the cranks. No, his brand of lunacy is far more subtle and dependent on abstract mathematical concepts, which is why it isn’t readily obvious.

He claims to have proven Fermat’s Last Theorem. It has actually already been proven, but he claims that he has a much shorter, simpler proof rather than the current huge, complex proof. His proof actually fails due to various mathematical reasons I don’t fully understand myself, but that doesn’t keep him from repeating it over and over again. He’s apparently been at this for eight years now, in a near-continuous cycle, with little progress made.

He also claims to have found a new method for counting prime numbers, which actually does work but it turns out to be only a slight variant on a method which was discovered over 200 years ago. Nevertheless he insists that he must get his due credit and his name belongs up there with the rest of the great mathematicians. It’s like claiming that 3.915783256 + 4.754378423 = 8.670161679 is something that has never been calculated before and therefore you are a GENIUS who should go down in history…

The math stuff is kooky, but actually pretty dull. What really gets your attention is when he starts to talk about the supposed ‘consequences’ of all this arguing. Like Ed before him, he thinks there’s some vast conspiracy out there, in this case to preserve mathematicians’ roles as ‘priests’ in our society. Oh yeah, those damn mathematicians, always bossing us around…

We’d better watch out, because if mathematicians don’t stop repressing him and his wacky ideas, they’re going to have to get comfy in jail, and if that’s still not good enough, he’ll sic the Army on them. He is, after all, the living embodiment of power.

Is it unfair to point and laugh at these poor souls as the cheap form of entertainment they’ve become? Perhaps; I don’t really want to be too cruel myself, so I haven’t really participated in many of these debates. As long as they continue though, I’ll be sitting there on the sidelines, giggling to myself…

These guys are actually pretty tame compared to what else is out there on the rest of the net On Usenet they’re at least limited to arguing in text in something resembling paragraphs and such and with people responding to each other. On the web you’ll find all sorts of lunacy like TimeCube where they are not so constrained. If you want more, crank.net is a good starting point.

(Ugh, I never want to make another link to Google again…)