More breaking bee news! Alert (or somewhat conscious, anyway) MT.Net reader Matt alerted me to Bill Maher using the unverified Einstein quote to end his Real Time with Bill Maher show last week.

Also buzz-bombed is BBC Radio 2, and Discovery Channel Europe, according to Snopesters hot on the trail. Snopes now has a proper Einstein bees page in its Urban Legends section. That entry is now the top Google search result for “Einstein bees” Google queries, as it should be. I suppose my work here is done.

I consider the whole incident an insightful look at just how mentally lazy people can get when it comes to accepting facts (or those purported to be facts). Its obvious that critical thinking skills should be exercised more often than they are.

Snopester Bonnie has searched the Internets today in hopes of finding the source of the alleged Einstein bee quote. Despite poring through all the electronic databases known to man and bee (among them ProQuest, ProQuest Historical, LexisNexis Academic, Factiva, and JSTOR, she tells me), Bonnie has been unable to find any references earlier than the 1994 pamphlet distributed by the UNAF during its 1994 protest in Brussels.

I would tend to take any argument made during a protest with a large grain of salt, as they tend to play more to emotion than reason. My hunch is the quote was made up for the pamphlet to help sell the beekeepers’ story – just like most bogus quotes attributed to Einstein. The pamphlet likely had an expected shelf life of five minutes at most and thus had to make its argument quickly – perhaps with a quote from Dr. Einstein, real or not.

But the absence of proof is not proof. One cannot prove a negative, so the burden falls on whomever created the pamphlet to prove Einstein’s bee quote. Tracking this person down after thirteen years may prove more trouble than its worth, especially since this person likely wrote the pamphlet anonymously and preferred to stay that way. Without the help of some enterprising French sleuths to do the groundwork we may never know for sure.

With only the word of the pamphlet author to go on and no apparent supporting documentation, I’m inclined to conclude this quote is a fabrication.

It was nine years ago today that my wife became my fiance. We’ve been smiling ever since.

Fifty-eight plus more years to go!

The good folks on the Snopes message boards claim to have traced the Einstein bees quote back to a pamphlet that the Union Nationale de l’Apiculture Française wrote a decade ago. Snopester Bonnie cites articles that appeared in The Scotsman in 1994.

I searched The Scotsman’s online archive but articles from 1994 do not appear to be present. I have also searched online archives of American newspapers (some dating back 50 years) and found no mention of the quote. The oldest appearance on the Internet I’ve found of the quote is on a mailing list archived by Ibiblio.

The next stop is to research old issues of The Scotsman and see if they lead anywhere. I’m guessing my local library will not have any archives of a Scottish newspaper, though, so that puts me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Its, uh, hive time we track down this quote!

I just got a response back from Walter Isaacson, the author of the hot-off-the-presses biography of Albert Einstein called Einstein: His Life and Universe. Mr. Isaacson’s opinion:

“Einstein may have said something about bees, but I don’t know about it if he did.”

Things aren’t looking good for the Einstein bee quote, y’all.

On another note, three respected news outlets included the Einstein quote without bothering to check with any Einstein experts on its validity: Der Speigel, The Telegraph, and The Independent. It took me literally five minutes to give Mr. Isaacson a chance to shoot it down. It’s just another case of people not doing their fact checking.

[Update 25 April:] Snopes is now on the case. I’m standing down.

Albert Einstein once said

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Einstein also had this to say:

“Computers, working together, may one day generate facts out of thin air.”

Amazing how one can prop up any myth or fact simply by attributing it to Einstein, isn’t it? This silly bee quote making the rounds is yet another example of this.

I call bullshit. Einstein knew a lot about the universe. He blazed trails in physics like few others. He rightfully earned his place in science with his theories of relativity and others.

But Einstein didn’t know boo about bees, and I’ve got a crisp twenty to anyone who can prove otherwise.

If one does a Google search on “einstein bees,” one gets 893,000 results as of today. There are some otherwise reputable publications that have spread this quote, like Der Speigel and The Telegraph (UK). None seem to have proper attribution for this quote, nor seriously questioned whether Einstein ever had anything to do with bees. Der Spiegel seems to have been the first to spout this nonsense, as far as I can tell. Even Snopes has tried to track this down and come up empty.

It’s true that things on the Internet sometimes take on a life of their own. In this case, however, the myth apparently first took hold in the so-called “mainstream media,” and from there was echoed both in print and online.

This same press likes to take swipes at Wikipedia and other self-described news sites when their facts aren’t properly checked. And it should. Fact-checking should be embraced by all. The press, simply by virtue of making news its business, is not immune to nor excused from fact-checking. If the Internet can amplify a falsehood at lightning speed, it simply accelerates a process that has always occured in the mainstream media. One outlet breaks a story and the rest play catch-up. Its like dogs who bark only because other dogs are barking. Eventually one should find out why the first dog barked. Just because you read it on the Internet doesn’t make it so and just because you read it in the New York Times (*cough* Judith Miller’s WMDs *cough*) doesn’t make it so.

The Internet is a truly amazing phenomenon, putting a staggering wealth of information at your fingertips, yet it does not, cannot, nor should not do your thinking. As far as I am aware thinking is not being considered as a new feature.

Nothing can take the place of one’s ability to think for oneself. It is still your responsiblity, gentle reader, to judge whether or not information is accurate, no matter the source.

Don’t be seduced by the buzz.

[Update 15 Apr] Welcome, fellow fact checkers! This post has risen to #3 on a Google search for “einstein bees.” I noticed a burst of traffic on this post and have discovered via BoingBoing that the Independent has also repeated the bogus Einstein quote. At this point I think the quote has taken on a life of its own and will probably never die.

I should also stress that I am by no means a scholar of Einstein. I’m just saying that if Einstein said it, I want to see the citation. So far no one has provided any citation.

I will attempt to contact a few biographers of Einstein to see what they have to say about this.

[Update 15 Apr, 5 PM ET:] I heard back from Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson. He’s never heard of this quote, either.

My Vistaprint business cards arrived in yesterday’s mail. Now I have official calling cards mentioning me and my blog. Vanity cards I suppose you could call them. Regardless, its nice to have a card to hand out to people I meet with my personal contact information. I’m wondering why I didn’t get these sooner.

Vistaprint claimed the cards would take 21 days to arrive but like any good company they underpromised and overproduced. I’m pleased with their service and will likely give them business in the future.

(For the record, my card does not list me as blogger, but as a writer, photographer, and explorer. I think that fits.)

Don’t you love it when your plan comes together and the results exceed all your expectations? I sure do.

This last business trip was the first I’ve taken on AirTran in a long while.

AirTran got me where I wanted to go on time (or close to it) and its people were friendly, too. The impression I got from the company, though, is its populated by a bunch of slackers.

First off, when I wanted to fly out early they bungled my ticket. I was offered a first-place position in the 5-standby line at Atlanta, but I turned it down in preference to taking my original flight. I changed my mind an hour later and returned to find I was somehow already booked on the earlier flight, though for some reason I could no longer be the first-place standby. I got to Atlanta and handed my standby ticket to the mystified gate agent, who told me I wasn’t even on the standby list anymore!

Nevertheless, she easily found me a seat. “Maybe that’s why this flight is oversold, ” she said, shaking her head. “People keep putting passengers on my plane.”

The flight attendent working the Raleigh-Atlanta flight mumbled quite a few words in the safety announcement, leading me to believe she was in a hurry. Later in the flight I watched her spill a drink right down her uniform. At this point I wondered if she hadn’t mumbled the words so much as slurred them.

I asked the customer service agent for the gate for my connecting flight. She sent me to the wrong terminal, though fortunately I had some time to spare.

Getting on the Pensacola flight, I stepped back to the lavatory as the flight loaded. No water was available. They could’ve been servicing the lavatories at the moment. I don’t know.

Flying back from Pensacola to Atlanta, the pilot taxied right up to the gate, killed the engines, and plunged the plane into darkness. The ramp workers forgot to plug the power cord into the plane!

Once we got to Raleigh it took a long, long time to get our baggage. In spite of our arriving before a Continental flight (and their longer walk through the terminal), the Continental flight got its baggage before we did. That seems to be pretty typical of AirTran.

Its the little things like this – the slacker-ish thinngs – that make me wonder where else these guys might be cutting corners. On the bright side, their people are friendly, unlike US Airways (and some other airlines). I also appreciated the XM satellite radio at every seat. Nothing makes it easier being 13th in line for takeoff than rocking out to “Tainted Love.”

Would I fly them again? Yeah, I might, depending on the schedule. AirTran offers the promise of surprise, at least.