Einstein Once Said …

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.

I’m An Official Blogger Now!

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.)

The Street Musician Virtuoso

The ever-excellent O’Donnellweb found this story of an experiment conducted by the Washington Post. The Post wanted to see if commuters on the Metro would pay attention to a street musician playing in the station if the musician happened to be a virtuoso. The musician was the master violinist Joshua Bell, who has played in the finest venues in the world.

Included in this captivating story are video clips of Bell’s performance, as well as the reactions of the passersby. As for me, listening to him play sent chills through me. His music brims with emotion.

Guess what reaction he draws from commuters?

Local Events To Honor UNC Student Jason Ray

According to WRAL, there will be two local events to remember Jason Ray, the UNC student who portrayed UNC mascot Rameses who died after being hit by a car last month:

A celebration of the life of Jason Ray will be held Tuesday from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Carolina Club of the George Watts Hill Alumni Building.

Also, a concert in his honor will be performed at the Cat’s Cradle April 17th. The show will raise money for the Jason Ray Memorial Fund.

Girl

Beck
Girl

I saw her, yea I saw her
With her black tongue tied round the roses

A fist pounding on a vending machine
Toy diamond ring stuck on her finger
With a noose she can hang from the sun
And put it out with her dark sunglasses
Walking crooked down the beach
She spits on the sand
Where their bones are bleaching
Continue reading →

Photos From RTP 2.0

I’ve posted my pictures from the RTP 2.0 social I went to the other night. You can check ’em out here. (My RTP 2.0 pics are hereby placed under the Creative Commons Attribution-3.0 Unported license. In essence: go crazy with them, just let folks know I took ’em.)

The beer at Tyler’s was outstanding, though the eats turned out to be two bags of soggy potato chips. Regardless of my hunger, the sponsors made the right call in favoring the bar over chips. I can eat stout all night!

I was happy with the people there, too. I met a Massachusetts-transplant graphic artist looking to team up with a photographer, a local entrepreneur/angel investor sniffing out the Next Big Idea, and an old friend/former coworker-turned-entrepreneur whom I hadn’t seen in six years. My only real complaint is there just wasn’t enough time to talk to all the interesting people there!

Kudos to Fred, CED, Broadwick, and everyone else who made it happen.

Easter Weekend Recap

It was a fun, if chilly, Easter weekend. K and the kids spent the end of the week visiting K’s parents and didn’t get back until Saturday afternoon, leaving me time to get a few things done around the house.

Saturday morning I woke up a little later than normal (almost 8!), not taking much advantage of the quiet house. I spent the morning reinstalling Ubuntu on my Thinkpad, with an eye for encrypting my home directory using dm-crypt, the encryption piece built right into the Linux kernel.

After chasing down one or two minor bugs, I succeeded in getting it configured. Now when Ubuntu boots it asks for a passphrase and a key file before mounting my home directory. It was incredibly simple and offers a lot of peace of mind. I hope to do the same on my work laptop so that in the unlikely event I lose my laptop I won’t be losing company secrets.

Once that was done, I went to the garage to see what I could straighten up. I settled on the lumber in the corner, which was meant for an attic project I never began. The project was to build a box over the pull-down attic stairs to better insulate them. For an hour I wrestled the boards into a box-like shape, nailing them together nicely.

Once I put them on top of the stairs, however, I conceded that the obstacles surrounding the stairs could not easily be avoided. The box would add enough height to the stairs (already confined due to their position in the joists) to make it difficult to climb on and off of them. I pulled the boards apart and decided to someday tackle that problem with insulation only.

The 2×6 boards were too useful to retire, though, so I used them for another project I’d been dreaming up: a stand for working on our sailboat’s outboard motor. The engine had been lying horizontally on the garage floor ever since November and I needed an easy way to get it fixed up without putting it on the boat itself. I was reminded of the stands we used in my high school shop classes to work on similar engines, so that’s what I built. After another hour (and one blistered knuckle), I had a 40″ stand, tall enough to put the engine on and still have room for a trash can filled with water: the perfect engine test environment!

The engine tests I subsequently ran showed me for the first time how much electricity the engine’s alternator provides: anywhere between 6 and 30 volts depending on RPMs. This voltage is meant to charge the sailboat’s batteries but the power cable from the engine is tattered and terminates in bare wires. An upcoming project (made possible by the new stand) is to replace the tattered cable with a new, coiled one with some sort of plug on the end. That should make it easy to charge the batteries the next time we’re out.

The family got home about that time, so the rest of the day was spent catching up. K and I retired to our beds and read until late.

We were greeted at 7:30 this morning by the sound of the kids gleefully bellowing at each other from across the hall. After we ate the pancakes K generously cooked for us, we got dressed and headed over to my parents’ house for an Easter lunch (and egg hunt).

The kids had the best time with their cousins, chasing each other around the house. I helped Dad wire a light fixture. We marveled at their newly remodeled kitchen and then put it to use with a tasty lunch of ham, green bean casserole, potato salad and fruit salad, followed by apple pie a la mode and washed down with sweet tea. It was quite good!

It was also good to see my brothers and their families. My brother Allen was the talk of the day with his new job at SAS. It’s only the best company around to work for. He seems quite happy there so far. I think he’ll stay that way, but then again he’s a happy guy.

Once the day had warmed into the mid-50s, my brothers and I hid Easter eggs in the front yard and watched as the kids snapped them up in seconds. This was the third hunt for Hallie and Travis over the Easter holidays, so they’re old pros by now. Try as we might, though, we couldn’t get a decent picture of all the kids. Oh well.

Once home and the kids were down for their naps, I took a short one myself and then did some work on my taxes. I also did a backup of our important files and tuned in NASA TV to check up on the current space tourist (and MS Word author) Charles Simonyi. I didn’t see Charles but the kids and I had fun watching NASA films about Apollo 13, which blasted off 37 years ago this month.

After more tax work I once again went out in the cold to bundle up the plants for what I hope to be the last time this season. For the crepe myrtles it might be too late but it doesn’t hurt to try ’em. I hope we can get the warm weather back for good but next Sunday might be cold again, too.

After this blog entry, I will write some more in my dream journal and then commence to dreaming. Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day, work-wise. I hope it is for you, too.