International Bigfoot Symposium

DaytonCIM writes "Yup, that's right the creature that took on Steve Austin (no, not the drunk and bloated pro wrastler, but the REAL Six Million Dollar Man) has legions who gather to debate and discuss his furriness. The International Bigfoot Symposium is going on right now. SFGate also has a nice article on the grand meeting."

Comments

um....

[c4ffeine]

This makes me think... I can see both way's points of view. I see that there is a LOT of evidence for Bigfoot' existence and that some of it might be hard to fake, but we must wonder: why haven't we got more than 1-2 pieces of video footage of the damn thing? We really should just thouroughly comb the woods where it is supposed to be. Even if we don't find it, we'll probably find some drug caches and convicted felons on the run... It's worth a try

Various kooks

[Henry V .009]

I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.

It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.

Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:

The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)

And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.