Environmental Graffiti is not on my list of places to visit regularly, but I occasionally find myself linking through to there. Sometimes, they will have an interesting gallery with relatively sensible captions. Sometimes, you will find a pile of crap. Such is the case for an entry called "5 Most Mysterious Places On Earth", put together in the most desultory manner conceivable by someone calling themselves ifaynshteyn. This booby's idea of mysterious places is as follows:
1. Easter Island
- fair enough, Easter Island is interesting and exotic, but to pretend that there is a magical mystery about the giant statues is perverse (actually, dishonest). What's fascinating about Easter Island is the story of religious obsession, environmental degradation and societal collapse which surrounds the construction of the moai. The author is too lazy to do any research, though, so handwaves about mysterious forces.
2. Mystery Spot, Santa Cruz, CA
- oh the bathos. Straight from a world heritage site in a far away location, to ... a shonky tourist attraction in California (though you have to know where this particular Santa Cruz is, or google it, because the author doesn't think it worth telling you). This rube trap is based around the exploitation of the "gravity hill" phenomenon, of which more later.
3. Bermuda Triangle
- a fraud, pure and simple. Doesn't everyone know this yet? Not ifaynshteyn, apparently.
4. Atlantis
- yawn. The world's second most overworked mystery after Jack the Ripper (1). The most interesting thing about this page is that the antique map showing Atlantis is drawn, by modern conventions, "upside down", with North at the bottom.
5. Brown Mountain Lights
- there's nothing at all about the actual location in this piece, it's all about some rather generic "mystery lights". Category fail.
The article succeeded only in annoying me with its ignorance, laziness and ineptitude.
However, it did push me tolook up the "gravity hill" phenomenon, and that is actually vaguely interesting. You will probably have some vague memory of seeing such things on TV or in the yellow press: somewhere in the world, be it the USA, Korea or Ireland, there is a "magic hill" where cars roll and spilt water flows "uphill", to the amazement of onlookers. Here are a couple of examples:
Chenju, Korea
Spook Hill, Lake Wales, Florida
The explanation is stuaggeringly straightforward, and easily demonstrated. Humans just aren't very good at determining inclination, especially if it is gentle, and use visual cues to help them. The most important of these is the horizon, but this isn't always visible, so other cues are used instead. But in certain places these cues are misleading, and our brains interpret a slight downward slope as a slight upward one. We expect objects to roll in one direction, but they roll the other - but because we are still relying on the incorrect visual cues, this makes things appear to be rolling uphill. Bizarrely, given that a spirit level could resolve the issue, many people insist on confecting supernatural or pseudoscientific explanations, often involving magnetism. I wonder if they realise how powerful a magnetic source would be required to pull a car uphill? And why it doesn't seem to be affecting their keys? Or why it also affects liquids? Idiocy piled upon idiocy.
The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. Just how mysterious can
a deliberately badly constructed shed actually be?
Here's another video: the people involved are "paranormal investigators", which is not encouraging, but they make some simple tests and come to a sensible conclusion - nothing is rolling uphill.
Look! A spirit level! Burn him!
The ease with which humans' fairly weak ability to measure inclination may be confused, can have tragic consequences. Pilots who lack visual cues - in the dark, or in heavy fog/cloud - can make gross errors in spatial awareness. This was the case in Korean Airlines Flight 8509, a Boeing 747 cargo plane bound for Milan, which crashed shortly after take-off from London's Stansted Airport in December 1999 (2). The plane had taken off, at night, with a defective Attitude Director Indicator (artificial horizon) on the captain's side. This had already been reported faulty, but a Korean Airlines engineer working without proper documentation, and not having spoken directly to the previous crew, misidentified the fault. The flight took off with the captain's ADI still not working, even thought the paperwork said it had been fixed.
At night, without the external visual cues to alert him, Captain Park Duk Kyu failed to realise that his ADI was still malfunctioning as he performed a left bank shortly after take off, and pushed the airplane further and further over. Park, a former Air Force colonel who had flown fast jets, lacked crew management skills and had cowed his less experienced co-pilot by his aggressive and condescending attitude. Even though the co-pilot could see, from his functioning ADI, that the plane was banking out of control, he was too afraid of his superior officer to intervene by overriding the captain's controls. The flight engineer attempted to warn the captain verbally, but was ignored - Flight 8509 ploughed wing first into woodland near the village of Great Hallingbury, killing all 4 crew (3) and totally destroying the aircraft.
Fire officers inspecting what is left of Flight 8509.
The ADI which provoked D. K. Park's fatal blunder had been malfunctioning during the previous flight, but had not caused a disaster. In this case, the external visual cues during daylight operation had rapidly alerted the previous captain to the discrepancy, and he had switched his attention to the third, redundant ADI between the two pilots. At night, Captain Park had chosen to believe his faulty instruments, even when the aircraft was banked over at 80 degrees.
Which makes cars rolling gently down deceptive slopes in Chenju or Florida look rather trivial.
Notes
(1) Oh, Jack the Ripper - the most popular ever excuse for showing horror porn dressed up as historical reconstruction.
(2) There is an episode of Mayday a.k.a. Air Crash Investigation dealing with this - Series 11, Episode 7, "Bad Attitude". It's easy enough to find on YouTube, but I shan't be linking to it as it is pirated material. For those unfamiliar with British airports, Stansted is the third largest of the London airfields, out to the north-east of the city, and is largely used by charters, budget airlines and cargo carriers.
(3) As well as the captain, first officer and flight engineer, the mechanic who messed up the ADI repair was travelling in the jump seat.
EDIT: Music link retired 2/1/2013
Hear, hear!
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