I once met Katherine Smith, the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Natural Medicine (not a magazine I'd recommend reading - it'll make you angry!). We had an enjoyable chat, and as we were at a wellness and spiritual festival, WellFest, she had no idea I was a skeptic. She showed me her folder of photos and cuttings about the “synchronicity” she'd experienced in her life - a series of spirals, stretching from a spiral painting she made as a young child, through to photos she'd taken in the ‘80s with faint spirals in the background, and a recent picture of a weird glowing spiral in the sky she'd cut out from a newspaper. I told her that I recognised the sky spiral, that it was a picture from Norway of a Russian rocket booster. Of course she was having none of it - the spiral in the sky was a sign for her, part of a message the universe was sending her through a series of events too unlikely to be coincidence. And of course she wasn't interested in reading into this phenomenon any further - she'd decided what it was, and what it meant to her, and that was enough.
Last night people saw a similar spiral over NZ, with reports from Nelson down to Stewart island. Thankfully the journalist that covered this story for NewsHub didn't jump to any silly conclusions (except for a brief cheeky mention of “extraterrestrials”!). Instead they explained that the spiral came from a SpaceX upper stage rocket, part of a Falcon 9 that was launching a Globalstar FM15 into orbit. For me this rational, scientific explanation is much better than fooling myself into thinking the spiral is a special sign meant for me.
In this week's newsletter I ponder the story of the google engineer who appears to have fooled himself into thinking the AI he's been working with is sentient, I report on a field trip where I listened to a group of people who have fooled themselves into thinking QAnon is real, and I talk about yet another crypto scam - this one using deep fakes of Elon Musk to fool people into thinking that if they give the scammers some money as cryptocurrency, they'll receive double their money back - spoiler, that's not what happens.
As well as my rambling, Bronwyn looks at some recent attacks on minority groups here in NZ, and wonders how much we can blame on American nonsense thinking such as QAnon and the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and how much is our own fault.
