Reliable sources report

As forecast by the Institute for Quantum Bogodynamics at MIT, the recent election was accompanied by a massive uptick in the ambient bogon flux, resulting in an unusual incidence of blather, disinformation and hoaxes throughout infospace. Of note today is the revelation that the source of reports that VP candidate Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent and could not name the nations that comprise North America was a McCain advisor named Martin Eisenstadt (bogus), Sr. Fellow of the Harding Institute (nonexistent). MSNBC ate it up with a spoon.

And they're not alone. Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, the hands within the Eisenstadt sock-puppet, have been taking in bloggers and journalists for over a year. Their creation posted pro-Giuliani campaign rants on YouTube, advocated for a casino in Baghdad's Green Zone, and outed Joe the Plumber as a relative of Charles Keating. Among the egg-faced were the Los Angeles Times, New Republic and Mother Jones.

People are hungry to believe, and never more so than when new "information" reinforces what they already believe. Some people will carry to the grave their belief that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, others that Bush operatives planned 9-11.

We might expect a more skeptical treatment from the press, and to their credit they have quashed some of the most egregious disinformation to blight the political season. But BS receptors seem to be wired into even the brightest of brains. Believe me--I'm a blogger, too.

And checking it twice

I'm not an avid mass forwarder of email. I receive and send too much in my day job to enjoy doing more than the necessary off duty. But as a public library trustee I was interested to read a forwarded list of titles that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was supposed to have recommended for removal from the town library. The list purported to originate from the minutes of the library board. I was on the verge of forwarding it to my library director and fellow trustees, when I thought to check into its veracity. Good thing--it was bogus.

There are claims in the press that Palin had a conversation about policy regarding library books she considered inappropriate with the library director, and a claim that she subsequently tried to have the director removed, but no list has ever been unearthed, nor evidence that any particular titles were ever proposed. It is now unlikely that there ever will be a credible list, or that the other claims will ever be substantiated or disproven.

Because the entire conversation has now been overtaken by the question of who floated the bogus list and why. And why so many people were ready to accept it at face value, and whether it could be additional evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Bad info not only drives out good, it poisons the well of further discussion and investigation. It reduces all claims to equal veracity and converts what could have been a dialog into twin streams of disconnected invective.

This is one of the great dangers of the new media landscape. We get too much of our news from sources of untraceable provenance, from "redmeat14@yahoo.com." If there is a bright side to this tawdry episode, it is that it highlights the continuing value of professional and accountable media sources--despite what you might be reading about them in mass emails.

from An Introduction to Information Science

To fathom the workings of the material universe, theoretical physicists have developed elaborate structures of strings, quarks, forces and dimensions, spreading out from a generative big bang, maybe 15 billion years ago. Researchers in cybernetics are beginning to postulate similar structures to explain the development of the dataverse or cyberspace, which exploded into being about 441 quadrillion nanoseconds ago, around 1994.

Left: Radio Bob deploys bogon detection apparatus.

Instead of particles possessed of mass, cyberspace is thought to be composed of particles of information. And instead of charge, they have polar qualities of validity and bogosity. The irreducible units of information are known as the bogon and the cluon. The presence of bogons can be felt most strongly in the vicinity of intense bogon emission sources, such as political figures and sales executives. The development of the worldwide web was accompanied by a huge outflux of bogons, as evidenced by early websites such as "The Hamster Dance," and by the formation of the dot.com bubble. Cluons propogate at a slower rate, trailing the wavefront of the "bogon bang" by as much as two years. The spreadsheets of venture capitalists became a rich source of cluons that helped to stabilize the rapidly deflating, but still superheated mass. While the interplay of cluons and bogons explain much of the observable dataverse, researchers are still seeking evidence for a supermassive neutral information particle, tentatively dubbed the "npron."

As in the physical universe, particles are not uniformly distributed in cyberspace. For example, there is a peak in the field strength of the local bogon flux each year, shortly after the vernal equinox. For an excellent exegesis of recent research, see the Wikipedia entry on quantum bogodynamics.