The tracker site has been on a handsome run of serious, insightful posts lately. So now relax and sit back for a shaggy dog story.
In Death Valley there remains to this day, despite many hypotheses, a mystery. Surely you've read of this, perhaps some reporters among the tracker's readers wrote of it. Scattered upon an almost always-dry lake are large stones, boulders really, that seem to have been shoved across the now-cracked mud by forces difficult to divine. Nearly-straight grooves mark their paths. Nobody has ever seen one in transit. Some are so large a horse would labor to drag them. Yet, seemingly self-schlepped, there they silently sit, mocking the curious. Some call them the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa.
There is no track but there are some odd way stations through which one account on the web right now seems itself to have been dragged through digital aggregator goo, but this was transmogrifying as it went.
Two days ago I spotted the first hint of something awry. Just as I stood yesterday to write a post (am experimenting with a stand-up desk) the home broadband turned slow as mud in a lightly flooded Death Valley lakebed in January. It was creeping along at about 20 kbps, not the screaming 14-25 megabytes per second Comcast usually delivers. It made those sailing stones look positively superluminal. Hours later, and just after I picked up from the Comcast outlet on University Avenue a combo modem/wireless router, the old modem that I had blamed suddenly kicked back into gear. Weird. Picking up this tale where I left off…
The first story encountered was this:
- Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM (and no I don't know what it means by news consortium)): MYSTERY SOLVED? NASA geologist may have found out secret behind 'sailing stones'. It almost makes sense. But it also has odd hiccups. Why add the honorific "Professor" before the name of the author of the latest hypothesis? No university is mentioned, only that he's at the space agency. Another hitch: the place of the sailing stones is called on first ref Racetrack Player, not Playa. Another mention gets it right. Maybe it was the evil spellchecker optimized – by Microsoft perhaps – to massacre iPhone text messages? Or was it dictated to a second person who took a phonetic stab at the word? And why this lousy grammar, per description of how the professor's experiment in his lab showed that one could "move the rock around simple (cq) by blowing it gently." And to top it off the story declares that some of its information came from something the prof told Smithsonian Magazine in 2009! I wondered, why am I reading this now? As it turns out I asked the right question but for the wrong reason.
Next, and while wondering if this general news is on offer from other agencies I found this gem:
- New theory on stone toddler / The mysterious rocks in Death Valley is truly puzzles for a long time scientists, until a geologist that has found the answer on the kitchen table ; Hmmm. One also reads in this account "On the barren track, players ( sometimes weighs nearly 320 kg ), leaving behind a trail in the sand, mark the movement could not fathom the eyes of science." Well and distinctly put! This account's own mysterious origin and syntax is partly explained by the agency on which it runs, DBV, based in Vietnam. It's pretty clear somebody there probably rewrote it into perfectly good Vietnamese, whereupon a translation engine reverse engineered it for the English-language site. However, the reference to the rocks as "players" makes one suspect it is a descendant of the first version, from Smithsonian [Correction: Catholic Online], bulleted above.
After suppressing a giggle over the oddities of the yarn's meander, it was time for a serious hunt for provenance :
- Smithsonian (July 10, 2013) Joseph Stromberg: How Do Death Valley's 'Sailing Stones" Move Themselves Across the Desert? ; Ah, an oasis of clarity in the wilderness. One even spots how, if working really fast and thinking pretty slow, a rewriter might take a quote to have been delivered in 2006. The explanation of what the source, a NASA expert who gets in the news fairly often, Ralph Lorenz, did in his lab experiment finally makes some sense. This has a feature-story feel, several sources, a rich load of color and a memorable capture of the eeriness of Death Valley and the lonely corner at the end of a long, rough dirt road where one finds Racetrack Playa.
Further nosing around reveals that quite a few outlets recently wrote this story up as well, but at a quick glance they appear to be inspired by the Smithsonian story.
More important!, this general hypothesis and the formal paper describing it created a news burst in 2011! Shoot, the whole thing is a retread? That earlier coverage includes this by an estimable writer of physics and similar things, and one from the professor's home institution:
- InsideScience News Service (Feb. 18, 2011) Phillip F. Schewe: Rafting for Rocks.
- Johns Hopkins Magazine (June 1, 2011) Michael Anft: Solving the mystery of Death Valley's walking rocks ;
So this is old news. It was even sort of old by the time Schewe got to it. Don't blame Smithsonian so much. It perhaps had this lying in its accepted and edited but not published box for some time. Schewe's piece hasn't the rich atmosphere of Stromberg's story but it explains the scientific basis for the hypothesis better. Gad. Shaggy Dog For Sure. Lesson? Don't just assume news is new. And don't assume all self-styled 'news' agencies check a yarn's legitimacy.
Grist for the Mill: pdf of American Journal of Physics paper, Ice rafts not sails: Floating the rocks at Racetrack Playa ; Ralph D. Lorenz homepage, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab
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