The Creature in the Dark Lagoon

WHAT is the truth about the reported sightings of a mysterious creature lurking in the depths of the lake at Ruislip Lido, on the outskirts of north-west London? Ordinarily I'd be more than skeptical about such stories, remembering the old Scottish bricklayer from the vicinity of Loch Ness who told me there were usually a few sightings of the Loch Ness Monster towards the end of the tourist season, when trade was getting a bit slack.

Besides, the last time I heard of a creature being reported in a stretch of London water it was on the Welsh Harp, at Neasden, and that story, if not the mystery creature, seems to have died the death. Somehow I can't imagine a large beast of unusual appearance waddling or slithing its way along the North Circular and out through the suburbs to migrate, lay eggs or have live offspring in the Ruislip lake without someone saying something. There'd be talk in the pubs, in Wembley and at Rayners Lane.

Something weird is happening at Ruislip, mind. Ducks and even geese have been seen to
vanish from the surface, not snatched at the lakeside by poachers, but seemingly pulled down at the centre of the lake. If a mysterious creature has taken shape from the chemical-rich sludge it could be carnivorous.
The lido is not recommended for swimming, anyway, but if the tales were being told to attract the curious they would surely not include details bound to frighten away people who take their kids up paddling?

Could there be another explanation? Cast your mind back to the last time Ruislip featured in this blog. It was about the night that a stream of fire engines, ambulances and police cars headed up the road to the area of the lido and woods, where an aircraft had supposedly crashed. A young man who had been drinking in the Waters Edge pub said he had heard a plane come in very low overhead. But nothing reached the news that night, and we assumed it was some kind of exercise, until the local paper reported there had been a hoax sparked by some kids setting off beacon flares.

What if there had been an accident of some kind that night? Both the RAF and United States forces have a long association with the Ruislip area. During the period before the so-called "hoax" there were many night-flights from Northolt airfield, both of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. We have all heard of biological warfare, but the development of genetic modification science and techniques could offer frightening new possibilities in that department. Could an experiment have gone wrong, or its results have been accidentally been dropped in the lake, whether by a crash or a container being accidentally released?

The authorities have been saying nothing, but then it took a long time before the British Defence Establishment admitted what kind of research was being carried out at Porton Down, and even longer before they admitted servicemen who were affected might be entitled to claim compensation. Even last year's emergency 'hoax' was kept out of most of the news media.

The appearance on last month's Trafalgar Square peace demonstration of some distinguished looking individuals bearing placards concerning the 9/11 Twin Towers conspiracy was a reminder that many people no longer accept official explanations or even classic theories about the events in the world. Former MI5 agent David Shayler has gone from merely whistleblowing to lending his weight to the 9/11 conspiracy's exposure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth_Movement

I don't want to see any more conscientious government scientists being found lying in a ditch, but if anyone can shed light on the Ruislip monster mystery now is the time to speak out.

(I would like to thank Avril Furst for help with research for this article).

They got the wrong Rupert

WELL-LOVED character on waterfront(below), and mean, tough old bird from Australia (above).











DON'T want you to think this blog has gone all soft, but I was quite pleased this weekend to get a comment from California about my piece on black swans. I was using my pix of a black swan hanging out on the Grand Union canal to discuss the idea of "a black swan" as an unexpected, even unpredictable, occurrence. Or, perhaps some of my friends might suspect, using the discussion of a book on this theme of "black swans" as my excuse to publish my pix of the Black Swan of Alperton.
(see "Birds of a different feather")

Anyway, our West Coast reader writes:- "realize this is a philosophy site as opposed to a bird site, but I couldn't resist -- here in California, not only did we have a black swan suddenly appear, but the freshwater bird appeared in & adapted to saltwater! After 15 years of roaming about, he was adored like a community pet. When he was run over by a boat, there was a large funeral for the bird, reported in the LA Times..."

I'd heard that black swans had made it to New Zealand, but across the Pacific to Califormia? Seems the black bird who became the most famous resident of Newport Beach had an assisted passage before getting loose, as this item from the Orange County Recorder tells:

Friday, September 15, 2006
Newport loses an icon, Rupert
The black swan had been the unofficial mascot for Newport Harbor about 15 years.
By JEFF OVERLEY
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

NEWPORT BEACH – Reports of his demise were common over the years, but this time it's for real – Rupert the black swan, icon of Newport Harbor, has died.
Among many mishaps, Rupert famously survived a drenching with diesel fuel, being snared in the neck by a fishing hook, a dog mauling, and a disappearance during El Niño storms that had locals placing frantic phone calls to police and the press.
Wednesday afternoon, Rupert's luck finally ran out when he was run down by a Harbor Patrol boat responding to reports of a woman's body floating in the water.
Perhaps because of his many ordeals, Rupert was notoriously cantankerous, with a particular disdain for the color red.
"Red he hated, and that's what (color) those Harbor Patrol boats are," said resident Gay Wassall-Kelly, Rupert's unofficial owner, surmising why the swan may have ventured in the boat's path.
His bull-like instincts reportedly led him to harass Junior Lifeguards in red swimming trunks and even charge burning boats.
Despite his temperament, the irascible Rupert endeared himself to locals by responding to his name and sipping fresh water out of open palms.
"He was so feisty but so lovable," Wassall-Kelly said.
Rare in this area for his dark color and for his presence in salt water, which swans do not favor, Rupert is thought to have arrived in Newport Harbor in 1991, possibly after escaping from an owner's cage.
Over the years, his travails made headlines. Local reporters spilled significant ink when the bird was coated with diesel fuel in 1995 and when his black swan "girlfriend," Pearl, died in 2002.
His popularity reached such heights that his image adorned Newport Beach's Rose Parade float this year.
"He was certainly the mascot of the harbor," said Jim Mahoney, owner of Gondola Romance, where Rupert often nibbled fruit and cheese from the hands of patrons.
Harbor Patrol workers always left bread crusts and fresh water for Rupert on the docks.
"It's tragic for us," said Sgt. David Ginther of Orange County Harbor Patrol. "We've cared for this animal for years and years, and here it looks like we were responsible for the animal's death."
Rupert's body was taken to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, where he was a regular patient over the years.
The bird's body was picked up for cremation, and his ashes are to be returned Tuesday. A local Hawaiian outrigger canoe group has offered to lead a ceremony in which the swan's remains will be spread in the harbor or ocean, workers said.
"It's really sad. He was just irreplaceable," said Jamie Pavlat, a center supervisor. "There's no way to get another Rupert."
Contact the writer: 714-445-6683 or joverley@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1276659.php

Here's another report:

... rupert the swan... O.C. Patrol Boat Kills Harbor's Black Swan Craft hitting Rupert, a Newport fixture for more than two decades, was on its way to the site where a body was found. By David Haldane, Times Staff Writer September 14, 2006

A Harbor Patrol boat speeding to where a woman's body had been found Wednesday inadvertently ran over and killed Rupert, the black swan of Newport Harbor whose misadventures with fishing lines and burning boats made him a local legend for more than two decades.

The body of the unidentified woman was found wrapped in a blanket and floating off the dock of the Newport Harbor Yacht Club about 4:15 p.m., said Sgt. Bill Hartford, a spokesman for the Newport Beach Police Department. "Right now it's being investigated as a probable homicide," Hartford said. The body was first reported by a dock worker at the club. As police and coroner's examiners began their investigation, harbor denizens — unaware of the woman's death — were mourning the loss of the bird they considered an icon.

"Everybody in Newport Harbor knows him," Elizabeth Barnes, 42, said of the big Australian swan reputed to have once been a pet. Over the years, Rupert's antics attracted notoriety. Velvety-rich black with a bright red beak, the 15-pound bird was known for chasing lifeguards, honking at boaters and causing at least one terrified pair of canoeists to capsize. He was impaled by fishhooks, routinely swam toward burning boats, was nearly strangled by fishing line and once was found near death after coming upon a diesel fuel spill.

Several years ago, Rupert's longtime mate, Pearl, died under mysterious circumstances, prompting locals to initiate a fund drive to buy him a new wife. "He'd been really depressed," Barnes said.
http://www.tikiroom.com/tikicentral/bb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic=14543&forum=13&start=165&PHPSESSID=87a0570554aebe491659a98f8170a897


While the papers were reporting on how well-loved Rupert had been, some big bronzed California swimmers and surfers were saying how "mean" the bird was, chasing them out of the water. What wooses!

One thing I noticed. Though Rupert had a name, and a celebrity send off, none of the news reports told us anything about the woman whose body had been floating in the water and whom the patrol boat was going to see what the bird was hit. Not even a name.

The other thing - that Rupert apparently met his unfortunate end because he hated the colour red. Just the sight of it sent him mad, so that he may even have tried to attack the red hull of the police patrol boat, and thus met his demise.

Now I'd been wondering about that name, Rupert. Could they have given it to this swan because by any chance his arrival and settlement in Californian waters put them in mind of another Australian-born immigrant who has come to nest in the United States? He too can be a mean old bird, feeding off the public then snapping at people, and - except when making some more of his fortune in China - is bitterly anti-Red.

Dammit, captain! You squashed the wrong Rupert!

Birds of a different feather

"ALL swans are white. This bird is black. Therefore..." But it IS a swan. Cygnus atratus,

if you'll pardon the language.

Until some years ago, the only places I had seen black swans were on the postage stamps once issued by Western Australia, and the labels of a brand of lager (whatever happened to it?), also hailing from that part of the world,

Then I was pleased to see they had introduced some in St.James' Park in London. Apparently Regents Park has some too. But what was a really nice surprise was to come across this one in the pictures, who had evidently come up from the park along the Grand Union Canal, introduced itself to the locals in Alperton, and was hanging out with the gang (or should we say swanning about?) on the stretch between the Plough and Pleasure Boat pubs and Sainsbury's. Not unlike our own perambulations at the time.

Apparently the black swans from Australia are a different species from the white European varieties, though I've noticed that cygnets are sort of grey, so could both have evolved from a common ancestor, going in different directions in northern and southern hemispheres, like the way water is supposed to go down the plughole in different ways north and south of the Equator? (Before you explode in derision, let me be first to admit my ignorance of natural history. Blame our education system.) But the difference was not apparently enough to prevent the antipodean guest from knowing it was a swan, nor the other swans (whom I'd previously thought stand-offish) from apparently accepting it.

However, the reason I've brought you on safari in south Wembley is not to discourse on the social life of our feathered friends but to muse on some philosophical points. There's been a good deal of talk recently about the ideas in a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The author is not an ornithologist either; his interest is in Cygnus atratus as an example of the unexpected, turning up to confound the generalisers. His previous work was Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

I've not read either book yet, but I have seen some impressive reviews.

According to one admirer The Black Swan " is the most important book in social science since Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Nassim Taleb's book also happens to be the most significant contribution to the science and philosophy of uncertainty since Andrey Kolmogorov axiomitized probability theory (which along with Bayes, gave us the solid foundation necessary to think clearly about chance) and made progress (with contributions by Chaitin and Solomonoff) towards a more mathematically precise definition of randomness. In terms of epistemology, reading The Black Swan gave me a sense of intellectual kinship that I have not felt since reading Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox."

Now, I'm no mathematician, but I have a smattering of logic. The statement we began with was a categorical syllogism, it begins with a generalisation, derived from experience - that all swans are white - which was disproved when people from the north discovered a black bird in Australia, and decided it was a swan. But was this unpredictable, even improbable? Not to native Australians, who might have been surprised to encounter the white version. Saying "All swans are white" was not like saying 2+2=4. The whiteness of swans was not a priori deductible from the nature of swans (or what was known about it) but a generalisation from empirical observation. This does not devalue it as knowledge but limits its value for prediction.

If you were mapping a coastline it would be important to do it accurately, for navigation, but would not tell you reliably what the parts as yet undiscovered would be like.

'Nassim Taleb mentions the analogy to maps in relation to his disdain for what he calls "Platonicity." Taleb defines Platonicity (named after the philosopher Plato) as "our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined 'forms,' whether objects, like triangles, or social notions .... we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures ..." The cardinal sin of Platonicity is that it "makes us think that we understand more than we actually do."'

http://econophysics.blogspot.com/2007/05/black-swan-well-thats-life.html

Fair warning. But consider other cases. If tossing a coin it had landed heads ninety-nine times, you might still think there was a 50:50 chance of it landing tails next time. Or you might consider the possibility that it was a biased coin. In backing horses you look at their form, even though as we know it is impossible as yet even when laying odds to predict the outcome of a race with any certainty. If we knew enough to do that it would be the end of horse racing, or at least of betting on it. However, Nassim Taleb and his readers are concerned with the predictability or otherwise of still more serious issues.

'WAS 9/11 A BLACK SWAN?
Nassim Taleb, a scientist-philosopher-businessman, makes the case that 9/11 was a black swan. A black swan is a unpredictable event that defies prediction. An outlier. I agree. He expands:
A vicious black swan has an additional elusive property: its very unexpectedness helps create the conditions for it to occur. Had a terrorist attack been a conceivable risk on Sept. 10, 2001, it would likely not have happened.
In their analysis of black swans (which by definition will likely never be repeated), human beings engage in what is called hindsight bias. This is the tendency to believe that the event was predictable based on knowledge gained after the event occurred. In effect, people unknowingly substitute current knowledge of outcomes into the gaps of knowledge that were present when building earlier expectations of potential events'. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/04/was_911_a_black.html

Notice how easily the writer has slipped into discussing "black swans" (and even "a vicious black swan"!) as meaning unpredictable events, even though the book has not been out that long. I wonder if anyone can predict how widespread this usage will become, and whether it will be taken up by media hacks without even a clue what it means before, like other trendy expressions it fades into obscurity? I'm pleased to see one commentator is skeptical:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tim_radford/2007/05/swanning_about.html
I'm all for an attack on Platonism and the complacency of scholastic generalisations (often based on far less certain knowledge than people thought they had about swans) assuming we know everything about what is, and what's more, what is going to be. But I'm also suspicious of political leaders and other so-called "experts" who always claim something was "unpredictable" when they mean, they failed to predict it. I also remember how eagerly some of our gurus on the left grasped at "uncertainty" and "chaos theory" when they wanted to acquire mystic status in place of any pretence at political strategy.

When we say that black swans were "unpredictable", that was not a matter of some unknowable quirk in nature, but of our inadequate knowledge. It is perhaps a telling sign of our times that whereas primitive human beings devised religion to cope with the mysteries of nature and natural catastrophes, modern human beings fear what appears the unpredictable results of human social, economic and political processes. Even when such events as major floods devastating Asian villages or an American city are predicted, it is society and government that hamstring efforts to cope with them.

Was 9/11 predicted? So far as I am aware, not. Was it unpredictable? Well, there were warning signs. On February 26, 1993 at 12:17 PM, a man called Ramzi Yousef took a truck with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the underground garage of the World Trade Centre's North Tower. The explosion tore a 100 foot hole through 5 sub levels of concrete leaving six people dead and 50,000 other workers and visitors gasping for air in the shafts of the 110 story towers. Many people inside the North Tower were forced to walk down darkened stairwells which contained no emergency lighting, some taking two hours or more to reach safety. As the Port Authority was a bi-state agency, the towers were exempt from New York City building codes. Subsequent to the bombing the Port Authority installed emergency lighting in the stairwells. In 1997-8 six Islamicists were convicted and sentenced to life in prison for their part in the bombing. According to a judge, the conspirators' aim had been to cause the north tower to crashing into the south tower, toppling both landmarks.

So it might have been reasonable to guess that the World Trade Centre was going to be a target again, and what political direction the attack might come from. Had the US intelligence services known enough about what was being planned ... well, we cannot say. But the attack was surely "unpredictable" only in the sense that those who might have prevented it did not know enough (for all their expenditure on surveillance around the globe, which makes one wonder whether they were too busy looking at the rest of us) .

Nassim Taleb is Lebanese, and looking at the tangle of factions and outside interests preying on his native country I can understand why, quite apart from what experiences he might have had with stock markets, he is inclined to stress the unknown, even irrational. All the same... Does anyone know, let alone understand, what was behind the armed clash that suddenly brought fresh deaths and misery to Nahr el-Bared camp, making its residents once again refugees? Maybe even the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam did not know.

But that does not mean nobody did.

Not knowing, we should not fall for glib and fabricated conspiracy theories. But admitting we don't know should not make us think that nobody does, or accept that some things are without reasons and unknowable. The swan was there all the time before the scholars knew about it.