A second gallery of mathematical cranks, wanks, and wonks

Continued from part one, this will be a second look at the many purveyors of woo in the math world. Fascinating though they are...

Radiant Primes

OK, we'll start with a gentle example. This guy... might be right, it seems to check out. But his idea of taking prime numbers, converting them to another base, reversing the digits, converting that number back, and then checking if it's composite or prime and then (are you still following?) plotting the result in dots on a graph produces a picture that's pretty much the random static noise you'd expect to get with some radial lines raining down. He explains the process lucidly here. It makes a pretty cellular automata, but I don't see what he's so excited about. This isn't crank math so much as it's a fundamental failure to understand how math research works.

"God Almighty's Grand Unified Theorem" (GAGUT)

Oooooh, we have a live one! It's hard to tell if this is math though, or if the passion of this person's vision transcends the simple arts of calculus altogether. Anyway, any page written in ALLCAPS that yells "GOD!!!" this many times is a guaranteed winner. Diving deeper into the site, however, reveals a lot more ALLCAPS raving and not a hell of a lot of math. But I noticed an awful lot of focus on race (pro-black) including one link that insists God elected Obama. Then you find this:

...clicky to biggy, and you'll find the biggest equation to nutting ratio on the site, and that's just one unexplained line. Yes, I see, the capital G is God. Now what?

Truth Evolutionism

Now this guy sounds like the Time Cube guy on Prozac.

"So sciences about largest negative action pursuit, largest happiness pursuit, largest profit pursuit and largest knowledge pursuit are unified into one: Science of Pursuit"

 Right, but how does that help us get laid? I confess that this guy loses me every other sentence, so I can't so much trace reasoning flaws because I can't follow the reasoning. The guy just won't slow down and let the rest of us catch up to the monologue in his head.

"In Truth Evolutionism, every existence origins from perturbation in nihility. So its ultimate goal is to find the evolution process from perturbation to existence and the best methods for expansion."

 um?

 "Physicists have discovered least action principle, so basic natural laws are best methodology to pursue negative action. So for systems with the same mathematical expression as negative action, basic natural laws will be their best methodology."

ah...

"This is an objective truth standard. Larger system won more attention, respect and even worship from human beings. You can imagine, if there were a system larger than universe, its laws will be worshiped better than "natural laws", and treated as more important truth than natural laws. With the objective truth standard, the system with the largest possibility to be observed contains ultimate truth."

Dammit man, slow the hell DOWN! This sounds like you could cook up a philosophy here, if only you'd quit nouning verbs and dropping 'the's!

Return to Socrates


Right at the top, we start out with "Ideas, Philosophy, Science, Software, God, Universe, Randomness" - Which leads me to my own first theory of math cranks: If you're trying to tackle more than two big ideas in one paper, you're probably a crank. This guy has also been in business a long time, and makes reference to readers and even a message board for open discussion at one time. But, weird for an admirer of Socrates, his primary mathematical fixation seems to be on gambling. We're in luck, probability math happens to be one of my favorite fields. Anyway, he starts out attacking the lottery for not paying true odds. Correct so far; I think all lotteries should be burned to the ground. As soon as he starts rattling about betting systems, I set my Ctrl-F for "Martingale" and bingo!


Yep, crank. For those of you wondering, a Martingale system is one where you try to recover previous losses by doubling your bet or using some other complex betting pattern. The problem where all Martingales fail is that they fall against the casino concept of a "table limit":

That limit stops you from doubling your bet infinitely; eventually you'll lose big, and then you'll never get it back. And then right after Martingale you get the famous gambler's fallacy, stated so well by our "expert" here:

"What you need is a notebook and a pencil. Write down the last roulette spins, from the oldest one available to the most recent spin. Do not start playing until you have at least 42 spins on your piece of paper. I prefer a small notebook with 20 rule lines. Multiples of 10 or 20 make it easy to count quickly the number of roulette spins. Use the roulette report that follows as the template (rows and columns). "

...the gambler's fallacy, explained in Wikipedia, is the fallacy of believing that past trials dictate future trials; in other words, if the wheel comes up red six spins in a row, then the gambler's fallacy would have it that black is a good bet right now because "the law of averages" say that red has less of a chance coming up now. The problem here is that the roulette wheel has no memory! Neither does any other random device - the dice don't know which number's "turn" it is to come up, your coin does not know that it's "supposed to" come up heads next toss because it just tossed five tails in a row.

Still, this guy's a real card. He's got books he's sold, casinos he's gotten into fights with... He's got his racket, he's happy.

Well, that runs my bookmark list dry. Til next time, True Believers!
 

Wacky medieval laws

During the height of witch-hunting in the 15th century, there was a book published in Germany that was a sort of "Witch-Hunting for Dummies" guide, name of Malleus Maleficarum.

Full page scans available at Cornell's online repository, and while you're there, they have a few other witch-related tomes to check out for all your witchery needs. There's also a full site devoted to this and other witch-related beliefs, even into the present day.

But even practices for catching plain old criminals wasn't much better. For instance, there was the process of cruentation, in which an accused murderer was brought together with the corpse of the presumed victim and ordered to lay their hands upon the carcass. If the dead body should then spontaneously begin bleeding from its wounds, that would be a sign from on high that the defendant was guilty. One can only imagine how many murderers got off scott-free.

Many such practices are covered in the blanket category of "Trial by Ordeal," where you get all the variations on tying you up and throwing you into the river to see if you sink or swim, or plunging your hand into boiling water to see if God healed you, or simply swallowing poison, or other such life-jeopardizing trials. In some cases, surviving the ordeal unscathed meant that God had declared you innocent, while in other areas it was considered just the opposite proof, that you had escaped by the Devil's aide.

Then there was the practice of compurgation, a law which meant that you could be found innocent if you could find twelve people who said they believed your side of the story. Well, who couldn't scare up twelve friends?

One more curiosity is the German principle of "stadtluft macht frei," a kind of statue-of-limitations where if a serf had managed to escape capture for a year-and-a-day, they was no longer open to being re-chained.

And for a final medieval law oddity, animals could be tried in a court of law exactly as if they were human.

It's come to this: Happiness is now a disease

A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder:

"It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant."

Okaaaay... Pretty sure this is a parody, but you never can be quite sure.

On a related note, there's also discussion about whether to classify unipolar mania. See, unipolar mania is like bipolar disorder in a higher key; instead of cycling between extremes of depression and mania, you just have the manic phases. So most of the time you're normal, except sometimes you're extremely hyper and happy.

Doesn't that sound nice?

A gallery of mathematical cranks, wanks, and wonks

You wouldn't think that mathematics, as a field, would attract that many fringe-living crackpots - at least not as much as, say, medicine or space physics. In math, after all, either 2 plus 2 adds up to 4 or else it doesn't, and there's not much room for argument after that. But, oh, how wrong you'd be! Join me on this intellectual Tilt-A-Whirl as we explore the home pages of some extremely unhinged amateur mathematicians:

Zim Mathematics

The startling page layout is just the appetizer to Zim Olsen's theories. However, Zim doesn't really seem as out there as some, merely extremely eccentric. On the crank side, there's the ranting philosophy of how we should think of mathematics, which reads like a better-educated Time Cube manifesto. On the other hand, we have the following masterpiece:

The Lord’s Prayer in System(s) Mathematics

Our Father who art in heaven
hallowed be thy name;
(1) + - × ÷ = (0) + - × ÷ = (1+0) + - × ÷ = (1,0) + - × ÷

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
(1) +, -, ×, ÷ = (0) +, -,×, ÷ = (1+0) +, -, ×, ÷ = (1,0) +, -, ×, ÷

Give us this day our daily Bread.
Y(A,B) + - × ÷ => X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷)

Forgive us for our sins,
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

As we forgive those who sin against us.
W(A,B,Y(1,0) + - × ÷) => W(1,0)

Lead us not into temptation
X(1,0,Y(A,B)) + - × ÷

But deliver us from evil.
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

For thine is the Kingdom, the Power,
and the Glory, forever and ever.
F(1,0) = ___, ___, …___

OK, anybody who can engage in such whimsy has my benefit of the doubt.

Diamond Theory

Here again, I don't think Steven Cullinane is really unhinged per se. At the very least, his geometric study is fun to play with, particularly when you find this toy. And I'm not really sure that anything he says is wrong per se. But you might find yourself asking "So what?" or more to the point, "Why is this supposed to be the central theory to explaining life, the universe, and everything?"

The Correct Value for Pi

OK, here at last is somebody I can pin to the board. This Iranian scholar can't stand it that Pi is infinite, and insists that its true value is actually 3.125, so there! Wrong sir! Thank you for being up front and not burying it under 100 pages of dense "proof."

Impossible Correspondence

Ah, we love the argumentative ones! This colorful Mad Hatter uses amusing George-Clinton-type coinages like "supraconsciousness" to insist that everybody else is wrong, dammit, especially that Albert Einstein. Go on, pick a page, any page - the "Analysis of Maths by Theosophical Reduction" argues that we only need nine digits to define the universe and then wades into the I-Ching and something called the Mayan "Tzolk'in"... uh, this:

...guaranteeing that this refugee from Klingon astrology will lose the hell out of you before you can even suss out what he's rambling about. Oh, and there's a great bit of numerology about the Quran, and a piece on market cycles and Fibonacci done with no sense of irony for Darren Arinovsky's film. And hey, there's this:

"In his stand against the ether, Einstein had argued, "we should not speak of things that can't be measured." Probably the number one reason for saying that was to insure the job of measurements. Today, the Aether not only has been experimentally shown to "exist", but the reversed, subluminal group wave Aether and the superluminal phase wave Aether could also be measured once it was defined as the existent medium."

Treasures, treasures I tell you!

C.F. Russel - Cubed

This is impossible. I take back everything I ever said about the Time Cube guy; THIS is the craziest web person with a cube-centric theory! Oh, the pages start out tame enough,

but it gets crazier...

and crazier...

and CRAZIER!!!

God, thank you, man! I made it up to page 16 before I couldn't hang on any more and blew my load! And THEN I found this dingus. Take me! Take me away to your crazy, right-angled world forever.

Spermatozoid Homunculus

TIL folks of a few centuries ago believed that sperm cells contained little tiny people, perfect replicas of the humans they would become. As told here. In the modern day, we've moved on past the silly idea of perfect replicas embedded in sperm or egg cells; now the anti-choice religious crowd insists that conception makes a perfect little tiny person.

Heaven's Gate cult initiation tape

Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult famous for their 1997 mass suicide, in which 39 members quietly laid down in bunk beds with plastic bags taped over their heads and died. They believed that they would launch themselves onto a flying saucer trailing the then-visible Hale-Bopp comet. At the time, I was working at the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada, on the night shift. We had an excellent view of the comet from the top floor of the plant, where we'd pause on break and stare at the blurry speck in the sky, wondering what madness possessed these people.

Well, I've recently discovered the entire tape series of cult leader Marshall Applewhite's video speeches to the sect members on YouTube. So spend some time listening to this guy ramble and see if maybe he couldn't hypnotise you into cutting your junk off and killing yourself (with $5.75 in your pocket, gotta remember the fare!):

That's just part one. There's the whole series here.

Oh, and let us not forget that the original website, maintained by the cult members who financed themselves through web development, is still up for anyone to view. The creepiest touch is the expanding 'red alert' GIF at the top. Did the cult members check the page every day for this signal? And when it appeared, that was their "boarding call"?

How did hippos get to Columbia?

Well, as the video explains, the hippos - the original pair, anyway - were part of the menagerie of Pablo Escobar, famous Columbian drug lord. They adapted to the environment and roam free today, starting from a breeding pair.

The life and times of Pablo Escobar read like something straight out of Scarface. Legends of his tremendous cocaine-fueled wealth even include an anecdote of how they had to store cash in a warehouse for so long that rats broke in and gnawed 10% of the stored $100-bills, destroying them. Escobar's henchmen just shrugged and wrote it off as a loss.

Anyway, when you're so goddamned rich that you have a problem with rats eating your money because you can't spend it fast enough, you tend to splurge on a few indulgences. So Escobar built himself a wonderland, complete with his own zoo. What a show-off!

And that's why today, hippos are now a native species in Columbia.

Your Whacko Conspiracy Video of the Week

Meet Macon Carrington, who has his own YouTube channel and would like to have a word with you about the secret, horrific rituals that Scientologists and Freemasons inflict on hapless kids. With demonstrations on dolls and better special effects than most History Channel shows.

Oh, he's also nuttier than squirrel scat and hair-raisingly creepy besides.

DISCLAIMER: Which is not to say that Scientologists or Freemasons are exactly nice people, and in fact there is evidence that Scientologists have done mean stuff to people before.

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

If you think modern media is rife with sloppy fact-and-source-checking and complete disregard for integrity, you should see what lulus they pulled back in the day.

In August of 1835, the New York Sun newspaper indulged in a particularly fanciful bit of tabloid reporting claiming that a new high-definition telescope was pulling in evidence of life on the moon - including unicorns, tailless beaver-like creatures, and batmen. Yes, real, flying, bat-winged batmen! Plus beaches, oceans, forests, temples constructed of sapphire, and all kinds of fanciful stuff.

While readers were presumably clued in that the whole thing was meant to be an amusing hoax, editors from competing newspapers were not so amused. As told on HistoryBuff.com:

"Rival editors were frantic; many of them pretended to have access to the original articles and began reprinting the Sun's series. It was not until the Journal of Commerce sought permission to publish the series in pamphlet form, however, that Richard Adams Locke, confessed authorship. Some authorities think that a French scientist, Nicollet, in this country at the time, wrote them."

"After a number of his competitors, humiliated because they had "lifted" the series and passed it off as their own, upbraided Day, the Sun of September 16, 1835, admitted the hoax. When the hoax was exposed people were generally amused. It did not seem to lessen interest in the Sun, which never lost its increased circulation."

Really makes you wonder if you repeated the exact same experiment today, how many would fall for it all over again. After all, according to a 2005 New York times story (if we can believe this one!), one in five adult Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

Stiletto surgery - lopping off a toe to fit into your shoes

Well, anything for vanity, right?

There's been a number of stories about women getting extreme cosmetic foot surgery over the past decade. Daily Mail posts this one, and check the article further down for an infographic of various procedures. ABC News ran this story in 2012, and then there's this NYT article from 2003, which also quotes a survey about women getting foot surgery for a better shoe fit as far back as 1993.

Looks like the trend isn't going away! So consider, Prince Charming, the next time you fit that glass slipper on Cinderella, she just might have cheated to be sure she fits.

The thing is, some 90% of women wear shoes that are too narrow. And the pointy stiletto makes the matter worse, forcing the pressure all down on those tiny, vulnerable toes. But really, is it all to attract a man? Except for foot fetishists (who, even then, might prefer the whole, unaltered female foot, seeing as how they admire it so), most guys could care less how a woman's feet look. It is more of a competition between women that seems to be the driving force.

The fascination with women having tiny, impractical feet has deep cultural roots. You've probably heard of the Chinese practice of footbinding, a cruel practice in which a girl's feet are bound daily so as she grows, the bones of her feet gradually break and distort into an unnatural shape. Such outrage did it cause that a "foot emancipation society" formed in the Qing Dynasty, and formed one of the cornerstones of Chinese women's lib.

Yet here we are, a century later, practicing a similar custom and there's hardly a murmur of protest. One could definitely see where complications can arise in later years; the human foot puts on a lot of miles carrying a lot of weight in one lifetime, and missing a toe (as those who have had accidents can attest) makes walking harder. Nevertheless, women are already to risk malnutrition through eating disorders and the various complications of silicon breast implants, so what's one more toe?

The quack medicine that turns you into a Smurf

What, did you think we were joking?

Boom! There, real-life Papa Smurf all up in yo' shizzle! And here's Smurfette:

...and in fact there's dozens of photos online of this condition. Most recently, Baby Boomer Randroid politician Stan Jones fell victim to the condition.

What you're seeing here is the effects of a condition known as "Argyria", which is caused by the ingesting of colloidal silver. That's right, drinking silver potions turns you blue. Colloidal silver is frequently prescribed by quacks as treatments for various illnesses - it's been a staple of alternative medicine for some time. As for Stan Jones, he actually made his own silver potions and drank them at home for reasons related to Y2K paranoia back before the turn of the century. And he still swears by it!

For those stuck with this condition, guess what? There's no cure! OK, technically there's laser surgery, so if you call having all of your skin being burned off and waiting for it to grow back a "cure" then yes, that's a cure.

The case of the ketchup counterfeiters

You might have seen the story about the Canadian maple syrup thieves earlier, and thought "that's the weirdest crime story I'll see all year!" And how wrong you'd be! From Yahoo:

"Officials discovered the fake ketchup factory after tenants complained about flies and rotten odors coming from another part of the 7,000-square-foot warehouse in Dover, N.J. They found thousands of plastic bottles labeled Heinz ketchup, many of which had exploded after being abandoned in the hot building.

"Heinz representatives say that they think someone bought large containers of regular Heinz Ketchup and poured it into bottles labeled 'Simply Heinz,' a higher-priced product made with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Late Friday, they reached out to reassure consumers, saying that it was unlikely the counterfeit condiment ended up on store shelves."

Wait... so this makes money? That's your master criminal plan? You'd think even a villain on Batman would have come up with a slightly grander scheme. But in fact, counterfeit foods are a common enough crime scheme to warrant the involvement of organized crime. From this Daily Finance article:

"Most of those counterfeiters are small-scale operators. However, there have been reports of a few large operations that include bottling equipment and printing machines, and which produce their own raw, poor-quality alcohol, which is placed in replicated bottles of premium brands. These businesses, which sometimes span international borders, are almost always linked to organized crime."

Now, high-end scotch where it goes for $80 a bottle or so, you could see. There's at least a profit margin there. What's the gain on ketchup, ten cents a bottle?

Think American reality shows are over the top? (slightly NSFW)

The Pain Game is a Dutch reality TV game show in which contestants are subjected to various mild torments and humiliations. Here's a blog post that tells you a bit more about it.

This might seem risque and shocking to American audiences, but really, is it any worse than what we do to American reality show contestants? Forcing them to eat bugs, perform dangerous stunts, dress like a transvestite for a week, and be dunked under bucket-fulls of yogurt and so on? Fear Factor is one Western show that came close, as is Solitary.

I say, quit dicking around! It's obvious that full-scale sadomasochism play is what a lot of game shows out there have in mind already, so just bust out the whips and chains and be done with it.

Gene Ray's Twitter

It may be the real McCoy or it may be a clever parody (it's really, really hard to tell) but there is a Twitter account under the name of Gene Ray, "wisest human", creator of the website most famous throughout the web for being the most prolific raving of paranoid schizophrenia.

Also something I made tribute to in one of my more impish plot devices in my own webcomic.

So give him some... distant... respect. Especially since he was kind enough to come speak at MIT.

And now, the obligatory Gene Ray parody paragraph (without even looking):

"Time Cube is PERfeCT 4-dimensional pureness!!! Only stupid evil DENY. Harmonic nature is four-sided perfection in the Earth and Heaven. School educates stupid to DENY PERFECT COSMIC Harmony. Educators cannot teach GODPERFECT harmony. in cubic TIME!!!!!!! dimensions are four - COUNT THEM! God in harmony with WHITE MAN SCHOOL. The stupid can't understand cosmic brilliance of balance cube in four--earth backwards against math - YOU are EVIL stupid ANTI-cube!! Yadda yadda turkeys in my nose blah blahblah blah..."

Oh, alright, here's a video interview:

You know, the mind--blowing thing about this is that he actually comes off as less crazy in person than on his web page. I've wondered about that four-sided thing myself for years, and bam, he clears it up just like that!

Beyond Mein Kampf: Three books by dictators

1. Quotations from Chairman Mao

Published from 1964 through 1976, and still a popular read in much of the People's Republic of China, this is a collection of parts of speeches, letters, and general utterances of Chairman Mao Zedong. It was commonly known as the "Little Red Book" and also featured many images from the life of the Chairman. At one point, it was more prominently displayed than even images of the Chairman himself. While it was not required reading for the population, it was commonly printed in small pocket editions, so it could be with one always, and issued to soldiers and other grunts, even, presumably, throughout the Great Chinese Famine.

2. The Green Book

Published in 1975 until right around the Libyan Civil War in 2011, this was a small collection of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's thoughts on all matters political. It was said to be directly inspired by Mao's "Little Red Book". Unlike that book, The Green Book was published with the intent of making it required reading for all Libyan citizens. Libyan children during Gaddafi's reign had to study the book for two hours per week as part of official school curriculum. Quotes from the book were also broadcast daily over the official radio stations. Billboards were everywhere with quotes from the book. Can you say "citizen brainwashing"? Revolutionaries burned the book at protests and its since become quite a rare publication since the overthrow of Gaddafi.

3. The Ruhnama

We have now reached the epitome of batshit egomania. This book, roughly translated as "The Book of the Soul", was the work of Saparmurat Niyazov, "President for Life" of Turkmenistan until his death in 2006. This was just a little bit more than a run-of-the-mill political rant. Example:

That's a real giant statue of the book, elevated on a rotunda surrounded by bubbling fountains. Here's some people around it for scale:

No, wait, we're not done. Every evening, the giant damned thing opens and displays text and plays video! Here's a video showing the construction of this behemoth, and showing it in action:

Yeah, eat your heart out, Stephen King.

The Ruhnama is not just a political tract, but spiritual scripture and autobiography of Niyazov himself. Required reading in school? That's small potatoes! Reading from the book took you from kindergarten to college in Turkmenistan. You couldn't publicly criticize the book without being thrown in prison and tortured. To make more room in the schedule for studying the Ruhnama, algebra, physics, and phy-ed were removed from the curriculum. You'd have to pass a test on the Ruhnama to get a driver's license. Quotes from the thing are inscribed in half the hard surfaces in Turkmenistan. Posters of the Ruhnama flank the streets. By law, it has to receive equal treatment with the Qur'an, even in Muslim mosques.

Shortly before his death, Niyazov claimed that he had arranged it with no less than GOD HIMSELF that anybody who read the Ruhnama three times was guaranteed a place in Heaven.

We could go on all day, all night, and all day tomorrow about the blood-curdling insanity and megalomania of Saparmurat Niyazov and the utter hell-on-Earth of a nightmarish, dystopian, totalitarian dictatorship this human piece of shit imposed on his imprisoned citizens (who were restricted from legally exiting the country), but this page on traveling Turkmenistan gives you a very good taste of it.

It is fitting that the Internet-fabled "Door to Hell" (a natural gas fire that has raged for 40 years) is in Turkmenistan. How come we've heard all about Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein, but never Niyazov?

The Woman Who Was Arrested Because Of A Teddy Bear's Name

If you're ever in Sudan and you're in a spot where you are forced - through an unfathomable chain of circumstances extending from your current lot in life - to name a teddy bear, name it anything but "Muhammad"!

Gillian Gibbons, a schoolteacher from Liverpool, England, failed to follow this wise advice, and look what happened to her! In 2007, she got arrested for blasphemy against Islam, which could have drawn her six months in jail, a beating of 40 lashes, or a cash fine.

The outcome: She was eventually given a presidential pardon and returned to England. The school in Sudan has since been closed down because of public outcry and controversy over the matter.

Ten Idiotic Audience Consumer Reactions To Movies

Swingline had to manufacture a red stapler to meet demand after the release of Office Space.

The price of amber quadrupled after the release of Jurassic Park.

CB radio culture suffered an "Eternal September" after the release of Smokey and the Bandit.

Plumbing fixture stores remarked upon the decline in demand for showers after the release of Psycho.

Beach attendance went down after the release of Jaws.

Injuries and deaths from playing Russian Roulette spiked in 1981 after the release of The Deer Hunter.

Thousands of people wrote in demanding to know where they could buy a hoverboard after the release of Back To the Future.

Investment in plastics went up after the release of The Graduate.

The demand for caller ID tripled after the release of the film Scream.

And finally, demand for any breed of animal goes up after said animal is in a popular movie. (e.g. 101 Dalmatians)

UPDATE 5/19/12: For a recent example, Hundreds of pet owls were abandoned after Harry Potter movies stopped coming out.