I've previously posted about the issue of placebo walk buttons -- that is, the widespread suspicion that the walk buttons at intersections don't have any effect on traffic lights. (There's also a separate theory that you can control the traffic lights by pushing the button in a special way.)

An article on canada.com addresses the issue of placebo buttons at some length. They insist the idea of placebo buttons is a myth (at least for the city of Victoria), and they interview a traffic planner to discover what really happens when the button is pushed:


Of course, many people insist on pushing the button even if it's already been pushed, in which case it isn't having any effect. Why do they do this?


(via Legends & Rumors)

Fake road signs have been popping up around Frankston, Australia, amusing some and outraging others. The signs are said to be the work of a "mystery artist." From the Frankston Leader:





It reminds me of the Fake Road Sign Project that artists conducted in Lyon, France back in 2004 (with the official endorsement of the Lyon city government). The Lyon Sign Project used to be online at bopano.net, but that link now appears to be dead. A few of the Lyon signs can still be seen here, here, and here.

Related post: Welcome to Detroit.

This looks like it would be a great place to visit.



It's Cinque Terre in Italy. Unfortunately, it's not quite so colorful in real life. (via City Comforts)

Local 6, an Orlando news station, recently conducted a "missing child experiment." They plastered posters all over a mall claiming that 8-year-old Britney Begonia was missing. Then they had Britney herself sit down alone a few feet from some of the signs. The question was: would anyone notice the poster and offer to help Britney?

The predictable result: Of the hundreds of people who walked past and saw the posters, only two stopped to ask Britney if she was OK. Many people, questioned later, said they noticed Britney's resemblance to the girl in the poster, but were "fearful of getting involved."

It's the unresponsive bystander effect, well known to social psychologists. People don't like sticking their neck out to get involved in a potentially uncomfortable situation, especially if no one else seems to be doing so.

I just realized that Local 6 is the same station that ran a similar experiment back in February that I posted about, in which they had an actor pretend to be a criminal breaking into a car, and filmed the non-response of bystanders on the streets. They evidently think unresponsive bystanders make for compelling news. And luckily for them, social psychologists have devised all kinds of situations in which to test the phenomenon, including the bystander response to arterial bleeding. So Local 6 shouldn't run out of material anytime soon.

Heraldnet.com (the newspaper of Snohomish County) recently ran this story:


When I saw this story I assumed either it had to be a joke, or the reporter had fallen for a prank. Kind of like when reporters are tricked into quoting "Haywood Jablome" as a source.

A "MILF" (for anyone unfamiliar with the term) is popular internet slang for any attractive older woman. By internet standards, that means any woman over the age of 25. It stands for "Mom I'd like to f***".

So a story about "Marci Milfs" being appalled by racy books has to be a joke. Right? Apparently not. It's just another example of an unfortunate last name. Marci Milfs seems to be a real person.

Officials at the Houston Zoo report that they're being inundated with thousands of phone calls as a result of a prank text message circulating via cell phone. From click2houston.com:


I think the message, translated from text speak into english, says: "Hey, why is someone calling me and looking for you and asking me where are you at, and where you live? Here's their number: 713 555 650. Tell them to stop calling me."

This is a new variant of the classic "phone the zoo" prank, which is one of the most popular April Fool's Day pranks of all time. Usually the prank involves tricking someone into calling the zoo and asking for "Mr Lion" or "Mr Fox". The prank used to be so popular that many zoos would have to shut down their switchboards on April 1st.

The prank is as old as telephones themselves, and actually traces back much further, deriving from the even older prank of fooling people into going to the Tower of London to see the "washing of the lions."

About two weeks ago a story started going around alleging that an Adolf Hitler doll, marketed to children, was being sold in the Ukraine. From the Daily Mail:


But now it seems that the reports of the Hitler Doll were a hoax. WikiNews reports:

In this video a surfer hitches a ride behind a shark, after getting the shark to swallow some chunks of meat attached to a fishing line. It looks like it was shot in southern California, and we do get some big sharks around here occasionally. Just last week a guy was killed off the coast of San Diego by a great white. But this video looks obviously fake. As many of the youtube comments point out, you can see the wake of a boat off camera in front of the shark fin.

I don't have any information about who made the video. At the end, the word "Notorious" appears on the screen, but I don't know who or what that is.

On November 9, 1874 the New York Herald reported that the wild animals had escaped from the Central Park Zoo. The article filled an entire page of the paper, and was topped by the dramatic headlines: "AWFUL CALAMITY. The Wild Animals Broken Loose from Central Park. TERRIBLE SCENES OF MUTILATION. A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death."

The article, after a slightly slow start, really hit its stride once it started to describe the carnage. Readers were treated to vivid descriptions of rhinos impaling people on their horns, lions tearing limbs off, and panthers attacking churchgoers. They just don't write news articles like that anymore.

But if you read through to the very end of the article (which was 10,000 words long), you encountered this disclaimer: "Of course the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true."

Most people didn't bother to read the entire article, and so mass panic ensued in the city. The next day the Herald claimed it had done the city a favor by drawing attention to the possibility of such a scene occurring if conditions weren't improved at the zoo.

The New York Zoo Escape is one of the more notorious hoaxes of the 19th century, and yet, to my knowledge, the text of the Herald's article has never been reprinted. So I resolved to change that. I found that San Diego State University had the Herald on microform, made a trip out there, copied the article, and typed it out. It took me longer than I anticipated, but it's done now. It's a pretty good read.

Some trivia about the Zoo Escape hoax: It was indirectly connected to the tradition of using an elephant as the symbol of the Republican party. I explain the connection fully in the hoaxipedia article.