I’ve been getting a few odd, cryptic messages on twitter from someone calling himself @spiritualgenome. I looked him up to figure out what the heck he was babbling about, and found his web page. Turns out he’s a crop circle nut, and you might find a few minutes amusement in his delusions.

Fascinating new discoveries by Russian molecular biologists have revealed that DNA has a mysterious resonance that has been termed the Phantom-DNA Effect. In addition these Russian researchers have found that DNA reacts to voice activated laser light when it is set at the specific frequency of the DNA itself. Using these methods it is possible not only to change the information patterns in the DNA, but it is also possible to communicate with the DNA.

This “phantom DNA” effect is all over the web, surprisingly: people claim that if you shine a laser through a solution of DNA, it scatters or resonates in some particular pattern that persists even after you remove the DNA. Guess what? While it’s a very popular subject on fringe websites hosted on cheap servers with crappy web design, it seems to be completely absent from the scientific literature.

Huh. Who would have guessed?

You might be wondering what it has to to do with crop circles. All will be explained in the following paragraph.

It seems that there is a divine intelligence in the DNA that is capable of resonating with the natural frequency of the earth in order to create crop circles. This divine intelligence is what the Hindus refer to as the Inner Self, and there are indications that the increase in crop circle activity in recent decades is set to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, at which point this divine intelligence in the DNA will become generally known to the world, thus ushering in a new era in 2012.

Ooooo-OOoOO-ooooh. Magic DNA, lasers, quantum physics, psychic powers, vibrations, crop circles, mystical Mayan calendars, and 2012 — it’s got everything. Total lunatic meltdown.

I just thought somebody who would throw together something this insane deserved a brief flurry of attention to his wacky webpage before I blocked him.

Gosh, when I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like much. But at least Dr Rachel Dunlop has won the Shorty Award in the Health category, beating out some quack. Congratulations!

Just recently, Stephen Fry achieved the landmark of one million followers on twitter (I have less than 1% of that). Apparently, that’s the threshold for achieving a personal singularity.

Apparently, twitter tracks hot trends in the tiny little conversations flying about, and the #1 hot topic today was “No God”. The amusing reason why is that someone posted that boring and fallacious cliche, “Know God…Know Peace. No God…No Peace”, a lot of Christians retweeted it, and a few atheists contributed to the confusion by saying “no god”, and that’s all it took to single out that one phrase and turn it into the top few words being bandied about.

Just to make it even more hilarious, various Christian twitterers (or whatever they call them) freaked out and started frantically submitting their magic mantra even more, which just blew it up even higher. And all the atheists are sitting back laughing and writing “no god” again!

Combine stupid text searches with a human feedback loop, and look at the silly behavior it can evoke.

James Hrynyshyn is completely missing the point. He has a post up where he tendentiously explains why twitter is evil, as if it should be a surprise. Why is the Pope Catholic? Why is the darkness dark? Why does Microsoft suck? These aren’t interesting questions: the point is that they are.

I have a Twitter account. I do not have a “My Little Pony” account. Think about it. Isn’t it quite probable that I would leap into this technology precisely because it has great potential for evil? Be seduced, and embrace the evil. It’s fun!

One hundred forty characters is exactly enough room for a “Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”, but not enough for lengthy monologuing, the bane of villain’s plans everywhere. It’s enough to leave vague hints that has everyone wondering and guessing to what, exactly, one is up. One can easily configure it so one is only receiving tweets from a tiny number of people, who can mostly be ignored, while sending tweets that distract thousands. It is a force multiplier that can turn trivia into terrifying rumors that reverberate across Tweetopia.

Come on. You don’t think a benign force would compel people to start using ridiculous terms like “tweet” and “twitter”, do you? It’s like “blog” — a monstrosity that can corrupt a whole language.

Clucking regretfully over the phenomenon did not stop the German Wehrmacht, nor did calling them brutally efficient. Same with Twitter. It’s evil. We’re celebrating that.