Gravitational blink

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12.

I found out about this rumor, currently making the rounds on social media, from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  The whole thing apparently started with a video posted on Instagram by user @mr_danya_of; the video was subsequently removed, but not before it was reshared thousands of times, downloaded, and posted all over the place.  The claim is that there were gravitational waves emitted from two different black holes equidistant from the Earth, and that they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so where they intersect -- here, evidently -- they'll undergo destructive interference.  The result is that it will "cancel Earth's gravity" for the seven seconds it takes them to pass by us, and we all need to, I dunno, make sure everything is tied down securely or something, because otherwise it's going to cause huge amounts of death and destruction.

Whoo.  Okay.  Where do I start?

First of all, the information was alleged to come from NASA (of course), from something called "Project Anchor."  Which doesn't exist.  Of course, over at NASA they would say that, wouldn't they?  So let's move on to a few other, harder-to-argue-with objections.

Second, according to the General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, whereof nothing travels faster, remember?  So if there were gravitational waves headed toward us from a black hole (let alone two of them), we wouldn't have any way of knowing about it ahead of time.  Now, you might be thinking, what about the gravitational waves that have been detected by the interferometer array LIGO?  Well, there, we knew there were two neutron stars that had been orbiting each other and were about to merge, so all we had to do was watch until it happened.  (Okay, I'm making it sound simple; in practice it was a lot more complicated than this, but the point is we did have some advance warning in that case.)  Here, we just supposedly have black holes out there emitting gravitational waves for some undisclosed reason, and we've somehow found out about this eight months ahead of their arrival, which Einstein says is impossible, and on the whole I'm inclined to side with Einstein over "mr_danya_of."

Third, what was immediately obvious is that whoever is taking this seriously has no idea how destructive interference actually works.  Simply put, destructive interference occurs where two waves in the same medium intersect in such a way that the crest of one wave overlaps the trough of the other.  At that point, their amplitudes will cancel.  Here, supposedly these two gravitational waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, so they'd cancel completely wherever they intersect.

But if that happened, what we'd see is... nothing.  If the two waves did completely cancel, the result at that point would be an amplitude of zero.  In other words, they'd be undetectable.  This would not somehow "erase Earth's gravity."

Fourth, the Earth's diameter is about 0.04 light seconds, so if a gravitational wave or two passed across us, that's how long the effect would last.  How this person came up with seven seconds as a plausible time duration for something traveling at the speed of light, I have no idea.

Fifth, the gravitational field of the Earth at a given distance is dependent on only one thing: its mass.  As long as the Earth's mass doesn't change, the strength of the field won't, either, regardless how it's jostled by gravitational waves (or anything else).

Sixth, what the actual fuck?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AllenMcC., GravityPotential, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I mean, it's a good thing the Earth's gravity isn't going to disappear, even for seven seconds.  If you, unlike the people posting this story, passed high school physics, you may recall that the reason we're all happily glued to the Earth's surface is the pull of gravity -- and without it, Newton's First Law (an object experiencing no unbalanced forces continues at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant velocity) takes over.  We're all right now moving at a good clip -- at the Equator, about 1,670 kilometers an hour -- but our tendency to fly off is counterbalanced by the centripetal (center-pointing) pull of gravity.  If gravity suddenly disappeared, we'd continue moving at our original speed, but tangent to the circle we're currently traveling in.  The Earth, presumably unperturbed, would continue to rotate out from underneath us, and when the gravity switched back on seven seconds later, we (and everything else not moored) would come crashing back down.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for my own latitude, just shy of halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, and found that in seven seconds unsecured objects traveling tangent to the Earth's surface would end up about twenty centimeters up in the air.  Falling back to Earth from that height would be a bit of a jolt, and no doubt the sudden change in stress would damage some buildings, but it's far from the carnage mr_danya_of and others are claiming.

But to reassure you that you have no cause for concern, even in that regard... no, NASA isn't "94.7% certain" that the Earth's gravity is going to blink for seven seconds on August 12.  There is no such thing as Project Anchor.  Gravitational waves, and in fact waves in general, do not work this way.  We have far more important things to worry about right now, such as trying to figure out what country FIFA Peace Prize Winner Donald Trump is going to declare war on next.

If you see anyone posting hysterical nonsense about how NASA Admits We're All Gonna Die In August, you should definitely inform them that this is complete horseshit, and suggest that maybe at least reading the Wikipedia pages about the relevant physics concepts might be a good idea before publicly humiliating themselves by pretending they understand science.

So anyway, there you have it.  To the friend who sent me the link, thanks just bunches for further reducing my already-abysmal assessment of humanity's overall intelligence.  Me, I'm going to go back to fretting about real stuff.  Not that this is productive either, mind you.  But at least it's better than making shit up so you have additional imaginary stuff to fret about.

Even I am not that neurotic.

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The parasitic model

A couple of years ago, I posted a frustrated screed about the potential for AI-generated slop to supplant actual creativity.  My anger at the whole thing is based on the fact that I put a great deal of time, effort, and passion into my writing -- not only here, but in my fiction.  The idea that someone could use large language model software and a few well-chosen prompts to produce an eighty-thousand-word-long novel in a matter of minutes, while it takes me months (sometimes years) of steady hard work to create and refine something of equal length -- well, it's maddening.

Still, I've at least been encouraged by the fact that there are folks taking a stand about this, and not only writers like myself, but people in the publishing industry.  Software has been written to detect AI-generated prose, and while it's not flawless, it does at least an adequate job.  My friend J. Scott Coatsworth, an excellent writer in his own right, for several years ran a queer-themed flash fiction contest, and was dismayed and disheartened by the fact that during its last run, he used AI-detection software to check the submissions -- and disqualified ten of them (out of something like two hundred) on that basis.  

While this isn't a very high percentage, what strikes me here is how low the incentive was to cheat.  There was no cash prize; the winners got into an anthology and received a free copy of it, which was lovely, but hardly a bag full of gold.  And, most astonishingly, the maximum word count was three hundred words.  Now, mind you, I'm not saying it's easy to write a good story that short; but for fuck's sake, it's less than a page.

How lazy can you get?

AI is being sneakily inserted into everything.  Those of you with email through Google have probably noticed that now if there's a back-and-forth chain of emails, you get an AI "summary of the conversation" whether you want it or not.  (There might be a way to opt out, which I'll look into if I get much more pissed off by it.)  Just a couple of days ago, I was part of three-person electronic exchange with two people I work with, and was completely weirded out when I saw at the top of the thread, "You sympathized with (person 1) for being sick, and both you and (person 2) said it was no problem, that you'd both cover for her and make sure her work got done in her absence, and to get well soon."

Thanks, Google AI, but I don't need my sympathies summarized.  Nor anything else I've emailed people about.  This is way too close to a stranger reading my private correspondence for my comfort.

Not that anything is private on the internet.

The problem has extended into other realms of writing, too.  Wikipedia has become so infested with AI-written articles -- with their attendant problem of "hallucinations," which is tech-speak for "fabricated bullshit" -- that the people running it put together WikiProject AI Cleanup, a program used to detect AI/LLM-generated articles based on common patterns in the writing style.

There's the often-cited issue with AI's fondness for em-dashes, but there are lots of other giveaways, too.  AI-generated prose often uses fulsome adjectives like "breathtaking" and "foundational" and "pivotal."  It's also fond of participial phrases at the end of sentences -- "... symbolizing the region's commitment to innovation."

Syntactic analysis of a simple sentence as done by a large language model [Image licensed under the Creative Commons DancingPhilosopher, Multiple attention heads, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But now, a tech entrepreneur named Siqi Chen has created an open-source plug-in for Anthropic's "Claude Code AI Assistant" that used the WikiProject's list of red flags as a starting point -- so that Claude Code can learn to write less like AI and more like a real person, and slip past the AI detectors.

Chen named his plug-in "The Humanizer."

What really torques me is how breezy Chen is about the whole thing.  "It’s really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X.  "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to … not do that."

Maybe Chen and his ilk wouldn't be so fucking flippant about it if he were one us writers struggling to get our quarterly royalty checks out of the double digits.  AI is trained on human-created writing -- without a dime's worth of compensation for the actual authors, and tech companies fighting tooth and nail to make sure they can continue to rip us off for free -- as well as AI-generated slop taking a share of the space in the already-narrow publishing market.  

Funny how these issues of morality and intellectual property rights never bother the techbros as long as their own bank accounts are fat and happy.  It's a parasitic model for business, and people like Chen are no more likely to put the brakes on than a tick is likely to ask a dog for permission to bite.

The whole thing has become an arms race.  Good-faith publishers and consumers of written work try to figure out how to detect AI-generated prose, so the techbros respond by springboarding off that to find newer and better ways to evade detection.  We find new ways to shut it off, they find new places to insert it into our lives.  Here in the United States, the situation is only going to get worse; the current regime has a "deregulate everything" approach, because we all know how well corporations self-limit out of ethical considerations.

*brief pause to stop rolling my eyes*

So I'll end this post the way I've ended damn near every post I've done on AI.  Until there are regulations in place to protect the intellectual property of creative people, and to protect consumers from potentially dangerous "hallucinated" content, stop using AI.  Yes, I know it can create pretty pictures that are fun to post on social media.  Yes, I know you can use it to generate cool artwork to hang on your wall -- or for the cover of your book.  Yes, I know it makes writing stuff quicker and easier.  But at the moment, the damage far outweighs the benefits, and as we've seen over and over, tech companies are not going to address the concerns unless they have no choice.

The only option is for consumers to strangle it at its source.

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On the loosh

There's a general rule-of-thumb that if you are trying to get people to believe some outlandish idea, you do not increase your chances of success by altering it to make it even more outlandish.  If, for example, your particular shtick is that the Earth is a flat disk, you will not sound more plausible by adding that it was put in motion by the god Frisbeus, and during the End Times the Devil will alter its orbit so it gets stuck up on the Celestial Roof.

This goes double if you give your idea a silly name.  Frisbeeterianism, for example.

This is a rule-of-thumb that the UFO/UAP crowd seem not to have taken to heart, given an article I've now been sent three times by well-meaning loyal readers of Skeptophilia, to the effect that the rumor now circulating amongst "whistleblowers" is that the aliens are using the Earth as a "misery farm," getting things set up so as to generate maximum despair, because they feed off negative emotional energy.

Called "loosh."

Apparently loosh has been around for a while, originating in 1985 with a dude named Robert Monroe who was seriously into out-of-body experiences.  Monroe, however, envisioned loosh as nice stuff; the "essence of universal love."  This kind of energy (using the latter term in its non-scientific sense), Monroe said, is nourishing to the soul, and therefore our benevolent alien overlords want us to produce as much as possible, then share the stuff around.

It bears keeping in mind, however, that Monroe also wrote a book about visiting "The Park," which is the Reception Center for heaven, where spirits go immediately after death to recuperate for a while.  How Monroe got there without dying first is an open question, so we're kind of in deep water right off the bat.

In any case, loosh got picked up by conspiracy theorist David Icke, and that's where things took a darker turn.  Because, after all, you can't have a good conspiracy theory based on a plot to make everyone really nice to each other, whether aliens are involved or not.  Icke claimed that Monroe had misinterpreted loosh; it's not the essence of love, it's actually a negative spiritual energy generated when people are miserable.  In Icke's view, the Earth is a prison planet, and our alien masters want us to be upset, because then they have more food to eat, or something.

I have to admit that as a model, this works surprisingly well.  The last ten years have been not only a non-stop shitshow, but off-the-register weird.  It would explain a lot if there are superpowerful aliens who are just fucking with us.  I mean, the other option is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are some kind of naturally-occurring phenomenon, and I don't know about you, but for me that stretches credibility to the snapping point.

But one thing I'll give the alien overlords: if there really is a plot to make every smart person on Earth extremely depressed, so far it's working brilliantly.

In any case, apparently there are now UFO Truthers out there who not only want the government to 'fess up about alien spacecraft sightings, but also to admit that the government is in league with the aliens to keep us all trapped in the Slough of Despond.  In some versions, the elected officials themselves are alien shapeshifters (in the case of Stephen Miller, the shape honestly hasn't shifted much).  In other versions, they're just collaborators who are hoping the aliens will keep them in power so the feast can continue.

What's vaguely unsettling about all this -- I mean, besides the fact that there are people who take it seriously -- is that this is strangely close to the plot of my novel, Eyes Like Midnight.

In this novel, the Earth is being invaded by the Black-eyed Children, who are evil aliens that can take the form of human children (although they can't manage the eyes for some reason, which come out a solid, glossy black).  The Children kidnap humans because they feed on cognitive energy -- so for them, the eight-billion-odd people on the planet are basically an all-you-can-eat buffet.  There's even been infiltration of the government with humans who are under mind control, and who are acting as collaborators to allow the Children to take over (and thwarting the heroic few who are fighting back).

It's a really good story, and you all should buy it right now.  But let me just emphasize one thing about Eyes Like Midnight:

It is a work of fiction.

Like, I made the story up from beginning to end.  It's based on an urban legend that's been around for a while, but that, too, is fiction.

Given all that, I'm inclined to think that "Earth as misery-producing prison planet" is as well.

Or, who knows?  Maybe I'm one of the collaborators myself, and by writing this I'm just trying to sow doubt in your mind.  Maybe the whole fifteen-year history of this blog has, all along, been one elaborate exercise in misdirection.  Each time I post here, I cackle maniacally and wiggle my fingertips in a menacing fashion, just delighted at how many people I'm bamboozling with all this nonsense about "science" and "skepticism" and "rationality."

When the reality is that the Earth is actually shaped like a donut.  With sprinkles.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I think I need to go lie down for a while.  You can only exude so much loosh before you start feeling a little light-headed.

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Remembrance of things past

Almost all of us implicitly trust our own memories.

Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced.  Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past.  In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication.  And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.

It all feels true.

If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:

We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself.  As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool.  Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool.  That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it.  But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did.  I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen.  Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?"  Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.

But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake.  It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body.  It had been Elizabeth's aunt.  And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.

So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative.  They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.

Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."

In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects.  Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive.  Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors.  Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive.  People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over.  Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad.  Some committed suicide.

Some simply... vanished.

The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it.  The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game.  Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.

There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently.  There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:

Polybius never existed.  Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one.  Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DocAtRS, Polybius Arcade 1 cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But hard evidence of the real deal?  Zero.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

So what happened here?

Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend."  Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure.  There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines.  There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves.  And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.

Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.

It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it?  This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.

Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?"  Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for.  The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false.  Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are.  It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.

That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless.  They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong. 

How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened!  I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly?  Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate.  What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.

I know this is kind of a terrifying thing.  Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories.  To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin.  But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true?  He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.

Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue.  Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.  

So, how accurate is our view of the past?

No way to tell.  Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.

And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception.  We're built like this -- like it or not.

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The gates of heaven and hell

Like many people my age, I recall vividly when Carl Sagan's series Cosmos first aired.  I was in my late teens, and I and my friends eagerly gathered each week to discuss the details of the latest episode. 

There was a lot to talk about.  The exquisite choices for accompanying music, the stunning visuals (which have held up amazingly well, despite being almost fifty years old), and most of all, the mind-bending science.  But one episode took a darker turn, and to this day I recall the impact it had on me.

It was called "Heaven and Hell," and focused on the contrast between the Earth (heaven) and neighboring Venus (hell).  It opens, though, with a sequence about something that happened in June 1908 -- the "Tunguska event," in which either a fragment of a comet or a small asteroid hit the Earth near the Tungus River in Siberia, flattening trees radially outward for miles around and creating a shock wave that registered on seismographs in London.  Back then, there were no bombs capable of such an enormous blast, so no one doubted that it was an amazingly powerful, but natural, event.

However, by 1980, when Cosmos aired, nuclear proliferation was a dark cloud that hung over the entire world.  Sagan had the following to say:

There was no warning until [the Tunguska impactor] plunged into the atmosphere.  If such an explosion happened today, it might be thought, in the panic of the moment, to be produced by a nuclear weapon.  Such a cometary impact and fireball simulates all the effects of a fifteen-megaton nuclear burst, including the mushroom cloud, with one exception: there would be no radiation.  So could a rare but natural event, the impact of a comet with Earth, trigger a nuclear war?

It's a strange scenario: a small comet hits the Earth, as millions have during Earth's history, and the response of our civilization is promptly to self-destruct.

That kind of unthinking, irrational reactiveness seems to be hardwired into our brains.

It is horrifying to think about, but the awful truth is that when something terrible happens, something over which we have no control, the immediate impulse many have is to look around for someone to blame -- and then to strike back.  Consider, for example, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, an 8.0-magnitude megathrust quake that struck the southeastern coast of the island of Honshu.  It killed an estimated 105,000 people, most of them due to tsunamis and the enormous fires that broke out following the initial quake.  (Even so, it doesn't make the top ten list of the deadliest earthquakes on record.)  Half of Tokyo and nearly all of Yokohama were destroyed, and over two million people were left homeless.

Ruins of the Nihonbashi District of Tokyo following the earthquake [Image is in the Public Domain]

The astonishing thing about the Kantō Earthquake, though, is what happened afterward.

The dust had hardly settled, the last fires put out, when rumors began to circulate that looters, especially ethnic Korean and Chinese residents, had taken advantage of the chaos to rob survivors and pillage the wreckage of homes and businesses.  Nationalist, pro-Japanese fervor soared.  With the tacit approval of the government, military, and police, vigilantes launched attacks on majority Korean and Chinese neighborhoods in what was framed as retaliation.

In what is now known as the Kantō Massacre, an estimated six thousand more people were killed, including some ethnic Japanese victims who either tried to defend their Korean and Chinese neighbors, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Ultimately, seven hundred people were arrested for the murders, but the majority of them received light sentences or were acquitted.

We can look at this through the lens of a hundred years of time, but those same impulses are still with us.  When something goes wrong in our own lives -- either something pervasive like economic hardship, job insecurity, or medical problems, or something sudden and acute like a natural disaster -- we look around for someone to blame.  We're not doing well?  Must be the immigrants, the brown-skinned people, the people who belong to another religion (or no religion at all), the LGBTQ+ people, the poor people on the dole.  The real social issues that caused the problem (or in the case of natural disasters, worsened their impact) -- staggering wealth inequity, corrupt and authoritarian governments that line the pockets of the ultra-rich, loud-mouthed "influencers" who manipulate their listeners by inflaming hatred, intolerance, and bigotry -- seldom get much attention.

It's easier to target a scapegoat than it is to effect real change.

So it doesn't take a comet impact to make humanity do its damndest to self-destruct.  All it takes is a crisis.

We're in precarious times now, when the powers-that-be are pulling out all the stops to keep our focus away from the actual issues.  I've been scared and discouraged by a lot of what has happened in the last six months, but at the same time heartened by the steadfastness and bold courage of a great many who have refused to be cowed.  I hope we can continue to speak up for what is right, and that the darkness many of us see ahead turns out to be only a passing shadow, a door into brighter, more peaceful times.

Still, I want to end with one more quote from Sagan, which it would be good for all of us to keep in mind as a cautionary note.  "The gates of heaven and hell are adjacent... and unmarked."

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Eye on the sky

In the brilliant, mind-bending dark comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh plays (to absolute perfection) the laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang, who finds that the universe has been shattered into hundreds of parallel time streams, and her job is to get all of reality back on the rails.

Along the way, Evelyn discovers that in these different timelines, she had many other possible fates, including a martial arts master, an award-winning dancer, and an acclaimed movie star.  At one point she asks why she (the laundromat-owner version) is being asked to save the universe, and receives the hilarious answer that of all the possible Evelyns, she is the one who is the biggest failure.

So basically, whatever she decides to do, there's no way she can fuck things up any worse.

Oh, and the wonderful Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu also have fantastic roles, and Jamie Lee Curtis just about steals the show as an absolutely fed-up IRS agent named (I shit you not) Deirdre Beaubeirdre.

If you haven't seen it, put it on your list immediately.  It's that good.

The reason it comes up is that I have to wonder if we're all actually trapped in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  Just in the last couple of days, Donald Trump threw a major temper tantrum because people are telling him he can't have Greenland to play with.  Trump's response to everything is always one of three things: belligerent social media posts, lawsuits, and tariffs.  He selected the last-mentioned, threatening tariffs against any nation that sides with Denmark and Greenland, because there's nothing like raising the price of imported goods paid by your own citizens to make a point with the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, that point seems to be summed up in psychologist Abraham Maslow's pithy line, "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

If you needed another example of how ridiculous things have gotten, look no further than my home state of Louisiana, which recently enacted a law establishing an agency (a branch of the Department of Environmental Quality) to handle reports about "weather modification."  How ordinary, untrained laypeople would recognize weather modification if they saw it is an open question, but that hasn't stopped them from making hundreds of reports, because apparently a founding principle of the United States is (to swipe Isaac Asimov's phrase) "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge."

So I had a look at a few of them.  And...

... yikes.

One from my hometown of Lafayette describes "multiple chemtrails crisscrossing the sky."  Another, from New Iberia, says (and I quote), "There was a large fog that covered New Iberia within the past few weeks; materials (nanochip/bacteria) were dropped into the fog causing parasitic infections (per a medical source).  Who is authorized to poison citizens?"  Then there was the one from Covington, which I reproduce here verbatim, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

I haven't noticed especially this past Sunday and Monday on a clear sky clear blue sky.  Small Plains will appear.  This is not the first time there's several up to three and they will make a Chris cross pattern in the sky, admitting white substance and it clouds the sky when they're done the sky is cloudy before it was a clear sky.  I don't know what they're admitting.  I don't know who's doing it.  I don't know who's paying for it.  I don't know why it's being done, but I want answers to all of my questions because of this should not be happening in Saint Tammany Parish and it happens all the time.

Then, from Thibodaux we have:

Obvious they are not naturally occurring clouds but remnants of the last spray.  They take hours to dissipate where regular jet trails disappear immediately.  Also the rippling effect caused clearly by frequency emission should be looked into.  Hmmmm wonder what towers emit those.

Last, we have the guy from Lake Charles who said that there were chemtrails all over the place, and he would be happy to show anyone who was willing to come to his house, but first, visitors must prove that they are"not robots."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Weather Service]

Okay, let me just make a few clarifications for any yo-yos who think all this makes sense.

The combustion of jet fuel produces two main waste products: carbon dioxide and water vapor.  When water vapor is released into the (cold) upper air layers, it condenses into a line of tiny water droplets called a contrail.  How long it takes a contrail to dissipate and/or evaporate depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, windspeed, turbulence, and humidity.

In particular: the higher the humidity, the slower the evaporation.  And the air down in Louisiana is really fucking humid.

I grew up there, remember?

Also, allow me to point out that if there was some sort of nefarious program to poison U.S. citizens, adding toxins (or nanochips and bacteria) to jet fuel so that the remnants in the exhaust would settle, and then hoping the right people would be outside to breathe in the Bad Stuff and die, has to be the all-time stupidest idea I've ever heard.  Despite this, these wingnuts filing all the reports seem to picture a bunch of Boris-and-Natasha-style villains mwah-hah-hahing and gleefully rubbing their hands together over what a brilliant and devious plot this is.

Although now that I come to think of it, this is actually not a bad comparison.  Chemtrails are about as plausible a superweapon as Goof Gas, which was Boris's invention that (if inhaled) makes the victim suddenly much stupider.  (It didn't work on Bullwinkle, you might recall, because he was already so stupid there was nowhere else to go.  A little like the people filing all these reports.)

What galls me the most about the chemtrails agency, though, is that every single one of these claims has to be investigated by agents who are getting paid by taxpayer money that could be used for something more worthwhile, which is, oh, just about anything.  Say, the education system, so the next generation grows up smart enough to know that "frequency emissions" don't create clouds.

Me, I'm torn between laughing and flipping my desk.  I don't know how Evelyn Quan Wang managed to keep her sanity, but I'm getting worn out from living in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  I mean, I guess you have to try and find some humor in it, like the guy who posted the pic of Donald Trump as a crying, messy-faced toddler in a high chair, and his mother is saying to him, "No, Donald, you can't have any Greenland until you've finished your Venezuela."

But at the moment, I'm just shaking my head over the whole thing.  Maybe I can appeal to Michelle Yeoh to help out.  If she's not up to the task, I'll settle for Rocky and Bullwinkle.

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Renaissance

It's easy to get beaten down by the constant barrage of bad news.

This effect is amplified if you, like me, suffer from anxiety and depression on good days.  All I have to do is spend a while reading the headlines, or (worse) hanging out on social media, and I start catastrophizing.  Everything is awful.  The bad guys always win.  We're all doomed.

I can spiral down that whirlpool really quickly, while at the same time knowing that it's not true.  A wise friend once told me, "The biggest lie that depression tells you is that the lows are permanent."  Yes, there are some very bad things happening right now.  But it is possible to hold that in your mind at the same time as believing there's still hope for the future.  I can agree with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and still wish it would bend a hell of a lot faster.

It's why I post here every day, and (mostly) focus on the positive, or at least the intriguing, rather than writing about the current political horror show day after day.  I do believe in speaking up for truth, fairness, and compassion, and decrying their opposites -- and I have done.  But I've found that it's equally important to find things that give us hope.  There is good news out there, and people are still doing lovely, kind, interesting, important, and wonderful things.

Sometimes those little sparks of hope come from odd quarters.  Which brings us to the Dover Twist.

It sounds like some sort of obscure English country dance, but it's not.  It's a species of moth native to southern England, Periclepsis cinctana, a little brown-and-white creature with a wingspan of only a bit over a centimeter.

It's an extreme habitat specialist, requiring chalk grasslands, which have largely been cleared for building.  And as we've seen over and over, when conditions change -- especially with human disturbance -- the specialists always get hit first and hardest.

So it was with the Dover Twist.  Although related populations still persist in mainland Europe, and a small relic on the island of Tiree off the northwest coast of Scotland, the last individual in its original habitat of southeastern England was seen in 1953.  Attempts to relocate it failed, and it was declared extirpated.

Until a couple of months ago, when conservation ecologist Rebecca Levey discovered a thriving population of them on a downland in Lydden Temple Ewell Nature Reserve, northwest of Dover.

"I was absolutely blown away," Levey said.  "It's the kind of discovery you dream of making, but you never expect it to actually happen.  With so many butterflies and moths in trouble across the UK, it’s fantastic to find this tiny little species bucking the trend.  After a 73 year gap in sightings, I'm so pleased to share that we now know it is still in Kent and I'm sure it'll be keeping me busy in the near future as we begin the task of uncovering the exact habitat it needs as part of Butterfly Conservation's work helping to save our most threatened moths."

The unexpected renaissance of this species is not only lovely news in general, but gives hope that some other species thought extinct -- especially ones like the Thylacine and Ivory-billed Woodpecker, that live(d) in remote and poorly-explored regions -- might still persist.  (Both of those, in fact, have been the subject of repeated sighting reports, but thus far, nothing that convinces the skeptics.  The search continues.)

I'm not sure why this story cheered me up as much as it did.  The Dover Twist is certainly not what my ecology professor called one of the "charismatic megafauna," something that'd be likely to end up featured in a calendar entitled "Majestic Wildlife."  But that this little insect survived undetected, virtually under our noses, is a symbol that things can turn out well.

The good guys do win sometimes.  Even if in this case, the good guys are a British ecologist and a minuscule brown-and-white moth.  Maybe it's not a dramatic victory, the kind that would make headlines, but it does give me a little boost of hope.

And this morning, that's enough to go on.

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