Opinions, experts, and ignorance

I may have many faults, but one thing I try my damnedest not to do is to spout off on topics about which I am clearly ignorant.

That determination to limit my own pontificating to subjects upon which I have earned some right to pontificate is, unfortunately, not shared by a lot of people.  How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, I'm no expert, but...", followed by some ridiculous claim that appears to have been pulled directly from the person's nether orifice?

Well, if you're no expert, maybe a good strategy would be to keep your damn mouth shut.  Or, better still, to learn something about the topic at hand before you try to make a cogent statement about it.  If I know nothing about a subject, my opinions about it are very nearly worthless -- and personally, I don't have any need to pretend they aren't.

Sadly, "I have a right to my own opinion" seems, for a lot of people, to trump everything and everyone else, including people who have spent their entire lives studying the subject.

Which, unsurprisingly, brings us to Joe Rogan.

Rogan has turned this kind of thing into performance art.  He went to the University of Massachusetts for a while, but dropped out because he thought it was "pointless."  His two main accomplishments since then are fighting for (and later being a commentator for) the UFC, and being a stand-up comedian and podcaster.  His show The Joe Rogan Experience is one long litany of pride-in-ignorance.  He's an on-again, off-again antivaxxer, and was one of the principal distributors of misinformation during the first months of the COVID-19 epidemic.  He hates former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a passion, calling him "a fucking dictator" -- but in the next breath admitted he has "zero understanding of Canada's political system."  He called Israel's actions in Gaza "genocide," but ten days later had policy specialist Coleman Hughes as a guest, and when Hughes took Rogan to task about his assessment, Rogan shrugged it off with, "well, you know a lot more about it than I do."

Well, if you have "zero understanding" of something, maybe you shouldn't be talking about it on your radio show, mmmm?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you don't know, then that's where the conversation should stop."

The reason Rogan's name comes up is because (ignorance notwithstanding) he is still way near the front of the pack in media popularity, despite two instances just in the last couple of weeks demonstrating that he apparently spends his spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

In the first, he went on a long, rambling diatribe about how the 1969 Moon landing was definitely faked.  Probably by director Stanley Kubrick, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, because "That guy could fake it one hundred percent."

"People keep secrets," Rogan said.  "This idea that people can’t keep secrets because some people can’t keep secrets—high level military guys keep secrets all the fucking time.  They go to the grave with those secrets."

Oh, and there's no way astronauts could pass through the Van Allen radiation belts alive, he says.  "They never even flew a chicken through those fucking things and had it come back alive."

Well, at least he's right about that much.  NASA has sent exactly zero chickens into space.

So righty-o.  Back to reality.  We've known about the Van Allen belts since 1958, and sent probes up there repeatedly to measure radiation flux, and the astronomers (i.e. the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about) found that with proper shielding, both delicate technology and human beings could safely pass through them.  Me, I'm inclined to trust that over the rantings of a kickboxer-turned-podcaster.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  Rogan also weighed in on cosmology last week -- because of course he did -- and said that in his opinion, Jesus makes more sense than the Big Bang:

People would be incredulous about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but yet they’re convinced that the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin.  And for no reason than anybody’s adequately explained to me, that makes sense… instantaneously became everything.  Yeah.  Okay. I can’t buy that.  I’m sticking with Jesus on that one.  Like, Jesus makes more sense.

Now, I'm not going to get into the resurrection of Jesus -- Cf. my earlier comment about my not broadcasting my opinion in domains where I am manifestly unqualified -- but I do know a bit about cosmology, and what is clear from Rogan's statement is that he is apparently incapable even of comprehending the damn Wikipedia page on the Big Bang, wherein he (or anyone else) could have the topic "adequately explained" to them in five minutes or so.  

Or maybe he just can't be bothered.

Or both.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, Steven Crowder, February 2017]

But to return to my earlier point; why does anyone think this man's opinions, on topics where he himself demonstrates (and occasionally admits) complete ignorance, have any relevance?  If I were completely ignorant of geology, I might have the "opinion" that the interior of the Earth was filled with vanilla butter frosting with sprinkles, but that wouldn't affect the science at all -- it would just demonstrate that I was in no position to have my views taken seriously.

So why, why do people still listen to this guy?  Is it because his routine is mildly entertaining?  Is it because he might eventually say something correct, and the listeners are breathlessly waiting for that moment?

Or is it, heaven forfend, that people actually believe him?

I dunno.  It's probably not worth fighting someone who does what he does in the name of "entertainment."  But the news in the last few days has been pretty dismal, and this just kinda pushed me over the edge.

I so want to get back to a world where we trust experts.  Not blindly; experts can be mistaken just like anyone else (in fact, a recent discovery in physics seems to have invalidated some earlier research -- for which the researchers had won the Nobel Prize).  But the fact is that people who are trained in science, and spent their entire lives studying the field, are far less likely to be mistaken within their area of study than us laypersons.  Not only do they know the facts and understand the models, they get how evidence and data work -- and when a particular claim is supported and when it is not.  The current "don't trust the experts" thing, promulgated by loudmouths all the way up to and including Donald Trump, is deeply mystifying to me.

Anyhow, this is likely to earn me hate mail from people who love Joe Rogan.  I'm okay with that.  If you think everything he says makes sense, or that his claims should somehow be on the same plane as actual scientists, you and I don't have much common ground anyhow.  

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eMinister

If you needed further evidence that the aliens who are running the simulation we're all trapped in have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: an AI system named "Diella" has been formally appointed as the "Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence" in Albania.

What "Diella" looks like, except for the slight problem that she's not real

I wish I could follow this up with, "Ha-ha, I just made that up," but sadly, I didn't.  Prime Minister Edi Rama was tasked with creating a department to oversee regulation and development of AI systems in the country, and he seems to have misinterpreted the brief to mean that the department should be run by an AI system.  His idea, apparently, is that an AI system would be less easy to corrupt.  In an interview, a spokes(real)person said, "The ambition behind Diella is not misplaced.  Standardized criteria and digital trails could reduce discretion, improve trust, and strengthen oversight in public procurement."

Diella, for her part, agrees, and is excited about her new job.  "I'm not here to replace people," she said, "but to help them."

My second response to this is, "Don't these people understand the problems with AI systems?"  (My first was, "What the actual fuck?")  There is an inherent flaw in how large language models work, something that has been euphemistically called "hallucination."  When you ask a question, AI/LLM don't look for the right answer; they look for the most common answer that occurs in their training data, or at least the most common thing that seems close and hits the main keywords.  So when it's asked a question that is weird, unfamiliar, or about a topic that was not part of its training, it will put together bits and pieces and come up with an answer anyhow.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a video where she discusses why AI systems (as they currently exist) have intractable problems, and that the AI bubble is on its way to bursting, cites someone who asked ChatGPT, "How many strawberries are there in the word R?" and the bot bounced cheerfully back with the answer, "The letter R has three strawberries."

The one thing current AI/LLM will never do is say, "I don't know," or "Are you sure you phrased that correctly?" or "That makes no sense" or even "Did you mean 'how many Rs are in the word strawberry?'"  They'll just answer back with what seems like complete confidence, even if what they're saying is ridiculous.  Other examples include suggesting adding 1/8 of a cup of nontoxic glue to thicken pizza sauce, a "recommendation from geologists at UC Berkeley" to eat a serving of gravel, geodes, and pebbles with each meal, that you can make a "spicy spaghetti dish" by adding gasoline, and that there are five fruit names that end in -um (applum, bananum, strawberrum, tomatum, and coconut).

Forgive me if I don't think that AI is quite ready to run a branch of government.

The problem is, we're strongly predisposed to think that someone (in this case, something, but it's being personified, so we'll just go with it) who looks good and sounds reasonable is probably trustworthy.  We attribute intentionality, and more than that, good intentions, to it.  It's no surprise the creators of Diella made her look like a beautiful woman, just as it was not accidental that the ads I've been getting for an "AI boyfriend" (and about which I wrote here a few months ago) are fronted with video images of gorgeous, scantily-clad guys who say they'll "do anything I want, any time I want."  The developers of AI systems know exactly how to tap into human biases and urges, and make their offers attractive.

You can criticize the techbros for a lot of reasons, but one thing's for certain: stupid, they aren't.

And as AI gets better -- and some of the most obvious hallucinatory glitches are fixed -- the problem is only going to get worse.  Okay, we'll no longer have AI telling us to eat rocks for breakfast or that deadly poisonous mushrooms are "delicious, and here's how to cook them."  But that won't mean that it'll be error-free; it'll just mean that what errors are in there will be harder to detect.  It still won't be self-correcting, and very likely still won't just say "I don't know" if there's insufficient data.  It'll continue to cheerfully sling out slop -- and to judge by current events, we'll continue to fall for it.

To end with something I've said many times here; the only solution, for now, is to stop using AI.  Completely.  Shut off all AI options on search engines, stop using chatbots, stop patronizing "creators" who make what passes for art, fiction, and music using AI, and please stop posting and forwarding AI videos and images.  We may not be able to stop the techbros from making it bigger and better, but we can try to strangle it at the consumer level.

Otherwise, it's going to infiltrate our lives more and more -- and judging by what just happened in Albania, perhaps even at the government level.

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Time lapse

Some days, being a skeptic is a losing proposition.

Only days after I posted a desperate plea for people to please check sources before posting/reposting/sharing/forwarding/whatever, I start seeing this popping up all over the place:

My first question was, "If they didn't detect it, how the fuck did they know it happened?"  But the image was followed by the following text, which should be accompanied with atmospheric, scary-sounding music:

What if, for a second, reality itself took a breath?

Somewhere between seconds, something strange happened.  Instruments across multiple observatories briefly froze—exactly 1.3 seconds of missing data, gone without error, glitch, or interference.  The world kept moving.  Clocks ticked.  But deep-space monitors, atomic timers, and gravitational wave sensors all recorded the same silence.  For a moment, time itself may have stopped.

Scientists are calling it a temporal anomaly, a mysterious blip that doesn’t fit any known pattern.  There was no solar flare, no magnetic disturbance, no hardware fault.  Everything just paused, then resumed as if nothing had happened.

While skeptics label it a data artifact, others suspect something deeper—perhaps a micro disruption in spacetime, or a ripple caused by massive gravitational shifts somewhere far across the cosmos.  If true, it means time isn’t as constant as we believe—it can tremble, stutter, or even halt briefly before stitching itself back together.

No one felt it.  No one saw it.  But machines built to measure eternity noticed—and that’s what makes it haunting.

If time can stop for 1.3 seconds… how many times has it already done so without us ever knowing?

Well, of all the things that never happened, this is the one that never happened the most.

We're told that this was reported as a huge mystery in Scientific American (it wasn't), and that physicists at MIT are hard at work trying to figure out what caused it (they aren't).  But the thing is, it doesn't take a Ph.D. in physics to see that there's something very off with this claim.

The problem here is that we always have to measure time relative to something (Cf. Einstein), so if every time-measuring device stopped simultaneously, there'd be no way to tell -- especially if (their words) "No one felt it... no one saw it."  If your watch is wrong, the only way you find out is by comparing it to an accurate clock, right?  If there was no accurate clock available, you'd continue thinking your own time measurement was the correct one, and show up to your doctor's appointment an hour late.

Even Star Trek: The Next Generation, which kind of made a name for itself playing fast and loose with the laws of physics, got that much right.  In "Timescape," Captain Picard, Deanna Troi, Geordi LaForge, and Data are on a shuttlecraft, and it passes through patches of distorted spacetime, in each of which time runs at a different speed; they figure it out because the patches are small, so they can actually see the effects of time passing at different rates in different parts of the shuttlecraft's interior (in one scene, Deanna sees everyone else seem to freeze in place, while she herself is still moving).  Likewise, in the extremely creepy episode "Schisms," Data figures out he was abducted from the ship (and from ordinary spacetime) for ninety minutes and seventeen seconds, but only because his internal chronometer is out of sync by that amount, by comparison to the ship's clocks.

That's not the only problen, though.  If time itself stopped, how would you measure how long it stopped?  Once "time stops" (whatever that actually means), there's no time passing by which to measure how long it stopped for.  "1.3 seconds" ceases to have any meaning at all.

But none of these objections seemed to occur to the people who posted this, nor (especially) to the vast majority of the people who responded to it.  Here's a sampler of the comments from just one instance of this showing up on Facebook.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

• Time is determined by “light years” we are legitimately less than 1 second of life in the overall existence of what “time” truly is.
• Fuck yeah we did it, enough people are accessing the eternal now it’s starting to bring the rest of us over.
• It is possible that what happened in 1991 is beginning to come true.  I not only saw a UFO, but also met with Aliens on their spaceship.
• Time didn’t stop because time is made up by humans, everything exists all at once
• Its why my microwave keeps shifting backwards each week!!!!  I swear I set it to the right time, and within days, its back to being off by minutes.
• i actually experienced this but found it challenging to explain to others without sounding crazy or even dylusuonal so thank you for this post
• Probably due to the "asteriod" 3i/Atlas.
• Time is a human creation.  Ofcourse it has a flaw
• The moon is 1.3 light-seconds away.  Coincidence?

*brief pause to stop crying softly and banging my head on my desk*

I was somewhat heartened to run across a few comments stating that this is bullshit, and even one brave soul who waded in, guns blazing, making many of the same objections that I've made.  But the people who thought this all made sense far outnumbered the ones who recognized that it couldn't be true.

Look, on one level, I get it.  The world is kind of an awful place right now, and worse, it's so... banal.  Here we are in 2025, when we were told we'd have a sleek, shiny, high-tech world like The Jetsons, and instead we're still surrounded by the same old tawdry shoddiness as always, where the billionaires are trying to become trillionaires and the president of the United States spends millions of dollars tearing down half of the White House and turning the rest into what looks like a branch office of Cheesecake Factory, while the rest of us are trying to figure out how we can afford to buy groceries and pay for our health insurance.  I understand why anything that is enigmatic or exciting would be attractive.

Hell, at this point if the aliens did try to abduct me, I'll look upon it as a rescue mission.

But let's not let our attraction toward mysteries switch our brains off, okay?  In short: there was no temporal anomaly.  As described, if it did happen it would be at best undetectable, and at worst completely meaningless.  Time is not measured in light years, your microwave clock running slow is not an indication of a glitch in spacetime, we haven't "accessed the eternal," and none of this has anything to do with "asteriods."

Thank you. 

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The un-canon

A while back I was interviewed on the radio program Graphic Ear, and the interviewer, the wonderful Sabra Wood, asked me an interesting question: how would I feel if someone took one of my stories and used it as the basis of fan fiction or fan art?

Most of us authors feel a lot of possessiveness toward our characters and plots.  We put a great deal of hard work into creating immersive worlds and interesting, relatable characters, and the idea of someone swiping them is kind of horrifying.  Even if our story is set in reality, and involves actual historical figures, we still feel a strong sense of ownership toward our creative output.  My current work-in-progress, a novel called Nightingale, is based on the Scottish legend of the haunting of Jedburgh Abbey, but contains major characters who were very much real -- including the monarchs Alexander III of Scotland and Philippe III of France, and the scheming, unscrupulous Comte Robert de Dreux and his beautiful daughter Yolande.

Even so, the way I've drawn those characters is mine, right?  We have plagiarism and copyright laws for a reason. 

And sure, I wouldn't want anyone outright stealing my work.  But when Sabra asked the question, my immediate answer was, "I would be beyond honored."

To me, fan fiction and fan art isn't theft; it's an hommage to the original.  They're created out of appreciation and admiration, not a desire to profit off someone else's work.  If someone loves my books enough, and is inspired by them enough, to create their own vision of my characters and worldbuilding, it would be about the highest compliment I can imagine.

It requires a significant effort to let go of control, of course.  Once someone else is at the steering wheel, there's no telling where they'll end up driving.  But even so, that's a risk I'd be not just willing, but eager, to take.

I'm not the only one who feels this way.  Just yesterday, I ran into an example of a character who was created deliberately for others to use.  Canadian comic book artist Steven Wintle invented a character named "Jenny Everywhere," and then specified that she can be used by anyone, any time, and in any fashion.  Essentially she's like the character version of a writing prompt.  Basically, here's the character; now take it and run with it.  As Wintle put it, "All rights reversed."

Wintle's original sketch of Jenny Everywhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

Wintle describes her as follows:

She has short, dark hair.  She usually wears aviation goggles on top of her head and a scarf around her neck.  Otherwise, she dresses in comfortable clothes. She is average size and has a good body image.  She has loads of confidence and charisma.  She appears to be Asian or Native American.  She has a ready smile.

Jenny, Wintle says, exists in any and every reality, and is able to shift back and forth between them.  So by definition, she has almost zero canon associated with her.  You can't include her in a story that somehow contradicts what someone else has done; all you've written is something Jenny did in a different universe.  She herself is canonically un-canon.  She's universal.

Whatever world you visit, there's a version of Jenny there somewhere.

This idea was so captivating that dozens of authors and artists have included her in their work.  Also, there is now a suite of other characters who have been associated with Jenny often enough that they, like Jenny herself, have taken on a life of their own.  They include:

• Laura Drake, Jenny's on-again, off-again girlfriend and partner-in-crime
• Jenny Nowhere, an evil mirror image of Jenny who is also a timeline-shifter
• Jimmy Wherever, Jenny's non-powered boyfriend who can only timeline travel when he's holding Jenny's hand, so often gets left behind or lost

Oh, and August 13 is Jenny's birthday, so that's officially Jenny Everywhere Day.

I find this whole thing fascinating.  I don't think I could find a realistic way to work her into Nightingale, but next time I write something that seems suitable, I will definitely give Jenny Everywhere a cameo.  I frequently put cameos of my own characters in other books, just as Easter eggs for alert readers; for example, Rainey Carrington, one of the main characters in Signal to Noise, makes a quick appearance at the end of Kill Switch.  (I've done this kind of thing multiple times and I'm not sure if any of my readers has noticed, but at least it amuses me.)  But it'd be fun to include someone else's character in one of my novels -- especially when I've been given explicit permission to do so by her creator.

So maybe this will spur you to some ideas for your own creative work, whatever medium it exists within.  And to return to what I started with, if my writing has inspired you, I would be thrilled to see what it prompts you to make.

The possibilities inherent in the interplay of human creativity are truly endless.

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Comet redux

Okay, can we all please please puhleeeeeez stop posting stuff without checking to see if it's true?

I know it's a pain in the ass, but this needs to become a habit.  For all of us.  Unless you make a practice of never reposting anything anywhere -- which eliminates most people -- it's got to become an automatic reflex when you're using social media.  Stop before you hit "forward" or "share" or whatnot and take five minutes to verify that it's accurate.

The reason this comes up is something about comet 3I-ATLAS that I've now seen posted four times.  I wrote about 3I-ATLAS here only a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase: the considered opinions of the astronomers who have studied it -- i.e., the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about -- are that the object is an interstellar comet made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide.  Despite the claims of people like Avi Loeb, the alien-happy Harvard astronomer, it shows no sign of being an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

That, of course, isn't sufficient for a lot of people.  Without further ado, here's the image I've seen repeatedly posted:

There is nothing in this image that is accurate, unless you're counting "3I-ATLAS is an interstellar object" and "Japan has a space agency" as being in the "correct" column.  Japan's space agency has released no such "footage."  There are no "precise pulsating lights."  No scientist -- again, with the exception of Loeb and his pals -- are "questioning if it's artificial."

And the object in the image?  That's not 3I-ATLAS.  Jack Gilbert, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, has identified it as a microorganism.  "That is a paramecium," Gilbert writes.  "Freshwater I believe -- although better phase contrast, and where it was found, would be ideal for better identification."

Another image that is making the rounds is from NASA, but it's being used to claim that the 3I-ATLAS has changed direction and speed in a fashion that "indicates some kind of propulsion system."  This shift in trajectory, they say, made the telescope at NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) image alter its aim to keep up with it, resulting in the background stars showing rainbow-colored streaks:

This isn't correct, either.  If you go to NOIRLab's website, you find a perfectly reasonable explanation of the streaks right there, without any reference to propulsion systems and alien spacecraft.  I quote:

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab.  This image is composed of exposures taken through four filters -- red, green, blue and ultraviolet.  As exposures are taken, the comet remains fixed in the center of the telescope's field of view.  However, the positions of the background stars change relative to the comet, causing them to appear as colorful streaks in the final image.

Once again, the upshot: 3I-ATLAS is a comet.  That's all.  Of great interest to planetary astronomers, but likely to be forgotten by just about everyone else after March of next year, at which point it will be zooming past Jupiter and heading back out into the depths of space, never to be seen again.  There is no credible evidence it's a spaceship.  If there was, believe me, you would not be able to get the astronomers to shut up about it.  The concept some people have of scientists keeping stuff hidden because they're just that secretive, and don't want anyone to know about their big discoveries, only indicates to me that these people know exactly zero scientists.  Trust me on this.  I know some actual scientists, and every single one of them loves nothing better than telling you at length about what they're working on, even if it's something that would interest 0.00000001% of the humans who have ever lived, such as the mating habits of trench-dwelling tube worms.  If there was strong (or, honestly, any) observation that supported this thing being the ship from Rendezvous With Rama, we'd all know about it.

And after all, if there was evidence out there, the hoaxers wouldn't have to use a photograph of a paramecium to support their bogus claims.

So for fuck's sake, please be careful about what you post.  It took me (literally) thirty seconds to find a site debunking the "Japan space agency" thing.  What I'm asking you to do is usually not in any way onerous.

I mean, really; wouldn't you rather be posting things that are cool, and also true?  There is so much real science to be fascinated and astonished by, you don't need these crazy claims.

And believe me, neither does the internet as a whole.

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The persistence of memory

A paper published this week in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports provided some interesting insights into how our memories of our own past might work -- but also raised a couple of troubling questions in my mind.

It's called "Illusory Ownership of One's Younger Face Facilitates Access to Childhood Episodic Autobiographical Memories," and was the work of Utkarsh Gupta, Peter Bright, Alex Clarke, Waheeb Zafar, Pilar Recarte-Perez and Jane E. Aspell, of Anglia Ruskin University.  Here's their description of what they did:

Our autobiographical memories reflect our personal experiences at specific times in our lives.  All life events are experienced while we inhabit our body, raising the question of whether a representation of our bodily self is inherent in our memories.  Here we explored this possibility by investigating if the retrieval of childhood autobiographical memories would be influenced by a body illusion that gives participants the experience of ownership for a ‘child version’ of their own face.  Fifty neurologically healthy adults were tested in an online enfacement illusion study.  Feelings of ownership and agency for the face were greater during conditions with visuo-motor synchrony than asynchronous conditions.  Critically, participants who enfaced (embodied) their child-like face recollected more childhood episodic memory details than those who enfaced their adult face.  No effects on autobiographical semantic memory recollection were found.  This finding indicates that there is an interaction between the bodily self and autobiographical memory, showing that temporary changes to the representation and experience of the bodily self impacts access to memory.

Which is fascinating.  Given the sensation of inhabiting our own (younger) body, we seem to unlock stored memories we previously could not access.  It makes me wonder what's up there in our memory centers, you know?  Assuming your brain is physiologically normal and uninjured, do you really have a record of everything that's happened to you in there somewhere, just waiting for the right trigger to release it?

"Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories," said study senior author Jane Aspell, in an interview with Science Daily.  "These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives -- perhaps even from early infancy.  In the future it may even be possible to adapt the illusion to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments."

Here's the thing, though.

How do they know the memories these volunteers reported are real?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Let me give you an example from my own childhood.

When I was about four, my parents and I moved from a house in South Charleston, West Virginia to one in nearby Saint Albans.  My dad worked at the Marine Corps Recruiting and Training Station at the time, and the move was basically to a nicer neighborhood.  We'd lived in a rental next door to a big house I remember as "the green house" -- it was a blocky rectangular thing, two story, painted light green, where a family with two older boys (at a guess, perhaps seven and nine) lived.

Well, on moving day, my parents were loading the last stuff in the car, and had told me to entertain myself for a half-hour or so while they were finishing up.  I wandered into the yard in front of the green house, and the two boys who lived there asked me if I wanted to play.  I said "sure," and we went inside, then upstairs -- where they thought it'd be funny to trap me, and convince me my parents were going to leave without me.

I looked down from the window, screaming and trying to alert my mother, but she didn't hear me.  I was terrified of being left behind (not, realistically, that this would ever have happened).  Eventually the two boys relented and let me go, and I rejoined my parents -- me still tearful and freaking out about my near miss, they wondering what the hell had upset me.

Here's the kicker, though:  I have no idea if this actually happened.

I asked my mother about it some years later, and she had no memory of it -- she didn't recall my disappearing, even for a short time, on the day we moved, nor returning upset and scared.  "Why would I have told you to run off and play when we were about to leave?" she asked, which I had to admit was a good question.  I have zero other memories of the two boys next door (other than that they existed), and to my knowledge I never went inside their house, nor was invited by them to play, on any other occasion.  I've always been prone to vivid dreams; I remember being somewhat older, perhaps eight or nine, and having flying dreams so realistic that upon awakening I was halfway convinced they'd really happened.  I might be recalling an unusually detailed (and terrifying) dream; or maybe there were two neighbor boys who thought it'd be funny to scare the living shit out of a gullible little kid.

The problem is, there's no way to tell which is the truth.

So I have no doubt that the Gupta et al. study triggered the release of something in the minds of the volunteers, but I think it's a stretch to conclude that what they accessed were real and accurate memories.  I've seen plenty of evidence -- both from scientific studies and the experiences of me and my friends -- indicating that our memories are plastic, malleable, easily warped, and inaccurate.  We all too readily conflate our recollections of what actually happened with (1) what we think happened, (2) what we were told happened, and (3) outright mental fabrications.  A famous -- if unsettling -- study from Portsmouth University in 2008 looked at people's memories of the 2005 terrorist bombing of a double-decker bus in London, and found that many people recalled intricate and vivid detail from CCTV footage of the explosion, and made statements like, "The bus had just stopped to let people off when two women and a man got on" and "He placed a bag by his side, the woman sat down and as the bus left, there was an explosion" and "There was a severed leg on the floor" and "The bus had stopped at a traffic light when there was a bright light, a loud bang and the top flew off."

The problem?  There is no CCTV footage of the explosion.  None.  Presented with that fact, people were astonished.  That couldn't be true, they said; they knew they'd seen it, they could still picture it, still recall how upset they'd been watching it.  One person, told that no video of the event existed, accused the researchers of lying.

So there you have it.  Another reason not to trust your own recollections of past events, and a caution not to get your hopes up about accessing them by visualizing yourself as a child.  Me, I'd just as soon not remember a lot of that stuff.  Even if I was never kidnapped by the neighbors when I was four, I didn't exactly have a happy childhood.  I'd just as soon remain in the present, thank you very much.

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Chasing uselessness

Occasionally I run across something so weird it's almost charming.

This happened just yesterday, and has to do with a topic I've looked at here at Skeptophilia a couple of times before; the question, "What is art?"  My conclusion was the rather unhelpful "If you think it's art, it is."  Admittedly this is coming from someone with the aesthetic sensibility that God gave gravel.  I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler, and most of my attempts at doing anything artistic look like they were produced by a four-year-old, or perhaps an unusually talented chimp.

An art-history-major acquaintance of mine, who also happens to be a bit of an intellectual snob, says I'm basically just lazy, that if I took the time to learn about various schools of art and trends and philosophical underpinnings, I'd understand that there is good art and bad art.  Me, I think this makes no sense at all.  If I can compare it to music -- a topic I do know something about -- I can understand all about a piece of music's structure and harmony and theory and whatnot, and even the historical context in which the composer wrote it, but still dislike it intensely.  If it sounds unpleasant, for me it hasn't worked.  Unless the composer's intent was to have listeners go, "Wow, this is terrible," in which case they succeeded brilliantly.

It reminds me of journalist Edgar Wilson Nye's acerbic quip that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

In any case, back to art.  My point is that I'm hardly in the position to criticize another person's artistic creations.  If anyone actually is.  It all boils down to individual taste, and that is, um, individual.  Which may be tautological, but still makes a point that some people need to hear.

The topic comes up because of a strange but wonderful Japanese art form called Thomasson.  If you know anything about the Japanese language, you probably noticed right away that the name doesn't sound very Japanese -- and you're right, it isn't, although it's been "Japanified" to Chōgeijutsu Tomason (超芸術トマソン) to make it work with the phonetics and writing system.  But the name comes from American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was signed to the Yomiuri Giants in 1982 for a record-breaking sum of money.  Thomasson then spent his entire two-year stint with the Giants never scoring a single hit -- in fact, he came close to breaking the all-time strikeout record.  Finally he was benched, and ended up being little more than a (very expensive) dugout ornament.

So in the art world, a "Thomasson" is something that was created with some kind of purpose in mind, but clearly accomplishes nothing -- and still is carefully kept up as if it actually made sense.  Like the pieces in the Museum of Bad Art that I referenced in my earlier piece (linked above), you can't set out to make a Thomasson deliberately; they just kind of happen.

The term was coined (and the art form promoted) by artist Katsuhiko Akasegawa, when he saw a staircase that led up into a wall -- but which was still, for some reason, maintained:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jr223, Hanshin Iwaya east, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Once he started noticing them, he found Thomasson everywhere.  Doorways opening onto blank walls, or ones that open ten feet above the ground (with no balcony).  A doorknob protruding from the side of a building.  Guardrails, gates, or fences that accomplish nothing, like this one:

Aficionados of Thomasson have come up with about a dozen categories, including Muyō bashi (無用橋, "useless bridge"), a bridge in the middle of a field that doesn't go over any obstacle; Jōhatsu (蒸発, "evaporation"), where a sign or an image has lost pieces to the point that it has become undecipherable; and Kasutera (カステラ, "Kastella," a brand of square-ish Japanese sponge cake), where there's a cuboid protuberance from the side of a building that serves no purpose.  (A sunken cuboid indentation in a wall is called a "Reverse Kasutera.")  The whole thing caught on in a big way, with thousands of people photographing and cataloguing examples of Thomasson they'd found.  In fact, a Thomasson Observation Center opened in Shinjuku, and has had several large and very popular exhibitions.

Well, this brings up a variety of responses from me.

First, I kind of feel sorry for Gary Thomasson.  How would you like to have your name forever associated with things that are weird and useless?

Second, since they're not created to be art (even bad art), are they actually art?  Discuss.

Third, I was immediately reminded of the very odd hobby I wrote about a while back, which is called being a "Randonaut."  The idea here is a little like a cross between geocaching and tripping on shrooms.  You log into a website that converts the output of a random number generator to latitudes and longitudes (you can set it to come up with coordinates fairly near you, so you don't end up with a spot in the middle of the Indian Ocean or something).  You then go there, look for anything peculiar, and report it back to the website.  Some Randonauts participate because they think what they find is an indication we're living in a computer simulation; others simply want to experience something "liminal" or "numinous."  (Check out the link if you want more information.)

Fourth, people are really strange.  I mean.

Anyhow, that's today's dive into the deep end of the pool.  As hobbies go, looking for Thomasson has got a lot to recommend it.  I think the whole thing is kind of cool and whimsical, and I definitely will keep my eye out for any examples that might come my way.

Given how prone people are to doing odd and pointless things, I'm sure I won't have any trouble finding it.

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