Whistling words

I've long been fascinated by the phenomenon of priming, where our interpretation of a sensory stimulus is altered by what we expected to see or hear.  An excellent example of priming is this famous image:

If you've never seen this before, it's hard to see anything but black blotches.  Once you realize it contains a Dalmatian dog -- his head and dark ear are right dead-center in the image -- you'll always see it.  You can't go back to your previous state of blissful ignorance.

It works in the auditory realm, too.  My wife and I are absolutely addicted to the wonderful British series The Great Pottery Throwdown, where a group of twelve amateur potters participate in a series of challenges and ultimately are whittled down to three finalists and a single winner.  Carol and I are both potters -- I won't speak for her, but I can say with confidence that if I were on Throwdown I would be eliminated in the first round -- and it's astonishing what these artists can create given the demands and time constraints.  (I also really enjoy how kind they are to each other.  Although it's a competition, they help each other, and everyone seems genuinely heartbroken every time one of them gets sent home.)  Well, we're re-watching one of the early seasons, and there's a young woman on the show with a pronounced Welsh accent.  Even though I'm usually pretty good at understanding people from the UK, I'm baffled by something like half of what she says...

... until we turn on captioning.  Then I have no problem.  And it's not just that I'm reading along (although I certainly am) -- it really seems like her voice is much more understandable with that little bit of help.

The reason this comes up is a recent study by Cambridge University engineer Václav Volhejn, who is working with sine-wave speech, a voice simulation using a mixture of pure tones (sine waves).  The result sounds like someone trying to imitate human speech using a slide whistle.  (You can read how he creates the audio here.)  If I close my eyes, I can barely get anything from it -- maybe a word here or there.  But once I get the cues of what I was supposed to hear, suddenly it seems obvious.  The effect lasts, too.  If I turn off captioning and go back and listen to the audio again, I can still understand it nearly perfectly.

How this all works is not understood, but probably has something to do with how our brain accomplishes recall.  A 1994 study found that we're primed to recognize words faster if we have prior exposure to semantically-related words; shown the word dog, for example, we recognize the word wolf more quickly than if we're presented it without the prime.  We're also primed to anticipate -- and therefore more quickly recognize -- words that are commonly found in association (lot would be primed by parking), or words that have similar sounds even if they're semantically unrelated (ground would be primed by round).  That it has something to do with the brain's recall network is supported by research suggesting that priming effects vanish very early in the development of dementia; apparently even before significant cognitive impairment occurs, dementia patients lose their ability to make these kinds of efficient associations.

What's strangest, though, is that you can be primed two different ways with equal strength.  This article from Stranger Dimensions contains an audio clip of sine-wave speech that can be primed to sound like either green needle or brainstorm -- which have almost nothing in common phonetically, and don't even have the same number of syllables.  Which you hear depends on which text you're looking at, and if you're like me you can go back and forth indefinitely, from exactly the same audio input.

Then there's the McGurk effect, where what we see actually overrides what we hear so completely that it can cause us not to understand what's coming in through our ears.  The two syllables ba and va sound a great deal alike, but the first sound differs in how it's produced; /b/ is a voiced bilabial stop, /v/ a voiced labiodental fricative.  But when we see someone's mouth moving in an audio/video clip that's been altered to make it look like he's saying va when he's actually saying ba, we hear va.  It's absolutely convincing.  Somehow, we're primed by seeing his mouth move -- explaining why it's always easier to understand someone face to face than on the telephone.

All of this is further evidence of a point I've made many times here at Skeptophilia; what you perceive is incomplete, inaccurate, and dependent on a great many external and internal conditions that can change from one moment to the next.  "I know it happened that way, I saw it with my own eyes!" is fairly close to nonsense.  Oh, sure; for most of us, our sensory-perceptual systems work well enough to get by on.  But the idea that what we seem to perceive is some kind of perfect transcription of reality is simply wrong.

It's humbling and a little frightening how easily fooled we are, but the implications for how our brain retrieves stored information are absolutely fascinating.  So even if we should be a little more careful about acting certain of the accuracy of our own perceptions and memories, it does open the window on how our brains make sense of the world we live in.

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Kakistocracy

I picked up a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium (at almost four hundred pages, it's only short by comparison to his full three-volume History of Byzantium) at a used book sale.  To be fair, it couldn't afford to be much shorter because it covers about eleven hundred years of history.  I got it because it's a time and place I don't know much about, and when I opened it last week I kind of steeled myself for a dry, college textbook approach.

Turns out I shouldn't have been apprehensive.  Norwich is not only a great historian, he's a great writer, and his prose gallops right along, focusing not solely on the usual names and dates but on the personalities involved.  And... wow.  What a parade of lunatics.  The book certainly illustrates the truth of Dave Barry's trenchant quip, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that individual is crazy."

Honestly, there were a few good ones.  The emperor Leo VI was called "the Wise" for good reason; and you may recall that I wrote about his scholarly and good-natured son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago because of his deep devotion to preserving the written works of the ancients.  But some of the bad ones -- ye gods and little fishes.  Michael III was an unstable drunkard about whom Norwich says, "Content to leave the responsibilities of government to others, he was unable to check his own moral decline which, in the last five years of his life, finally reduced him to a level of degradation that fully earned him his later sobriquet of 'the Sot.'"  Constantine IV had "a streak of insanity that... [transformed] him into a monster whose only attributes were a pathological suspicion of all around him and an insatiable lust for blood."  Nicephorus II was a "sanctimonious and unattractive old puritan" who was "pitiless and cruel, and whose meanness and avarice were notorious."

You might have heard the term kakistocracy -- "government by the worst."  (Interesting that it went from being a nearly unknown word to being kind of all over the place in the last ten years.  I wonder why that is?)  Well, the Byzantines, with only a handful of exceptions, had what amounted to eleven centuries of kakistocracy, enduring long periods of intermittent chaos before ultimately collapsing into ruins in the mid-fifteenth century.

Gold coin with an image of one of the better Byzantine emperors, Leo VI "the Wise" [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Solidus of Leo VI (reverse), CC BY-SA 2.5]

What has struck me over and over, though, is that throughout its long history, people did whatever they could to get into positions of power, trying either to clamber onto the throne itself or at least get close to it.  Why on earth would they want that?  I mean, on one level, I get it; power usually comes along with money and luxury, and the peasants of the Byzantine Empire didn't lead any happier lives than peasants in any other age.  My question, though, is why in the hell anyone was brave enough to risk it.  Very few emperors died peacefully of old age; bunches of them were deposed or murdered outright.  The same went for the nobles and the imperial advisors.  And being on the losing side often didn't just mean exile; there's example after example of dethroned emperors and ousted courtiers being castrated and having their noses cut off and their eyes gouged out.

You'd think that seeing this happen once or twice would be enough to induce anyone else having royal aspirations to say, "Um, yeah, no fucking way."  You'd be wrong.  The amazing truth is that having one guy get mutilated and exiled -- and after all that torture and blood loss, usually they didn't survive for very long afterward -- seemed to trigger the other competitors to say, "Cool!  One less rival to worry about!  I'm sure that won't happen to me."

The whole thing reminds me of a Tony Robbins motivational seminar a few years ago that culminated in a supposed mind-over-matter exercise of walking on hot coals.  The predictable happened, and thirty people were treated in a Dallas hospital for burns on the soles of their feet.  When I heard about this, I immediately wondered why, when the first couple of people shrieked in pain, the rest weren't dissuaded.  Did they line up in inverse order of IQ, or something?  But apparently that tendency not to learn from other people's hard experience is not a modern phenomenon, to judge by A Short History of Byzantium.

You can't know how you'd react unless you'd actually been raised in that culture; that's one of the problems with passing value judgments on figures from history.  But here, from my twenty-first century perspective, I find it a little hard to fathom.  I can't imagine how anyone would think "you have a chance at being powerful... but you may end up losing your eyes, nose, and balls" is a good bet, especially considering how many of the emperors and their cadre found themselves drawing the short straw.

What also strikes me about this period of history is how many of the central players -- not only the emperors, but the Patriarchs of what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church -- were so completely certain that they were right.  About everything.  Me, I'm hardly sure of anything, but these guys make the Pope's claims of infallibility sound like waffling.  One of the biggest disputes -- that went on for a hundred years and cost thousands of lives -- was about iconoclasm, the idea (still prevalent in most Muslim sects) that it was sacrilegious to depict holy figures in art, and worse still to venerate or worship them.  The Byzantine iconoclasts went around destroying every piece of religious art they could find, and many of them were perfectly willing to murder anyone who got in the way.  The iconodules, or "icon-worshipers," were equally violent.  And because both the imperial throne and the Patriarchate swung back and forth between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, each time the ground shifted there was a bloody purge of the ones who had previously been in ascendancy.

I mean, come on.  So some guy wants to pray to an image of the Virgin Mary, and you personally don't like that idea.  Is the next logical step "I must therefore cut his head off"?  Are you really that sure your position is the correct and God-approved one?

Of course, once again we haven't really progressed that far.  We have a Secretary of Defense who apparently thinks that God is standing by smiling while we bomb Iranian girls' schools, and at least a few prominent military leaders who are having multiple orgasms over the thought that Trump's little "excursion" might be the lead-up to Armageddon.

I dunno.  All it really proves to me is that I honestly have no idea what makes people tick most of the time.  I've wondered before if I might be some kind of changeling, because when I look around me, mostly what I think is, "None of this makes any fucking sense."

Anyhow, I recommend A Short History of Byzantium if you are (1) a history buff, (2) like well-written non-fiction, and (3) want further evidence that the human race is irredeemably weird.  I will say, though, that if ever time travel is invented, I am not going back to Byzantium.  Fascinating as it is, and little as I have any desire to be in a position of power, it still was not a safe place for pretty much anyone.  I like my various bodily organs securely attached where they are, thank you very much.

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Vanished into the wilderness

As I've said many times before: I'm not saying that the paranormal is impossible.  I would really like it, however, if people would consider all of the natural possibilities before jumping straight to the supernatural ones.

This comes up because of a claim over at UFO Sightings Hotspot sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, where much is being made about the alleged disappearance of people (hundreds of them, apparently) in parks around the world.  The article comes along with a 24-minute video, which is worth watching if you have the time and don't mind doing a few facepalms, but this passage from the post will give you the gist:

The mystery of hundreds of people vanishing in national parks and forests is possible linked to a strange and highly unusual predator that is living in the woods and forests all across the world and is able to overpower someone in an instant.

People disappear in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru and in national parks and forests in U.S.A.

 
While paranormal researcher Stephen Young described Markawasi as a dimensional portal and suggested the strange energy visitors have described feeling there is possibly caused by a confluence of ley lines or the piezoelectric properties of granite, Glenn Canady from BeforeItsNews reported that David Paulidis, a former cop began investigating a story about the hundreds that vanished from National Parks and forests in U.S.A...  David began making his own list and discovered there were over 30 cluster sites where most of these vanishings were happening.  He noticed that the people that vanish often do so right under the noses of others in the area.  The missing also shed their clothes right away and they are folded neatly.  One of the Park Rangers said it was like you were standing straight up and you melted away, that’s what it looked like!

So that's the claim.  People are vanishing by the scores, and the only possible explanations are (1) a huge and vicious predator, with apparently worldwide distribution but completely unknown to science, (2) ley lines, (3) "dimensional portals," or (4) the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

Let's consider for a moment a couple of other explanations, shall we?  Then I'd exhort you to weigh them along with the supernatural ones, and see what seems to you to be the most likely.

There are two things about hiking in the wilderness that people, especially urban and suburban dwellers, often fail to take into account.  My perspective from this comes from a long personal history of back-country hiking, starting when I was a kid and my dad and I used to go to the canyon country of Arizona every summer to hunt for rocks and fossils.  Later, after I moved to Washington state, I used to go out in summer for weeks at a time up into the Cascades and the Olympic Range, relishing the silence and the open space after spending the rest of the year in the bustle and noise of Seattle.

If you've never done this yourself, the first thing you need to realize is that the wilderness is freakin' huge.  And empty.  On my trips into the Cascades, there were times that I'd go a week without seeing a single person.  The place is a big expanse of mountains, glaciers, and trees; if I'd gotten lost and gone missing, perhaps been hurt, the chances are very much against my ever being found again. I  ran across a comment on a website about hiker disappearances that seems appropriate, here:

We were out rockhounding in the desert and followed some tank tracks.  Turns out they were WWII tank tracks, and in one gully we found a long dead US Army Jeep, upside down.  We were likely the first people to have seen it since 1940 or so.  We took the shovel.  That's how we know - it hadn't been stripped.  A Jeep - lost for 40 years.  So - yes, a body would be easy by comparison, especially since animals would eat most of it.

 
Once you get off a trail, it's not hard to be on ground that hasn't been trod for decades.  And get lost.

Add to that the fact that there are countless false trails, some made by animals, some simply natural open spots, that could lead a hiker astray.  This is one reason why hiking manuals recommend always going camping with a friend (not that I listened, of course).  Having two people there doubles the chances that you'll both come back alive.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Miguel.v, Forest on Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And the "not that I listened" part highlights the second thing that a lot of people don't think about, and that's the penchant for people to do dumb stuff.  Again, I have some personal experience in this regard.  Despite my "be careful if you're out in the wilderness" message, I was known to make seriously boneheaded choices back in my young-and-stupid days.  I recall being by myself up in the Cascades, and after a hot hike I decided to strip bare-ass naked and jump into a little crystal-clear lake I'd come across, not noticing that the lake was fed by melting glacial ice until I was already mid-swan-dive.  The water temperature was probably around 38 F.  I think on that day I may have set the world record for fewest milliseconds spent swimming.  I've also loved to climb since I was a kid, and have scaled many a cliff and rock face and tree -- all, of course, without any climbing equipment.  Any of those escapades could have resulted in my being seriously injured or killed.  That I wasn't is more a testimony to dumb luck than it is to skill.

Look at the moronic stuff people will do in front of witnesses, often while right next to gigantic "caution" signs.  A couple of summers ago, my wife and I went to Yellowstone National Park, and we saw many members of the species Homo idioticus doing things like walking right up to bison, elk, and bears, stepping off of boardwalks in order to get up close and personal with hot-enough-to-melt-your-skin-off hot springs, and climbing on crumbling rock formations.  At least here, if something bad happened, there were people around to help (not that in the case of the grizzlies or hot springs, there'd have been much we could do).  But out in the middle of nowhere?  You're on your own.  And I can use myself as a case-in-point that even in those much more precarious circumstances, people still do dumb stuff.

So you don't need to conjecture "dimensional portals," ley lines, or anything else supernatural to account for disappearances.  The immensity of nature, coupled with natural human stupidity, is certainly sufficient.  Add to this our penchant for imagining stuff while alone or in unfamiliar surroundings, and you can explain the data, such as it is, without recourse to the paranormal.

And trust me.  Whatever the explanation, it has nothing to do with the "piezoelectric properties of granite."

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The road not taken

One of the most intriguing sets of life forms I've ever heard of is the Ediacaran Assemblage.

It dates from the late Precambrian Era -- something on the order of 570 million years ago -- and is named after the Ediacara Hills of Australia, where rocks of that age are exposed at the surface.  They're sometimes conflated with the Cambrian Explosion fauna like the ones in the famous Burgess Shale, but any connection between the two is tenuous at best.  Not only are they separated by almost seventy million years, the Burgess Shale animals are (mostly) from phyla we know about.  A few -- like the bizarre and aptly-named Hallucigenia -- have more obscure relationships to modern life, but most of the fossils we find there are identifiably proto-arthropods or proto-annelids or proto-whatnot.  So while the Cambrian Explosion fauna is fascinating in its own right, by and large it's still fairly familiar ground.

Not so the Ediacaran Assemblage.

These things are downright mysterious.  Take, for example, the group called rangeomorphs.

They may have been animals, although they were sessile (fixed to the seafloor) via stalks, and had weird frond-like structures of uncertain purpose (but which may have been a mechanism either for oxygen extraction or for filter feeding).  So if you were to look at a living one, your initial impression might well be that it was some odd sort of seaweed, and not an animal at all.

A 550-million-year-old fossil of the rangeomorph Charnia masoni, from the Mistaken Point Formation in Newfoundland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smith609 at English Wikipedia, Charnia, CC BY 2.5]

Not only are they bizarre-looking, many seem to have no living descendants, including Obamus coronatus (which looks like a French cruller) and the hubcap-like Tribrachidium heraldicum, one of the only known animals to have triradial symmetry.

Artist's reconstruction of Obamus coronatus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com/), Obamus NT, CC BY-SA 4.0]

There's a misconception about evolution -- that it's linear and progressive, that one form supersedes another in some kind of stepwise fashion based upon an identifiable "improvement," such as increase in speed, defensive or offensive capabilities, ability to access food, or intelligence.  While you can find examples where this appears to have happened, there's a large measure of the chaotic involved in the history of life.  Not only do we see sudden and drastic changes in the climate and environmental conditions -- which, after all, are the biggest drivers of selective pressure -- random occurrences like volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes can create a situation where extinction had way less to do with poor evolutionary fitness than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Ediacaran Assemblage seems to have been on the unfortunate end of that particular equation.  As I mentioned, the majority of them apparently left no descendants, not only today but even by the beginning of the next geological era.  None of the bizarre Ediacaran life forms appear in the early Cambrian; the dominant animals five hundred million years ago show almost no resemblance to their predecessors seventy million years earlier.

In fact, the subject comes up because of a paper a few weeks ago in Geology suggesting that the wipeout of the Ediacaran Assemblage represents the Earth's first known mass extinction (not counting the Great Oxidation Event, of which the effect on life was uncertain but probably enormous).  The new study uses recently-uncovered late Precambrian fossil beds that greatly add to the described Ediacaran biota, and the analysis found that we may well have been drastically underestimating the magnitude of the crash.

The researchers' data shows that what is known as the Kotlin Crisis, the biotic collapse that took out pretty much all of the Ediacaran life forms, may have wiped out as much as eighty percent of life on Earth.  This easily places it amongst what paleontologists Jack Sepkoski and David Raup called the "Big Five" extinction events (the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, End Triassic, and Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions).  In fact, if the eighty percent number is correct, it would be in second place -- handily beating the sixty-odd percent of life destroyed in the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and exceeded only by the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic "Great Dying."

So, what caused the Kotlin Crisis?  At the moment, it's uncertain.  It may have been a series of unfortunate events, including climate shifts, changes in oxygenation of the ocean, volcanic eruptions, and possibly the evolution of carnivory, but honestly, we're not sure.  There are few enough rock outcrops of that age available to study that any determination is likely to be slow in coming.

But what's certain is that these (very) distant cousins of ours represent a road not taken -- a branch of the vast evolutionary tree of life on Earth that led to no descendants.  It always makes me wonder what would have happened had they survived, and perhaps outcompeted, the bilateral, mobile forms that superseded them, and who ultimately became our ancestors.  If -- in evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's evocative words -- we could re-run the tape, who would now be the dominant life forms on Earth?

Wouldn't be us, that's for damn sure.  Maybe something like H. P. Lovecraft's bizarre pentaradial "Great Old Ones:"

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Ardans - blog - Facebook, Old One by Tom Ardans, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I can virtually guarantee that whatever it would have been, it'd be something so strange to our eyes that it would give even Darwin pause, despite all his blithe talk about "many forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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A fine and private place

I recently joined Substack (I encourage you to check it out and subscribe if you like -- my focus there is different than here at Skeptophilia), and a poignant post there got me thinking about graveyards.

I've always been fascinated with cemeteries -- and, even as a child, didn't find them to be scary places.  Somber, perhaps, but peaceful, tranquil, quiet.  Part of it was simple familiarity; I lived with my grandmother for about a year and a half when I was a kid, in the little village of Broussard, Louisiana, and her house was only half a block away from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, with its attendant (and very old) cemetery.  So in my free time I spent many hours wandering amongst the gravestones, reading the inscriptions and wondering who those people had been, what their lives and deaths had been like.

So okay, maybe I was kind of a peculiar child.  I doubt anyone who knows me would find that particularly surprising.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bobbywomble, Old Grave Stone, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Some years later, I visited the cemetery in southwestern Pennsylvania where my great-grandparents were buried (as well as many cousins of varying degrees, and older generations of the family -- the Scottish/English side of my family lived in that part of the world for two centuries).  While most of the inscriptions in the (largely French-speaking) community of Broussard were pretty prosaic -- names, dates of birth and death, and every once in a while something like "Chère Maman" or "Toujours Dans Nos Coeurs" -- the ones in the mostly Anglo-Celtic, Protestant community where the Pennsylvania branch of my family resided frequently waxed poetic.  I still remember one that had the haunting, eerie lines,

Remember, friend, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

Grim, but also strangely beautiful. 

Of course, not all of them were so thought-provoking.  There was also one that said,

Here lies my wife, Sarah Bly.
She's at peace, and so am I.

They all contain stories, from the poignant to the banal.  Some of the tales they tell, though, are hidden, and the graves can hold secrets you'd never guess.  I'd long wondered why my great-great grandfather, Elias Scott, was buried there when he died in August of 1884, while his wife, Harriet (Kent) Scott, who'd died only two months earlier, was not.  It was only after going through transcripts of old newspaper clippings that I found out the reason.  Elias had suffered from "shaking palsy" (now called Parkinson's disease) and had been in a slow decline for years.  That whole side of the family was too poor to afford good nursing help, and Harriet had been solely responsible for his day-to-day care.  According to the article I found in the Waynesburg Republican, Harriet had succumbed to despair from her burdens and had taken her own life by poison, explaining why she wasn't buried with her husband -- many sects of Christianity forbid the burial of suicides on consecrated ground, which adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole story.  The article did say, though, that she had been "an excellent lady when in her right mind, and had the respect of all who knew her."  I was so shaken by this discovery that it inspired me to write a poem -- infrequent for me, as poetry is not my usual medium -- which I titled Nocturne for Mrs. Scott:

Her husband watches from the bed they share,
Watery eyes following her deft movements,
The cleaning and tidying, done with no conscious thought.
Take his empty water glass, put away the medicine the doctor left.
Straighten the lace on the bedside table, pull back the curtains.
She will not meet his eyes.
Her mind is caught in a web of remembering,
Trapped like a dying moth waiting for the sting, the poison, and oblivion.

She sees a time when this weak and withered man
Whose thin limbs and creaking voice she despises,
Was a laughing farm boy with chestnut hair and powerful arms,
And she remembers the chase, and wanting to be caught,
His arm looping around her waist,
Catching her up, twirling, spinning, kissing,
And falling to the ground together.

She despises him more because it wasn't always as it is now,
The dying old man fading and failing on the linen sheets,
Leaving her still in the midst of her strength,
Still in the depth of her own needs.

There is a brown glass bottle in the cabinet, near his medicine.
The paper label is gashed with crimson lettering.
Each time she pours the medicine, thick and dark, into a cup for him to drink from,
Her eyes brush across the label with a touch like snow on bare skin,
And she wonders how long it would take, and how she would feel, free.
Then she sees the laughing boy he once was,
And she leans against the counter
And weeps for her own weakness and wickedness and foolishness.

One summer morning, after the cleaning and tidying and straightening and pulling back of curtains,
The brown glass bottle with the crimson lettering
Fell from her numb fingers to shatter on the tile floor of the kitchen,
A trickle of dark fluid staining the jagged fragments.
And upstairs, the creaking voice, weak from need, weak from not wanting to need,
Still calls for her.

Humans have been ritually burying the dead for at least a hundred thousand years -- the first certain burial is from Qafzeh, Israel, and carbon-dates to around then -- and possibly a lot longer ago than that.  When the concept of an afterlife became woven into it is a matter of pure conjecture, but certainly ancient "grave goods" -- things like tools and adornments and talismans -- suggest that our ancestors very early on were convinced that there was some kind of life after death, and providing the deceased with cool or useful stuff would ensure that they at least started off well.

I still recall being in college, and reading the lilting, sassy poem To His Coy Mistress, by the seventeenth-century writer Andrew Marvell, which has to be the ultimate carpe diem poem ever written.  (An English lit major friend summarized it, accurately if crudely, as "Life's short, let's fuck.")  Marvell's lines, "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace," are certainly in that spirit, but I think the poem says way more than simply a plea for love.  A walk through a graveyard is a good exercise in staying cognizant of life's fragility -- and its shortness.  Marvell's poem reminds us of that as well, and I've found the final stanza to be good advice, even beyond the amorous aspects.  And perhaps that's as good a place as any to end this:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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Worlds in collision

In 2021, University of Washington astronomer Anastasios (Andy) Tsanidakis was reviewing data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia Mission, and discovered something really strange.

An ordinary, Sun-like star called Gaia20ehk -- eleven thousand light years away in the constellation Puppis -- had, up until 2016, a nearly flat energy output.  This is more or less what our Sun would look like from that distance; yes, there are minor fluctuations, but (fortunately for us) it's pretty stable over short time intervals.

Then... well, here it is in Tsanidakis's words: "The star's light output was nice and flat, but starting in 2016 it had these three dips in brightness," he said.  "And then, right around 2021, it went completely bonkers.  I can't emphasize enough that stars like our Sun don't do that.  So when we saw this one, we were like 'Hello, what's going on here?'"

The chaotic fluctuations in energy output were across the electromagnetic spectrum, but strongest in the infrared region.  And stranger still, a more detailed analysis showed that the peculiar behavior was not from the star itself, but because there was -- suddenly -- a huge, irregular debris cloud surrounding it.  This rock and dust eclipsed the star's light, but some of it was apparently radiating itself, accounting for the wild yo-yoing in the infrared.  "The infrared light curve was the complete opposite of the visible light," Tzanidakis said.  "As the visible light began to flicker and dim, the infrared light spiked.  Which could mean that the material blocking the star is hot -- so hot that it's glowing in the infrared."

Tsanidakis and his team figured out that there was only one phenomenon that fit all the observations; two of Gaia20ehk's planets had collided with each other.

"It's incredible that various telescopes caught this impact in real time," Tzanidakis said.  "There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and Moon.  If we can observe more moments like this elsewhere in the galaxy, it will teach us lots about the formation of our world."

Artist's rendition of the collision of the two planets in the Gaia20ehk system [Image credit: A. Tsanidakis et al.]

Tsandiakis and his colleagues are particularly interested in watching how this all plays out, because -- as he mentioned -- it is very similar to the process that is thought to have formed the Moon.  The collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet astronomers call Theia, something like 4.5 billion years ago, triggered the remelting of the entire combined mass; the energy of the collision sheared off a chunk of Theia, which collapsed into what would eventually become the Moon.  Now that we've actually seen something similar happening in another star system, astronomers will be on the lookout for more events like this.

"How rare is the event that created the Earth and Moon?  That question is fundamental to astrobiology," said James Davenport, senior author of the paper, which was published three days ago in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  "It seems like the Moon is one of the magical ingredients that makes the Earth a good place for life.  It can help shield Earth from some asteroids, it produces ocean tides and weather that allow chemistry and biology to mix globally, and it may even play a role in driving tectonic plate activity.  Right now, we don't know how common these dynamics are.  But if we catch more of these collisions, we'll start to figure it out."

Tsanidakis explains that while collisions are probably common in the early history of a stellar system, they can still occur in systems with stable, middle-aged stars like Gaia20ehk.  Near passes by other stars, or by rogue exoplanets, could destabilize planetary orbits, causing one of the system's planets either to be ejected, or (in this case) gradually to spiral inward.  This could explain the three dips in brightness that was his first clue something odd was happening -- they represent grazing passes as the two planets' orbits overlapped more and more.  But eventually, they got close enough that there was a head-on impact, and all hell broke loose.

Considering the quantity of data that missions like Gaia produce, I find it astonishing that Tsanidakis and his colleagues even picked up on it.  You have to wonder what other wonders might be hidden in the enormous hauls from JWST, Hubble, and (soon) the Vera Rubin Telescope.  Fortunately, a sharp-eyed astronomer caught this one, and as a result we've learned a huge amount about exoplanetary collisions.

It's staggering to think about.  The awe-inspiring vistas we're seeing through our best telescopes are only now being studied and analyzed, and who knows what else the astronomers will find?

All from following astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's adjuration -- "Keep looking up."

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Little bits of beauty

I have a curious hobby.

Well, at least an uncommon one.  I collect old nature field guides.  My somewhat flexible cutoff date is publication before 1950, but I'll make an exception for something really beautiful.  My favorites are the ones with the striking line drawings, woodcuts, or lithographs illustrating the entries:

A page from F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Guide to American Trees and Shrubs (1915)

I'm fortunate to work as a sorter for the largest used book sale in the eastern half of the United States -- we process a half a million books a year -- so I always pick up one or two new ones each time the sale comes around.

Leafing through the pages, for some reason, makes me ridiculously happy.  They're old and beautiful and were created with love and care, and they have that unmistakable smell of old books that is pure magic to us bibliophiles.

It's also an escape from the real world, which seems pretty grim at the moment.  I relate to my friend who posted on social media, "My desire to be well-informed is at odds with my desire to remain sane."  I can only immerse myself in the news for a short time before I saturate, become overwhelmed, and drown in despair at the greed and imbecility of the people we're allowing to steer the course of the entire human race.

But then I retreat into books, and for a little while at least, everything's okay.

It may seem like a cowardly refusal to keep my eyes open -- but merciful heavens, we need things like that.  We need to keep creating, we need artists and musicians and writers and dancers and everyone else who remains determined to continue bringing little bits of beauty into this poor, damaged world.  There's an apocryphal quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill, which (although almost certainly not his words) bears a message we should all take to heart.  The story goes that some military leader or another during World War II was giving Churchill a hard time because he refused to cut governmental financial support for the arts and music.  The general claimed every cent should go to munitions and the war effort.  Churchill responded, "Then what are we fighting for?"

Yeah.  Exactly.  If we creative types stop creating -- become so bogged down by the daily horrors in the news that we put down our pens, brushes, musical instruments, whatever medium we work in -- then the evil men and women who for some reason are trying their best to tear down and trample every good thing in the world will truly have won.

Please.  Don't let your voice be silenced.  Especially not now.  We need to show them that the small joys they disdain add up to something beautiful and immense and unstoppable.  We need to live up to the standard set by Sam Gamgee in The Two Towers:

"It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered.  Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy?  How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened?  But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow.  Even darkness must pass.  A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer.  I know now, folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't.  They kept going because they were holding on to something."

"What were they holding on to?" Frodo asked.

"That there's some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for."

It is indeed, Sam.  And it's worth remembering that even little bits of beauty -- flowers in the garden, throwing the ball for your dog, listening to your favorite piece of music, watching the way the wind moves the tree branches, or leafing through the illustrations in an old field guide -- can recharge our souls to continue the fight for another day.

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