tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43071870402501938572024-03-18T15:28:14.991-07:00SkeptophiliaFighting Gullibility with Sarcasm, 6 days a weekGordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.comBlogger3986125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-20220682413812901892024-03-18T03:39:00.000-07:002024-03-18T04:08:49.653-07:00Memory boostAbout two months ago I signed up with Duolingo to study Japanese.<div><br /></div><div>I've been fascinated with Japan and the Japanese culture pretty much all my life, but I'm a total novice with the language, so I started out from "complete beginner" status. I'm doing okay so far, although the fact that it's got three writing systems is a challenge, to put it mildly. Like most Japanese programs, it's beginning with the <i>hiragana</i> system -- a syllabic script that allows you to work out the pronunciation of words -- but I've already seen a bit of <i>katakana</i> (used primarily for words borrowed from other languages) and even a couple of <i>kanji</i> (the ideographic script, where a character represents an entire word or concept).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqy2-5WsGoVzOg4OoOv5l88wutyCBmQGVTKvBdK-jtmDYUpSN9LPctnuCwSuXIYo9j6b-Pffvc3x_1qIdYPnkS9t4BdvdmNcPP0wF0EfZT_xQPjctGsWZQH0sGHFozLq4oIz-xm2Tv13yw0fhRkcLpckCUZMSQl2da-hYVFpMPpnNFgxbJ0i4nvfLZlWY-/s1599/140405_Tsu_Castle_Tsu_MIe_pref_Japan01s.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1599" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqy2-5WsGoVzOg4OoOv5l88wutyCBmQGVTKvBdK-jtmDYUpSN9LPctnuCwSuXIYo9j6b-Pffvc3x_1qIdYPnkS9t4BdvdmNcPP0wF0EfZT_xQPjctGsWZQH0sGHFozLq4oIz-xm2Tv13yw0fhRkcLpckCUZMSQl2da-hYVFpMPpnNFgxbJ0i4nvfLZlWY-/w400-h266/140405_Tsu_Castle_Tsu_MIe_pref_Japan01s.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:663highland">663highland</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:140405_Tsu_Castle_Tsu_MIe_pref_Japan01s.jpg">140405 Tsu Castle Tsu MIe pref Japan01s</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><div><br /></div><div>While Duolingo focuses on getting you listening to spoken Japanese right away, my linguistics training has me already looking for patterns -- such as the fact that <i>wa</i> after a noun seems to act as a subject marker, and <i>ka</i> at the end of a sentence turns it into a question. I'm still perplexed by some of the pronunciation patterns -- why, for example, vowel sounds sometimes don't get pronounced. The first case of this I noticed is that the family name of the brilliant author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa">Akutagawa Ryūnosuke</a> is pronounced /ak'tagawa/ -- the /u/ in the second syllable virtually disappears. I hear it happening fairly commonly in spoken Japanese, but I haven't been able to deduce what the pattern is. (If there is one. If there's one thing my linguistics studies have taught me, it's that all languages have quirks. Try explaining to someone new to English why, for instance, the <i>-ough</i> combination in <i>cough, rough, through, bough, </i>and <i>thorough</i> are all pronounced differently.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Still and all, I'm coming along. I've learned some useful phrases like "Sushi and water, please" (<i>Sushi to mizu, kudasai</i>) and "Excuse me, where is the train station?" (<i>Sumimasen, eki wa doko desu ka?</i>), as well as less useful ones like "Naomi Yamaguchi is cute" (<i>Yamaguchi Naomi-san wa kawaii desu</i>), which is only critical to know if you have a cute friend who happens to be named Naomi Yamaguchi.</div><div><br /></div><div>The memorization, however, is often taxing to my 63-year-old brain. Good for it, I have no doubt -- <a href="https://www.uclahealth.org/departments/neurology/about-us/neurology-lab-profiles/bilingualism-delays-onset-alzheimers-symptoms">a recent study</a> found that being bi- or multi-lingual can delay the onset of dementia by four years or more -- but it definitely is a challenge. I go through my <i>hiragana</i> flash cards at least once a day, and have copious notes for what words mean and for any grammatical oddness I happen to notice. Just the sheer amount of memorization, though, is kind of daunting.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe what I should do is find a way to change the context in which I have to remember particular words, phrases, or characters. That seems to be the upshot of a study I ran into a couple of days ago in <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</i>, about <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240312182752.htm">a study by a group from Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh</a> about how to improve retention.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm sure all of us have experienced the effects of cramming for a test -- studying like hell the night before, and then you do okay on the test but a week later barely remember any of it. This practice does two things wrong; not only stuffing all the studying into a single session, but doing it all the same way.</div><div><br /></div><div>What this study showed was two factors that significantly improved long-term memory. One was spacing out study sessions -- doing shorter sessions more often definitely helped. I'm already approaching Duolingo this way, usually doing a lesson or two over my morning coffee, then hitting it again for a few more after dinner. But the other interesting variable they looked at was that test subjects' memories improved substantially when the context was changed -- when, for example, you're trying to remember as much as you can of what a specific person is wearing, but instead of being shown the same photograph over and over, you're given photographs of the person wearing the same clothes but in a different setting each time.</div><div><br /></div>"We were able to ask how memory is impacted both by what is being learned -- whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes -- as well as when it is learned over repeated study opportunities," said Emily Cowan, lead author of the study. "In other words... we could examine how having material that more closely resembles our experiences of repetition in the real world -- where some aspects stay the same but others differ -- impacts memory if you are exposed to that information in quick succession versus over longer intervals, from seconds to minutes, or hours to days."<div><br /></div><div>I can say that this is one of the things Duolingo does right. Words are repeated, but in different combinations and in different ways -- spoken, spelled out using the English transliteration, or in <i>hiragana</i> only. Rather than always seeing the same word in the same context, there's a balance between the repetition we all need when learning a new language and pushing your brain to generalize to slightly different usages or contexts.</div><div><br /></div><div>So all things considered, Duolingo had it figured out even before the latest research came out. I'm hoping it pays off, because my son and I would like to take a trip to Japan at some point and be able to get along, even if we don't meet anyone cute named Naomi Yamaguchi. But I should wind this up, so for now I'll say <i>ja ane, mata ashita</i> (goodbye, see you tomorrow).</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-8069218491720534032024-03-16T03:26:00.000-07:002024-03-16T03:26:24.666-07:00The haunted sentry boxA while back, my wife and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the lovely island of Puerto Rico. On the way there, Carol asked me what I wanted to do while we were in San Juan. I thought about all the possibilities -- lounging on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, hiking, seeing the sights -- so of course what I said was, "I want to see the Haunted Sentry Box."<br /><br />I first ran into the tale of the Haunted Sentry Box of Old San Juan when I was perhaps twelve years old, and happened upon a copy of C. B. Colby's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strangely-Enough-C-B-Colby/dp/0590031236"><i>Strangely Enough</i></a>. This book is a whimsical, often scary, sometimes hilarious account of dozens of "true tales of the supernatural," each only a page or two long. It was one of my first encounters with someone who claimed that ghosts, UFOs, and monsters could be real, and is one of the things that started me down the long and twisty road that led to <i>Skeptophilia</i>. (I still have my battered and much-reread copy.)<br /><br />The Tale of the Haunted Sentry Box is chilling in its simplicity. In it, we hear about a sentry "many years ago" in the fortress of San Cristóbal in the oldest part of San Juan, who was assigned duty in one of the stone sentry boxes that jut out from the main wall. He was reluctant, we're told, because it was a lonely post, and he had a "feeling of foreboding." And sure enough, when another soldier went to relieve him some hours later, the sentry box was empty. His superiors were certain the man had deserted.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rda-xpWTsmE/VsW-tr2gCII/AAAAAAAAE4M/v7i3AHFB3as/s1600/IMG_0021.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rda-xpWTsmE/VsW-tr2gCII/AAAAAAAAE4M/v7i3AHFB3as/s400/IMG_0021.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">One of the sentry boxes on the wall of San Cristóbal. I have to admit, it wouldn't be a job for the claustrophobic.</div><br />So the second soldier was assigned to take the missing man's place, and a watch was set on the wall overlooking the sentry box. Only shortly afterwards, a searing light blazed from inside the sentry box, shining out through the slit-like windows, and a "piercing scream" split the night. The watchman roused his superiors from sleep, and they ran to investigate. The second soldier was now missing as well -- the inside walls were "black with soot," and there was a strong smell of sulfur.<br /><br />The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.<br /><br />See why I wanted to go there? So we hiked on over to San Cristóbal, paid our five bucks' admission fee, and explored the ancient walls and rooms of the fortress. But although "La Garita del Diablo" was marked on maps -- proving that Colby hadn't, at least, made the story up himself -- we couldn't find the actual item.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4MzsHGcHpGY/VsW_7sxf-pI/AAAAAAAAE4U/lEKu0V0XPYg/s1600/IMG_0018.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4MzsHGcHpGY/VsW_7sxf-pI/AAAAAAAAE4U/lEKu0V0XPYg/s400/IMG_0018.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Me, exploring one of the non-haunted sentry boxes of San Cristóbal. I detected no soot, sulfur, or traces of missing soldiers.</div><br />Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of <i>course</i> there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box. Could I have directions for how to get there?<br /><br />The young woman behind the counter looked alarmed. "Oh, no, no," she said, her eyes wide. "We do not allow anyone to go there, sir."<br /><br />"Really?" I said. "Why? I was hoping to see it for myself."<br /><br />"It is not allowed," she said firmly. From her expression, she looked torn between crossing herself and forking the sign of the evil eye in my direction.<br /><br />She added reluctantly that there was, however, a point on the exterior wall where one can lean out and peer down toward La Garita del Diablo, if I was so determined to blight the memory of my visit with such a place. Eager to so blight myself, I followed her directions to the wall's edge, and leaned over. And here it is:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XkW0PjfS2i0/VsXBVy8T4LI/AAAAAAAAE4c/_Yfla5LqD6s/s1600/IMG_0023.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XkW0PjfS2i0/VsXBVy8T4LI/AAAAAAAAE4c/_Yfla5LqD6s/s400/IMG_0023.JPG" /></a></div><br />Not impressive at this distance, perhaps. And I wasn't able to pick up any presentiments of evil through my binoculars when I scanned the place. No black smoke curling up from the windows, no leering face in the shadows of the door. It looked just like all of the other sentry boxes we saw, both in San Cristóbal and in the big fortress of El Morro only a mile westward along the coast of San Juan Harbor.<br /><br />So the whole thing was a little anticlimactic. Here I hoped to give Satan a good shot at me, and I was prevented from doing so by some silly regulation about protecting the tourists from being vaporized.<br /><br />I'm happy to say that the remainder of the trip was wonderful, and I did get to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach in swim trunks, drinking coconut rum, and trying unsuccessfully to get rid of all the sand stuck to my legs. We also spent a happy half-day hiking in the El Yunque Rain Forest, only an hour's drive to San Juan, which is a must-see for birders and other nature lovers.<br /><br />But I have to confess to some disappointment about the Haunted Sentry Box. So near, and yet so far. Not only did I not get incinerated by Satan, our airplane crossed the Bermuda Triangle (twice) and we didn't disappear. You know, if the world of the paranormal is so eager to interact with us living humans -- and to give a skeptic his well-deserved comeuppance -- they really aren't taking these opportunities very seriously.<p>****************************************</p><div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-79746252083542577342024-03-15T03:30:00.000-07:002024-03-15T03:30:22.096-07:00I've got your number<p></p><div class="post-footer" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.6; margin: 1.5em 0px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></div><p></p>An inevitable side-effect of writing six times a week here at <i>Skeptophilia</i> is that I get some weird gifts sometimes.<br /><br />This explains why I am the proud owner of:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>a cardboard-cutout Bigfoot that you can dress up with various stickers (he's currently wearing a kilt and a jaunty-looking tam-o'shanter)</li><li>a certificate insuring my dog in case of alien abduction</li><li>a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast</li><li>a book entitled <i>UFOs: How to See Them</i></li><li>a deck of steampunk Tarot cards</li><li>a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"</li><li>a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)</li><li>the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"</li></ul>The latest addition to my collection comes to me from a loyal reader of <i>Skeptophilia.</i> I got a surprise package from him in the mail, and when I opened it up, it turned out to be a book called...<br /><br />... <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mysteries-Secrets-Numerology-Patricia-Fanthorpe/dp/1459705378"><i>Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology</i></a>.<br /><br />This book, by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, is a complete analysis of the practice of numerology across the world, as viewed through the critical lens of believing every bit of it without question. I checked out how it has fared on Amazon, and found that it has thus far received two reviews:<br /><blockquote>1: This book is full of wonderful information regarding numerology. I got a copy from the library, but I will be buying my own to keep as a reference for numerology and sacred geometry. Well Done!... and:<br /><br />2: Fine. This purchase was for some research I was doing and I came away amazed that anyone can take this entire subject matter area seriously. The book drones on forever and that makes it great bedtime reading... Yes, I did work the examples on my own set of numbers as well as those other family members and it didn't help me understand them any better than I did before. They're still boring. I put this book in the same category as those purporting to provide proof of alien abductions happening every day, all over planet earth. If you really must find something in which to believe to give your life purpose, or help you amaze your friends, this book is for you.</blockquote><div>So it's gotten a fairly mixed reception so far.<br /><br />Undeterred by the second review, I read through it. I will admit that I skimmed past the parts of it where the authors calculate numerological values for everyone from Hippocrates to Alexander Graham Bell. I did note that the authors concluded that the "dark side of his numerological 1" for the famous British murderer Hawley Crippen "may have been what drove him to the rash and impetuous murder" of his second wife, Cora. Which seems like a stretch, as from pure statistics one out of every nine people on Earth are "numerological 1s," and as far as I can tell, very few of them murder their second wives.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g-S0SwMCL4k/WOEH6UkP03I/AAAAAAAAGh4/dBv1P4pwXrMy7A6ZHeyr3eMMAunGOhm8wCLcB/s1600/De_Occulta_Philosophia_-_Proportionen_des_Menschen_und_ihre_geheimen_Zahlen.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g-S0SwMCL4k/WOEH6UkP03I/AAAAAAAAGh4/dBv1P4pwXrMy7A6ZHeyr3eMMAunGOhm8wCLcB/s400/De_Occulta_Philosophia_-_Proportionen_des_Menschen_und_ihre_geheimen_Zahlen.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image is in the Public Domain]</div><br />The practice of numerology goes back a long way. The whole thing seems to have begun with the mystical practice called <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria">gematria</a></i>, which basically assigned numbers to damn near everything -- and woe be unto you if your number turned out to be bad. The whole 666 being the Number of the Beast thing comes from gematria; and there's a lot of equating one thing for another because they "have the same number." Here's an example from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Baruch">Third Book of Baruch</a>, one of the biblical apocrypha, as explained in the above-linked Wikipedia article:</div><blockquote>A snake is stated to consume a cubit of ocean every day, but is unable to ever finish consuming it, because the oceans are also refilled by 360 rivers. The number 360 is given because the numerical value of the Greek word for snake, δράκων, when transliterated to Hebrew (דרקון) is 360.</blockquote><div>Makes perfect sense to me.</div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, back to the Fanthorpes' book. The last section, while no less ridiculous, was at least kind of interesting. We're told therein that because all sorts of factors can contribute to a person acting a particular way, or an action having a particular outcome, there's no reason not to believe that "numbers can exert invisible and unsuspected influences just as powerful." We're then instructed that we should all pay more attention to the numbers in our lives, and especially look for the good influences of the numbers 1 (which, I note, didn't help Crippen much), 3, 6, 7, and 9. Only in the second-to-last paragraph do the Fanthorpes bring up the central problem with the whole thing: "These attempts to use numbers as influences to attract good things and to protect against negative things are very interesting, but are open to the question of whether -- when they seem to work -- they are actually self-fulfilling prophecies."<br /><br />Well, yeah. The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.<br /><br />So I'm sure you're all dying to know what my number is. The book gives detailed instructions on how to calculate your number, although it does say there are different ways of doing so. "Therefore," the authors write, "two equally well-qualified and experienced numerologists working with slightly different systems could reach very different conclusions." (Which to me, is just a fancy way of saying, "we admit this is bullshit.")<br /><br />I used what they say the "simplest way" is -- writing out the English alphabet underneath the numbers 1-9, starting with A=1, B=2, and so on; after you reach I=9, you start over with J=1. Following this protocol, my whole name adds up to 76. You're then supposed to add the digits (giving 13) and then add those (giving a final answer of 4).<br /><br />So my number is 4, which unfortunately is not one of the "auspicious numbers" mentioned above. Four, apparently, means "a foundation, the implementation of order, a struggle against limits, and steady growth."<br /><br />I suppose it could be worse.<br /><br />In any case, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't get "9" (the number of "immense creativity"). Nor am I going to do what the authors say some folks have done, which is change their name to one that has a better number.<br /><br />It might be worth getting a second opinion, however. Maybe I should see what the "steampunk Tarot cards" have to say on the matter. That should be illuminating.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-17454200581272239092024-03-14T03:37:00.000-07:002024-03-14T03:37:30.691-07:00In memoriamI want you to recall something simple. A few to choose from:<div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>your own middle name</li><li>the street you grew up on</li><li>your best friend in elementary school</li><li>the name of your first pet</li><li>your second-grade teacher's name</li></ul></div><div>Now, I'm presuming that none of you were actively thinking about any of those before I asked. So, here are a couple of questions:</div><div><br /></div><div>Where was that information before I asked you about it? And how did you retrieve it from wherever that was?</div><div><br /></div><div>The simple answer is, "we don't know." Well, we have a decent idea about where in the brain specific kinds of information are stored, mostly from looking at what gets lost when people have strokes or traumatic brain injury. (A technique my Anatomy and Physiology professor described as "figuring out how a car functions by smashing parts of it with a hammer, and then seeing what doesn't work anymore.")</div><div><br /></div><div>But how exactly is that information is encoded? That's an ongoing area of research, and one we're only beginning to see results from. The prevailing idea for a long time has been that interactions between networks of neurons in the brain allow the storage and retrieval of memories -- for example, you have networks that encode memory of faces, ones that involve familiarity, ones that activate when you feel positive emotions, possibly ones that fire for particular stimuli like gray hair, glasses, being female, being elderly, or tone of voice -- and the intersection of these activate to retrieve the memory of your grandmother.</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is, all attempts to find a Venn-diagram-like cross-connected network in the brain have failed. Even so, the idea that there could be a much smaller and more specific neural cluster devoted to a particular memory was ridiculed as the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell">grandmother cell model</a>" -- the term was coined by neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin in the 1960s -- it was thought to be nonsense that we could have anything like a one-to-one correlation between memories and neurons. As neuroscientist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Connor">Charles Edward Connor</a> put it, the grandmother cell model had "become a shorthand for invoking all of the overwhelming practical arguments against a one-to-one object coding scheme. No one wants to be accused of believing in grandmother cells."</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2SCe66fMs4Nnj-NfVSeI68Dssf9r4etxsdrzLn4O_V5nI-w1WpEcAECKvAHLZVHRR0OD9BOVMQkXMPGeoC3JqRZpnPVSoULl4auT360X3eGumxQwO6kqmiAk5qYAjvGgBqNN-3e6z8BJqRVCleB49nb0gQa03iUtLEzN5UYjNnR3f1UaOyFsOYvIO0RTv/s1297/Brain_memory.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1198" data-original-width="1297" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2SCe66fMs4Nnj-NfVSeI68Dssf9r4etxsdrzLn4O_V5nI-w1WpEcAECKvAHLZVHRR0OD9BOVMQkXMPGeoC3JqRZpnPVSoULl4auT360X3eGumxQwO6kqmiAk5qYAjvGgBqNN-3e6z8BJqRVCleB49nb0gQa03iUtLEzN5UYjNnR3f1UaOyFsOYvIO0RTv/w400-h370/Brain_memory.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Michel Royon]</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem came roaring back, though, when neurosurgeons Itzhak Fried and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga were working with an epileptic patient who had electrical brain-monitoring implants, and found that when he was shown a photograph of Jennifer Aniston, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-searching-for-jennifer-aniston-neuron/">a specific neuron fired in his brain</a>. Evidently, we <i>do</i> encode specific memories in only a tiny number of neurons -- but how it works is still unknown. </div><div><br /></div><div>We have over eighty billion neurons in the brain -- so even discounting the ones involved in autonomic functioning, you'd still think there's plenty to encode specific memories. But... and this is a huge <i>but...</i> there's no evidence whatsoever that when you learn something new, somehow you're doing any kind of neural rewiring, much less growing new neurons.</div><div><br /></div><div>The upshot is that we still don't know.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reason this comes up is because of <a href="https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/news/brain-waves-travel-one-direction-when-memories-are-made-and-opposite-when-recalled">a study at Columbia University</a> that was published last week in <i>Nature Human Behavior</i>, that looked at a newly-discovered type of brain wave, a <i>traveling wave</i> -- which sweeps across the cerebrum during certain activities. And what the researchers, led by biomedical engineer Joshua Jacobs, found is that when memories are formed, traveling waves tend to move from the back of the cerebrum toward the front, and in the opposite direction when memories are retrieved.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, nothing in the brain is quite that simple. Some people's brain waves went the other direction; it seems like the change in direction is what was critical. "I implemented a method to label waves traveling in one direction as basically 'good for putting something into memory,'" said Uma Mohan, who co-authored the paper. "Then we could see how the direction switched over the course of the task. The waves tended to go in the participant’s encoding direction when that participant was putting something into memory and in the opposite direction right before they recalled the word. Overall, this new work links traveling waves to behavior by demonstrating that traveling waves propagate in different directions across the cortex for separate memory processes."</div><div><br /></div><div>The other limitation of the study is that it doesn't discern whether the traveling waves, and the change in direction, are a cause or an effect -- if the change in direction <i>causes</i> recall, or if the shift in wave direction is caused by some other process that is the actual trigger for recall -- so the direction change is merely a byproduct. But it certainly is an intriguing start on a vexing question in neuroscience.</div><div><br /></div><div>Me, I want to know what's going on with the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Just about everyone experiences it -- you know the memory is in there somewhere, you can <i>almost</i> get it, but... nope. Most puzzling (and frustrating), I find that giving up and going to The Google often triggers the memory to appear before I have the chance to look it up. This happened not long ago -- for some reason I was trying to come up with the name of the third Musketeer. Athos, Porthos, and... who? I pondered on it, and then finally went, "to hell with it," and did a search, but before I could even hit "return" my brain said, "Aramis."</div><div><br /></div><div>What the fuck, brain? Do you do this just to taunt me?</div><div><br /></div><div>At least I comfort myself in knowing that we don't really understand how any of this works. Which is slim consolation -- but at least it means that my own brain is no more baffling than anyone else's.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-36269019262951764952024-03-13T03:34:00.000-07:002024-03-13T03:34:08.351-07:00Speaking beauty<p>My novel <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Midst-Lions-Arc-Oracles-Book/dp/1960370111/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=AUTHOR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LbqiY2S2iCb7qPa0hFIfREMsjIkiBtDiuQeNLg9AxUoXeo_iIPB95X4YJbMs2gbpePPCjTJM5OvW5zMIn0gyUAjAbvwRJ4p9nCuHRiUHb0l5FyXw-fgmdQ5XL-TZejmw7O3v1L6U2Q_wOTqxk_OfScGbjBk2SwAWpC5Uct5ZTFERvlcERSji-wEw0wPnENHyUbxbwyB1MqakbrLoiULYquJt1zGYk0Pwm8GWDX6Fnyg.7AdbfRepjyZe_w0ESihGcOiqHUBRidYWelesVsCu5mI&qid=&sr=">In the Midst of Lions</a>,</i> the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor. He also has a strong pessimistic streak, something that proves justified in the course of the story. He develops a conlang called Kalila not only as an entertaining intellectual exercise, but because he fears that civilization is heading toward collapse, and he wants a way to communicate with his friends that will not be understood by (possibly hostile) outsiders.</p><p>Kalila provides a framework for the entire trilogy, which spans over fourteen centuries. I wanted the conlang to follow a similar trajectory as Latin did; by the second book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scattering-Winds-Arc-Oracles-Book/dp/B0CJ4F33Q4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">The Scattering Winds</a></i>, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chains-Orion-Echoes-Visions-Oracles/dp/1960370162/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=AUTHOR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LbqiY2S2iCb7qPa0hFIfREMsjIkiBtDiuQeNLg9AxUoXeo_iIPB95X4YJbMs2gbpePPCjTJM5OvW5zMIn0gyUAjAbvwRJ4p9nCuHRiUHb0l5FyXw-fgmdQ5XL-TZejmw7O3v1L6U2Q_wOTqxk_OfScGbjBk2SwAWpC5Uct5ZTFERvlcERSji-wEw0wPnENHyUbxbwyB1MqakbrLoiULYquJt1zGYk0Pwm8GWDX6Fnyg.7AdbfRepjyZe_w0ESihGcOiqHUBRidYWelesVsCu5mI&qid=&sr=">The Chains of Orion</a></i>, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently. </p><p>But of course, in order to incorporate it into the narrative, I had to invent the conlang. While I'm not a professor like Quaice, my master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly solid background for comprehending (and thus creating) a language structure. I've mostly studied <i>inflected</i> languages, like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Greek -- ones where nouns, verbs, and adjectives change form depending on how they're being used in sentences -- so I decided to make Kalila inflected. (Interestingly, along the way English lost most of its noun inflections; in the sentences <i>The dog bit the cat</i> and <i>The cat bit the dog</i> you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words <i>dog</i> and <i>cat </i>change form, as they would in most inflected languages. English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- <i>he/him/his</i>, <i>she/her/hers</i>, <i>they/them/theirs,</i> and <i>who/whom</i> are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)</p><p>One of the interesting choices I had to make centers on phonetics. What repertoire of sounds did I want Kalila to have? I decided I was aiming for something vaguely Slavic-sounding, with a few sound combinations and placements you don't find in English (for example, the initial /zl/ combination in the word for "quick," <i>zlavo</i>.) I included only one sound that isn't found in English -- the unvoiced velar fricative (the final sound in the name Bach), which in accordance with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet">International Phonetic Alphabet</a> I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; <i>lexa</i>, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."</p><p>Of course, in the end I used about one percent of all the syntax and morphology and lexicon and whatnot I'd invented in the actual story. But it was still a lot of fun to create.</p><p>The topic comes up because of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00238309231202944">a really cool study</a> that recently came out in the journal <i>Language and Speech</i>, by a team led by linguist Christine Mooshammer of Humboldt University in Berlin. The researchers wanted to find out why some languages are perceived as sounding more pleasant-sounding than others -- but to avoid the bias that would come with actual spoken languages, they confined their analysis to conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Orkish.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ0OEntJRkVb_fHA4WIvjQYLahrRKtPHp626VWNyxIdODNqj2mqx_lHzxWgFVq3WqW1Oyx1vVfxwXP4ldiKsBX8nqXnaQLCCkZuMcEh72ofWjpwz3Q1jnr3dMh8BEUUXZqUefcjrS_AAJOuaEXM1azrJZZgK5BToxfEj8fRN2YJECEOOMFvwP3j5WEtqH7/s296/Namarie_First_Stanza_Tengwar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="249" data-original-width="296" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ0OEntJRkVb_fHA4WIvjQYLahrRKtPHp626VWNyxIdODNqj2mqx_lHzxWgFVq3WqW1Oyx1vVfxwXP4ldiKsBX8nqXnaQLCCkZuMcEh72ofWjpwz3Q1jnr3dMh8BEUUXZqUefcjrS_AAJOuaEXM1azrJZZgK5BToxfEj8fRN2YJECEOOMFvwP3j5WEtqH7/w400-h336/Namarie_First_Stanza_Tengwar.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">The first stanza of a poem in Quenya, written in the lovely Tengwar script Tolkien invented [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><p>The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from <i>Game of Thrones</i>) and Klingon to sound the most unpleasant. Interestingly, Orkish -- at least when not being snarled by characters like Azog the Defiler -- was ranked somewhere in the middle.</p><p>Some of their conclusions:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Languages with lower consonantal clustering were rated as more pleasant. (On the extreme low end of this scale are Hawaiian and Japanese, which have almost no consonant clusters at all.)</li><li>A higher frequency of front vowels (such as /i/ and /e/) as opposed to back vowels (such as /o/ and /u/) correlates with higher pleasantness ratings.</li><li>Languages with a higher frequency of continuants (such as /l/, /r/, and /m/) as opposed to stops and plosives (like /t/ and /p/) were ranked as more pleasant-sounding.</li><li>Higher numbers of unvoiced sibilants (such as /s/) and velars (such as the /x/ I used in Kalila) correlated with a lower ranking for pleasantness.</li><li>The more similar the phonemic inventory of the conlang was to the test subject's native language, the more pleasant the subject thought it sounded; familiarity, apparently, is important.</li></ul><p></p><p>This last one introduces the bias I mentioned earlier, something that Mooshammer admits is a limitation of the study. "One of our main findings was that Orkish doesn’t sound evil without the special effects, seeing the speakers and hearing the growls and hissing sounds in the movies," she said, in <a href="https://www.psypost.org/from-star-treks-klingon-to-tolkiens-orkish-unraveling-the-auditory-aesthetics-of-constructed-languages/">an interview with <i>PsyPost</i></a>. "Therefore, the average person should be aware of the effect of stereotypes that do influence the perception of a language. Do languages such as German sound orderly and unpleasant and Italian beautiful and erotic because of their sounds, or just based on one’s own attitude toward their speakers?"<br /></p><p>I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila? If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.</p><p>It's a fun study, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. It brings up the bigger question, though, of why we find <i>anything</i> aesthetically pleasing. I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's <i>Firebird</i>) while others that are considered by many to be masterpieces do nothing for me at all (I've yet to hear a piece of music by Brahms that elicits more than "meh" from me). There's an emotional resonance there with some things and not others, but I'm at a loss to explain it.</p><p>So maybe I should end with a song by Enya, which is not only beautiful musically, but is sung in the conlang she invented, Loxian. Give this a listen and see where you'd rank it.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-htgmsMnKig" width="320" youtube-src-id="-htgmsMnKig"></iframe></div><div><br /></div>I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty sweet-sounding.<p>****************************************</p><div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-54630363502441983432024-03-12T03:23:00.000-07:002024-03-12T03:23:11.444-07:00A tangle of beliefs<p>I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.</p><p>The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way. Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do? Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.</p><p>On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense). No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.</p><p>So, respect people? Of course, always. But respect <i>claims</i>? Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others. My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."</p><p>This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_new_religious_movements">List of New Religious Movements</a>." By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHI7lLoV675A4gipGmXxPuaBQrEDa40uiLbsoawEUlx8pg6GF-sV_dECl3glYWuDBSgZfCY9V8bZxeZgtxBRwWkgDH-xD5MBr0_lEFBmHv114uHIMD6hjz_XgY-OZedf29Pf9JMwNljRpUON5ZBKyYThyeCukkttd9fMG3S9JdmXJnh3ZB8rm9rDAX7fw/s800/RELIGIONES.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHI7lLoV675A4gipGmXxPuaBQrEDa40uiLbsoawEUlx8pg6GF-sV_dECl3glYWuDBSgZfCY9V8bZxeZgtxBRwWkgDH-xD5MBr0_lEFBmHv114uHIMD6hjz_XgY-OZedf29Pf9JMwNljRpUON5ZBKyYThyeCukkttd9fMG3S9JdmXJnh3ZB8rm9rDAX7fw/w400-h400/RELIGIONES.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://lizenzhinweisgenerator.de/wiki/File:ReligijneSymbole.svg">ReligijneSymbole.svg</a>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dariusofthedark">Dariusofthedark</a>]</div><p>I find this kind of mind-boggling. I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true! Here's what everyone else should believe!" Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.</p><p>But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude. And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre. You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all. Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Tao_(UFO_religion)">Chen Tao</a>, founded in 1993 in Taiwan by Hon-Ming Chen. He later upped stakes and moved his community to Garland, Texas, because "Garland" sounds a little like "God's land." This one mixes Buddhism, Christian End-Times stuff, and... UFOs. Chen became infamous for stating that on March 31, 1998, God would be visible nationwide on Channel 18, and would have an important message for us (because, of course, what other kind of message could God have?). When God failed to show, Chen (showing remarkable contrition for a cult leader) said, "I must have misunderstood," and offered to be crucified or stoned as penance, but no one took him up on it.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asatru_Folk_Assembly">Ásatrú Folk Assembly</a>, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement">Genesis II Church of Health and Healing</a>, founded in 2009 by Jim Humble and self-styled "QAnon prophet" Jordan Sather, which seems to have been mostly a way of selling something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" as a cure for everything from COVID-19 to cancer, but which turned out to be a solution of chlorine dioxide (bleach). The "miracle" is that anyone survives after drinking it. Some people, unfortunately, did not.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Light">Church of Light</a>, founded in 1932 by C. C. Zain, which melds astrology, occultism, hermeticism, and Christianity. This one, though, has been torn apart by internal schisms and rifts, to the point that there now seem to be more sects and sub-sects of the Church of Light than there are actual members.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amica_Temple_of_Radiance">Amica Temple of Radiance</a>, founded in 1959 by Roland Hunt and Dorothy Bailey, based on the teachings of spiritualist Ivah Bergh Whitten. The idea here is apparently that colors have a sacred significance, and you can heal yourself (both physically and spiritually) by figuring out what your color is and then exposing yourself to that frequency of light. Seems to me that "... but this doesn't actually work" would pretty much puncture a hole in the claim, but I guess the placebo effect can be awfully powerful.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn_Cult">Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven</a>, founded in 1922 by May Otis Blackburn, who told her devotees she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the secrets of heaven and earth to the masses. Some of her "secrets" had to do with resurrecting the dead, once again resulting in the objection "... but this doesn't actually work" (as you'll see, this will become a recurring theme here). The whole thing fell apart when Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing forty thousand dollars from one of her followers.</li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adonism">Adonism</a>, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler. The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_(mythology)">Bel</a>, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adonis">Adonis</a>, the worship of whom involved having lots of sex with whatever gender(s) you like. So I guess I can understand why devotees thought Adonism was pretty cool. Sättler, though, ran afoul of the anti-decadency drive of the Nazis, ended up in jail, and is thought to have died in Mauthausen concentration camp.</li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Unlimited">People Unlimited</a>, founded in 1982 by Charles Paul Brown, which teaches that humans can be immortal. The claim ran into an unfortunate snag in 2014 when Brown died, but (astonishingly) the group didn't lose members, who transferred their allegiance (and hopes of eternal life) to Brown's widow Bernadeane.</li><li>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism">Missionary Church of Kopimism</a>, founded in Uppsala, Sweden in 2010 by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe. The main tenet of this movement is that information is sacred, and therefore copyright law is inherently immoral. The internet is "holy," they say, because it is a conduit of communication, and file sharing is a sacrament. Their logo -- I <i>swear</i> I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."</li><li>"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Has_Won">Love Has Won</a>," founded by Amy Carlson, who claimed to be a nineteen-billion-year-old being who had birthed all of creation. Not content with that, she was reincarnated 534 times, including incarnations as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe, finally ending up as a 32-year-old manager of a Dallas, Texas McDonalds before founding her cult in 2007. Among her odder claims were that Donald Trump had been her father in a previous incarnation, Robin Williams was an archangel, and the remnants of the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria live beneath Mount Shasta. She said that she was going to "lead 144,000 souls into the fifth dimension," but died in 2021 under mysterious circumstances before she had the chance.</li></ul><div>And this is just a very short sampler from a very long list.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's not that I'm perplexed about the founders, for the most part. Some (like Humble and Sather, the ones hawking the Miracle Mineral Supplement) are almost certainly in it for the money. Others are motivated by having power and influence over their followers, or (like Franz Sättler) because free sex with whoever you want is a nifty perk. Yet others (like Amy Carlson) probably are just mentally ill.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what honestly puzzles me is how so many people can look at these sorts of cults and say, "Yes! Of course! That makes <i>perfect</i> sense!" And, even stranger, continue to believe even after circumstances (or hard evidence) show that what the leaders are claiming <i>can't</i> be true.</div><div><br /></div><div>To return to my initial point -- it's hardly that I'm sure of everything myself, or am somehow convinced I have a direct pipeline to the Eternal Truths. But to fall for some of these (<i>tens of thousands</i>!) of "new religious movements," you have to entangle yourself in belief systems that honestly make no sense whatsoever.</div><div><br /></div><div>In conclusion -- if you belong to any of these groups, please don't come after me with a machete. I'm not saying you can't belong to the Missionary Church of Kopimism and do a Gregorian chant every time you cut-and-paste, or immerse yourself in a beam of orange light to try to cure your acne. </div><div><br /></div><div>But at least allow me my incredulity, okay?</div><p></p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-73544489611006523822024-03-11T03:25:00.000-07:002024-03-11T03:25:21.795-07:00Turning the focus knob<p>I am <i>really</i> distractible.</p><p>To say I have "squirrel brain" is a deep injustice to squirrels. At least squirrels have the focus to accomplish their purpose every day, which is to make sure our bird feeders are constantly empty. If I was a squirrel, I'd probably clamber my way up the post and past the inaccurately-named "squirrel baffle" and finally get to the feeder, and then just sit there with a puzzled look, thinking, "Why am I up here, again?"</p><p>My "Oh, look, something shiny" approach to life has at least a few upsides. I tend to make weird connections between things really fast, which long-time readers of <i>Skeptophilia</i> probably know all too well. If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, <i>England > Cornwall > Tintagel > King Arthur > Monty Python > the "bring out yer dead" scene > the Black Death > mass burials > a weird study I read a while back about how nettle plants need high calcium and phosphorus soils, so they're often found where skeletons have decomposed</i>, and I'll say, cheerfully, "Did you know that nettles are edible? You can cook 'em like spinach," and it makes complete sense to me even though everyone else in the room is giving me a look like this:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzSPFr62sb8DcVYAZHgPGcFREhoza1vVjvq015-3YxKpVcBeRGlUJaUz6k8m3CHy1RlhB_XvNrKfo4NRuwAuX-F9d0qeBFIfUHLwo4H7Ytt_22rkdYz5VLt9uA09FoXgk9g3tetrrMhUncUpqVnGbewT9n_z8b6nQAFXHBwiZlJ032sau1ruONMUqWJEy9/s341/image-asset.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="341" height="383" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzSPFr62sb8DcVYAZHgPGcFREhoza1vVjvq015-3YxKpVcBeRGlUJaUz6k8m3CHy1RlhB_XvNrKfo4NRuwAuX-F9d0qeBFIfUHLwo4H7Ytt_22rkdYz5VLt9uA09FoXgk9g3tetrrMhUncUpqVnGbewT9n_z8b6nQAFXHBwiZlJ032sau1ruONMUqWJEy9/w400-h383/image-asset.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Talking to me is like the conversational equivalent of riding the Tilt-O-Whirl.<br /><p>Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.</p><p>A more significant downside, though, is that my inability to focus makes it really hard in noisy or chaotic environments. When I'm in a crowded restaurant or bar, I can pay attention for a while to what the people I'm with are saying, but there comes a moment -- and it usually does happen quite suddenly -- when my brain just goes, "Nope. Done," and the entire thing turns into a wall of white noise in which I'm unable to pick out a single word. </p><p>All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.</p><p>However, as <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01826-7">a study last week in <i>Nature Human Behavior</i></a> shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a <i>lot</i> of us find daunting. And, most encouragingly, that capacity for focus is not related to intelligence. "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" said Harrison Ritz, of Brown University, who led the study, in <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308122958.htm">an interview with <i>Science Daily</i></a>. "[Our] findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time. It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."</p><p>The researchers ran volunteers through a battery of cognitive tests while hooked up to fMRI machines, to observe what parts of their brain were involved in mental coordination and filtering. In one of them, they had to estimate the percentage of purple dots in a swirling maelstrom of mixed purple and green dots -- a task that makes me anxious just thinking about it. The researchers found two parts of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, that seemed to be involved in the task, but each was functioning in different ways.</p>"You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering," Ritz said. "In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what's going on with the dots. When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.<br /><br />"In the scenario where the purple and green dots are almost at 50/50, it might also direct the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob in order to increase the sensitivity to color. Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the appropriate color, so the participant is better able to make the correct selection."<div><br /></div><div>The applications to understanding disorders like ADHD are obvious, although of course identifying the parts of the brain that are responsible is only the beginning. The question then becomes, "But what do you <i>do</i> about it?", and the truth is that current treatments for ADHD are a crapshoot at best. Even so, it'd have been nice if this understanding had come sooner -- it might have saved me from being told by my third grade teacher, unkindly if accurately, "You have the attention span of a gnat."</div><div><br /></div><div>I apparently haven't changed much, because recalling this comment made me go, <i>gnats > a scene in one of Carlos Castaneda's books where the main character was high on mushrooms and hallucinated a giant man-eating gnat > edible mushrooms, which my wife hates > food preferences > licorice, another thing a lot of people hate > a study I read about using licorice extract to treat psoriasis</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hey, did you know that the word <i>psoriasis</i> comes from the Greek word ψώρα, meaning "itch"? I bet you didn't know that.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-75275222172285929182024-03-09T03:31:00.000-08:002024-03-09T05:36:29.745-08:00Brane teaser<p>After my diatribe a couple of days ago about the misuse of the word <i>dimension</i>, I got into a discussion with a friend that can be summed up as, "Okay, then how <i>are</i> we supposed to picture spaces with more than three dimensions?"</p><p>Well, the simple answer is that we can't. Our brains are equipped to manage pictorial representations of three dimensions or fewer. We can try to get a handle on it via analogy -- a particularly masterful example is Edwin Abbott's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Romance-Dimensions-Thrift-Editions/dp/048627263X">Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions</a></i>, which considers a two-dimensional character named A. Square, who has as hard a time picturing a third dimension as we do a fourth. When a three-dimensional sphere passes through Flatland, A. Square perceives it as a series of successive two-dimensional slices -- a circle that appears out of nowhere, grows larger, then shrinks and finally vanishes. The implication is that if a four-dimensional object -- a hypersphere, perhaps -- were to pass through our three-dimensional world, we'd see something similar; a projection of successive "slices," a sphere popping into existence, expanding, then contracting and vanishing.</p><p>But the fact remains that these are ways of thinking about a concept that is, honestly, beyond our ken. It's the problem that plagues many of the deep models of physics -- something that can be described clearly and accurately by the math is nevertheless impossible to visualize. It's a bit like the situation with quantum mechanics; the math is astonishingly precise and makes spot-on predictions, but if you ask most physicists, "So what physical reality is the math <i>describing</i>?" the answer you'll get is a slightly embarrassed "we don't know." (If they don't say "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation">Shut up and calculate</a>.")</p><p>It's a serious sticking point with people like myself, who understand best when we can picture what's going on. It was when I hit that spot in my undergraduate studies -- when the professor said, basically, "The math is what's real, here, don't bother trying to visualize it because you can't" -- that I decided that a career in physics was not in the cards for me.</p><p>Despite that, I have continued to be intrigued with notions like quantum indeterminacy and higher-dimensional space, even though when I read about them I often have an expression on my face like the one my puppy has when I explain a complex concept that is beyond his comprehension, such as why he shouldn't eat the sofa. I'm currently reading a wonderful book about the topic of extra dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, called <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Warped-Passages-Unraveling-Mysteries-Dimensions/dp/0060531096/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GDTSVRSHUFB7&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.v6bipKw6tjqU8yK2kw87zsz7LyBD8UgqwEvQMUbm-5KbpywXN39RQwZdg9A6vKBkzZ3y_9JoeMhKjFelql46dNN3o_bmKt1285q8gq6wOLam8tu7Ne4TGkoCIHuKkdSp8kUa8RgGyKTzy_gM6hoQCPcjBTM3t6dfI1bXgIxwB0-5BzYj-VMgQAgl87XTusxryum7ZblEpsdzGZj08hF-60Q0xb4a50-QGuLHBll5Vnc.93kf3RBSJfBpwPuOEQIZGEDRjFuOx_zAOi2WtszDcrs&dib_tag=se&keywords=lisa+randall&qid=1709899128&s=books&sprefix=lisa+randall%2Cstripbooks%2C79&sr=1-1">Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions</a></i>, which does an outstanding job of bringing the topic down to a level we eager-but-not-so-bright puppies can understand. (And if you want more, she has an appendix with mathematical notes elucidating the topic in a deeper and more precise fashion.) </p><p>One of the more fascinating topics she goes into is the concept of a <i><a href="https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~gmoore/WHAT-IS-BRANE.pdf">brane</a></i> -- a cross-section of a higher-dimensional space a bit like A. Square's expanding-and-contracting circles. The name comes from the word <i>membrane</i>, because (like a cell membrane) a two-dimensional brane can be a boundary on a three-dimensional space. The surface of the Earth's ocean, for example, can be seen as a two-dimensional brane (not only acting as a boundary, but oscillating up and down into the three-dimensional space on either side).</p><p>Of course, you're not limited to two-dimensional branes in three-dimensional space. A generalized name for branes in <i>p</i> dimensions is called a <i>p-brane</i>, which was one of my father's favorite insults (albeit spelled differently). </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTg9HUqh-hvnZS3o7blBsqBSE9ZOT4MBYln1bCX12j9ktupwTQzdDflgFquM-zcxNyYyGldlVJTjIdL1hwwvmavdPas3Ui6gssyPiNAs5_z2WXpo3FrGWuGtUdStyC-oigu08qwzzFt-dW71wXfExqOqmVkKUhNg8Hm9oj_jfD0Tn-BSg7ablQgz4Lwp8i/s1200/CalabiYau5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTg9HUqh-hvnZS3o7blBsqBSE9ZOT4MBYln1bCX12j9ktupwTQzdDflgFquM-zcxNyYyGldlVJTjIdL1hwwvmavdPas3Ui6gssyPiNAs5_z2WXpo3FrGWuGtUdStyC-oigu08qwzzFt-dW71wXfExqOqmVkKUhNg8Hm9oj_jfD0Tn-BSg7ablQgz4Lwp8i/w400-h400/CalabiYau5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">A two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional projection of a six-dimensional structure called a <i>Calabi-Yau manifold</i>. Yeah, my head hurts, too. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andrew J. Hanson, Indiana University., <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CalabiYau5.jpg">CalabiYau5</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><p>Where it becomes more interesting, and unfortunately far harder to picture, is when you consider the idea from some physicists -- Randall has been one of the lead researchers in this field -- that our own three-dimensional universe is a three-brane within a higher-dimensional space. There is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology">a tantalizing suggestion</a> that this model may explain some of physics's most persistent mysteries, such as why the gravitational force is so weak compared to the other three. If we are actually living in a three-dimensional slice, the gravitational force within our bit of space may leak across into the higher dimensions, weakening its intensity and perhaps influencing other branes within the space (which might give physicists a way of finding evidence for the conjecture).</p><p>There's even the suggestion that the Big Bang may have occurred because of collision between two three-branes in a multi-dimensional hyperspace -- a model called <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe">ekpyrotic cosmology</a></i>. </p><p>But we're still up against the problem that it's impossible to answer the question, "But what does it actually <i>look</i> like?" The mathematics is crisp and clear; any picture we come up with is, by comparison, incomplete and inaccurate. Take, for example, a hypercube, a symmetrical four-dimensional structure that can be described mathematically but is impossible to visualize. All we can do is consider what projections of it -- shadows, so to speak -- look like in three dimensions. Here's a particularly mesmerizing projection of a rotating hypercube:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyhJF3ZNH1uyHx-pvCvwq9BgaXviFgDMuKoIz2lX5JnZDQY0cI9P5cPbnDe73lntCsbWLJDc9oLCRNSjKtBYKa2tVww9mBXRziYsCyrLksHZ-8jwYbpjWtT_DpQ1dWpil8nO0465aAiA7mKMZ9SEhfPye0wVAyU3IrsjPuXhtKhWqB4T7NNRTmAyL3yL1s/s256/8-cell-orig.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="256" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyhJF3ZNH1uyHx-pvCvwq9BgaXviFgDMuKoIz2lX5JnZDQY0cI9P5cPbnDe73lntCsbWLJDc9oLCRNSjKtBYKa2tVww9mBXRziYsCyrLksHZ-8jwYbpjWtT_DpQ1dWpil8nO0465aAiA7mKMZ9SEhfPye0wVAyU3IrsjPuXhtKhWqB4T7NNRTmAyL3yL1s/w400-h400/8-cell-orig.gif" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jason Hise, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:8-cell-orig.gif">8-cell-orig</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode">CC0 1.0</a>]</div><p>So we're kind of ending where we started. All of this is just a teaser, really -- a brief excursion into a subject that is just now being investigated by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. If the mathematics of branes and higher dimensions and whatnot is beyond you -- it certain is me -- we're left with trying to get a faint glimmer of understanding via analogy. Which only gets you so far.</p><p>But at least it gives us something our branes -- um, brains -- can handle.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-45675469694176938242024-03-08T03:27:00.000-08:002024-03-08T03:27:08.473-08:00The electric landscape<p>In his remarkable TED Talk "<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en">Can We Create New Senses for Humans?</a>," neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the concept of the <i>umwelt</i> -- the part of the available stimulus space sampled by a particular animal's senses. A simple example is the thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes are sensitive to -- the familiar ROYGBIV of the rainbow. There's plenty of electromagnetic radiation outside of that slice; gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves are all ordinary photons, just like visible light is. It's just that our eyes aren't sensitive to those frequencies, so they're outside of our <i>umwelt</i>.</p><p>The <i>umwelt</i> also has to do with the relative weighting of senses; how big a part of our sensory world a particular experience constitutes. Most humans have a sense of smell, but my dogs live in a far richer olfactory world than I do. But even how those inputs are utilized -- i.e., what kind of information they provide for making sense of the world -- can vary greatly. Bats and dolphins use hearing in much the same way as we use our eyes, creating "sonic landscapes" of the objects around them. What's kind of amazing, though -- and one of the main points of Eagleman's talk -- is that humans can train their brains to use other "peripherals" (as he calls them) to learn about the world, such as blind people who have learned to navigate the space around them by making clicking noises and listening for echoes from nearby obstacles.</p><p>It's always been fascinating to me to consider how the world would look to a night-flying echolocating bat. Do they "see" their world through their ears and auditory cortex?</p><p>The topic of how other animals perceive their worlds -- and how different it could be from what we experience -- comes up because of <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07157-x">a paper this week in the journal <i>Nature</i></a> about how <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peters's_elephantnose_fish">elephantnose fish</a> (<i>Gnathonemus petersii</i>), which live in murky streams in west and central Africa where eyesight doesn't serve much purpose, develop their visual picture of the world (including locating prey) using electric fields. And not only do they gain information by creating and sensing electrical signals, they enhance those pictures using the signals created by nearby members of their species, making them one of the only known animals that relies on collective signal production and sensing.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8rtgP6af3MqTA64P5hHUruXPwetSlISEz9NWsP4cG57k3bG3_YIxiefErL07hzGHdbD4LnXKH9R9CeIkf6MMiOr4xWJ9nlc9f1EqXUdz97LV4BsNR0CmoB6i4M8AUCXuQzyoyZ5b-3M8k7d6nr98nnOrycvHF-WUd_tOz3nSgmct7G3W7t__aMoHYbmox/s766/Gnathonemus_petersii.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="492" data-original-width="766" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8rtgP6af3MqTA64P5hHUruXPwetSlISEz9NWsP4cG57k3bG3_YIxiefErL07hzGHdbD4LnXKH9R9CeIkf6MMiOr4xWJ9nlc9f1EqXUdz97LV4BsNR0CmoB6i4M8AUCXuQzyoyZ5b-3M8k7d6nr98nnOrycvHF-WUd_tOz3nSgmct7G3W7t__aMoHYbmox/w400-h258/Gnathonemus_petersii.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Gnathonemus petersii</i> [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><br />"Think of these external signals as electric images of the objects that nearby electric fish automatically produce and beam to nearby fish at the speed of light," said Federico Pedraja of Columbia University, who headed the study. "Our work suggests that three fish in a group would each receive three different "electrical views" of the same scene at virtually the same time."<br /><div><br /></div><div>The elephantnose fish's capacity for working in groups is a little like humans out on a search at night with flashlights. One person with one flashlight would have a small illuminated field of view, but if there were twenty people it would go much faster, not only because of greater manpower, but because each person wouldn't be restricted to what is revealed by only their own flashlight beam. Just as with twenty different flashlights in the night rather than a single one, in the case of elephantnose fish, the electrical fields produced by their neighbors clarify the picture they all receive.</div><div><br /></div>"In engineering it is common that groups of emitters and receivers work together to improve sensing, for example in sonar and radar," said Nathaniel Sawtell, who co-authored the study. "We showed that something similar may be happening in groups of fish that sense their environment using electrical pulses. These fish seem to 'see' much better in small groups... [They] have some of the biggest brain-to-body mass ratios of any animal on the planet. Perhaps these enormous brains are needed for rapid and highly sophisticated social sensing and collective behavior."<div><br /></div><div>To return to my original point -- how would the world look to an elephantnose fish? Surely nothing like what we see. Some sort of topography of electrical field strength, perhaps, creating an image of the obstacles they have to maneuver around, the prey they seek, and the predators they need to avoid. But really, there's no way to know. We're all trapped within our own <i>umwelt</i>. I can't even imagine what the world is like for my dogs, who are a great deal more similar to me than these fish are.</div><div><br /></div><div>To perceive the world like another living being does, you'd not only have to come equipped with their sensory systems, but put the information together using their brains. We can only speculate, with all the inevitable biases that come from being locked in our own ways of knowing. But this study did at least give us a hint of how different the world could appear -- if we were odd little fish living in muddy African rivers.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-3039518506335347902024-03-07T03:29:00.000-08:002024-03-07T03:29:28.555-08:00Dimensional analysisAs long-time readers of <i>Skeptophilia</i> know, it really torques my lug nuts when people take perfectly good scientific terms, re-define them however the fuck they like, and then pretend what they're saying makes sense.<br /><br />The list of terms this has happened to is a long one, and includes <i>frequency, resonance, quantum</i> (lord, how they do love the word <i>quantum</i>), and <i>vibration</i>, to name a few. But there's none that bothers me quite as much as the rampant misuse of the word <i>dimension</i>.<br /><br />Part of the reason this one gets to me is that the basic concept of a dimension is so simple that you'd think it'd be hard to get wrong. If you go to the Wikipedia article about the term, you will read in the very first line, "In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it." The space we live in is three-dimensional because to define the location of a point, you need to know where it lies referent to three directions -- up/down, back/front, and right/left.<br /><br />This hasn't stopped people from taking the term and running right off the cliff with it. And it's not a new phenomenon. I remember an episode of the abysmal 1960s science-fiction series (heavy on the fiction, light on the science) <i>Lost in Space</i> called "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension," wherein Will Robinson was kidnapped by a pair of evil aliens who looked like the love children of Matt Gaetz and Herman Munster.<div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTJ5ll4dLxWA_6CBAXZUgZqcfy0M2AbuTsJo3rJaUOe8bRD3X8Kx1IsKoZBosEtiLNeLZNywcY7RQkyhFYQ7a8sJ3leErW6QfXHI6NUv8ud-9Dneu-QpH62wl9oSHDZY7511LjIiyuGRF0gBh5f9BiJBe28CeYGUs2qYHFr-zJiqnwouc5bXPgQvgpMg/s870/MV5BOGRhZjFkMTEtM2VhNi00YmUyLTg2M2ItMTYyZWEzMGFlZTEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjUxNDg0Nzc@._V1_.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTJ5ll4dLxWA_6CBAXZUgZqcfy0M2AbuTsJo3rJaUOe8bRD3X8Kx1IsKoZBosEtiLNeLZNywcY7RQkyhFYQ7a8sJ3leErW6QfXHI6NUv8ud-9Dneu-QpH62wl9oSHDZY7511LjIiyuGRF0gBh5f9BiJBe28CeYGUs2qYHFr-zJiqnwouc5bXPgQvgpMg/w400-h305/MV5BOGRhZjFkMTEtM2VhNi00YmUyLTg2M2ItMTYyZWEzMGFlZTEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjUxNDg0Nzc@._V1_.jpg" /></a></div><br />These aliens told Will they were "from the fifth dimension," which makes about as much sense as if your Uncle Fred told you he was from "horizontal." Be that as it may, after they captured Will they revealed to him their nefarious plan, which was to use his brain to power their spaceship. Things looked bad, but Will defeated them by (I swear I am not making this up) feeling sad at them, which caused their spaceship to blow up.<br /><br />So using the word "dimension" as a fancy way of saying "a mysterious place somewhere" goes back a long way. But because of a loyal reader of <i>Skeptophilia</i>, I just read what has to be the single most ridiculous example of this I've ever seen.<br /><br />And that includes "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension."<br /><br />It's an article in <i>Your Tango</i> called "<a href="https://www.yourtango.com/self/do-we-visit-other-dimensions-when-we-sleep">The Theory That Claims We Visit Other Dimensions While We Sleep</a>," by NyRee Ausler. Which brings up another misused word that really bothers me, which is "theory." A theory is not "this crazy idea I pulled out of my ass just now," and nor does it mean "a guess that could just as easily be right as wrong." A theory is model with strong explanatory and predictive power, and which fits all the available data and evidence we have at hand. When the creationists say, breezily, "Evolution is just a theory," that is not some kind of point in their favor; all it shows is that they have no idea what the word actually means.<br /><br />After all, we call it "music theory" and that's <i>not because we think music may not exist</i>.<br /><br />But I digress.<br /><br />Anyhow, back to NyRee Ausler. It will come as no shock to find out that she answers her question, "do we visit other dimensions while we dream?" with, "Yes, of <i>course</i> we do." The way we know, she says, is that the laws of physics aren't the same in dreams as they are in reality. I can vouch at least for that much. I dreamed last night that I was out working in my garden, and I kept accidentally digging up plants and knocking things over and generally wreaking havoc, but then when I was done not only was everything back to normal, but the flowers were in full bloom despite the fact that it's currently early March in upstate New York, meaning we have at least a month and a half before we'll be seeing any colors other than gray and brown.<br /><br />In any case, her point that "dreams are fucking weird" hardly needs further elucidation, but she goes on to say that the reason for all this is that dreams take place in another dimension. And then she launches into a brief description of -- I shit you not -- string theory, which is a mathematical model of subatomic physics requiring ten spatial dimensions, all but three of which are thought to be (very) submicroscopic and "curled up." The analogy commonly used is an ant on a garden hose -- it can go along the hose (one stretched-out dimension), or around the hose's circumference (one curled-up dimension). The string theorists claim that three of the dimensions in our universe are of the stretched-out variety, and seven are curled up so tightly that we don't experience them on a macroscopic scale, but influence quantum phenomena such as how particles interact at very high energies. <br /><br />And yes, what NyRee Ausler is saying is that when you dream, you are somehow visiting these extremely tiny, curled-up dimensions, and that's why dreams are peculiar. Once again, acting as if these extra dimensions were places, not just mathematical constructs describing spatial coordinates.<br /><br />But it gets even better than that, because she goes on to tell us what each of those dimensions are like, one by one. I direct you to the original link if you want to read about them all, but here's one, just to give you the flavor:<br /><blockquote>The sixth dimension consists of a straight line of possible worlds. Here, you get an opportunity to access all possible worlds that started with the same original conditions, like the Big Bang Theory. It is known as the "phase space" in a set of parallel universes where everything that could have happened in our pasts, but did not, occurred in some other universe. The sixth dimension exists in the same space and time as the one we occupy, an overlay of our universe or a 3-D space containing every possible world.</blockquote>Right! Exactly! What?<br /><br />What made me laugh the hardest is that she tried to give her article an extra <i>soupçon</i> of scienc-y-ness by mentioning <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold"><i>Calabi-Yau manifolds</i></a>, an extremely complex concept from higher-dimensional algebraic geometry, because lobbing in a technical term you obviously don't understand clearly strengthens your argument.<br /><br />I know it's probably a waste of energy for me to spend my time railing about this, but there are people who will read this and think it's actual science. And that bugs the absolute hell out of me. The thing is, her article is not just wrong, it's <i>lazy</i>. As I demonstrated above, all you have to do is to take the time to read the first paragraph of a damn Wikipedia page to see that what Ausler is claiming is blatant horse waste.<br /><br />But science is hard, and technical, and to really understand it requires reading peer-reviewed journal articles and learning terminology and mathematics. Easier to blather on about string theory and dimensions and (*<i>snerk</i>*) Calabi-Yau manifolds as if you knew what you were talking about, and hope that enough people click on the link that the ad revenue will pay for your groceries next month.<br /><br />So anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent me the article. I did get a couple of good laughs out of it, but the overall teeth-grinding I did while reading it probably resulted in net damage to my emotional state. Pseudoscience will be with us always, springing up like mushrooms after a summer rain. Or like my garden flowers on a chilly, wet day in March, at least in my sixth-dimensional dreams.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-16018963685372139842024-03-06T03:26:00.000-08:002024-03-06T03:26:35.712-08:00Arts and sciencesBehind every art is science.<div><br /></div><div>Of course, you can produce beautiful art without knowing any scientific details; the Renaissance masters created gorgeous paintings without knowing the exact chemical composition of their paints. It's amazing, really, that they accomplished what they did, combining their astonishing talents and aesthetic senses with materials developed using what amounted to trial-and-error.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wouldn't consider myself an artist, but I do play around with clay, and I've gotten the chance to geek out over the scientific side of pottery -- specifically, glaze chemistry. Glazes are generally made of four ingredients -- a glass-former (usually some form of silica), a flux (which lowers the melting temperature of the mix and make it flow), a refractory material (to give it stability and viscosity), and a colorant. One of the first things I learned when I started making pottery, though, is not to assume the final product after firing to 1200 C will be the same color as the raw glaze; in fact, the reverse is usually true. Here's a kiln load, coated with various raw glazes, before firing:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifvH07oFfBEKXsMLNvwIvKQG7HERiuJYKD-tMHaJcbuWrBT4r_JQroFCYZHNFM7obXpUB3MgapuTC750_fjXeTd98AqzQhTNhOhYgD8Pjui1zqCXWpAki_FiNBZxVHzCk4rXqKK7a2Z8KrUlp4oBx4MgZ1Y1JlaU4MkiGbCWlvgjYi8_i2h_p1IizdAROm/s3024/06CA7ABF-B91B-4B58-AAB5-2C089604C73D.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifvH07oFfBEKXsMLNvwIvKQG7HERiuJYKD-tMHaJcbuWrBT4r_JQroFCYZHNFM7obXpUB3MgapuTC750_fjXeTd98AqzQhTNhOhYgD8Pjui1zqCXWpAki_FiNBZxVHzCk4rXqKK7a2Z8KrUlp4oBx4MgZ1Y1JlaU4MkiGbCWlvgjYi8_i2h_p1IizdAROm/w400-h400/06CA7ABF-B91B-4B58-AAB5-2C089604C73D.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>And the same kiln load after firing:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXEJM3WA9LjlvKb8FUGbpHgXK-1opcg3DsQf2qpuVDQByBT3djSfVb_aY8DkPWVacydGZLqNrpcqk4hjl-yilUwnIkNbdiyJE1rRh3_OnttqsWVA5y3pa9L8IelcfkoSqag6cswqQdxO0f0QcqnbtPYkfU6YqMQMSfNE5HGp0YQD66e2wwDfwWHqQUKDoQ/s3024/6957C7A1-44C9-4773-B184-A6480117D7DB.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXEJM3WA9LjlvKb8FUGbpHgXK-1opcg3DsQf2qpuVDQByBT3djSfVb_aY8DkPWVacydGZLqNrpcqk4hjl-yilUwnIkNbdiyJE1rRh3_OnttqsWVA5y3pa9L8IelcfkoSqag6cswqQdxO0f0QcqnbtPYkfU6YqMQMSfNE5HGp0YQD66e2wwDfwWHqQUKDoQ/w400-h400/6957C7A1-44C9-4773-B184-A6480117D7DB.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The changes that occur during firing always strike me as something very like alchemy. Even knowing a bit about how they work -- and what I know is, honestly, little more than a bit -- there's still an unpredictability about glazes that make them fun, exciting, and occasionally exasperating to work with.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was reminded of my trials and tribulations -- and occasional triumphs -- with glaze chemistry as I was reading <a href="https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/2/pgae059/7603780">a paper in <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Nexus</i></a> a couple of days ago. Called "Marangoni Spreading on Liquid Substrates in New Media Art," and written by San To Chan and Eliot Fried of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, this paper looks at the creation of intricate and beautiful fractal patterns using little more than acrylic ink and paint, water, and rubbing alcohol.</div><div><br /></div><div>The technique involves applying tiny droplets of thinned acrylic ink onto a painted surface. The irregularities in the surface draw the liquid away from the point where it is applied, and the design develops as you watch, creating branching patterns resembling snowflakes, neurons, or lightning. Just as with ceramic glazes, the exact mix of the various ingredients can drastically change the results. The process works because acrylic paints and inks are <i>thixotropic</i>, meaning that their viscosity changes when they're stirred or shaken (a common thixotropic substance is ketchup -- which is why you have to shake it or it won't pour). The water and alcohol change the viscosity, and in combining the ingredients there's a sweet spot where the mixture is viscous enough to hold together into threads on the painted surface but not so viscous that it doesn't move.</div><div><br /></div>"In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces," said San To Chan, who co-authored the study. "One of them is surface tension -- the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond. In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet. Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre. This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears -- the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting."<div><br /></div>"We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil," said Eliot Fried, the study's other co-author. "If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments. The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, traveling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern."<br /><br /><div>I love knowing the science behind the arts (although I must admit that the mathematics in the paper about dendritic art lost me pretty quickly). It was great fun, for example, that the fiddler in the band I was in for ten years was a physics professor at Cornell University and taught a class called The Physics of Music -- she more than once told me things about how my instrument worked that I honestly hadn't known (such as why flutes go sharp when they warm up). </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know about you, but knowing the science of how things work enhances my appreciation for their beauty. I've loved Bach's music ever since I first heard it as a teenager; but now, understanding how fugues and canons are constructed makes my wonderment over pieces like the astonishing <i>A Musical Offering</i> that much more profound. Likewise, my knowing a little about glaze chemistry enhances my enjoyment of the beauty of the results.</div><div><br /></div><div>Science itself is beautiful. And when you combine it with art and music, you have something truly magical.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-59810544413491240162024-03-05T03:28:00.000-08:002024-03-05T03:28:01.534-08:00Mouse tales<p>Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muridae">Muridae</a> -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.</p><p>And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyorhinomys_stuempkei">Sulawesi snouter</a>, <i>Hyorhinomys stuempkei</i>. It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2QImlFQM36m46eDwiKX-2FWNvono7MbWXDOjLlSIM4xDuk9DcAqY2CPG8fMoqS5h2H8jARfTbjjO_WMunMX-RRLZtMAvvwqEPIcqjM6nGs4gZ2cN9S9CyfFf9iJQqNCOTQuh0tdq01aIq-7c3rFXU9c7zC5KXqKY5p68JL0n1nH8NT_nuOtb01BdgisX/s1198/Hyorhinomys07.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1198" data-original-width="1124" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2QImlFQM36m46eDwiKX-2FWNvono7MbWXDOjLlSIM4xDuk9DcAqY2CPG8fMoqS5h2H8jARfTbjjO_WMunMX-RRLZtMAvvwqEPIcqjM6nGs4gZ2cN9S9CyfFf9iJQqNCOTQuh0tdq01aIq-7c3rFXU9c7zC5KXqKY5p68JL0n1nH8NT_nuOtb01BdgisX/w375-h400/Hyorhinomys07.JPG" width="375" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Hyorhinomys stuempkei</i> [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kevinrowephd">Kevin C Rowe and Museum Victoria</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hyorhinomys07.JPG#mw-jump-to-license">Hyorhinomys07</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>]</div><p>But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology. </p><p>It's about its name.</p><p>Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, <i>stuempkei</i>, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, <i>The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades</i>, an exhaustive study of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinogradentia">Order Rhinogradentia</a><i>. </i>The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants. However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi). Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.</p><p>Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well. Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives. Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll. Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolf_Steiner">Gerolf Steiner</a>, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.</p><p>Sad story, yes?</p><p>However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.</p><p>Some questions you might be asking yourself:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?</li><li>And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?</li><li>Those island names don't sound very Polynesian. ("Annoorussawubbissy"? Really?)</li><li>Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.</li><li>How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?</li><li>Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia? Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?</li><li>I mean seriously, what the fuck?</li></ol><p></p><p>The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor). However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.</p><p>Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.</p><p>However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke! And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an <i>hommage</i> to Steiner and his masterful monograph.</p><p>Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-72939675094541803902024-03-04T03:26:00.000-08:002024-03-04T03:26:56.602-08:00The songs of the ancestors<p>My grandmother was born in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, a little village in the Allegheny hill country in the southwestern corner of the state. It's a beautiful region, whose first European settlers came in the eighteenth century from Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some later influxes from Germany and eastern Europe.</p><p>It's also got more than its fair share of poverty. The soil is rocky and poor, and farming was never really going to work for more than the barest subsistence. Until the coal boom of the 1880s, and then the discovery of natural gas there in the 1920s, a lot of people -- my grandmother's family included -- did little more than scrape by. Despite her hardscrabble roots, and far more than their fair share of troubles, my grandma was always proud of the people she'd come from. I remember spending many hours as a child listening to her stories of growing up there, and how proud she was of her Scottish ancestry.</p><p>One constant thread for her, and one I've inherited, was music. She knew scores of old ballads, which I now know were carried across the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland and Northern England by my grandmother's ancestors and others like them -- "Annie Laurie," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Barbara Allen," "The Four Marys," and "Lord Randall" amongst them, all songs I still love not only for their nostalgia but because they're honestly beautiful. A study by British historian and musicologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp">Cecil Sharp</a> found that many songs and tunes that still persist both in the Appalachians and in the Scottish lowlands have actually changed less in their western versions; put another way, the Appalachian musical tradition preserves virtually unchanged the musical culture from its English and Scottish roots three centuries ago.</p><p>As fascinating as this is (and however important for my own personal family history), this is far from the most astonishing example of persistence in musical tradition despite distance, time, and hardship. In fact, the reason this comes up is <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-memory-of-a-song-reunited-two-women-separated-by-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade-180983864/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=2292024&utm_content=new&fbclid=IwAR3c7FIRjITIS99-0Kz2N-Am5FiC73A7fICjd7SnTMdCVWhcE69ctzNj7yk">an article last week in <i>Smithsonian Magazine</i></a> that was sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of <i>Skeptophilia</i> about a song still sung in Sierra Leone that was preserved close to perfectly in the Gullah Geechee culture of the Sea Islands in Georgia.</p><p>Here are the bare bones of the story -- but you really should read the entire account at the link above, because it's amazing.</p><p>In 1933, a Black linguist and anthropologist named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Dow_Turner">Lorenzo Dow Turner</a> was studying the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language">Gullah language</a> of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Gullah is a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language">creole</a></i> -- a language formed by the mixture of other languages, sometimes beginning so that people of different languages could communicate with each other for purposes of trade, but eventually solidifying into a true complex language with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon. In the case of Gullah, its roots come from various West African languages and English, but due to the remoteness (and difficulty of travel) of the region where it's spoken, it's had a couple of hundred years to go its own way.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFwPc8mKdQhSSq0HSq1NA4tViK3j0EVj9eR_Ly8cDUTm8CXPWJHP-yVc-d9hlcoi5vIaCcATwiZMXg-3uylRXWh_rKkuGJnhZxdE9fsj5lv01DvcGemkmjZoBIbCMWB1c_ot-1G0wZOEyQASJUFDXnUcmOuslAi25CLDRtSMU3VD5qHUbHSMZFXLMhD2a/s1600/1600px-Mirror_Children.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="1600" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlFwPc8mKdQhSSq0HSq1NA4tViK3j0EVj9eR_Ly8cDUTm8CXPWJHP-yVc-d9hlcoi5vIaCcATwiZMXg-3uylRXWh_rKkuGJnhZxdE9fsj5lv01DvcGemkmjZoBIbCMWB1c_ot-1G0wZOEyQASJUFDXnUcmOuslAi25CLDRtSMU3VD5qHUbHSMZFXLMhD2a/w400-h283/1600px-Mirror_Children.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Yoruba musicians [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:4toscenethesis">4toscenethesis</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mirror_Children.jpg">Mirror Children</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>]</div><p>Anyhow, Turner was doing a linguistic analysis of Gullah, and came across a native speaker who knew a song she said had been passed down to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother. It wasn't in Gullah; only a few words were clearly from that language. The woman herself didn't know what the lyrics meant, only that she was singing it as her great-grandmother had.</p><p>Well, a Sierra Leonean student of Turner's recognized the lyrics as being in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_language">Mende language</a> -- spoken by about a third of the citizens of modern Sierra Leone, and which is related to other West African languages such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandinka_language">Mandinka</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambara_language">Bambara</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susu_language">Susu</a>. It wasn't until much, much later that Yale University anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner's account, and together with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma set out to see if they could find the song's roots...</p><p>... and they found, in the remote village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, a woman who sang an almost identical version of the song.</p><p>Here are the lyrics in Mende:</p><blockquote><i>A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee<br />A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka<br />Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei<br />Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee<br />Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia</i></blockquote><p> And the English translation:</p><blockquote>Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.<br />Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace.<br />Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun.<br />Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family.<br />Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.</blockquote><p>I don't know about you, but my reaction was... <i>wow</i>.</p><p>That not only <i>a</i> song, but a song that powerful, was preserved for over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic is truly extraordinary. And in the Sea Islands, without even knowing what the words meant. Gullah and Mende have some shared vocabulary, but not nearly enough that they're mutually intelligible -- making the song's persistence in coastal Georgia even more astonishing. And you have to wonder if that little village in Sierra Leone is the place from which the Gullah singer's ancestors were kidnapped and transported by the horrific Atlantic slave trade.</p><p>Music is one of the things that is common to the human experience, and the songs of a people are part of their cultural memory. I'll never cease being grateful to my my grandma for instilling in me early the love of music, and for her teaching me the songs she'd grown up with. It's a tie to my ancestors a long way back. Our cultural roots are as much a part of our lineage as our DNA -- something British singer Rose Betts celebrates in her lovely song "Irish Eyes," which you should all put on your playlists:<br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EhJD4ekxoxk" width="320" youtube-src-id="EhJD4ekxoxk"></iframe></div><br />It's essential that we sing -- new songs and old, the ones written yesterday and the songs of the ancestors first sung centuries ago. The music is the important thing, whatever it is.<p></p><p>Whatever you choose to sing, just keep singing.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-23848888667604381652024-03-02T03:24:00.000-08:002024-03-02T03:24:56.738-08:00Jesus in Japan<div>We'll end the week on an appropriately surreal note.</div><p></p><div class="post-footer" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.6; margin: 1.5em 0px 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></div><p></p>Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation. For example: have you heard about the town of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shing%C5%8D,_Aomori">Shingō</a>, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu? If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:<br /><br /><a href="http://io9.com/5871071/did-you-know-that-jesus-christs-tomb-is-in-japan">It's where Jesus was buried</a>.<br /><br />There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q69SJPDAxbc/VKU9l0w7WkI/AAAAAAAADL8/aKBwr0y35_w/s1600/GraveSign.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q69SJPDAxbc/VKU9l0w7WkI/AAAAAAAADL8/aKBwr0y35_w/s1600/GraveSign.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image is in the Public Domain]</div><br />According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place. Isukiri makes no appearance in the Bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret. The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age thirty or so.<br /><br />He was in Japan, of course.<br /><br />How he got to Japan from Palestine is never really explained. Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia. But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate <i>et al</i>. had planned for him.<br /><br />So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well. He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending upon whom you believe.<br /><br />And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō. The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing. Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō. He just changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku, and settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village. Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.<br /><br />I find all of this pretty peculiar. What could possibly be the origin of this story? It seems to have gained traction with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some <a href="http://takenouchi-documents.com/">ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story</a>. (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens. But another time for that, perhaps.) There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:<blockquote><div>More than two thousand years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters. The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters.</div><div> <br />The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary. Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world. The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training. These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history. However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.</div></blockquote><div></div><div>So all the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there. Got it.<br /><br />Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahikari">originals</a> were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid. Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers. And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them, but also brings up the question of what exactly the Association is Studying.<br /><br />But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery." What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/5326614.stm">participate in some curious rituals</a> -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing." All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from two thousand years ago.<br /><br />Even so, I'm not buying it. Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at <i>Skeptophilia</i> -- the <a href="http://skeptophilia.blogspot.com/2011/05/cargo-cults-john-frum-and-prince-philip.html">cult of John Frum</a> and the <a href="http://skeptophilia.blogspot.com/2011/04/friday-jfk-assassination-and-ancient.html">Sirius B story from the Dogon</a>). Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?<br /><br />In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CcCETZV4NLo/VKVFX7RLhHI/AAAAAAAADMM/19-_kj0dZlo/s1600/3376918015_7de4685fff_z.jpg"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CcCETZV4NLo/VKVFX7RLhHI/AAAAAAAADMM/19-_kj0dZlo/w400-h266/3376918015_7de4685fff_z.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of photographer <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/14665421@N00/3376918015">Jason Hill</a>]</div><div><br /></div>So that's our weird claim for the day. Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother. If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out. At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-57751912082783798462024-03-01T03:25:00.000-08:002024-03-01T03:25:43.457-08:00Twists and turnsA recommendation to anyone who wants to completely revolutionize the scientific world: learn some damn science first.<div><br /></div><div>It's why I get so completely fed up by people like Deepak Chopra, who blather on about "quantum frequencies" when I doubt he could give an accurate definition of either word. Look, I get that physics is hard; I <i>majored</i> in physics, for fuck's sake. Okay, I wasn't very good at it, but at least I came away with (1) a great deal of respect for the people who <i>are</i> smart enough to truly understand it, and (2) a determination not to pretend I'm an expert when I'm not.</div><div><br /></div><div>But this isn't the perspective that a great many people have, to judge by the success of Chopra's books, which include -- I shit you not -- <i>Quantum Healing</i> and <i>Quantum Body</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I'm not here to rail about Deepak Chopra, who in any case has been something of a frequent flier here at <i>Skeptophilia</i>. No, today's rant comes to you courtesy of a long-time loyal reader who asked me if I'd ever heard of "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_field_(pseudoscience)">torsion field theory</a>" and if so, what I thought about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>My first thought was that any kind of field theory was going to involve mathematics on a level that would lose me after the first paragraph, so (<i>Cf.</i> my statement in paragraph two above) whatever opinion I had of it wouldn't be worth much. But I'm nothing if not dedicated to my readers, so I said I'd look into it.</div><div><br /></div><div>And... holy Moses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Torsion field theory was born of some research (using the term loosely) in the 1980s by two Russian scientists (using that term loosely as well), Anatoly Akimov and Gennady Shipov. The basic idea was that a particle's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)">spin configuration</a> causes it to give off "emanations" that allow for the transfer of information faster than the speed of light.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're thinking, "Wait... but... Einstein said...?", you're not the only one. In 1991, physicist Yevgeny Aleksandrov exposed them as frauds, and called the grants they'd received from the Russian government to support their work "embezzlement."</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyone who's saying, "Okay, well, that was that, then," obviously doesn't understand how persistent the purveyors of pseudoscience can be. Akimov and Shipov portrayed Aleksandrov's attacks as coming from a hidebound scientific establishment that couldn't handle being challenged -- and also wanted to keep all the grant money for itself. (Similar to all of the alt-med proponents complaining about being suppressed by "Big Pharma.") They fought back -- and won, receiving grants from the Russian government throughout the 1990s, and ultimately founding "The International Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics" to continue doing their thing. (Thus showing that having a fancy-sounding name for your "institute" doesn't mean that you're doing actual science.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Not a single thing they did -- not <i>one</i> -- ever generated a paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal. Despite this, "torsion field theory" is still being talked about as a "revolution in physics" (and its proponents still claim the physics community is suppressing it), and it has been used to explain -- once again, I feel obliged to mention that I am not making this up -- such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and levitation. It's said to be the basis of homeopathic "remedies," perpetual motion machines, stargates, and UFO propulsion systems.</div><div><br /></div><div>Did you notice a commonality between every one of the things I just listed?</div><div><br /></div><div>Yeah, me too.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's the problem. This is <i>not</i> how science works. Proposing a "theory" that flies in the face of not one, but <i>two</i> of the most thoroughly tested models in physics (the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics), based upon exactly zero evidence, and then using that "theory" to explain a bunch of phenomena that to the best of our current knowledge, don't exist, <i>isn't science</i>. It's self-delusion at best, and outright fraud at worst. And it doesn't improve things when you name it by swiping some actual terms from physics (<i>torsion</i> means a twisting force; a <i>field</i> is a distribution of values of a quantity in space).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrxNS_R-OVmY8BD08K2FmAun7z1TsHS5oKIRxY2bk0sHDxhGtuT9Aj06rdND_KD4IxJYLiA8P4EqDLlxlCXtvjszPzo7Ew_OZOX0su2Ayy0Ud-HXzYqBPzVuI3ji1XFaLkzMvDL2KNjIj_kyxmxkgz5fd_hPBerCDjXxQL1oRf7SMYA-Kz3_CVj34sjqE8/s800/Circle_development_with_torsion.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="800" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrxNS_R-OVmY8BD08K2FmAun7z1TsHS5oKIRxY2bk0sHDxhGtuT9Aj06rdND_KD4IxJYLiA8P4EqDLlxlCXtvjszPzo7Ew_OZOX0su2Ayy0Ud-HXzYqBPzVuI3ji1XFaLkzMvDL2KNjIj_kyxmxkgz5fd_hPBerCDjXxQL1oRf7SMYA-Kz3_CVj34sjqE8/w400-h269/Circle_development_with_torsion.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">A diagram of the torsion tensor. Like, you know, actual <i>science</i> [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Circle_development_with_torsion.png">Circle development with torsion</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>]</div><div><br /></div><div>No, science isn't perfect. But it does have one enormously important thing going for it -- it self-corrects. And scientists, far from being the sticks-in-the-mud the pseudoscientific community would like you to believe, are <i>always</i> on the lookout for the places it's not working, because identifying and correcting those places is how careers are made. If there really <i>was</i> some mysterious twisty-turny field generated by quantum spin that could generate faster-than-light information transfer, the physicists would be clambering over each other to get their papers published first.</div><div><br /></div><div>That'd be Nobel Prize material, right there.</div><div><br /></div><div>So many thanks to the reader who suggested I research "torsion field theory." I now have many dents in my forehead from all the faceplants I did. If you find any other revolutionary developments in physics that for some reason no actual physicists are working on, though, I'd rather not know about them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe you should just send them directly to Deepak Chopra.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-60274919050899721632024-02-29T03:31:00.000-08:002024-02-29T03:48:05.839-08:00The dying of the lightIn July of 2004, my father died. I was at his bedside in Our Lady of Lourdes General Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana when it happened. He'd been declining for a while -- his once razor-sharp mental faculties slipping into a vague cloudiness, his gait slowing and becoming halting and cautious, his former rapier wit completely gone. The most heartbreaking thing was his own awareness of what he had lost and would continue to lose. It looked like a slow slide into debility.<div><br /></div><div>Then, in June, he had what the doctors described as a mini-stroke. Afterward, he was still fairly lucid, but was having trouble walking. It had long been his deepest fear (one I share) that he'd become completely dependent on others for his care, and it was obvious to us (and probably to him as well) that this was the direction things were going.</div><div><br /></div><div>What happened next was described in three words by my mother: "He gave up."</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite the fact that the doctors could find no obvious direct cause of it, his systems one by one started to shut down. Three weeks after the mini-stroke and fall that precipitated his admission into the hospital, he died at age 83.</div><div><br /></div><div>I had never been with someone as they died before (and haven't since). I was out of state when my beloved grandma died in 1986; and when my mother died, eight months after my father, it was so sudden I didn't have time to get there. But I was by my father's side as his breathing slowed and finally stopped. The event itself wasn't at all dramatic; the transition between life and death was subtle, gentle, and peaceful. However wrenching it was on my mother and me, for him there seemed to be hardly a boundary between "here" and "not here."</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, I'm judging that from the outside. No one knows -- no one <i>can</i> know -- what the experience was like for him. It's funny, really; death is one of the experiences that unites us as human, and one which we all will ultimately share, but none of us knows what it actually <i>is</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDVA8xvJnPJkx0qUhzaN2UaDowCROQzUCI_T71zrPJSyZl_GXbSvuOCdb7BMDGuvP_FyvbH6hzwfRxaZooOgxjFn3ayo-5XtHAg75ESyAvjXpxjtOeTFBXEFZ_H7xIewf3curmtEbyj2a9wNJp-EnwAPK10xpqLAkie4wFd-ndUQLKzyps0IuY1zQwp4jR/s520/Le_Mire_et_Oudry_-_La_Fontaine,_fable_'La_mort_et_le_mourant'_(illustration).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="520" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDVA8xvJnPJkx0qUhzaN2UaDowCROQzUCI_T71zrPJSyZl_GXbSvuOCdb7BMDGuvP_FyvbH6hzwfRxaZooOgxjFn3ayo-5XtHAg75ESyAvjXpxjtOeTFBXEFZ_H7xIewf3curmtEbyj2a9wNJp-EnwAPK10xpqLAkie4wFd-ndUQLKzyps0IuY1zQwp4jR/w400-h296/Le_Mire_et_Oudry_-_La_Fontaine,_fable_'La_mort_et_le_mourant'_(illustration).jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Noël LeMire, <i>La Mort et le Mourant</i> (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><div><br /></div><div>A <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brain-scans-suggest-life-flashes-before-our-eyes-upon-death-180979647/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=2272024&utm_content=recent&fbclid=IwAR3UInLUi9je8Xx5QSjZaE0iEHHK8PDBRaWaJ0HPSJlSiZ01LaK9hd7UiBE">study in the journal <i>Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience</i></a>, though, may be the first clue as to what the experience is like. An 87-year-old Canadian epilepsy patient was set up for an electroencephalogram to try and get a picture of what was causing his seizures, when he unexpectedly had a severe heart attack. The man was under a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, so when his heart stopped beating, they let him die...</div><div><br /></div><div>... but he was still hooked up to the EEG.</div><div><br /></div><div>This gave his doctors our first glimpse into what is happening in the brain of someone as they die. And they found a sudden increase in activity in the parts of the brain involved in memory, recall, and dreaming -- which lasted for thirty seconds <i>after</i> his heart stopped, then gradually faded.</div><div><br /></div>"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon who was the study's lead author. "As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members. Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."<div><br /></div><div>Which is a pleasant thought. Many of us -- even, for some reason, the devoutly religious, who you'd think would be positively eager for the experience -- are afraid of death. Me, I'm not looking forward to it; I rather like being alive, and as a <i>de facto</i> atheist I have no particular expectation that there'll be anything afterwards. Being with my father as he died did, however, have the effect of making me less afraid of death. The usual lead-up, with its frequent pain and debility and illness, is still deeply terrifying to me, but crossing the boundary itself seemed fairly peaceful.</div><div><br /></div><div>And the idea that our brains give us one last go-through of our pleasant memories is kind of nice. I know that this single patient's EEG is hardly conclusive -- and it's unlikely there'll be many other people hooked up to a brain scanner as they die -- but it does give some comfort that perhaps, this experience we will all share someday isn't as awful as we might fear.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-12738257132334224302024-02-28T03:30:00.000-08:002024-02-28T04:07:20.318-08:00The family tree of folk tales<p>When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Case-Marble-Monster-I-Edmonds/dp/B001ROWRV8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=D5R7QGT8E2M2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XNVuwXm5IcD2pjVe2Px8kU3vR-CMYeU1ttXXxphMquPpbvJv0lAlep-AeL_yLut1FmFjjXaXFJPyArNwsSmoIjPoU1seXzonCAbUKsYpw9RGqIuZo4da68df6yxFX3pOwDIxGfPafvAjL1JRgdmyWJ8GTTGHOLLPRh6rduBr6uTu4Fz33e35qgdReFh9S6rMTq-vQ8XAwy1CVsi6NKQZiJ5ASzgPjHsilmuCN1ICsCA.1ip3Zr4GpsUipdQ4gsYgm6MAPuDIPJvMh37Zd2DJ4v4&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+case+of+the+marble+monster&qid=1709036869&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+case+of+the+marble+m%2Cdigital-text%2C121&sr=1-1-catcorr">The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories</a></i>. They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.</p><p>The stories center on the wise and humorous character of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Coka_Tadasuke">Ōoka Tadasuke</a>, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases. In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered <i>tempura</i> shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.</p><p>Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid. The <i>tempura</i> shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.</p><p>"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile. "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."</p><p>The whole collection is an absolute delight. Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilx9NRb6M7Xhie_xl8js9LDH9mLcuKCnWFSQN_HR-Z8c6Vjdz6wyidCktTES4FCBmYrWr87MxcCsVqZmN7WibB2cjmuN51JMH3M7bYIs5IL0jtr0GOyu1EXmQwRMxhuBqaK499P3zwYM7uwXrto9-M8hohbiaj8oj6SE30nLvT7U32NAvD21er1EAmNXXu/s1200/Oooka_tadasuke.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="900" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilx9NRb6M7Xhie_xl8js9LDH9mLcuKCnWFSQN_HR-Z8c6Vjdz6wyidCktTES4FCBmYrWr87MxcCsVqZmN7WibB2cjmuN51JMH3M7bYIs5IL0jtr0GOyu1EXmQwRMxhuBqaK499P3zwYM7uwXrto9-M8hohbiaj8oj6SE30nLvT7U32NAvD21er1EAmNXXu/w300-h400/Oooka_tadasuke.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><p>Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time. And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart. Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).</p><p>How long have we been telling our invented tales, though? The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A1in_B%C3%B3_C%C3%BAailnge">Táin Bó Cúailnge</a> </i>(<i>The Cattle Raid of Cooley</i>), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh">Epic of Gilgamesh</a></i>, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E. But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go? And how could we be at all sure?</p><p>A <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.150645">new study</a> by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out. Long-time readers of <i>Skeptophilia</i> may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2021/08/the-evolution-of-little-red-riding-hood.html">delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood"</a> that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which. Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.</p><p>There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock">molecular clock</a></i> -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate. The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the long ago that common ancestor lived.</p><p>De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out. As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics. And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.</p><p>In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising. The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world. I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the <i>loup-garou</i> and <i>feu follet</i> and <i>les lutins</i> that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it). That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-18466685300049055402024-02-27T03:21:00.000-08:002024-02-27T03:21:11.612-08:00The ghost of Greyfriars<p>I've been asked a number of times why I disbelieve in such phenomena as ghosts, and my answer is always the same: I don't. I have no strong evidence that they exist, which is not the same thing. Presented with scientifically admissible evidence, I'd have no choice but to admit that, in fact, I do believe in spooks.</p><p>So on this count -- like with most other fringe-y beliefs -- I'm able to have my mind changed. But -- to borrow a phrase from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson -- "I need more than 'you saw it.'"</p><p>And that's the difficulty I have with just about every ghost story I've ever heard. Take, for example, the spot that is often called "the most haunted place in Scotland" -- <a href="https://hauntedpalaceblog.com/2017/06/02/greyfriars-kirkyard-covenanters-bloody-mackenzie-and-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/">Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMGUCR5BHjv-EPi-hRMS4NWuamo_cLdNjmoX8GmZd61EtA6q6wSAgig5E2iGWhRdgRL5fdU8kxrZy1hrUeaJoedQSXg4U53esSmLDlXD81hzON9pGLYJDEac6gmpPJVYegBpzfZAOcAas889xw4DxbDXNd-HsyBWHj3uMWEgV5qOE75HOM7tqyfm7EhDcK/s1599/Greyfriars_Kirkyard_-_03.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1599" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMGUCR5BHjv-EPi-hRMS4NWuamo_cLdNjmoX8GmZd61EtA6q6wSAgig5E2iGWhRdgRL5fdU8kxrZy1hrUeaJoedQSXg4U53esSmLDlXD81hzON9pGLYJDEac6gmpPJVYegBpzfZAOcAas889xw4DxbDXNd-HsyBWHj3uMWEgV5qOE75HOM7tqyfm7EhDcK/w400-h266/Greyfriars_Kirkyard_-_03.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kadellar">Carlos Delgado</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greyfriars_Kirkyard_-_03.jpg">Greyfriars Kirkyard - 03</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><p>It's unsurprising that the place is claimed to have ghosts; it's been used as a cemetery since the time of Mary Queen of Scots. But it didn't really get an evil reputation until the horrible "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Time">Killing Time</a>," when beginning in 1679 and lasting nine years, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenanters">Scottish Covenanters</a> got into a dispute with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_England">King Charles II</a> over whether the Presbyterian Church would be the sole form of religion in Scotland. (It's always been astonishing to me how often people were killed in Europe, and in the places the Europeans colonized, over disputes that boil down to "my Jesus is better than your Jesus.") In the end, of course, Charles's side won, and hundreds of Covenanters were transported, imprisoned, or even executed as traitors to the crown. And things only got worse when Charles's brother <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_II_of_England">James II</a> succeeded to the throne -- James was (to put not too fine a point on it) a narrow-minded, humorless religious fanatic, who (as a Roman Catholic) was even more against the Covenanters than his brother was.</p><p>However, the name most often associated with the Killing Time is one <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mackenzie_of_Rosehaugh">George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh</a>, nicknamed "Bluidy Mackenzie" by the Covenanters, who despised him because of his siding with the King and for his role in the persecutions that followed. It's likely Mackenzie saw himself as having no choice, and that he was simply doing what the King ordered him to do -- but, from the Covenanters' perspective, that was a mighty fine excuse for the horrors that followed, which included people being crowded into unheated, stone-floored jails in midwinter with only four ounces of food a day to sustain them. The worst spot was the official Covenanters' Prison, conveniently (considering how many of them died) located right next to Greyfriars Kirkyard.</p><p>In any case, the persecutions eventually ended with the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution">Glorious Revolution</a>" of 1688, when James II was deposed and his daughter, Mary II, and her Dutch husband William of Orange, were put on the throne. The Presbyterians were given their religious freedom, the surviving Covenanters (there weren't many) freed, and everything more or less went back to normal. Mackenzie only lived three more years, dying in 1691 at the age of 55, and was buried with honors...</p><p>... in Greyfriars Kirkyard, within a stone's throw of the old Covenanters' Prison.</p><p>Which these days is called rubbing salt in a wound.</p><p>It wasn't long before the horrors that had happened gave rise to claims that Mackenzie's spirit was haunting the place. By the nineteenth century, it was so established as a haunted spot that Robert Louis Stevenson commented upon it (and Mackenzie), "When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly, sometime or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave... Foolhardy urchins [thought it] a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advocate’s Mausoleum and challenge him to appear. 'Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye dar!'"</p><p>This legend has persisted to today, where Greyfriars figures prominently on Edinburgh ghost tours. But here's where the problem comes up. It's haunted by an evil presence, they claim, which <a href="https://vocal.media/horror/the-truth-about-the-mac-kenzie-poltergeist">one site</a> says "is attracted to and feeds on fear;" <a href="https://vocal.media/horror/the-truth-about-the-mac-kenzie-poltergeist">another</a> says the vengeful spirit has "knocked more than fifty people [on ghost tours] unconscious" and has scratched or bruised others, including an eleven-year-old boy who was given a black eye.</p><p>And my question is: if there's such an embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence that the ghost of Greyfriars is real, how has this not been verified scientifically?</p><p>If people are being beaten up right and left by a ghost, it seems like it'd be simple to set things up so that there'd be <i>some</i> kind of evidence other than saying after the fact, "I'm sure I didn't have these scratches when I came in here." Now, mind you, I'm not accusing anyone of lying. But it certainly does seems suspicious that if so many people are having these experiences, no one has conducted a scientifically-admissible investigation of the place.</p><p>If they have, I haven't found anything about it. Plenty of anecdotes, nothing in the way of proof of the claims.</p><p>So, to return to my original point -- I'm convincible. But don't @ me with more "my grandma's Cousin Ethel went there and an invisible hand touched the back of her neck!" I'm very sorry grandma's Cousin Ethel got scared, but that's hardly to the point as far as science goes.</p><p>In any case, you can bet that the next time I'm in Scotland, Greyfriars Kirkyard will be high on the list of must-sees. And I hereby invite the ghost <i>himself</i> to change my mind. I would consider a black eye from a poltergeist a badge of honor, and after all, as a skeptic it's no more than I deserve.</p><p>Bluidy Mackenzie, do your worst.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-75619151370625897102024-02-26T03:26:00.000-08:002024-02-26T03:26:11.764-08:00Biggest and brightest<p>If you're the kind of person who likes having your mind blown by superlatives, astrophysics is the science for you.</p><p>I ran into two really good examples of that last week. In the first, <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240221160304.htm">a paper in the journal <i>Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society</i></a>, from research led by astrophysicist Ruth Daly of Pennsylvania State University, found that the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- Sagittarius A* -- is spinning so fast it's actually warping the fabric of space time around it, flattening it into the shape of a football.</p><p>The "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem">no-hair theorem</a>" of the physics of black holes states that they are rather simple beasts. They can be completely characterized using only three parameters: their mass, charge, and angular momentum. The name comes from the quip by physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler">John Archibald Wheeler</a> that "black holes have no hair," by which he meant that there are no other adornments you need to describe to get a full picture of what they're doing. However, I've always been puzzled by what exactly it means to say that a black hole has angular momentum; objects with mass and spin, such as a twirling top or the rotating Earth, have angular momentum, but since the mass in a black hole has (at least as far as we understand them) collapsed into a singularity, what exactly is spinning, and how could you tell?</p><p>Last week's paper at least answers the second half of the question. Using data from x-ray and radio wave collimation and material outflow from Sagittarius A*, astrophysicists can determine how much spacetime is being deformed by the angular momentum of the black hole, and from that determine its rate of spin.</p><p>And it's spinning <i>fast</i> -- an estimated sixty percent of the maximum possible rate, which is set by the universal speed limit that matter can't travel at or faster than the speed of light. The deformation is so great that the fabric of spacetime is compressed along the spin axis, so it appears spherical from above but flattened from the side.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5IaKkFuLO4_2sbL26kYPWCemWZ0Ot4KeXTotfU240D_WLEmAvoDSt9FDdE3tvELuDUPYYM1jOI2PZs6wejLx86O_AsD8PpHdkbj6XkGtWXaA1NJj1xhZLvMYAF4cEUtot6PJe2q6_MPtBlo2VKF78V9fCmjmZkGLAsA5OGECj56uH7_PS1cEynQr7qHVh/s1600/Black_Holes_-_Monsters_in_Space.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5IaKkFuLO4_2sbL26kYPWCemWZ0Ot4KeXTotfU240D_WLEmAvoDSt9FDdE3tvELuDUPYYM1jOI2PZs6wejLx86O_AsD8PpHdkbj6XkGtWXaA1NJj1xhZLvMYAF4cEUtot6PJe2q6_MPtBlo2VKF78V9fCmjmZkGLAsA5OGECj56uH7_PS1cEynQr7qHVh/w400-h225/Black_Holes_-_Monsters_in_Space.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]</div><p>The <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240222122324.htm">second piece of research</a> comes from a study at the European Southern Observatory, and was published in <i>Nature Astronomy</i>. It looks at the recent discovery of the brightest object known, a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar">quasar</a></i> (an active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole) that -- get ready for the superlatives -- is five hundred trillion times more luminous than the Sun, contains a black hole that has seventeen billion times the mass of the Sun, and is consuming one Sun's worth of mass a <i>day</i>. This object, given the unassuming name of J0529-4351, is twelve billion light years away, making it also one of the most distant objects ever studied.</p>"All this light comes from a hot <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk">accretion disk</a> that measures seven light-years in diameter -- this must be the largest accretion disk in the Universe," said study co-author Samuel Lai, of Australian National University. If he sounds a little blown away by this -- well, so are we all. A seven-light-year accretion disk means that if it were placed where the Sun is, not only would its accretion disk engulf the entire Solar System, it would extend outward past the five nearest stars -- the triple-star system of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri">Alpha/Proxima Centauri</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star">Barnard's Star</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhman_16">Luhman 16</a>.<div><br /></div><div>I don't know about you, but something on that scale boggles my mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that's not a bad thing, really. I think we need to be reminded periodically that in the grand scheme of things, the problems we lose so much sleep over down here are pretty minuscule. Also, it's good to have our brains overwhelmed by the grandeur of the universe we live in, to be able to look up into the night sky and think, "Wow. How fortunate I am to be able to witness -- and in some small way, understand -- such wonders."</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-68169549595659095932024-02-24T03:26:00.000-08:002024-02-24T03:26:52.017-08:00Hand-in-gloveOne of the more fascinating bits of biochemistry is the odd "handedness" (technically called <i>chirality</i>) that a lot of biological molecules have. Chiral molecules come in a left-handed (<i>sinistral</i>) and a right-handed (<i>dextral</i>) form that are made of exactly the same parts but put together in such a way that they're mirror-images of each other, just like a left-handed and right-handed glove.<br /><br />Where it gets really interesting is that although the left-handed and right-handed forms of biologically active molecules have nearly identical properties, they aren't equivalent in function within living cells. Nearly all naturally-occurring sugars are right-handed (that's where the name <i>dextrose</i> comes from); amino acids, on the other hand, are all left-handed (which is why amino acid supplements often have an "l-" in front of the name -- l-glutamate, l-tryptophan, and so on). Having evolved with this kind of specificity has the result that if you were fed a mirror-image diet -- left-handed glucose, for example, and proteins made of right-handed amino acids -- you wouldn't be able to tell anything apart by its smell or taste, but you would proceed to starve to death because your cells would not be able to metabolize molecules with the wrong chirality.<div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7DT9WEt-u4A/YNXNl0Id61I/AAAAAAAALlo/JvqdJmJc4NEduDVgwuEc0sVrjIG6Oh3JwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1530/1530px-Chirality_with_hands.svg.png"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7DT9WEt-u4A/YNXNl0Id61I/AAAAAAAALlo/JvqdJmJc4NEduDVgwuEc0sVrjIG6Oh3JwCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h271/1530px-Chirality_with_hands.svg.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Chirality in amino acids [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Molecular chirality was used to brilliant effect by the wonderful murder mystery author Dorothy Sayers in her novel <i>The Documents in the Case</i>. In the story, a man dies after eating a serving of mushrooms he'd picked. His friends and family are stunned; he'd been a wild mushroom enthusiast for decades, and the fatal mistake he apparently made -- including a deadly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitocybe_dealbata">ivory funnel mushroom</a> (<i>Clitocybe dealbata</i>) in with a pan full of other edible kinds -- was something they believed he never would have done.<br /><br />The toxic substance in ivory funnels, the alkaloid <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscarine">muscarine</a>, is -- like many organic compounds -- chiral. Naturally-occurring muscarine is all left-handed. However, when it's synthesized artificially in the lab, you end up with a mixture of right- and left-handed molecules, in about equal numbers. So when the contention is made that the victim <i>hadn't</i> mistakenly included a poisonous mushroom in with the edible ones, but had been deliberately poisoned by someone who'd added the chemical to his food, the investigators realize this is the key to solving the riddle of the man's death.<br /><br />Chiral molecules have another odd property; if you shine a beam of polarized light through a crystal, right-handed ones rotate the polarization angle of the beam clockwise, and left-handed ones counterclockwise. So when an extract from the victim's digestive tract is analyzed, and a polarized light beam shined through it splits in two -- part of the beam rotated clockwise, the other part counterclockwise -- there's no doubt he was poisoned by synthetic (mixed-chiral) muscarine, not by mistakenly eating a poisonous mushroom that would only have contained the left-handed form.</div><div><br /></div><div>So specific chirality is ubiquitous in the natural world. We have a particular handedness, all the way down to the molecular level. What's a little puzzling, however, is <i>why</i> this tendency occurs. Not chirality <i>per se</i>; that merely arises from the fact that if you bond four different atoms or groups around a central carbon atom, there are two ways you can do it, and they result in molecules that are mirror images of each other (as shown in the image above). But why do living things all exhibit a preference for a <i>certain</i> handedness? It must have evolved extremely early, because virtually all living things share the same preferences. But what got this bias started -- especially given that left-handed and right-handed molecules are equally easy to make abiotically, and have nearly identical physical and chemical properties?</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240220144545.htm">a paper this week in the journal <i>Advanced Materials</i></a> may have just answered this long-standing question. A group led by Karl-Heinz Ernst, at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, found that the selection for a particular handedness happened because of the interplay between the electromagnetic fields of metallic surfaces with the spin configuration of chiral molecules.</div><div><br /></div><div>They created surfaces coated with patches of a thin layer of a magnetic metal, such as iron or cobalt, and analyzed the magnetic "islands" to determine the direction of orientation of the magnetic field of each. They then took a solution of a chiral molecule called <i>helicene</i>, which had equal numbers of right and left-handed forms, and poured it over the surface. The hypothesis was that the opposite patterns of spin of the electrons in the two different forms of helicene would allow them to bond only to a magnetic patch with a specific orientation. </div><div><br /></div><div>So after introducing the mixed helicene to the metal surfaces, they looked to see where the molecules adhered.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sure enough -- depending on the direction of the magnetic field, one or the other form of helicene stuck to the metal surface. The magnetic field was acting as a selecting agent on the spin, picking out the handedness that was compatible with the orientation of the patch.</div><div><br /></div><div>This, of course, is only a preliminary study of a single chiral molecule in a very artificial setting. However, it does for the first time provide a mechanism by which selective chirality could have originated. "In certain surface-catalyzed chemical reactions," Ernst explained, "such as those that could have taken place in the chemical 'primordial soup' on the early Earth, a certain combination of electric and magnetic fields could have led to a steady accumulation of one form or another of the various biomolecules -- and thus ultimately to the handedness of life."</div><div><br /></div><div>So a simple experiment (simple to explain, not to perform!) has taken the first step toward settling a question that chemistry Nobel laureate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Prelog">Vladimir Prelog</a> called "one of the first questions of molecular theology" back in 1975. It shows that science has the capacity for reaching back and explaining the earliest origins of biochemistry -- and how life as we know it came about.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-85708428212903879582024-02-23T03:22:00.000-08:002024-02-23T03:22:34.298-08:00The language of Sark<p>The title of my master's thesis was <i>The Linguistic and Cultural Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland</i>. I don't think many people read it other than me and my committee, but it did win the 1996 International Prize For Research With Absolutely No Practical Applications Whatsoever. And it allowed me to learn valuable information such as the fact that there were two words in eleventh-century England for <i>window</i> -- one from Old English (<i>eagþyrl</i>, literally "eye-hole") and one from Old Norse (<i>vindauga</i>, literally "wind-eye") -- and for some reason the Old Norse one won and our word <i>window</i> comes from it rather than from Old English.</p><p>Which is a handy "fun fact" for me to bring out at cocktail parties, especially if I want everyone to back away slowly and then find other people to talk to for the rest of the evening.</p><p>In any case, I spent a good bit of my time in graduate school learning assorted random facts about western European linguistics, which was why I was a bit gobsmacked when I found out that <a href="https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240221-sarkese-britains-archaic-norman-language?fbclid=IwAR1DIx0Opt_cBWNDuZ9dZlPI8BSVnvyXvYbq83rGBQbZF4_Cqc9GlVzedN0">there's a language in western Europe that I had never even heard of</a>. It's called Sarkese, and is only found on the tiny (1.5 by 3.5 kilometers) island of Sark, east of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIa4kjPlgGGhoeUtkSbSdfi2BolfafwuM3Ua1UV73pF1o2x66b1TyfjWnBsZNIAIhKpkLWYishNNE2SpFAZEai7bqwXOFKLfG6EnLrFiFidTAcny5MBNRJC2wrZP4fLazhjTZyFwRpzPZyXYf2SGqgDi31CtSraRpTrFpWeYWm2Z2wQhcauCDEB9l11dy4/s1200/860px-Wyspy_Normandzkie.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="860" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIa4kjPlgGGhoeUtkSbSdfi2BolfafwuM3Ua1UV73pF1o2x66b1TyfjWnBsZNIAIhKpkLWYishNNE2SpFAZEai7bqwXOFKLfG6EnLrFiFidTAcny5MBNRJC2wrZP4fLazhjTZyFwRpzPZyXYf2SGqgDi31CtSraRpTrFpWeYWm2Z2wQhcauCDEB9l11dy4/w286-h400/860px-Wyspy_Normandzkie.png" width="286" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Channel Islands [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aotearoa">Aotearoa</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wyspy_Normandzkie.png">Wyspy Normandzkie</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><p>Sark is currently home to five hundred people, of whom only three learned Sarkese (known colloquially as <i>patois</i>) as their first language. It's a Romance language -- the closest relative is French, but it's not mutually intelligible. It came originally from medieval Norman French via the isle of Jersey; the ancestors of the people of Sark came over from Jersey in 1565 and it's been relatively isolated ever since.</p><p>The samples of Sarkese in the article I linked above illustrate how far the two have diverged in the close to a thousand years since it split from mainland French. "Thank you very much," for example -- <i>merci beaucoup</i> in French -- is <i>mérsî ben dê fê</i> in Sarkese. French has seventeen different vowel phonemes; Sarkese has over fifty. Add to that the complication that the island is shaped like an hourglass, with a narrow isthmus (La Coupée) that is all but impassible during storms, and the two pieces (Big Sark and Little Sark) have different dialects.</p><p>Fortunately, a Czech linguist, Martin Neudörfl, is trying to document Sarkese, and has worked with the three remaining fluent speakers -- who are all over eighty years old -- and about fifteen semi-fluent individuals to produce a huge library of recordings, and reams of documents describing the morphology and syntax of Sarkese. "We have hundreds of hours [of recordings] and our audio archive is outstanding," Neudörfl said. "Even if I were to disappear, someone could revive the language just using the recordings. We've only achieved this through years of exhaustive research. It's all thanks to [the speakers] for sharing their knowledge."</p><p>It's always sad when a language goes extinct, and so many have done so without anyone ever recording them or writing them down. In large part it's due to competition with more widely spoken languages; it's eye-opening to know that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers">half of the world's individuals are native speakers of only fifteen different languages</a>. The other half speak one of the other seven-<i>thousand</i>-odd languages that currently exist in the world. Sarkese is one of many languages that have fallen prey to the prevalence, convenience, and ubiquity of English.</p><p>On the one hand, I get why it happens. If you want to be understood, you have to speak a language that the people around you can understand, and if you only spoke Sarkese you could communicate with eighteen other people on the island (and one Czech linguist). But still, each language represents a trove of knowledge about the culture and history of a people, and it's a tragedy when that is lost.</p><p>So kudos to Martin Neudörfl, and the Sarkese speakers who are working with him to record this language before it's too late. Makes me wish I'd tackled a project like this for my master's research. I could be wrong, but I don't think Old Norse is coming back any time soon.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-62737664842037254032024-02-22T03:19:00.000-08:002024-02-22T03:19:45.901-08:00Animalia paradoxa<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus">Carl Linnaeus</a> was born in Råshult, Sweden, on 23 May 1707. His father Nils was the minister of the parish of Stenbrohult but was also an avid gardener, and the story goes that when Carl was young and got upset, Nils would bring him a flower and tell the little boy its name, and that always calmed him down.<div><br /></div><div>The love of botany -- and of knowing the names of living things -- was to shape Carl Linnaeus's life. Prior to his time, there was no systematic way of giving names to species; there were dozens of names in various languages for the same species, and sometimes several different names in the <i>same</i> language. Additionally, the fact that this is before the recognition of the relatedness of all life meant that things were named simply by their superficial appearance, which may or may not indicate an underlying relationship. We still have some leftovers from this haphazard practice, such as the various birds called <i>buntings</i> (from the Middle English <i>buntynge</i>, "small bird") that aren't necessarily related to each other. (For example, the North American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_bunting">indigo bunting</a> is in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae">cardinal family</a>; the European <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_bunting">pine bunting</a> in the family <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunting_(bird)">Emberizidae</a>.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Young Linnaeus was lucky enough not only to have supportive parents, but a variety of people who recognized his intellect and ability and nurtured him in his studies. (Amongst them was the scientist and polymath <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Celsius">Olof Celsius</a>, whose nephew <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Celsius">Anders</a> gave us the Celsius temperature scale.) He was primarily interested in botany, but quickly became frustrated with the fact that the same plant could have six different names in six different villages -- and worse still, it was impossible to communicate taxonomic information clearly to botanists in other countries, where the names would have come from their native language.</div><div><br /></div><div>So he decided to do something about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Linnaeus came up with the idea of <i>binomial nomenclature</i> -- the "two-name naming system," more commonly called "scientific names." Each species would be assigned a unique and unambiguous name made of the <i>genus</i> and <i>species</i> names, each derived from Latin or Greek (which were the common languages of science at the time). The genus would include various related species. His determinations of who was related to whom were based upon appearance -- this is long before genetics became the <i>sine qua non</i> of systematics -- and some of Linnaeus's classifications have been revised in the 250-odd years since he wrote his <i>magnum opus</i>, the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systema_Naturae">Systema Naturae</a></i>. But even so, the system he created is the one we still use today.</div><div><br /></div><div>And this is why scientists the world over will know, if you say <i>Mustela nigripes</i>, that you are talking about the black-footed ferret. (The scientific name translates to... "black-footed ferret." Just because they're fancy-sounding Latin and Greek words doesn't mean they're all that revelatory.)</div><div><br /></div><div>So Linnaeus took the first steps toward ordering the natural world. But what is less well-known is that he included a few animals in his book that are more than a little suspect -- and labeled them as such, illustrating an admirable dedication to honoring hard evidence as the touchstone for scientific understanding.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a section called "<i>Animalia paradoxa</i>," Linnaeus listed some "species" that had been reported by others, but for which there was no clear evidence. From the tone of his writing, it's obvious he was doubtful they existed at all, and was only including them to point out that any reports of them were based upon hearsay. These included the following genera, along with his description of them:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Hydra: "body of a snake, with two feet, seven necks and the same number of heads, lacking wings, preserved in Hamburg, similar to the description of the Hydra of the Apocalypse of St.John chapters 12 and 13. And it is provided by very many as a true species of animal, but falsely. Nature for itself and always the similar, never naturally makes multiple heads on one body. Fraud and artifice, as we ourselves saw [on it] teeth of a weasel, different from teeth of an Amphibian [or reptile], easily detected."</li><li>Monoceros: "Monoceros of the older [generations], body of a horse, feet of a 'wild animal,' horn straight, long, spirally twisted. It is a figment of painters. The Monodon of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Artedi">Artedi</a> [= narwhal] has the same manner of horn, but the other parts of its body are very different."</li><li>Satyrus: "Has a tail, hairy, bearded, with a manlike body, gesticulating much, very fallacious, is a species of monkey, if ever one has been seen."</li><li>Borometz: "The Borometz or Scythian Lamb is reckoned with plants, and is similar to a lamb; whose stalk coming out of the ground enters an umbilicus; and the same is said to be provided with blood from by chance devouring wild animals. But it is put together artificially from roots of American ferns. But naturally it is an allegorical description of an embryo of a sheep, as has all attributed data."</li><li>Manticora: "Has the face of a decrepit old man, body of a lion, tail starred with sharp points."</li></ul></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5r4cfCgTcXPmvuivge6T6iiS5ExOEe5-MuECcZ2Di1tRIeVEAPCKC7K-Ng0RdJAdDw-YJCtMvuUzObuuGxNOsNTqc0-_U8UnTlTyv2yo54maLzlHWYl0YhddYht_F2_dWcFl8bvjWGuwLFtkdJ5sLjCBRvFAqZDrotHaSnRQhzymji868idc4hvcsRLoz/s775/Jonston1650-quadruped-TabLIII-manticore.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="775" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5r4cfCgTcXPmvuivge6T6iiS5ExOEe5-MuECcZ2Di1tRIeVEAPCKC7K-Ng0RdJAdDw-YJCtMvuUzObuuGxNOsNTqc0-_U8UnTlTyv2yo54maLzlHWYl0YhddYht_F2_dWcFl8bvjWGuwLFtkdJ5sLjCBRvFAqZDrotHaSnRQhzymji868idc4hvcsRLoz/w400-h279/Jonston1650-quadruped-TabLIII-manticore.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">A manticore, from Johannes Jonston's <i>Historiae Naturalis</i> (1650) [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><div><br /></div><div>I've always admired Linnaeus -- like him, I've been fascinated with the names of things since I was little, and started out with plants -- but knowing about his commitment to avoid getting drawn into the superstition and credulity of his time makes me even more fond of him. He was unafraid to call out the <i>Animalia paradoxa</i> as probable hoaxes, and that determination to follow the rules of scientific skepticism still guides taxonomists to this day.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, sometimes there <i>are</i> some bizarre "forms most beautiful and most wonderful" in the natural world, to borrow a phrase from Darwin. When the first taxidermied pelts and skeletons of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus">duck-billed platypus </a>were sent from Australia back to England, many English scientists thought they were a prank -- that someone had stitched together the remains of various animals in an attempt to play a joke. And once convinced that they were real, the first scientific name given to the platypus was...</div><div><br /></div><div>... <i>Ornithorhynchus</i> ("bird-billed") <i>paradoxa</i>.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-85937485271239136882024-02-21T03:35:00.000-08:002024-02-21T03:35:35.219-08:00Shaky groundA little less than six years apart -- on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake">1 November 1755</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1761_Lisbon_earthquake">31 March 1761</a> -- two major earthquakes struck the country of Portugal, each time generating a tsunami that devastated the capital city of Lisbon.<div><br /></div><div>They were both huge, although given that this was before the invention of the seismometer, we can only guess at how big; estimates are that the 1761 quake was around 8.5 on the Richter Scale, while the 1755 one may have been as high as 9.0. Each time, the tremors were felt far from the epicenter. The shaking from the 1755 quake was recorded as far away as Finland.</div><div><br /></div><div>The effects in Portugal and nearby nations were devastating. In 1755 the combined death toll in Portugal, Spain, and Morocco -- mostly from the tsunami -- is estimated at fifty thousand. Over eighty percent of the buildings in Lisbon were damaged or completely destroyed -- and five and a half years later, many of the ones that had survived in 1755 collapsed.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxR0_TJhqYmSrjVTP1nwOm-lGVMlS_2bZN1_54uP3TbD25o7d34vwe2LXkEmAYRwRTU0YqeDz2orcJuZtPUQlQ36-xd_PaIUthfXO2O53uzE68nu5pM4xwRPBDiOa14vnSbKD6mk0WtawH2Rg0dLQD_ZFcC2_hb_WDFt9bPAK4SqbnZG3qRluT3Dw2Rj44/s1200/Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="900" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxR0_TJhqYmSrjVTP1nwOm-lGVMlS_2bZN1_54uP3TbD25o7d34vwe2LXkEmAYRwRTU0YqeDz2orcJuZtPUQlQ36-xd_PaIUthfXO2O53uzE68nu5pM4xwRPBDiOa14vnSbKD6mk0WtawH2Rg0dLQD_ZFcC2_hb_WDFt9bPAK4SqbnZG3qRluT3Dw2Rj44/w300-h400/Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Ruins of the Convento do Carmo, which was destroyed in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Chris_Adams">Chris Adams</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg">Convento do Carmo ruins in Lisbon</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><div><br /></div><div>What's curious is that Portugal isn't ordinarily thought to be high on the list of seismically-active nations. It's not on the Ring of Fire, where the majority of the world's earthquakes and volcanoes occur. The fact is, though, there is a poorly-studied (and poorly-understood) fault zone offshore -- the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores%E2%80%93Gibraltar_Transform_Fault">Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault</a> -- that is thought to have been responsible for both of the huge eighteenth century quakes, as well as a smaller (but still considerable) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1816_North_Atlantic_earthquake">earthquake in 1816</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The AGTF, and how it's evolving, was the subject of <a href="https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/doi/10.1130/G51654.1/634682/Gibraltar-subduction-zone-is-invading-the-Atlantic?redirectedFrom=fulltext">a paper in the journal <i>Geology</i></a> last week. The big picture here has to do with the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Cycle">Wilson Cycle</a></i> -- named after plate tectonics pioneer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tuzo_Wilson">John Tuzo Wilson</a> -- which has to do with how the Earth's crust is formed, moved, and eventually destroyed.</div><div><br /></div><div>At its simplest level, the Wilson Cycle has two main pieces -- <i>divergent zones</i> (or <i>rifts</i>) where oceanic crust is created, pushing plates apart, and <i>convergent zones</i> (or <i>trenches</i>) where oceanic crust is subducted back into the mantle and destroyed. Right now, one of the main divergent zones is the Mid-Atlantic Rift, which is why the Atlantic Ocean is gradually widening; the Pacific, on the other hand, is largely surrounded by convergent zones, so it's getting smaller.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, the real situation is considerably more complex. In some places the plates are moving parallel to the faults; these are <i>transform</i> (or <i>strike-slip</i>) <i>faults</i>, like the AGTF and the more famous San Andreas Fault. And what the new paper found was that the movement along the AGTF doesn't just involve side-by-side movement, but there's a component of compression.</div><div><br /></div><div>So the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault, in essence, is trying to turn into a new subduction zone.</div><div><br /></div>"[These are] some of the oldest pieces of crust on Earth, super strong and rigid -- if it were any younger, the subducting plate would just break off and subduction would come to a halt," said João Duarte, of the University of Lisbon, who lead the research, in <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240215113615.htm">an interview with <i>Science Daily</i></a>. "Still, it is just barely strong enough to make it, and thus moves very slowly."<div><br /></div><div>The upshot is that subduction appears to be invading the eastern Atlantic, a process that (in tens or hundreds of millions of years) will result in the Atlantic Ocean closing up once more. The authors write:</div><blockquote>[T]he Atlantic already has two subduction zones, the Lesser Antilles and the Scotia arcs. These subduction zones have been forced from the nearby Pacific subduction zones. The Gibraltar arc is another place where a subduction zone is invading the Atlantic. This corresponds to a direct migration of a subduction zone that developed in the closing Mediterranean Basin. Nevertheless, few authors consider the Gibraltar subduction to be still active because it has significantly slowed down in the past millions of years. Here, we use new gravity-driven geodynamic models that reproduce the evolution of the Western Mediterranean, show how the Gibraltar arc formed, and test if it is still active. The results suggest that the arc will propagate farther into the Atlantic after a period of quiescence. The models also show how a subduction zone starting in a closing ocean (Ligurian Ocean) can migrate into a new opening ocean (Atlantic) through a narrow oceanic corridor.</blockquote><p>So the massive Portugal quakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seem to be part of a larger process, where compression along a (mostly) transform fault is going to result in the formation of a trench. It's amazing to me how much we've learned in only sixty-odd years -- Wilson and his colleagues only published their seminal papers that established the science of plate tectonics between 1963 and 1968 -- and how much we are still continuing to learn.</p><p>And along the way elucidating the processes that generated some of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-2671031831546930812024-02-20T03:27:00.000-08:002024-02-20T03:27:24.835-08:00Dream a little dream of me<p>In one of my favorite novels, <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i> by Ursula LeGuin, the main character -- an unassuming man named George Orr -- figures out that when he dreams, his dream changes reality. The problem is, since when the change occurs, it alters everyone else's memories of what had happened, the only one who realizes that anything has changed is him.</p><p>At first, of course, he doesn't believe it. He must be remembering wrong. Then, when he becomes convinced it's actually happening, he starts taking drugs to try to stop him from dreaming, but they don't work. As a last resort, he tries to get help from a psychologist...</p><p>... but the psychologist realizes how powerful this ability could be, and starts guiding George into dreams that will shape the world into what <i>he</i> wants it to be.</p><p>It's a powerful cautionary tale about what happens when an unscrupulous person gains control over someone with a valuable talent. Power corrupts, as the oft-quoted line from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton">John Dalberg-Acton</a> goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.</p><p>I couldn't help thinking about <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i> when I read about <a href="https://thedebrief.org/lucid-dreaming-breakthrough-achieved-as-researchers-report-successful-control-of-a-virtual-object-while-sleeping/">some new exploration of lucid dreaming</a> taking place at <i>REMSpace</i>, a California startup, that will be featured in a paper in <i>The International Journal of Dream Research </i>soon (a preprint is available at the link provided). A <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream">lucid dream</a></i> is one in which you are aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, and often have some degree of control over what happens. Around twenty percent of people report regular lucid dreaming, but there is some research that suggests many of us can learn to lucid dream.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQC3JANsnKQIoBuIgBuq0rds6tonMXY3jNXBDEWt86uMi-YT_mm8t-gVSWdMS91CYilOlcl5L_T9BZrDAe6KCW0O1ouKfUGMDDrl1fQV2IqbUpmGffDH_lT189uhzR6jv2F0i6G-04NvkBaZ1zg3uIqXduCTQTw9yCoiAMHcNsTIC6lURssBrzdQ1rPaBM/s1200/Dickensdream.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="922" data-original-width="1200" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQC3JANsnKQIoBuIgBuq0rds6tonMXY3jNXBDEWt86uMi-YT_mm8t-gVSWdMS91CYilOlcl5L_T9BZrDAe6KCW0O1ouKfUGMDDrl1fQV2IqbUpmGffDH_lT189uhzR6jv2F0i6G-04NvkBaZ1zg3uIqXduCTQTw9yCoiAMHcNsTIC6lURssBrzdQ1rPaBM/w400-h308/Dickensdream.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Dickens's Dream</i> by Robert W. Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]</div><p>At this point, I'll interject that despite a long history of very vivid dreams, I've never had a lucid dream. I did have an almost-lucid dream, once; it was a weird and involved story about being a groomsman in a wedding in a big cathedral, and when the priest said the whole "does anyone have any objections?" thing, a gaudily-dressed old lady in the front row stood up and started shouting about what an asshole the groom was and how the bride could do way better. And I'm standing there, feeling horrified and uncomfortable, and I thought, "This is bizarre! How could this be happening? Is this a dream?" So I kind of looked around, then patted myself to reassure myself that I was solid, and thought, "Nope. I guess this is real."</p><p>So the one time I actually <i>considered</i> the question of whether I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.</p><p>But I digress.</p><p>Anyhow, the researchers at REMSpace took a group of test subjects who all reported being able to lucid dream, and hooked them up to electromyography and electroencephalography sensors -- which, respectively, measure the electrical discharge from voluntary muscle contractions and neural firing in the brain -- and gave them the pre-sleep suggestion that they would dream about driving a car. Using the output from the sensors, they created a virtual avatar of the person on a computer screen, and found that they were able to use tiny motions of their hands to steer it, and even avoid obstacles.</p>"Two-way interaction with a computer from dreams opens up a whole area of new technologies," said <a href="https://remspace.net/michael_raduga/">Michael Raduga</a>, who led the experiment. "Now, these developments are crude, but soon they will change the idea of human capabilities."<div><br /></div><div>Maybe so, but it also puts the dreamer in the hands of the experimenter. Now, I'm not saying Michael Raduga and his team are up to anything nefarious; and obviously I don't believe anyone's got the George-Orr-like ability to change reality to conform to what they dream. But does anyone else have the feeling that "two-way interaction" into your dreams is potentially problematic? I've heard a lot of people say things like, "hypnosis isn't dangerous, you can't be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that induces you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do," but if there's one thing my knowledge of neuroscience has taught me, it's that the human brain is highly suggestible.</div><div><br /></div><div>So as interested as I am in lucid dreaming, I'm not ready to sign up to have my dreams interacted with by a computer controlled by someone else. And I hope like hell that when Raduga and his group at REMSpace start "changing the idea of human capabilities," they are <i>extremely</i> careful.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, that's our interesting-but-a-little-scary research for today. Me, I'm gonna stick with my ordinary old dreams, which are peculiar enough. And given my failure at detecting a potentially lucid dream when I had the chance, I doubt I'd be all that good at it in any case. I'd probably drive my virtual dream car right into a telephone pole.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-43750297621411153622024-02-19T03:28:00.000-08:002024-02-19T03:28:43.987-08:00The viral acceleratorIt's virus season, which thus far I've been able to avoid participating in, but seems like half the people I see are hacking and snorting and coughing so even with caution and mask-wearing I figure it's only a matter of time. Viruses are odd beasts; they're obligate intracellular parasites, doing their evil work by hijacking your cellular machinery and using it to make more viruses. Furthermore, they lack virtually all of the structures that cells have, including cell membranes, cytoplasm, and organelles. They really are more like self-replicating chemicals than they are like living things.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CKgqKkkv5UI/XBOBNjE0G2I/AAAAAAAAIz0/3tA-5mnuEdk4-QlnHRtMTtFvSETnqixeQCLcBGAs/s1600/800px-Symian_virus.png"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CKgqKkkv5UI/XBOBNjE0G2I/AAAAAAAAIz0/3tA-5mnuEdk4-QlnHRtMTtFvSETnqixeQCLcBGAs/s400/800px-Symian_virus.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40">Simian Polyoma Virus 40</a> [Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phoebus87">Phoebus87</a> at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/">English Wikipedia</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Symian_virus.png">Symian virus</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>]</div><br />What is even stranger about viruses is that while some of the more familiar ones, such as colds, flu, measles, invade the host, make him/her sick, and eventually (with luck) are cleared from the body -- some of them leave behind remnants that can make their presence known later. This behavior is what makes the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpesviridae">herpes family of viruses</a> so insidious. If you've been infected once, you are infected for life, and the latent viruses hidden in your cells can cause another eruption of symptoms, sometimes decades later.<br /><br />Even weirder is when those latent viral remnants cause havoc in a completely different way than the original infection did. There's a piece of a virus left in the DNA of many of us called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Endogenous_Retrovirus-W"><i>HERV-W</i></a> (human endogenous retrovirus W) which, if activated, can trigger multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia. Another one, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxsackievirus">Coxsackie virus</a>, has an apparent connection to type-1 diabetes and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj%C3%B6gren_syndrome">Sjögren's syndrome</a>. The usual sense is that all viral infections, whether or not they're latent, are damaging to the host. So it was quite a shock to me to read a piece of recent research that there's a viral remnant that not only is beneficial, but is critical for creating <i>myelin</i> -- the coating of our nerve cells that is essential for speeding up nerve transmission!<div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00013-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867424000138%3Fshowall%3Dtrue">The paper</a> -- which appeared last week in the journal <i>Cell</i> -- is by a team led by Tanay Ghosh of the Cambridge Institute of Science, and looked at a gene called <i>RetroMyelin</i>. This gene is one of an estimated forty (!) percent of our genome that is made up of <i>retrotransposons</i>, DNA that was inserted by viruses during evolutionary history. Or, looking at it another way, genes that made their way to us using a virus as a carrier. Once inside our genome, transposons begin to do what they do best -- making copies of themselves and moving around. Most retrovirus-introduced elements are deleterious; HIV and feline leukemia, after all, are caused by retroviruses. But sometimes, the product of a retroviral gene turns out to be pretty critical, and that's what happened with <i>RetroMyelin</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin">Myelin</a> is a phosopholipid/protein mixture that surrounds a great many of the nerves in vertebrates. It not only acts as an insulator, preventing the ion distribution changes that allow for nerve conduction to "short-circuit" into adjacent neurons, it is also the key to <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltatory_conduction">saltatory conduction</a></i> -- the jumping of neural signals down the axon, which can increase transmission speed by a factor of fifty. So this viral gene acted a bit like a neural accelerator, and gave the animals that had it a serious selective advantage.</div><br />"Retroviruses were required for vertebrate evolution to take off," said senior author and neuroscientist Robin Franklin, in <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240215113551.htm">an interview in <i>Science Daily</i></a>. "There's been an evolutionary drive to make impulse conduction of our axons quicker because having quicker impulse conduction means you can catch things or flee from things more rapidly. If we didn't have retroviruses sticking their sequences into the vertebrate genome, then myelination wouldn't have happened, and without myelination, the whole diversity of vertebrates as we know it would never have happened."<div><br /></div><div>The only vertebrates that don't have myelin are the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatha">jawless fish</a>, such as lampreys and hagfish -- so it's thought that the retroviral infection that gave us the myelin gene occurred around the same time that jaws evolved on our branch of the vertebrate family tree, on the order of four hundred million years ago.<br /><div><br /></div><div>So even some fundamental (and critical) traits shared by virtually all vertebrates, like the myelin sheaths that surround our neurons, are the result of viral infections. Just proving that not all of 'em are bad. Something to think about the next time you feel a sore throat coming on.</div></div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0