tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43071870402501938572024-03-28T11:10:57.191-07:00SkeptophiliaFighting Gullibility with Sarcasm, 6 days a weekGordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.comBlogger3995125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-56401351933441776272024-03-28T03:28:00.000-07:002024-03-28T03:28:17.301-07:00The origins of the story<p>I'm always interested in looking into where tales of the paranormal get started. We've seen a number of examples here at <i>Skeptophilia</i>, each with its own peculiar provenance. There are ones that have the feel of Scary Tales Told Around A Campfire, and which probably have little connection to reality other than the setting, like <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2020/08/the-legend-of-50-berkeley-square.html">the legend of 50 Berkeley Square</a> and the famous <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2012/10/anecdotal-evidence-and-restless-coffins.html">tumbling coffins of Barbados</a>. Others come from works of fiction that were misinterpreted (or misrepresented) as fact, and afterward took on a life of their own, such as <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2023/10/the-strange-tale-of-christopher-round.html">the tragic tale of Christopher Round</a>. There are stories for which the basic facts are clearly true, but which picked up paranormal overtones by virtue of being unexplained, such as the odd phenomenon of <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2022/01/footprints-in-snow.html">the Devonshire footprints</a>. Last, and most common, there are ones for which the main players are definitely real people with a decent amount of credibility, and who seem to have had no particular reason to lie other than perhaps relishing getting a chuckle from scaring the absolute shit out of their friends, such as the weirdly open-ended <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2020/07/nurse-black.html">tale of Nurse Black</a> (still my all-time favorite "true ghost story"), the story of <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2023/10/the-strange-tale-of-christopher-round.html">the haunting of Hinton Ampner</a>, <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2013/10/lord-dufferin-and-man-in-garden.html">Lord Dufferin's terrifying premonition</a>, and the much-retold legend of the <a href="https://www.skeptophilia.com/2021/09/the-shrieking-skulls-of-calgarth.html">screaming skulls of Calgarth</a>.</p><p>More interesting to me, though, are ones where the story itself has no obvious point of origin. One of these for which I've spent an inordinate amount of time digging, and come up absolutely empty-handed, I know about because of the book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Haunted-houses-Bernhardt-J-Hurwood/dp/B0006WBQ3M/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Haunted Houses</a></i>, by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, which I've owned (courtesy of the beloved Scholastic Book Club) since shortly after it was published in 1972.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggwWnURxdndDSoKj0TB7vRn2OQrb0Hp8iWNfnKTgeWGeXWpi7Kt_en77oQsTNrLjQ0jZfL4Mu961QYdjrcJ4SP1KhCbiJdNJAjQcZBN7gSUl20w5PNsArHRoY-KrKrqyJrV3Nkf9KhNRV2TTDDvSEbVG9VStiHJQ6B7ci3GHXWtZFPaxCFE3l5HBUnDWp5/s1599/The_Haunted_House_Das_Geisterhaus_(5360049608).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/AVvXsEggwWnURxdndDSoKj0TB7vRn2OQrb0Hp8iWNfnKTgeWGeXWpi7Kt_en77oQsTNrLjQ0jZfL4Mu961QYdjrcJ4SP1KhCbiJdNJAjQcZBN7gSUl20w5PNsArHRoY-KrKrqyJrV3Nkf9KhNRV2TTDDvSEbVG9VStiHJQ6B7ci3GHXWtZFPaxCFE3l5HBUnDWp5/w400-h266/The_Haunted_House_Das_Geisterhaus_(5360049608).jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons <a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/25691430@N04">Harald Hoyer</a> from Schwerin, Germany, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Haunted_House_Das_Geisterhaus_(5360049608).jpg">The Haunted House Das Geisterhaus (5360049608)</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>]</div><p>Hurwood gave the story the rather lurid name "The Mystery House of Horror," and it was one of a handful in the collection that completely freaked me out when I read it as a highly imaginative, impressionable twelve-year-old who was absolutely convinced that if I left even the slightest gap in the curtains of my bedroom at night, someone or *<i>gulp</i>* some<i>thing</i> would watch me through the window while I slept. You'd think monsters would have better stuff to do at night than to squint at a sleeping kid, but you never know, with monsters.</p><p>Right?</p><p>Of course right.</p><p>In any case, "The Mystery House of Horror" is about a manor house in Kensington, England that had a sinister reputation. No one, we're told, has any information about when it was built or by whom, which right away seems a little strange for a culture so absolutely obsessed with keeping track of the minute doings of the landed gentry. All Hurwood tells us is that the unnamed original owner was a "man of ill repute" who hanged himself in the house rather than waiting for the law do it first, and after that, the house and the gardens that surrounded it were definitely a Very Bad Place.</p><p>It was rented for a time by a family with the last name of Trent, but that tenancy came to an abrupt end when something tried to smother Mrs. Trent in her sleep with a pillow. Her husband leapt to her aid, and found himself in a wrestling match with something strong, slimy, invisible, and giving off a horrible stench. For some reason, even after this incident they stayed on a few more weeks. This is more than I'd have done -- if that happened to me, all you'd see is a comical, <i>Looney Tunes</i>-style blur as I ran away screaming, my feet not even touching the ground. But during those weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Trent were plagued by something slamming doors, and occasionally violently shaking their beds at night.</p><p>Eventually, though, they had enough, and left.</p><p>The next tenant was a Mrs. Cattling, who moved in with eight small dogs, four dachshunds and four Pomeranians. The dogs obviously hated the place right from the get-go (a common trope in paranormal stories is dogs being more sensitive to hauntings than humans are), and one night their fear was realized as something attacked them, killing one of the Pomeranians. What happened next is, to me, the scariest part of the entire story:</p><p></p><blockquote>She was about to pick up the limp little form when something made her whirl around. To her horror she saw one of the pillows on the bed lift itself up and stand on end. Frozen to the spot, she watched as it compressed itself into the shape of some hideously unfamiliar beast with a long muzzle, sharp teeth, and monstrously evil gleaming eyes. For a moment she stared at it in morbidly rapt fascination, like a bird at a snake about to devour it. Then, summoning all her strength, she rushed to the bed, seized the pillow and flung it to the floor, jumping on it with both feet and screaming, "You killed my dog! You killed my dog!"</blockquote>Quite the badass, that Mrs. Cattling. The tale is reminiscent of the absolutely terrifying short story "O, Whistle and I'll Come for You, My Lad," by M. R. James, in which a malevolent and invisible spirit creates a body for itself out of whatever happens to be around -- a bedspread, curtains, clothing hanging on a line. *shudder*<p></p><p>After Mrs. Cattling (and her surviving dogs) left, the house went through various other tenants, none of whom stayed long. One saw a "gaunt, cadaverous figure" standing by the end of the bed. Another saw a man in "peculiar old-fashioned dress" tinkering with the gas mantle. She assumed her husband had called a repairman, but the husband hadn't done any such thing, and when the woman returned to the kitchen she found it filling up with a dangerous level of natural gas -- the result, we're led to believe, of one of the house's resident ghosts trying to do away with its living tenants.</p><p>Even when it was unoccupied, strange things happened. A pair of young lovers looking for a quiet place to have a nice snog found their way into the house's garden one evening, but before they could get down to the business at hand the young man noticed that despite the house being empty, there was an eerie golden light in one of the upstairs windows. As they watched, it changed to a "ghastly bluish-green," and a "tomblike chill" descended over them. But finally we have people showing some degree of common sense -- the couple hauled ass out of the place and vowed never to come near it again.</p><p>Understandably, the house got such a bad reputation that no one would rent it. "Some time between World War I and World War II," we're told, it was torn down, and "when the last scraps of debris were hauled away, the residents of the neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief."</p><p>So it's a very creepy story, and going back through it to write this post I had a couple of moments where I had an honest shiver. (Fortunately, as I write this, it's a bright sunny morning, my dogs are all safely asleep on their own personal sofa, and there are no peculiar-looking repairmen working on the gas line. The latter is largely because we don't have a gas line, but still.)</p><p>But where did the story come from?</p><p>I've done a significant amount of research trying to find anything but Hurwood's account, and had zero success. You'd think that a house with this kind of story behind it would merit mention <i>somewhere</i>, but if there is, I haven't been able to find it. All of the references I've come across ultimately lead back to Hurwood himself.</p><p>So as compelling as the story is, I think the answer is that it came from Hurwood's own imagination.</p><p>I kind of get the draw, you know? As a novelist, I want my own imaginary creations to get as much notice as they can, and if I were writing a <i>True Tales of the Supernatural</i> sort of collection, it'd be mighty tempting to throw one of my own stories in there just for fun. And I suspect that's what Hurwood did. The Mystery House of Horror, I'm afraid, never existed.</p><p>I might be wrong, of course. If one of my readers knows the provenance of this story (other than Hurwood's anthology), please let me know in the comments. Maybe there <i>was</i> a haunted house in Kensington, and that'd be worth knowing about.</p><p>Although I'd be just as happy if invisible, slimy, smelly creatures didn't exist. Even if all they did was watch me through gaps in the curtains at night.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-49510002292536875402024-03-27T03:29:00.000-07:002024-03-27T03:29:00.083-07:00The asymmetrical universe<p>I'm currently reading the 2006 book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Warped-Passages-Unraveling-Mysteries-Dimensions/dp/0060531096/ref=sr_1_1?crid=NK1JQYRCVJ1O&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.blvtcKbNFW1CsWCJKsxjiwBqu4L5MZw7-JE4QpLRXCWyLJvuAB6DxjPayfQroJZPeSkT831BF6EDnf4D7snU49OjZmOgdhLMJrslTa3d7YM.bEpE1RG_DMwULnFTKsX9MPvHtMF1TRlJ4JxT9NWdZ2k&dib_tag=se&keywords=warped+passages+by+lisa+randall&qid=1711451486&sprefix=warped+pass%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1">Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions</a></i>, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. As you might imagine from the title, it's a provocative and mind-blowing read. And although it's written for laypeople, with most of the abstruse mathematics removed -- theoretical physics is, honestly, 99% math -- I must admit that a good chunk of it is going so far over my head that it doesn't even ruffle my hair.</p><p>The rest, though, is <i>way</i> cool.</p><p>The heart of the book is the consideration of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstring_theory">superstring theory</a></i> as a model for the way the universe is built. The idea -- at least at the level I understand it -- is that the fundamental building block of matter and energy is the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(physics)">string</a></i>, a one-dimensional structure that can either be open-ended or a closed loop, and the various manifestations we see (particles, for instance) are the different vibrational modes of those strings. But deeply embedded in this model is the idea that the universe has fundamental <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry">symmetries</a>, which unify seemingly disparate forces and allow you to make predictions about what exists but is as yet undiscovered based upon what might be necessary to complete the symmetry of the theory.</p><p>This search for underlying patterns in what we see around us drives a lot of theoretical physics. And certainly there are times the approach pays off. It was that mode of inquiry that allowed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow">Sheldon Glashow</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam">Abdus Salam</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg">Steven Weinberg</a> to come up with <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction">electroweak theory</a></i>, which showed that at high enough energy the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces act as a single force. (It was later experimentally confirmed, and the three won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the discovery.) Carrying this approach to its extreme are people like <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_an_8_dimensional_model_of_the_universe?language=en">Garrett Lisi</a>, whose eight-dimensional model of particle physics (based upon a mathematical structure called a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_group">Lie group</a></i>) tries to unify everything we know from experimental results into a symmetrical whole based upon it seeming to fit into a pattern that is "too beautiful not to be true."</p><p>The superstring model, too, makes predictions of particles and forces, largely based upon arguments of symmetry and symmetry breaking. Each of the particles in the Standard Model should, the math tells us, have a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpartner">supersymmetric partner</a>" -- each known <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion">fermion</a> paired with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson">boson</a> with the same charge and similar interactions, but a higher mass, and vice versa.</p><p>Experimental confirmation, of course, is the hill on which scientific theories live or die, and what the theorists need is hard evidence that these predicted particles exist. Randall's book is peppered with optimistic statements such as the following:</p><p></p><blockquote>In a few years, CERN will be the nexus of some of the most exciting physics results. The Large Hadron Collider, which will be able to reach seven times the present energy of the Tevatron, will be located there, and any discoveries made at the LHC will almost inevitably be something qualitatively new. Experiments at the LHC will seek -- and very likely find -- the as yet unknown physics that underlies the Standard Model.</blockquote><p></p><p>Randall's book was published in 2006; the LHC came online in 2008.</p><p>And in the sixteen years since then, not a single particle has been found confirming superstring theory -- no superpartners, no <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza%E2%80%93Klein_theory">Kaluza-Klein particles</a>, nothing. It did find the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson">Higgs boson</a>, which was a coup, but that was already predicted by the Standard Model, and didn't explain anything about the fundamental messiness of particle physics; why particles have the masses they do, forces have the strength they do, and (most vexing) why the extremely weak gravitational force seems to be irreconcilable with the other three.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn6sTJUDAsf11mhuR-l2D3EM5SEeOGfeFcwu_BJuWXSLBKDTZVhtlHini9Dy2Sf_TYxHKdO_w0nIsNSUQE07-cBBRv2wWgxo311w3AWKG1AjRRsG5FMg2h8Ctx2pe-E2BNe0IvpFyDfFXevoGPxXYR2Hri9B9t8ahZ7BBMKun5FT4B3QJiIGtx0rHH3qbr/s1200/0_OrLx9tQa98APfztG.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="727" data-original-width="1200" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn6sTJUDAsf11mhuR-l2D3EM5SEeOGfeFcwu_BJuWXSLBKDTZVhtlHini9Dy2Sf_TYxHKdO_w0nIsNSUQE07-cBBRv2wWgxo311w3AWKG1AjRRsG5FMg2h8Ctx2pe-E2BNe0IvpFyDfFXevoGPxXYR2Hri9B9t8ahZ7BBMKun5FT4B3QJiIGtx0rHH3qbr/w400-h243/0_OrLx9tQa98APfztG.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>This understandably bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists. It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all. Instead, we have a model that works, but has a lot of what seem like arbitrary parameters.<br /><br />But the fact is, every one of the efforts to get the Standard Model to fit into a more beautiful and elegant theoretical framework has failed. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o">a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach</a> that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types. It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline." Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided. Maybe the actual universe simply <i>is</i> messy. Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that). In her wonderful book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/1541646762/ref=asc_df_1541646762/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459770216327&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6148637912727744115&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9005807&hvtargid=pla-918112228932&psc=1"><i>Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray</i></a>, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.<br /><br />Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model <i>works</i>. Just to give one recent example, <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/standard-model-particle-physics">a paper last year</a> in <i>Physical Review Letters</i> described a set of experiments showing that a test of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment that agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 <i>billionths</i> of a percent.<br /><br />This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science. As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer. Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it. Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:<br /><blockquote>If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory. The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work. Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity. Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay]. Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation. And so on... A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency. </blockquote>And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.<br /><br />I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper. John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me. But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.<br /><br />Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants. We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable. Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."<p>****************************************</p><div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-13253013452950111112024-03-26T03:23:00.000-07:002024-03-26T03:23:16.861-07:00The shadow knowsOne of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis"><i>sleep paralysis</i></a>.<br /><br />I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me. But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.<br /><br />The reason all of this comes up is <a href="http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/10/shadow-people-on-the-loose/">an article that appeared over at the site <i>Mysterious Universe</i></a> about "Shadow People." The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Roswell-UFO-Conspiracy-Exposing-Shocking/dp/1945962046/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507827643&sr=8-1&keywords=nick+redfern">The Roswell UFO Conspiracy</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shapeshifters-Morphing-Monsters-Changing-Cryptids-ebook/dp/B01NAVP15B/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1507827643&sr=8-3&keywords=nick+redfern">Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Real-Men-Black-Mysterious-Connection-ebook/dp/B005JRX17I/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1507827643&sr=8-9&keywords=nick+redfern">The Real Men in Black</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Order-Book/dp/1578596157/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1507827643&sr=8-10&keywords=nick+redfern">The New World Order Book</a></i>, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.<br /><br />So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye. Let me let him speak for himself, though. Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:<br /><blockquote>Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Walks-Shadow-People-Among/dp/1933665378"><i>Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us</i></a>. He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about. He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.</blockquote>Shadow Cats? Why only cats? Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps. Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening. The cats I've owned specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are. If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box. They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.<br /><br />On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping." Our three dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.<br /><br />But then there's "Hat Man." On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:<br /><blockquote>I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me. He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins. It was none other than Chicago. The sky was dark and millions were dead. Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings. And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head. The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun. On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out. It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.</blockquote>So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction. Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."<br /><br />In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1111/j.1439-054X.2004.00017.x">Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings</a>," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM. REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination. Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10487786/">Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare</a>" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholinergic_neuron">cholinergic neurons</a> (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin">serotonergic neurons</a> (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited. This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYL5sKHn0h_u6i33lN_-QG4nNZgghcmFiEn23LV28a7iVgbpE3J0G6o-yOQJ4TPnb3IX5Curhhr3mofwnSpVi_uZNKQ-5fEWNp8eZPjaJVXnoOZ-bdFAX_Ee2B9Le6aue-qsHQcbXv7P5/s1600/450px-Shadow_Photography.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYL5sKHn0h_u6i33lN_-QG4nNZgghcmFiEn23LV28a7iVgbpE3J0G6o-yOQJ4TPnb3IX5Curhhr3mofwnSpVi_uZNKQ-5fEWNp8eZPjaJVXnoOZ-bdFAX_Ee2B9Le6aue-qsHQcbXv7P5/s400/450px-Shadow_Photography.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image is in the Public Domain]</div><br />The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia">hypnagogic experiences</a> (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality. So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.<br /><br />Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though. I still don't see how that'd work. Given my luck at trying to get cats comply with simple rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate. If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea. Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear. They're just helpful that way.<p>****************************************</p><div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-90680309136124514812024-03-25T03:26:00.000-07:002024-03-25T03:26:11.940-07:00Dog days<p>Our new dog, Jethro, is in the middle of a six-week puppy obedience class.</p><p>After three weeks of intensive training, he reliably knows the command "Sit." That's about it. The difficulty is he's the most chill dog I've ever met. He's not motivated to do much of anything except whatever it takes to get a belly rub. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_YP7WasmXzQehEAmQBE1N31VQGMDBQB0sfQcTy5wmEXxiN1AgoY6SG7kpuwUQJ998LXu3vQEOCtmUtZJO3Y0wIfj3rcMkqg8jKVGC8ik4wcHeRLJVef9Bba2RYNnrX5btB-z8rEc9ffO7oYBXu9y0JzQTlaT_72Y7fLL2U9GHwj5fBlqSh1QwXmi9VOfn/s3780/Jethro%206.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3780" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_YP7WasmXzQehEAmQBE1N31VQGMDBQB0sfQcTy5wmEXxiN1AgoY6SG7kpuwUQJ998LXu3vQEOCtmUtZJO3Y0wIfj3rcMkqg8jKVGC8ik4wcHeRLJVef9Bba2RYNnrX5btB-z8rEc9ffO7oYBXu9y0JzQTlaT_72Y7fLL2U9GHwj5fBlqSh1QwXmi9VOfn/w320-h400/Jethro%206.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Jethro in a typical position</div><p>Otherwise, whatever he's doing, he's perfectly content to keep doing it, especially if it doesn't require any extra effort. In class a couple of weeks ago I <i>finally</i> got him to lie down when I said, "Down," but then he didn't want to get up again. In fact, he flopped over on his side and refused to move even when I tried tempting him with a doggie treat. After a few minutes, the instructor said, "Is your dog still alive?"</p><p>I assured him that he was, and that this was typical behavior.</p><p>After a few more futile attempts, I gave up, sat on the floor, and gave him a belly rub.</p><p>Jethro, not the instructor.</p><p>So after working with Jethro in class and at home, I've reached three conclusions:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>He has an incredibly sweet, friendly disposition.</li><li>He's cute as a button.</li><li>He has the IQ of a PopTart.</li></ol><p></p><p>When we give him a command, he looks at us with this cheerful expression, as if to say, "Those are words, aren't they? I'm pretty sure those are words." Then he thinks, "Maybe those words have something to do with belly rubs." So he flops over on his back, and his lone functioning brain cell goes back to sleep, having accomplished its mission.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEV5WTHCXhfDATRpLiHcgaIN9tnunz8ah5ql9_ocDiQ3nh2ctbHhzjdB0mxM9U1IYXeZlBdJmSHWVihlraZqvbcY5EnDM_4NnAmzEK5CkG1H0cY7if9J6d5Swt47M9WO-BBm_C7iWF3tsI4hPK5BgTv1RQsr2BLWY8UgI0EWm4r7ltJF8H8FJGX2MlsPG1/s3780/Jethro2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3780" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEV5WTHCXhfDATRpLiHcgaIN9tnunz8ah5ql9_ocDiQ3nh2ctbHhzjdB0mxM9U1IYXeZlBdJmSHWVihlraZqvbcY5EnDM_4NnAmzEK5CkG1H0cY7if9J6d5Swt47M9WO-BBm_C7iWF3tsI4hPK5BgTv1RQsr2BLWY8UgI0EWm4r7ltJF8H8FJGX2MlsPG1/w320-h400/Jethro2.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Jethro in a rare philosophical mood</div><p>I couldn't help but think of Jethro when I read <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00171-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982224001714%3Fshowall%3Dtrue">a study out of Eötvös Loránd University</a> in Budapest, Hungary, which looked at how an electroencephalogram trace changes when dogs are told the names of things (rather than commands to <i>do</i> things), and it found that the parts of the brain that are involved in mental representations of objects activate in dogs -- just as they do in humans. The upshot is that dogs seem to form mental images when they hear the names of the objects.</p>"Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," said study lead author Marianna Boros, in <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240322145438.htm">an interview with <i>Science Daily</i></a>. "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name."<br /><br /><div>Interestingly, this response seemed to be irrespective of a particular dog's vocabulary. "It doesn't matter how many object words a dog understands," Boros said. "Known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects."</div><div><br /></div>"Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do," said Lilla Magyari, who co-authored the study. "Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of."<div><br /></div><div>Well, okay, maybe <i>your</i> dog does. With Jethro, the best response he seems to be capable of is mild puzzlement. I wish he'd been one of the test subjects, but my fear would be that when they'd say a word to him, the response on the EEG would be *<i>soft static</i>*, and the researchers would come to me with grave expressions and say, "I'm sorry to give you the bad news, Mr. Bonnet, but your dog appears not to have any higher brain function."</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, I have to admit that it's hard to discern between "I don't understand what you're saying" and "I don't give a damn about what you're saying." Yesterday when my wife was trying to teach him to catch a foam rubber frisbee, and he repeatedly allowed the frisbee to bonk off of the top of his head, it might be that he knew perfectly well what she wanted him to do and just didn't want to do it. So perhaps Lilla Magyari's right, and he's smarter than we think he is. </div><div><br /></div><div>Given how often he's persuaded us to give up on all the "Sit," "Down," and "Stay" bullshit and just give him a belly rub, maybe he's not the one who's a slow learner.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-76927048774582219062024-03-23T03:28:00.000-07:002024-03-23T03:28:11.026-07:00Twisted faces<p>One of the most terrifying episodes <i>The X Files</i> ever did was called "Folie à Deux." In the opening scene, a man sees his boss not as a human but as a hideous-looking insectile alien who is, one by one, turning the workers in the company into undead zombies.</p><p>The worst part is that he's the only one who sees all of this. Everyone else thinks everything is perfectly normal.</p><p>The episode captures in appropriately ghastly fashion the horror of psychosis -- the absolute conviction that the awful things you're experiencing are real despite everyone's reassurance that they're not. In the show, of course, they <i>are</i> real; it's the people who <i>aren't</i> seeing it who are delusional. But when this sort of thing happens in the real world, it is one of the scariest things I can imagine. As I made the point in my neuroscience classes, your brain is taking the information it receives from your sensory organs and trying to assemble a picture of reality from those inputs; if something goes wrong, and the brain puts that information together incorrectly, that flawed picture becomes your reality. At that point, there is no reliable way to distinguish reality from hallucination.</p><p>I was, unfortunately, reminded of that episode when a friend and loyal reader of <i>Skeptophilia</i> sent me a link yesterday to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/disorder-man-sees-demonic-faces-rcna144533?fbclid=IwAR1drlA-eKP52jvZwlDFBwdOrynKD7NqWVk3U86C-dQr6EvU_Lkdl3r_xC0">a story in <i>NBC News Online</i></a> about a man with <i>prosopometamorphopsia</i>, a (thank heaven) rare disorder that causes the patient's perception of human faces to go awry. When he looks at another person, he sees their face as grotesquely stretched, with deep grooves in the forehead and cheeks.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsWLOjni3u40ZbkRrJNhGz3i8nNtYToNCsgxHojcb1VPVYynpy1Ffw2ZECQ04K8N19GEKqcRplwifINK7qluJFg18K1j19iU9qDTTbnhqUOSVzYGOd0e55o2agIdP8Fci5kU4NhgcU7Rz0GAAn6W3kJvcYK3F7d6rEdGxBZOs2qLS-BZNhfw6vcRk2uAP/s1240/240321-faces-demons-ch-1626-9dcdbe.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="827" data-original-width="1240" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsWLOjni3u40ZbkRrJNhGz3i8nNtYToNCsgxHojcb1VPVYynpy1Ffw2ZECQ04K8N19GEKqcRplwifINK7qluJFg18K1j19iU9qDTTbnhqUOSVzYGOd0e55o2agIdP8Fci5kU4NhgcU7Rz0GAAn6W3kJvcYK3F7d6rEdGxBZOs2qLS-BZNhfw6vcRk2uAP/w400-h266/240321-faces-demons-ch-1626-9dcdbe.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Computer-generated images of what the patient describes seeing [Image credit: Antônio Mello, Dartmouth University]</div><p>Weirdly, it doesn't happen when he looks at a drawing or a photograph; only actual faces trigger the shift. A moving face -- someone talking, for example -- accentuates the distortion.</p><p>Some people with prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) have it from birth; most, though, acquire it through physical damage to the brain, such as a stroke or traumatic brain injury. The patient who was the first subject of this study shows up in MRI images with a lesion on the left side of his brain that is undoubtedly the origin of the distorted perception. As far as the origin of that, he had a severe concussion in his forties (he's now 59), but also suffered from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning four months before the onset of symptoms. Which of those is the root cause of the lesion, or if it's from something else entirely, is unknown.</p><p>At least now that he knows what's going on, he has been reassured that he's not going insane -- or worse, that he's seeing the world as it actually is, and like the man in "Folie à Deux," become convinced that he's the only one who does. "My first thought was I woke up in a demon world," the patient told researchers, regarding how he felt when the symptoms started. "I came so close to having myself institutionalized. If I can help anybody from the trauma that I experienced with it and keep people from being institutionalized and put on drugs because of it, that’s my number-one goal."<br /></p><p>I was immediately reminded of a superficially similar disorder called <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations">Charles Bonnet syndrome</a>.</i> (<i>Nota bene</i>: Charles Bonnet is no relation. My French great-grandfather's name was changed upon arrival in the United States, so my last name shouldn't even be Bonnet.) In this disorder, people with partial blindness, often from macular degeneration, start putting together the damaged and incomplete information their eyes are relaying to their brains in novel ways, causing what are called <i>visual release hallucinations</i>. They can be complex -- one elderly woman saw what appeared to be tame lions strolling about in her house -- but there's no actual psychosis. The people experiencing them, as with PMO, know (or can be convinced) that what they're seeing isn't real, which takes away a great deal of the anxiety, fear, and trauma of having hallucinations.</p><p>So at least that's one upside for PMO sufferers. Still, it's got to be disorienting to look at the world around you and know for certain that what you're seeing isn't the way it actually is. My eyesight isn't great, even with bifocals, but at least what I <i>am</i> seeing is real. I'll take that over twisted faces and illusory lions any day.</p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-80946446552031347732024-03-22T03:27:00.000-07:002024-03-22T03:27:42.895-07:00Leading the way into darkness<p>New from the "I Thought We Already <i>Settled</i> This" department, we have: the <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/west-virginia-opens-door-teaching-intelligent-design">West Virginia State Legislature has passed a bill</a>, and the Governor is expected to sign it, which would allow the teaching of Intelligent Design and other "alternative theories" to evolution in public school biology classes.</p><p>It doesn't state this in so many words, of course. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District">Dover (PA) decision</a> of 2005 ruled that ID is not a scientific theory, has no place in the classroom, and to teach it violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution. No, the anti-evolutionists have learned from their mistakes. State Senator Amy Grady (R), who introduced the bill, deliberately eliminated any specific mention of ID in the wording of the bill. It says, "no local school board, school superintendent, or school principal shall prohibit a public school classroom teacher from discussing and answering questions from students about scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist" -- but when questioned on the floor of the Senate, Grady reluctantly admitted that it would allow ID to be discussed.</p><p>And, in the hands of a teacher who was a creationist, to be presented as a viable alternative to evolution.</p><p>I think the thing that frosts me the most about all this is an exchange between Grady and Senator Mike Woelfel (D) about using the words "scientific theories" without defining them. Woelfel asked Grady if there was such a definition in the bill, and she said there wasn't, but then said, "The definition of a theory is that there is some data that proves something to be true. But it doesn’t have to be proven entirely true."</p><p>*brief pause for me to scream obscenities*</p><p>No, Senator Grady, that is <i>not</i> the definition of a theory. I know a lot of your colleagues in the Republican Party think we live in a "post-truth world" and agree with Kellyanne Conway that there are "alternative facts," but in science you can't just make shit up, or define terms whatever way you like and then base your argument on those skewed definitions. Let me clarify for you what a scientific theory is, which I only have to do because apparently you can't even be bothered to read the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory">first paragraph of a fucking Wikipedia article</a>:</p><blockquote>A <b>scientific theory</b> is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or <i>a fortiori</i>, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment... Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.</blockquote><p>Intelligent Design is <i>not</i> a theory. It does not come from the scientific method, it is not based on data and measurements, and it makes no predictions. It hinges on the idea of <i>irreducible complexity</i> -- that there are structures or phenomena in biology that are too complex, or have too many interdependent pieces, to have arisen through evolution. This sounds fancy, but it boils down to "we don't understand this, therefore God did it." (If you want an absolutely brilliant takedown of Intelligent Design, read Richard Dawkins's book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-Universe/dp/0393351491/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3K1YHYJO1H51M&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dSxkrY2azGH4Ay12RrbJcLAhgW8obqmykT_vME2MB7mJKINphCVMtPAfQgVdWOEjySgvKSSnnLF1hFwcUXLH0FpmhlGOFzTPA4gheWDdv1YW9Ag3jn_BlZLfQn0C_SxhficQJKyx5kCcU1Y0zFqFtWlvDzbZGDWwB5D4dLf6yV80zIgMWEpfy594VYvqrr8GCysRABfQQvchnyBoNvEeLJIm-9w4oT-_YOkAO00qlwQ.LTeoMoTFXSz6VefJX07PnIT2s3szKY58kD4jMYGBFy8&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+blind+watchmaker+by+richard+dawkins&qid=1711030816&sprefix=richard+dawkins+bl%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1">The Blind Watchmaker</a></i>. How, after reading that, <i>anyone</i> can buy ID is beyond me.)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyphenhyphenvv1pxL55SR42tO_WDihgpmp72koN_t1U0rqtwEvoNSQhqQgiIOSMoMXkuG-k-nCG5BU2ybkPOXSqx8eGefsFF7A8G4HQ8zNAFioVoZmhrhUHHu9my5ztNyQXIP1xtkWgPO1OgQyK8zFmEk_6flBDl2QzHGKr6T_OwqGm019LsNWFwySl6JuN1WXGgDb/s1600/1600px-Watch_with_no_background.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1184" data-original-width="1600" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyphenhyphenvv1pxL55SR42tO_WDihgpmp72koN_t1U0rqtwEvoNSQhqQgiIOSMoMXkuG-k-nCG5BU2ybkPOXSqx8eGefsFF7A8G4HQ8zNAFioVoZmhrhUHHu9my5ztNyQXIP1xtkWgPO1OgQyK8zFmEk_6flBDl2QzHGKr6T_OwqGm019LsNWFwySl6JuN1WXGgDb/w400-h296/1600px-Watch_with_no_background.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Watch_with_no_background.png">Watch with no background</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode">CC BY 3.0</a>]</div><p>And don't even get me <i>started</i> on Young-Earth Creationism.</p><p>What gets me is how few people are willing to call out people like Amy Grady on their bullshit. People seem to have become afraid to stand up and say, "You are wrong." "Alternative facts"<i> aren't</i> facts; they are errors at best and outright lies at worst.</p><p>And if we live in a "post-truth world" it's because we're choosing to accept errors and lies rather than standing up to them.</p><p>As historian Timothy Snyder put it, in his 2021 essay "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html">The American Abyss</a>":<br /></p><blockquote>Post-truth is pre-fascism... When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions... Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.</blockquote><p>But Carl Sagan warned us of this almost thirty years ago, in his brilliant (if unsettling) book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CIO5Q88TZEJZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ms2M3LmQ0eJvE1u7gc9IxvmUfVayanwTrx47AT3-dgYqQCtV-lzWbVgFzVfT-0TbXXrB3kgjSHLIVLvYdsr-v9M8Zpuv3K5ZZiT9Utn4W56-iRQtx4eBM-ehrWRNTn4nmPkMa_JfHOxvis6iABRoR0TrmOT2CVnY9Zm6oD7tKSupbfhTkNUjmajIy7W1FnqIYT_7zmJte54jrFD81k0RaFCuuwPsyEV1JzcvTTPfWgY.JYraS4pTuLclkj8ThblsBmgYZchvZLT9YarP_FWMdac&dib_tag=se&keywords=carl+sagan+demon+haunted+world&qid=1711020054&sprefix=carl+sagan%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-1">The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark</a></i>:</p><blockquote>Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.</blockquote><p>People like Amy Grady are leading the way into that darkness, and it seems like hardly anyone notices.</p><p>We cannot afford to have a generation of children going through public school and coming out thinking that ignorant superstition is a theory, that sloppily-defined terms are truth, and that pandering to the demands of a few that their favorite myths be elevated to the status of fact is how science is done. It's time to stand up to the people who are trying to co-opt education into religious indoctrination.</p><p>In the Dover Decision, we won a battle, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have not yet won the war.</p><p></p>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-56508232293580991022024-03-21T03:23:00.000-07:002024-03-21T03:23:04.367-07:00Crown jewelA <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf">white dwarf</a></i> is the remnant of an average-to-small star at the end of its life. When a star like our own Sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel, it goes through a brief period of fusing helium into carbon and oxygen, but that too eventually runs out. This creates an imbalance between the two opposing forces ruling a star's life -- the outward thermal pressure from the heat released by fusion, and the inward compression from gravity. When fusion ceases, the thermal pressure drops, and the star collapses until the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_degeneracy_pressure">electron degeneracy pressure</a></i> becomes high enough to stop the expansion. The <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle">Pauli Exclusion Principle</a></i> states that two electrons can't occupy the same quantum state, and the force generated in order to prevent this happening is sufficient to counterbalance the gravitational pressure. (At higher masses, even that's not enough to stop the collapse; the electrons are forced to fuse with protons, generating a neutron star, or at higher masses still, a black hole.)<div><br /></div><div>For a star like our Sun, in a single-star system, that's pretty much that. The outer layers of the star's atmosphere get blown away to form a ghostly shell called a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_nebula">planetary nebula</a></i>, and the white dwarf -- actually the star's core -- remains to slowly cool down and dim over the next billion-odd years. But in multiple-star systems, something far more interesting happens.</div><div><br /></div><div>White dwarfs, although nowhere near as dense as neutron stars, still have a strong gravitational field. If the white dwarf is part of a close binary system, the gravitational pull of the white dwarf is sufficient to siphon off gas from the upper atmosphere of its companion star. The material from the companion is heated and compressed as it falls toward the white-hot surface of the white dwarf, and once enough of it builds up, it suddenly becomes hot enough to fuse, generating a huge burst of energy in a runaway thermonuclear reaction.</div><div><br /></div><div>The result is called a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova">nova</a></i> -- a "new star," even though it's not new at all, it has merely flared up enough to see from a long way away. (The other name for this phenomenon is a <i>cataclysmic binary</i>, which I like better not only because it's more accurate but because it sounds badass.) Once the new fuel gets exhausted, it dims again, but the process merely starts over. The siphoning restarts, and depending on the rate of accretion, there'll eventually be another flare-up.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpfko-P-J5-Y5GePF9y8W3eA7ryhlnUGMrOmdLICjjgpbuBAdkJhJvETVuVr2woD4wRh-_rz_FR2_KACQGrKRWQg2YwobrF8yBTAKc2H8N_tH8foG4ZdmigwvtRaCIjugWk-AAKyly8A4uQYFxfQemHdcRUYsL3ACgABEjRzUb32e3ilREQXNzqkuwUEIn/s540/NovaCygni_ArtistConcept_watermarked.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="303" data-original-width="540" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpfko-P-J5-Y5GePF9y8W3eA7ryhlnUGMrOmdLICjjgpbuBAdkJhJvETVuVr2woD4wRh-_rz_FR2_KACQGrKRWQg2YwobrF8yBTAKc2H8N_tH8foG4ZdmigwvtRaCIjugWk-AAKyly8A4uQYFxfQemHdcRUYsL3ACgABEjRzUb32e3ilREQXNzqkuwUEIn/w400-h225/NovaCygni_ArtistConcept_watermarked.gif" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Artist's concept of a nova flare-up [Image courtesy of NASA Conceptual Image Lab/Goddard Flight Center]</div><div><br /></div><div>The topic comes up because there is <a href="https://blogs.nasa.gov/Watch_the_Skies/2024/02/27/view-nova-explosion-new-star-in-northern-crown/">a recurrent nova that is due to erupt soon</a>, and when it does, a "new star" will be visible in the Northern Hemisphere. It's in the rather dim, crescent-shaped constellation of Corona Borealis, between Boötes and Hercules, which can be seen in the evening in late spring to midsummer. The star T Coronae Borealis is ordinarily magnitude +10, and thus far too dim to see with the naked eye; most people can't see anything unaided dimmer than magnitude +6, and that's if you've got great eyes and it's a completely clear, dark night. But in 1946 this particular star started to dim even more, then suddenly flared up to magnitude +2 -- about as bright as Polaris -- before gradually dimming over the next days to weeks back down to its previous near-invisibility.</div><div><br /></div><div>And the astrophysicists are seeing signs that it's about to repeat its behavior from 78 years ago. The best guesses are that it'll flare some time before September, which is perfect timing for seeing it if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. If you're a star-watcher, keep an eye on the usually unremarkable constellation of Corona Borealis -- at some point soon, there will be a new jewel in the crown, albeit a transient one.</div><div><br /></div><div>You have to wonder, though, if at some point the white dwarf in the T Coronae Borealis binary system will pick up enough extra mass from its companion to cross the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit">Chandrasekhar Limit</a>. This value -- about 1.4 solar masses -- was determined by the brilliant Indian physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subrahmanyan_Chandrasekhar">Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar</a> as the maximum mass a white dwarf can have before the electron degeneracy pressure is insufficient to halt the collapse. At that point, it falls inward so fast the entire star blows itself to smithereens in a <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova">type-1a supernova</a></i>, one of the most spectacular events in the universe. If T Coronae Borealis did this -- not that it's likely any time soon -- it would be far brighter than the full Moon, and easily visible in broad daylight, probably for weeks to months.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now <i>that</i> I would like to see.</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-48060979075444143242024-03-20T03:34:00.000-07:002024-03-20T03:34:12.551-07:00Grammar warsIn linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the <i>descriptivists</i> and the <i>prescriptivists</i>. The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be. The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.<br /><br />Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong." I have to admit that I'm far more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot." Drives me nuts. And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.<br /><br />It's "all right," dammit.<br /><br />However, some research published in <i>Nature</i> shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.<br /><br />In "<a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature24455.html">Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change</a>," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania describe that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.<br /><br />The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled." The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist because they're common; less common words, like "turf" -- which once pluralized to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular inflection, and eventually the regular one (in this case, "turfs") takes over.<br /><br />The research by Newberry <i>et al</i>. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness. They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call <i>stochastic drift</i>, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.<br /><br />"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study. "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side. The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember. But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."<br /><br />So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail. It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English that are now completely accepted by descriptivist and prescriptivist alike are the result of such mangling. Both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire"). "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called <i>back formation</i> -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction. A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle. (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English yanks words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8tu8BCtG2jPSp9rKGA3YWoz4qYB1W_TV82h_wunGfdR6KAeqGTrGGSxOzAJRjWPb0Se8ryhBu5CV6oCbgntxnn9L6VSQxRdiCyYlCyKLaQdgIrKQ4LO-BVKlPArZ2cTZbqWveA6vOZTH/s1600/Ah_c448ec_5554065.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8tu8BCtG2jPSp9rKGA3YWoz4qYB1W_TV82h_wunGfdR6KAeqGTrGGSxOzAJRjWPb0Se8ryhBu5CV6oCbgntxnn9L6VSQxRdiCyYlCyKLaQdgIrKQ4LO-BVKlPArZ2cTZbqWveA6vOZTH/s400/Ah_c448ec_5554065.jpg" /></a></div><br />Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry." It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to. But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot." A line has to be drawn somewhere. And I'm gonna draw it a lot, all right?<p>****************************************</p><div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4307187040250193857.post-69914397527500168952024-03-19T03:29:00.000-07:002024-03-19T03:29:29.287-07:00Cosmological conundrumsThree of the most vexing problems in physics -- and ones I've hit on a number of times here at <i>Skeptophilia</i> -- are:<div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter">dark matter</a> -- the stuff that (by its gravitational influence) seems to make up 26% of the mass/energy of the universe, and yet has resisted every effort at detection or inquiry into what other properties it might have.</li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy">dark energy</a> -- a mysterious "something" that is said to be responsible for the apparent runaway expansion of the universe, and which (like dark matter) has defied detection or explanation in any other way. This makes up 69% of the universe's mass/energy -- meaning the ordinary matter we're made of comprises only 5% of the apparent content of the universe.</li><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quantum-mechanics-universe-physicists">the conflict between the general theory of relativity (i.e. the theory of gravitation) and quantum physics</a>. In the realm of the very small (or at high energies), the theory of relativity falls apart -- it's irreconcilable with the nondeterministic model of quantum mechanics. Despite over a century of the best minds in theoretical physics trying to find a quantum theory of gravity, the two most fundamental underpinnings of our understanding of the universe just don't play well together.</li></ol></div><div>A while back I was discussing this with the fiddler in my band, who also happened to be a Cornell physics lecturer. Her comment was that the mess physics is currently in suggests we're missing something major -- the same way that the apparent constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum, regardless of reference frame, created an intractable nightmare for physicists at the end of the nineteenth century. It took Einstein coming up with the Theories of Relativity to show that the problem wasn't a problem at all, but a fundamental reality about how space and time work, to resolve it all.</div><div><br /></div><div>"We're still waiting for this century's Einstein," Kathy said.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-ZXUNti_78yl7qAu1a9NamXpb_bdmqM-6fe_dloQBpdOVRtGeVS8k2zPb5dkTMiHEl-pejbcvkMICqKovxmnGgxMeA1iofFY_nSMYtPOzYEWyhp3CmBM4ZLvEd-SOjx4C7THwEC8U9o5SRIEVqVGnGOuLUjOUMFvsL7OpopRxSNKkhBSJWzNdaLLYxKlK/s1600/Collage_of_six_cluster_collisions_with_dark_matter_maps.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="963" data-original-width="1600" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-ZXUNti_78yl7qAu1a9NamXpb_bdmqM-6fe_dloQBpdOVRtGeVS8k2zPb5dkTMiHEl-pejbcvkMICqKovxmnGgxMeA1iofFY_nSMYtPOzYEWyhp3CmBM4ZLvEd-SOjx4C7THwEC8U9o5SRIEVqVGnGOuLUjOUMFvsL7OpopRxSNKkhBSJWzNdaLLYxKlK/w400-h241/Collage_of_six_cluster_collisions_with_dark_matter_maps.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collage_of_six_cluster_collisions_with_dark_matter_maps.jpg">Collage of six cluster collisions with dark matter maps</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode">CC BY 4.0</a>]</div><div><br /></div><div>There's no shortage of physicists working on stepping into those shoes -- and just last week, two papers came out suggesting possible solutions for the first two problems.</div><div><br /></div><div>One claims to solve all three simultaneously.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both of them start with a similar take on dark matter and dark energy as Einstein did about the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether">luminiferous aether</a></i>, the mysterious substance that nineteenth-century physicists thought was the medium through which light propagated; they simply don't exist. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240315160911.htm">The first one</a>, from Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa, proposes that the need for both dark matter and dark energy in the model comes from a misconception about how the laws of physics change on a cosmological time scale. The prevailing wisdom has been "they don't;" the laws now are the same as the laws thirteen billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang. Gupta suggests that making two modifications to the model -- assuming that the strength of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have decreased over time, and that light loses energy as it travels over long distances, explain all the astrophysical observations we've made, and obviates the need for dark matter and dark energy.</div><div><br /></div>"The study's findings confirm that our previous work -- JWST early-universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology -- about the age of the universe being 26.7 billion years [rather than the usually accepted value of 13.8 billion years] has allowed us to discover that the universe does not require dark matter to exist," Gupta said. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy."<div><br /></div><div><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19459">The second</a>, by Jonathan Oppenheim and Andrea Russo of University College London, suggests a different solution that (if correct) not only gets rid of dark matter and dark energy, but in one fell swoop resolves the conflict between relativity and quantum physics. They propose that the problem is the deterministic nature of gravity; if a quantum-like uncertainty is introduced into gravitational models, the whole shebang works without the need for some mysterious dark matter and dark energy that no one has ever been able to find experimentally.</div><div><br /></div><div>The mathematics of the model -- which, I must admit up front, are beyond me -- introduce new terms to explain the behavior of gravity at low accelerations, which are (not coincidentally) the regime where the effects of dark matter become apparent. It's a striking approach; physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who is generally reluctant to hop on the latest Grand Unified Theory bandwagon (and whose pessimism has been, unfortunately, justified in the past) writes in <a href="https://nautil.us/what-physicists-have-been-missing-506607/">an essay on the new theory</a>, "Reading Oppenheim’s new papers—published in the journals <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43348-2"><i>Nature Communications</i></a> and <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041040"><i>Physical Review X</i></a>—about what he dubs 'Post-Quantum Gravity,' I have been impressed by how far he has pushed the approach. He has developed a full-blown framework that combines quantum physics with classical physics, and he tells me that he has another paper in preparation which shows that he can solve the problem of infinites that plague the Big Bang and black holes."</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite this, Hossenfelder is still dubious about Post-Quantum Gravity. "I don’t want to withhold from you that I think Oppenheim’s theory is wrong, because it remains incompatible with Einstein’s cherished principle of locality, which says that causes should only travel from one place to its nearest neighbours and not jump over distances," she writes. "I suspect that this is going to cause problems sooner or later, for example with energy conservation. Still, I might be wrong... If Oppenheim’s right, it would mean Einstein was both right and wrong: right in that gravity remained a classical, non-quantum theory, and wrong in that <a href="https://nautil.us/how-einstein-reconciled-religion-to-science-237262/">God did play dice indeed</a>. And I guess for the good Lord, we would have to be both sorry and not sorry."</div><div><br /></div><div>So we'll just have to wait and see. If either of these theories is right, we're talking Nobel Prize material. If the second one is right, it'd be the physics discovery of the century. Like Sabine Hossenfelder, I'm not holding my breath; attempts to solve definitively the three problems I started this post with are, thus far, batting zero. And I'm hardly qualified to make a judgment about what the chances are for these two. But like many interested laypeople, I'll be fascinated to see which way it goes -- and to see if we might, in the words of my bandmate/physicist friend, be "looking at the twenty-first century's Einstein."</div>
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Gordon Bonnethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06003472005971594466noreply@blogger.com0tag: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.com1tag: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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyfLtnFqsxoFNwWc-1ET_SKE7njcs3mS00zC4fgv7C3RnY1YMQxdDfFoa3Vrr-eO_wKIWmnot5Ya_mZ0Yfg3DvpdrJSPyOCJZTLPQuZyB7rgXskJ-bLSIXaFRZsU1ehj7y-k4UJ8-WuTGZ/s1600/IMG_0021.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyfLtnFqsxoFNwWc-1ET_SKE7njcs3mS00zC4fgv7C3RnY1YMQxdDfFoa3Vrr-eO_wKIWmnot5Ya_mZ0Yfg3DvpdrJSPyOCJZTLPQuZyB7rgXskJ-bLSIXaFRZsU1ehj7y-k4UJ8-WuTGZ/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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA-bj8ZuRhwuF94V7balpk3U1utpHloN3JjG2eXGVeHLNw5h-xVtBK56moFVMLZLsyHJ4XD5ejCyaS021SP7oIKnh5bNsf_secVY6ZNweMOnR6Z-J66IxMHkaIZG1nWkBGpzwfLxuYf5Ff/s1600/IMG_0018.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA-bj8ZuRhwuF94V7balpk3U1utpHloN3JjG2eXGVeHLNw5h-xVtBK56moFVMLZLsyHJ4XD5ejCyaS021SP7oIKnh5bNsf_secVY6ZNweMOnR6Z-J66IxMHkaIZG1nWkBGpzwfLxuYf5Ff/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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikP3U1VDUx2BUKVCw1BBI7q8jmKm4O_eb4mDww_Kq3F8u7GHESvbNjgwfKvRpePg3nPYRMP5xRNt-d14s_vujakOX7w27ASLdmsw5F-4QmPGThCjKxhIyKnix5_EQpHj9jY-j7Nlt3N4eG/s1600/IMG_0023.JPG"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikP3U1VDUx2BUKVCw1BBI7q8jmKm4O_eb4mDww_Kq3F8u7GHESvbNjgwfKvRpePg3nPYRMP5xRNt-d14s_vujakOX7w27ASLdmsw5F-4QmPGThCjKxhIyKnix5_EQpHj9jY-j7Nlt3N4eG/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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6HsDFLjqhBzMChmBGVUd7ANBN3_PgP6oUkkFVa1gVRxfO0nxKpLfhbfoXRSJF8x8M-OuZWI0rZ-HC3h4biICnsz2o1Y-z1TbXneleNLB6b9VJNo8oHVws4eNRFIUTRpWI2bRMnNB46IrU/s1600/De_Occulta_Philosophia_-_Proportionen_des_Menschen_und_ihre_geheimen_Zahlen.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6HsDFLjqhBzMChmBGVUd7ANBN3_PgP6oUkkFVa1gVRxfO0nxKpLfhbfoXRSJF8x8M-OuZWI0rZ-HC3h4biICnsz2o1Y-z1TbXneleNLB6b9VJNo8oHVws4eNRFIUTRpWI2bRMnNB46IrU/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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihopo16jXSpMGCTKbWHZeHmTtw3OE108lyy6fOQKfwEMxjP5rMoNHRTjfOmYkaESxrFmyK1QOc0suPe3YEcmfCzWZo0jRS6MQeCa50-Cd6bcQ4VhljI2VcDafn5OacWWl_adswZMpTCu3h/s1600/GraveSign.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihopo16jXSpMGCTKbWHZeHmTtw3OE108lyy6fOQKfwEMxjP5rMoNHRTjfOmYkaESxrFmyK1QOc0suPe3YEcmfCzWZo0jRS6MQeCa50-Cd6bcQ4VhljI2VcDafn5OacWWl_adswZMpTCu3h/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://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHc0lisdW9u60b87tnzX5oo0tp4suBv0IW13QDgAfFc4WhR4e2dMFwbyuPkV8zGG2smt7HmL-ofvHplYOeVTRUCTvUVSkhDNESQY65shW-fZNjQTy8ZJNFdrCWPzru0klPMlzXY7CCL1NU/s1600/3376918015_7de4685fff_z.jpg"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHc0lisdW9u60b87tnzX5oo0tp4suBv0IW13QDgAfFc4WhR4e2dMFwbyuPkV8zGG2smt7HmL-ofvHplYOeVTRUCTvUVSkhDNESQY65shW-fZNjQTy8ZJNFdrCWPzru0klPMlzXY7CCL1NU/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.com0