Comet redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The persistence of memory

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the thing, though.

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

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Let me give you an example from my own childhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chasing uselessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourth, people are really strange.  I mean.

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

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

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Apocalypse already

When Vermont Governor George Aiken was asked in 1966 what should be done about the ongoing military debacle in Vietnam, he famously responded that we should simply declare victory and go home.

This approach -- which amounts to "say something counterfactual with confidence, and it will henceforth be true" -- is not unique to Aiken.  Look at Donald Trump's recent claims that he's ended eight wars, steamrolled over China's Xi Jinping with his masterful strategizing, is the most beloved president in the history of ever, his poll numbers are amazing believe me, ICE only arrests evil drug-dealing criminal illegal immigrant terrorists, grocery prices are way down, the Democrats are a hundred percent responsible for the government shutdown, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The problem, of course, occurs when people start to catch on and realize you've been talking out of your ass.

I've never seen this idea brought to such heights, though, as with a group of people I only found out a couple of days ago.  They're called Full Preterists -- and they have an answer to all the scoffers who laugh about the fact that every time a preacher predicts some prophecy or another from the Bible will come true on such-and-such a date, it doesn't happen.

Scoff all you will, the Full Preterists say.  You wanna know why all those preachers got it wrong?

It's because all the prophecies in the Bible already happened.

Yup.  Everything.  Not only Jesus's words in the Olivet Discourse that "the Sun will be darkened, and the Moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken," but all the stuff from the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, and the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation.

Full Preterism apparently got its start in the sixteenth century with the Jesuit theologian and mystic Luis del Alcázar.  Del Alcázar was a major figure in the Counter Reformation, which was an attempt by the Catholics to prove to the Protestants that they were capable of cleaning their own house, thank you very much.  It generated some creditable attempts to rid the Vatican of corruption, but also spawned a resurgence of the Inquisition and a lot of loony philosophizing.  Del Alcázar very much belongs to the last-mentioned.  His book Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi (An Investigation into the Hidden Sense of the Apocalypse) concluded that everything but the very last bit of the Book of Revelation -- the part about Jesus returning and creating Paradise on Earth -- had already taken place, and in fact occurred before John of Patmos wrote it in around 90 C.E.

So John was mostly writing history, not prophecy.

"But wait," you might be saying.  "What about stuff that's really specific?  Like the Star Wormwood thing in Revelation 8 that 'fell from heaven and poisoned a third of the fresh water on Earth and made it too bitter to drink'?  What about Revelation 6:12 where a giant earthquake rearranges all the continents, and the Sun turns black and the Moon red as blood?  What about the giant crowned locusts with iron armor, men's faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, and scorpions' stings, that come out of the Earth in Revelation 9?  It'd be kind of hard to miss all that."

Ha-ha, say the Full Preterists.  Of course you didn't miss that.  It's just that -- the inconvenient parts are symbolic.  You know, metaphors.  The Antichrist was Nero.  Or maybe Domitian.  Or was he the Beast?  Or are the Antichrist and the Beast the same?  The locusts are the armored soldiers of Rome (the sharp pointy objects they always carried are scorpions' stings).  The Tribulation was the persecution of Christians by Rome.  Or maybe the destruction of Jerusalem (and the Temple) in 70 C.E.  After all, in Matthew 24:34 Jesus himself says, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place," which sounds pretty unequivocal, so somehow, all of it must be in the past, right?

Of course right.

Oddly enough, when del Alcázar said all this stuff, only a few people responded by saying, "Okay, now you're just making shit up."  I guess since the Counter Reformation went hand-in-hand with the Inquisition, it's understandable that most people went along with him.  If someone says, "Hey, y'all, listen to this crazy claim I just now pulled out of my ass," then follows it up with, "... and if you don't believe it, I'll have you tortured and then burned alive," the vast majority of us would say, "Oh, yeah, brilliant idea, my man.  Keep 'em coming, you're on a roll."  Full Preterism jumped from the Catholics to the Protestants when Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius read del Alcázar's book, said, "Okay, that makes total sense," and wrote his own book called Commentary on Certain Texts That Deal With the Antichrist in 1640 elaborating even further.  John Donne, of Death Be Not Proud fame, quoted del Alcázar in a sermon, even though it was at a point when the Church of England was ascendant and "papism" was frowned upon, to put it mildly.  French writer and theologian Firmin Abauzit, whose accomplishments included proofreading Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, was a seventeenth-century Full Preterist, who was highly influential in the church -- and in intellectual circles -- at the time.  The idea landed in America in 1845 with Robert Townley's The Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ: A Past Event, although apparently Townley later decided that the idea was silly and wrote a rebuttal of his own book.

Here's the problem, of course, and it's the same trap that closed on Harold Camping's ankle; if you make a highly detailed, extremely specific prediction, and it fails to come true, you're gonna lose credibility; but if you keep it vague and symbolic, people start asking awkward questions like "Why is this verse metaphorical, but that one is literally true?"  The Full Preterists seem to want to make the weirder prophecies in the Bible into metaphors and keep the pieces they like as the inerrant Word of God, which strikes me as mighty convenient.  At least the people who think it's all true, but the awkward bits simply haven't happened yet, are being consistent.

Me, I'm inclined to look at all of 'em with an expression like this:

But I guess that's no surprise to anyone.

Anyhow, I thought this was all interesting from a human psychology perspective.  Once we've decided on a worldview, anything that threatens it it leaves us scrambling like mad to keep the whole thing from collapsing, however far-fetched some of those solutions end up being.  Of course, I'm probably as guilty of that as the next guy; I've often wondered what I'd do if my rationalist, science-based view of reality received a serious challenge.

Like if the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons showed up, or something.  My guess is I'd be pretty alarmed.  Although considering the fact that I live in the hinterlands of upstate New York, at least it'd give me something more interesting to do than my usual occupation, which is avoiding working on my current novel by watching the cows in the field across the road.

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Searching for Rosalia

Remember how in old college math textbooks, they'd present some theorem or another, and then say, "Proving this is left as an exercise for the reader"?

Well, I'm gonna pull the same nasty trick on you today, only it has nothing to do with math (I can hear the sighs of relief), and I'll give you at least a little more to go on than the conclusion.

This particular odd topic came to me, as so many of them do, from my Twin Brother Separated At Birth Andrew Butters, whose Substack you should definitely subscribe to (and read his fiction, too, which is astonishingly good).  He sent me a link from the site EvidenceNetwork.ca entitled, "A Continent Is Splitting in Two, the Rift Is Already Visible, and a New Ocean Is Set to Form," by Rosalia Neve, along with the message, "What do you think of this?"

Well, usually when he (or anyone else) sends me a link with a question like that, they're looking for an evaluation of the content, so I scanned through the article.  It turned out to be about something that I'm deeply interested in, and in fact have written about before here at Skeptophilia -- the geology of the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.  A quick read turned up nothing that looked questionable, although I did notice that none of it was new or groundbreaking (pun intended); the information was all decades old.  In fact, there wasn't anything in the article that you couldn't get from Wikipedia, leading me to wonder why this website saw fit to publish a piece on it as if it were recent research.

I said so to Andrew, and he responded, "Look again.  Especially at the author."

Back to the article I went.  The writer, Rosalia Neve, had the following "About the Author" blurb:

Dr. Rosalia Neve is a sociologist and public policy researcher based in Montreal, Quebec.  She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from McGill University, where her work explored the intersection of social inequality, youth development, and community resilience.  As a contributor to EvidenceNetwork.ca, Dr. Neve focuses on translating complex social research into clear, actionable insights that inform equitable policy decisions and strengthen community well-being.

Curious.  Why would a sociologist who studies social inequality, youth development, and community resilience be writing about an oddity of African geology?  If there'd been mention of the social and/or anthropological implications of a continent fracturing, okay, that'd at least make some sense.  But there's not a single mention of the human element in the entire article.

The image of Dr. Neve from the article

So I did a Google search for "Rosalia Neve Montreal."  The only hits were from EvidenceNetwork.ca.  Then I searched "Rosalia Neve sociology."  Same thing.  Mighty peculiar that a woman with a Ph.D. in sociology and public policy has not a single publication that shows up on an internet search.  At this point, I started to notice some other oddities; her headshot (shown above) is blurry, and the article is full of clickbait-y ads that have nothing to do with geology, science, or (for that matter) sociology and public policy.

At this point, the light bulb went off, and I said to Andrew, "You think this is AI-generated?"

His response: "Sure looks like it."

But how to prove it?  It seemed like the best way was to try to find the author.  As I said, nothing in the content looked spurious, or even controversial.  So Andrew did an image search on Dr. Neve's headshot... and came up with zero matches outside of EvidenceNetwork.ca.  This is in and of itself suspicious.  Just about any (real) photograph you put into a decent image-location app will turn up something, except in the unusual circumstance that the photo really doesn't appear online anywhere. 

Our conclusion: Rosalia Neve doesn't exist, and the article and her "photograph" were both completely AI-generated.

[Nota bene: if Rosalia Neve is actually a real person and reads this, I will humbly offer my apologies.  But I strongly suspect I'll never have to make good on that.]

It immediately brought to mind something a friend posted last Friday:

What's insidious about all this is that the red flags in this particular piece are actually rather subtle.  People do write articles outside the area of their formal education; the irony of my objecting to this is not lost on me.  The information in the article, although unremarkable, appears to be accurate enough.  Here's the thing, though.  This article is convincing precisely because it's so straightforward, and because the purported author is listed with significant academic credentials, albeit ones unrelated to the topic of the piece.  Undoubtedly, the entire point of it is garnering ad revenue for EvidenceNetwork.ca.  But given how slick this all is, how easy would it be for someone with more nefarious intentions to slip inaccurate, inflammatory, or outright dangerously false information into an AI-generated article credited to an imaginary person who, we're told, has amazing academic credentials?  And how many of us would realize it was happening?

More to the point, how many of us would simply swallow it whole?

This is yet another reason I am in the No Way, No How camp on AI.  Here in the United States the current regime has bought wholesale the fairy tale that regulations are unnecessary because corporations will Do The Right Thing and regulate themselves in an ethical fashion, despite there being 1,483,279 counterexamples in the history of capitalism.  We've gone completely hands-off with AI (and damn near everything else) -- with the result that very soon, there'll be way more questionable stuff flooding every sort of media there is.

Now, as I said above, it might be that Andrew and I are wrong, and Dr. Neve is a real sociologist who just turns out to be interested in geology, just as I'm a linguist who is, too.  What do y'all think?  While I hesitate to lead lots of people to clicking the article link -- this, of course, is exactly what EvidenceNetwork.ca is hoping for -- do you believe this is AI-generated?  Critically, how could you prove it?

We'd all better start practicing how to get real good at this skill, real soon.

Detecting AI slop, I'm afraid, is soon going to be an exercise left for every responsible reader.

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Weirdness one-upmanship

Thursday's post -- about a strange legend from England called the "fetch" and similar bits of odd folklore from Finland, Norway, and Tibet -- prompted several emails from loyal readers that can be placed under the heading of "You Think That's Wild, Wait'll You Hear This."

The first submission in the Weirdness One-Upmanship contest was about a Japanese legend called Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女), which translates to "the Slit-mouthed Woman."  The Kuchisake-onna appears to its victims as a tall, finely-dressed woman with long, lustrous straight black hair and the lower part of her face covered, carrying either a knife or a sharp pair of scissors.  She comes up and says, "Watashi wa kirei desu ka?" ("Am I pretty?")  This is also kind of a pun in Japanese, because kirei ("pretty") sounds a lot like kire ("cut").  In any case, by the time she asks the question you're kind of fucked regardless, because if you say no, she kills you with her knife.  If you say yes, she lowers her face covering to show that her mouth has been slit from ear to ear, and uses her sharp pointy object to do the same to you.

The only way out, apparently, is to tell her, "You're kind of average-looking."  At that point, the Kuchisake-onna is foiled.  It's a little like what happens if a vampire tries to gain access to the house of a grammar pedant:

Vampire: Can I enter your house?

Pedant:  I don't know, can you?

Vampire: *slinks away, humiliated*

So if you're ever confronted with a Kuchisake-onna, it will be the only time you'll ever come out ahead by telling someone "Eh, you're okay, I guess."

A man about to meet his fate at the hands of a Kuchisake-onna. The three women on the left don't seem especially concerned.  (From Ehon Sayoshigure by Hayami Shungyōsai, 1801)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kuchisake-onna has made multiple appearances in movies, anime, manga, video games, and at least one mockumentary that was taken seriously enough that people in Gifu Prefecture (where the film was set) were cautioned by one news source not to go outdoors after dark.

The second reader who contacted me asked me if I'd ever herd of the Panotti.  I speculated that it was some kind of Italian finger food that was a cross between pancetta and biscotti, but of course that turned out to be wrong.  The Panotti were a race of humanoids with extremely large ears who appeared in Pliny the Elder's book Natural History.  The reader even provided me with a picture:

A, um, Panottus as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Panotti, said Pliny, lived in a place called -- I shit you not -- the "All-Ears Islands" off the coast of Scythia.  The guy in the picture looks rather glum, though, doesn't he?  I guess I would, too, if I had twenty-kilogram weights hanging from the sides of my head.

A reader from Hawaii wrote to tell me about a legend called the Huakaʻi pō, which translates to "Nightmarchers."  This extremely creepy bit of folklore claims that dead warriors will sometimes arise from their graves and march their way to various sacred sites, chanting and blowing notes on conch shells.  Anyone who meets them will either be found dead the next morning, or will soon after die by violence.  The only way around this fate is to show the Huakaʻi pō the proper respect by lying face down on the ground until they pass; if you do that, they'll spare you.

That'd certainly save me, because if I was suddenly confronted at night by a bunch of dead Hawaiian warriors, I'd faint, because I'm just that brave.

The reader wrote:

People still sometimes plant rows of ti trees near their houses, because the ti is sacred in Hawaiian culture and the Nightmarchers can't walk through them.  Otherwise the Nightmarchers will walk right through your walls and suddenly appear in your house.  So without that protection, even staying indoors isn't enough.

Last, we have the Mapinguari, a cryptid from Brazil that I'd never heard of before.  The reader who clued me in on the Mapinguari commented that he would "rather meet a fetch, or even a tulpa, than one of these mofos," and when I looked into it I can't help but agree:

A statue of a Mapinguari in the Parque Ambiental Chico Mendes, Rio Branco, Brazil [Image credit: photographer Lalo Almeida]

These things -- which kind of look like the love child of Bigfoot and a cyclops -- also have an extra mouth where their belly button should be, because apparently one mouth isn't sufficient to devour their victims fast enough.  They're denizens of the Brazilian rain forest, and the name is thought to come from the Tupi-Guarani phrase mbaé-pi-guari (mbae "that, the thing" + pĭ "foot" + guarî "crooked, twisted"), because in some versions of the legend their feet are attached to their legs backwards so anyone seeing their footprints and trying to flee in the opposite direction will get caught and eaten.

So anyhow, thanks to the readers who responded to Thursday's post.  I guess we humans never run out of ways to use our creativity to scare the absolute shit out of each other.  Me, I'm just as glad to live in upstate New York, where I'm unlikely to run into Kuchisake-onna, Panotti, Huakaʻi pō, or Mapinguari.  Around here the main danger seems to be dying of boredom, which I suppose given my other choices doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.

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Signal out of noise

A paper this week out of the University of Washington describes research suggesting that intelligence is positively correlated with the ability to discern what someone is saying in a noisy room.

This was a little distressing to me, because I am terrible at this particular skill.  When I'm in a bar or other loud, chaotic environment, I can often pick out a few words, but understanding entire sentences is tricky.  I also run out of steam really quickly -- I can focus for a while, but suddenly the whole thing descends into a wall of noise.

The evidence, though, seems strong.  "The relationship between cognitive ability and speech-perception performance transcended diagnostic categories," said Bonnie Lau, lead author on the paper.  "That finding was consistent across all three groups studied [an autistic group, a group who had fetal alcohol syndrome, and a neurotypical control group]."

So.  Yeah.  Not a favorable result for yours truly.  I mean, I get why it makes sense; focusing on one conversation when there are others going on is a complex task.  "You have to segregate the streams of speech," Lau explained.  "You have to figure out and selectively attend to the person that you're interested in, and part of that is suppressing the competing noise characteristics.  Then you have to comprehend from a linguistic standpoint, coding each phoneme, discerning syllables and words.  There are semantic and social skills, too -- we're smiling, we're nodding.  All these factors increase the cognitive load of communicating when it is noisy."

While I'm not seriously concerned that about the implications regarding my own intelligence, it does make me wonder about sensory synthesis and interpretation in general.  A related phenomenon I've noticed is that if there is a song playing while there's noise going on -- in a restaurant, or on earphones at the gym -- I often have no idea what the song is, can't understand a single word or pick up the beat or figure out the music, until something clues me in to what the song is.  Then, all of a sudden, I find I'm able to hear it clearly.

A while back, some neuroscientists at the University of California - Berkeley elucidated what's happening in the brain that causes this oddity in auditory perception, and it provides an interesting contrast to this week's study.  A paper in Nature: Communications in 2016, by Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen, considered how the perception of garbled speech changes when subjects are told what's being said -- and found through a technique called spectrotemporal receptive field mapping that the brain is able to retune itself in less than a second.

The authors write:

Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis.  This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood.  Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models.  We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex. Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range.  This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed ‘perceptual enhancement’ in understanding speech.

What astonishes me about this is how quickly the brain is able to accomplish this -- although that is certainly matched by my own experience of suddenly being able to hear lyrics of a song once I recognize what's playing.  As James Anderson put it, writing about the research in ReliaWire, "The findings... confirm hypotheses that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language, the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes, continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment."

A related phenomenon is visual priming, which occurs when people are presented with a seemingly meaningless pattern of dots and blotches, such as the following:

Once you're told that the image is a cow, it's easy enough to find -- and after that, impossible to unsee.

"Something is changing in the auditory cortex to emphasize anything that might be speech-like, and increasing the gain for those features, so that I actually hear that sound in the noise," said study co-author Frédéric Theunissen.  "It’s not like I am generating those words in my head. I really have the feeling of hearing the words in the noise with this pop-out phenomenon.  It is such a mystery."

Apparently, once the set of possibilities of what you're hearing (or seeing) is narrowed, your brain is much better at extracting meaning from noise.  "Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world," co-author Christopher Holdgraf said.  "It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’  By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy."

It makes me wonder about the University of Washington finding, though, if there might be an association between poor auditory discernment and attention-related disorders like ADHD.  My own experience is that I can focus on what's being said in a noisy environment, it's just exhausting.  Perhaps -- like with the song phenomenon, and things like visual priming -- chaotic brains like mine simply can't throw away extraneous information fast enough to retune.  Eventually, it just gives up, and the whole world turns into white noise.

In any case, there's another fascinating, and mind-boggling, piece of how our brains make sense of the world.  It's wonderful that evolution could shape such an amazingly adaptive device, although the survival advantage is obvious.  The faster you are at pulling a signal out of the noise, the more likely you are to make the right decisions about what it is that you're perceiving -- whether it's you talking to a friend in a crowded bar or a proto-hominid on the African savanna trying to figure out if that odd shape in the grass is a predator lying in wait.  

Even if it means that I personally would probably have been a lion's afternoon snack.

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