The ghost ship of Northumberland Strait

What fascinates me about many claims of the paranormal is how persistent they are.

Once the story of some otherworldly sighting gets around, it's remarkably hard to eradicate belief in it -- not only is there the "well, my mother's brother's best friend's boss's gardener saw it with his own eyes" phenomenon, there's also the problem of confirmation bias.  As soon as you're even partially sold on an idea, all it takes is minuscule amounts of evidence thereafter to cement your certainty further.

Take, for example, the curious story of the "ghost ship of Northumberland Strait," which has been reported from the narrow channel of water separating Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for about two hundred years.  It's a fully-rigged schooner, eyewitnesses claim, with "pure white sails and masts of gold..." that is also aflame. 

The sightings have apparently been convincing enough.  In 1900, a group of well-meaning citizens of Charlottetown were so sure of what they were seeing that they piled into a rowboat and rowed out toward the stricken ship, only to have it vanish into thin air before they could reach it.  Interest in the apparition was boosted by Canadian singer-songwriter Lennie Gallant, a PEI native who included a song about the ghost ship on his 1988 album Breakwater:

There's a burst of flame and a flash of light

And there on the tide is a frightening sight

As a tall ship all aflame lights up the sky

Tales of the phantom ship, from truck to keel in flames

She sails the wide Northumberland Strait

No one knows her name.

 It even merited depiction on a Canadian postage stamp in 2014:

The people who've seen it are, apparently, completely convinced.  Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Giguère was interviewed in 2008 about his sighting of a "bright white-and-gold ship" in Tatamagouche Bay, and a local man named Melvin Langille backed him up, saying he'd seen the ship himself only a few months earlier.  "I believe in all that stuff," Langille said, "and I don't know what else it would be."

That statement, though, encompasses the dual problems with claims like this.  "I believe in all that stuff" predisposes you not to question what you might be seeing, and "... I don't know what else it would be" is the Argument From Ignorance that you hear all the time in discussions of UFOs.  "I saw a bright light in the sky, and I don't know what it is -- therefore it must be interstellar visitors from outer space."  But as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "If you don't know what it is, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't then go on to say, "... so it must be" anything."

As far as the ghost ship of Northumberland Strait, it may well have started out from a real incident.  In 2015, the Canadian Hydrographic Service found a sunken ship in Pictou Harbour, sitting on the ocean floor under about twelve meters of water.  It's about sixty meters long, has large wooden propellors -- and signs of fire damage.  As far as most recent sightings, explanations could be a combination of phenomena like St. Elmo's Fire -- luminous electrostatic discharges from ships' masts during stormy weather -- and mistaking fog banks or mirages for distant ships.

Because if you already believe in something, it doesn't take much to act on your imagination and impel you to interpret what you're seeing as something supernatural.

So that's our curious claim for the day.  It's an interesting legend, even though there's probably not much to it in reality.  But if I'm ever visiting the Maritimes and I see a flaming white-and-gold ship out at sea, I'll happily eat my words.

****************************************

Finding the right search parameters

I was making dinner last week, and the recipe called for soy sauce.  I knew we had a bottle of it -- and I was pretty sure it was somewhere in the door shelves of the fridge, amongst the various salad dressings, jellies, jams, sauces, and marinades we'd collected.  But I could not find the damn thing, and was becoming increasingly frustrated.

So instead of a quick scan -- usually sufficient to find what I'm looking for -- I decided on a one-at-a-time, bottle-by-bottle search, and as you've probably already guessed, I found the soy sauce in under thirty seconds.  I realized immediately what the problem was; in my mind I pictured it as having a red cap, and our bottle had a green cap.

You'd think that wouldn't make a difference, given that everything else about it was exactly like what I was picturing, up to and including being full of soy sauce and having a big label on the front that said, "SOY SAUCE."  But one piece of the search parameter was off, and that made me scan right past it, not once but several times.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons GanMed64, Soy Sauce selection (6362318717), CC BY 2.0]

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and it amazes me how subtle the error can be and still derail my efforts.  It doesn't have to be anything nearly as egregious as in the hilarious anecdote Dave Barry writes about when his mother, groceries in a cart and two small children in tow, spent an hour trying to find her car in the store parking lot.  She looked so pathetic that several kind shoppers pitched in to try to help her.  "It's a black Chevrolet," she said, over and over.  It was only after the search had gone on for a ridiculous length of time, up and down the parking lot lanes, that she remembered that the previous week they'd traded in their old car for a new one, and told the helpers, "Wait! I just realized, it's not a black Chevrolet, it's a yellow Ford!", wearing a forced smile in a desperate attempt to convince them that she was not, in fact, insane.

The helpers apparently were not amused, and his mom spent the rest of her life trying to live down the embarrassment.

So we can be confounded by our brain's preconceived notions of what we're looking for, from the subtle to the (should be) obvious.  And some researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that finding the right search parameters even extends to characteristics we can't see.

This puzzling result came out of a series of experiments that were the subject of a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.  The team, led by cognitive neuroscientist Li Guo, timed how long it took test subjects to isolate a target object from clutter, and they found that knowing characteristics of the object that aren't apparent to the eye -- like hardness or fragility -- significantly improved the speed with which subjects could find the object in question.  The authors write:

Our interactions with the world are guided by our understanding of objects’ physical properties.  When packing groceries, we place fragile items on top of more durable ones and position sharp corners so they will not puncture the bags.  However, physical properties are not always readily observable, and we often must rely on our knowledge of attributes such as weight, hardness, and slipperiness to guide our actions on familiar objects.  Here, we asked whether our knowledge of physical properties not only shapes our actions but also guides our attention to the visual world.  In a series of four visual search experiments, participants viewed arrays of everyday objects and were tasked with locating a specified object.  The target was sometimes differentiated from the distractors based on its hardness, while a host of other visual and semantic attributes were controlled.  We found that observers implicitly used the hardness distinction to locate the target more quickly, even though none reported being aware that hardness was relevant.  This benefit arose from fixating fewer distractors overall and spending less time interrogating each distractor when the target was distinguished by hardness.  Progressively more stringent stimulus controls showed that surface properties and curvature cues to hardness were not necessary for the benefit.  Our findings show that observers implicitly recruit their knowledge of objects’ physical properties to guide how they attend to and engage with visual scenes.

What I find most curious about the results of this experiment is if the characteristic you're given can't be seen, how does it help your brain to locate the object you're searching for?  "What makes the finding particularly striking from a vision science standpoint is that simply knowing the latent physical properties of objects is enough to help guide your attention to them," said study senior author Jason Fischer.  "It's surprising because nearly all prior research in this area has focused on a host of visual properties that can facilitate search, but we find that what you know about objects can be as important as what you actually see...  To me what this says is that in the back of our minds, we are always evaluating the physical content of a scene to decide what to do next.  Our mental intuitive physics engines are constantly at work to guide not only how we interact with things in our environment, but how we distribute our attention among them as well."

So it may be that we're approaching our search from a set theory perspective; searching through "the set of all things in my living room" is more efficient if I can eliminate "the subset of things in my living room that are rigid, heavy, stand upright," etc., so eventually my brain can whittle it down to "the couch throw-pillow my puppy dragged behind the recliner."

It's still puzzling to me how our brains actually accomplish this, because it means some kind of interaction is occurring between our visual interpretive systems and our non-visual memories (of such things as texture, durability, and so on).  It'd be interesting to have people perform this task while in a fMRI machine -- and see how their brain firing pattern differs while performing this task as compared to performing a task that simply requires memory retrieval.

So that's today's look at the fascinating world of cognitive neuroscience.  It doesn't explain, however, the weird phenomenon that happens to me while I'm doing home repair projects, wherein I spend 5% of the time doing actual home repair and 95% stomping around swearing and looking for the tool that was just in my damn hand five seconds ago.  That one's a mystery.

****************************************

Wry eye

Have you been experiencing itchy eyes lately, and had your eyelids turn an odd pinkish color?  You may want to see your ophthalmologist and ask about treatment for bixonimania, which is a chronic inflammatory eye disease caused by excessive exposure to blue light.  The connection between blue light and inflammation is credited to a research scientist named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, who was the lead author of a paper on the topic.

At this point, alert readers might be wondering why an eye disorder has a name ending in -mania, which is a suffix almost always associated with names for psychiatric disorders.  You may even be looking at my opening paragraph with the following expression:

If so, then kudos.  There's no such thing as bixonimania, although I suspect that staring at anything bright for excessive amounts of time will probably cause eye irritation.  There's also no such person as Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, although with a name like that there certainly should be.

The topic comes up because some of you may need further convincing that we need to be extremely cautious in turning over the control of -- well, anything -- to artificial intelligence, and the whole bixonimania thing is a fine illustration of why that is.  Two years ago, an article in Medium came out, credited to Izgubljenovic and describing the condition; this was followed up by two preprints on SciProfiles that did the same thing, only in a more technical fashion.  The whole hoax was the brainchild of Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, who wanted to find out if LLMs would pick up the fake paper and work it into their "knowledge bases," then use it to dispense information to anyone who asked.

It succeeded beyond her wildest dreams... or, possibly, nightmares.

Along the way, Osmanovic Thunström threw in plenty of clues that the whole thing was made up.  The imaginary Izgubljenovic was said to be a researcher at (nonexistent) Asteria Horizon University in (nonexistent) Nova City, California.  The acknowledgements included thanking "Professor Maria Bohm at Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise."  Under "Funding," Izgubljenovic credited "the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery.  This work is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad."  If that weren't enough, the test subjects were said to be "fifty made up people between twenty and fifty years of age."

Oh, and scattered several times in the paper was the sentence, "This entire paper is made up."

None of that mattered.  Soon, Microsoft's Bing Copilot, ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini were all happily answering questions about eye health that included advice to avoid blue light exposure in order to minimize the risk of bixonimania. 

Perplexity AI even told one user that there were ninety thousand people worldwide suffering from the disorder.

AI is turning out to be a fine example of the old principle of "garbage in, garbage out."

What's most worrisome is that even when Osmanovic Thunström published her (actual) work, stating outright that bixonimania doesn't exist, it still didn't correct the problem.  In this way, AI/LLMs seem to act much like humans; once they're tainted with misinformation, it's exceedingly difficult to expunge it.  Recent probes into the question found that even now, few of the AIs will come right out and say bixonimania was a hoax.  Microsoft Copilot said the diagnosis was "not widely recognized," but that information about the disorder was "emerging;" ChatGPT that it is "a proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis."  More than one LLM said that "research into the condition is ongoing."

"If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed," said Alex Ruani, of University College London, who specializes in research about health misinformation.  "This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates...  It looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here."

And can I just interject that the problem isn't limited to health information?  These are systems people are increasingly relying on for information about everything, including the supposed facts upon which they will decide whom to vote for.  There are people in the upper echelons of the United States military who want to entwine AI with our strategic defense systems -- and, you may recall, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently got in a nasty feud with Anthropic AI Systems because Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, demanded the Defense Department guarantee some safety guardrails on the use of their product before employing it.

Hegseth, of course, whose idea of strategy is "Shoot 'em up pew pew pew," told Amodei "We don't need no stinkin' guardrails," cut ties with Anthropic and cozied up to xAI's Grok.  Amodei, Hegseth said, was "woke," which is MAGA-speak for "me no like that."

Elon Musk, unsurprisingly, has fewer scruples.

Me, I'm still urging you -- hell, I'm pleading with you -- not to use AI at all, for anything, until these problems are acknowledged as such by the powers-that-be, and accordingly dealt with.  It's leading us down a road whose final destination is not going to be pleasant.

And if a single paper that was basically just one big red flag saying "THIS IS FAKE DON'T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT" was able to infiltrate the AI systems currently being used to such an extent that two years later, it still hasn't been purged -- well, if that doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what would.

****************************************

Danger down under

Around my neck of the woods we like to complain a lot in spring about the blackflies and mosquitoes, but by and large, compared to most places we have pretty placid wildlife.  Me, I'm not so fond of the yellowjackets that nest underground and pack a nasty sting, but even they're not that big a deal compared to what some people have to contend with.  And even Australia -- a place notorious for its dangers -- should give thanks for the fact that they're not as bad as they used to be, at least according to a paper in Nature Communications that falls under the "You think things are scary now?" department.

Of course, it's not like even the modern Australian wildlife is anything to trifle with.  The country is where you can find some of the world's most dangerous snakes, including the taipan, the brown snake, and the tiger snake.  The north coast is home to the enormous and aggressive saltwater crocodile, while the south coast has a sizable population of great white sharks.  The eastern coast, not to be outdone, is where you can run into the harmless-looking box jellyfish, which is in contention for winner of the most-potent venom contest; it injects its victim with a substance that has an LD-50 of 0.04 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, and can kill in under five minutes if an antidote isn't administered.  Even the plants bear watching.  The north coast has the beach spinifex grass, which reinforces the pointed tips of its leaves with silica drawn from the soil, essentially turning the plant into a cluster of tiny glass shards.  Worst of all is the gympie-gympie, which is like the humongous nettle from hell, inflicting an excruciating sting that can last for years.

(The Wikipedia article I linked says that the fruit of the gympie-gympie is "edible if the stinging hairs are removed first."  To which I respond, "Do I look like a fucking lunatic to you?"  I'll stick with fruit that's not attempting to murder me, thanks.)

But the paper "Extinction of Eastern Sahul Megafauna Coincides with Sustained Environmental Deterioration," by a team led by Scott Hocknull of the University of Melbourne, gives you a good feeling for how much worse it could be.  It describes a treasure-trove of fossils from Walker Creek in northeastern Australia that had the remains of hitherto-unknown species of fauna, including:

• a thus-far unclassified kangaroo that was four meters tall and weighed just shy of three hundred kilograms
• a new species of the genus Diprotodon, which was basically a wombat on steroids -- it's estimated to have been two meters tall at the shoulder and had a mass of 2,500 kilograms
• a new species of the horrific carnivorous marsupial Thylacoleo, which was slightly smaller than your average African lion, but is estimated to have had the most powerful bite of any known mammal, living or extinct
• a six-meter-long goanna and two never-before-seen species of monitor lizards
• a land-dwelling crocodile, because apparently the water-dwelling ones weren't bad enough

Artist's reconstruction of Thylacoleo carnifex [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Thylacoleo BW, CC BY 3.0]

The kicker is that these things were around after the colonization of Australia by humans, and in fact, by some estimates there was a fifteen thousand year overlap where the ancestors of today's Native Australians had to contend with a nightmarish megafauna.  Me, I wonder why they stuck around, you know?  If I was one of them, and landed in my boat on the shores of Australia, and saw land crocodiles and six-meter-long lizards and a lion-sized Tasmanian devil, I would have used the words of the inimitable Eric Cartman: "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home."

Of course, home was Papua-New Guinea, which honestly wasn't all that much better.

It's an interesting question as to what finally did in these formidable critters.  Hocknull et al. write the following, in an article in The Conversation:

Why did these megafauna become extinct?  It has been argued that the extinctions were due to over-hunting by humans, and occurred shortly after people arrived in Australia.

However, this theory is not supported by our finding that a diverse collection of these ancient giants still survived 40,000 years ago, after humans had spread around the continent.

The extinctions of these tropical megafauna occurred sometime after our youngest fossil site formed, around 40,000 years ago.  The timeframe of their disappearance coincided with sustained regional changes in available water and vegetation, as well as increased fire frequency.  This combination of factors may have proven fatal to the giant land and aquatic species.

As magnificent as these creatures undoubtedly were, it's probably better that they're gone.  I've heard Australia is a pretty cool place, even considering its dangerous flora and fauna, but if the animals of Walker Creek were still around, it'd be hard to understand how anyone could manage to live there.  Just taking a short walk to the grocery store would be risking getting dismembered by enormous carnivorous marsupials.

Makes today's snakes and crocodiles and whatnot seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

****************************************

The ancient immigrant

It's sometimes hard to fathom that only a hundred years ago, there was still a spirited argument going on in the astronomical community over whether the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe -- and that the other "nebulae" might be merely small-ish features lying in the outskirts.

The center of the "Milky Way is all there is" faction was the famous astronomer Harlow Shapley, who was their spokesperson in the 1920 "Great Debate" with Heber Doust Curtis, who believed the "nebulae" (or at least some of them) were very distant galaxies more or less like our own.  Neither man came away from the Debate convinced of the other's reasoning, but the whole affair was conclusively settled a few years later when Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variables in the Andromeda Galaxy.  Cepheid variables are a curious type of star that experience a regular periodicity in brightness, and the brilliant astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt had showed that their periods of variability were related in a straightforward way to their intrinsic brightness.  Because of this, they can be used as standard candles -- just as you can estimate how far away a motorcycle is at night if you compare how bright the headlight appears to be with how bright you know it actually is.

So the discovery of Cepheids in Andromeda gave Hubble a way of figuring out how far away it is from us, and it turns out not to be a small cloud in the fringes of our own galaxy, but an "island universe" of its own that's actually slightly larger than the Milky Way, and 2.5 million light years away.  And of course, Hubble and others went on to discover red shift and the expanding universe, and better telescopes showed that there are billions of galaxies out there, some of them so far away that the light they emit has been traveling for most of the age of the known universe in order to get here.

A cool postscript is that Shapley, confronted with this evidence, admitted defeat, and went on to make major contributions to galactic astronomy.  It's what I love about science; it self-corrects, and the best scientists look on these reversals as opportunities rather than embarrassments.  (Although Shapley did allow himself a moment of rueful laughter at his own error, calling Hubble's paper on Cepheids in Andromeda as "the letter that destroyed my universe."

In any case, we now live in a cosmos so much vaster and richer and stranger than the one they knew a century ago -- one can only imagine what more we'll know a hundred years from now.

These musings come up because of a wonderful piece of research out of the University of Chicago, where a group of undergraduate astronomy students were assigned by their teacher, Alex Ji of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to analyze recent SDSS data for anything anomalous, and they found something astonishing; an ancient star that not only appears to date from the very early universe, but has migrated here from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a star cluster than neighbors the Milky Way.

Astronomers can make a shrewd guess about how old a star is based upon its metallicity -- what proportion of its makeup is anything other than hydrogen and helium.  (Astronomers confusingly call all other elements metals, which must annoy the hell out of the chemists.)  Since all of the hydrogen, and a good fraction of the helium, were formed during the Big Bang -- and virtually all of the other elements have been created since then through nuclear fusion and energetic events like supernovae and neutron star collisions -- the quantity of metals in a star tells you how many cycles of birth and death occurred prior to the star's formation.  The Sun, for example, is fairly metal-rich, and is probably a third- or fourth-generation star; its contents were enriched from the activity of previous generations of stars.  (It's still not as high in metals as the bizarre Przybylski's Star, which is so anomalously high in rare heavy elements that there's a credible case to be made that it was seeded by technological aliens.)

The newly-discovered star, however is the opposite; it's called SDSS-J0715-7334, and from its spectrum it appear to be almost entirely hydrogen and helium.  Even relatively lightweight elements like carbon are so rare in it that they're well-nigh undetectable.  In fact, its total metallicity is 0.005% of the Sun's -- making it by far the most metal-poor star ever detected.

Me, I wonder how this star lived as long as it has.  Most of the universe's first-generation stars have long since exhausted their fuel and either collapsed into white dwarfs or else flared out as supernovae.  How has this one persisted all this time?

Weirder still, the star didn't start out in the Milky Way.  Using its current motion, the students calculated that it originated from outside of our galaxy, and backtracked its path to the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Okay, I'm super impressed.  These are a bunch of undergraduates, for cryin' out loud.  As an undergraduate, I was mostly focused on eating pizza and hanging out with my friends and earning grades that were at least high enough not to get me kicked out of the university.  These young people?

They're getting their names in the author line on papers in Nature Astronomy.

"These students have discovered more than just the most pristine star." said Juna Kollmeier, the Director of SDSS.  "They have discovered their inalienable right to physics.  Surveys like SDSS and Gaia make that possible for students of all ages everywhere on Earth and this example shows that there is still plenty of room for discovery."

So that's our cool story for the day.  An ancient immigrant from another star cluster.  Further evidence of Carl Sagan's evocative words: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

****************************************

Losing the plot

What strikes me about the last ten years isn't just the slow slide into fascism, the grift, the corruption, the attempted codification into law of misogyny and bigotry and homophobia and transphobia, but just how fucking weird these people are.

I swear, if I time-traveled back a decade and presented a manuscript to my publisher that was a verbatim transcript of everything that has happened since 2016, he would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

Let's start with disgraced former Representative Matt Gaetz, who this week came out with the announcement that the United States government is forcibly mating humans with aliens to produce "beings capable of communicating with extraterrestrials."  

"I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication," Gaetz said. "An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me on that."

There are six of these breeding programs scattered across the country, Gaetz said.

And the person who was interviewing him, ultra-conservative talk show host Benny Johnson, nodded sagely instead of saying what I would have, which is, "Maybe you should consider getting back on your meds, Matt."

Gaetz has said some outrageous things before, but this one has to take the prize.  On the other hand, considering the fact that he has about three acres of forehead, perhaps he knows about all this from first-hand experience:

Then we had the Vice President himself, J. D. Vance, blathering on about aliens as well, but explaining that they're not visitations from intelligent extraterrestrials, they're actually demons from hell.

Because that makes ever so much more sense.

"I don’t think they’re aliens," Vance said, once again apparently in complete seriousness.  "I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion.  When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, and you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security, and things like that.  But I’ve still got three years left as vice president.  I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I am going to.  Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.  I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy top of the classification."

Sure, J. D.!  Whatever you say!  I bet you have a whole filing cabinet full of stuff labeled "Tippy-Top Secret"!

If all that weren't enough, enter Gregg Phillips, who has been tapped to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, claiming that he was once teleported to a Waffle House.

"I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," Phillips said.  "And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like fifty miles away from where I was.  And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘a Waffle House.’  And: ‘a Waffle House where?’  And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’  And they said: ‘That’s not possible, how can you be at a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, you just left here a moment ago.’  But it was possible.  It was real."

Or maybe he was just trying to beat a record for the number of times someone said "Waffle House" in one conversation.

I'll admit I've often wished we had Star Trek-style transporters, so I could do stuff like beam over to Tokyo for a nice sushi lunch every so often, but according to Phillips, it's not the joyride you might think.  "Teleporting is no fun," he said.  "You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride.  And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Yeah, I'm sure it was, Gregg!  *backs slowly away, keeping my eyes on him at all times*  I hope you really enjoyed your waffles in the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia!  Waffle House Waffle House Waffle House!

*once there's enough distance between us, turns and runs like hell*

You know, this stuff would all be high comedy if these weren't the people currently influencing policy in the United States, people who have held (or are still holding) public office, and who have the amazingly-regenerated ear of Donald Trump.  And the scary part is that Trump, who is not exactly Rhodes Scholar material himself, is remarkably easy to sway as long as you stroke his bloated ego, which explains how certifiable wingnuts like RFK Jr. ended up in cabinet-level positions.

But it's not just him, of course.  The entire administration, and their hangers-on and cheerleaders and sycophants, appear to have completely lost the plot.

One of the criticisms of Joe Biden was that he appeared bland and boring -- people called him a "do-nothing" because most of what he accomplished wasn't accompanied by horns blaring and all-caps self-congratulatory posts on Truth Social.  But you know what?  I liked bland and boring.  I liked not having to worry when I turn on my laptop over my morning coffee what the latest lunatic pronouncements from Washington D. C. were going to be.  I would love it if we had leaders who just calmly, quietly, and intelligently did their jobs, instead of violent nutcakes like Pete Hegseth, who appears to believe it's his sacred duty to usher us into the End Times so that Jesus will come back, presumably wearing camo and toting an AR-15.

Deus vult, baby.

On the other hand, to go back to my starting point, I have to wonder... is any of this believable?  There's an element of surreality to the entire world right now that brings back to mind a comment I've made before; that maybe we're all in a computer simulation, and the aliens in charge have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us. 

Or as Mark Twain put it, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

****************************************

The lost temple

The history of ancient Rome is replete with strange characters, but one of the strangest is the ultimately pathetic figure of Elagabalus, who reigned for only four years (May 218 to March 222 C. E.) before being assassinated at the age of eighteen by the Praetorian Guard on the instigation of his own grandmother, the formidable and ruthless Julia Maesa.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carole Raddato, Marble bust of Roman emperor Elagabalus, ca. 221 AD, Capitoline Museums (20814003112), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Elagabalus, born Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus (so you can see why he's usually known by his single sobriquet), has been the subject of dubiously accurate lauds by the LGBTQ+ community because he was clearly queer; contemporaneous records describe his penchant for dressing as a woman and taking male lovers.  The problem is, his sexual orientation notwithstanding, he was a dreadful choice for ruler, preferring to throw lavish festivities than to pay any attention to affairs of state.  Perhaps unsurprising given that he landed on the throne at the age of fourteen; I don't know many fourteen-year-old boys who, given a choice between unlimited parties and sex and dealing with the responsibilities of governing an empire, would choose the latter.

In any case, if you want a queer Roman icon to admire, a much better choice is the Emperor Hadrian, who fell headlong in love with a Greek man named Antinous, but was also a pretty decent ruler.

And actually, given the (many) stunningly beautiful depictions of Antinous Hadrian had commissioned, I can understand why the emperor went goggle-eyed over him.  I would have, too.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marie-Lan Nguyen, Antinous Farnese MAN Napoli Inv6030 n02, CC BY 2.5]

Poor Elagabalus, on the other hand, shouldn't have been on the throne in the first place, which would still have been true if he were one hundred percent straight.  Not only was he a completely incompetent ruler, he also made the cardinal error of trying to change Roman religious beliefs by decree, tossing out Jupiter and Juno and Vesta and all the rest in favor of a Sun-god called Elagabal he'd swiped from a Middle Eastern cult (thus his nickname of "Elagabalus").  This went over about as well as the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's similar attempt fifteen hundred years earlier.  People were pissed, and he quickly made himself a number of powerful enemies amongst the Senate, aristocracy, and Praetorian Guard, which in ancient Rome was generally a short road toward a messy demise.  Elagabalus got wind of what was coming, and his mother, Julia Soaemias, hid him inside a chest, but the Praetorians found them and killed them both, cut off their heads, stripped the corpses naked, dragged them around Rome, and threw what was left into the Tiber River.

So much for Elagabalus.  But the story doesn't end there, because -- according to writings from shortly after his death -- the unfortunate young Emperor had during his short reign built an enormous temple to Elagabal that was demolished following his fall from power.  Modern archaeologists tried to locate the site without success.  Even after hints that it had been somewhere in Syria, archaeological investigations didn't identify for certain where it had once stood -- or if, perhaps, it never existed, and was a post-assassination fabrication.

The search was complicated by the fact that (1) "somewhere in Syria" is a big place, and (2) until very recently, Syria hasn't exactly been a safe region wherein to conduct archaeological research.  But now that things have settled down (a little), a team from the University of Sharjah started investigating a site that was long rumored to have been the location of Elagabal's temple -- the Great Mosque of Homs.  Homs, originally Emesa, is a city of immense antiquity, ruled by the Seleucids, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, and Ottoman Turks in succession, each culture leaving its stamp on the buildings and the people.  It was known as a site for the worship of Elagabal, so the idea that Elagabalus's grand temple was somewhere in the vicinity was a decent guess.  And given that people all over the world have the habit of building and rebuilding places of worship on the same sacred sites, the Great Mosque was a good starting point.

And they found what they were looking for -- a Greek inscription that talks about a being associated with the Sun, likening him to the wind, storms, and the power of the leopard, all descriptors known to have been used by Elagabalus to honor his favorite deity (and, by reflected glory, himself).

It's not proof, of course.  That this was a site where Elagabal was worshiped doesn't mean this was the site that Elagabalus himself commissioned.  But it does at least lend credence to the claim, and gives the archaeologists a reason to keep looking for more clues.

So now we have at least a little more in the way of hard evidence about the short, pitiful reign of an inept teenager who is yet another in the long list of examples illustrating why "royal blood" is a completely fucked-up concept.  I can't help but feel sorry for the kid, and it brings back to mind an earlier musing about why the hell people were so eager to be on the throne in the first place, given how few emperors died of old age.  Doesn't seem like four years of partying and sex were worth the end result, frankly.

****************************************