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Skeptophilia
Fighting Gullibility with Sarcasm, 6 days a week
Monday, March 18, 2024
Memory boost
Saturday, March 16, 2024
The haunted sentry box
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 Strangely Enough. 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 Skeptophilia. (I still have my battered and much-reread copy.)
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.
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.
The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.
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.
Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of course there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box. Could I have directions for how to get there?
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."
"Really?" I said. "Why? I was hoping to see it for myself."
"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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Friday, March 15, 2024
I've got your number
This explains why I am the proud owner of:
- 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)
- a certificate insuring my dog in case of alien abduction
- a very creepy-looking ritual mask from the Ivory Coast
- a book entitled UFOs: How to See Them
- a deck of steampunk Tarot cards
- a drawing of a scowling alien with a speech bubble saying "Nonbelievers Will Be Vaporized"
- a car air freshener shaped like a Sasquatch (fortunately, it doesn't smell like one)
- the poster made famous from Fox Mulder's office, with a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe"
... Mysteries and Secrets of Numerology.
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:
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:
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.
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.
The practice of numerology goes back a long way. The whole thing seems to have begun with the mystical practice called gematria, 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 Third Book of Baruch, one of the biblical apocrypha, as explained in the above-linked Wikipedia article:
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.
Well, yeah. The whole book is basically Confirmation Bias "R" Us.
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.")
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).
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."
I suppose it could be worse.
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.
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.
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Thursday, March 14, 2024
In memoriam
- your own middle name
- the street you grew up on
- your best friend in elementary school
- the name of your first pet
- your second-grade teacher's name
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Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Speaking beauty
My novel In the Midst of Lions, 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.
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, The Scattering Winds, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, The Chains of Orion, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently.
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 inflected 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 The dog bit the cat and The cat bit the dog you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words dog and cat change form, as they would in most inflected languages. English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, and who/whom are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)
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," zlavo.) 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 International Phonetic Alphabet I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; lexa, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."
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.
The topic comes up because of a really cool study that recently came out in the journal Language and Speech, 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.
The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) 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.
Some of their conclusions:
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 an interview with PsyPost. "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?"
I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila? If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.
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 anything aesthetically pleasing. I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's Firebird) 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.
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.
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Tuesday, March 12, 2024
A tangle of beliefs
I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.
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.
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.
So, respect people? Of course, always. But respect claims? 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."
This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements." 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."
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.
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:
- Chen Tao, 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.
- The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.
- The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, 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.
- The Church of Light, 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.
- The Amica Temple of Radiance, 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.
- The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, 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.
- Adonism, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler. The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as Bel, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure Adonis, 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.
- People Unlimited, 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.
- The Missionary Church of Kopimism, 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 swear I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."
- "Love Has Won," 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.
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Monday, March 11, 2024
Turning the focus knob
I am really distractible.
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?"
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 Skeptophilia probably know all too well. If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, 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, 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:
Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.
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.
All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.
However, as a study last week in Nature Human Behavior shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a lot 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 an interview with Science Daily. "[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."
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.
"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."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."
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