Scooting past the reviewers

If there's one piece of advice I have for anyone trying to stay informed, it is: check your sources.

Unfortunately, these days, that takes more than just a quick look, or a recommendation from someone with authority.  After all, it wasn't that long ago that Donald Trump tweeted that Fox News wasn't right-wing enough for him, that all of his faithful MAGA followers should troop on over to OANN (One America News Network), that it was the only news source that was "fair and balanced."  Of course, this was transparent enough; in Trump-speak, "fair and balanced" means "willing to kiss Trump's ass on a daily basis."  OANN is a far-right outlet allied to sites like Breitbart -- and let's face it, anything to the right of Fox News isn't even within hailing distance of unbiased.

So "sounds like a reliable source" is itself unreliable.  As an example, take the paper authored by Mathieu Edouard Rebeaud (University of Lausanne), Valentin Ruggeri (University of Grenoble), Michaël Rochoy (University of Lille). and Florian Cova (University of Geneva).  I won't tell you the title, but leap right in with an excerpt:

As the number of push-scooters has been rising in France, so has the number of push-scooters accidents.  Some of these accidents have proven to be deadly and previous YouTube™ and Dropbox© studies have warned against the deadly potential of push-scooters [1].  For a comparison, only three Chinese people had died from the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019 [2].  It is therefore important to reflect on the use of push-scooters through an accurate and ethical cost-benefit analysis.

Use and promotion of push-scooters have been advocated on the basis that they would contribute to the reduction and slowing of global warming.  In fact, the French scientific elite has been working on the subject and has recently argued that there was no proof of global warming, as he could not see the ice cap melt on his computer [3].  So, even if global warming was real, there are serious reasons to think that France is not affected, as global warming clearly stopped at the closed border [4].  Unfortunately, the debate is being polluted by bots, trolls and so-called experts funded by Big Trottinette to spread misinformation.  Indeed, an independent study (in press on the third author’s Google Drive®) found a positive correlation between experts’ positive advocacy of push-scooters and the amount of money they received from Decathlon® (r = 3.14).  The fact that push-scooters are now a ‘generic’ means of locomotion that can be produced by anyone for a cheap price might lead people to the conclusion that no private interest is involved, but we’re not fooled, we know the truth [5].  So, it is important to diminish the increasing number of push-scooter drivers who are sacrificed on a daily basis.

The authors then go on to show that the way to combat the deadly push-scooter accident surge is through doses of hydroxychloroquine, which also shows promise in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  (Well, most of their research supported this.  They didn't have so much luck with Study 2.  "Study 2 was excluded from analysis and from this paper," the authors write, "as it did not provide informative results (i.e. the results we wanted)."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alex Genz, Female rider on Egret One eScooter, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Also notable is that besides the four actual authors, there are also additional co-authors listed as belonging to places like "The Institute of Quick and Dirty Science of Neuneuchâtel, Switzerland" and the "Institute of Chiropteran Studies of East Timor," and one is called a "General Practitioner and Independent Seeker of Science" from Ankh-Morpork, France.

You may be thinking that this must have appeared in some kind of science spoof site like the brilliant Journal of Irreproducible Results.

You may be wrong.

This paper, titled, "SARS-CoV-2 Was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?", was published in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health.

Sounds like a legitimate source, doesn't it?  You might be clued in that something was wrong if you noticed that the paper was submitted on July 24, accepted on August 11, and published on August 15 -- I say that notwithstanding the obviously goofy content from the title on, because most of the papers in the AJMH aren't blatantly off.  But if you look at stuff like this -- dates that make it clear that there was zero peer review involved -- there's no doubt left that this is one of those predatory pay-to-play journals, that will publish damn near anything if you give 'em some money.

Which, of course, was the point of the Rebeaud et al. paper.  It wasn't just to give us all a good laugh -- although it did that as well, I was nearly in tears by a quarter of the way through -- it was to shed some light on the way that predatory journals muddy the waters for everyone.

So back to where we started: CHECK. YOUR. SOURCES.  Which doesn't just mean a cursory "okay, it's a 'journal of medicine and health,' it must be reliable."  Take five minutes to do a quick search to see if there are any reviews or commentary on the journal itself.  The best thing is to find good sources that you know you can always rely on -- top-flight research journals like Science, Nature, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and PLOS-One, to name five -- as well as research-for-the-layperson journals like Scientific American and Discover.

If you get outside of those realms, though, caveat lector.  You never know what kind of lunacy you'll find, up to and including recommendations for taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent push-scooter accidents.

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Beastly

I'm currently in the alarming situation of having reached the last book in the TBR stack on my dresser.

My next good opportunity to restock isn't until the first week of May, at the volunteers' presale for the Tompkins County Friends of the Library used book sale, so I'm gonna have to make this one last.  Fortunately, the book I just started is in French -- which I can read pretty well, but am a bit slower than I am with English.  And at 373 pages, I might be able to stretch it out a bit, although I doubt I'll make it all the way to May.

The book I'm reading is La Bête de Gévaudan by Michel Louis, and is about one of the strangest stories to come out of pre-revolutionary France -- the "Beast of Gévaudan," which was responsible for a series of brutal attacks (many of them fatal) near the village of Gévaudan, in Lozère département in south-central France, between 1764 and 1767. 

An illustration of the Beast attacking Marie-Jeanne Vallet (she fought it off with a pitchfork, and survived) (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Beast dispatched its victims by ripping their throats out.  Apparently, there were more than sixty victims of the Beast, the first a fourteen-year-old girl killed in 1764.  There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the thing; it was described as a huge, hairy quadruped, with a foul odor and a heavy, thick tail.  Thus far, there's nothing particularly weird here, and in fact this description matches my friend's dog Rudy, who is half mastiff and half golden lab but looks like he has some Clydesdale somewhere in his ancestry.  Rudy has no idea how enormous he is, and galumphs around inside the house knocking over large pieces of furniture, all the while wagging happily.  Rudy's huge head, which is made entirely of reinforced concrete, is at a height that is seriously unfortunate for any adult male visitors, and guys have been known to go into a protective crouch whenever Rudy so much as looks at them.

But I digress.

Whatever the identity of the Beast, it created terror throughout the region, especially when the pattern was noticed that the attacks were mostly on young people who were by themselves.  Parents became understandably afraid to send their family members outdoors alone -- a serious problem for farmers and shepherds, who relied on their children to help out with the chores.  And of course, there's no horrible situation that can't be made worse by a religious figure saying "it's all your own fault, you know."  That function was fulfilled by the Bishop of Mende, Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, who issued a declaration stating that the Beast was "a scourge sent by God" to punish the people in the area for their sins.  He quoted Moses's threat, "I will arm the teeth of wild beasts against them," and said that everyone needed to pray like crazy so that God in His Infinite Mercy would stop sending monsters to tear the throats out of children.

This, as you might imagine, had exactly zero effect.

The opinion of many people at the time of the attacks, as well as many people today, is that the Beast of Gévaudan was an unusually large and aggressive wolf.  There is a twofold difficulty with this, however; first, wolves -- at least, non-rabid ones -- don't attack humans all that often, and second, the people who actually saw the Beast were unanimous that it wasn't a wolf.  The descriptions all substantially agree; it was tawny/reddish, not gray, had a dark stripe running down its back, and its muzzle was considerably larger, heavier, and more powerful than a wolf's.  Keep in mind that the people in this region had been farmers and sheep-raisers for centuries; they knew what a wolf looked like.  (One suggestion, apropos of the coat color, is that the Beast was the Italian subspecies of Eurasian wolf, which is known to develop a russet-colored coat in the summertime, but that still doesn't explain the Beast's formidable bulk.)

There's also the issue that a number of people who saw it thought it could walk on two legs -- but this much, at least, I'm willing to attribute to the inevitable wild exaggerations that happen when you've been through a harrowing experience.

One of the weirder explanations I've heard for the Beast of Gévaudan is that it was a prehistoric holdover of some kind -- perhaps a dire wolf (Aenocyron dirus), or, even less plausibly, an Andrewsarchus.  This latter critter is an early member of Artiodactyla, the order that includes pigs, hippos, and whales.  Although it may be hard to see a commonality between artiodactyls and wolves, keep in mind that early artiodactyls had a pretty formidable array of dental weaponry:

Artist's conception of Andrewsarchus [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem is, Andrewsarchus seems to have been extinct by the end of the Eocene Epoch (34 million years ago), so if the Beast of Gévaudan was an Andrewsarchus, this means the species has to have somehow survived for 34 million years without leaving a single fossil behind.  As far as dire wolves go, there's far less of a time gap -- there are dire wolf fossils from ten thousand years ago -- but they're only known from the Americas.

Me, I'm dubious.

In any case, the Beast of Gévaudan was finally killed in June 1767 by a hunter named Jean Chastel.  Chastel had been hired by the French government to take care of the Beast, and the story is that he was standing, leaning against a tree reading his Bible, when he heard a noise and saw the Beast loping toward him, murder in its eyes.  Instead of pissing his pants and then having a stroke, which is probably what I would have done, he calmly lifted his rifle and shot the Beast between the eyes with a specially-prepared silver bullet.  Chastel's bravery earned him a monument in his honor in the village of La Besseyre-Sainte-Mary, near where the Beast was killed, which you can still visit today.

Chastel placed the Beast's body on a wagon of a man bound for Versailles, with instructions to deliver it to the authorities there so that Chastel could collect his reward.  But this being in the days before refrigeration, the carcass started to decompose, and finally began to smell so bad the wagon-driver buried it beside the road along the way.  Chastel apparently never got his reward, but at least there were no more attacks afterward.

So what was the Beast of Gévaudan?  Despite the anomalous descriptions, my money is still on an unusually large, perhaps oddly-colored wolf.  (Or wolves.  From the number of attacks, it's hard to imagine they were all perpetrated by the same animal.)  Michel Louis, author of La Bête de Gévaudan, goes to great lengths to describe how remote and rugged the terrain in the region is -- this is the southern part of the Massif Central, the big mountain range in central Auvergne and northern Languedoc, and in the mid-eighteenth century it was largely trackless wilderness.  So there's no need to appeal to the even wilder explanations I've seen, like the Beast being a werewolf or a demonically-possessed man wearing a wolf suit.

In any case, it's a peculiar story, and one that excites the imagination even today, almost three hundred years later.  While the incidents undoubtedly had a purely prosaic explanation, it's entirely understandable that the populace in the region reacted with abject terror.  If I knew there was an enormous carnivore in upstate New York ripping people's throats out, I doubt I'd ever go outside.  

Hell, I'm afraid enough of Rudy.

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A lens on the past

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.

Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining. Unrealistic is probably a better choice.  This is especially common apropos of cultures for which non-historians (1) have very little in the way of solid facts, and (2) got badly beaten by more aggressive or militaristic societies, and thus have the appeal of the underdog.  (The ancient Celts and the pre-colonization Indigenous Americans and Australians are good examples of this phenomenon.) 
The sad truth is, except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false, and comes out most strongly in fictional depictions of the past.  Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful, sexy Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals.  Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor.  (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up.  But my point stands.)

But it's not just the prehistorics.  Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer.  But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.

Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies.  I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (The Tree of Knowledge), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), late thirteenth century France (Nightingale), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down).  I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.

But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy.  That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination.  Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.

The reason this all comes up is a rather horrific discovery in Spain of the site of a battle that took place in the third century B.C.E.  Again, I might be using the wrong word -- this wasn't a battle so much as a massacre.  A settlement near the current tiny village of La Hoya, in the province of Salamanca, was attacked by an unidentified set of marauders and basically slaughtered, their bodies being left to the scavengers.

A team led by Javier Ordoño Daubagna of Arkikus, an archaeological research company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, did the investigation, and came upon thirteen skeletons; nine adults, two adolescents, one young child, and one infant.  All of them showed signs of violent death.  One of the adolescents, a thirteen-year-old girl, had her arm cut off and flung three meters from her body, where it was found -- still wearing the five copper bracelets she'd been wearing when she died.

The fact that the bracelets and other valuable objects weren't taken indicates that whatever the reason for the attack was, it wasn't material profit.

"The nature of the injuries, the presence of women and young children as victims and the context of where the human remains were found on the site all indicated that this was not a battle between anything like matched forces," said study co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford.  "This was not a battle between noble warriors."

It also puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like.  "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."

In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses.  The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff.  And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species.  Not that we don't still have a long way to go.  But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine, my answer is always "right here and right now."  Although if I could skip to a point when Trump and his fascist cronies are no longer in power, I wouldn't turn that down.

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The absence of evidence

Yesterday a friend sent me an article from Sentinel News by Charles Magrin entitled, "A Real Phenomenon, A Cultural Taboo," that revolves around the question of why the scientific community doesn't take UFOs more seriously, and asked, "What do you think of his argument?"

I encourage you to read the essay in its entirety, but to summarize, Magrin's reasoning seems to boil down to four main points:

1. UFOs (or, as we're now supposed to call them, UAPs) are rejected as visitations from extraterrestrial intelligences because to accept them would overturn our place as the smartest species in the known universe.  "[T]he phenomenon cannot be accommodated without unsettling the very foundations of the modern political order," Magrin writes.  "It challenges sovereignty, anthropocentrism and the monopoly on defining reality.  It is not disturbing because it is false, but because it challenges our frameworks of understanding."
2. There's an active governmental coverup of the actual evidence for visitation.  Magrin gives a number of examples of various inquiries into UAPs by the United States government that were either classified as top secret and filed away or else scotched, and quotes UAP investigator J. Allen Hynek as saying, "The investigators seem to have been directed to find a conventional explanation for each case, no matter how far-fetched it might have been."
3. Belief in extraterrestrial intelligence is part of the cultural system of many Indigenous peoples, and for us here in the United States to accept that it's real would "challenge Christian monotheism."  Inevitably, the Dogon people came up, a claim which I addressed in a previous post here at Skeptophilia.  *heavy sigh*
4. We can't handle incredulity, and "aliens coming here in spaceships" is just too far outside of our worldview even to consider.

To me, the only one that deserves serious consideration is #2.  The government clearly does cover things up in cases where it involves national security, or (as we're currently experiencing) in cases where to expose the truth would result in putting the president and many of his top staff members in prison for life.  Could the United States government be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence?  It's possible, although given how many times we've had impassioned testimony from "whistleblowers" like David Grusch and promises by Trump and others to come clean about alien visitations, all of which have amounted to zilch, I'm perhaps to be excused for feeling dubious.

As far as the rest of his reasons, I'm calling bullshit.

Starting in the fifteenth century, science has pushed deeper and deeper into what's called the Copernican Principle -- that we not only aren't the center of the universe, we're not really the center of anything.  In fact, our position, both literally and figuratively, is nowhere special.  From what we can see looking out into space, the universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic -- approximately equal matter/energy density everywhere, and pretty much the same no matter which direction you look.  The idea that there's a gigantic conspiracy on the part of scientists to preserve our central place in the universe is a ridiculous claim, given that it's the scientists who have shown that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System, the Solar System isn't the center of the Milky Way, the Milky Way isn't the center of the Local Group, and so on.  (And, incidentally, that humans are just another animal in the vast tree of life, all originating from a common single-celled ancestral species.)

Magrin also makes a quick slide from talking about people who doubt UFOs/UAPs to those who doubt "NHIs" -- "non-human intelligences."  This brings to mind astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's quip that we should "remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for... If something is unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't then go on to say 'so it must be' anything."  While I think that Tyson is being a little categorical here (mostly for humorous effect), he's got a point.  Maybe the conversation shouldn't end, but we need to be very cautious about swinging from "we don't know what this is" to attributing it to whatever our favorite explanation is.  Sure, continue to investigate, continue to examine the evidence, and -- as Carl Sagan put it -- "Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."  The problem is that the UFO enthusiasts have a tendency to want us to go from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty.

Plus, I think Magrin is being disingenuous, here.  There are a couple of other much better reasons why scientists are hesitant to jump on the UFO/UAP bandwagon.  The first is straightforward and obvious; there simply is no hard evidence that's available to study.  Whether this is because the government is hiding it is immaterial; you can't expect a scientist to espouse a particular model if there's no data there to analyze.  What "evidence" we do have, in the form of grainy photographs, blurred video clips, and various first-hand accounts, does not meet the minimum standard of what science accepts as sufficient.

Second, hoaxers and liars abound.  Oh, how I fucking hate hoaxers.  There's a spectrum of belief, from the gullible on one end (believe even if there's no good evidence) to the cynical on the other (disbelieve even if there is good evidence).  I've made the point here before that I think we should all aim for the midpoint, skepticism -- believing if and only if there's reliable evidence, and keeping your mind open otherwise.  The problem here is that we're all human, scientists included, with the natural proclivity to get completely fed up if we're fooled over and over.  The prevalence of hoaxers (or, less culpably, people making reports of UFOs/UAPs where it turns out they've misinterpreted perfectly natural phenomena) has understandably tilted a lot of scientists' needles toward the "cynical" side of things.  It's not a good thing; and the best astronomers out there (David Kipping comes to mind) stubbornly resist having their emotions swamp their rational faculties in either direction, whether it's their excitement over the possibility of extraterrestrial life or their frustration over how many times the purported evidence has turned out to be a bust.

And that touches on another thing that Magrin conveniently ignores; the vast majority of scientists would love to have their prior understanding overturned.  This is a common misapprehension amongst laypeople; that the scientific establishment is devoted to guarding the status quo like crazy, and will destroy anyone who dares to challenge the edifice we already have.  In fact, exactly the opposite is true.  Can you imagine how the scientific establishment would react if there was incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence?  Or Bigfoot, or ghosts, or telepathy, or precognition, or any of a dozen other fringe-y claims?  They wouldn't be trying to suppress it; they would be trampling over each other to be the first to submit a paper to Nature about it.  Actual overturnings of the dominant scientific paradigm are rare, but when they occur, it's how careers are made, how tenured professorships are achieved, how Nobel Prizes are won.  Consider the names we all remember, science nerd and layperson alike; Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Hubble, Matthews & Vine, Watson/Crick/Franklin, Rubin, Hawking.  They were not afraid to challenge the prior understanding, and what they accomplished secured their reputations amongst the greats of scientific history.

Anyhow, as far as Magrin's claims, I'm predictably unimpressed.  Okay, maybe the government is up to shenanigans with respect to UFOs/UAPs, and "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as historian William Wright famously said.  The problem is, absence of evidence isn't evidence of anything.  So as I've said before, I'll happily turn into a True Believer once I have hard data to base it on.  But until someone brings out a chunk of an alien spacecraft, I'm solidly in the "dubious" column.

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Hellscape

In the Star Trek episode "The Savage Curtain," the intrepid crew of the Enterprise visit the planet Excalbia.  I forget why, because the planet was completely covered by churning seas of lava, so it wasn't exactly a great site for an away mission.  But when they get there, they find that there's one spot that's hospitable, and in fact has Earth-like conditions, by which I mean the typical Star Trek landscape of sand, styrofoam rocks, and scraggly vegetation.  It turns out that the livable area was created by some superpowerful aliens to provide a spot where Captain Kirk could have a battle involving Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and various other historical and not-so-historical figures to find out whether good is actually stronger than evil.

Okay, put that way, I know the plot sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, but don't yell at me.  I didn't write the script.

In any case, I was reminded of Excalbia when I read about a new study out of Oxford University using data from the James Webb Space Telescope.  The team looked at a recently-discovered exoplanet, L 98-59 d, which orbits a red dwarf star only thirty-five light years away, and found that it's unlike any other exoplanet we've thus far studied.

It's about 1.6 times the mass of the Earth, but for a planet its size has a fairly low density, and spectroscopic data has shown an atmosphere rich in an element you usually don't find -- sulfur.  Venus's atmosphere has some sulfuric acid, but L 98-59 d had a great deal more, mostly in the form of the toxic and vile-smelling hydrogen sulfide.  This is over a surface that appears, like Excalbia, to be largely molten.

Being chemically reactive, you wouldn't expect hydrogen sulfide to be long-lived in a planet's atmosphere, and it's sufficiently lightweight that stellar activity should readily blow it out into space.  Some process, therefore, must be generating it as fast as it's consumed either by being blasted out of the atmosphere or chemically reacted and then drawn down by convection of the liquid rock surface.  Apparently, something about the mechanics of a deep, silicate-rich mantle is causing the entrapment and release of the huge amounts of sulfur we see in the atmosphere, but how that works is still a mystery.  And given how far outside the norm L 98-59 d is -- or, what our models suggested was the norm -- it makes you wonder what else might be out there.

"This discovery suggests that the categories astronomers currently use to describe small planets may be too simple," said Harrison Nicholls, who was lead author on the paper.  "While this molten planet is unlikely to support life, it reflects the wide diversity of the worlds which exist beyond the Solar System.  We may then ask: what other types of planet are waiting to be uncovered?"

And that's considering the number of strange planetary types we already had in the exoplanet zoo, which include bizarre hycean planets, hydrogen-rich water worlds; chthonian planets, the cores of what used to be "hot Jupiters" that had their atmospheres stripped by stellar wind; and tidally-locked eyeball planets, with such extreme differences in temperature between their light and dark sides that they experience continuous blistering superhurricanes at the light/dark boundary.  That the sulfurous hellscape of L 98-59 d isn't something the astrophysicists had even thought up -- well, let's just say that what Carl Sagan called the "Encyclopedia Galactica" might be a lot longer, and weirder, than we'd ever dreamed.

So that's the cool news from the astronomers for the week.

Oh, and by the way, good turned out to be stronger than evil, although while finding that out Abraham Lincoln got assassinated again, which was kind of a shame.  On the positive side, Genghis Khan and Kahless the Unforgettable and various other execrable individuals went down to ignominious and well-deserved defeat.  Captain Kirk unsurprisingly got his shirt ripped open and gained valuable opportunities to show off his chest, but despite that the superpowerful aliens decided they'd gotten their answer and let the Enterprise and its crew go.  So in case you're wondering about philosophical questions like the relative power of good and evil, Star Trek solved it all in forty-five minutes, not counting commercial breaks.

Maybe we should turn Kirk et al. loose on whether intelligence always beats stupidity, because at the moment that one seems to be an open question.

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Whistling words

I've long been fascinated by the phenomenon of priming, where our interpretation of a sensory stimulus is altered by what we expected to see or hear.  An excellent example of priming is this famous image:

If you've never seen this before, it's hard to see anything but black blotches.  Once you realize it contains a Dalmatian dog -- his head and dark ear are right dead-center in the image -- you'll always see it.  You can't go back to your previous state of blissful ignorance.

It works in the auditory realm, too.  My wife and I are absolutely addicted to the wonderful British series The Great Pottery Throwdown, where a group of twelve amateur potters participate in a series of challenges and ultimately are whittled down to three finalists and a single winner.  Carol and I are both potters -- I won't speak for her, but I can say with confidence that if I were on Throwdown I would be eliminated in the first round -- and it's astonishing what these artists can create given the demands and time constraints.  (I also really enjoy how kind they are to each other.  Although it's a competition, they help each other, and everyone seems genuinely heartbroken every time one of them gets sent home.)  Well, we're re-watching one of the early seasons, and there's a young woman on the show with a pronounced Welsh accent.  Even though I'm usually pretty good at understanding people from the UK, I'm baffled by something like half of what she says...

... until we turn on captioning.  Then I have no problem.  And it's not just that I'm reading along (although I certainly am) -- it really seems like her voice is much more understandable with that little bit of help.

The reason this comes up is a recent study by Cambridge University engineer Václav Volhejn, who is working with sine-wave speech, a voice simulation using a mixture of pure tones (sine waves).  The result sounds like someone trying to imitate human speech using a slide whistle.  (You can read how he creates the audio here.)  If I close my eyes, I can barely get anything from it -- maybe a word here or there.  But once I get the cues of what I was supposed to hear, suddenly it seems obvious.  The effect lasts, too.  If I turn off captioning and go back and listen to the audio again, I can still understand it nearly perfectly.

How this all works is not understood, but probably has something to do with how our brain accomplishes recall.  A 1994 study found that we're primed to recognize words faster if we have prior exposure to semantically-related words; shown the word dog, for example, we recognize the word wolf more quickly than if we're presented it without the prime.  We're also primed to anticipate -- and therefore more quickly recognize -- words that are commonly found in association (lot would be primed by parking), or words that have similar sounds even if they're semantically unrelated (ground would be primed by round).  That it has something to do with the brain's recall network is supported by research suggesting that priming effects vanish very early in the development of dementia; apparently even before significant cognitive impairment occurs, dementia patients lose their ability to make these kinds of efficient associations.

What's strangest, though, is that you can be primed two different ways with equal strength.  This article from Stranger Dimensions contains an audio clip of sine-wave speech that can be primed to sound like either green needle or brainstorm -- which have almost nothing in common phonetically, and don't even have the same number of syllables.  Which you hear depends on which text you're looking at, and if you're like me you can go back and forth indefinitely, from exactly the same audio input.

Then there's the McGurk effect, where what we see actually overrides what we hear so completely that it can cause us not to understand what's coming in through our ears.  The two syllables ba and va sound a great deal alike, but the first sound differs in how it's produced; /b/ is a voiced bilabial stop, /v/ a voiced labiodental fricative.  But when we see someone's mouth moving in an audio/video clip that's been altered to make it look like he's saying va when he's actually saying ba, we hear va.  It's absolutely convincing.  Somehow, we're primed by seeing his mouth move -- explaining why it's always easier to understand someone face to face than on the telephone.

All of this is further evidence of a point I've made many times here at Skeptophilia; what you perceive is incomplete, inaccurate, and dependent on a great many external and internal conditions that can change from one moment to the next.  "I know it happened that way, I saw it with my own eyes!" is fairly close to nonsense.  Oh, sure; for most of us, our sensory-perceptual systems work well enough to get by on.  But the idea that what we seem to perceive is some kind of perfect transcription of reality is simply wrong.

It's humbling and a little frightening how easily fooled we are, but the implications for how our brain retrieves stored information are absolutely fascinating.  So even if we should be a little more careful about acting certain of the accuracy of our own perceptions and memories, it does open the window on how our brains make sense of the world we live in.

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Kakistocracy

I picked up a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium (at almost four hundred pages, it's only short by comparison to his full three-volume History of Byzantium) at a used book sale.  To be fair, it couldn't afford to be much shorter because it covers about eleven hundred years of history.  I got it because it's a time and place I don't know much about, and when I opened it last week I kind of steeled myself for a dry, college textbook approach.

Turns out I shouldn't have been apprehensive.  Norwich is not only a great historian, he's a great writer, and his prose gallops right along, focusing not solely on the usual names and dates but on the personalities involved.  And... wow.  What a parade of lunatics.  The book certainly illustrates the truth of Dave Barry's trenchant quip, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that individual is crazy."

Honestly, there were a few good ones.  The emperor Leo VI was called "the Wise" for good reason; and you may recall that I wrote about his scholarly and good-natured son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago because of his deep devotion to preserving the written works of the ancients.  But some of the bad ones -- ye gods and little fishes.  Michael III was an unstable drunkard about whom Norwich says, "Content to leave the responsibilities of government to others, he was unable to check his own moral decline which, in the last five years of his life, finally reduced him to a level of degradation that fully earned him his later sobriquet of 'the Sot.'"  Constantine IV had "a streak of insanity that... [transformed] him into a monster whose only attributes were a pathological suspicion of all around him and an insatiable lust for blood."  Nicephorus II was a "sanctimonious and unattractive old puritan" who was "pitiless and cruel, and whose meanness and avarice were notorious."

You might have heard the term kakistocracy -- "government by the worst."  (Interesting that it went from being a nearly unknown word to being kind of all over the place in the last ten years.  I wonder why that is?)  Well, the Byzantines, with only a handful of exceptions, had what amounted to eleven centuries of kakistocracy, enduring long periods of intermittent chaos before ultimately collapsing into ruins in the mid-fifteenth century.

Gold coin with an image of one of the better Byzantine emperors, Leo VI "the Wise" [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Solidus of Leo VI (reverse), CC BY-SA 2.5]

What has struck me over and over, though, is that throughout its long history, people did whatever they could to get into positions of power, trying either to clamber onto the throne itself or at least get close to it.  Why on earth would they want that?  I mean, on one level, I get it; power usually comes along with money and luxury, and the peasants of the Byzantine Empire didn't lead any happier lives than peasants in any other age.  My question, though, is why in the hell anyone was brave enough to risk it.  Very few emperors died peacefully of old age; bunches of them were deposed or murdered outright.  The same went for the nobles and the imperial advisors.  And being on the losing side often didn't just mean exile; there's example after example of dethroned emperors and ousted courtiers being castrated and having their noses cut off and their eyes gouged out.

You'd think that seeing this happen once or twice would be enough to induce anyone else having royal aspirations to say, "Um, yeah, no fucking way."  You'd be wrong.  The amazing truth is that having one guy get mutilated and exiled -- and after all that torture and blood loss, usually they didn't survive for very long afterward -- seemed to trigger the other competitors to say, "Cool!  One less rival to worry about!  I'm sure that won't happen to me."

The whole thing reminds me of a Tony Robbins motivational seminar a few years ago that culminated in a supposed mind-over-matter exercise of walking on hot coals.  The predictable happened, and thirty people were treated in a Dallas hospital for burns on the soles of their feet.  When I heard about this, I immediately wondered why, when the first couple of people shrieked in pain, the rest weren't dissuaded.  Did they line up in inverse order of IQ, or something?  But apparently that tendency not to learn from other people's hard experience is not a modern phenomenon, to judge by A Short History of Byzantium.

You can't know how you'd react unless you'd actually been raised in that culture; that's one of the problems with passing value judgments on figures from history.  But here, from my twenty-first century perspective, I find it a little hard to fathom.  I can't imagine how anyone would think "you have a chance at being powerful... but you may end up losing your eyes, nose, and balls" is a good bet, especially considering how many of the emperors and their cadre found themselves drawing the short straw.

What also strikes me about this period of history is how many of the central players -- not only the emperors, but the Patriarchs of what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church -- were so completely certain that they were right.  About everything.  Me, I'm hardly sure of anything, but these guys make the Pope's claims of infallibility sound like waffling.  One of the biggest disputes -- that went on for a hundred years and cost thousands of lives -- was about iconoclasm, the idea (still prevalent in most Muslim sects) that it was sacrilegious to depict holy figures in art, and worse still to venerate or worship them.  The Byzantine iconoclasts went around destroying every piece of religious art they could find, and many of them were perfectly willing to murder anyone who got in the way.  The iconodules, or "icon-worshipers," were equally violent.  And because both the imperial throne and the Patriarchate swung back and forth between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, each time the ground shifted there was a bloody purge of the ones who had previously been in ascendancy.

I mean, come on.  So some guy wants to pray to an image of the Virgin Mary, and you personally don't like that idea.  Is the next logical step "I must therefore cut his head off"?  Are you really that sure your position is the correct and God-approved one?

Of course, once again we haven't really progressed that far.  We have a Secretary of Defense who apparently thinks that God is standing by smiling while we bomb Iranian girls' schools, and at least a few prominent military leaders who are having multiple orgasms over the thought that Trump's little "excursion" might be the lead-up to Armageddon.

I dunno.  All it really proves to me is that I honestly have no idea what makes people tick most of the time.  I've wondered before if I might be some kind of changeling, because when I look around me, mostly what I think is, "None of this makes any fucking sense."

Anyhow, I recommend A Short History of Byzantium if you are (1) a history buff, (2) like well-written non-fiction, and (3) want further evidence that the human race is irredeemably weird.  I will say, though, that if ever time travel is invented, I am not going back to Byzantium.  Fascinating as it is, and little as I have any desire to be in a position of power, it still was not a safe place for pretty much anyone.  I like my various bodily organs securely attached where they are, thank you very much.

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