Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Monday, September 30, 2019

Feathered serpent gods and free association

Despite my fairly persistent railing against people who make outlandish, unverifiable claims, I find it even more perplexing when people make outlandish, demonstrably false claims, and amazingly enough I'm not talking about Donald Trump.

One of the problems, though, is that a lot of woo-woo claims are in the category of what physicist Wolfgang Pauli called "not even false" -- they're not verifiable in a scientific sense.  I mean, it's one thing to claim that last night your late Aunt Gertrude visited in spirit form and told you her secret recipe for making her Extra-Zesty Bean Dip.  I couldn't disprove that even if I wanted to, which I don't, because I actually kind of like bean dip.

But when someone makes a statement that is (1) falsifiable, and (2) clearly incorrect, and yet stands by it as if it made complete sense... that I find baffling.  "I'm sorry," they seem to be saying, "I know you've demonstrated that gravity pulls things toward the Earth, but I believe that in reality, it works the opposite way, so I'm wearing velcro shoes so I don't fall upward."

And for the record, I am also not talking about either Flat Earthers or biblical creationism.

This all comes up because of an article that appeared on Unexplained Mysteries a while back, the link to which I was sent by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Entitled "Easter Island Heads -- They Speak At Last," it was written by L. M. Leteane.   If that name sounds familiar to regular readers of this blog, it's because Leteane has appeared here before, most recently for claiming that the Central American god Quetzalcoatl and the Egyptian god Thoth were actually the same person, despite one being a feathered snake and the other being a shirtless dude with the head of an ibis, which last I checked hardly look alike at all.  Be that as it may, Leteane concludes that this is why the Earth is going to end when a comet hits it in the year 3369.

So I suppose that given his past attempts, we should not expect L. M. Leteane to exactly knock us dead in the logic department.

But even starting out with low expectations, I have to say that he has outdone himself this time.

Here's the basic outline of his most recent argument, if I can dignify it by calling it that. Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride.
  1. The Bantu people of south-central Africa came originally from Egypt, which in their language they called Khama-Roggo.  This name translates in Tswana as "Black-and-Red Land."
  2. Charles Berlitz, of The Mystery of Atlantis fame, says that Quetzalcoatl also comes from "Black-and-Red Land."  Berlitz, allow me to remind you, is the writer about whose credibility the skeptical researcher Larry Kusche said, "If Berlitz were to report that a ship was red, the chances of it being some other color is almost a certainty."
  3. The Olmecs were originally from Africa, but then they accompanied the god Thoth to Central America.  In a quote that I swear I am not making up, "That is evidently why their gigantic sculptured heads are always shown helmeted."
  4. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was also a real person, who ruled in the Indus Valley for a while (yes, I know that India and Babylonia aren't the same place; just play along, okay?) until she got fed up and also moved to Central America.  She took some people with her called the Kassites.  This was because she was heavily interested in tin mining.
  5. Well, three gods in one place are just too many (three too many, in my opinion), and this started a war.  Hot words were spoken.  Nuclear weapons were detonated.   Devastation was wreaked.   Passive voice was used repeatedly for dramatic effect.
  6. After the dust settled, the Olmecs, who were somehow also apparently the Kassites and the Bantu, found themselves mysteriously deposited on Easter Island.  A couple of more similarities between words in various languages and Pascuanese (the language of the natives of Easter Island) are given, the best one being "Rapa Nui" (the Pascuanese name for the island) meaning "black giant" because Rapa is a little like the Hebrew repha (giant) and Nui sounds like the French nuit (night).  This proves that the island was settled by dark-skinned giant people from Africa.  Or somewhere.
  7. The Olmecs decided to name it "Easter Island" because "Easter" sounds like "Ishtar."
  8. So they built a bunch of stone heads. q. e. d.
[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hhooper1 at English Wikipedia., Easter Island Ahu (2006), CC BY 2.5]

Well. I think we can all agree that that's a pretty persuasive logical chain, can't we?

Okay, maybe not so much.  

Let's start with the linguistic funny business.  Unfortunately for L. M. Leteane, there is a fundamental rule he seems to be unaware of, which is, "Do not fuck around with a linguist."  Linguistics is something I know a bit about; I have an M. A. in Historical Linguistics (yes, I know, I spent 32 years teaching biology.  It's a long story) and I can say with some authority that I understand how language evolution works.  

And one of the first things you're taught in that field is that you can't base language relationships on one or two words -- chance correspondences are all too common.  So just because roggo means "red" in Tswana (which I'm taking on faith because Leteane himself is from Botswana, and my expertise is not in African languages), and rouge is French for "red," doesn't mean a damn thing just because they happen to share a few letters.  Rouge goes back to the Latin ruber, then to Ancient Greek erythros, and finally to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *reudr.  Any resemblance to the Tswana word for "red" is coincidental.  And as for "Rapa Nui" meaning "black giant" because of some similarity to those words in (respectively) French and Hebrew, that's ridiculous; Pascuanese is a Polynesian language, which is neither Indo-European nor Semitic, and has no underlying similarity to either French or Hebrew other than all of them being languages spoken by people somewhere.

And as far as Easter Island being named after Ishtar... well, let's just say it'll take me a while to recover from the headdesk I did when I read that.  Easter Island was so named by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, because he first spotted it on Easter Sunday in 1722.  He called it Paasch-Eyland, Dutch for "Easter Island;" its official name is Isla de Pascua, which means the same thing in Spanish.   Neither one sounds anything like "Ishtar." 

And for the record: "Ishtar" and "Easter" don't have a common root anyway, something I dealt with back in 2014 when a thing kept being circulated that Easter was a pagan holiday involving sacrificing children to Babylonian gods.  Which I probably don't need to point out is 100% USDA Grade-A bullshit.  A quote from that post, which is just as applicable here: "Linguistics is not some kind of cross between free association and the game of Telephone."

And as for the rest of it... well, it sounds like the plot of a hyper-convoluted science fiction story to me.  Gods globe-trotting all over the world, bringing along slave labor, and having major wars, and conveniently leaving behind no hard evidence whatsoever.

The thing I find maddening about all of this is that Leteane mixes some facts (his information about Tswana) with speculation (he says that the name of the tin ore cassiterite comes from the Kassites, which my etymological dictionary says is "possible," but gives two other equally plausible hypotheses) with outright falsehood (that Polynesian, Bantu, Semitic, and Indo-European languages share lots of common roots) with wild fantasy (all of the stuff about the gods).  And people believe it.  His story had, last I checked, been tweeted and Facebook-liked dozens of times, and amongst the comments I saw was, "Brilliant piece of research connecting all the history you don't learn about in school!  Thank you for drawing together the pieces of the puzzle!"

So, anyway. I suppose I shouldn't get so annoyed by all of this.  Actually, on the spectrum of woo-woo beliefs, this one is pretty harmless.  No one ever blew himself up in a crowded market because he thought that the Olmecs came from Botswana.  My frustration is that there are seemingly so many people who lack the ability to think critically -- to look at the facts of an argument, and how the evidence is laid out, and to see if the conclusion is justified.  The problem, of course, is that learning the principles of scientific induction is hard work.  Much easier, apparently, to blather on about feathered serpents and goddesses who are seriously into tin.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Saturday, September 28, 2019

A titanic undertaking

While I first ran into the idea of life on other worlds when I was a kid watching shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek, it wasn't until I was in college and read Arthur C. Clarke's followup to his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, called 2010: Odyssey Two, that I first considered life around moons in our own Solar System.

The upshot of the book is that there is a developing intelligent species on Europa, one of the so-called "Galilean" moons of Jupiter.  It's not such a far-fetched idea; Europa has a water-ice crust and might well have liquid water underneath it, so it's entirely possible there's some life form or another living down there.  (In the book, there was, and the super-intelligent civilization that sent the famous monolith to Earth in the previous book starts broadcasting the message, "All these worlds are yours -- except Europa.  Attempt no landings there" in an attempt to keep humans from dropping in and fucking things up, which you have to admit we have a tendency to do.)

Europa is only one candidate for hosting life, however.  An even better bet is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest (after Jupiter's moon Ganymede) moon in the Solar System.  It's larger than the planet Mercury, although less than half as massive, and its surface seems to be mostly composed of water and ammonia -- although in 2004 the Cassini-Huygens probe found liquid hydrocarbon geysers at its poles, which is certainly suggestive of some fancy organic chemistry going on underneath the surface.

A photograph of Titan taken by Cassini-Huygens.  Its featurelessness is because we're seeing the tops of the clouds -- thought to be, basically, photochemical smog.  [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

In any case, it's a place ripe for some serious exploration.  And it's certainly looking better than even the nearest stars; our fastest spacecraft, Deep Space 1, would take about 81,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is a little long to wait for results.  So I was thrilled to find out that NASA is talking about a mission to Titan -- that involves packs of "shapeshifting" robot drones.

One limitation of any probe we've sent out is that even if it's working optimally, it still can only survey a minuscule percentage of the target's surface.  What the planned Shapeshifter mission does is to send a spacecraft out there that's composed of hundreds (or more) smaller, self-propelled, robotic spacecrafts that can then roam around exploring the surface or dive down and puncture the crust and see what's down in the oceans that we believe exist below it.

"We have very limited information about the composition of the surface," said team leader Ali Agha, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  "Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes – we potentially have all of these, but we don't know for certain.  So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket."

The difficulty -- well, one of the many difficulties -- is whether we'll recognize life on Titan if we find it.  Besides an atmosphere that seems to be mostly made of ammonia and methane, Titan has an average surface temperature of around -180 C, which is a little chilly.  So any living thing there would have to be adapted to seriously different conditions than anything we've found on Earth.  There's no reason to believe that it would share characteristics with any terrestrial life form besides the most basic requirements for life -- reproduction, metabolism, and some kind of inheritable genetic code -- so we'll have to be pretty willing to expand our definition of "living thing" or we'll likely miss it entirely.  (Remember the Horta from the famous original Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark?"  It was a silicon-based life form that used hydrofluoric acid instead of water as its principal circulatory solvent -- and also as a defense mechanism, as various red-shirted unfortunates found out. The intrepid crew of the Enterprise at first thought the Horta was some bizarre geological formation -- which, of course, it sort of was.)

In any case, I hope Agha's project gets off the ground, both figuratively and literally.  If we can't develop faster-than-light travel, and unfortunately Einstein's ultimate universal speed limit seems to be strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, investigating other star systems is kind of impractical.  So we probably should focus on what's going on here at home -- and hope we're not told, "Attempt no landings on Titan."

Although if we were, that would be eye-opening in an entirely different way.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Friday, September 27, 2019

Celebrity re-invention

Yesterday a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia brought to my attention a claim I hadn't run into before: that actor Morgan Freeman is actually the same person as musician Jimi Hendrix.

My first thought was, "Wait a moment.  Jimi Hendrix is dead and Morgan Freeman isn't," which you'd think would kind of preclude them from being the same person.  But what the writer of the article, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, is saying is that Jimi Hendrix faked his death, then reinvented himself as Morgan Freeman.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Sifry, Morgan Freeman, 2006, CC BY 2.0]

The main evidence of the claim, if I can dignify it with that word, is that there's no record of Freeman before Hendrix's death from a drug overdose in 1970.  Which, as far as I can find out, is patently false; even his Wikipedia page lists plenty of stuff he did before 1970 (at which point Freeman would have been 33 years old), including a lot of easily-verifiable stuff like his winning a state-wide drama competition in Mississippi at age 12, performing in a radio show while in high school, and a four-year stint in the military.

Adl-Tabatabai says all that stuff is made up, and it's been done to protect Freeman from the notoriety he'd get if information about his former life came out.  As far as his own evidence, it mostly seems to consist of his screaming at us that we're idiots if we don't believe him, and anyone who says otherwise lacks critical thinking skills, common sense, and probably a brain as well.

After I read this article, I began to wonder if there were other celebrities about whom this sort of thing has come up, so I did a Google search for, "celebrities identity change conspiracy."  And all I can say is, there are a lot of people out there who are in serious need of a hobby, if not immediate intervention by a mental health professional.

So down the rabbit hole I went.

First we have singer Avril Lavigne, who died in 2003 and was replaced by a body-double named "Melissa."  The evidence here seems to be mostly that around that time Lavigne/Melissa started to dress differently.  Because obviously the only way to make a wardrobe change is to die and have your replacement start wearing different clothes.

Then there's Eminem, who died in 2007 either in a car crash or of a drug overdose, depending on which version you go for, possibly caused by the fact that Eminem turned down an opportunity to join the Illuminati, and then was replaced either by a clone or an android.  Apparently Eminem version 2.0 looks younger than the first one did, and he even slipped up and gave away the game in an interview in 2008 wherein he said, "Right now I'm kinda just concentrating on my own stuff, for right now and just banging out tracks and producing a lot of stuff.  You know, the more I keep producing the better it seems like I get, 'cause I just start knowing stuff."

Get it?  "Knowing stuff?"  What stuff do you know, Slim Shady?  *suspicious eyebrow raise*

And how about J. K. Rowling?  Here the conspiracy theorists went a step further than killing her, as they did with Lavigne and Eminem; they claim she never existed in the first place.  The entire Harry Potter series was written by a team of marketing professionals, because it's not possible for anyone to write that much that quickly.  As far as Rowling herself, she's an actress hired to "give a human face" to what is essentially a multimedia scam.

Well, as far as no one being able to put out books that fast, I'm calling bullshit on that one, because I got my first publishing contract in 2015 and as of right now, I have thirteen books in print.  I'm not sure my word count is up to Rowling's standard -- most of my books are a bit shorter than the Harry Potter novels, especially the last three -- but I know that kind of output is possible because I did it, while (for the record) holding down a full time job.

Or maybe I'm just a robot myself.  I dunno.

The last one I'll mention -- but far from the last one out there -- is that singer Katy Perry is a grown-up Jon-Benét Ramsey.  Ramsey, you probably know, is the tragic six-year-old beauty pageant contestant who was murdered in her own home in 1996, a crime that has never been solved.  The conspiracy theory is that Ramsey's parents staged her death for some unspecified reason, and kept her in hiding until she was eighteen, at which point she re-emerged as Katy Perry with her infamous song "I Kissed a Girl (and I Liked It)."

As far as evidence -- again using the word in its loosest sense -- other than a passing resemblance between the two, there's the line from Perry's memoir (she has a memoir?  who knew?), "Not that I was one of those stage kids.  There was no JonBenét Ramsey inside of me waiting to burst out."  It is kind of an odd thing to say -- there are a lot of child actors she could have mentioned who would have much more positive associations -- but the conspiracy theorists say this was Perry's way of owning up to who she actually was.  "The Illuminati always leave clues in plain sight," said one proponent of this claim.

Righty-o.  Because the Illuminati are just that wily.  "If we put clues out there that your average YouTube geek can find, it'll make everyone believe we can't possibly be this stupid."

At this point, the waters got a little deep, and I kind of gave up.  It illustrates to me a rather unfortunate thing, though -- that no matter how intrinsically ridiculous an idea is, you can get people to believe it if you just append to it the words "conspiracy coverup Illuminati."  But I need to wrap this up, because I need to finish my next novel by my deadline 4.8 seconds from now.  Should be a piece of cake, as I only have seventeen chapters left to write.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Thursday, September 26, 2019

Memento mori

A few days ago I was out for a nice run when my iPod started sending me a rather unsettling message by playing, one after another, "100 Years," "Dance in the Graveyards," "O Very Young," and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," which -- for those of you who don't listen to the same music I do -- are all songs about dying.

I'm not superstitious, but I have to admit I was a little careful when I crossed the road to look both ways and make sure there was no eighteen-wheeler bearing down on me.  I got home safely, but it's no wonder that since then I've been thinking about death and the odd beliefs associated thereto.

I am not just referring to religious concepts of the afterlife, here, although as an atheist I am bound to think that some of those sound pretty bizarre, too.  I've heard everything from your traditional harps-and-haloes idea, to being more or less melted down and fused with God, to fields of flowers and babbling brooks, to spending all of eternity with your dead relatives (and it may sound petty of me, but considering a few of my relatives, this last one sounds more like my personal version of hell).  Then, of course, you have the much-discussed Islamic 72-virgins concept of heaven, which brings up the inevitable question of what the virgins' opinions about all of this might be.  All of these strike me as equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking, given that (honestly) believers have come to these conclusions based on exactly zero evidence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dguendel, Leipzig, Old St. John`s Cemetery, historical gravestone, CC BY 3.0]

But today, I'm more considering the rituals and traditions surrounding death itself, aside from all of the ponderings of what (if anything) might happen to us afterwards.  I was first struck by how oddly death is handled, even here in relatively secular America, when my mom died fourteen years ago.   My wife and I were doing the wrenching, painful, but necessary choosing of a coffin, and we were told by the salesman that there was a model that had a little drawer inside in which "photographs, letters, and other mementos can be placed."  There was, we were told, a battery-powered light inside the drawer, presumably because it's dark down there in the ground.

Carol and I looked at each other, and despite the circumstances, we both laughed.  Did this guy really think that my mom was going to be down there in the cemetery, and would periodically get bored and need some reading material?

Lest you think that this is just some sort of weird sales gimmick, an aberration, in another odd coincidence just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an article that appeared a while back in Huffington Post describing an invention by Swedish music and video equipment salesman Fredrik Hjelmquist.  Hjelmquist has one-upped the coffin with the bookshelf and reading light; his coffins have surround-sound, and the music storage device inside the coffin can be updated to "provide solace for grieving friends and relatives by making it possible for them to alter the deceased's playlist online"...

... and are also equipped to play music streaming from Spotify.

The whole thing comes with a price tag of 199,000 kroner (US$30,700), which you would think would put it out of the price range of nearly everyone -- but there have been thousands of inquiries, mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from as far away as China and Taiwan.

Oh, and I didn't tell what the name of Hjelmquist's creation is.

CataCombo.  And no, I didn't make that up.

Now, I understand that many of the rituals surrounding death are for the comfort of the living; the flowers, the wakes, the songs at funerals, and so on.  But this one is a little hard to explain based solely on that, I think.  Is there really anyone out there who would be comforted by the fact that Grandma is down there in Shady Grove Memorial Park, rockin' out to Linkin Park?  I would think that if you would go for something like this, especially considering the cost, you would have to believe on some level that the Dearly Departed really is listening.  Which, to me, is more than a little creepy, because it implies that the person you just buried is somehow still down there.   Conscious and aware.  In that cold, dark box underground.

To me, this is the opposite of comforting.  This is Poe's "The Premature Burial."

The whole thing brings to mind the Egyptians' practice of placing food, gifts, mummified pets, and so on in the tombs of departed rich people, so they'll have what they need on their trip into the afterlife.   But unlike the Egyptians, who had a whole intricate mythology built up around death, we just have bits and pieces, no coherent whole that would make sense of it.  (And again, that's with the exception of religious explanations of the afterlife.)  As a culture, we're distinctly uneasy about the idea of dying, but we can't quite bring ourselves to jump to the conclusion, "he's just gone, and we don't understand it."

I was always struck by the Klingons' approach to death in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  As a comrade-in-arms is dying, you howl, signifying that the folks in the afterlife better watch out, because a seriously badass warrior is on the way.  But afterwards -- do what you want with the body, because the person who inhabited it is gone.  "It is just a dead shell," they say.  "Dispose of it as you see fit."

Me, I like the Viking approach.  When I die, I'd appreciate it if my family and friends would stick me on a raft, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean, and then have a big party on the beach afterward with a lot of drinking and dancing and debauchery.  That's probably all kinds of illegal, but it seems like a fitting farewell, given that I've always thought that Thor and Odin and Loki and the rest of the gang were a great deal more appealing than any other religion I've ever run across.  But if that turns out to be impractical, just "dispose of me as you see fit."  And fer cryin' in the sink, I am quite sure that I won't need a reading light or a Spotify account and surround-sound.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Have fun storming the castle!

It started out as a joke.

Ten months ago, community college student Matty Roberts, of Bakersfield, California, thought it'd be entertaining to start a webpage suggesting that there was going to be a massive gathering to storm the gates of Area 51, the military training site in the Nevada desert that has long been associated with aliens and conspiracies.  Called "Storm Area 51: They Can't Stop All of Us," the webpage turned into an internet sensation, and two million people made noises about showing up to rush into the not-so-secret facility on September 20 and demand the truth about how the military has been covering up hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

Roberts soon learned the truth of the adage "be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  Every bored computer geek would love to have one of their creations go viral, but when that happened here, Roberts panicked.  His panic became worse when the FBI showed up at his door demanding an explanation, and increased again when the Air Force put out a memo saying that they would not hesitate to stop anyone trying to enter Area 51 illegally, including by using deadly force.

But by this time, the "Storm Area 51" phenomenon had taken on a life of its own, and Roberts was unable to stop the juggernaut he'd created.  He wasn't the only one who was freaking out, either.  The elected officials of the town of Rachel, Nevada, near the border of Area 51, were in crisis mode trying to figure out how they would cope with a sudden influx of (potentially) millions of people.  "Law enforcement will be overwhelmed and local residents will step up to protect their property," said a post on the city website.  "It will get ugly."  The commissioners of Lincoln County, where Rachel is located, agreed to declare a state of emergency if they were descended upon by the Storm Area 51 horde.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Made by X51 (Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x51/  Web: http://x51.org/), Wfm x51 area51 warningsign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As September 20 approached, the phenomenon showed no sign of abating.  Officials were prepared for the worst.  Guards were placed -- well, even more guards than usual were placed -- around the perimeter of Area 51 to cope with the crowds of people rushing the gates shouting "The Truth Is Out There."

Then the big day dawned...

... and 150 people showed up.

Well, 150 people traveled within sight of the fence, which isn't illegal anyhow, and only half of those decided to go up to the main gates.  The guards told the 75 who made it to the gates that they couldn't come in, and as befits a bunch of Fearless Conspiracy-Destroying Stormers, all but two of them said, "Oh.  Okay.  Never mind, then."  Of the two who were actually arrested, one of them got caught trying to duck under the fence, and the other was nabbed for pissing on a fence post.

The upshot is that of the millions of Truth Seekers who pledged to get into Area 51 by whatever means necessary, the number who got one foot inside the fence was... one.  And "one foot inside" was apparently all she got before she was cuffed by the authorities.

So... that's kind of underwhelming.  Makes me glad I didn't fork over money for a plane ticket and rental car.  I'm not exactly the lawbreaking type anyhow, so I expect if a guard had told me, "If you try to get in here, I'm going to shoot you so many times your torso will look like a block of Swiss cheese," I'd have looked like one of those Looney Tunes characters who's running away so fast his feet are just a circular blur.

Because that's how brave I am.

In any case, I'm glad no one got hurt, which would have sucked.  And I bet Matty Roberts is breathing a sigh of relief.  Me, I'm still curious about what's in there, although I think the chance that they actually do have evidence of extraterrestrials is slim to none, whatever Fox Mulder would have you believe.  But the fact that this was a big flop says something interesting about human nature, doesn't it?  We have a remarkably short attention span, as a species, and when push comes to shove, most of us will choose to stay home eating potato chips and watching reruns of Dr. Who rather than putting ourselves in an uncomfortable situation.  Which explains a lot about some of the quandaries we've ended up in, and why it's so hard to get people to take action.  I mean, if you can't even get two million people to rush the gates of a military facility to get probably-nonexistent evidence of aliens, you have to wonder what it would take to get people mobilized.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Tuesday, September 24, 2019

An early walker

A recent discovery of a proto-hominid has been raising eyebrows in the paleoanthropology circles, for a variety of reasons.

Called Rudapithecus, it dates from the late Miocene Epoch, around ten million years ago.  It was small, at least compared to some of our other cousins, weighing in at between twenty and forty kilograms, roughly the size of your average golden lab.  Exactly where it fits in our family tree isn't certain yet, although most likely it's a collateral line, not one that is directly ancestral to Homo sapiens.

So far, nothing that surprising.  But there are a few things about Rudapithecus that are causing some serious head-scratching.  Among them:
  • Rudapithecus was bipedal.  This is pretty certain from the shape of the pelvis, which has a morphology much more like ours than it is like the largely-quadrupedal chimps and gorillas.
  • This bipedalism evolved way earlier than we'd thought.  The first unequivocal evidence we have of bipedalism -- or, that we had before this discovery -- was the African species Ardipithecus from a bit over four million years ago.  So if the inferences are correct, this more than doubles the antiquity of bipedalism in our relatives.
  • Weirdest of all -- Rudapithecus didn't live in Africa.  This discovery was made in a quarry in Rudabánya, Hungary.
So this will require some serious reworking of our understanding of primate evolution.
Lineage of hominins. That's us, way up near the top left. The left-hand scale is a time axis, in millions of years before present. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dbachmann, Hominini lineage, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Rudapithecus was pretty ape-like and probably moved among branches like apes do now—holding its body upright and climbing with its arms," said Carol Ward, a Curators Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences in the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and lead author of the study.  "However, it would have differed from modern great apes by having a more flexible lower back, which would mean when Rudapithecus came down to the ground, it might have had the ability to stand upright more like humans do.  This evidence supports the idea that rather than asking why human ancestors stood up from all fours, perhaps we should be asking why our ancestors never dropped down on all fours in the first place...  We were able to determine that Rudapithecus would have had a more flexible torso than today's African apes because it was much smaller...  This is significant because our finding supports the idea suggested by other evidence that human ancestors might not have been built quite like modern African apes."

So -- contrary to our usual picture of our ancestry -- it may be that the most recent common ancestor of humans, chimps, and gorillas (somewhere in the red slice on the graph) might have been more like us than they were like the other great apes, at least in terms of locomotion.  Kind of punches another hole in our self-importance, doesn't it?  We tend to have the attitude, "Of course we're the most highly evolved primate.  The further back you go, the more primitive and ape-like they get."  Now, it's looking like we may need to reconsider that.  It may be that the mostly-quadrupedalism of chimps and gorillas may have been the more recent innovation.

In any case, I'm sure this won't be the last you hear on the subject.  As with everything in science, it's subject to revision if new data comes to light.  And given the discovery of this fossil in a most unlikely location, I'm not even putting any money on where the next bit of evidence will come from.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Monday, September 23, 2019

A rain of dust

One of the problems with the modern industrialized worldview -- and yes, I know this is an overgeneralization, but still -- is our tendency to think we're capable of controlling everything.

I'm not so much talking about simple day-to-day occurrences.  At least on a theoretical level, we're all aware we could get clobbered by a truck while crossing the road.  But the bigger stuff all seems so solid, so unshakeable, that it's hard to imagine it ever changing.  Of course the grocery stores will always have food, there'll always be electricity available when we plug in our toasters, water will flow when we turn on the faucet.  On an even bigger scale -- it'll be warm in the summer and cool in the winter, the crops will grow, the rain will fall.

You don't have to know much science -- or history, for that matter -- to realize how false this attitude is.  Even small perturbations to the global ecosystem can have drastic consequences.  (Just as a handful of examples -- the 1984-1985 drought in Ethiopia that left 1.2 million dead and 400,000 refugees; the drought in the Yucatán in the early 10th century C.E. that is thought to have caused the downfall of the Mayan Empire; and the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. brought on by drought and lousy farming practices.)

The fact is -- and it's a point I've made before -- we need to be extraordinarily careful in pushing at the global ecosystem, because it can respond catastrophically to purely natural circumstances.  Adding global-scale human foolishness into the equation is a recipe for disaster.

As an example of how distant events can have unexpected global consequences, take the study published last week in Science Advances suggesting that a collision between two asteroids half a billion kilometers away triggered a drastic plunge in temperatures and the initiation of an ice age.  The event, which took place in the mid-Ordovician Period (466 million years ago), involved the destruction of an asteroid on the order of 150 kilometers in diameter, creating a dust plume that rained down upon the Earth.  The dust and debris blocking the sunlight triggered a drop in global temperatures and a sudden (geologically speaking) turnaround in the climate that spread ice sheets over much of the high latitudes in both hemispheres.

Of course, cosmic dust is falling into the Earth's atmosphere all the time, but this event caused a massive spike in the amount.  "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," said study co-author Philipp Heck of the University of Chicago in an interview with Astronomy.  "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000."

The outcrop in Sweden that the researchers studied.  The layer containing the debris from the collision is visible as a gray line about 2/3 of the way up the cliff face.  [Image courtesy of Philipp Heck and the Field Museum]

The result of the cool-down was a huge increase in biodiversity as life forms evolved to cope with the change.  But before you start in on the "life finds a way" line of thought, and that this'll save us from the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, allow me to point out that the massive Ordovician chill was slower than today's warm-up by orders of magnitude.  "In the global cooling we studied, we're talking about timescales of millions of years," said Heck. "It's very different from the climate change caused by the meteorite 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs, and it's different from the global warming today — this global cooling was a gentle nudge.  There was less stress."

So yeah.  Having a thousand times the amount of dust flung at us from the explosion of an asteroid 150 kilometers across is still not as drastic as what we're currently doing to the climate.

Oh, and in a rather horrid coincidence, that quantity of debris is roughly equal to the amount of plastic we produced in 2015, 79% of which was landfilled.

So the idea that somehow the Earth is obligated to remain hospitable to human life regardless what we do to it -- or what happens outside of our sphere of control -- would be ludicrous if it weren't so terrifying.  It's why ham-handed efforts to "own the libs" by nitwits like Laura Ingraham (who tried to be funny by "attempting to drink a light-bulb stuffed steak using plastic straws") fall flat if you know anything at all about science.

Go ahead, Laura, laugh it up.  You better hope that we "libs" are overestimating the danger posed by the pro-industry, pro-fossil-fuels, damn-the-ecology-full-speed-ahead policies favored by people of your stripe.  And don't even start with me about how environmentally-conscious people are "hoping for disaster" or "trying to destroy the economy."  Fearing that something is likely to happen isn't the same as hoping it will happen, which should be clear to anyone who has an IQ larger than their shoe size and concern for anything other than short-term financial gain.

So once again, we have a piece of research about a distant event millions of years ago providing a cautionary tale about what's happening here and now.  I wish I had some kind of positive note to end this on, but increasingly, it's looking like our current behavior is likely to throw us past a tipping point -- and our long-term legacy might be appearing to some scientist in the distant future as a gray stripe in a rock outcrop.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]





Saturday, September 21, 2019

Silence in the skies

Much as I hate to end the week on a dark note, I felt like I had to tell you about an alarming piece of research indicating that we may be in a lot more ecological trouble than we realized.

My wife and I live in a very "birdy" area -- right in the middle of a flyway, so we get a lot of what are called "passage migrants" that come through in spring heading to breeding grounds in eastern Canada, and back again in autumn as they fly toward their winter homes in more temperate latitudes.  We also have a great number of breeding residents, and (especially in a rural area such as ours) any wooded areas or natural fields are usually alive with birds, especially in late spring and early summer.

This spring, though, we noticed that there seemed to be a much smaller number, and smaller diversity, than usual.  One of the first spring birds we hear around here is the Eastern Phoebe, and the first one I heard was weeks later than usual (and we heard very few of them at all, despite the fact that they're very common most years).  We ordinarily have Baltimore Orioles nesting in our back yard, and I only heard a single oriole -- and that from a distance -- all summer.  The lovely Rose-breasted Grosbeak, usually a common bird at our feeders, showed up only once or twice in May, and not at all afterward.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of photographer Ken Thomas]

Not a single Scarlet Tanager this year.  No Least Flycatchers.  No House Wrens.  No Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.  No Veeries (sad, because its beautiful song is usually a lovely part of a walk through the woods around here).  No Black-throated Blue, Black-throated Green, Blue-winged, or Black-and-White Warblers.  Barely any Eastern Meadowlarks (usually common in the field across the road from our house, and part of the dawn chorus all summer), Indigo Buntings, Savannah Sparrows, Wood Thrushes.

Now, I'm not saying this decline was true everywhere, and it may be that some of the species we didn't see this year were abundant elsewhere.  But the shift in what once were commonplace backyard birds was striking -- and disconcerting.

Apparently, however, we're not the only ones who are experiencing an overall decline in numbers and diversity.  According to a paper published this week in Science, compared to 1970 there's been a 29% overall decrease in avian populations in the United States.

You read that right.  Over one in four are gone, an estimated total of three billion birds.

If this doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you need to stop and think about this a little more.

This loss of America's avifauna affects more than just birders, especially when you read the paper and find out that the decline wasn't uniform.  Species whose habitat was protected under the Migratory Bird Act -- mainly waterfowl like ducks and geese -- have done all right, and in fact some species have increased in numbers since 1970.  The hardest hit were the woodland and grassland birds -- species vulnerable to poor land utilization practices, habitat loss, and the increasing use of pesticides in agriculture.

Still, why does it matter?  A few pretty birds gone, which is sad, but why is it a concern for your average human being?  The term "canary in the coal mine" has almost become a cliché, but it applies here.  These species are sounding the alarm for overall ecological degradation, which ultimately affects all species, ourselves included.  The idea that we can devastate the environment and reap no consequences can only be believable if you have no concept whatever of how biology works.

If we don't change our ways, we're going to get our comeuppance sooner rather than later.  You can't keep pulling threads out of the tapestry without the entire thing falling to pieces.  Or, as Sierra Club founder John Muir put it: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]






Friday, September 20, 2019

Pitch perfect

Following up on a post last week about our perception of aesthetics in music, today we look at the question of whether the way our brains interpret tone structure is inborn.

While it may appear on first glance that the major key scale -- to take the simplest iteration of tone structure as an example -- must be arbitrary, there's an interesting relationship between the frequencies of the notes.  Middle C, for example, has a frequency of about 260 hertz (depending on how your piano is tuned), and the C above middle C (usually written C') has exactly twice that frequency, 520 hertz.  Each note is half the frequency of the note one octave above.  The frequency of G above middle C (which musicians would say is "a fifth above") has a frequency of 3/2 that of the root note, or tonic (middle C itself), or 390 hertz.  The E above middle C (a third above) has a frequency of 5/4 that of middle C, or 325 hertz.  Together, these three make up the "major triad" -- a C major chord.  (The other notes in the major scale also have simple fractional values relative to the frequency of the tonic.)

[Note bene:  Music theoretical types are probably bouncing up and down right now and yelling that this is only true if the scale is in just temperament, and that a lot of Western orchestral instruments are tuned instead in equal temperament, where the notes are tuned in intervals that are integer powers of the basic frequency increase of one half-tone.  My response is: (1) yes, I know, and (2) what I just told you is about all I understand of the difference, and (3) the technical details aren't really germane to the research I'm about to reference.  So you must forgive my oversimplifications.]

Because there are such natural relationships between the notes in a scale, it's entirely possible that our ability to perceive them is hard-wired.  It takes no training, for example, to recognize the relationship between a spring that is vibrating at a frequency of f (the lower wave on the diagram) and one that is vibrating at a frequency of 2f (the upper wave on the diagram).  There are exactly twice the number of peaks and troughs in the higher frequency wave as there are in the lower frequency wave.


Still, being able to see a relationship and hear an analogous one is not a given.  It seems pretty instinctive; if I asked you (assuming you're not tone deaf) to sing a note an octave up or down from one I played on the piano, you probably could do it, as long as it was in your singing range.

But is this ability learned because of our early exposure to music that uses that chord structure as its basis?  To test this, it would require comparing a Western person's ability to match pitch and jump octaves (or other intervals) with someone who had no exposure to music with that structure -- and that's not easy, because most of the world's music has octaves, thirds, and fifths somewhere, even if there are other differences, such as the use of quarter-tones in a lot of Middle Eastern music.

Just this week a paper was published in the journal Current Biology called "Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing," by Nori Jacoby (of the Max Planck Institute and Columbia University), Eduardo A. Undurraga, Joaquín Valdés, and Tomás Ossandón (of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Malinda J. McPherson and Josh H. McDermott (of MIT).  And what this team discovered is something startling; there's a tribe in the Amazon which has had no exposure to Western music, and while they are fairly good at mimicking the relationships between pairs of notes, they seemed completely unaware that they were singing completely different notes (as an example, if the researchers played a C and a G -- a fifth apart -- the test subjects might well sing back an A and an E -- also a fifth apart but entirely different notes unrelated to the first two).

The authors write:
Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear.  We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon—the Tsimane', who live in relative isolation from Western culture—as well as US musicians and non-musicians.  Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges.  Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range.  Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible.  But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above or below the heard tones, Amazonians did not, ignoring the note “chroma” (C, D, etc.)...  The results suggest the cross-cultural presence of logarithmic scales for pitch, and biological constraints on the limits of pitch, but indicate that octave equivalence may be culturally contingent, plausibly dependent on pitch representations that develop from experience with particular musical systems.
Which is a very curious result.

It makes me wonder if our understanding of a particular kind of chord structure isn't hardwired, but is learned very early from exposure -- explaining why so much of pop music has a familiar four-chord structure (hilariously lampooned by the Axis of Awesome in this video, which you must watch).  I've heard a bit of the aforementioned Middle Eastern quarter-tone music, and while I can appreciate the artistry, there's something about it that "doesn't make sense to my ears."

Of course, to be fair, I feel the same way about jazz.

In any case, I thought this was a fascinating study, and like all good science, opens up a variety of other angles of inquiry.  Myself, I'm fascinated with rhythm more than pitch or chord structure, ever since becoming enthralled by Balkan music about thirty years ago.  Their odd rhythmic patterns and time signatures -- 5/8, 7/8, 11/16, 13/16, and, no lie, 25/16 -- take a good bit of getting used to, especially for people used to good old Western threes and fours.

So to conclude, here's one example -- a lovely performance of a dance tune called "Gankino," a kopanica in 11/16.  See what sense you can make of it.  Enjoy!

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]