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.

Friday, January 31, 2020

Hotspot

Today's topic in Skeptophilia isn't controversial so much as it is amazing.  And shows us once again what a weird, endlessly fascinating universe we live in.

First, though, a bit of a science lesson.

A great many processes in the natural world happen because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law can be framed in a variety of ways, two of which are: (1) heat always tends to flow from a hotter object to a colder one; and (2) in a closed system, entropy -- disorder -- always increases.  (Why those are two ways of representing the same underlying physical law is subtle, and beyond the scope of this post.)

In any case, the Second Law is the driver behind weather.  Just about all weather happens because of heat energy redistribution -- the Sun warms the ground, which heats the air.  Hot air tends to rise, so it does, drawing in air from the sides and creating a low pressure center (and wind).  As the warm air rises, it cools (heat flowing away from the warmer blob of air), making water vapor condense -- which is why low pressure tends to mean precipitation.  Condensation releases heat energy, which also wants to flow toward where it's cooler, cooling the blob of air (which is also cooling because it's rising and expanding).  When the air cools enough, it sinks, forming a high pressure center -- and on and on.  (Circular air movement of this type -- what are called convection cells -- can be local or global in reach.  Honestly, a hurricane is just a giant low-pressure convector.  A heat pump, in essence.  Just a fast and powerful one.)

Okay, so that's the general idea, and to any physicists who read this, I'm sorry for the oversimplifications (but if I've made any outright errors, let me know so I can fix them; there's enough nonsense out there based in misunderstandings of the Second Law that the last thing I want is to add to it).  Any time you have uneven heating, there's going to be a flow of heat energy from one place to the other, whether through convection, conduction, or radiation.

But if you think we get some violent effects from this process here on Earth, wait till you hear about KELT-9b.

KELT-9b is an exoplanet about 670 light years from Earth.  But it has some characteristics that would put it at the top of the list of "weirdest planets ever discovered."  Here are a few:
  • It's three times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System.
  • It's moving at a fantastic speed, orbiting its star in only a day and a half.
  • It's tidally locked -- the same side of the planet is always facing the star, meaning there's a permanently light side and a permanently dark side.
  • It's the hottest exoplanet yet discovered -- the light side has a mean temperature of 4,300 C, which is hotter than some stars.
So the conditions on this planet are pretty extreme.  But as I found out in a paper by Megan Mansfield of the University of Chicago et al. that appeared in this week's Astrophysical Journal Letters, even knowing all that didn't stop it from harboring a few more surprises.

Artist's conception of KELT-9b [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Tidally-locked planets are likely to have some of the most extraordinary weather in the universe, again because of effects of the Second Law.  Here on Earth, with a planet that rotates once a day, the land surface has an opportunity to heat up and cool down regularly, giving the heat redistribution effects of the Second Law less to work with.  On KELT-9b, though, the same side of the planet gets cooked constantly, so not only is it really freakin' hot, there's way more of a temperature differential between the light side and the dark side than you'd ever get in our Solar System (even Mercury doesn't have that great a difference).

So there must be a phenomenal amount of convection taking place, with the atmosphere on the light side convecting toward the dark side like no hurricane we've ever seen.  But that's where Mansfield et al. realized something was amiss.  Because to account for the temperature distribution they were seeing on KELT-9b, there would have to be wind...

... moving at 150,000 miles per hour.

That seemed physically impossible, so there had to be some other process moving heat around besides simple convection.  The researchers found out what it is -- the heat energy on the light side is sufficient to tear apart hydrogen molecules.

At Earth temperatures, hydrogen exists as a diatomic molecule (H2).  But at KELT-9b's temperatures, the energy tears the molecules into monoatomic hydrogen, storing that as potential energy that is then rereleased when the atoms come back together on the dark side.  So once again we're talking the Second Law -- heat flowing toward the cooler object -- but the carrier of that heat energy isn't just warm air or warm water, but molecules that have been physically torn to shreds.

So, fascinating as it is, KELT-9b would not be the place for Captain Picard to take his away team.  But observed from a distance, it must be spectacular -- glowing blue-white from its own heat, whirling around its host star so fast its year is one and a half of our days, one side in perpetual darkness.  All of which goes to show how prescient William Shakespeare was when he wrote, "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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





Thursday, January 30, 2020

An epidemic of lunacy

Humans are odd creatures sometimes.

We have a regrettable tendency to abandon reason entirely when we're confronted with scary circumstances.  I suppose it's understandable enough; we're emotional as well as logical, and when we're frightened the emotional parts of our brain tend to swamp the more rational bits.

Still, it'd be nice if we could control that tendency, because it would help to reduce our likelihood of falling for weird counterfactual explanations at the times that it's the most critical for us to keep our  heads screwed on straight.

Take, for example, the most recent Scary Circumstance, namely, the outbreak of Wuhan coronavirus that so far has killed just over a hundred people, sickened thousands, and (by some estimates) left over a hundred thousand people at risk of exposure.

Coronaviruses [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

Worrisome stuff, isn't it?  The potential for a pandemic is there, and the unknowns about the virus still outnumber the knows -- the rate at which it's passed on (what the epidemiologists refer to as "R0"), whether it's mutating as it spreads, what the mortality rate is, whether it's contagious while an individual is still asymptomatic.  But as I alluded to earlier, "frightening unknown virus" does not equate to "I think I'll make bizarre shit up."

Let's start with something I've now seen four times on social media, although I couldn't find a good link to the origin of the claim.  This particular flavor of nonsense is that the coronavirus outbreak is particularly dangerous to a specific subset of humanity...

... people who have been vaccinated for other diseases.

It will come as no surprise that the people who are spreading this foolishness are the anti-vaxxers.  How exactly a vaccine for (say) mumps would make you more likely to contract coronavirus they never explain.  The reason for that, of course, is that there is no explanation, because the claim itself is idiotic.  The anti-vaxxers are simply looking for another horrible thing to blame on vaccines, and the Big Bad Guys pushing vaccination -- doctors and "Big Pharma."  And since there is no actual evidence vaccines are dangerous, and ample evidence they reduce your risk of a number of deadly diseases to near zero, if you're going to claim otherwise you pretty much have to spin your argument from whole cloth.

That feeling when you're so ignorant about vaccines you end up reinventing them by mistake.  [Screencap from Twitter]

Then, there's the even more insidious approach of the insane conspiracy theory group QAnon, who have a two-part claim: (1) that Bill Gates patented the Wuhan coronavirus in 2015 and is using it to kill off the weak in some sort of bizarre eugenics experiment; and (2) that all you have to do to cure a coronavirus infection is to drink bleach.

As far as the first part, I don't know what to say except "are you fucking kidding me right now?"  The second part, though, has been around for a while -- the bleach solution ("Miracle Mineral Solution," which contains chlorine dioxide, a highly toxic compound) has been touted as a cure-all for all sorts of viral and bacterial infections.  And the claim is correct in a sense; if you have a coronavirus infection and you drink Miracle Mineral Solution, you won't be sick any more.

You'll be dead.

Lastly, from the "How Do People This Stupid Exist?" department, we have the folks who apparently think that coronavirus has something to do with Corona beer, other than the fact that "corona" appears in both names.

Corona, I hasten to point out (probably unnecessarily), is the Latin word for "crown."  The virus got that name because it's covered with spiky projections that look a little bit crown-like; the beer was given that name because its manufacturers wanted people to think it was the King of Beers (another incorrect claim, as the King of Beers is clearly Guinness).  But the similarity between the names has evidently led some people to think that there is more to it than that, and Google searches for "beer virus" have gone through the roof.

What exactly people think the connection is, I have no idea.  My hopeful side tells me that maybe people are just wanting to find out if anyone really is silly enough to think that the beer contains the virus.  But my gut tells me that it's more likely there really are people who believe the beer is transmitting the virus, or the beer cures the virus, or possibly both at the same time.

Who the hell knows?

Anyhow -- until such time as a coronavirus vaccine is developed, the best way to avoid catching or passing on infection is to do what you (hopefully) are doing already during flu season -- wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you're sick yourself, stay home.  Other than that, try to resist the temptation to let your emotions carry you away.  Epidemics are bad enough without loopy speculation getting in the way.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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





Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Sparkling camouflage

Natural selection is such an amazing driver of diversity.  As Richard Dawkins showed so brilliantly in his tour-de-force The Blind Watchmaker, all you have to have is an imperfect replicator and a selecting agent, and you can end up with almost any result.

The only requirement is that the change has to enhance survival and/or reproduction now.  Evolution is not forward-looking, heading in the direction of whatever would be a cool idea.  (It'd be nice if it were; I've wanted wings for ages.  Big, feathery falcon wings from my shoulders.  It'd make wearing a shirt impossible, but let's face it, I hate wearing shirts anyway so that's really not much of a sacrifice.)

Anyhow, the trick sometimes is figuring out what the benefit is, because it's not always obvious.  The extravagant tail of the peacock is clearly an attractant for females, although at this point the male peacocks may have maxed out -- reached the point where the tail's advantage of attracting females is counterbalanced by the disadvantage of being so cumbersome that it makes it harder to escape predators.  When two competing selecting agents hit that balance point, the species -- with respect to that trait, at least -- stops evolving.

A good bunch of the wild colorations you find in nature have to do with sex.  Not only attracting mates in animals, but colorful flowers attracting a specific pollinator -- because pollination is (more or less) plant sex.  But not all; the stripes of the Bengal tiger are thought to break up its silhouette in the dappled sunlight of its forest home, making it less visible to prey.  The bright colors of the dart-poison frogs are warning colorations, advertising the fact that they're highly poisonous and that predators shouldn't even think about it if they know what's good for them.  A recent study concluded that one advantage of stripes in the zebra is that it confuses biting flies, including the dangerous tsetse fly (carrier of African sleeping sickness) -- horses that were draped with striped cloth (mimicking the zebra's patterns) were far less susceptible to horsefly bites.  It's probable that the stripes also confuse predators such as lions, which frequently try to target one animal in a fleeing herd and separate it from the rest, a task that's difficult if the stripes make it hard to tell where one zebra begins and the other ends.  So zebra stripes may be a twofer.

Sometimes, though, the reason for a bright coloration isn't obvious.  In the summer here in upstate New York we often see brilliant little tiger beetles, named not for stripes (most of them don't have 'em) but for their role as a voracious predator of other insects.  The ones we have here are a glistening emerald green, which I always figured camouflaged them on plant leaves -- but there are ones that are an iridescent blue, and one species is green and blue with orange spots.

Hard to call that camouflage.


Turns out that even the non-green ones might be using their sparkling colors as camouflage, however implausible that sounds.  A study that appeared this week in Current Biology, led by Karin Kjernsmo of the University of Bristol, concluded that the iridescence itself confuses predators, as much as it seems like it would attract attention.

Kjernsmo was studying the aptly-named Asian jewel beetles, which like our North American tiger beetles come in a wide range of glittering colors.  She took the wing cases of jewel beetles, both the iridescent and the matte species, and baited them with mealworms to see if birds had a preference.  85% of the targets with matte wings (of various colors) were picked off by birds, while only 60% of the iridescent ones were.

"It may not sound like much," Kjernsmo said, "but just imagine what a difference this would make over evolutionary time."

Her next question, though, was why.  This is much harder to determine, mostly because you can't ask a bird why it picked a particular insect for lunch.  (Well, you can ask.)  So what she did was a simple but suggestive experiment using human subjects -- she stuck various-colored wing cases to leaves at eye level on a forest trail, and had thirty-six human subjects walk the trail and see how many they could find.  They found 80% of the matte ones -- and only 17% of the iridescent ones!

It's a surprising result.  It may be that the shifting, sparkling surface of an iridescent insect confounds the ability of your visual cortex to make sense of what it's seeing by rendering it more difficult to perceive the edges, and therefore the shape, of what you're looking at.  The result: you can see the colors, but you don't recognize it as a beetle.  It's a plausible guess, but it will take more research to find out if it's the correct one, and if the reason the humans couldn't see iridescent wings is the same as why birds didn't eat them.

But once again, we're left with a slight difference in selection by a predator leading to what Darwin called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  The natural world is deeply fascinating, and is even more wonderful when you not only can appreciate its beauty -- but understand where that beauty may have come from.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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





Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Hunters in the skies

Despite what you might have gathered from movies like Jurassic Park, we know very little about the behavior and appearance of prehistoric animals.

The exceptions stand out because they're so rare.  We know that Cretaceous-era hadrosaur Maiasaura nested in colonies -- because paleontologists have found entire family groups fossilized in place, with nests, eggs, and young all together at the same time.  The large ornithopod Iguanodon seems to have traveled in herds, given the 1878 discovery of 31 individuals that all died more or less simultaneously in what is now Belgium.  The Cretaceous parkosaurid Oryctodromeus apparently spent a lot of time in underground burrows judging from remains found in Montana and Idaho.

And a handful of others.  Surprisingly, one of the most iconic dinosaurs from Jurassic Park -- the Velociraptor -- has never been conclusively shown to be a pack hunter (although it may have been), and almost certainly wasn't intelligent enough to figure out how to open the latch on a walk-in freezer.

So she may not have been such a Clever Girl after all.

As far as appearance, that can be even dicier.  From complete skeletons, scientists can use the position of muscle attachment points to make a good approximation at body contour, but there are a lot of structures without bones that wouldn't fossilize at all.  Consider, for example, that a fossilized elephant skeleton would show very little evidence of a trunk -- so future paleontologists probably wouldn't know it had one, and their reconstruction would look pretty different from reality.  When feathers or hair are preserved -- itself an unlikely occurrence -- scientists can guess at color and patterns from traces of pigments left behind, as with the feathered pterosaur whose tail feathers showed clear evidence of banding.

Other than that, it's pretty much all speculation based on analogy to modern species.  So it's a fair bet that if we time-traveled back to a hundred million years ago, we'd have a hell of a lot of surprises when we saw how those critters actually behaved, what they looked like, and what they sounded like.

This is why when there's a fossil that gives us a clue about behavior, it's pretty special.  Like the one described in a paper in Scientific Reports yesterday -- a fossilized squid that had a tooth from a pterosaur embedded in it.

The 150-million-year-old fossil, found in Germany, is of a thirty-centimeter-long individual of the prehistoric squid genus Plesioteuthis, but when the scientists looked carefully at it they found something extraordinary -- there was a long tooth fragment in the mantle, which after analysis they concluded came from the pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus.  I've always loved the pterosaurs -- they're far and away my favorite prehistoric animals (yes, I have favorite prehistoric animals.  Doesn't everyone?).  They vary in size from little Sordes pilosus, with a wingspan of only 0.8 meters or so, up to the mind-bogglingly huge Quetzalcoatlus, which was as long tip-to-tail as a giraffe and had a wingspan of twelve meters -- as large as a small airplane.  (Imagine what you'd do if one of those glided overhead while you were out picnicking.)

Rhamphorhynchus was on the small end of things, with a 1.8 meter wingspan.  It was a pretty cool-looking creature (I mean, as far as we can tell) -- with a long tail ending in a diamond-shaped rudder.

An amazingly well-preserved fossil of Rhamphorhynchus from Germany [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mike Beauregard from Nunavut, Canada, Rhamphorhynchus gemmingi pterosaur, CC BY 2.0]

So the new fossil find gives us some interesting evidence for this beast's feeding behavior.  What it looks like is that it probably flew low over bodies of water, similar to what the remarkable birds called Black Skimmers do today, grabbing prey that ventured too near to the surface with their long, toothy beaks.  Only this time a Rhamphorhynchus lost its fight for dinner -- it might be that at thirty centimeters, the squid was too large or too heavy for it to pull out of the water -- and lost a tooth as well.  The squid went on to fight its battles for survival another day (as, probably, did the Rhamphorhynchus), only to end up as a fossil itself, still with the predator's tooth buried in its mantle.

This fascinating glimpse of how these hunters in the prehistoric skies found their prey is all the more cool for its rarity.  It's not often the remains of a long-deceased animal can give you hints about how it behaved when it was alive.  This lens into the past has allowed us to glimpse a diverse group that died out completely 66 million years ago -- flying dinosaurs that dominated the air of a long-lost world.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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





Monday, January 27, 2020

Jump scare preparation

When I was about twelve, I was lying on the sofa in my living room one evening watching a horror movie called Gargoyles.

From the perspective of a few more decades of living, I can say now that Gargoyles was a pretty derpy movie.  The general gist was that the people who put gargoyle statues on Gothic cathedrals were sculpting from life, and that all over the world there were caves occupied by the great-great-great-etc. grandchildren of those medieval monsters.  So of course there's the intrepid scientist character who is convinced that gargoyles exist but can't get his supervisors to believe him, but he goes and investigates them anyhow, and in the process hits one of them with his pickup truck.  (The gargoyles, not his supervisors.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Florian Siebeck, Paris Gargoyle, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Well, the scientist is just thrilled by this development.  He thinks, "Wow, now I have proof!", loads the deceased gargoyle into his truck, and then stops at a motel for the night.  Then he does what you would do if you had never ever ever watched a horror movie in your life, namely: he decides that he can't leave a gargoyle corpse in the open bed of his pickup truck in the parking lot of a motel, so he drags it into the room with him.

He gets undressed for bed, turns out the lights, and -- of course -- it turns out the gargoyle isn't dead.  There's a soft, stealthy noise, and then a vaguely humanoid-shaped shadow rises, looming over the foot of the sleeping scientist's bed.

This was when my father, who was sitting in the recliner next to the couch, reached out and grabbed my shoulder and yelled, "THERE'S ONE NOW!"

After he peeled me off the ceiling with a spatula and my heart rate began to return to normal, I at least was thankful that I hadn't pissed my pants.  It was a close-run thing.

It's a wonder that I actually watch horror movies at all, because I am seriously suggestible.  When the movie The Sixth Sense first was released on DVD, my girlfriend (now wife) and I watched it at her house.  Then I had to make a forty-five minute drive, alone in my car at around midnight, then go (still alone) into my cold, dark, empty house.  I might actually have jumped into bed from four feet away so the evil little girl ghost wouldn't reach out from underneath and grab my ankle.  I also might have pulled the blankets up as high over me as I could without suffocating, following the time-tested rule that monsters' claws can't pierce a down comforter.

So yeah.  I might be a skeptic, but I am also a great big coward.

This was why I found some research that was published in the journal Neuroimage last week so fascinating.  It comes out of the University of Turku (Finland), where a team led by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa had people watching movies like The Devil's Backbone and The Conjuring while hooked to an fMRI scanner.

They had participants (all of whom said they watched at least one horror movie every six months) rate the movies they watched for suspense and scariness, count the number of "jump scares," and evaluate their overall quality.  The scientists then looked at the fMRI results to see what parts of the brain were active when, and found some interesting patterns.

As the tension is increasing -- points where you're thinking, "Something scary is going to happen soon" -- the parts of the brain involved in visual and auditory processing ramp up activity.  Makes sense; if you were in a situation with real threats, and were worried about some imminent danger, you would begin to pay more attention to your surroundings, looking for cues to whether your fears were justified.  Then at the moment of jump scares, the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and fight-or-flight response spike in activity, as you make the split-second decision whether to run, fight the monster, or (most likely in my case) just have a stroke and drop dead on the spot.

Nummenmaa and his team found, however, that all through the movie, the sensory processing and rapid-response parts of the brain were in continuous cross-talk.  Apparently the brain is saying, "Okay, we're in a horror movie, so something terrifying is bound to happen sooner or later.  May as well prepare for it now."

What I still find fascinating, though, is why people actually like this sensation.  Even me.  I mean, my favorite Doctor Who episode -- the one that got me hooked on the series in the first place -- is the iconic episode "Blink," featuring the terrifying Weeping Angels, surely one of the scariest fictional monsters ever invented.


Maybe it's so when the movie's over, we can reassure ourselves that we might have problems in our lives, but at least we're not being disemboweled by a werewolf or abducted by aliens or whatnot.  I'm not sure if this is true for me, though.  Because long after the movie's over, I'm still convinced that whatever horrifying creature was rampaging through the story, it's still out there.

And it's looking for me.

So maybe I shouldn't watch scary movies.  It definitely takes a toll on me.  And that's even without my practical joker father scaring me out of five years of my life expectancy when the monster appears.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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





Saturday, January 25, 2020

Arguing to learn

That we live in contentious times is so blatantly obvious it's kind of silly even to point it out.

Politics.  Immigration.  LGBTQ rights.  Climate change.  Religion, and its influence on public policy.  Discrimination.  Gun laws.  Poverty and homelessness.  The list of topics to argue about seems endless, as does the vitriol they engender.  A number of people I know look upon the holidays with dread, because of the potential to bring together family members with diametrically opposite opinions -- making the conditions right for turning Thanksgiving dinner into a conflagration.

Avoiding the topics, of course, strikes a lot of people as cowardly, especially when the topics themselves are of such critical importance.  We're not talking goofy arguments about trivia, like the time a friend of mine and I got in a heated debate over which Olympic sport was silliest, short-track speed skating or curling.  (The answer, obviously, is curling.  Not that I could get him to admit that.  Unfortunately, the most our argument accomplished was getting long-suffering eyerolls from both of our wives, and some sotto voce discussion between the two of them about how they ended up paired with the likes of us.)

But here, the stakes are much higher.  We argue because we feel strongly that the outcome is vitally important.  And because of this, we often adopt an argue-to-win stance -- feet planted firmly, unwilling to give an inch or accede to any suggestion that our opponents might have some points on their side.

The problem is -- and I think most people could affirm that anecdotally from their own experience -- this approach has a very poor success rate.  How often has the fight on Christmas Eve between liberal, tree-hugging Cousin Sally and conservative, Trump-supporting, Fox-News-watching Uncle Jake actually resulted in either of them changing their views?  About anything?  Yes, I think it's important to stand your ground and fight for what you believe in, but maybe it's time to admit that the approach most people take isn't working.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hector Alejandro, Two boys engaged in arm wrestling, CC BY 2.0]

That's the gist of some research published this week in Cognitive Science.  In "The Influence of Social Interaction on Intuitions of Objectivity and Subjectivity," by Matthew Fisher, Joshua Knobe, and Frank C. Keil (of Yale University), and Brent Strickland (of the École Normale Supérieure), we learn that a lot more could be accomplished if instead of an argue-to-win strategy, we adopted an argue-to-learn approach.

The researchers paired people up based on their having opposing opinions about a variety of controversial topics.  The members of one group of pairs were instructed to interact with their partners with an argue-to-win approach -- to justify their own position and to try to argue their points as objectively and convincingly as they could, and were told they would be graded on their success at convincing their partners of the error of their ways.  The members of the other group of pairs were instructed to use an argue-to-learn approach -- they were told they'd be paired with people of opposing viewpoints, but the task was to learn as much as they could about the reasoning behind their partner's opinions, and to be able to then articulate it coherently afterward.

Neither group of participants knew that the mode of argument was going to be different between different pairs -- they only knew what their own task was.  And in order to make sure that the experiment was controlled, the researchers took the extra step of having independent raters evaluate the pairs on how well they'd fulfilled the requirements of their tasks, to make certain that by random chance the argue-to-win group wasn't populated with combative types and the argue-to-learn group with peaceniks.

Afterward, test subjects were given a set of questions to determine their attitudes about there being an objective correct answer to every dilemma.  The questions included, "Given that most issues have more than one side, it is inevitable that one must be correct and the others wrong," and "Even if someone disagrees with me, (s)he has rational reasons for doing so."

Interestingly, just the task of being forced for four minutes into adopting either a no-quarter-given approach or a let's-listen-to-each-other approach created a marked difference between how participants answered the questionnaire.  The argue-to-win group were much more likely to agree with statements suggesting there was one objective correct answer, and that anyone not believing that answer were simply wrong; the argue-to-learn group were more likely to agree with statements implying that truth was nuanced, and that people of opposing opinions aren't necessarily ignorant or irrational.

So if you want to sway people, the way to do it is not through verbal fisticuffs; it's through listening to the other side's reasons and making it clear you want to learn more about their arguments, not batter them down with your own.

Now, understand that I'm not trying to say -- and neither were the researchers -- that there aren't objective truths and moral absolutes out there, or that everything is on that mushy ground of subjectivity.  Climate change deniers and young-Earth creationists are simply factually wrong.  People who support discrimination on the basis of race or sexual orientation are espousing an inherently immoral stance.  But there are a lot of ways even to approach these topics without a knock-down-drag-out fight.  Even if climate change itself is undeniable, what (if anything) we can or should do about it is certainly up for discussion.  And perhaps it might be more successful to tackle the issues of racism and misogyny and homophobia not by wavering in our own conviction to do what is right and moral, but to find out why our opponents believe what they do.  When someone shouts, "All liberals are America-haters who want to destroy our country," it might be better to say, "I'm a liberal and I don't think that.  Why do you say all liberals think that way?" rather than "Oh, yeah?  Well, you're an ignorant hate-monger!"

Not that the latter is necessarily false, just that pointing it out doesn't accomplish anything.

So that's the latest on how to keep arguments from going thermonuclear, and maybe even convincing some folks to rethink their views at the same time.  Heaven knows with the increasing polarization in the world, and the news media and pundits feeding into that every chance they get, we need to stop and listen to each other more often.

And even if the two of you leave with your views substantially unchanged, who knows?  Maybe both of you will have learned something.

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

I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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





Friday, January 24, 2020

Junk science

I get really fed up with people's gullibility sometimes.

I mean, I get it.  No one's an expert at everything, there are gaps in our knowledge, so when we hear a claim about something with which we are less-than-well-informed, we might shrug and go, "Okay, that might be true."

But the thing is, we shouldn't stop there.

There are lots of reasons a plausible-sounding claim might still be false.  It could be that the person making the claim was misinformed him/herself.  It could be (s)he was lying for some reason.  It could be that the person making the claim misinterpreted, or is misrepresenting, the source of the information.  It could be that the source itself is simply wrong.

So you don't just shrug, say, "That makes sense, I suppose," and forthwith stop thinking.  You do a little research -- in these days of the internet, it's hardly time consuming to do so.  You learn something to fill in the gap in your understanding.  You consider the reliability of the source -- either the person you heard it from, or the original source material.

Or all of the above.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it will result in your not being suckered by the latest bizarre claim, fad, or challenge floating around cyberspace.  And there have been some doozies.  Here's a sampler:
  • Some people learned that there was a chemical used as an anti-foaming agent in fast-food deep-fryers, then found out that this same chemical was used as a carrier in a study looking at ways to prevent hair loss.  The result was, I kid you not, people smooshing McDonald's fries on their scalp to reverse pattern baldness.
  • A fad "challenge" a while back put a number of people in the hospital.  The challenge was to swallow a Tide detergent pod.  It turns out this isn't what they meant by "cleanliness is next to godliness."
  • The Good Lord alone knows how this one started, but there's an "alt-med" claim that all illness is caused by your body being too acidic.  The goal, apparently, is to increase your pH, because bigger numbers are better, or something.  Who the fuck knows?  But it resulted in people making drastic adjustments to their diets to try to accomplish what their kidneys were doing anyhow.
  • Scientists found out that amongst the compounds used as a chemical signal between (and within) cells is hydrogen sulfide, which is also present in small amounts in intestinal gas.  This prompted a headline at Fox News Online (speaking of unreliable sources), and I quote, "Study Says Smelling Farts is Good For You," which then got passed all over the place (*rimshot*), often with a triumphant comment by people who fart a lot that they're actually doing a public service by gassing out their homes and offices.  This incident also gives support to the studies that show if you append "Study Shows" in front of any damnfool claim you want, you can get people to believe you.
I'd like to say that things like the aforementioned have cured people of believing idiotic claims out of hand, but that optimistic idea got squelched yesterday when I read that -- and I must state up front, I am not making this up -- guys are dipping their genitals in soy sauce because "studies show" that men have taste receptors in their testicles.

The whole thing started with the only source I know of that is less reliable than Fox News, which is The Daily Mail Fail.  Apparently back in 2017 some researchers found that there are nerve endings in the testicles of mice, of unknown function, that are similar to the bitter chemoreceptors of the tongue.  This was reported by The Daily Mail that mice taste with their balls.  And that prompted bunches of guys to dip their junk in soy sauce to see if they could confirm those results.

(I wondered immediately, why soy sauce in particular?  Why not some other condiment?  But then I realized that there are many worse choices, such as habañero pepper sauce, the thought of which is going to have me in a protective crouch for the rest of the day.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creative Tools, Kikkoman soysauce, CC BY 2.0]

Despite dozens of videos making their way around the internet with guys trying the new Testicle Teriyaki recipe and then shouting, "I can taste the soy sauce!", the whole thing is idiotic.  I mean, it pains me even to have to say that in so many words.  Even if the chemoreceptors in the testicles of humans are the same as those of mice, and they could somehow be activated by something in soy sauce, there's a fundamental problem -- stay with me here -- in that guys' balls are inside our scrotums.  So this would only have a prayer of a chance of working if we absorbed chemicals through our scrotums.  The fact that we don't should be obvious to any guy who has washed his junk with soap and water while taking a shower, and -- surprise! -- doesn't end up tasting soap.

For fuck's sake.

So if any guys reading this are tempted to dip their balls in soy sauce, just... don't.  Stop, think, research, consider the source.  And please, don't listen to The Daily Mail.  Like, on anything.  Especially if they're saying you should drop your pants and pour condiments on your naughty bits.

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

I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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





Thursday, January 23, 2020

Homicide by faceplant

Sometimes I think my friends are trying to kill me.

I say this because of the frequency with which they send me links to articles that cause me to headdesk so hard that I risk brain injury.  I mean, I'm sure they mean well.  I ask for submissions for topics for Skeptophilia, after all, so I bring a good bit of it upon myself.  But there are those who just seem to go above and beyond the call of duty.

Such as my friend James, who a couple of days ago sent me a link to an article over at Truth Theory called "Vibratory Quantum Theory Explained in 2,000-year-old Ancient Text."  This one was so far out in left field that it wasn't even in the same zip code as the ballpark.  In fact, it was enough beyond your average wacko-has-a-website that I thought it deserved some mention here.

Kind of a Hall of Infamy, or something.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, of course taking the precaution first of putting a pillow on your desk to pad your faceplant.  But if you'd prefer just getting a flavor of it rather than experiencing it in its entirety, I include below some excerpts, along with my responses.
Quantum physics now states that matter is merely an illusion and that everything is energy at a different frequency in vibratory motion.
This is the first sentence of the article, which is called "starting off with a bang." Quantum physics says no such thing.  Quantum physics is a mathematical description of the behavior of matter and energy on very small scales (scientists have to go to phenomenal efforts to observe quantum effects on the macroscopic scale).  Even if you strip away the math and try to come up with a layman's-terms-description of the model, you will find nothing about "everything is energy at a different frequency in vibratory motion."  I know this, you see, because I took an entire course called "Quantum Physics" when I was an undergraduate, and that phrase never came up.
In the first place, science teaches that all matter manifests, in some degree, the vibrations arising from temperature or heat.  Be an object cold or hot–both being but degrees of the same things–it manifests certain heat vibrations, and in that sense is in motion and vibration.
This is not so much wrong as it is trivial.  Yes, anything above absolute zero (i.e. everything in the universe) is in constant motion; that, in fact, is the definition of temperature (the average kinetic energy, or energy of motion, of the molecules in an object or substance).  But this motion is chaotic, not orderly and periodic, so it's not really a vibration, any more than a hundred kindergartners running around in a playground is a marching band.
And so it is with the various forms of Energy.  Science teaches that Light, Heat, Magnetism and Electricity are but forms of vibratory motion connected in some way with, and probably emanating from the Ether.
The ether (or aether) was shown to be nonexistent by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which happened in 1887.  Way to keep up with the cutting edge, dude.
Science does not as yet attempt to explain the nature of the phenomena known as Cohesion, which is the principle of Molecular Attraction; nor Chemical Affinity, which is the principle of Atomic Attraction; nor Gravitation (the greatest mystery of the three), which is the principle of attraction by which every particle or mass of Matter is bound to every other particle or mass.  These three forms of Energy are not as yet understood by science, yet the writers incline to the opinion that these too are manifestations of some form of vibratory energy, a fact which the Hermetists have held and taught for ages past.
Okay, gravitation is still kind of a mystery, but the other three (cohesion, molecular attraction, and chemical affinity) are all pretty well understood by anyone who has taken a high school chemistry class.  And I'll bet my next year's income that when gravitation is fully explained and incorporated into a Grand Unified Field Theory, it will turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with "hermeticism."
When the object reaches a certain rate of vibration its molecules disintegrate, and resolve themselves into the original elements or atoms.  Then the atoms, following the Principle of Vibration, are separated into the countless corpuscles of which they are composed. And finally, even the corpuscles disappear and the object may be said to Be composed of The Ethereal Substance.
Okay, I have to admit that this passage defeated me.  I've read it three times and I still don't know what the fuck it means.

After this, he goes off into the aether (ba-dum-bum-kssh) with stuff about telepathy and the occult and whatnot, and at that point my face began to resemble this:


 So I'll leave you to read the rest if you're so inclined, and you have a pillow handy.

In any case, thank you to James and to my other friends for their attempts to commit faceplant homicide.  I do appreciate the gesture, and let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you in return.  One good headdesk deserves another.

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

I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

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