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.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Monster mash-up

Today we're going to turn our attention once more to the distant past, for three stories about three very strange extinct animals.

The first one springboards off Monday's post, about the spectacular Kem Kem fossil beds in Morocco, that gives us a snapshot of "the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth," according to Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Detroit, who led the team that investigated the site.

What we already knew was impressive enough, with scads of gigantic predators with Big Nasty Pointy Teeth coming at you from all directions, including overhead.  But a paper this week in Nature added another dimension to one of the Kem Kem species -- Spinosaurus, a thirteen-meter-long, eighteen-ton dinosaur with a giant sail running down its back and a row of evil-looking conical six-centimeter-long teeth.

Thus far, it sounds like another lumbering predator of the kind made famous by Jurassic Park, but now Nizar Ibrahim is lead author on another study, called "Tail-Propelled Aquatic Locomotion in a Theropod Dinosaur," we find out something that makes it even more terrifying:

This thing was aquatic.

So we're talking about a water-dwelling predator that makes great white sharks look like goldfish.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mariomassone, Spinosaurus white background 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The authors write:
This dinosaur has a tail with an unexpected and unique shape that consists of extremely tall neural spines and elongate chevrons, which forms a large, flexible fin-like organ capable of extensive lateral excursion.  Using a robotic flapping apparatus to measure undulatory forces in physical models of different tail shapes, we show that the tail shape of Spinosaurus produces greater thrust and efficiency in water than the tail shapes of terrestrial dinosaurs and that these measures of performance are more comparable to those of extant aquatic vertebrates that use vertically expanded tails to generate forward propulsion while swimming.  These results are consistent with the suite of adaptations for an aquatic lifestyle and piscivorous diet that have previously been documented for Spinosaurus.  Although developed to a lesser degree, aquatic adaptations are also found in other members of the spinosaurid clade, which had a near-global distribution and a stratigraphic range of more than 50 million years, pointing to a substantial invasion of aquatic environments by dinosaurs.
So this gives new meaning to the tagline from Jaws, "Don't go into the water."

Then from Madagascar we have a well-preserved fossil from the weird -- and poorly-known -- group called gondwanatheres.  These were mammals, mostly confined to the Southern Hemisphere (unsurprising given the name, if you know your prehistoric geography), and despite a superficial similarity to a capybara, aren't closely related to any current mammalian group.

[Artist's reconstruction of the gondwanathere Vintana sertichi [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/, Vintana NT small, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The most recent find is from the species Adalatherium hui, which is a Greek/Malagasy mishmash meaning, basically, "crazy beast."  The species predated the Cretaceous Extinction -- so it coexisted with the last of the non-avian dinosaurs -- and had a number of bizarre features, such as a hole in the top of the snout.  The oddity of its features may have to do with isolation in an island environment, allowing the evolution of the species to run in a different direction from its mainland relatives.  "Island environments promote evolutionary trajectories among mammals and other vertebrates that contrast with those on continents, and which result in demonstrable anatomical, physiological and behavioural differences," write the authors, a team led by David Krause of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  "These differences have previously been ascribed to markedly distinct selection regimes that involve factors such as limited resources, reduced interspecific competition and a paucity of predators and parasites."

So here's a reconstruction of Adalatherium.  The badger-like coloration is artistic license, of course, based on the inference from its skeleton that it made its living by digging:


[Image courtesy of Andrey Atuchin]

The gondwanatheres seem to be closely related to another weird extinct mammalian group, the multituberculates, about which I wrote a year ago.  Both vanished, for reasons unknown, in the Miocene Epoch, on the order of fifteen million years ago.

The latest piece of research is about the strangest, most alien-looking animal ever, Tullimonstrum (the "Tully Monster," named after Francis Tully, who discovered the first fossils of the species).  If you think I'm being hyperbolic, here's what the Tully Monster looked like:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PaleoEquii, Tullimonstrum, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The thing was so peculiar that paleontologists couldn't even decide if it was an invertebrate or a proto-vertebrate; the evidence seemed to favor the latter, and a 2016 study concluded it was an ancestral vertebrate related to lampreys and hagfish based upon its eye structure, fins, and teeth.  But now, new research that included detailed analysis of the eyes using a particle accelerator to determine the elemental makeup of the remnants in the fossil has thrown a wrench into that explanation.  In an article in LiveScience, paleontologist Chris Rogers of the University College-Cork tells us that the ratio of zinc to copper in the animal's eyes is much more like an invertebrate than a vertebrate -- but before we rewrite all the textbooks on Precambrian animals, the distribution of copper wasn't much like an invertebrate, either.  "We... found that Tully's eyes contain different type of copper to that found in vertebrate eyes," Rogers writes.  "But the copper also wasn't identical to that in the invertebrates we studied.  So while our work adds weight to the idea that Tully is not a vertebrate, it doesn't clearly identify it as an invertebrate either."

So we're back to the "what the hell is it?" stage of things.

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the past for today.  As I've pointed out before, the inherently fragmentary nature of the fossil record means that our picture of what life was like back then is going to be incomplete at best.  But slowly, painstakingly, researchers are refining our view of the animal life of eons long gone -- and what they're showing us is strange indeed.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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




Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Perchance to dream

New from the "They Made A Movie Out of This and It Didn't End Well," we have: some researchers at MIT who are trying to figure out how to hack into, and control, your dreams.

The world of dreams is so strange and vivid that the idea of selecting or controlling dream content has been the subject of fiction for a very long time.  Ursula LeGuin's brilliant novel The Lathe of Heaven is about the intersection between dreaming and reality -- and about a disturbed young man's discovery that the content of his dreams is altering everyone's reality.

The problem is, because everyone changes simultaneously, so do their memories -- meaning the only one who realizes what's going on is the young man himself.  And when he convinces his psychologist that he's telling the truth, the psychologist decides to use that ability for his own malign purposes.

Introducing a frightening ethical issue into the whole thing.

It's popped up over and over again.  Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the necessity of dreams, and what might happen if we're deprived of REM sleep, in the episode "Night Terrors" -- which has the scene which in my opinion is the single scariest moment in the whole series, when Dr. Crusher is wandering through the makeshift morgue trying to figure out why an entire starship's crew died violent deaths at each other's hands, and she turns around -- and the corpses, still shrouded in their sheets, are all sitting up.


Not to be outdone, The X Files did an episode about controlling dreams -- and how that could be used to alter someone's personality and intentions -- in the episode "Amor Fati," wherein the evil Cigarette-Smoking Man has Fox Mulder so sunk in a realistic dream that Dana Scully has to enter the dream to rescue him by convincing him it's all an illusion.

Perhaps most famously, the movie Inception looks at the possibility of hacking into someone's dreams and placing a subconscious suggestion in the dreamer's mind -- without, of course, his own permission.  This is a lot closer to what the MIT scientists are doing (more on that in a moment), leading to ethical issues that are a bit more likely than the ones in Lathe to stare us in the face.

So this obsession with dreams has come up again and again in fiction, and no wonder.  The content of dreams is wild, and for most of us, uncontrollable.  There's the estimated one percent of us who regularly lucid dream -- they're aware during dreams that they're dreaming, and can learn to control the content -- but most of us, myself included, can't do that.

But now, some researchers at MIT are trying to change all of that.

In the MIT "Dream Lab," scientists have developed a device call Dormio -- it's a form-fitted glove that detects when you're slipping into sleep, and injects an audio cue to insert some image or another into your dream state.  In one trial, the word was "tiger" -- and an impressive number of the test subjects reported that their dreams involved tigers.

Of course, this is just the first step toward broadening our reach into the dream world.  "People don’t know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves," said Dream Lab researcher Adam Horowitz.  "Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important."

Another Dream Lab researcher, Judith Amores, is trying a different route into the dreaming subconscious -- through the sense of smell.  Long known to have intimate ties into memory, the sense of smell might be a way to jump into the dream world without using an audio cue (which for light sleepers, might simply wake them up).  "The sense of smell is particularly interesting because it’s directly connected to the memory and the emotional parts of the brain — the amygdala and the hippocampus," Amores said.  "And that’s a very interesting gateway to access well-being."

All of it opens up a vast array of possibilities not only for research, but for psychological healing.  A dream-based approach to treating PTSD, for example, has very real potential.  Since one of the functions of REM sleep seems to be memory consolidation, there could also be applications to improving learning capacity and retention of information.  But beyond that, there's just the capacity for it to be pure fun.

"It’s such an exhilarating feeling to lucid dream," Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, said in an MIT blog post.  "You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

On one hand, I'm not sure we need something else that allows people to hide from reality.  On the other, if I had a device I could wear that allowed me to control my dreams, I'd do it every night.

Think of the fun you could have with self-controlled no-repercussions full-body-sensurround fantasies every night.  I think a lot of us might not want to wake up.

Which brings up a whole other set of problems.

In any case, the researchers in the Dream Lab and other similar projects are looking at this as a way to connect to unused potential, not as a way of controlling people, which is the right approach.  "This is less like, 'I’m going to map something so I control it,' and more like, 'I’m going to give you a looking glass, and you do with that what you will,'" Horowitz said.  "I have very little interest in creating tools that take people further from themselves.  That’s definitely not the hope."

Or, as Ruben Naiman of the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine put it, "The thing with hacking dreams is that it’s based on a presumption that the subconscious is unintelligent, that it doesn’t have a life.  The unconscious, it’s another kind of intelligence.  We can learn from it. We can be in dialogue with it rather than dominate it, rather than ‘tap in’ and try to steer it in directions we want."

So all of this is pretty exciting, and I still wouldn't hesitate to volunteer to try out whatever they come up with.  But if I put that glove on and end up getting the audio clue, "Corpses in a morgue sitting up," I am right the fuck outta there.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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




Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The voices in our heads

If you needed any further evidence that novelists really are a breed apart, consider the study that was carried out by some researchers at Durham University that appeared in the journal Consciousness and Cognition last month, and was the subject of an article in The Guardian this week.

The team of psychologists surveyed authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh, in 2014 and 2018, and asked a  set of curious questions:
1. How do you experience your characters?
2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice?  Please tell us about this process.
7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around?  If so, please describe these experiences.  How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?
Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway.  But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters.  62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.

You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type that I am, to scoff at this.  But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Martin Hricko, Ghosts (16821435), CC BY 3.0]

Here are two striking examples of this -- with as little in the way of spoilers as I can manage, in case you want to read the story yourself.

My novella Convection, in the collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows, is about seven people trapped in an apartment complex during a Category-5 hurricane, trying to survive while the world is falling apart around them.  I had initially come up with the character of Jennie Trahan to be the obnoxious, irritating antagonist, getting in everyone's way, criticizing, obstructing, and generally being a class-A bitch.  About a third of the way through, something happened -- something I can best describe as Jennie telling me (in her bossy, snarky tone of voice) that she wanted a different role.  It was almost like she yanked the keyboard out of my hand, told me to go to hell, and started writing her own part.  In the end, you not only find out why she acts the way she does -- something I honestly didn't know about her when I came up with her -- she ends up being one of the most sympathetic (and important) characters in the story.

The other case of this was in my novel Lines of Sight, the first in the Boundary Solution trilogy.  One of the first things that happens is that while out investigating a sighting of the mysterious and frightening Black-eyed Children, the main character Kerri Elias's partner Mike Rivers is abducted.  This spurs Kerri to try to find out what happened to him and, if possible, get him back, but the problem was that I didn't know what exactly had happened to him until halfway through the second book in the trilogy, Whistling in the Dark.  There was a point where suddenly I had the puzzle worked out -- it just popped into my head, as if someone else had explained it to me -- and I said out loud, "Oh, so that's what happened to Mike!  Huh.  I didn't know that."

Those of you who are not fiction writers might well be backing away slowly, keeping your eye on me the whole time, but turns out, I'm far from the only author this has happened to.  Here are some examples that came out of the study:
  • I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head.  I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
  • Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write.  Of course, I turn and no one is there.
  • They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me.  They belong to the characters.  They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
  • I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen.  To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
  • They do their own thing!  I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.
"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech...  Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions.  For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."

Which is kind of fascinating.  When I've done book signings, the single most common questions revolve around where my characters and plots come from.  I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me."  They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important.  I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.

I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside.  Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.

But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful.  So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably powerful and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.

And I swear, I didn't have any idea about Jennie Trahan's backstory and what happened to Mike Rivers.  Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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




Monday, April 27, 2020

The hills are shadows

One of the reasons I became a speculative fiction novelist is because I love to think about how the world would be if the rules were different.  What if we could pick up from inanimate objects the emotional impressions of the last person who held them?  What if time travel into the past were possible?  What if the force of people's belief caused mythological creatures to come to life?

The difficulty is that this dreaminess about altering the laws of the universe runs headlong into my desire to understand what the actual rules are, and which ultimately led me to dedicate my life to science.  After an unfortunate time in my teenage years when I worked really, really hard to convince myself that all the weird paranormal shit I'd immersed myself in was the truth, I was forced by the modicum of intellectual honesty I had back then to admit that the evidence for all of it was nil, and to give the whole thing up as a bad job.

So I ended up teaching science and critical thinking, and simultaneously writing paranormal fiction.  Seemed like a good compromise.

But this push to explore the fringes still shows up.  I'm most attracted to the areas of science that are strange and counterintuitive.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia will attest to this, given my near obsession with things like quantum physics and the behavior of black holes.  And there's one other realm of science that allows me to do what journalist Kathryn Schulz calls "seeing the world as it isn't" -- and that's paleontology.

Because after all, things in the distant past were very, very different than they are now.  We're so used to looking around us and seeing The World As It Is that we don't often consider that this brief point in time is part of a continuum of geological and biological change, and is framed on both sides -- past and future -- by worlds that were and will be wildly different from the one we live in.

As an example, consider the paper published last week in the journal ZooKeys, which is about the fauna of the Sahara.  Immediately I said that name, I'm guessing you pictured sand dunes, perfectly clear blue skies, no plant life (maybe a palm tree or two, if there was an oasis in your imagination), and perhaps a camel or a white-robed Bedouin.

Turn the chronometer back a hundred million years, though, and you wouldn't even know it was the same place.

At that point, the Sahara was a tropical forest, with a huge bay of the Tethys Ocean (the remnant of which we now call the Indian Ocean) right in the middle.  The Atlantic Ocean had only recently opened up, and western Africa was separated from South America by a narrow strait.  What is now an unbroken swath of desert was a large island in the west, a smaller island in the middle of the central bay, and a big chunk of land to the east that is now the remainder of the continent of Africa.

A map of the continents during the late Cretaceous Period [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mannion, P. D. (2013). "The latitudinal biodiversity gradient through deep time". Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29 (1). DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2013.09.012., LateCretaceousMap, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that just scratches the surface.  The paper I referenced above, "Geology and Paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Kem Kem Group of Eastern Morocco," by a team led by Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Detroit, describes the fossil finds in the Kem Kem Group, a dazzlingly rich fossil bed that is only now beginning to be investigated thoroughly.

What this fossil bed shows us is a world that's not only drastically different from how we picture the Sahara today, it's drastically different from anything currently on Earth.  "This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth," Ibrahim said in an interview in Science Daily, "a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long."

Such a time-traveller, in their short remaining life expectancy, would meet up with such beasts as Carcharodontosaurus -- the name means "jagged-toothed lizard" -- which averaged eight meters from tip to tail, just shy of the length of an average school bus.  Its signature teeth were twenty centimeters long and serrated like steak knives.  There were twenty-meter-long crocodilians such as Aegisuchus, which were big enough to turn your average modern saltwater crocodile into saltwater taffy.  There was the fifteen-meter-long, twenty-ton Spinosaurus, another carnivore.  The skies were no safer -- there was a variety of pterodactyloids, including the flying hunter Apatorhamphus, which had a long, needle-toothed snout and a wingspan of five meters.

And that's just a sampler.

"Many of the predators were relying on an abundant supply of fish," said study co-author Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth.  "This place was filled with absolutely enormous fish, including giant coelacanths and lungfish.  The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times larger than today's coelacanth [which averages two meters in length].  There is an enormous freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth, they are like barbed daggers, but beautifully shiny."

So if you went for a swim, at least you'd have something pretty to look at while you were being messily devoured.

But the vagaries of plate tectonics and climate eventually widened the Atlantic and closed off the bay in the mid-Sahara, and the place started to dry out.  It was green for a lot longer than you'd think, however.  There's evidence that as little as seven thousand years ago, the Sahara got a great deal more rain and was much more verdant than it is today, but a shift in the path of the African monsoon turned off the tap and converted the whole area into a vast, mostly-uninhabitable desert.

I'd like to close with the beautiful and poignant words Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in his poem "In Memoriam."  I've quoted them here before, but they are so apposite there's really no fitter way to end.  Read this, and think about the Sahara -- and what your own homeland might look like in a hundred million years' time.
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves, and go.
***************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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




Saturday, April 25, 2020

Spirals and ice ages

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia recently sent me a link that spells out why we're headed to another ice age, which precipitated my vanishing down the rabbit hole for almost two hours.

The gist of the first website I looked at is that we're headed for an ice age despite everything we're currently doing to send us into the climate change hothouse, because the current model of the Solar System is "not only boring, but incorrect."  This follows the well-known scientific law that if you're bored by a theory, that's evidence that it's wrong.

This startling revelation came from a post on the r/Conspiracy subreddit that could be used as an advertisement about why it's critical to take high school physics.  It starts with a video on YouTube called "The Helical Model: Our Solar System is a Vortex," wherein we find out that because the Sun is traveling in a (more-or-less) circular path around the center of the galaxy, the planets aren't traveling in circles, they travel instead in a "vortex."  "The Sun is like a comet," the video tells us, "dragging planets in its wake."

Because apparently comets do that.  Who knew?

"Rotational motion" and "vortex motion" are, we are told, "completely different things."  Then we're shown all sorts of pretty pictures of spiral stuff like ammonite shells and fern fiddleheads.

But so far, what we've been shown is hardly startling, if you know any physics at all.  Of course the motion of the planets looks different if you're viewing it from a different perspective.  Physicists call this a reference frame, and they know all about them -- the idea of reference frames is what gave Einstein the idea for the Theories of Relativity.  So it's not some kind of earthshattering idea to point out that if you're traveling with the Sun, the planets move in ellipses, and if you're not -- if you're at a fixed point above the center of the Milky Way, watching the stars zoom around in circles -- the planets will travel in a spiral-ish fashion.  The motion isn't different; what has changed is your reference frame.

But that's only the beginning.  We're then shown two drawings of "energy fields," one around a human and one around... um, something.  I'm not sure what.  The first one is marked "copyrighted," so out of respect for intellectual property rights (although this may be stretching the definition of the word "intellectual"), I'll just post a link to it.  The second, though, I'll reproduce here:



The original poster on r/Conspiracy called these "Taurus fields."  And I sat there for some time, wondering, "Why Taurus?  Why not Scorpio or Aquarius, or, for that matter, Camelopardalis?"  And then it came to me: he means "torus."  As in, a donut-shaped thing.  Although I do think that "Taurus" is correct in one sense, in that this seems to me to be a lot of bull.

In any case, this sets us up for the punch line, which I present here in toto:
...we are just on the outside of the Iron Age (the shaded in cone), and entering the Bronze Age.  Being we are still in the cone, this is causing us to travel in a spiral, but the spiral is widening.  This is causing us to gain speed, like a sling. 
This gain in speed is causing our sun to produce longer solar flares.  This will cause our planet to rise in temperature, causing our polar caps to melt.  This, of course, will cause major flooding.  We've yet to see the worst, and the worst will last about a month to a month and a half.  This will flood most of the world. 
And the sun progresses to increase, the planets will pull away (think of gravity like a bungee cord), and this will then cause global cooling, which will introduce us into a new ice age. 
The ice age will take about 300 years to fully manifest, but it will last between 12,000 - 16,000 years. 
This explains all the black projects costing trillions of dollars.  This explains all the underground bunkers being built.  This explains all the camps, all the militarization of police, all the crack down on rights.  This explains why people that seem to have all the money they need seem to need more money.
Wowza.  This may be one of the most concentrated samples of bullshit I've ever seen.  We have: a total lack of understanding of basic physics, apocalyptic stuff, "global cooling," government conspiracy theories, and underground bunkers, all in the space of just five short paragraphs.

We are then directed to two websites for further information.  The first is Half Past Human, which seems to be some kind of conspiracy site (although I did see references to "swirlies in the sky" and "spacegoat farts" as I scrolled down the entries, both of which I would prefer not to investigate, rabbit hole notwithstanding).  The second is DJSadhu.com, which is a blog with lots of videos and articles about how everything we know about physics is wrong.  Oh, and chemtrails and Cliven Bundy and music and pyramids.

It's a general rule of thumb that whenever some n00b comes down the pike, without any scientific training whatsoever, and claims to have discovered a Grand Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, (s)he is (1) probably insane, and (2) definitely wrong.  Scientists do make mistakes; as British science historian James Burke put it, in the episode "Worlds Without End" from his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, "The so-called voyage of discovery has, as often as not, made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge."  Science sometimes backtracks, makes missteps, pursues what ultimately turn out to be dead ends.

But scientists do understand the method by which you achieve understanding, and because of that, the overall body of science becomes better refined, and closer to grasping the actual truth, as time goes on.  The bottom line: we may not understand everything, but we have a pretty good idea of how to explain a lot of what we see.  The likelihood of anyone finding anything that completely overturns our understanding of any branch of science is slim indeed.

And that includes vortex motion, Taurus fields and "spacegoat farts."

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

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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




Friday, April 24, 2020

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Being a fiction writer, I think about villains a lot.

Of course, the proper word is "antagonist," but "villain" is a lot more evocative, bringing to mind such characters as the the dastardly Snidely Whiplash from the brilliant Adventures of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties.

Left to right: Snidely Whiplash, Dudley Doright, Fair Nell Fenwick, and Dudley's horse, who is named... Horse.  They just don't write comedy like that any more.

One of the things that I've always tried to do with the villains in my own novels is to make them three-dimensional.  I don't like stories where the villains are just evil because they're evil (unless it's for comedic effect, like Mr. Whiplash).  My college creative writing teacher, Dr. Bernice Webb (one of the formative influences on my writing) told us, "Every villain is the hero of his own story," and that has stuck with me.

Of course, that doesn't mean you need to sympathize with the motivation the villain has, whether it be money, sex, power, revenge, or whatever.  For example, I find this villain one of the most deeply repulsive characters ever invented, because what motivates her is pure sadism:


But it works because we've all known people like her, who use their power to hurt people simply because they can, who take pleasure in making their subordinates' lives miserable -- and because of that twist in their personality, a frightening number of them become bosses, teachers, and political leaders.

The reason this whole villainous topic comes up is because of a study published in the journal Psychological Science this week called "Can Bad Be Good?  The Attraction of a Darker Self," by Rebecca Krause and Derek Rucker, both of Northwestern University.  In a fascinating study of the responses of over 235,000 test subjects to fictional characters, Krause and Rucker found that people are sometimes attracted to villains -- and the attraction is stronger if the villain contains positive characteristics they share.

For example, Lord Voldemort was ruthless and cruel, but he also was intelligent and ambitious -- character traits that in a better person are considered virtuous.  The Joker is an essentially amoral character who has no problem killing people, but his daring, his spontaneity, his quirkiness, and his sense of humor are all attractive characteristics.  Professor Moriarty is an out-and-out lunatic -- especially as played by Andrew Scott in the series Sherlock -- but he's brilliant, clever, inventive, and fearless.

And what Krause and Rucker found was that spontaneous and quirky people (as measured by personality assessments) tended to like characters like The Joker, but not characters like the humorless Lord Voldemort.  Despite his being essentially evil, Moriarty appealed to people who like puzzles and intellectual games -- but those same people weren't so taken with the more ham-handed approach of a character like Darth Vader.

"Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us," said study co-author Rucker, in an interview in the Bulletin for the Association of Psychological Science.  "Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite."

What seems to be going on here is that we can admire or appreciate a villain who is similar to us in positive ways -- but since the character is fictional, it doesn't damage our own self-image as it would if the villain was a real person harming other real people, or (worse) if we shared the villain's negative traits as well.

"Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves," said study lead author Rebecca Krause.  "When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them."

Which makes me wonder about myself, because my all-time favorite villain is Missy from Doctor Who.  


Okay, she does some really awful things, is erratic and unpredictable and has very little concern about human life -- but she's brilliant, and has a wild sense of humor, deep curiosity about all the craziness that she's immersed in, and poignant grief over the loss of her home on Gallifrey.  Played by the stupendous Michelle Gomez, Missy is a complex and compelling character I just love to hate.

What that says about me, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand, I still fucking loathe Dolores Umbridge.  That woman deserved to get eaten, one bite at a time, by Hagrid's hippogriff Buckbeak.  Being sent to Azkaban at the end of the last movie was too good a fate for her.

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

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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




Thursday, April 23, 2020

Pseudohistory of the world

I have wondered for some time what starts a person down the path of inventing some crazy crackpot theory.  When I was a teenager, I went through a wishful-thinking, proto-woo-woo stage myself, during which I desperately wanted stuff like Tarot cards to work.  But after I messed around a little with them, I figured out pretty quickly that (1) the card patterns were entirely random, and (2) any meaning that emerged consisted of what I, or the person for whom the reading was being done, was imposing upon them.

I.e., Tarot cards don't work.  Another cool idea smashed to smithereens upon the shores of reality.

But for some folks, apparently that fact-checking protocol never kicks in.  So what starts out as a minor glitch in thinking grows, and grows, and eventually becomes this enormous counterfactual ball of bullshit, and all the while its inventor sits there thinking (s)he has revolutionized human knowledge.

Take, for example, Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who for some reason left his chosen field of study and decided to become a historian.  But he didn't do what most historians do, to wit, examining primary documents and reading scholarly papers on historical research; he set out to revise history.

Because evidently, we've been doing history wrong.

Passage from a 10th century manuscript of Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War, even though it apparently never happened [Image is in the Public Domain]

He invented something that he calls the New Chronology.  And when he calls it "new," he's not just whistlin' Dixie.

Here are a few features of his "New Chronology:"
  • None of the dating methods we use are accurate.  I mean, none.  This includes archaeological stratigraphy, dendrochronology, proxy records, and radioisotope dating.
  • Pretty much nothing that occurred before the Early Middle Ages (8th century C. E.) actually occurred.  What we think we know about those times comes from Renaissance-era forgeries, hoaxes, and lies.
  • This includes the entire Roman Empire, the city-states of the Ancient Greeks, and the pharaonic period of Egypt.
  • Jesus never existed.  The biblical story of Jesus is a mythologized account of the life of Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos.
  • The 2nd century Almagest of Ptolemy, one of the most famous mathematical treatises of the ancient world, was written in the 17th century.
  • The Tatar and Mongol invasions never happened.  Russia has pretty much always been inhabited by Russians.  And lemme tell you, the Russians are awesome.  They are pretty much the awesomest people ever.
  • The Old Testament Jerusalem is the same place as Constantinople.  Why then, you might ask, do we have a city that is now called "Jerusalem" which is in a completely different location?   Stop asking questions.
  • The Anglo-Saxon King Egbert of Wessex is the same person as Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great.
  • Because the name "England" is a cognate to the Byzantine imperial dynasty, the "Angeli."
  • Yes, I know that England and Byzantium are on opposite sides of Europe.  I believe I've already told you once to stop asking questions.
And so on and so forth. Jason Colavito, writing for Skeptic magazine, did a blistering takedown of Fomenko's theory (if I can dignify it with that name), which you would think would be unnecessary, given that a better name for "New Chronology" would be "My First Big Book of Batshit Insane Ad Hoc Assumptions."

Now, the fact that some crank has written some crazy books (seven of them, in fact) isn't an indicator of anything particularly odd, except that it still doesn't answer my original question of how someone wouldn't realize pretty quickly that what they were proposing made no sense whatsoever (with luck, before (s)he'd written seven books about it).  But what I find more surprising is that there are people who believe Fomenko.  And they include Russian chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Yes, I realize that being a chess grand master doesn't necessarily mean that you're sane in other respects.  But Kasparov seems to be a pretty reasonable guy, all things considered -- he's a political activist and has been articulate in his criticism of Vladimir Putin, and currently is on the board of directors of the Human Rights Foundation.

And yet, somehow, he thinks that Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology" makes sense.

All of which hammers home the point that I don't really understand human thought processes all that well.  Because however good you are at chess or mathematics, you're not going to convince me that the ancient Greeks didn't exist.

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

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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




Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Lonely wanderer

The phrase "the vastness of interstellar space" gets thrown around a lot, but it's hard for a lot of us even to wrap our brains around how vast it is.

Here's an analogy that will give you a feeling for it.  Imagine that the Sun (which is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter) is shrunk down to the size of a marble, with a diameter of about 1.5 centimeters.

The Earth would be about the size of a grain of fine sand, and would be roughly a meter and a half away.  Jupiter would be eleven times larger in diameter, and over five times farther away.

You ready?  The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be a somewhat smaller marble, over four hundred kilometers away.  So if the marble-Sun was located in my living room, here in upstate New York, the marble-Proxima-Centauri would be somewhere around Baltimore, Maryland.

Everything in between is empty space.

I remember when I first watched the brilliant short video Powers of Ten (which, if you haven't seen it, take ten minutes and watch -- you won't be sorry) when I was perhaps seventeen years old, and I recall vividly being blown away by the magnitude of it all -- and how once you're even in the outer reaches of our own Solar System, the Sun has diminished in brightness until it looks like nothing more impressive than an unusually bright point of light.  You get very much farther out, and the Sun itself is seen to be a rather dim and ordinary star, swallowed up in the diamonds-on-black-velvet of the perpetually dark interstellar sky.

This whole mind-boggling topic comes up because of an analysis of a comet that zipped through the Solar System late last year.  Comet 2I/Borisov, which never got closer than the orbit of Mars nor bright enough to see without a telescope, didn't make much of an impact on the layperson -- if they heard about it at all, it was on the level of "hey, there's a comet out there," but the less-than-spectacular show it put on from Earth meant that most people probably never even heard about it.

But 2I/Borisov was hiding something pretty spectacular, something that was the subject of two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy this week.  The comet had a chemistry so peculiar that it seems as if it was formed in another star system -- then made its way across interstellar space to make one and only one slingshot path around our Sun, never to be seen again.

Comet 2I/Borisov [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA and the European Space Agency]

The tipoff was that the comet had an unusually high amount of carbon monoxide -- three times higher than had ever been observed in a "local" comet.  Here's what the first paper, by Martin A Cordiner (astrochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) et al., had to say:
Comets spend most of their lives at large distances from any star, during which time their interior compositions remain relatively unaltered.  Cometary observations can therefore provide direct insight into the chemistry that occurred during their birth at the time of planet formation.  To date, there have been no confirmed observations of parent volatiles (gases released directly from the nucleus) of a comet from any planetary system other than our own...  2I/Borisov must have formed in a relatively CO-rich environment—probably beyond the CO ice-line in the very cold, outer regions of a distant protoplanetary accretion disk, as part of a population of small icy bodies analogous to our Solar System’s own proto-Kuiper belt.
For what it's worth, the CO ice-line -- the boundary between where carbon monoxide can exist as a solid and where it volatilizes into a gas -- occurs at a temperature of about 25 degrees above absolute zero.  So "very cold" doesn't begin to describe it.

The second paper, by Dennis Bodowitz (planetary scientist at Auburn University) et al., describes what was so unusual about it:
Interstellar comets offer direct samples of volatiles from distant protoplanetary disks.  2I/Borisov is the first notably active interstellar comet discovered in our Solar System.  Comets are condensed samples of the gas, ice and dust that were in a star’s protoplanetary disk during the formation of its planets, and inform our understanding on how chemical compositions and abundances vary with distance from the central star.  Their orbital migration distributes volatiles, organic material and prebiotic chemicals around their host system.  In our Solar System, hundreds of comets have been observed remotely, and a few have been studied up close by space missions.  However, knowledge of extrasolar comets has been limited to what could be gleaned from distant, unresolved observations of cometary regions around other stars, with only one detection of carbon monoxide.  Here we report that the coma of 2I/Borisov contains substantially more CO than H2O gas, with abundances of at least 173%, more than three times higher than previously measured for any comet in the inner (<2.5 au) Solar System.  Our ultraviolet Hubble Space Telescope observations of 2I/Borisov provide the first glimpse into the ice content and chemical composition of the protoplanetary disk of another star that is substantially different from our own.
Apparently, the trajectory of the comet tracks its origin back to a point somewhere in the constellation Cassiopeia -- but which star, and how far away it formed, is impossible to tell.

But it makes me picture that chunk of ice starting millions, possibly billions, of years ago in a disc of debris around a far-distant star, then being ejected and wandering for eons in the dark cold of interstellar space before having a single chance encounter with our Sun -- and afterwards, launching off in a different direction to wander in the voids once more, perhaps forever.

The whole thing makes me feel kind of sorry for it.

While anthropomorphizing a comet is probably ridiculous, it does bring home how huge the universe is, and how (comparatively) insignificant we are.  Which is always a good thing to keep in mind.  Humans tend toward hubris, and being reminded every so often that we're not actually All That And A Bag Of Potato Chips is worth it.

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

Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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