The emotional thermostat

For a variety of reasons I've decided to go back to work part time.

Retirement is great, but because the universe has a perverse sense of humor, we found out the week after I retired that our house needed forty thousand dollars of foundation work in order to stop it from sliding down the hill into our creek.  The project involved putting piers under the foundation, meaning holes had to be drilled through and around the foundation down to the bedrock.  The good news, if there's any good news in a scenario like this one, is that we caught it before any serious structural damage was done to the house.

Not that you'd be able to tell from what the interior of the formerly-finished basement looked like once they were done.  The foundation work required stripping the whole thing down to the joists, studs, and cement floor, removing all the pre-existing carpet, tile, walls, and ceilings.  All of which now has to be re-installed.

L to R: Me and my son, mid-demolition.  You can probably see the family resemblance between us.

So needless to say, we ended up with a hefty home improvement loan to pay off.  This was for me the main impetus to getting another job.  So this week I started work helping out seniors with yard work and house work, and providing companion care for people who aren't able to get out much.

I've always been inordinately worried about money.  During the time I was a single dad, I was literally down to nickels at the end of every pay period, and constantly looking for ways to economize.  Putting aside extra against eventualities like unexpected car repairs was pretty much impossible.  I've had a "poverty mentality" ever since, and even though now we're doing okay financially, I still have the constant expectation that the bottom is going to drop out.

It's all part and parcel of how my depression and anxiety seem to operate.  Reality checks (like looking at our bank statement and seeing that we do, in fact, have enough to pay our mortgage this month) don't make a dent in the panicked emotional state I seem to live in most of the time.  The way I've described it is that it's like I have two brains, an emotional one and a rational one, and they are not on speaking terms with each other.

Turns out this is a remarkably accurate description of what's going on.  A study published this week in The Journal of Neuroscience by Mary Kate P. Joyce, Miguel Ángel García-Cabezas, Yohan J. John, and Helen Barbas of Boston University, entitled "Serial Prefrontal Pathways Are Positioned to Balance Cognition and Emotion in Primates," we find out that there is a part of the brain called "Area 32" (not to be confused with Area 51) which links two other reasons, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the subgenual cortex.  The subgenual cortex is connected with emotional expression; the DLPFC is essentially like a thermostat, speaking through Area 32 to the subgenual cortex and allowing emotional equilibrium.

A neurological analog to the "reality check" I mentioned earlier.

But when the DLPFC is quiet for some reason, no longer relaying inhibitory signals through Area 32, the subgenual cortex kind of stages a coup, leading to a runaway emotional reaction. 

Identifying the regions of the brain involved in certain abnormal responses is the first step toward targeted therapy.  I can speak from experience that this is really needed in the case of depression.  I've been through the wringer trying to find an antidepressant that works and doesn't give me horrible side effects -- it took three years to finally get one that seems to blunt the edge of the worst of it.  The strangest part of all this is how unpredictable it is; one person can have excellent results from an antidepressant that is either useless or actually detrimental for someone else, and honestly, no one knows why this is.

Research like this provides some hope that we may be narrowing in on what's going on.  Which is incredible news to people like me who've suffered from depression and anxiety for decades.

But now I need to get this posted and get going.  I've got to get out to my client's garden and finish cutting back her perennials.  All in a day's work.

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

To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Penguin walkabouts and sinking continents

One of the wonderful things about writing this blog every day is that it means I'm constantly learning stuff myself.

Today's topic is a good example, and kind of a curious one because it touches on three topics about which I usually credit myself with knowing a good deal, and those are geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  But because of my buddy and twin-separated-at-birth Andrew Butters, whose wonderful blog Potato Chip Math you should definitely subscribe to, I ended up learning some really cool stuff about three subjects near and dear to my heart.

The link Andrew sent me led me to a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society called "Ancient Crested Penguin Constrains Timing of Recruitment into Seabird Hotspot," which analyzes some three-million-year-old (Pliocene Epoch) penguin fossils found on the North Island.  Careful study of these fossils, of a species called Eudyptes atatu, led the researchers to the conclusion that penguins in general might have their origins not in Antarctica, as you might imagine (I know I did), but in the "lost continent" of Zealandia.

(If I can indulge a fourth interest, linguistics, the scientific name Eudyptes atatu comes from Greek and Maori roots, respectively, and means "good diver from the dawn of time."  Which I think is a pretty awesome name.) 

Anyhow, I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Zealandia.  The article Andrew sent (from the site Science Alert) said that Zealandia was a former continent that basically sank.  This sounded a little suspicious to me; Atlantis notwithstanding, continents don't sink.  The edges can be more or less covered with water depending on the extent of polar ice and the sea level, but pieces of continental crust (being thick and relatively cold) just get carried along by whatever plate they're sitting on.  So they can move, split, and join, sort of like a big free-floating game of Tetris with irregularly-shaped pieces and no rules.  But you don't make much new continental crust, and what you've got pretty much is what you're stuck with.  (The Laurentian Highlands of Québec and Ontario, for example, has been around since Precambrian times, dating back 540 million years.)

So the idea of a continent (or most of it) sinking seemed pretty far-fetched to me.  But that, apparently, is exactly what happened.

A map (courtesy of NOAA) showing the former extent of Zealandia, outlined in pink

Zealandia used to be a lush rainforest -- think New Guinea or Borneo -- but subsidence gradually reduced its size, till by the beginning of the Miocene Epoch 23 million years ago, all that remained above sea level were New Zealand and New Caledonia, and the other 93% of it lay beneath the waves.  This greatly increased the distance to the nearest land mass (Australia) and effectively isolated New Zealand entirely, which is why it has such a unique flora and fauna today.

The other continent that Zealandia used to be near was Antarctica, and from their homeland of Zealandia they colonized the (at the time much closer) southern continent, which then slid away because of plate tectonics, moving to its present position near the South Pole and taking the penguins with it.  

But the fossils of Eudyptes atatu strongly point to a New Zealand origin for penguins in general, even though the only ones that have survived there to modern times are the Fiordland Penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus), the Erect-crested Penguin (Eudyptes sclateri), the Snares Penguin (Eudyptes robustus), the Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes), and the Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor).  (You can see from the scientific names that the first three are in the same genus as the fossil species; whether they are descendants, or only cousins, isn't known.)

So that was today's opportunity to learn something about geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  Thanks again to Andrew for alerting me to the research, which I had somehow missed entirely.  Fun stuff, not least because it involves penguins, which are some of the most adorable birds in the world, if I may be allowed to interject a completely non-scientific opinion into the mix.

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

To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Little fish

I had an interesting, and rather revelatory, experience this summer.

One of my passions is running.  Well, to be more accurate, I like having run.  While I'm out there, slogging up the hills and dripping sweat, I am most frequently asking myself why the hell I do this, when it is clearly painful, exhausting, and generally unpleasant.  But afterward I always feel better, and every time I've raced I come home and signed up for more races.

As a friend of mine put it, it's a little like the guy who smacks his head on the wall because it feels so good when he stops.

In any case, in May I signed up for the One New York Challenge, a five-hundred-kilometer "virtual race" across New York, the proceeds from which were donated to COVID research.  We had from May 15 to August 31 to finish, and there was a leaderboard that was updated daily to keep track of everyone's submitted mileage and times, so you could see how you ranked against other participants.

Well, this is where the trouble started.  Because I'm not all that great at running -- I'll be up-front about that -- but I am insanely competitive.  So every day I'd enter my miles (I run an average five miles a day, pretty much without exception), then immediately log on to the leaderboard to see how -- or if -- my place had shifted.

I ended up finishing the race way ahead of the deadline, with over a month to spare, crossing the finish line in 827th place overall (out of 6,428 participants), and in 30th place (out of 151) in my age class.

Me after finishing the 499th kilometer

So reason to be proud, right?  Not only finishing the race, but in the top fifteen percent out of everyone and in the top twenty percent in my age class.

But all I could focus on was thinking, "Holy shit.  826 people were faster than me."

Turns out I'm not alone in doing this, self-defeating as it is.  A study this week in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that we feel much better about ourselves when we're big fish in a little pond than when we're little fish in a big pond -- even if our own skill level is the same in both situations.

In "Taking Social Comparison to the Extremes: The Huge-Fish-Tiny-Pond Effect in Self-Evaluations," by Ethan Zell and Tara Lesick of the University of North Carolina, we find out that we pay much closer attention to our in-group ranking (whatever the size and skill level of the group) than we do to how the whole group ranks against other groups.  Put a different way, most of us are much happier ranking higher amongst peers who as a whole are mediocre than ranking lower amongst the elite.

And doesn't just affect our emotional states, it affects how we actually evaluate our own skill level.  The setup of the experiment involved the administration of a verbal-reasoning test to students at a variety of colleges.  Participants were given their scores, and two other pieces of information; how they ranked against other participants from their own college, and how their college ranked against other colleges.  Afterward, each volunteer was asked how they felt about their performance, and to evaluate their own verbal-reasoning ability not just against their peers but in a general, global sense.

Naturally, high scorers at highly-ranked colleges were not only happy with their performance, but felt pretty confident about their skill.  More interesting were the high scorers at low-ranked colleges, and the low scorers at highly-ranked colleges.  The former had the same glowing assessment of their own skills and performance as the high scorers at highly-ranked colleges, while the latter were generally disappointed with their skills and performance -- even when the overall scores of the members of the two groups were similar.

It makes sense, I suppose, given our long history of tribalism.  If Zog is competing against Thak in boulder-throwing, his rival's performance is right there in front of him, immediate and obvious.  It's way less obvious (and often much less important in the here-and-now) if Zog's whole tribe is made up of elite boulder-throwers or if, to put it bluntly, they suck.  I know it's always thin ice to attribute psychological tendencies to evolutionary history, but there's a good argument that the disappointment of the little-fish-big-pond experience is built into our brains by our having evolved living in small, tightly-knit groups.

In my own experience, being a mediocre racer in a very large group slowed me down for a bit, but (fortunately) hasn't stopped me.  Three weeks ago I started a new challenge; to run four hundred miles in 108 days.  (Five hundred kilometers -- 310 miles -- was apparently not enough, for some reason.)  It's for a good cause -- my sign-up money goes to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  And there's swag to look forward to when I'm done, including another badly-needed race t-shirt, to add to the 793 race t-shirts I already own.

Twenty days in, I've already got 25% of the miles completed.  I'm currently 192nd overall (out of 1,716 participants) and 8th in my age class (out of 30).  Which is entirely unacceptable. 

Time to get out running again and see if I can pass a few of these folks.

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

To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

The strange tale of Christopher Round

When I was maybe twelve years old, the highlight of school was getting the monthly Scholastic Books sale flier.

It had dozens of books, at prices that seem ridiculous by today's standards -- on the order of $0.99 for a paperback.  Even back then, I loved scary stories, and it's through Scholastic that I got my first copies of collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.

Back then, in 1972, I saw a book in one month's flier I just had to get.  It was called Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt. J. Hurwood, and at that point was a new release.  When it arrived a few weeks later, I read it eagerly, simultaneously scaring the absolute shit out of myself and running for the first time into such classic tales as the canine ghosts of Ballechin House, the screaming skulls of Calgarth, and the weirdly open-ended story of Nurse Black.

There was one story in the collection, though, that struck me as more sad than frightening.  It was titled "The Tragic Ghost of Cambridge University," and made enough of an impression that when I bumped into a reference to it yesterday on a website called "Ghosts that Haunt Seven Cambridge Colleges and the Stories Behind Them," I recognized it immediately -- and went to dig up my copy of Haunted Houses (yes, I still have it) that I hadn't looked at for something like thirty years or more.

It tells the tale of an academic fellow named Christopher Round, who was pursuing a degree in classics at Christ's College.  He was brilliant but shy -- one of those sorts whom you barely notice until he says something, and then it turns out to be perceptive and interesting, much to your surprise.  This was why his classmate Philip Collier -- similar to Round in intellect, but outgoing, genial, and strikingly handsome -- outshone Round in just about every way you can imagine.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The wub, Christ's College, Cambridge - First Court 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

No one else in their class was even close to the same caliber, but when it came to a competition, Round always came in second.  Even after graduation (both with honors -- but guess who got first place?), the rivalry continued, because both of them were accepted as Fellows of Christ's College.

Both applied for a professorship in Greek.  Once again, Collier won, and Round was forgotten.

All through this, their interactions were at least superficially friendly.  Round wasn't the combative type in any case, and it's doubtful that Collier even realized the damage he was doing.  From the outside, it looked like a perfectly ordinary relationship -- outgoing guy and his quiet, second-fiddle sidekick.

The final straw came when Round fell in love with a woman named Mary Clifford.  Mary was high society, and beautiful, and for a time it looked like things were at last going to turn in poor Christopher Round's favor.  But fate had other plans in store.  Mary's parents took her on a trip to Italy, and while traveling she bumped into a fellow Brit who was on holiday...

... Philip Collier.

When she returned, she reluctantly told Christopher Round that she'd fallen madly in love with his rival, and in fact, had accepted a proposal of marriage.  Round was devastated, but his habit of making light of his anger and jealousy once again triumphed.  He forced a smile and wished Mary well.  Relieved that he'd taken it so easily, Mary went her way, feeling like disaster had been averted.

But only a few weeks later, Round was walking back to his flat past the Fellows' Swimming Pool when he heard a noise.  Coming from the other direction was Philip Collier -- staggering drunk.  As he watched, Collier stumbled and fell in.  Although a good swimmer while sober, Collier was flailing, and reflexively Round looked for some way to help him.  There was a long wooden pole with a hook on the end lying along the hedge, used for catching things out or pushing them along the surface of the pool, and he picked it up, intending to hook Collier's clothing and help him out.

Then he thought, "Why should I do this?"  And before he could stop himself, he struck Philip Collier in the temple with the hook, and watched as his rival sank beneath the water and drowned.

Round expected to shine now that the man who had eclipsed him his entire adult life was dead, but it didn't happen.  Instead, he was consumed with remorse.  Mary Clifford, for her part, didn't go running back to him; it's uncertain if she was so sunk in grief herself that she couldn't think of romance, or if she perhaps suspected Round's role in Collier's death.  No legal investigation was ever launched.  Collier's death was ruled as accidental, so there was no worry about a hangman's noose looming in the future.

But Christopher Round was never to be the same.  He threw himself into academics, but even without Collier there to outshine him, he was not able to stand out.  He lived the rest of his life in obscurity, and his role in his rival's death only became known because he wrote out a full confession, with instructions that it was only to be unsealed fifty years after his death.

But his sad, remorseful ghost still haunts Christ's College, especially the grassy lawn by the swimming pool where Philip Collier died.  To this day, students see his stoop-shouldered figure at night, dressed in nineteenth-century garb, walking heavily along the pool, and finally disappearing without trace behind the yew hedge.

Good story, isn't it?  It's a staple in the "true tales of hauntings in Britain" books and websites, often alongside the more famous tales I alluded to at the beginning of this.

But there's just one thing more you might want to know.

It's fiction.

I'm not saying this because I'm being my usual snarky, skeptical self.  The tale of Christopher Round and Philip Collier is the subject of a novel called A College Mystery by Alfred Ponsford Baker, published in 1918, and there is no indication anywhere in the book that Baker thought it was a true story.  Worse still, for those who want it to be real, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a mention of the story anywhere before the publication of Baker's book.  And a thorough scouring of Christ's College records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows no one named Christopher Round or Philip Collier, not only as Fellows (which surely would have been recorded -- especially Collier, who supposedly was appointed as Professor of Greek) but even as students.

So what is conveniently left out of the account in Hurwood's Haunted Houses -- and just about every other recounting of the story of Christopher Round -- is that the whole thing comes from a work of fiction.

It's funny how the urban legend tendency works, isn't it?  Something that might have started as an up-front made-up story that no one really takes seriously grows through accretion and somehow gains the veneer of veracity.  And once that happens -- once it's told somewhere as a True Tale of the Supernatural -- few people even think to check into the story's antecedents and see if it holds any water.

Just as well.  Christopher Round's sad, ill-fated, and ultimately tortured life is better off as a fictional tale, and even the murder victim Collier doesn't come off as very praiseworthy.  Makes a good story, though -- even if the whole thing seems to have sprung from the mind of a British novelist.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Neurobabble

Confirming something that people like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz figured out years ago, researchers at Villanova University and the University of Oregon have shown that all you have to do to convince people is throw some fancy-sounding pseudoscientific jargon into your argument.

The specific area that Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jessica Evans, Colton Christian, and Sara D. Hodges researched was neurobabble, in particular the likelihood of increasing people's confidence in the correctness of an argument if some bogus brain-based explanation was included. Fernandez-Duque et al. write:

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing?  Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure?  To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types.  Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.  In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial.  Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious “hard sciences” (Experiments 3 and 4).  Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will.  We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline.  

So this may explain why people so consistently fall for pseudoscience as long as it's couched in seemingly technical terminology.  For example, look at the following, an excerpt from an article in which Deepak Chopra is hawking his latest creation, a meditation-inducing device called "DreamWeaver":

About two years ago I got interested in the idea that you could feed light pulses through the brain with your eyes closed and sound and music at a certain frequency.  Your brain waves would dial into it and then you could dial the instrument down so that you would decrease the brain wave frequency from what it is normally in the waking state.  And then you could slowly dial down the brainwave frequency to what it would be in the dream state, which is called theta, and then you even dial further down into delta.

What the hell does "your brain waves would dial into it" mean?   And I would like to suggest to Fernandez-Duque et al. that their next experiment should have to do with people immediately believing claims if they involve the word "frequency."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NascarEd, Sleep Stage N3, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then we have the following twofer -- an excerpt of an article by Deepak Chopra that appeared on Dr. Oz's website:

Try to eat one of these three foods once a day to protect against Alzheimer’s and memory issues.  

Wheat Germ - The embryo of a wheat plant, wheat germ is loaded with B-complex vitamins that can reduce levels of homocysteine, an amino acid linked to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  Sprinkle wheat germ on cereal and yogurt in the morning, or enjoy it on salads or popcorn with a little butter. 
Black Currents [sic] - These dark berries are jam-packed with antioxidants that help nourish the brain cells surrounding the hippocampus.  The darker in color, the more antioxidants black currents [sic] contain.  These fruits are available fresh when in season, or can be purchased dried or frozen year-round. 
Acorn Squash - This beautiful gold-colored veggie contains high amounts of folic acid, a B-vitamin that improves memory as well as the speed at which the brain processes information.

Whenever I read this sort of thing, I'm not inclined to believe it; I'm more inclined to scream, "Source?"  For example, I looked up the whole black currant claim, and the first few sources waxed rhapsodic about black currants' ability to enhance our brain function.  But then I noticed that said sources were all from the Black Currant Foundation (I didn't even know that existed, did you?) and the website blackcurrant.co.nz.  Scrolling down a bit, I found a post on WebMD that was considerably less enthusiastic, saying that it "may be useful in Alzheimer's" (with no mention of exactly how, nor any citations to support the claim) but that it also can lower blood pressure and slow down blood clotting.

So I suppose that the only way to protect yourself against this kind of nonsense is to learn some actual science, and be willing to read some peer-reviewed papers on the subject -- which includes training yourself to recognize which sources are peer-reviewed and which are not.

But doing all this research myself leaves me feeling like I need some breakfast.  Maybe a wheat germ, black currant, and acorn squash stir-fry.  Can't have too many antioxidants, you know, when your hippocampus is having some frequency problems.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Listening to Cassandra

Yesterday's post, in which I skated backward through geologic time into the deep past, alluded to a few really bad times the Earth has been through.  Episodes of trap volcanism, which make the biggest volcanoes you can think of look like wet firecrackers.  Mass extinctions.  Asteroid collisions.

Bad as 2020 has been, the planet has seen worse.

A lot worse.

One awful event I didn't mention, however, is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  It occurred about 56 million years ago.  The gist is that over a period of maybe fifty thousand years, there was a spike of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere -- over 44,000 gigatons (that's 44 trillion tons) of excess carbon dioxide.  The result was a greenhouse-effect temperature surge that was on the order of five to eight degrees Celsius, on average, worldwide.

The results were catastrophic, starting with the extinction of close to half of the species of foraminifera, single-celled organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain and whose calcareous shells were literally dissolved away by increasingly acidic water.  Life eventually bounced back -- it always seems to -- leading to diversification amongst a number of mammalian lineages, including ungulates and carnivores.

But for a while, things were pretty unpleasant.  Unbearably hot, a choking, acrid atmosphere laden with carbon dioxide and methane, and oceans like a sweltering vinegar bath.

Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory just published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at why this sudden and catastrophic event occurred.  What they found out has two conclusions, one of interest only to folks who like geology, and the other which should terrify the absolute shit out of every human being on Earth.

Let's deal with the tame one first.

In "The Seawater Carbon Inventory at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," the researchers, Laura Haynes and Bärbel Hönisch, found that the cause of all this global havoc was a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now the North Atlantic.  The Mid-Atlantic Ridge had only recently formed, and North America was still in the process of separating from Europe.  Today the processes at the Ridge are relatively slow and steady -- London is moving away from New York City at about 2.5 centimeters a year -- because the area at the junction is made up of thin, fragile oceanic crust that is easy to tear apart.

But back in the Paleocene Epoch, the rift was forming underneath, old, cold, thick continental crust, and when that opened up, it was sudden and catastrophic.  Upwelling lava burned through deep layers of sedimentary rocks, not only coal seams but limestone.  Carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere at a phenomenal rate.  If that wasn't bad enough, disturbance of sea floor sediments caused a massive ejection of methane, which is not only toxic but is a powerful greenhouse gas in its own right.

The result: a huge ecological shift causing a mass extinction.  "If you add carbon slowly, living things can adapt," said study co-author Bärbel Hönisch, in an interview with Science Daily.  "If you do it very fast, that's a really big problem."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Which brings us to the second conclusion.  This is the part you should really pay attention to.

The estimated rate of carbon injection that caused all this havoc was on the order of one gigaton per year.  (Estimates from the available evidence are between 0.3 and 1.7 Gt/year, so somewhere in the vicinity of one Gt/year is a ballpark average.)  The current measurements of the rate of carbon injection into today's atmosphere are around 10 Gt/year.

Ten times higher than during the catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event.

I don't like to keep ringing the changes on the same topic, but dammit, we need someone in power to take charge of this situation and at least make a passing attempt to do something about it.  This "Meh, we've always used fossil fuels and it's been fine" attitude is seriously imperiling the long-term habitability of the Earth.  The data from today's atmospheric scientists and climatologists are unequivocal; analogous events in the past (the colossal Permian-Triassic Extinction has also been linked to a massive carbon spike) should be an indicator of where all this could lead.

People cite "economic catastrophe" as a potential result of unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, and use that as a justification for jamming the brakes on any move toward renewable energy.  My response is, if you want to see a fucking economic catastrophe, just keep doing what you're doing.

Economic catastrophe will be the least of our worries.

More and more, people who are warning about the ultimate outcome of climate change -- both actual scientists, and also concerned laypeople like myself -- are seeming like Cassandra, the woman in Greek mythology who was given the power of perfect foresight, but simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her.  I don't know what it will take for elected officials to start listening to today's Cassandras.  Increasingly it's seeming like the only option is voting out damn near every politician currently in office.

The problem is that the political system is propped up by corporate money, with the result that rich donors and lobbyists have a stranglehold on the country.  How to solve that piece of the problem is beyond my ability to parse.

All I can do is keep sounding the alarm, and hope that someone --anyone -- influential is finally listening.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

The depths of time

An article this week in Smithsonian got me to thinking about the scale of history and prehistory.

The topic of the article is fascinating enough on its own.  Archaeologists working in the Nefed Desert of northern Saudi Arabia have discovered tracks of what was pretty close to an anatomically-modern human, fossilized in a dried-up lake bed.  What's remarkable about these tracks is that the best estimate the researchers have for their age is 120,000 years.

This is a surprise for a couple of reasons.  The conventional wisdom is that humans didn't leave Africa until 50,000 years ago, so this would mean our cross-continental walkabout started over twice as long ago as we thought it did.  Also, it points to the Arabian Peninsula as having had a dramatically different climate back then -- along with the human footprints were the prints of elephants, camels, buffalo, and horses, suggesting something more similar to the central African savanna than the current barren desert.

But what this brought to my mind is the vastness of time.  When we think of "old stuff" we tend to lump it all together.  If asked to name something old that humans did, a lot of people would come up with the Egyptian Pyramids -- but these footprints are 24 times older than the Great Pyramid.

So when the person who created these prints was walking across this mudflat, it would be another 115,000 years before the builders of the Great Pyramid were born.

Our minds boggle at big numbers.  The 120,000 year old footprints are still, geologically speaking, recent, still in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.  Ten times further back -- 1.2 million years ago -- you're still in the Pleistocene.  To reach the next age back -- the Pliocene -- you have to go over twenty times deeper into the past, on the order of 2.6 million years ago.

And still, things would be more or less like they are now.  Sure, there were some odd animals lurching about -- the enormous short-faced bear and tank-like armadillo relatives called glyptodonts come to mind -- but a map of the continents wouldn't be too very different from today's.

Ten times further back than that, 26 million years ago (and 25.88 million years prior to the "extremely old" Saudi Arabian footprints), and you're in the Oligocene Epoch, the time of some of the largest land mammals ever, and finally things are looking pretty different.  The aptly-named titanotheres hit their peak size with the Baluchatherium, which was five meters tall at the shoulder.  This is also when the weird little multituberculates bit the dust for reasons unknown, after being one of the dominant mammal groups since the Jurassic Period.

To get back to the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, we have to go a bit over twice as far back as that -- 66 million years, or 550 times older than the Arabian footprints we started with.  T. rex bought the farm during the Cretaceous Extinction, but what's kind of mindblowing is that another of the popular dinosaurs, Stegosaurus, went extinct over twice as far back as that, toward the end of the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago.

Put a different way, in terms of time, you're fifteen million years closer to the Tyrannosaurus rex than he is to the Stegosaurus.

It's why I always get a bit of a laugh when I hear people say the dinosaurs were a colossal evolutionary failure.  The earliest true dinosaurs appeared in the early Triassic Period, something like 240 million years ago, and the last of them (again, other than birds) died at the K-T Boundary, 66 million years ago.  So they were the dominant life forms for 174 million years, roughly seven hundred times longer than humans have been around.

Back another twelve million years before the first dinosaurs was the horrific Permian-Triassic Extinction, caused by a serious Series of Unfortunate Events -- the lockup of Pangaea changing the climate, sea level, and ocean current flow, along with a volcanic event for which superlatives fail me.  It covered virtually all of what is now Siberia, burning through live vegetation and Carboniferous-era coal deposits, spiking the carbon dioxide content of the air, simultaneously boosting the temperature by fifteen or more degrees and turning the oceans into an acidic, anoxic sewer.  By some estimates, 96% of life on Earth died, pretty much because a natural event did accidentally to the world's sequestered carbon reserves what humans are now doing deliberately.

Cautionary tale, that should be, but for some reason it isn't.

Over twice as far back as that -- something like 541 million years ago, or 4,500 times older than the Arabian footprints -- we reach the Cambrian Explosion, the rapid diversification that produced just about every basic animal body plan that exists today.

And that's where we'll stop, although be aware that in a trip back to the formation of the Earth, you would still only be one-twelfth of the way there.

I don't know how anyone can not be impressed by the vast depths of time, and how honestly insignificant and ephemeral we are.  You are the end product of a lineage that stretches back all the way to the beginning, each generation of which lived long enough to reproduce.  As my evolutionary biology professor put it, "Your ancestors all the way back had to be good at two things: surviving and fucking."  (Accurate if a bit crass.) 

What it all makes me think of is where it's all going.  What, if we could look forward, would we see?  120,000 years, 5 million, 50 million, 500 million years from now?  Highly unlikely that humans (or their descendants) will last so long; extinction and replacement are the rule, not the exception.  I expect that whatever we'd see would be as weird to our eyes as the glyptodonts and pterodactyls and stegosaurs are.

But considering what the Earth's ecosystems have gone through in the past, I'm pretty sure there'll still be life of some kind, even in those far reaches of the future.  And I find that a comforting, if humbling, thought.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Towards zero

Most scientifically-literate types know about the impossibility of reaching the temperature of -273.15 C, better known as "absolute zero."  The way most of us would explain why it's impossible goes back to one formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Since the Second Law says that heat always flows from a hotter object to a colder one unless you put energy into the system (I always called this "the Refrigerator Principle" in my biology classes), once you get near absolute zero it takes exponentially more energy to remove that last bit of heat from the object you're cooling, and to go all the way to zero would require (1) an infinite amount of energy expended to accomplish it, and (2) an infinite heat sink in which to place the extracted energy.  (Despite having been conjectured for over a century, this way of looking at absolute zero was proven beyond question by the mathematics of known physical laws just three years ago.) 

There's another way to look at it, though, which is a little harder to wrap your brain around, because it hinges on one of the most misunderstood laws of physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Developed in 1927 by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle does not mean what I saw someone claim on a woo-woo website a while back that "because of the Uncertainty Principle, we now know that science can't ever prove anything."

What the Uncertainty Principle does tell us is, despite its name, extremely specific.  What it says is for a particle, there are pairs of physical quantities called complementary variables, and for such a pair (call 'em A and B), the more we know about variable A, the less we can even theoretically know about variable B.  The most commonly cited pair of complementary variables is position and momentum/velocity.  If we know exactly where a particle is, we have no accessible information about its velocity, and vice versa.

Note that the Uncertainty Principle is not about the inaccuracy of our measuring techniques.  It's not that the particle has a specific position and velocity and we just don't know what they are, the same as watching a car speed by and thinking, "Okay, it was going so fast, at any given point along the road I don't know exactly how quickly it was moving."  This is a fundamental, built-in feature of the universe.  If I know a particle's position to a high degree of certainty, its velocity is equally uncertain, and in fact the particle exists in a superposition of all possible velocities simultaneously.  The reality is inherently blurry, and the more you home in on one piece of it, the blurrier the rest of it gets.

So what does this have to do with absolute zero?  Well, the temperature of an object is a measure of the average speeds of its constituent particles.  So if you had an object at absolute zero, you'd know the positions of the particles (because they're not moving) to 100% accuracy, and you'd also know their velocities (zero) to 100% accuracy.

About as huge a violation of the Uncertainty Principle as you can get.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study at the University of Vienna that was the subject of a paper last week in Science in which we read about a 150-nanometer bit of silica (made up of around a hundred million atoms) that was cooled down to twelve millionths of a degree above absolute zero.  This turns out to be the true temperature limit for a particle that size; every atom in the particle was in the ground state, the lowest allowable energy a particle can have without violating Heisenberg's law.  The particle was suspended in an "optical trap" -- the easiest way to describe it is they levitated it with lasers -- and then allowed to free-fall so they could observe its behavior.

What the researchers hope to do is to use such experiments to shed some light on the behavior of gravity in the quantum world, something that has been a dream of physicists for a very long time.  While the other three fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have all been shown to be manifestations of a single "electronuclear" force, gravitation has resisted all attempts to incorporate it into a "Grand Unified Theory" that could simultaneously explain the gravitational warping of space and the strange behavior of the quantum world.  None of the candidates for a Grand Unified Theory (the most famous contender is string theory) have as yet panned out, but the search continues -- and the ability to cool particles described in last week's paper give a bit of hope that physicists will be able to isolate and study systems under conditions that make the mathematics tractable.

So that's our quantum weirdness for today.  Thanks to the friend and long-term loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me the link to the study.  I would never claim to say I understand it at any kind of deep level -- after all, no less a luminary than Richard Feynman famously said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."  The fundamental workings of the universe are counterintuitive and mind-blowingly odd, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

That rabbit's dynamite!

After dealing in recent posts with such topics as the catastrophic loss of Arctic sea ice, the role of isolation in depression, and various scientific advances from astrophysics, archaeology, and neuroscience, I'm sure what you're all thinking is, "Yes, but what about BunnyMan?"

BunnyMan is a cryptid I'd never heard of, that apparently haunts the town of Clifton, Virginia, in Fairfax County.  And according to an article over at Mysterious Universe, we're not talking some gentle, fuzzy little Peter Cottontail, here.  BunnyMan is more like the scary evil rabbit from Donnie Darko.

Author Brent Swancer, who is also the person who a while back warned us about giant Sky Jellyfish attacking Japan, tells us that sightings of BunnyMan have been going on for over a hundred years.  The whole thing started with the escape in 1904 of two inmates from an insane asylum, Douglas Grifon and Marcus Wallster, in the woods near Clifton.  Wallster was eventually found, hanging from a bridge railing, with a note saying, "You'll never catch me, no matter how hard you try.  Signed, The BunnyMan."  Grifon was never found.  And thus began a century's worth of mysterious deaths and sightings of guys in bunny suits.

You may be laughing by now.  I know I was.  Swancer, however, seems to be entirely serious, and describes numerous encounters with the long-eared lunatic.  And he tells us that this thing is the most foul-tempered rrrrrodent... -- well, let's hear an example or two in his own words:

Two of the most intriguing and bizarre accounts of the Bunny Man surfaced in 1970.  The first incident occurred on October 19, 1970, when an Air Force Academy cadet by the name of Bob Bennett was allegedly with his fiancée and parked his car on Guinea Road in Burke, Virginia, so that the couple could talk.  It was at this time that they noticed a white figure moving outside of the vehicle.  Moments later, the front window was smashed into a cascade of glass, and an ominous voice warned “You’re on private property and I have your tag number.”  The horrified couple sped away and as they screamed down the road they noticed a small hatchet on the floor of the car.  When questioned later by the police, Bennett would insist that the attacker had been decked out in a full bunny suit, and he told his superiors at the Air Force base the same thing.  As ridiculous as the story sounded, Bennett would continue to insist it was true long after the incident.

Then, later that same year, BunnyMan had another run-in over people trespassing in his private Carrot Patch:

Just two weeks after the Bennett incident, the Bunny Man struck again.  Paul Phillips, a private security guard for a construction company, reported that he had seen a man-sized rabbit in front of a house under construction.  When approached by Phillips, the rabbit was reported to have said “All you people trespass around here.  If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head,” after which it started to furiously hack away at the unoccupied house with an axe.  Allegedly, when the startled Phillips went back to his car to get a firearm, the “bunny” swiftly escaped into the woods and disappeared.

Swancer's article is chock-full of other stories about people meeting this buck-toothed bad guy in northeastern Virginia.  In fact, the Colchester Overpass, the site of numerous suicides by hanging, has also been the site of so many appearances that it's supposedly called "BunnyMan Bridge" by locals who don't mind losing any credibility they might have had.

What strikes me about all of this is the proximity of Clifton, Virginia to the CIA Headquarters in Langley.  The two are only separated by twenty miles, as the rabbit hops, which I'm sure can't be a coincidence.  After all, I've watched historical documentaries in which Fox Mulder and Dana Scully found out about all sorts of horrible things the government was involved in, including alien hybridization experiments.  So the next step, evil-wise, would be hybridizing humans with various animals, some of which would inevitably escape and terrorize the countryside.  Just be glad it was BunnyMan.  It could have been WeaselMan, PigeonMan, or, god forbid, HornetMan.

I've been at this blog for ten years, and by this time, I thought I'd run into every cryptid in the book; but I have to admit, before yesterday I'd never heard of this guy.  So thanks to Brent Swancer for another example of hard-hitting journalism, uncovering the depredations of a vicious rabbit only a stone's throw from our nation's capital.  I feel safer now.  As Elmer Fudd teaches us, forewarned is forearmed.

Swancer ends his article on a cautionary note:

Who, or what, is the Bunny Man?  Is this a case of a ghost, an unsolved crime, a psycho on the loose, some mystery animal, or merely the delusional human psyche working upon its inner fears to create a phantom construct in the real world in the form of scary stories and myth?  The story of a man-sized bunny running around terrorizing, even murdering, people seems to cross over the line from mystery into preposterousness, but many urban legends doubtlessly have their origins in some grain of truth, so who really knows?  For the case of the Bunny Man, no matter how ludicrous it may sound, it might be a good idea to stay away from the Colchester Overpass at night, just in case.

Of course, he misses one possibility, which is "people impersonating a figure from a local legend to stir up trouble," which I think is the most likely solution.  Given the propensity of pranksters to keep such stories going -- consider the copycat phenomenon in the case of crop circles -- it's no wonder that once BunnyMan started being a thing around Clifton, he continued to be seen over and over again.

Any notoriety is better than obscurity, I suppose.

So that's our hare-raising tale for today.  If you're ever down in Fairfax County, keep your eyes open, especially at night.  You might want to bring some carrots along as a peace offering.  I hear BunnyMan has quite a temper.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

King of the who?

Given yesterday's post on odd coincidences, I thought it was kind of amusing that I stumbled upon the topic for today's post -- more or less by random chance -- immediately after reading two books that touched on the subject.

Both of them are about the Arthurian Legends, which has been an interest for years, so my reading them isn't itself odd.  It's odder, perhaps, that I didn't like either one of them at all.  The first was the novelization of the story from the point of view of Morgaine (Morgan le Fay), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.  I found just about every character in the story somewhere between obnoxious and downright repulsive, and it's hard to stay invested in a novel when I honestly don't give a damn if the characters live or die.  (My distaste was only deepened when I found out about the disturbing allegations against Bradley and her husband made by their children -- allegations which were proven in the husband's case, leading to his being sent to prison for pedophilia and dying there in 1993.)

The second was intended as historical scholarship, and although I'm hardly a qualified expert on the subject, this one seemed to me to face-plant rather badly as well.  Norma Lorre Goodrich's book King Arthur looks at the literary sources of Arthuriana, focusing especially on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory.  Glossing over the fact that the earliest of the three -- Geoffrey of Monmouth -- was still writing a good five centuries after Arthur's time, she goes through intellectual backflips to support her contention that Arthur and his pals weren't from Cornwall and Wales as usually depicted, but from Scotland, more specifically the area around Stirling and Edinburgh.  Like I said, I can't give a knowledgeable opinion about her use of the source material, but I am qualified to say that her attempts at historical linguistics are nothing short of silly.  (They amount to, "if you change this letter to this one, and reverse the syllables, and add a prefix, you can clearly see these two words are the same!")

Oh, and when she mentioned "fifth century Vikings" I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to hurl the book across the room.

Speaking of authoritative sources...

Anyhow, I just stopped reading Goodrich's book last night (didn't finish it and don't intend to), so I was a little startled when, in the course of looking for a topic for today's post, I stumbled quite by accident on an article in Edinburgh Live from only last week about some new archaeological discoveries on "Arthur's Seat," the remains of an extinct volcano overlooking the Firth of Forth.  Researchers have found the site of a village occupied by the Votadini, a rather mysterious Iron Age Celtic tribe who spoke a Brythonic language (i.e. more closely related to Welsh, Breton, and Cornish than to Scots Gaelic), centered around Traprain Law, a hill fort seventeen kilometers east of Edinburgh.

Arthur's Seat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Monniaux, Edinburgh Arthur Seat dsc06165, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which, of course, is exactly the area Goodrich claims was Arthur's bailiwick.  That she's not the only one who thinks there's a connection to King Arthur is evident from the name of the site, although it seems likely that the place was named a long while after Arthur's time by people who thought the Arthurian connection gave the place more gravitas.

Anyhow, the new research on the topic is more grounded in history, and more interesting.  The remains of the village on Arthur's Seat showed some significant fortification, including buildings surrounded by a hundred-meter-long, five-meter-thick rampart blocking the easiest path up to the top of the hill.  Fifth-century Roman silver coins were found at the site, suggesting the Votadini traded with the Romans living in the northern parts of England, although the evidence is their territory was only under actual occupation during a fairly short time in the middle of the second century C. E.

The archaeologists, however, found zero evidence of King Arthur having anything to do with the site.  If, in fact, there ever was a historical Arthur, something the jury is still out on.  The problem is, you can't really base history on a bunch of (way) after-the-fact, quasi-mythological accounts.  One of the best and most exhaustive analyses of the topic -- Francis Pryor's Britain A.D.: A Quest for Arthur, England, and the Anglo-Saxons -- found that the earliest source known that explicitly mentions Arthur, Nennius's Historia Brittonum, was written in the early ninth century, still a good three hundred years after Arthur's (alleged) reign.

Not exactly an eyewitness account, that.

Still, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as cosmologist Martin Rees was wont to say.  There could have been an Arthur messing about in Britain back then.  And there's no doubt that it's at the very least a fascinating legend.

I do still find it funny that I ran across this research literally the day after reaching the limits of my tolerance for Norma Lorre Goodrich's wild speculations on the same place and the same topic.  Not only that, a day after writing here at Skeptophilia on the subject of odd coincidences.  Which you have to admit is kind of meta.  Either it's the universe having a good laugh at my expense, or else I need to re-read my own post about how strange coincidences don't actually mean anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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