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, December 31, 2020

Sawney Bean and the veracity of folklore

One of the creepiest legends to come out of old Scotland is the tale of Sawney Bean (or Beane), whose cave-dwelling, cannibalistic family allegedly ran amok in South Ayrshire in the 16th century.  Bean, born Alexander Bean in East Lothian, was said to be the son of a manual laborer, but had a vicious streak from childhood that was exacerbated when in his late teens he married a woman who was worse.

The couple set up housekeeping in a deep cave in Bennane Head, a promontory between Ballantrae and Girvan on the west coast of Scotland.  There, he and his evil wife were the progenitors of quite a brood; eight sons, six daughters, and thirty-two grandchildren (many of them born to incestuous unions).  The Beans survived in their remote abode by waylaying travelers...

... and eating them.

"Sawney Beane at the Entrance of his Cave."  Note the woman in the background -- holding a severed human leg.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Local villagers knew about the disappearances, and sometimes they'd find bones and other body parts -- but in an apparent case of "How dumb exactly are you people?" it never occurred to them that the culprits were a crew of depraved cannibals living nearby.   The local law enforcement cast a suspicious eye on local innkeepers and pub owners, since they were often the last people to see the victims alive.  But eventually one lucky guy fought back against the Beans when attacked, survived (his wife, apparently, wasn't so lucky) and brought back a tale of being swarmed by men and women intent on murdering him.  King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) launched an attack on the family, sending soldiers in to destroy them and their stronghold.

The Beans were defeated, and those not killed in the skirmish were brought back to Edinburgh in chains.  The men were executed by having their hands, feet, and genitals chopped off, and allowed to bleed to death; the women were burned at the stake.  One daughter, "Black" Agnes Bean, who had escaped before the attack and attempted to settle down in Girvan under an assumed name, was eventually found out and hanged.

So that was the end of the Beans.  But the question that I'd like to ask is: is any of it true?  How would we know if it was?

One reason we might cast a skew glance at the tale is how varied the different versions of it are.  Sean Thomas wrote a piece on the Bean clan in Fortean Times, a bit of which was excerpted at the site The Spooky Isles (the original article, unfortunately, seems no longer to be available):
... from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI [ca. early 1600s], whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before.  Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years.  Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership...  To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediaeval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediaeval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time.
While the main part of the story itself doesn't involve the supernatural -- something that would lead me to doubt the whole thing -- there's a paranormal twist to the execution of Agnes Bean in Girvan:
Historically, Girvan was significant as the home of the Hairy Tree.  According to legend, the Hairy Tree was planted by Sawney Bean’s eldest daughter in the town’s Dalrymple Street.  However, when her family was arrested, the daughter was implicated in their incestuous and cannibalistic activities and was hanged by locals from the bough of the tree she herself planted.  According to local legend, one can hear the sound of a swinging corpse while standing beneath its boughs.
When you add to this the fact that there is an ongoing dispute amongst the people in Girvan regarding which tree in the town is the authentic "Hairy Tree," it does tend to make you wonder how much of the rest of it can be true.

Another suspicious factor is the similarity of the Bean story to an earlier tale from Scotland, that of "Christie Cleek."  Christie Cleek, born Andrew Christie in Perth in the mid 14th century, was driven to murder and cannibalism during the horrible famine that followed the ravages of the Black Death in the British Isles in the 1350s.  "Cleek" means "shepherd's crook" -- the tool Christie used to pull down travelers and pluck riders from their horses.  Like the Beans, Christie Cleek and his family lived in hiding, feasting on human flesh and striking fear into the hearts of the locals.  It has a different ending, though -- after the famine eased, an armed force was sent in to rid the countryside of the menace.  Everyone in the family was killed but Christie himself -- he escaped, and lived to a ripe old age under an assumed name.  The name "Christie Cleek" became a synonym in that part of Scotland for the bogeyman, useful for scaring children to the pants-wetting stage during late-night storytelling sessions around the fire.

So the inconsistencies and variations in the Bean story, plus the analogies to earlier tales, makes you wonder.  The most likely answer is that Bean himself (and possibly his savage wife) were real, but that a lot of the excesses attributed to them and their progeny were exaggerations.  About the veracity of the details, there is simply not enough hard documentation to be certain.

It's a gruesome and fascinating story.  Certainly a good one for a shiver up the spine.  It'd be nice to know if it was true, but as with most things in the distant past, it's probably not possible.  So like a lot of folklore, we have to let it be -- filed under the heading of "Who knows?"
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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



Wednesday, December 30, 2020

The Guardians, the fourth dimension, and a lawsuit from Saturn

Given how surreal this year has been, I was thinking a few days ago that it was a little surprising that we haven't had any completely batshit insane stories lately.  But far be it from 2020 not to rise to such a challenge and say, "y'all hold my beer and watch this."  Just yesterday, two different loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me unrelated links (at least I think they're unrelated, although as you'll see, it's a little hard to tell) that wind up the year with style.

If by "style" you mean "wearing an enormous tinfoil hat."

In the first, we have a guy named Mark Russell Bell over at Metaphysical Articles commenting on the Trump administration's decision that the "U.S. Space Force" sounded way too much like something that would be led by President Skroob and Dark Helmet, and decided to find something with fewer comical associations...

...so they settled on "The Guardians."  

A lot of us thought this was pretty amusing, but Mark Russell Bell loves it.  The reason why he loves it has to do with some weird combination of the following:

  • "deep trance mediumship"
  • the "Higher Self" and "Christ Consciousness"
  • Thomas Edison
  • a rejection of "pseudo-scientific flubdub"
  • "the incursion of the aeroform space people"
  • a "fourth-dimensional" explanation of flying saucers
  • light, heat, color, sound, and motion all being attributable to the flow of electrons
  • something about vaporizing and recondensing a brick
  • frequency being dependent on the inverse square root of the mass-density of the ether

Along the way you get the impression that (1) Mark Russell Bell is extremely serious, and (2) that he loathes people like me who are orthodox science types and require evidence before they'll believe in something.  My sense is he'd be entirely in favor of coming after people like me with a machete.  So if Mark Russell Bell ever reads this, allow me to mention that my wife and I recently moved to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique.

In the second story, we meet someone with an even poorer grip on reality, one Rickia Collings of Allen, Texas.  Collings, who prefers to go by "Capricornus God of Sun Rickia," has filed suit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claiming that his civil rights had been violated by the federal government...

... given that he actually comes from Saturn.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL and the Hubble Space Telescope]

"Capricornus" also includes as defendants in the lawsuit the United Kingdom and the United Nations, and states that the alleged civil rights violations began on July 4, 1776, which is a little odd in the case of the United Nations because it wasn't founded until 1945.  As far as how this could all work, "Capricornus" claims he's way older than he looks and has been living on the Earth since before the American Revolution.

The lawsuit itself, which you can read at the link provided, is highly entertaining.  Some highlights include his national origin, in which he says he is from "Saturn and Capricorn," his mother is "w/ Picies [sic, I'm assuming he means Pisces] from Neptune and Jupiter" and his father is "w/ Aquarius from Uranus W.O.G. III."  In the section where he's asked to describe how the defendant(s) discriminated against the plaintiff, he says, and I quote:

Moon KAF = the Messiah.  DA6T = the Messiah, which from of make a person or an animal lame.  A small enclosure in which a sheep or other domestic animals are kept put or keep in a pen, confine someone to a restricted place.  A rare astrological aspect involving any celestial body 3 plants, points, planets are sextile to each other& both are then quincunx to a 3rd.  Beginning history and reconstruction -- the first morning tet. book = kreate [sic] a fighter.  Hand, mouth, connected to speech, drum beats.  That which from of mitzvah of Torah child of commandment, law, ordinance, statute, contained in Torah, for that reason to be observed by all practicing Jews.  A mixture of natural & manmade landmarks.  To see and rejoice in the goodness and greatness of God.

See affidavit.

Well, from that stinging indictment, I think we can all agree that the United States, United Kingdom, and United Nations will have no choice but to make significant reparations.

If the above didn't meet your desired quota of weirdness, the affidavit "Capricornus" refers to is seven pages long, and having waded all the way through it, I can say that it makes precisely the same amount of sense as the bit I quoted above.  It does bear mention, however, that a central point he makes has to do with the fact that "Si" (the chemical symbol for the element silicon) can also stand for "systematic internaliser," "standing instruction," and the sacroiliac joint.

How this has anything to do with violating his civil rights, I have no idea.

If you look at the lawsuit paperwork, you'll see that it's all been officially stamped by the District Court, so apparently they're required to take it seriously.  I wonder on what basis they'll throw it out?  Perhaps because Saturn isn't technically in east Texas?  Will "Capricornus" get his day in court even so?  Will his father and mother show up from Uranus and Neptune and/or Jupiter in support of their son's cause?

These questions and more will be answered on next week's episode of Wingnuts on Parade!

So anyway, as you can see, although 2020 may be in its last week, we're not done with complete lunacy yet.  I keep on making the mistake of saying "Well, what more can happen?", and somehow, "more" always seems to "happen."  I'm rather looking forward to Friday and New Year's Day, although as a friend pointed out, 2021 is just 2020 reaching legal drinking age, so maybe my expectation that next year will be marginally saner is doomed to disappointment.

That's what seems likely from my knowledge of "pseudo-scientific flubdub," anyhow.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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



Tuesday, December 29, 2020

The flora of prehistory

I grew up around plants.  Well, everyone does, more or less, but my parents were dedicated gardeners and naturalists.  My dad grew show-quality tea roses and taught me how to recognize the trees of my native Louisiana from the shapes of the leaves and texture of the bark when I was still in elementary school.  My mom's flower gardens more than once had people pulling over to take photographs.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia are well aware of my fascination with prehistoric animals -- like many kids I grew up with books on dinosaurs (and posters of dinosaurs and models of dinosaurs...).  So it shouldn't have been a surprise that I was thrilled when I found out that just like the animals of prehistory, the plants of prehistory were different than the ones we have today.  But I recall that my interest was mixed with shock -- if I went back to the Cretaceous Period, not only would there be T. rexes and triceratopses stomping about, but the plants through which they'd have been stomping wouldn't have been the familiar oaks and ashes and hollies and camellias that were so familiar, but an entirely different flora in which I doubt there'd have been a single species I could have identified.

Well, maybe a couple, if not to species, at least to family.  Some of the earliest flowering plants were magnolias, and from the fossilized flowers, they look pretty much like... magnolias.  Ferns have been around for a long, long time (far predating the dinosaurs, in fact), and conifers like the common pines, cedars, and cypresses I saw every day were plentiful all the way back in the Triassic Period, 240-odd million years ago.  

But that's about it.  And although some of the groups were there, the species themselves would have been different ones than what we see around us today.  Imagine it: forests of plants with huge and wonderful biodiversity, in which you wouldn't recognize a single one that's familiar.

The reason I'm thinking about all this floral prehistory is a link to some cool research that showed up last week in Geology that a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me, about a discovery of a phenomenally well-preserved flower in hundred-million-year-old amber from Myanmar.  

Valviloculus pleristaminis, flower in lateral view.  Image credit: Poinar, Jr. et al., doi: 10.17348/jbrit.v14.i2.1014.

Dubbed Valviloculus pleristaminis (the genus name comes from the Latin valva -- "a folding door" -- and loculus -- "compartment;" the species name means "lots of stamens"), the little flower is only distantly related to any extant species.  Botanists think that Valviloculus might be allied to one of two rather obscure families of plants native to the Southern Hemisphere -- Monamiaceae and Atherospermataceae -- but that's only a preliminary analysis.

Atherosperma moschatum, an Australian species that may be one of the closest living cousins to Valviloculus [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Peter Woodard]

"This isn't quite a Christmas flower but it is a beauty, especially considering it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago," said emeritus professor George Poinar, Jr., of Oregon State University, who led the research into the newly-discovered species.  "The male flower is tiny, about two millimeters across, but it has some fifty stamens arranged like a spiral, with anthers pointing toward the sky.  Despite being so small, the detail still remaining is amazing.  Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some possibly female."

What's even more mind-blowing is something I've pointed out before; given how difficult it is to form a good fossil and then have it survive intact for millions of years, the species we know about (both animal and plant) probably represent about 1% of what was actually alive back then.  The vast majority of species came and went, leaving no traces.  So if we were to travel back to the mid-Cretaceous, when Valviloculus was living and flowering in the prehistoric forests, not only would we see it, but literally hundreds of other long-gone species as varied, attractive, weird, and fascinating as the ones we have today.

Imagine the colors, shapes, and scents, plants from tiny sprigs all the way to towering trees, and none of which we still have with us now.  Truly, in Darwin's words, evolution produced -- and continues to produce -- "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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



Monday, December 28, 2020

Guest post: Smaller than a dust mote

Today we're fortunate to feature a guest post by my friend, fellow blogger, and twin-separated-at-birth, Andrew Butters, whose blog Potato Chip Math is a must-read.  Like myself, Andrew is a devotee of astronomy, and here he'll take us on a voyage into deep space -- and give you a change of perspective you might never have considered.

Enjoy!

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I'll admit it, I'm a space nerd. I have been since high school and only got more intense when I started studying Applied Physics at university. There is a lot of weird science at the astronomical level and to comprehend it you have to wrap your head around concepts that you won't ever encounter in your daily life and then understand how to measure them. The two measurements that trip up just about everyone who hasn't studied them are time and distance. At an astronomical level those two things are astonishingly gigantic, so much so that to the average person they might as well have no meaning at all.

This is why, when I read a recent article on space.com, my mind, which studied this at a university level for several years, was sufficiently blown. Space.com does a decent job putting in lay terms what authors Linhua Jiang, Nobunari Kashikawa, Shu Wang, Gregory Walth, Luis C. Ho1, Zheng Cai, Eiichi Egami, Xiaohui Fan, Kei Ito, Yongming Liang, Daniel Schaerer, and Daniel P. Stark of the published article, "Evidence for GN-z11 as a luminous galaxy at redshift 10.957," explained in painstaking mathematical and scientific detail for the journal Nature Astronomy. I'll summarize it even further: space is fucking huge.

In the article, the authors prove rather conclusively that the farthest observable galaxy to date is a whopping 13.4 billion light years away. Don't let the word "years" in there fool you. A light year is a measure of distance and 13.4 billion of them are the equivalent of 127 nonillion kilometers (127,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km). To put that into a different perspective, there are 3600 seconds in an hour, a million seconds is a little over 11.5 days, and a billion seconds is 31.7 years. What about 127 nonillion seconds? That's 4.25 x 10^22 centuries or roughly five orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe itself.

So, space is huge. So what? Well, for me, it puts my existence on this third rock spinning in circles around a rather average sun as part of a rather average galaxy into perspective. As with any good conversation on this topic, it’s probably a good idea to lead with a little Carl Sagan. Many of you have seen this picture before:

[NASA – Image in the public domain]

It was taken in 1990 by the Voyager I probe on February 14 at the request of Carl Sagan. It took a decade for the request to come to fruition, but after it did here’s what he had to say about it:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994

To give you an idea of exactly how far away Voyager I was when it took that photograph, here’s a picture, though it’s not to scale. As we’ll see in a bit the scale of the Solar System, and indeed the Universe, is staggeringly massive.

Joe Haythornthwaite and Tom Ruen [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

How far away is that? It’s far. I mean, really far. The Pale Blue Dot photograph was taken 6 billion kilometers away. Voyager 1 launched in September 1977 and traveled at an average speed of roughly 60,000 km/h, and it still took thirteen years for it to get that far away. Neptune, the most distant planet in the Solar System takes 165 years to make a single trip around the Sun. When Neptunians say, “Winter is coming,” and have a look of concern on their faces it’s for good reason.

What if the Moon were the size of a single pixel on your screen right now? It’s a cool exercise to ponder and it gives us a real sense of the vastness of our surroundings. In fact, someone thought it was so cool that they created a model for it. Spend a few minutes scrolling (and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling) through it.

If the Moon Were 1-Pixel

This is all well and good, but what about beyond our Solar System? We orbit but one star out of hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone and our galaxy is but one of trillions in the observable Universe. To get a sense of what lies immediately beyond our Sun there are a couple of really cool, interactive sites you can visit Our Stellar Neighborhood, http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/, which allows you to zoom and pan and view 100,000 of the nearest stars. Solar System Model, https://www.solarsystemscope.com/, is a similar tool, but this one has more features and also includes options to show spacecraft, constellations, dwarf planets, comets, and a lot more. Still, nothing we’ve seen so far gets us out of our galaxy, the Milky Way, at the center of which is a black hole.

What about beyond our galaxy? A few years ago, while pondering the vastness of the Universe, some smart person at NASA decided that they would take the Hubble Telescope and point it at a small square of nothingness to see what they could see. Suffice it to say they were not disappointed.


Every bit of light you see in that picture is a galaxy. In each galaxy are hundreds of billions of stars. This picture represents only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the sphere of our night sky. To photograph the rest of it you would need to take another 12,913,983 pictures.

Which is all fine and dandy, but again, people have a hard time comprehending the scale. All of our reference points are too small and too slow. Fortunately, someone at NASA put together something that shows that even if you travel at the upper limit for speed – the speed of light – it takes a really long time to get anywhere. One could say that the speed of light in that respect is rather slow. Put another way, space is huge.


How long it takes for light to travel between the Earth and the Moon

How long it takes for light to travel between the Earth and Mars 

Finally, for anyone wondering where God and religion fit in, I will leave you with this (enlarge the photo when it loads and scroll): 



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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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



Saturday, December 26, 2020

Purging memory

Last night I had a good bit of trouble sleeping.

This isn't all that uncommon.  I've had issues with insomnia ever since I was a teenager.  Sometimes the issue is physical restlessness; sometimes it's anxiety, either over something real or something imagined.

Last night, it's because my brain was shrieking, over and over, "FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, PRÓSPERO AÑO Y FELICIDAD."

At least its timing was reasonably good, being that yesterday was Christmas.  What I wonder is why it couldn't choose a song that I don't hate.  I'm not one of those Bah-Humbug curmudgeons who dislikes all Christmas music; some of it I actually rather enjoy.

I'm of the opinion, however, that listening to "Feliz Navidad" over and over would have been ruled out as a torture device by Tómas de Torquemada on the basis of being too cruel.

Leaving aside my brain's questionable choice of which song to holler at me, a more interesting question is how to get rid of it once it's stuck there.  I've found that for me, the best thing is to replace it with something less objectionable, which in this case would have been just about anything.  There are a couple of pieces of sedate classical music and a slow Irish waltz or two that I can usually use to shove away whatever gawdawful song is on repeat in my skull, if I concentrate on running them mentally in a deliberate fashion.  It eventually worked, but it did take much longer than usual.

José Feliciano is nothing if not persistent.

The reason all of this comes up -- besides my Christmas-music-based bout of insomnia -- is some research out of a team from the University of Colorado - Boulder and the University of Texas - Austin that appeared in Nature Communications this month.  Entitled, "Changes to Information in Working Memory Depend on Distinct Removal Operations," by Hyojeong Kim, Harry Smolker, Louisa Smith, Marie Banich, and Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, this research shows that the kind of deliberate pushing away I use to purge bad music from my brain works in a lot of other situations as well -- and may have applications in boosting creativity and in relieving anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD.

What they did was to put a thought into their test subjects' heads -- a photograph of a face, a bowl of fruit, or an outdoor scene -- instructed them to think about it for four seconds, and then to deliberately stop thinking about it, all the while watching what happens to their neural systems using an fMRI machine.  Ceasing to think about something without replacing it with something else is remarkably hard; it brings to mind my dad's recommended cure for hiccups, which is to run around the house three times without thinking of an elephant.

The three different sorts of things they asked the subjects to try -- to replace the thought with something else, to clear all thoughts completely, or to suppress that one thought without replacing it -- all resulted in different patterns on the fMRI.  "Replace" and "clear" both worked fairly rapidly, but both left a trace of the original thought pattern behind -- a "ghost image," as the researchers called it.  "Suppress" took longer, and subjects described it as being more difficult, but once accomplished, the original pattern had faded completely.

"We found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you need to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one," said study co-author Marie Banich, in a press release from the University of Colorado.

Co-author Jarrod Lewis-Peacock concurred.  "Once we’re done using that information to answer an email or address some problem, we need to let it go so it doesn’t clog up our mental resources to do the next thing."

[Image © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons; used with permission]

This explains another phenomenon I've noted; that when I'm trying to think of something I've forgotten, or come up with a solution to a problem that's stumping me, it often helps if I deliberately set it aside.  Just a couple of days ago, I was working on my fiction work-in-progress, and found I'd written myself into a corner.  I'd created a situation that called for some as-yet-undreamed-of plot twist, or else rewriting a big section of it to eliminate the necessity (something I didn't want to do).  After basically beating it with a stick for an hour or two, I gave up in frustration, and went to clean up my garage.

And while working on this chore, and not thinking about my writing at all, a clever solution to the problem simply popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere.

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and the Kim et al. paper at least gives a first-order approximation as to how this occurs.  Pushing aside what you're thinking about, either consciously and deliberately or else (as in my garage-cleaning example) by replacing it with something unrelated, clears the cognitive thought patterns and gives your brain room to innovate.

Now, where exactly the creative solution comes from is another matter entirely.  I've described before how often my ideas for writing seem to originate from outside my own head.  I don't subscribe to a belief in any sort of Jungian collective unconscious, but sometimes it sure feels that way.

In any case, all of this gives us a lens into how to make our own thought processes more efficient -- in cases of clogged creativity as well as situations where errant thoughts are themselves causing problems, as in PTSD.  What the Kim et al. research suggests is that the first thing to work on is consciously purging the brain in order to create space for more positive and beneficial thoughts.

It's not necessarily easy, of course.  For example, my brain has finally stopped screaming "Feliz Navidad" at me, but has replaced it with "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow," which is only fractionally less annoying.  My considered opinion is that whoever wrote "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, head-first into a snowbank.

Okay, so maybe I am a Bah-Humbug curmudgeon.  God bless us every one anyhow, I suppose.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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




Friday, December 25, 2020

Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.  

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I don't have good records of where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and he's either my ancestor, or he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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




Thursday, December 24, 2020

Signal out of noise

I think I share with a lot of people a difficulty in deciphering what someone is saying when holding a conversation in a noisy room.  I can often pick out a few words, but understanding entire sentences is tricky.  A related phenomenon I've noticed is that if there is a song playing while there's noise going on -- in a bar, or on earphones at the gym -- I often have no idea what the song is, can't understand a single word or pick up the beat or figure out the music, until something clues me in to what the song is.  Then, all of a sudden, I find I'm able to hear it more clearly.

Some neuroscientists at the University of California - Berkeley have found out what's happening in the brain that causes this oddity in auditory perception.  In a paper in Nature: Communications, authors Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen studied how the perception of garbled speech changes when subjects are told what's being said -- and found through a technique called spectrotemporal receptive field mapping that the brain is able to retune itself in less than a second.

The authors write:
Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis.  This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood. Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models.  We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex. Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range.  This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed ‘perceptual enhancement’ in understanding speech.
What astonishes me about this is how quickly the brain is able to accomplish this -- although that is certainly matched by my own experience of suddenly being able to hear lyrics of a song once I recognize what's playing.  As James Anderson put it, writing about the research in ReliaWire, "The findings... confirm hypotheses that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language, the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes, continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment."

A related phenomenon is visual priming, which occurs when people are presented with a seemingly meaningless pattern of dots and blotches, such as the following:


Once you're told that the image is a cow, it's easy enough to find -- and after that, impossible to unsee.

"Something is changing in the auditory cortex to emphasize anything that might be speech-like, and increasing the gain for those features, so that I actually hear that sound in the noise," said study co-author Frédéric Theunissen.  "It’s not like I am generating those words in my head.  I really have the feeling of hearing the words in the noise with this pop-out phenomenon.  It is such a mystery."

Apparently, once the set of possibilities of what you're hearing (or seeing) is narrowed, your brain is much better at extracting meaning from noise.  "Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world," co-author Christopher Holdgraf said.  "It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’  By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy."

So there's another fascinating, and mind-boggling, piece of how our brains make sense of the world.  It's wonderful that evolution could shape such an amazingly adaptive device, although the survival advantage is obvious.  The faster you are at pulling a signal out of the noise, the more likely you are to make the right decisions about what it is that you're perceiving -- whether it's you talking to a friend in a crowded bar or a proto-hominid on the African savanna trying to figure out if that odd shape in the grass is a crouching lion.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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




Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Flat space, Hawking radiation, and warm spots

Ever wonder if the universe is flat?

No, I haven't taken Wingnut Pills and decided that the Flat Earthers make sense.  This is an honest-to-Einstein problem in physics, one that not only raises eyebrows about the supposed "fine-tuning" of the universe but has a huge effect on its ultimate fate.

By this time most people who are reasonably scientifically literate (or at least watch Star Trek) know about curved space -- that the presence of mass warps space-time, a little like the way a heavy weight on a trampoline stretches and deforms the flexible sheet it's sitting on.  The trampoline analogy isn't a bad one; if you have a bowling ball in the middle of a trampoline, and you roll a marble on the surface, the marble's path will be deflected in such a way that it appears the bowling ball is attracting the marble.  In reality, however, there's no attraction involved; the bowling ball has warped the space around it, and the marble is only following the contours of the space it's traveling through.

Bump up the number of dimensions by one, and you've got an idea of how curved space-time works.  The trampoline is a 2-D surface warped into a third dimension; where you're sitting right now is a 3-D space warped into a fourth dimension.

The "flatness problem" asks a seemingly simple question; okay, matter deforms space locally, but what's the shape of space as a whole?  In our trampoline analogy, you can visualize that although the bowling ball deflects the surface nearby, as a whole the trampoline is flat.  Harder to picture, perhaps, is that the trampoline could be a different shape; the surface of the entire trampoline could be spherical, for example, and still have indentations on the surface corresponding to places where massive objects were located.

That, in a nutshell, is the flatness problem.  The key is the matter/energy density of the entire universe.  If the universe is flat as a whole, the matter/energy density is exactly right for the outward expansion from the Big Bang to slow down, asymptotically approaching zero, but never quite getting there (and never reversing direction).  A universe with a higher matter/energy density than the critical value would eventually halt, then fall inward again, resulting in a "Big Crunch" as all the stuff in the universe collapses back to a singularity.  (This is sometimes called a "spherical universe" because space-time would be warped into a four-dimensional hypersphere.  If you can't picture this, don't worry, neither can anyone else.)  If the matter/energy density is lower than the critical value, the universe would continue to expand forever, getting thinner and more spread out, eventually reaching the point where any particular cubic light year of space would have very little chance of having even a single atom in it somewhere.  (This is known as a "hyperbolic universe," for analogous reasons to the "spherical universe" mentioned above, but even harder to visualize.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

So, which is it?

There doesn't seem to be a good reason, argued from first principles, that the universe has to be any particular one of the three.  When I first ran into this concept, in high school physics class, I was rooting for the spherical universe solution; ending the universe with an enormous collapse seemed (and still seems) preferable to the gradual attenuation of matter and energy that would occur with the other two.  Plus, it also raised the possibility of a rebounding second Big Bang and a new start, which was kind of hopeful-sounding even if nothing much would survive intact through the cusp.

Because there seemed to be no reason to expect the value of the matter-energy density -- known to physicists as Ω -- to be constrained, figuring out what it actually is occupied a great deal of time and effort by the astrophysicists.  It was a matter of some shock when by their best measurements, the value of Ω was:

1.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

To save you the trouble, that's exactly one, out to the 62nd decimal place.

So in other words, the universe is flat, or so close to it that we can't tell the difference.

This engenders more than a few other problems.  For one thing, why is Ω exactly 1?  Like I said earlier, nothing from the basic laws of physics seems to require it.  This brings up the issue of cosmological fine-tuning, which understandably makes us science-types a little twitchy.  Then there's the problem that the outer reaches of the universe that we can see -- so places farther away in space, and further back in time -- are moving away from us a lot faster than they should if the universe was flat.  This has given rise to a hypothesized repulsive "dark energy" to account for this, but what exactly dark energy is turns out to be even more problematic than the "dark matter" that appears to comprise over a quarter of the overall mass/energy of the universe even though we haven't been able to detect it other than by its gravitational bending of space-time.

The reason this warped topic comes up is research by the groundbreaking and often controversial Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, who published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this summer that identified six "warm spots" that had been detected in the background radiation of the universe, and which Penrose believes are "Hawking points" -- places where a black hole evaporated due to its "Hawking radiation" eventually bleeding off mass (a topic that deserves a whole other post).  The problem is, the evaporation of a black hole by Hawking radiation generates theoretical lifetimes for your average black hole of many times the current age of the universe, so the presence of six of them indicates something funny must be going on.

What that funny business is, Penrose claims, is that we're seeing the ghosts of black holes that evaporated before the Big Bang that formed our universe.

In other words, in a previous universe.

"The Big Bang was not the beginning," Penrose said in an interview with Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph.  "There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.  We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.  So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon."

So he's not talking about a spherical universe, collapsing in on itself; Penrose thinks that even if the universe is flat or hyperbolic, eventually random quantum fluctuations will generate an expansion that will start it all over again.  This may seem a little like the example my thermodynamics teacher used about random motion -- yes, it's possible that all the molecules in your cup of coffee will by chance jitter in the same direction at the same time, and your coffee will fountain up out of the cup.  He had us calculate the odds, though, and it turns out it's so remote that it's virtually certain it has never happened anywhere in the universe, during its entire thirteen-odd billion year existence.

But if you consider that a flat universe would have an essentially infinitely long time span, all it takes is the coffee to jitter in the right direction once, and you generate a new Big Bang.

Metaphorically speaking.

Whether Penrose is right about this remains to be seen, but it must be pointed out that he's had ideas before that have seemed "out there" and have turned out to be correct.  Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge and no faint light himself, said, "There would, I think, be a consensus that Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity."

So I'm disinclined to shrug my shoulders at anything Penrose says, however odd it may sound.  And it brings me back to the hopes for an oscillating universe I first held when I was seventeen years old.  If Penrose is right, there was something that existed before our current universe, and likely something will exist afterward.  Even if those are in the impossibly remote past and future, it still seems preferable to the miserable demise of a standard flat or hyperbolic universe.

So the issue is far from settled.  Which is the way of science, after all.  Every problem you solve brings up two more new ones.  Meaning we should have enough to keep us occupied until the nest Big Bang -- and maybe even beyond.

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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




Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Hurricanes on Neptune

In yesterday's post, we looked at a peculiar, as-yet unexplained radio transmission from Proxima Centauri, but there's an awful lot we don't understand right here in our own Solar System.

Okay, most of it's not as exciting as a candidate for a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, although it must be mentioned that just last week scientists, using data from the Cassini probe, suggested that the chemistry of the ocean beneath the frozen surface of Enceladus (the sixth-largest moon of Saturn) shows signs of a complex chemistry that might be indicative of the presence of life.  If there's anything alive there, it's almost certainly nothing larger than microbes, but at this point, I'll take it.  If life can develop on a frigid, icy world like Enceladus, it further bolsters my conviction that life must be plentiful in the universe.

But leaving behind the topic of extraterrestrial life for a bit (face it, this is me writing this, it's bound to come up again soon), there's strange enough stuff to investigate right here and right now without postulating something we honestly don't have any hard evidence for.  Take, for example, the odd behavior of the storm on Neptune that was described in a press release from NASA last week.

To understand its oddity, a brief physics lesson.  Forgive me if this is familiar ground, but to see why the Neptunian observations are so weird, the average layperson might need some background explanation.

There's a phenomenon that occurs on planets' surfaces called the Coriolis effect.  The Coriolis effect, named after nineteenth century French physicist Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis, is a "fictitious force," a bit like "centrifugal force," that only occurs because we're in a non-inertial reference frame -- in this case, sitting on a spinning ball rather than standing still.  The simpler situation of centrifugal force not being a real force can be illustrated if you've ever ridden the Gravitron at a carnival, the ride where you stand with your back against the wall in a spinning cylinder, and you feel like you're getting pushed back and held against the wall.  The reality is that your body is just trying to obey Newton's First Law, of moving in a straight line at a uniform velocity, but you're being prevented from doing so by the rigid wall pushing you in toward the center of the cylinder.  In other words, the actual force is pointing inward (a "centripetal force"); you only feel like there's an outward-pointing force because you're moving in a rotating, non-inertial reference frame.

In the slightly more complicated situation of the Coriolis effect, here it manifests as an apparent deflection of the path of an object traveling from a straight line with respect to someone on the surface of the Earth.  In reality, of course, the object is traveling in a straight line, and you'd see that if you watched it from a stationary point in space; it's the observer, and the surface of the Earth (s)he is standing on, that isn't.  The result is that moving objects appear to be deflected clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern, which explains the rotation of hurricanes but does not account for water spiraling down a drain (drains are way too small for the Coriolis "force" to have a measurable effect; the swirl of water going down a drain is due to the shape of the basin and water's movement left over from when it was poured).

The Coriolis effect.  The object in question is moving from the upper left to the lower right.  The blue line shows its path as seen in an inertial reference frame (i.e. from space); the red curve shows its apparent position relative to a fixed point on the Earth's surface.  Notice that this gives the object a seemingly rightward (clockwise) deflection from the point of view of someone watching it from an earthbound perspective.  [GIF courtesy of Georgia State University]

The reason all this twisty stuff comes up is an observation of a storm on the planet Neptune.  Neptune is a gas giant, a planet large enough and cold enough that its atmosphere comprises a significant portion of the radius of the planet (rather than just a thin shell like ours).  The core is probably rocky, but we honestly don't know much about it, because the place is basically one enormously thick layer of clouds.

And it's turbulent.  The storms on Neptune dwarf the ones here on Earth; the one in question, which looks like a dark spot in the bright blue surface of the tops of the clouds, has a diameter larger than the Atlantic Ocean.  But even on Neptune, the laws of physics are strictly enforced, and when astronomers saw the massive hurricane heading toward the planet's equator -- where the Coriolis effect drops to zero, then picks up in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere -- they thought the reversal of deflection would shear it to bits.

Neptune's enormous storm [Image courtesy of NASA]

But that didn't happen.  The storm appeared headed southward toward certain destruction, but then curved around and started heading north again.  Even weirder, it split off a smaller storm ("smaller" at 3,900 kilometers in diameter) which can be seen in the upper right of the planet's disc.  How it did that, and whether that had anything to do with the main storm's unexpected turn, is unknown.

"It was really exciting to see this one act like it's supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back," said Michael Wong, astrophysicist at the University of California-Berkeley, who led the team that made the discovery.  "That was surprising...  When I first saw the small spot, I thought the bigger one was being disrupted.  I didn't think another vortex was forming because the small one is farther towards the equator.  So it's within this unstable region.  But we can't prove the two are related.  It remains a complete mystery.  It was also in January that the dark vortex stopped its motion and started moving northward again.  Maybe by shedding that fragment, that was enough to stop it from moving towards the equator."

But the truth is, they really don't know for sure what caused the storm's odd trajectory.  It doesn't seem to be obeying the pattern we'd expect of a storm track -- although even here on Earth, predicting the path of a hurricane is an inexact science at best.  What it illustrates is that even in our own astronomical back yard, there are phenomena we're still working to explain.

Think about what kind of bizarre stuff we'll find when we are finally able to look farther afield.  What weird weather, geology, and oceanography might occur on planets around other stars -- planets that might have very elliptical orbits, rapid revolutions close in to the host star, or be spinning much faster than the Earth -- or maybe is tidally locked, so that the same side of the planet faces the star all the time?  I think we're in for some surprises, wherever we look.

Kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it?

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

Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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