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

Monday, January 31, 2022

A spoon full of embarrassment

Of all the unpleasant feelings in the world, I think I hate humiliation the most.

I once said that I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated.  I can't even handle watching when other people embarrass themselves, which is why I kind of hate most sitcoms.  I mean, sometimes it can be undeniably funny, like my friend's experience at a restaurant:
Server:  What would you like?
My friend:  I'd like the fried chicken half, please.
Server:  What side?
My friend (uncertainly):  Um, I don't know... Left, I guess.
Server:
My friend:
Server:  Ma'am, I meant which side order would you like with your dinner.
My friend: *resolves never to set foot in that restaurant again*
But even in situations like that, I totally understand my friend's reaction of never wanting to see that server again.  In her place, I'd be absolutely certain that the server would see me across the street or something, and elbow her friends and say, "Hey, look!  It's left chicken guy!"

So I can barely even imagine what it must be like to humiliate yourself while being watched by millions.  This is what happened in 1973 to self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who was invited to demonstrate his supposed abilities on the Johnny Carson Show.  Before his TV career, Carson had been a professional stage magician, so he knew how easy it is to fool people -- and he knew all the tricks a faker would use to hoodwink his audience.

Uri Geller in 2009 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dmitry Rozhkov, Uri Geller in Russia2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

He set Geller up with props like the ones he used in his "psychic demonstrations" -- and wouldn't let Geller use his own props, nor handle the ones Carson provided before the show.  The result was twenty minutes of the most cringeworthy television I've ever seen, as Geller failed over and over, blaming whatever he could think of -- Carson's disbelief, the hostile atmosphere, the response of the audience.  He finally settled on "I'm not feeling strong tonight."

Here's a clip of the incident, if you can stand to watch it.

Every time I think of Geller, I always am baffled by why this single experience didn't lead him to vanish entirely.  If something like that happened to me, I'd probably change my name and consider plastic surgery.  But no -- after a brief time when he seemed set back by his catastrophic performance with Carson, he bounced back and became more popular than ever.

So this is two things I don't get, combined into one; how Geller didn't retreat in disarray, and how anyone continued to believe that what he does is anything more than a clever magic trick.  But neither happened.  In fact, the reason this comes up today is because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that Geller is still at it, almost fifty years later, this time with a pronouncement warning NASA to get ready, because we're going to have an alien invasion soon.

The most amusing part of it is the reason he thinks we're due for ET to land; the discovery of a peculiar radio source that pulsates -- but (compared to other pulsating radio sources) with a verrrrrry long period.  This source flashes on and off every twenty minutes; a more ordinary pulsar flashes on twenty times a second.  So far, astronomers are still trying to figure out a natural phenomenon that could cause this really slow pulsation rate, but at present all they have are guesses.

But here's the funny part, apropos of Geller; he claims that this radio source is the signal that the aliens are about to land.  Unfortunately, this runs head-first into the fact that the anomalous astronomical object is four thousand light years away.  Which means that if the aliens were sending that signal toward Earth, it was intended for the Sumerians.

Be that as it may, Geller said we better get ready.  "A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before," Geller posted on Instagram.  "No doubt in my mind that this is connected to alien intelligence way way superior than ours.  Start deciphering their messages!  They are preparing us for a mass landing soon!  #nasa #hoova #spectra #spectra #aliens."

I'm curious about what he thinks we should ready ourselves.  I mean, what's he personally going to do to save humanity from the aliens?  Bend a spoon at them?

Anyhow, I guess not everyone overreacts to being humiliated the way I do.  Probably a good thing, that; one of my many faults is taking myself way too seriously.  But really.  How does Geller do it?  To me that's more impressive than any of his alleged psychic talents.  He should bill himself as The Amazing Impervious Man, or something.

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

It's obvious to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with geology and paleontology.  That's why this week's book-of-the-week is brand new: Thomas Halliday's Otherlands: A Journey Through Extinct Worlds.

Halliday takes us to sixteen different bygone worlds -- each one represented by a fossil site, from our ancestral australopithecenes in what is now Tanzania to the Precambrian Ediacaran seas, filled with animals that are nothing short of bizarre.  (One, in fact, is so weird-looking it was christened Hallucigenia.)  Halliday doesn't just tell us about the fossils, though; he recreates in words what the place would have looked like back when those animals and plants were alive, giving a rich perspective on just how much the Earth has changed over its history -- and how fragile the web of life is.

It's a beautiful and eye-opening book -- if you love thinking about prehistory, you need a copy of Otherlands.

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


Saturday, January 29, 2022

Locking the echo chamber

It must be awfully convenient to start out from the baseline assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

This observation comes about because Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I posted the following on Facebook: "On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm thinking about our cousins, Armand Simon, Céline (Bollack) Simon, and Irène Simon, and Baila Dvora (Bloomgarden) Serejski, Avish Serejski, Tsipe Serejski, and Sholem Serejski, who died at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz.  May they never be forgotten."  I also appended a link to a post I did five years ago about the Simon family, who were part of the French Resistance.

Most of the responses were wonderful, but one person, a cousin of mine, wrote the following:

I could never understand how everyday people went along with packing their possessions up and moving to the ghetto thinking how could it get worse?  And yet it became much worse.  I see this going on in our country today.  When we visited Hawaii last March to see our daughter who was living there, we had to get a specific COVID test to enter the state.  And it was negative.  But when we got there, it wasn’t from the lab approved by their Governor and we were hauled into an area for “processing”.  They called our hotel and we’re going to force us in a 14 day quarantine - they wouldn’t even look at our antigen test results!  And we went to a lab at the airport recommended by our airline.  Well I refused to pay for a resort and be forced to stay in a hotel room for 14 days, so we told them we would stay at our daughter’s apartment.  I wasn’t about to give this state a penny of our money and be under their control.  When I said to the lady at the airport Aloha, Welcome to Hawaii - she replied, "We don’t want you here."  I felt like we were no longer in the USA.  And you should see all the homeless in Hawaii because the Governor there shut down all the businesses - tents everywhere. For a state that relies on tourism as a huge part of their livelihood- this was beyond stupid.  Many people in the tourist industry had to move to the mainland and those that couldn’t afford to, now had to live on the streets.  And now you can’t go in restaurants or bars unless you have a vaccine passport.  I have a bad reaction to vaccines so I’m not about to get that shot and it’s my body - nobody should be forced to have to take an injection - EVER!  Our country is FUBAR.  Thank God we live in Florida and our Governor is the best combination of intelligence and common sense.  To think I have to check which states I can travel to is unconscionable.  Our country is on a very bad path as a whole. We can only hope that at some point there will be a mass resistance.

When someone pointed out that it was out of line to compare being mildly inconvenienced on your Hawaii vacation to six million people being systematically killed by the Nazis, she responded:

My point was definitely not a comparison. My point is that we are like the frog and boiling water theory if we don’t pay attention to our gradual loss of freedoms. And that is exactly what is taking [sic] with President Numbnuts in office right now.

And damn straight I am in the right state. I would appreciate if all the people flocking here from Democrat states would stay the hell out unless they have the intelligence to know why they want to be here. Don’t come here and ruin our freedom!

This, of course, isn't the first thing like this she's posted; it's just the first one directed at me.  She's had gems like a diatribe starting out "All Democrats are pinheads," implying that one-half of the American public are hopelessly stupid.  No need to know anything else about them; Democrat = idiot.  Done thinking.

I honestly can't comprehend this level of confident arrogance.  One of my (many) besetting sins is that I'm almost never 100% sure of anything; to me, most of the world is made up of gray areas, ambiguity, and extenuating circumstances.  But my cousin's attitude goes way beyond being sure of oneself.  Confidence and a strong trust in your own beliefs and principles are just fine; in her, it has morphed into a conviction that the people who share her beliefs are the only ones worth listening to.  

It's a scary position to be in.  I wrote a couple of years ago about how absolutely essential it is to keep in mind that your opinion could be based in error -- and cited some research showing that this willingness to consider our own fallibility is essential in science.  (I'd argue that it's essential in damn near everything.)

It reminds me of what Kathryn Schulz said, in her amazing TED Talk "On Being Wrong:"

It's like we want to believe that our minds are these perfectly transparent windows, and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.  And we want everybody to gaze out of the exact same window and see the exact same thing...  If you want to rediscover wonder, you have to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness -- and look around at each other, and look at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe, and be able to say, "Wow.  I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong."

I chose not to try to argue with her.  Maybe that was the cowardly choice, but my impression is that it would have been entirely futile.  Once you've landed in that position -- believing that everyone who disagrees with you is either misinformed, stupid, or lying outright -- you're kind of stuck there.  I don't shy away from an argument when there's ground to be gained, or at least when both sides are listening; but this person has so locked herself in an echo chamber that it's pointless even to engage.

If what I really crave is slamming my head into a wall, it'd be easier and quicker just to go find a wall and do it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evbestie, FilterBubble, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, I just decided to disconnect.  I'm kind of done posting on social media.  I'll still throw links to Skeptophilia on Facebook and Twitter every day, and probably will continue to post the occasional pic of my dogs on Instagram, but other than that, I've kind of had it.  I'm just weary unto death of the vitriol -- when you can't post a tribute to relatives who died in the Holocaust without it turning into a Fox News-inspired extremist screed, it's a sign that the platform itself is no longer worth the time and anguish.  And I unfriended my cousin (reducing the number of my blood relatives who still want to have anything to do with me to "almost one"), because I know about her that one of her mottos is "Death before backing down."  Interacting with someone like that isn't worth the toll it takes on me personally.

What that says about the state of affairs in the United States today is scary, though.  The media found out a couple of decades ago that polarization and agitation gets viewers, and has whipped up the partisan rancor to the point that each side thinks the other is actively evil.  It's kind of ironic that the whole nasty exchange started because of a post about the Holocaust, though.  It reminds me of the trenchant quote -- attributed incorrectly to Werner Herzog, and actually of unknown provenance -- "Dear America, you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of your people would happily kill another one-third, while the remaining one-third stands there watching."

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Friday, January 28, 2022

Bad Blood

The moral of this short story is either "Don't judge a book by its cover" or "Be careful who you piss off."  Both of them seem like decent takeaways.

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

Bad Blood

Melba Crane looked up as Dr. Carlisle entered the room.  She smiled, revealing a row of straight, white, and undoubtedly false teeth.  “Hello, doctor!  I don’t think we’ve met yet.  How are you today?”

Dorian Carlisle looked at his new patient.  She was tiny, frail-looking, with carefully-styled curly hair of a pure snowy white, and eyes the color of faded cornflowers.  “I’m fine, Mrs. Crane.  I’m Dr. Carlisle—I’m looking after Dr. Kelly’s patients while he’s on vacation.”

Mrs. Crane nodded, and raised one thin eyebrow.  “My, you look so young.  It’s hard to believe you’re a doctor.”  She giggled.  “I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Not at all.”  Dr. Carlisle lifted one of Mrs. Crane’s delicate wrists and felt gently for a pulse.  “I take it as a compliment.”

“It will be even more of a compliment when you’re my age.  I just turned eighty-seven three weeks ago.”

“Well, happy belated birthday.  I hear you had kind of a rough night last night.”

Mrs. Crane gave a little tsk and a dismissive gesture of her hand.  “Just a few palpitations, that’s all.  Nothing this old heart of mine hasn’t seen a hundred times before.”

“Still, let’s give a listen.”  Dr. Carlisle pressed his stethoscope to her chest.  Other than a slight heart murmur, the beat sounded steady and strong—remarkable for someone her age.

“How long will Dr. Kelly be away?”  Mrs. Crane asked, as Dr. Carlisle continued his examination.

“Two weeks.  He and his family went to Hawaii.”

“Oh, Hawaii, how lovely.  Such a nice man, and with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children.  He’s shown me pictures.”

Dr. Carlisle nodded.  “They’re nice folks.”  He pointed to a small framed photograph of a somewhat younger Mrs. Crane with a tall, well-built man, who appeared to be about thirty.  The man was darkly good looking, with a short, clipped beard and angular features.  He wore a confident smile, and stood behind Mrs. Crane, who was seated, her legs primly crossed at the ankle.  The man had his hand on her shoulder.

“Your son?” Dr. Carlisle asked.

Mrs. Crane nodded, and smiled fondly.  “Yes, that’s Derek.  My only son.”

“Do you get to see him often?”

“Oh, yes.  He visits me every day, especially now that I’m here in the nursing home.”  She paused and sighed.  “His father was Satan, you know.”

Dr. Carlisle froze, and he just stared at her.  She didn’t react, just maintained her gentle smile, her blue eyes regarding him with grandmotherly fondness.

He must have misheard her.  What did she say?  His father was a saint.  His father liked satin.  His father was named Stan.  His father looked like Santa.  But each of those collided with his memory, which stubbornly clung to what it had first heard.  Finally, he said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Satan,” Mrs. Crane said, her expression still mild and bland.  “That’s Derek’s father.  Lucifer.  He used to visit, too, quite often, when Derek was little, but I expect he has other concerns these days.”  She giggled again.  “And I’m sure he’s had dalliances with other ladies since my time.  Quite a charmer, you know, whatever else you might say about him.”

“Oh,” Dr. Carlisle croaked out.  “That’s interesting.”

“Well, of course, you couldn’t ask him to be faithful.”  If she heard his tentative tone, she gave no sign of it.  “He isn’t that type.  I did have to put up with a great deal of disapproval from people who thought it was immoral that I had a child out of wedlock.  But after all—” she tittered—“what else could they have expected?  He’s Satan, after all.”

"Satan," from Gustave Doré's illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost (1866) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Dr. Carlisle cleared his throat.  “Yes, well, Mrs. Crane, I have to finish my examination of you, and see a couple of other patients this morning, so…”  He trailed off.

Mrs. Crane gave her little wave of the hand again.  “Oh, of course, doctor.  I’m being a garrulous old woman, going on like that.  I’m sorry I’ve kept you.”

“It’s no problem, really.  And I wouldn’t worry about the palpitations—usually they’re not an indication of anything serious, especially if they don’t last long, as in your case.  Your blood pressure is fine, and your last blood work was normal, so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“I tried to tell the nurse that.  But she insisted that I see the doctor this morning.  I’m sorry I’m keeping you away from patients who need your help more than I do.”

“No worries, Mrs. Crane.”  Dr. Carlisle hung his stethoscope around his neck.  “Take care, and have a nice day.”

“You too, doctor.  It’s been lovely talking to you.”

Dr. Carlisle opened the door, and exited into the hall, feeling a bit dazed.

He stood for a moment, frowning slightly, and then came to a decision.  He walked off down the hall toward the nurses’ station, and set his clipboard on the counter, and leaned against it.

“Excuse me, nurse…?”  He smiled.  “I’m covering for Dr. Kelly this week and next.  I’m Dr. Carlisle—my office is up at Colville General.”

The nurse, a slim, middle-aged woman with gold-rimmed glasses and short salt-and-pepper hair, gave him a hand.  “I’m glad to meet you.  Dana Treadwell.  If there’s anything I can do…”

“Well, actually,” Dr. Carlisle said,  “I do have a question.  About Mrs. Crane, in 214.”

Dana gave him a quirky half-smile.  “She’s an interesting case.”

Dr. Carlisle nodded.  “That’s my impression.  She’s here because of advanced osteoporosis, but is there anything else that you can tell me that might be helpful?”

“Has periodic mild cardiac arrhythmia.  She had a full cardio workup about six months ago, showed nothing serious of note.  Some tendency to elevated blood pressure, but nothing that medication can’t keep in check.”  She paused, gave Dr. Carlisle a speculative look.  “Some signs of mild dementia.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you about.  Is she… is she delusional?”

“That depends on what you mean,” Dana said.  “Mentally, I hope I’m as with it when I’m eighty-seven.  But she is prone to… flights of fancy.  Particularly about her past.”

Dr. Carlisle didn’t answer for a moment.  Should he mention the whole Satan thing?  He decided against it.  “She does seem to like telling stories,” he finally said.

Dana's smile turned into a full-fledged grin.  “That she does.”

***

The following day, Dr. Carlisle was making his rounds, and passed Mrs. Crane’s room, and heard a male voice.  Curiosity did battle with reluctance to talk to her again, and curiosity won.  He knocked lightly, then stepped into the room.

Mrs. Crane looked up from a conversation she was having with a man who was seated at the edge of the bed, gently holding her hand.  When the man turned toward him, Dr. Carlisle immediately recognized him as the man in the photograph—noticeably older, perhaps in his mid to late fifties, but clearly the same person.  He still had the same carefully-maintained short beard, the same dark handsomeness, the same sense of strength, energy, presence.

“Oh, doctor, I’m so glad you’ve stopped by!” Mrs. Crane said.  “This is my son, Derek.”

“Dorian Carlisle,” Dr. Carlisle said.  “Nice to meet you.  I’m going to be your mother’s doctor for the next two weeks, until Dr. Kelly returns.”

Derek got up and extended a hand.  “Derek Crane."  They clasped hands.  Derek’s hand jerked, and a quick flinch crossed his face.

“Sorry,” Dr. Carlisle said, almost reflexively.

“It’s nothing.  Three weeks ago, I hurt my hand doing some home renovations.  I guess it’s still not completely healed.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Dr. Carlisle started, but Derek cut him off.

“It’s nothing.  Mom has been telling me about your visit yesterday.  It sounds like she talked your ear off.”

Dr. Carlisle smiled.  “Not at all. It was a pleasure.  I’d much rather chat with my patients and get to know them—otherwise, all too easily this job starts being about symptoms and treatments, and stops being about people.”

Mrs. Crane beamed at them.  “Well, it’s so nice of you to take time from your busy schedule to stop in.  I haven’t had any more palpitations.”

“That’s good,” Dr. Carlisle said.  “I just wanted to see how you were doing.  Nice to meet you, Derek.”

“Likewise.” Derek smiled.

Was there something—tense? speculative? about the smile?

No, that was ridiculous.  Mrs. Crane had just primed him to be wary of her son because she’s delusional.

Dr. Carlisle exited the room, and then stopped suddenly, his face registering shock.  He looked down at his hands.  On his right ring finger he wore his high school class ring, from St. Thomas More Catholic Academy.  He raised the ring to his eye, and saw, on each side of the blue stone in the setting, a tiny engraved cross.

***

That night, Dr. Carlisle told his girlfriend about Mrs. Crane over dinner.

“Now I want to meet this lady.”  Nicole grinned.

“Can’t do that. I can’t even tell you her name.  Privacy laws, and all that. I probably shouldn’t have even told you as much as I did.”

“It’s not like I’m going to go and tell anyone.  And I want to hear about your job.  It’s a huge part of your life.”

He took a sip of wine.  “And this one was just so out of left field.  I’ve dealt with people with dementia before, but they always show some kind of across-the-board disturbance in their behavior.  This was like, one thing.  In other respects, she seems so normal.”

“You didn’t talk to her that long.”

“No,” he admitted.  “But you learn to recognize dementia when you see it.  There was something about the way she looked at you—you could tell that her brain was just fine.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow.  “So, you think she really did have a fling with Satan?”

He scowled.  “No, of course not.  But I think she believes it.  But then…” he trailed off.

“But then what?”

“Her son jumped when I shook his hand, like he’d been shocked, or something.  Then he made some excuse about how he’d hurt his hand a couple of weeks ago.  But I noticed afterwards—I was wearing my high school ring.  It’s got crosses engraved on it.  And it was probably blessed by the bishop.”

“You’re kidding me, right?  I thought you’d given up all of that religious stuff when you moved out of your parents’ house.”

“I did.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” Nicole said.

“All I’m saying is that it was weird.”

“You’re acting pretty weird, yourself.”

“I just wonder if it might not be possible to test it.  See if maybe she’s telling the truth.”

“You do believe her!  Dorian, you’re losing it.  Satan?  You think she got laid by Satan?”

He sat back in his chair.  “I dunno,” he finally said.  “All I can say is, she believes it enough that it made me wonder.”

***

The next day, other than a quick walk down the hall in the early morning hours, Dr. Carlisle avoided that wing of the nursing home until after lunch.  When he finally went down the hallway toward room 214, he found that his heart was pounding.  But he was stopped in the hall before he got to Mrs. Crane’s room by the nurse he’d spoken to two days earlier, Dana Treadwell.

“You missed some excitement,” Dana said.

“What happened?”

“A bad spill.  Broken leg, possible fractured pelvis.”

Dr. Carlisle swallowed.  “Which one of the patients?”

“Not a patient,” Dana said.  “Mrs. Crane’s son.  Slipped on wet tile right outside his mother’s room, and fell.  Hard to believe you could be so badly hurt from a fall.  They brought him to Colville General—I heard he’s still in surgery.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, trying to keep his voice level.

“Mrs. Crane was really upset.”

“I’m sure,” Dr. Carlisle said.

Dana seemed to pick up the odd tone in his voice.  She raised one eyebrow.  “Yeah.  She was completely distraught.”

“Really?”

Dana nodded.  “Especially after her ex-husband came by.  We finally had to give her a sedative.”

Dr. Carlisle tried to think of something to say, and finally just choked out, “That’s too bad,” and turned away, hoping that Dana wouldn’t notice the ghastly expression on his face.  He stuck his hand in his lab jacket pocket, and fingered the small glass bottle, now empty, that he’d filled early that morning at the font in the nursing home’s chapel.

“Oh, and Dr. Carlisle?” Dana said, and he turned.

“You might want to know that before we finally got her to go to sleep, your name came up.”

“Me?” Dr. Carlisle squeaked.  “What did she say?”

“Something about your ‘needing an ocean of holy water.’  You might want to let Dr. Bennett handle her case from now on.”  She smiled.  “Just a suggestion.”

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Thursday, January 27, 2022

Drinking scepters

I mean no disrespect to archaeologists, but there's a fundamental difficulty with trying to understand a vanished culture when all you have is fragmentary remains; too often, there's just insufficient evidence to be certain if you're doing more than guessing.

This was one of the main points of the classic essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," by Horace Miner, which appeared in American Anthropologist in 1956.  Miner was riffing on the determination of anthropologists to analyze everything as if it were part of some kind of tribal religious artifact, so applied those same biases to things commonly found in American bathrooms -- mirrors, sinks, bottles of shampoo, combs and brushes, and so on.  The essay is hilarious but at the same time neatly poniards the tendency to interpret, and very likely misinterpret, the significance of objects left behind by cultures we know little about.

The topic comes up because of a paper out of Cambridge University that appeared in Antiquity last week.  It concerned a set of gold and silver tubes that had been dug up at the Maikop kurgan (grave mound), in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, way back in 1897.  The tubes were decorated with intricate carvings; several had ornaments shaped like bulls or oxen. 

Details of some of the Maikop tubes

The beauty of the decoration, and the fact that they were fashioned from precious metals, led to their being called "scepters."  This automatically conjured up images of use as symbols of authority by royalty, or instruments for invoking spirits (think "magic wands") by priests.  Some, more prosaically, thought they might form the struts supporting a canopy, once again for someone of high prestige.

Over a century later, the artifacts were re-examined, including a microscopic analysis of residue found inside the tubes.  This residue had a couple of odd components; grains of barley starch and cereal phytoliths (mineral crystals found inside plant seeds).  The interior of the end of the tube was shaped in such a way that it would have accommodated a conical piece of plant stem, particularly a piece of cut reed (Phragmites) that could have acted as a filter.  The conclusion?

The researchers believe that the "scepters" were actually straws for drinking beer.

Now, in favor of their use by (or in honor of) a prestigious person, there are admittedly the facts that (1) the straws were made of gold and silver, and (2) they ended up in the grave at Maikop.  The surmise is that they were probably made for, and used at, the funeral of the person buried in the kurgan, and the beer drinking wasn't just to get a buzz, but was part of the ritual.  But we're not talking insignificant amounts, here.  The authors write:

[A] single, early second-millennium BC burial in Tell Bagüz near Mari in eastern Syria, containing eight bronze tip-strainers, appears to support our hypothesis.  The set of eight drinking tubes in the Maikop tomb may therefore represent the feasting equipment for eight individuals, who could have sat to drink beer from the single, large jar found in the tomb.  The volume of this vessel (32 litres) suggests that each participant's share would be about four litres (or seven pints) per person.

Okay, I'm admittedly a lightweight -- two pints is my limit -- but seven?  Even considering that it's likely our modern brewing techniques result in a beer with higher alcohol content, that is a lot of beer to drink at one go.  I can see the funeral going as follows:

Priest:  Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our respects to our departed brother... um... hang on.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Okay, where was I?  Oh, yeah... our departed brother, who left this life only a day ago...

Participant 1:  Hold on a second.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Thanks, do go on.

Priest:  ... only a day ago, and was sadly gathered unto the arms of...

Participant 2:  Sorry.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  All right, what were you saying?

Priest (annoyed):  Anyone else, before I go on?

*five more people run outside to take a piss*

Be that as it may, the current analysis is pretty interesting, and it sounds like their hypothesis is supported by some decent evidence, but I do still think you have to be cautious not to over-conclude.  Trying to piece together a culture based on (extremely) fragmentary evidence is a sketchy enterprise.  Once again, I'm not meaning to diss the archaeologists, here; they do fantastic, and fascinating, work, and it's better to at least have a guess about the purpose of an artifact than simply to shrug our shoulders.

But it always makes me think about what archaeologists five thousand years from now will make of the artifacts left behind by us.  Think about it; trying to infer modern culture from the cover of a barbecue grill, a car tire, a piece of a mug saying "I 💙Cancun," a bird feeder, and a flip-flop.  Considering how far off the mark you could go with those makes misinterpreting beer straws as royal scepters seem like kind of a near miss.

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Wednesday, January 26, 2022

The spirits speak

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a post that appeared a couple of weeks ago over at the blog Future and Cosmos with the message, "I'm honestly curious to hear what you think of this."

The post had to do with a series of experiments done by a French researcher, Paul Joire, back in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  Joire is an interesting fellow; he was fascinated with claims of the paranormal, but much like the British-based Society for Psychical Research, did his level best to approach things from a scientific standpoint.  That's not to say he didn't have some significant missteps, though.  He invented a device he called a "sthenometer" which he said could detect the presence and configuration of the "nervous force" emitted by the human body, and suggested that it could potentially be used for diagnosis of illness -- but later experiments found that all it was picking up on was body heat.

Paul Joire, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

That said, Joire was at least trying to do things the right way.  He was obsessed with evidence of an afterlife, and investigated numerous claims of séances, table-rapping and table-turning, mediumship, automatic writing, and spirit photography, and (again like the SPR) found that the vast majority of them were outright hoaxes.

It's the remaining ones that are interesting.

The article at Future and Cosmos focuses on a series of experiments Joire did with a self-proclaimed medium and four other people as participants/witnesses, where "unseen agents" were questioned and asked for details of their lives and deaths.  The "agents" responded by rapping on the table to spell out in painstaking fashion words and sentences, which were then recorded by Joire.  The gist of the claim is that the information the ghosts were providing was unavailable to anyone at the table, and was only verified as correct after the fact (some were never verified, but never disproven; none, Joire said, was researched and proven false).  You should read the blog post in its entirety, and I don't want to steal the author's thunder, but here is just one of many examples:

Question. Bertolf must be a Christian name. Have you any other name ?
Answer. Bertolf de Ghistelles.
Q. Were you French ?
A. Flemish.
Q, Will you tell us the name of the locality where you lived ?
A, Dunkerque.
Q. Have you been a long time in the Beyond ?
A. Yes.
Q. In what year did you die ?
A. In 1081.
Q. What were you ?
A, Husband of a Saint.
Q. Do you mean that your wife is honoured as a saint, that she has been canonised ?
A, Yes.
Q. What was her name ?
A, Godeleine de Wierfroy.  Can she forgive me ?
Q, You did her harm ?
A. Yes.
Q. You killed her perhaps ?
A, I had her strangled...
Q, Have you found any members of her family ?
A, Heinfried and his wife Ogine, her father and mother.  They have forgiven me.
Q. Is the festival of your wife celebrated anywhere ?
A. Yes.
Q. On what date ?
A, July 6th....
Q, Did you die in a tragic manner ?
A, No, in a monastery.  I remained there nine years.

Joire was able to verify that there was a woman, later canonized, named Godeleine (or Godelive or Godelieve) of Ghistelles, who was murdered by her husband Berthold [sic] and her body thrown down a well; the remorseful Berthold later became a monk.

The author of Future and Cosmos has the following to say about Joire's experiments and conclusions:

[This would require] some extremely elaborate and very hard-to-prepare fraud in which a medium learned and meticulously memorized very many details about deceased figures (some not famous), and then orally recited those details, only pretending to be entranced...  The total number of raps needed to spell out the details above (with one rap per letter) would have been many hundreds, occurring spread out over a long time.  We can imagine no medium manually producing so many hundreds of raps at a table where five people were seated, without being detected by the investigators.

The only other "narrow possibility" we have of Joire's experiments not being actual evidence of spirit survival, we're told, is if the entire thing was fraudulent; i.e., that Joire himself fabricated it all.

Okay, so what do we make of this?

First, I'll agree with the author that if it's a fraud, it's a sophisticated one.  But the problem is in the last sentence; "We can imagine no medium [accomplishing this] without being detected."  Humans are notoriously easy to fool -- consider how readily we fall for the conjuring illusions of a professional stage magician -- especially when we have a vested interest in believing that the thing we're being fooled about is true.  After all, most of us, myself included, would love it if there were an afterlife.  For me, though, I'd prefer that it not be the harps, haloes, and fields of flowers variety.  I'd be thrilled with something like Valhalla, where you get to spend eternity whooping it up with your friends, participating in daily debauchery involving riotous parties, quaffing tankards of mead, and lots of sex.  So despite my general dubious attitude toward claims of spirit survival, I'm not honestly hostile to the idea, and no one would be happier than me if I turned out to  be wrong.

The thing that bothers me with Joire's experiments is the quality of the evidence.  Joire was able to verify the details in a great many of the cases (and there were a lot of cases; his book is apparently 635 pages long), which means that the details on these people's lives were out there somewhere prior to the experiments being run.  The author of Future and Cosmos says that after reading his accounts we'd be "unlikely to suspect so serious a scholar of that type of chicanery," but unfortunately, there is no human who is above suspicion.  A quick google search for "scientific fraud" will turn up hundreds of examples, some of which had people fooled for years and were debunked more or less by accident.  Scientists, sad to say, are no less prone to the temptations to cheat than the rest of us are.  Most people are honest, and do their best to play fair; but you can't start from the assumption that because a person is a scientist, (s)he is incapable of fraud.

What we can rely on, though, are the methods of science.  The rigor of the scientific approach is set up to exclude the drawing of false conclusions, whether because of innocent error or deliberate falsification, and I don't see how the evidence provided by Joire meets the minimum standard we'd require in order to agree with his conclusions (and those of the author of Future and Cosmos).  I recognize that this means his spirit-rapping question-and-answer sessions fall into a catch-22 -- if the actual accounts of the deceased subjects' lives were already out there, it opens up the possibility of foreknowledge and cheating; but if no such accounts existed, there'd be no way to verify that what the "spirits" said was true.  This, however, is an inherent flaw of the experimental design -- one that makes its results fail to achieve any kind of scientific rigor.

Note, though, that I'm not saying that Joire was a dupe or a fraud, or that he didn't communicate with the disembodied spirit of Bertolf de Ghistelles and other folks.  There is the possibility that Joire's accounts are nothing less than the unvarnished truth, and if you're going to keep an open mind, you have to admit that there's no positive evidence of fraud on the part of Joire or the medium.

But as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Unless you're starting by assuming your conclusion, you'd need more than this to buy what Joire is saying.  So as far as the possibility of a fun-filled Valhalla waiting for me, I'm going to have to temper my enthusiasm and wait for better data.

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Eldritch rabbit holes

Between research for Skeptophilia, my choice of reading material, and natural curiosity, I go down some deep rabbit holes sometimes.

This latest plunge into the netherworld of knowledge happened because I decided to reread The Lurker at the Threshold by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.  It's the umpteenth time I've read it, and although I'm well aware of its flaws (especially the overuse of words like "eldritch," the fact that every damn character in the story lives in an "ancient gambrel-roofed house," and the seemingly rushed/thinly-plotted final section), that book has some serious atmosphere.  I swear, I'll never see a stained-glass window again without thinking of the scene where the main character looks through the clear central pane of the crazy circular window in the library of the house where the story takes place -- and sees not the woods and stream lying outside, but a vista of an alien planet.

Near the end of the story, the scientist/historian Dr. Lapham is trying to convince his assistant that there's something supernatural going on, and goes through a bunch of examples from history of inexplicable occurrences.  I recognized one of them as being an actual event -- the disappearance of British diplomatic envoy Benjamin Bathurst in Perleberg, Germany in 1809 -- although the way it's described makes it sound way weirder than it actually was, and it's almost certain that Bathurst was simply robbed and murdered.  (This didn't stop me from giving the event a passing mention in my own novel, Sephirot.  Hey, if Lovecraft can get away with it, so can I.)

The fact that the Bathurst incident has at least a basis in reality made me wonder about a couple of the others Dr. Lapham mentions.  Several are references to other (fictional) Lovecraft stories, but I did wonder about his mention of sightings of mysterious undersea lights by the crews of two British ships, the light cruiser H. M. S. Caroline and the second-class cruiser H. M. S. Leander, in 1893.  So I did a bit of digging, and although the ships themselves were 100% real, I couldn't find any reference to odd sightings from either one.  

Anyhow, in The Lurker at the Threshold, the lights were supposedly the hallmark of the evil "Great Old One" Yog-Sothoth, who appeareth unto mankind as congeries of iridescent globes, so although I hath no idea what the fuck a "congery" is, I googled "real sightings of Yog-Sothoth," and that's when the bottom fell out of the rabbit hole.

The Invocation of Yog-Sothoth [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Demodus, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, Template:Other free]

This is how I ended up at a site called Lovecraftian Science, about which I can't for the life of me tell if the owner is serious.  Apparently the guy is a legitimate limnologist/ecologist, so it could well be that he's just having a bit of fun trying to apply the methods of science to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, but damned if he doesn't seem entirely in earnest.

Amongst the entries I saw therein:
  • "Cryptobiosis in Elder Things: Drifting Through Interstellar Space" -- in which we find out that the "Elder Things" in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" go into stasis when they're in outer space, and are propelled from one planet to another by dark energy.  We also read speculation that the members of the Elder Things have a similar protein structure to tardigrades, and that's how they manage to survive the trip from one planet to the next.
  • "Stephen Hawking's Ideas in a Lovecraftian Cosmos" -- wherein we learn that the titular musician in "The Music of Erich Zann" prevented an invasion of our universe by "extra-dimensional beings" by "generating micro-scale gravity waves of a very specific disturbance within space-time to link our universe with another."  Whatever that means.
  • "Lovecraftian Scientists: Astronomers from 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep'" -- musings on how the spirit of Joe Slater, main character in the short story mentioned in the title of the post, could have done battle with the evil entity residing near a star in the constellation of Perseus resulting in a spectacular nova observed in 1901 -- when the nova is 1,500 light years away, so the actual explosion happened 1,500 years ago.  "We do not know if the luminescent being that possessed Joe Slater could travel through time as easily as space so its existence was not limited to strictly linear time as it is with us," the author writes, apparently with a straight face.
  • "Lovecraft's 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family:' What of the Piltdown Man?" -- because there's nothing that strengthens an argument about the factual nature of a fictional story like drawing evidence from a blatant hoax.
  • "'The Dunwich Horror:' Meet the Whateleys" -- in which I found out way more than I wanted to know about the mechanics of Yog-Sothoth having sex with Lavinia Whateley, along with, I shit you not, Punnett squares for the offspring thereof.
I encourage you to peruse the website, because this is barely scratching the surface.  Whatever you can say about the guy's level of seriousness, there's no doubt that he's dedicated.

Being a writer, I've often joked about the FBI keeping a file on my google search history, but there are times I'm guessing that even the FBI would take the whole file and dump it in the trash and say, "Okay, never mind, this guy is a fucking loon."  I guess it's an occupational hazard of the combination of (1) being a speculative fiction writer, (2) owning a blog that frequently focuses on beliefs in weird stuff, and (3) having insatiable curiosity.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if it's disturbing or reassuring that there are people who go way further into the rabbit hole than I do; some of them, in fact, seem to have taken up permanent residence.

Anyhow, I'm going to try to go back to topics from science tomorrow.  I think one day of investigating eldritch giant interstellar tardigrades and what it'd be like to get laid by "congeries of iridescent globes" is enough to last me for a long time.

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Monday, January 24, 2022

It's all becoming clear

The phenomenon of transparency is way more interesting than it appears at first.

I remember thinking about the concept when I was a kid, the first time I watched the classic horror/science fiction film The Invisible Man.  Coincidentally, I was in high school and was in the middle of taking biology, and we'd recently learned how the human eye works, and Claude Rains's predicament took on an added layer of difficulty when it occurred to me that if he was invisible -- including his retina -- not only would we not be able to see him, he wouldn't be able to see anything, because the light rays striking his eye would pass right through it.  Since it's light being absorbed by the retina that stimulates the optic nerve, and Rains's retinas weren't absorbing any light (or we'd have seen them floating in the air, which is kind of a gross mental image), he'd have been blind.

So an invisibility potion isn't nearly as fun an idea as it sounds at first.

It wasn't until I took physics that I learned why some objects are transparent, and why (for example) it's harder to see a glass marble underwater than it is in the air.  Transparency results from a molecular structure that neither appreciably absorbs nor scatters light; more specifically, when the substance in question has electron orbitals spaced so that they can't absorb light in the visible region of the spectrum.  (If not, the light passes right through it.)  Note that substances can be transparent in some frequency ranges and not others; water, for example, is largely transparent in visible light, but is opaque in the microwave region -- which is why water heats up so quickly when you put it in a microwave oven.

The second bit, though, is where it really gets interesting.  Why are some transparent objects still clearly visible, and others are nearly invisible?  Consider my example of glass in air as compared to glass under water.  You can see through both, but it's much harder to discern the outlines of the glass underwater than it is in air.  Even more strikingly -- submerge a glass object in a colorless oil, and it seems to vanish entirely.

The reason is something called the index of refraction -- how much a beam of light is bent when it passes from one transparent medium to another.  A vacuum has, by definition, an index of refraction of exactly 1.  Air is slightly higher -- 1.000293, give or take -- while pure water is about 1.333.  The key here is that the more different the two indices are, the more light bends when crossing from one to the other (and the more the light tends to reflect from the surface rather than refract).  This is why the boundary between air and water is pretty obvious (and why those amazing photographs of crystal-clear lakes, where you can see all the way to the bottom and boats appear to be floating, are always taken from directly overhead, looking straight down; even at a slight angle from perpendicular, you'd see the reflected portion of the light and the water's surface would be clearly visible).

Likewise, the more similar the indices of refraction are, the less light bends (and reflects) at the boundary, and the harder it is to see the interface.  Glass, depending on the type, has an index of refraction of about 1.5; olive oil has an index of 1.47.  Submerge a colorless glass marble in a bottle of olive oil, and it seems to disappear,

The reason all this comes up has to do with the evolution of transparency in nature -- as camouflage.  It's a pretty clever idea, that, and is used by a good many oceanic organisms (jellyfish being the obvious example).  None of them are completely transparent, but some are good enough at index-of-refraction-matching that they're extremely hard to see.  It's much more difficult for terrestrial organisms, though, because air's lower index of refraction -- 1, for all intents and purposes -- is just about impossible to match in any conceivable form of living tissue.

Some of them come pretty close, though.  Consider the "skeleton flower," Diphylleia grayi, of Japan, which has white flowers that become glass-like when they're wet:


The transparency of the flower petals is likely to be a fluke, as it's hard to imagine how it would benefit the plant to evolve a camouflage that only works when the plant is wet.  An even cooler example was the subject of a paper in the journal eLife last week, and looked at a group of butterflies called (for obvious reasons) "glasswing butterflies."  These are a tropical group with clear windows in their wings -- but, it turns out, they're not all closely related to each other.

In other words, we're looking at an example of convergent evolution and mimicry.

The study found that some of the clear-wings are toxic, and those lack an anti-glare coating on the "windows."  This makes the light more likely to reflect from the surface, rather than pass through; think about the glare from a puddle in the road on a sunny day.  Those flashes of light act as a warning coloration -- an advertisement to predators that the animal is toxic, distasteful, or dangerous.

The glasswing butterfly Greta oto of Central and South America [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons David Tiller, Greta oto, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The coolest part of last week's paper was in looking at the mimics; the species that had the transparent windows but weren't themselves toxic.  Unlike the toxic varieties, those species had evolved anti-glare coatings on the windows, so the mimicry was obvious in bright light -- but in shadow, the lack of glare made them seem to disappear completely.  In other words, the clear parts act as a warning coloration in sunshine, and as pure camouflage in the shade!

Even more amazing is that a number of only distantly-related species have stumbled on the same mimicry -- so this particular vanishing act has apparently evolved independently more than once.  A good idea, apparently, shouldn't just be wasted on one species.

So that's today's cool natural phenomenon, which I hope I've clarified sufficiently.  There seems truly to be no end to the way living things can take advantage of physical phenomena for their own survival -- as Darwin put it, to generate "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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

It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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



Saturday, January 22, 2022

Cliffs of ice and rivers in the sky

One of the most frustrating things is that instead of meeting the challenges we have and then moving forward, we seem to be fighting the same battles over and over and over.  It's like running on a treadmill, except instead of getting aerobic exercise, all you get is high blood pressure and an ulcer.

It will come as no surprise that I'm once again referring to anthropogenic climate change, which has such a mountain of evidence behind it that there is no argument any more.  Or there shouldn't be.  But all it takes is Some Guy On The Internet making a comment that amounts to "Nuh-uh, is not," and all of the science deniers give him a standing ovation and say, "See, we told you."

The latest in the long line of unqualified anti-science types acting as if their pronouncements somehow outweigh actual research is a tweet from Matt Thomas claiming that the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia in 2020 exceeded all of the human-generated carbon dioxide ever emitted.  Thomas said, "This volcano just spewed more CO2 than every car driven in history.  Climate change is natural.  Taxing us into poverty isn’t the answer."

Despite the fact that this isn't just false, it's false by several orders of magnitude, it immediately started a Greek chorus of "Climate change is a hoax!" from all the self-appointed climatologists on Twitter.  The tweet got over a hundred thousand likes, and the video link he provided got millions of views.  I've seen it posted on social media dozens of times myself, always to shouts of acclamation.  Very few people responded the way I did, which was to say, "You, sir, are a dangerous idiot."  It seems like a lot of the people who actually trust science have been wearied to the point of exhaustion, and we're just not taking the bait any more.

And it's not like the numbers aren't out there to confirm Thomas's dangerous idiocy.  Anyone with a computer and access to scientific databases on the internet can check his figures, and see that he's not just in left field, he's so far away he couldn't see left field with a powerful telescope.  In an average year, all the volcanic activity in the world releases about 0.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide; the carbon dioxide released in one year from vehicular exhaust is ten times higher than that.  (Note that this is all the emissions from all the volcanoes in a year, as compared to vehicular emissions in a year; Thomas was claiming that one volcano exceeded the emissions of all the automobiles ever created.  I guess if you're gonna lie, you may as well make it a doozy.)

So instead of trusting Some Guy On The Internet, let's look at what the actual science is saying.  How's that for a novel idea?

Just last week there were three studies that in a sane world, would alarm the hell out of everyone, but for some reason, have barely caused a blip on the radar.

First from the University of Tsukuba (Japan), we have a study showing that a scary meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river is predicted to spike in frequency, especially in east Asia.  Atmospheric rivers are pretty much what they sound like; narrow, fast-moving bands of extremely humid air, that undergo what's called adiabatic cooling when they run into land that has a higher elevation.  This forces the air upward, causing the volume to expand and the temperature to drop -- and all of that moisture condenses as rain or snow.

We're not talking insignificant amounts of water, here.  An atmospheric river, propelled by a typhoon a thousand kilometers to the east, struck Henan Province in China last year.  The amount of rainfall they received is, honestly, hard to imagine.  In three days the city of Zhengzhou got sixty centimeters of rainfall -- about equal to its average annual precipitation.  In some places in the region, the rainfall rate exceeded twenty centimeters per hour.  Over three hundred people died in the floods, and the damage was estimated at twelve billion dollars.

And this phenomenon isn't limited to east Asia.  Want it brought home to you, Americans?  This same phenomenon has been known to strike other places with strong on-shore air currents driving into lowland areas bounded by steep climbs in elevation -- like the Central Valley of California.

The second study is from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and found that current models support that Greenland -- one of the world's largest repositories of land-bound ice -- has a delayed response to warming.  Meaning that even if everyone suddenly wised up and cut greenhouse emissions and the temperature stabilized, the Greenland Ice Cap would continue to melt.

For centuries.

The response of Some Guy On The Internet to this was a viral YouTube video showing an ice cube melting in a cup of water, wherein the water level in the cup did not change, captioned,  "A little science lesson for the IDIOTS at the global warming conference," once again to rousing applause, despite the fact that this particular SGOTI neglected the fact that the meltwater that matters is from ice that starts out on land.

That almost no one raised this objection makes me despair for the state of science education in American public schools.

Scariest of all was the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union warning that the Thwaites Glacier -- an on-land mass of ice about the size of Florida -- is in imminent danger of collapse.  And I do mean imminent; we're not talking "by 2100."

The prediction is that the collapse could come some time in the next three to five years.

The leading edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

What's going on is that Thwaites is held back by a floating ice shelf, the bottom of which is caught against the top of an undersea mountain.  The recent study looked at the rate of warm water infiltration and melting on the underside of that ice sheet, and found that the area of ice that's caught -- the part that's providing the friction holding the whole thing in place --  has decreased drastically.  It's like putting a chuck underneath the tire of a car in neutral sitting on an incline.  It doesn't move -- until you remove the chuck.  After that, the car rolls forward, and continues to accelerate.

If the ice sheet holding Thwaites back buckles, the entire glacier will start to slide.  Dumping this much ice into the ocean will raise sea levels by something on the order of sixty centimeters, inundating coastlines and low-lying areas and displacing millions of people.

Although the studies have improved in terms of detail, none of this is new information.  Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades.  Increasingly they're taking the role of Cassandra -- the figure from Greek myth who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.  The situation isn't helped by deliberate anti-science propaganda from the corporations who stand to lose financially if fossil fuels are phased out, and "news" services who are funded by those same corporations.

And, of course, by a populace who has been brainwashed to pay more attention to Some Guy On The Internet than to the hard data and sophisticated models generated by trained scientists.  But wearing blinders only works for so long.

Once you're up to your neck in sea water, it will be a little hard to argue that the scientists have been lying all along.

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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


Friday, January 21, 2022

The catalyst

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a class called Modern American Literature.

To say I was a lackluster English lit student is something of an understatement.  I did well enough in science and math, but English and history were pretty much non-starters.  I took the class because I was forced to choose -- one thing my high school had going for it was that each student developed his/her English program from a smorgasbord of semester-long classes, which ranged from Mythology to Sports Literature to Literature in Film to Syntax & Semantics -- but that semester I kind of just closed my eyes and pointed.

So Modern American Literature it was.

One of the assignments was to choose one from a list of novels to read and analyze.  I found that I didn't have a very good basis to make my decision, because although I'd heard some of the titles and recognized a few of the authors' names, I didn't really know much about any of them.  So once again taking my "what the hell does it matter?" approach, I picked one.

It was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Over the next two weeks, I read it, and I can say without any exaggeration that I've never seen things the same way since.

The story is set in 1714 in Peru, and opens with an accident.  Five people are walking on a rope bridge across a chasm when, without any warning, the ropes come loose and all five fall to their deaths in the river below.  A Franciscan friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses the disaster -- in fact, he'd been about to cross the bridge himself -- and this starts him wondering why God chose those five, and no others, to die that day.  

So Brother Juniper embarks on a quest to try to parse the mind of God.  There had to be some discernible commonality, some factor that united all five victims.  God, Brother Juniper believed, never acts at random.  There's always a reason for everything that happens.  So surely the devout, with enough prayer and study, should be able to figure out why this had occurred.

He searches out people who knew the victims, finds out who they were -- good, bad, or middling, young or old, devout or doubting.  What circumstances led each of them to decide to cross the bridge at that time?  Each was brought to that point by a series of events that could easily have gone differently; after all, if God had wanted to spare one of them, all he would have had to do was engineer a five-minute delay in their arrival at the bridgehead.

Or, in Brother Juniper's own case, speed him up by five minutes, if he'd been destined to die.

In either case, it would have been easy for an omnipotent power to alter the course of events.  So that power must have had a reason for letting things work out the way they did.

But in the end, after going into the histories of the five victims, and considering his own life, he realizes that there is no discernible reason.  There's no logic, no correlation, no pattern.  His conclusion is that either the mind of God is so subtle that there's no way a human would ever be able to comprehend it, or there are no ultimate causes, that things simply happen because they happen.  He feels that he has to communicate this to others, and writes a book about what he's learned...

... and it is promptly labeled as heresy by the Inquisition.  After a trial in which the Inquisitors attempt unsuccessfully to get Brother Juniper to recant what they perceive as his errors and lack of faith, he is burned at the stake, along with all the copies of his book.

It's a devastating conclusion.  It rattled me badly; I spent weeks afterward thinking about it.  And I never looked at the world the same way afterward.

Burned at the Stake, woodcut engraving by Ottmar Elliger (early eighteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason I bring this up is a bill that just received Senate approval in Florida that would prohibit schools from using curricula that causes students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."  On that basis, I would never have had the opportunity to read Wilder's book when I was in eleventh grade, solely because it made me uncomfortable.

This idea is so completely wrong-headed that I hardly know where to start.  One of the purposes of good books (not to mention honest instruction in history) is to shake you up, make you reconsider what you'd believed, push you to understand things that sometimes are unsettling.  I don't consider my own writing High Literature by any stretch, but I think that any book, regardless of genre, succeeds only by virtue of how it makes you think and feel.  If you reach the last page of a book and haven't changed at all since you opened it, the book has failed.  As my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, said, "If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

And this may make you feel "discomfort and anguish."  But sometimes that's what we need to feel.  Note that I'm not saying you have to overhaul your political and religious beliefs every time you read a book, but if it doesn't even make you think about them, something's wrong.  As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, you might leave the class on the last day of school with your beliefs unchanged, but don't expect to leave with them unchallenged.

It's the difference between teaching and indoctrination, isn't it?  Odd that indoctrination is supposedly what this bill is designed to prevent, when in reality, that's exactly what it accomplishes.  Don't consider our history critically; if something from the past makes you feel uncomfortable, then either don't teach it or else pretend it didn't happen (which amounts to the same thing).  Everything our forebears did was just hunky-dory because they were Americans.  

How far is that from the Deutschland über Alles philosophy of the Nazis?  Small step, seems to me.

We should be reading books that upset us.  Not only does this allow us to understand the past through the eyes of an author who sees things differently than we do, it opens our own eyes to how we got where we are -- and how we can make sure atrocities don't happen again.  Books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Richard Wright's Native Son, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying succeed because they do make us upset.  (All of the above, by the way, have a history of being banned by school boards.)

Good books should make you respond with more than just a self-satisfied "yes, we are all awesome, aren't we?"  They should be catalysts for your brain, not anesthetics.  It's not fun to realize that even our Founding Fathers and national heroes weren't all the paragons they're portrayed as, and our history isn't the proud parade toward freedom the sponsors of the Florida bill would like you to believe.  But discomfort, just like physical pain, exists for a reason; both are warnings, signaling you to think about what you're doing, and do something to fix the problem.  We gain nothing as a society by accepting sanctimonious ease over the hard work of understanding.

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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