Complexities

One of the most insidious tendencies in human nature is the way we gravitate toward simple answers to complicated questions.

I got started thinking about this because of a paper out of Stanford University that appeared this week in Science Advances, about the role that plumes of Saharan dust play in hurricane intensity and rainfall quantity.  This kind of thing is all done now using computer models, and to say the problem is mathematically complex is a stunning understatement.  The scientists have to try to work out the interactions between blobs of air that can move in three dimensions, that vary in temperature, humidity, pressure, and speed, in relation to dust particles of different sizes, shapes, and compositions, at different altitudes, and see if they can figure out how that will affect the barometric pressure, windspeed, and rainfall of storms once they reach land.

It's why weather prediction is still so difficult in general; weather is an exceedingly complex system.  This accounts for my kneejerk furious reaction when I hear someone say, "I should be a meteorologist, it's the only profession where you can be wrong three-quarters of the time and still get paid!"  (Hurr hurr.)  Or, like I actually heard someone say in a school board budget meeting -- "Why do the science teachers need an expensive weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I just look out the damn window."  (Hurr hurr hurr durr.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

It takes some self-awareness to realize you're pretty much completely ignorant about a topic, and considerable effort to remedy it, which probably explains why so many people like to pretend the world is simple.  So much easier to pick a solution that appeals to you -- especially one that doesn't require you to revise any of your preconceived notions -- and forthwith stop thinking.

Honestly, any time you hear "All we need to do is...", you should be on your guard.

The topic cropped up again a couple of days ago in a post from the wonderful author Lisa Lee Curtis, who took on addressing a meme that's been going around showing a trash-covered street with graffiti on the walls, in an obviously poor neighborhood, and the caption, "Democrats want us to believe they can clean up the environment, yet they can't even clean up their own district and streets."  Lisa does a brilliant takedown of the claim and the mindset behind it, and you should read it in its entirety (you can find it at the link provided), but one bit in particular stood out: "Democrats didn't do this.  Greed did this and continues to do this.  This isn't a partisan crisis, this is a human crisis, and you're playing armchair quarterback to something that isn't a fucking game."

But it's appealing to land on a simple solution, isn't it?  Whatever the issue is, find a one-liner of an answer and call it good.  It's the Democrats' fault.  It's the Republicans' fault.  It's the fault of irresponsible young people.  It's the fault of hidebound, conservative older people.  It's the fault of (fill in the blank): Black people, Muslims, Jews, atheists, the poor, LGBTQ+ people... whoever your favorite scapegoat is.

You know what?  It's time to grow up and stop being so damn lazy.  The world is full of complexities, which might suck, but last I checked, reality doesn't care if you think it sucks.  Learn about all sides of the issue, not just the one that comes from your preferred partisan news source, before you form an opinion.

And look, it's okay not to have an opinion about some things.  It's perfectly all right to say, "I just don't know enough about this topic that anything I could say about it would be relevant."  Work to learn about what's going on in the world, do your best to understand, but when something is truly beyond you -- like the mathematics of meteorological forecasting is for me -- then have a little humility and admit that you don't know enough to weigh in.

Oh, and for cryin' in the sink, don't spout off about subjects where you're completely ignorant and can't be bothered to learn.  There's a name for willful ignorance, you know.

It's called "stupidity."

Keep in mind the quote from H. L. Mencken: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time.  There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

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

Breaching the wall

Spartacus was a Thracian slave and gladiator, born in around 103 B.C.E. in what is now Bulgaria, about whose early years (despite several movies and books giving lots of lurid detail) little is known for certain.  He may have been conscripted into the Roman army -- certainly he knew a great deal about fighting and tactics -- but ultimately ran afoul with the notoriously harsh Roman discipline and was forced into slavery.  His physical prowess made it inevitable he'd be chosen as a gladiator, an occupation that could on occasion win you renown and eventual freedom, but much more frequently ended up with your dying a painful death in front of a large, cheering audience.

Spartacus by sculptor Dénis Foyatier (1830) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Spartacus statue by Dénis Foyatier, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Spartacus was having none of it, and in 73 B.C.E. he escaped confinement with about seventy other gladiators.  Soon their ranks were joined by an estimated seventy thousand slaves and poor people, which began the Third Servile War, a conflict Voltaire referred to as "the only just war in history."  They held out for two years -- no mean feat -- by this time, swelling their numbers to 120,000, before the inevitable happened.  The Roman army, under Marcus Licinius Crassus, defeated Spartacus's forces at the Battle of Lucania in 73 B.C.E.  Spartacus himself was killed in the battle (although his body was never found, leading to rampant speculation, lo unto this very day, that he somehow escaped).  In a way, even if he was killed during the fighting it was damned lucky for him, because after the battle ended six thousand of his compatriots were crucified along the Appian Way, surely one of the most horrific and cruel means of execution ever devised.

The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel (1882) [Image is in the Public Domain]

For what it's worth, Crassus got what he deserved in the end.  In 53 B.C.E. he died at the disastrous (from the Roman perspective, anyhow) Battle of Carrhae, by one account being held down and having molten gold poured down his throat.

Man, they did know how to come up with some creatively gruesome ideas, back then.

The reason Spartacus comes up is because of a story over at Smithsonian Magazine about an archaeological find in Calabria, the "toe of Italy's boot" -- a three-kilometer-long stone wall running alongside what appears to be a deep military ditch, and nearby, obvious remnants of a battle, such as broken iron sword handles, curved blades, javelin points, and spearheads.  The types of artifacts are consistent with production during the late Republic, which is right about the same time as the Third Servile War occurred.

In fact, Andrea Maria Gennaro, superintendent of archaeology for the Italian Ministry of Culture, who worked at the site, believes that the wall and ditch were built to contain Spartacus and his fellow rebels, but that there is a spot on the wall that shows sign of a breach.  It's known that the rebellious slave army did fight battles against the Roman army in the region -- and more than once succeeded, before finally being overwhelmed and defeated in Lucania, forty kilometers south of Naples.  Gennaro thinks this very spot might have been the site of one of those breaches by the famous rebel.

Part of the stone wall thought to have been part of the defense against Spartacus and the rebels [Image credit: Andrea Maria Gennaro]

"We started studying weapons recovered along the wall, and the closest comparisons are with weapons from the late Republican period," she said.  "We believe we have identified the site of the clash...  The wall is a sort of barrier due to its topographic location and other factors, like the absence of gates.  It divides the entire large flat area into two parts...  When we realized what it was, it was very exciting.  It's not every day you get to experience history first-hand."

I was struck by that palpable sense of history beneath my feet the entire time I was in Italy two months ago.  Mind you, there's history everywhere in the world; right here where I now live, the Seneca and Cayuga Nations and their ancestors thrived for thousands of years.  But there are few places in the world with as many tangible traces of antiquity as in Italy.

And now we have one with a direct connection to one of the most famous figures from the Roman Republic -- someone who is still held up as an inspiration to those fighting against oppression and servitude.  Even though Spartacus and his rebels ultimately failed -- certainly, the practice of slavery in Rome continued unabated afterward -- seeing the wall that they breached over two thousand years ago still acts as a symbol of brave men and women willing to put their lives on the line to be free.

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

Seeing angels

In Harry Nilsson's strange little cartoon fable-for-adults The Point (1971), the character of the Rock Man tells the main character Oblio, "You see what you wanna see, and hear what you wanna hear, you dig?"

I dig.  In fact, truer words never spoken.  We take what we experience and shoehorn it into what we already believed; it's impossible to do otherwise, because we're constrained by our expectations and prior understanding.  Science helps -- it's certainly a more objective approach than anything else I can think of -- but even it's not completely immune, something I wrote about in more detail a few years ago.  Confirmation bias seems to be a built-in condition of the human brain -- something we could all bear keeping in mind, especially when it comes to topics about which we're dead sure we're right.

To start with a rather low-emotional-charge example, take the story of the Angels of Mons.

The claim is that in August of 1914, with World War I in full swing, some British, French, and Belgian soldiers on the battlefield saw an angelic apparition near Mons, Belgium.  This happened during the middle of a battle where the Allied forces were greatly outnumbered by the Germans, and things were looking pretty bleak.  The sudden spectacle of divine messengers over the field, leading an army of ghostly bowmen, was a turning point in the battle; encouraged by the fact that apparently God was on the side of the Allies, they fought with renewed energy, finally driving the Germans back with heavy losses.  No less a figure than Brigadier General John Charteris spoke of there being widespread rumors of "an Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance."

A drawing that appeared in the Illustrated London News in November 1915, showing an artist's conception of the Ghostly Bowmen of Mons [Image is in the Public Domain]

The trouble began when people started investigating who actually saw the apparition.  Turned out that just about all the soldiers who were at Mons denied having seen it personally, but damn near every one of them "knew someone who had."  Interestingly, the British soldiers claimed the ghostly bowmen were being led by St. George, while the French soldiers said they were led by Joan of Arc.  More damning still, some of them said they hadn't heard about it, but had read about it -- and upon inquiry, what most of them had read was a (fictional) short story by Arthur Machen called "The Bowmen," published only a month after the battle in The London Evening News, recounting a tale of German soldiers driven back by the ghosts of British fighters who had died at the Battle of Agincourt.  

The Society for Psychical Research, which then (as now) was one of the foremost groups evaluating paranormal claims through a skeptical, scientific lens, said about the Angels of Mons, "We have received [no first-hand testimony] at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon...  The battlefield visions prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumor, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source."

Interesting that the ones who swore the visions were real were people who already (1) believed in angels, (2) thought that of course God was on their side, and (3) won the battle anyhow.  There might be a little more credibility to the story if there was a single German report of having been driven back by St. George and/or St. Joan, the angelic host, and spectral bowman -- which, of course, there isn't.  But even today, there are people who still claim fervently that it happened, and cite it as a real example of the existence of angels and of divine intervention in the course of human affairs.

Whatever happens to you, you make it fit whatever your perception of the world already was.

Which brings us to the higher-emotional-charge example, which is the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

The best information we have at the moment is that the shooter was an odd, disturbed young man, whose real motives may never be known for certain.  He was the registered Republican son of a Libertarian father and Democratic mother, and fit the almost-cliché picture of the mass shooter as a bullied, angry young loner.  This hasn't stopped the Democrats from saying of course he was a Republican, and the Republicans from saying he was a closet Democrat who had registered as a Republican as a smokescreen.  Anti-trans bigots made the claim the shooter was a trans woman -- a false story amplified by none other than Alex Jones, who just will not keep his stupid mouth shut despite his slander already having caused him to lose just about everything he owns.  Despite the source, the rumor was immediately swallowed whole by members of the far-Right who are desperate to characterize LGBTQ+ people as inherently depraved.

An even closer parallel to the Angels of Mons, though, is the response some have had to Trump's near-miss.  The pro-Trump Christians have been nearly unanimous in their claims that the bullet was deflected through direct divine intervention (never mind that a bystander was hit and killed; perhaps the Almighty didn't consider him as worthy of survival).  Pictures of an angel, the Virgin Mary (in the Roman Catholic versions), or even Jesus himself pinging the bullet away at the last moment are making the rounds.  On the other hand, a small, but growing, group of anti-Trump Christians are quoting Revelation 13:3, which is about the Beast (read, Satan) who "filled the whole world with wonder," whom people worshipped and followed without question -- and who received an apparently fatal wound to the head, but who miraculously escaped death.

Three guesses as to how they're interpreting that story.

You see what you wanna to see, and hear what you wanna hear.

Why is it so hard for people to confine themselves to the facts?  As I mentioned at the start, there's a measure of confirmation bias that is unavoidable, but these people seem to be taking scanty information and then painting in the gaps with whatever they'd desperately like to be true.  And it's unsurprising that much of it is given a religious slant; like the story of the angels over the battlefield, it's all too common to add in some divine providence to the mix -- where, of course, the angels you see conveniently make things work out in accordance with the way you'd very much like them to work out.

It puts me in mind of the trenchant quote by Susan B. Anthony, which seems as good a place to end as any: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

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

Make a little noise

Sometimes, you can mislead people not only by what you say, but by what you leave out.

Take, for example, the "Moodus noises," that have been reported for centuries near the village of Moodus, Connecticut, in the town of East Haddam.  The sounds themselves are real enough; in fact, the village's name comes from the Algonquian matchitmoodus, which translates to "place of noises."  Rumblings and deep booms are frequent, especially in the vicinity of nearby Mount Tom, and were apparently part of the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying short story "The Dunwich Horror":

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below...  Noises in the hills continue to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and other physiographers.  Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard -- a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow.

Which is pretty damn atmospheric, you have to admit.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Reuben C. Dodd - DeviantArt - Facebook, The Dunwich Horror - "Wilbur Whateley's Twin" by Reuben C. Dodd, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Interestingly, not only was Lovecraft springboarding off a real phenomenon of subterranean noises; the Devil's Hop Yard is also a real place, but it's not as eerie as Lovecraft would have you believe.  In fact, it's pretty enough that it was set aside as a state park, and as far as its diabolical name, no one's quite sure where it came from.  One theory is that a brewer who lived there was named Dibble, and the locals thought using the name for his hop fields was an amusing pun.

Of course, Lovecraft was writing fiction, and actually, he himself was not at all superstitious.  When fans wrote him letters asking for the directions to Dunwich or Arkham or Innsmouth -- or, worse, said they'd been there and wanted to tell him all about it -- he'd respond with admirable patience, "None of those are real places.  I know that for certain, you see, because I made them up."  But the fact remains that the Moodus noises are quite real, even if he and others spun fictional tales around them.  So what are they?

There are dozens of websites and books and YouTube videos claiming that they're supernatural in origin -- citing Native or early colonial legends but not going any further.  They often quote the passage from Charles Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land:

It was finally understood that Haddam witches, who practiced black magic, met the Moodus witches, who used white magic, in a cave beneath Mount Tom, and fought them in the light of a giant carbuncle [ruby] that was fastened to the roof...

If the witch-fights were continued too long the king of Machimoddi, who sat on a throne of solid sapphire in the cave whence the noises came, raised his wand: then the light of the carbuncle went out, peals of thunder rolled through the rocky chambers, and the witches rushed into the sky.

Most of the paranormal-leaning sources claim the area is haunted -- either by demons, or nature-spirits, or the ghosts of dead humans (or some combination).  They claim that there's a grand mystery still surrounding the place; you'll frequently see phrases like "no good explanation" and "unexplained phenomenon" and "scientists are baffled" (given the frequency of this one, you'd think scientists do little more than shrug their shoulders in helpless puzzlement all day long).  What these books, articles, and websites conveniently leave out is that in fact, a cogent scientific explanation for the Moodus noises was published by a geologist named Elwyn Perry...

... all the way back in 1941.

Perry proposed -- and the explanation has borne up under scrutiny -- that the Moodus noises are caused by minor seismic activity.  The area around Moodus is prone to earthquake swarms, despite its being far from obvious active fault lines.  In the 1980s there were four separate clusters of small quakes, numbering more than one hundred temblors in all, accompanied by a corresponding upswing of reports of booming and rumbling noises, and another swarm occurred in 2011.  Later studies found that the culprit is the Lake Char Fault, the subterranean suture line of a terrane (a microcontinent that ends up welded to a larger land mass) that stuck to North America during the lockup of Pangaea 250 million years ago.  The boundary was a weak spot when the Atlantic Ocean opened, and the tensional stress of rifting is still being released as the land settles.

So there's a completely natural explanation for the Moodus noises, however reluctant some people are to say so.  In a way, I get it; there's a certain frisson you get from accounts of orgiastic rites and conjuring evil spirits from underground caverns, that "it's a geologic fault zone and what you're hearing are small, shallow earthquakes" simply doesn't provide.

But predictably, I'd much rather know the real answer, and if I want to scare myself, I'll just read "The Dunwich Horror."  As far as the supernatural explanations, I tend to agree with journalist/skeptic Carrie Poppy: "We use these as stopgaps for things we can't explain.  We don't believe them because of evidence, we believe them because of a lack of evidence."

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

Life in the background

Robertson Davies's brilliant book Fifth Business opens with a quote that explains the title:

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.

Davies attributes the quote to the Danish playwright Thomas Overskou, but in reality Davies himself made it up, as he admitted to a scholar almost a decade after its publication when a thorough scouring of Overskou's work failed to turn up any such passage.  To give a rather meta twist to the whole thing, the novel is about a man (Dunstan Ramsay) who feels overlooked and marginalized in life, always the minor character eclipsed by everyone around him -- the one who is essential to the plot but never center stage -- and Davies has stated that the entire trilogy of which Fifth Business is the first installment is semi-autobiographical.

So Robertson Davies, essentially, wrote a memoir disguised as a novel about a sort-of fictional character whose accomplishments were overlooked or misattributed, and opened it with a quote he himself had made up and then attributed to someone else.

Man, there are some layers there to analyze.

I was immediately reminded of Davies's book when I came across a recent paper in the Journal of Research in Personality a couple of days ago.  The study, conducted by psychologists Ryan Goffredi and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri, looks at how we see our roles in our own autobiographical memories -- if we view ourselves as being the main character in our own story, driving the narrative and affecting the outcome, or as a minor character primarily acting as a foil for others' successes.  Interestingly, Goffredi and Sheldon found that people who see themselves in the starring role in their own life's story are generally more psychologically healthy -- they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher scores on assessments for emotional well-being and satisfaction with life.

It's not surprising, really.  A sense of agency in your own life has a huge effect on how you see the world.  The authors write:

These results support our notion that the way in which an individual perceives themselves as a character in their life story is likely to impact their well-being.  When people see themselves as being the agentic force in their lives and make decisions for themselves, as major characters do, rather than being swept about by external forces (and other people), they are more integrated and fully functioning selves.

Such individuals feel more autonomous, more competent and effective, and also experience better relational satisfaction with others, as evidenced by their increased basic psychological need satisfaction.  Conversely, those who see themselves as minor characters are more likely to feel thwarted in getting these needs satisfied, a condition associated with diminished self-integration and well-being.

This cut pretty close to the bone for me, because I have suffered from depression and anxiety my entire adult life, and have also felt very little agency in what goes on around me, but never really thought to link the two.  It's always seemed to me that in most situations I'm the perpetual outsider, not really central to anything or anyone, always trying to find my footing but never really succeeding, and only useful apropos of others' accomplishments.  And when I think of most of the big events in my life, it's always struck me how few of them I honestly was in control of.  Even my choice of a career happened more or less by accident -- and halfway through my first year of teaching, I was about a micron away from quitting, from admitting that I just wasn't up to the job and needed to find some other way of making a living.

But teaching itself is kind of emblematic of that mindset, isn't it?  You are there to facilitate your students' learning and advancement, launching them on their lives and careers and hopes and dreams, while you yourself stay put.  Each year you wave goodbye to one set of students and say hello to the next -- like a rock in the stream, watching the water perpetually flowing away from you and out of sight.

Reading the Goffredi and Sheldon paper, though, I find myself wondering how much of my sense of being "fifth business" in my own life's story is because I'm viewing it through the skewed lenses of mental illness.  After all, what the researchers found was a correlation; so if there is a causation there, which way does it point?  Does depression make you feel like a minor character in your own life, or does being marginalized in actuality lead to a loss of a sense of agency?

Could be both, of course.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Uark Theatre, As You Like It (14523154077), CC BY 2.0]

But perhaps that's why I enjoyed Davies's novel Fifth Business (and its sequels, The Manticore and World of Wonders) so much.  It was easy for me to identify with Dunstan Ramsay -- a man who spent his whole life with circumstance catching him by the tail and whirling him around, who never felt as if he were central to the narrative of his own story.  

The character Percy Boyd Staunton -- who is Ramsay's opposite, very much the main character of every scene he's in, for better or worse -- puts it this way: "If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get."

I have to wonder, though, if that option was ever really open to me.  And, after all, minor characters are necessary, too -- the ones who facilitate the protagonist's success or the antagonist's eventual comeuppance, even if they never reap any rewards for their actions.  It may be a little underwhelming to see your name in the playbill listed in a forgettable role like "Third Male Bystander," but hey, a role is a role.  Life in the background is, at least, usually safe.

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

The wind walker

One of the most terrifying legends to come out of the Algonquian tribes of northeastern North America is about a creature called the Wendigo.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Віщун, Wendigo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Wendigo is a spirit that haunts the deep woods, lying in wait for unwary travelers.  When it takes corporeal form it's humanoid, skinny and bony, and its approach is heralded by a sharp drop in temperature and a foul smell.  The Wendigo uses humans as food -- cannibalism is one characteristic the legends always mention -- but it's never sated, and is always looking for new victims to consume.

This myth is found across the region.  The English name comes from the Ojibwe word wiindigoo, but most of the Algonquian tribes have some version of it.  Ojibwe scholar Basil Johnston, in his book The Manitous, gives the following rather ghastly description of the Wendigo:

The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones.  With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave.  What lips it had were tattered and bloody...  Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.

For me, though, the most spine-chilling thing about the legend is what you're supposed to do if you see it before it sees you.  (If it sees you first, apparently you're pretty much fucked sideways.)  You're supposed to turn around and walk -- not run -- away.  It can only get you if your gazes meet, so if you turn your back on it and act like it's not there, you have a chance.  The Wendigo will then call your name in an appealing voice, trying to get you to turn around, but you have to just keep walking until you reach safety.

For me, I think the "don't run" part would be the hardest.  If I saw something like this, my legs would look like those comical Looney Tunes characters who are running so fast the lower half of their body turns into this elliptical blur.  I might not even stop when I reach safety.  I might keep running long enough to end up in Mozambique.  (Yes, I know that Mozambique is across the ocean from where I live.  The Looney Tunes characters never let a body of water stop them, and neither would I.)

As you might imagine, the legend is creepy enough that it's appeared in many works of fiction, starting with Algernon Blackwood's 1910 short story "The Wendigo."  H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, in their Cthulhu Mythos stories, incorporated many of the characteristics of the creature into their "Great Old One" named Ithaqua the Wind Walker.  I even gave a crack at it; my novella "The Conduit" (currently out of print) featured a spirit based on the Wendigo, but I used the cannibalism thing metaphorically; in my story the Wendigo didn't eat its victims' bodies, but instead possessed them and consumed pieces of their personality -- so that when it went on to a new host it retained the knowledge and abilities of the people it had previously inhabited.

What's most interesting about this legend is how many people think it's true.  If it weren't real, the argument goes, there's no way it would have become so widespread in the Indigenous tribes of the northeast.  There was a spirited discussion over at Quora a while back over whether the Wendigo actually exists, with the consensus being "Yes, of course it does."  If you do a Google search for "Wendigo legend true" or "Wendigo real" you'll get literally thousands of hits, including ones from people who claim to have narrowly escaped getting eaten by it.

Needless to say, I'm highly dubious.  Not only do we have our old friend "the plural of anecdote is not data" here, we've also got the problem that science (i.e. determining what is real and what is not) does not proceed by popular vote, so saying something is widely believed has no impact on its truth or falsity.  Take, for example, religion.  To make at least a passing attempt to stay off the thin ice I usually skate on, pick a religion that you don't happen to believe.  Let's say Greek mythology, for instance.  (My apologies to anyone who is a Poseidon worshiper -- please don't come at me with a trident, I'm just trying to make a point, here.)  Back in the heyday of ancient Greece, damn near everyone venerated the various gods and sub-gods and spirits and whatnot; you'd have gotten close to one hundred percent agreement that of course Zeus was up there hurling lightning bolts whenever there was a thunderstorm.  

"Lots of people think so" is simply not a reliable guide to the truth.

As always, what we need is hard evidence, and in the case of the Wendigo (not to mention Poseidon, Zeus, et al.) there isn't any.  As one of the lone voices of reason on Quora put it, "Yes, the Wendigo exists.  In the imagination.  Otherwise, no."

But that doesn't make the story any less scary.  And next time I go out for a trail run in our local National Forest, if I hear a soft, beckoning voice call out "Gordon...." from behind me, I am not turning around.  Maybe it'll be some friend of mine back there trying to get my attention, but that's just too bad.

If they really want to talk to me, they can text me or something.  I doubt the Wendigo has a phone, so at least that'd be safe enough.

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

The microcontinent

One of the nice things about science is that it allows us to understand the parts of the universe that are beyond common sense.  

Don't get me wrong, common sense is often a decent guide to figuring things out, and there's some truth to the lament that it'd be nice if it were more common.  The problem is, our intuitive grasp of how stuff works evolved in the context we live in -- moderate sizes and masses, moderate speeds, and moderate time durations.  Get very far out of that context, and common sense can give you the wrong answer.  One of the first times I ran into this was in high school physics, where I learned the startling fact that an object's vertical and horizontal velocity are entirely independent of each other.  This is illustrated by the oft-quoted example that if you fire a bullet horizontally, and at the same time drop a bullet from the height of the gun's barrel, the two bullets will hit the ground at precisely the same time (assuming level terrain).  It may seem counterintuitive, but it's true -- and it took Isaac Newton to show why that was.

We run into problems not only when we deal with things moving quickly, but when they're moving slowly -- so slowly they appear not to be moving at all.  I got to thinking about this when I was sent a link by my friend, the awesome author Andrew Butters (you should follow him at the link provided, and also immediately order his phenomenal new novel Known Order Girls, which is one of the most poignant books I've ever read).  Andrew is, like me, a science nerd -- we were both drastically unsuccessful physics majors in college, who despite that experience maintained a deep fascination with how the universe works.  (Interestingly, our comeuppance as incipient scientists came in different classes.  His nemesis was Electromagnetic Theory, and mine was Classical Mechanics.  In both cases we passed the class largely because the professor didn't ever want to see our names on his roster again, and afterward we both decided that maybe a career as a physicist was not in the cards.)

In any case, this time the topic he sent me was geology -- in particular, plate tectonics, a particular interest of mine.  Researchers have just found that a part of Nunavut, Canada is actually a microcontinent -- a geologically-anomalous piece of continental crust that came loose from Greenland and welded itself to North America on the other side of the Davis Strait.  

The Davis Strait and the west coast of Greenland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons brewbooks via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)]

What's curious about this is that up until about 45 million years ago, Canada and Greenland had been moving apart.  The evidence is that there was a rift zone -- that's what formed the Davis Strait in the first place -- and that some time in the Mid-Eocene Epoch, the rift failed.  (This is not that uncommon; there's a good possibility that the Cameroon Line and the New Madrid Fault are both failed rift zones.)  In any case, after the Davis Strait Rift sealed back up, Greenland started moving in tandem with the North American Plate -- except for a piece of it that sheared off and stuck to what is now Canada.

"The reinterpretation of seismic reflection data offshore West Greenland, along with a newly compiled crustal thickness model, identifies an isolated terrane of relatively thick (19–24 km [12-15 miles]) continental crust that was separated from Greenland during a newly recognised phase of E-W extension along West Greenland’s margin," the team wrote.  "We interpret this continental block as an incompletely rifted microcontinent, which we term the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent...  As our seismic reflection interpretations indicate an extensional event in the eastern Davis Strait between 58 and 49 Myr, spatially coincident with the zone of thinnest continental crust between the continental fragment and Greenland, we infer this extensional event [rift] led to the separation of this fragment from Greenland."

When you think about it, it's unsurprising that it took so long for geologists to figure plate tectonics out.  Despite such broad hints as the puzzle-piece outlines of South America and Africa, a process this slow is not obvious.  Add to that the fact that this particular plate is in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, accessible to researchers for maybe two months a year (that's being generous.)  The entire picture is still being pieced together.  Our tectonic map is pretty good, but the new research shows us that we don't have it all parsed quite yet.

Which is the way it should be.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, the more we learn, the more we extend the perimeter of our ignorance.  And this, after all, is what drives science -- the fact that every question we answer brings up a dozen more.

I think we'll be working at this for quite some time to come.

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

A celestial do-si-do

A common -- although, as it turns out, completely understandable -- error is to say that the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun.

No, I'm not recommending a return to the geocentric model, where the Earth is at the center of the universe and everything orbits around it in perfect circles, as decreed by the Almighty at the moment of creation (which, of course, was six thousand years ago).  The inaccuracy I'm referring to is much smaller than that -- but is still significant.

Instead of saying "the planets orbit the Sun," the more precise way to state it is that the planets and the Sun all orbit their common center of gravity.  Newton's Third Law describes how every force exerted creates an equal and opposite force -- so just as the Sun is pulling on the Earth, the Earth is pulling on the Sun.  The result is that both are in a dance around the system's center of gravity.  Given the Sun's vastly larger mass, their mutual center of gravity is well inside the Sun, so to say "the Earth orbits the Sun" is a sufficiently close approximation to account for what we observe on a daily basis.

The effect is big enough, though, that this is one of the ways that exoplanets have been discovered -- mostly in nearby systems, where it's easier to see.  A star with an unseen companion gets pulled around as they orbit their common center of gravity, so from our perspective it looks like the star has a slight wobble.  As the wobble is bigger if the planet has a larger mass, this technique has been used mostly to find exoplanets that are gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn, which are big enough to sling their host star around more effectively.

Sometimes, though, looking for a stellar wobble results in discovering something else -- an invisible object much too massive to be a planet, in a celestial do-si-do with a star.

That was the subject of a paper published this week in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, describing research led by Kareem El-Badry of Caltech.  The team found 21 stars with heavy but invisible companions, which from their size appear to be neutron stars, the collapsed, ultra-dense cores left behind by giant stars after they exhaust their fuel.

The curious thing is that prior to the formation of a neutron star, the giant star went supernova -- so why didn't that colossal explosion completely blow away the Sun-like star it's paired with?  The simple answer is we don't know.  "We still do not have a complete model for how these binaries form," El-Badry said.  "In principle, the progenitor to the neutron star should have become huge and interacted with the solar-type star during its late-stage evolution.  The huge star would have knocked the little star around, likely temporarily engulfing it.  Later, the neutron star progenitor would have exploded in a supernova, which, according to models, should have unbound the binary systems, sending the neutron stars and Sun-like stars careening in opposite directions...  The discovery of these new systems shows that at least some binaries survive these cataclysmic processes even though models cannot yet fully explain how."

If El-Badry et al.'s research bears up, it will be the first time neutron stars have been detected purely by their gravitational effects.

So that's today's cool news from science.  A stellar dance between a Sun-like star and a collapsed, super-dense neutron star.  And I love that El-Badry ends with the words, "... models cannot yet fully explain how."  Focus on the word "yet."  These are the sorts of things that push science forward -- some unexplained observation that makes scientists scratch their heads.  As Isaac Asimov put it, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but '... that's funny.'"

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

Traveler's tale

Yesterday's post focused on the unfortunate fact that gullible people will always be with us, as will the charlatans and fakers who make it their life's work to take advantage of credulity wherever they find it.  It's a theme regular readers of Skeptophilia will be all too familiar with.  However, today I'd like to look at something else -- something hopeful -- that, fortunately, will also always be with us.

My example of this is someone I wonder if you've heard of.  His name was Lābīn Sǎowùmǎ (拉賓掃務瑪), but he is more commonly known by his name rendered in the Syriac language, Rabban Bar Ṣawma ("Rabban," and the Chinese version "Lābīn," are honorifics, translating as "leader" or "master").  Bar Ṣawma was born into a wealthy family, probably of either Uyghur or Ongud descent, in Zhongdu (near modern Beijing, China) in around the year 1220 C.E.  

Bar Ṣawma was a Christian, a member of a small enclave of Nestorian Christians which had been founded during the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century.  In an open-mindedness unusual for the time, the Tang emperors allowed the Church of the East to coexist with the majority Confucian religion of the Han Chinese.  Although they had some ups and downs -- there was a bout of persecution in the tenth century -- there was still a small group practicing their religion by the thirteenth, officially overseen by a Patriarch who lived in what is now Iraq.

Bar Ṣawma became a monk at about age twenty, and quietly taught in Zhongdu for the next two decades.  It wasn't until the mid-1260s that he and a student of his, Rabban Markos, decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  And that was when their lives changed irrevocably.

It's a sad fact that a lot of religious people approach going to other cultures as "let's see how many people I can convert, voluntarily or otherwise."  Bar Ṣawma and Markos seemed to look at it more as "let's see how much I can learn from this amazing world."  Perhaps it came from their upbringing in a minority religion that had been treated with gracious tolerance; but however they came by the attitude, it allowed them to view other cultures with curiosity and not with fear, superiority, condescension, or condemnation.

They made their way through western China and Mongolia, into what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan, along the way making friends with the Mongol ruler Abaqa Khan.  The ended up in Baghdad, where they were welcomed -- amazingly, given the fact that the Crusades were kind of in full swing at that point -- and Markos decided to stay in a monastery in Mosul, where he was elected as Patriarch of the Church of the East, taking the name Yahballaha III.  (Markos/Yahballaha didn't always meet with such positive reactions; he was imprisoned by the Muslims twice, and each time had to be ransomed.  Despite this, he stayed in his role as Patriarch until his death in 1317.)

Bar Ṣawma, though, had a lot farther yet to go.

Chosen as the ambassador of the Church of the East to the Pope (then Honorius IV, although Honorius was to die before Bar Ṣawma arrived), as well as the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos and the various monarchs of Europe, he took off again in 1287 -- at which point he was 67 years old, so hardly a young man even by modern standards.  (I'm 63 and know whereof I speak, on that count at least.)  As hard as it is to imagine, Bar Ṣawma made his way through Armenia, across the Caucasus Mountains and through the Byzantine Empire, then on into the Greek Islands, Sicily (where he saw Mount Etna erupt), Naples, Rome, Genoa, Paris, and finally reached the Atlantic Ocean at Bordeaux, along the way having audiences with the various rulers of the lands he passed through, including King Philip IV "the Fair" of France and King Edward I of England (who was in Bordeaux at the time; in 1287 Gascony was ruled by the English).

Even more astonishing is that after this long voyage, he still had enough energy left to make the return trip.  He crossed Europe a second time, from west to east, and decided to settle down in Baghdad, where he spent the rest of his life, dying in 1294 at the age of 74.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PHGCOM, VoyagesOfRabbanBarSauma, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In the final years of his life, he wrote his memoirs, which were first published in English in 1928 under the rather cumbersome title The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China: or The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sawma, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe, and Markos Who as Mar Yahbh-Allaha III Became Patriarch of the Church of the East in Asia.  I've read excerpts of it -- I'd like to find a complete copy -- and what strikes me in every bit I've read is his deep curiosity and respect for the lands, people, and cultures he was visiting.  Here's a bit about his stay in Italy:

And from that place they travelled inland on horses, and they passed through towns and villages and marveled because they found no land which was destitute of buildings.  On the road they heard that Mar Papa [Pope Honorius IV] was dead...  Three days later the Cardinals sent and summoned Rabban Ṣawma to their presence.  And when he went to them they began to ask him questions, saying, "What is thy quarter of the world, and why hast thou come?"  And Rabban Ṣawma said unto him, "The Mongols and the Catholicus [i.e. the Patriarch] of the East have sent me to Mar Papa concerning the matter of Jerusalem; and they have sent letters with me."  The Cardinals said unto him, "Where is the Throne of the Catholicus?"  He said to them, "In Baghdad...  Know ye, O our Fathers, that many of our Fathers have gone into the countries of the Mongols, and Turks, and Chinese and have taught them the Gospel, and at the present time there are many Mongols who are Christians... "  Then Rabban Ṣawma said unto them, "I have come from remote countries neither to discuss, nor to instruct [men] in matter of the Faith, but I came that I might receive a blessing from Mar Papa, and to visit the shrines of the saints and to make known the words of King [Arghon] and the Catholicus.  If it be pleasing in your eyes, let us set aside discussion, and do ye give attention and direct someone to show us the churches here and the shrines of the saints; [if ye will do this] ye will confer a very great favor on your servant and disciple."

It's interesting how much you can gain in understanding when you go to a place with the attitude, "I'm not here to do anything to you, I just want to learn.  Show me whatever's cool."  I've tried to adopt that approach when I've traveled -- I've been lucky enough to visit a great many lovely places, and have met with nearly one-hundred percent positive responses from the people I've spoken with.

On the other hand, I have to admit that Rabban Bar Ṣawma rather puts me to shame.  After all, I had the convenience of an airplane to get where I was going.  He did the whole thing -- a one-way distance of over eight thousand kilometers -- in the thirteenth century, using a combination of horses, boats, and his own two feet.

It's easy to look back at the people of those times as being narrow-minded bigots whose only thought was forcing others to conform, at the point of a sword if necessary.  And certainly some of them were.  Don't get smug about how much more enlightened we are, though -- it's clear that we still have people of that mindset around today.  The Middle Ages didn't have the market cornered on bigotry, more's the pity.  

But more importantly, Rabban Bar Ṣawma is a reminder that then, as now, there were people who were kind, accepting, and broad-minded, who gazed around with wonder, saying "Look at this, isn't it all so beautiful?"

When you read the news every day, and it seems populated by the worst representatives of the human species, remember Rabban Bar Ṣawma and his long odyssey, driven only by his intellectual curiosity and his deep love for his fellow human beings.  Then set aside the doomscrolling, and reassure yourself that there are still those sorts of people around today, too.  Plenty of them.

Like Bar Ṣawma knew 750 years ago, to find them, all you have to be willing to do is to look around you.

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