Old New England

What do you know about the founding of New England?

No, not that New England, the other one.  Although there are some significant parallels, notably a king in a completely different country granting settlers land despite the fact that he didn't own it and it inconveniently happened to be already occupied by someone else.  (Hardly the only time this has happened, of course.  See the history of South and Central America, Indonesia, India, and pretty much the entire continent of Africa for other notable examples.)

This particular New England is on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine and Russia.  According to three medieval manuscripts -- the French Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis, Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, and the Icelandic Játvarðar Saga -- it was founded in the late eleventh century by a group of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon noblemen who, after the Norman Invasions of 1066, didn't like that the country had been taken over by a bunch of Frenchmen, so decided to up stakes and leave.  There's some indication that they were led by prominent English thegn Siward Barn, who had been imprisoned by William the Conqueror, and after being released in 1087 disappears from the records entirely.

This, apparently, may have been because he went to Constantinople.

The English group was mostly made up of powerful and wealthy landowners; after the Conquest, the peasant class pretty much went on with their miserable lives just as before, only with new kings and masters.  Most of them probably reacted to William's accession to the throne the same way these guys did:

"King of the who?"

In any case, Siward and his disaffected noblemen decided to take off for greener pastures (figuratively, not literally, as it turned out) and sailed to the Mediterranean, sacking the city of Ceuta near the Straits of Gibraltar, and pillaging and plundering their way from Mallorca to Menorca to Sicily (which at that point was also being run by the Normans).

It was in Sicily where they found out that Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenos was in trouble from Muslim invaders (and also from the goddamn Normans, who just would not mind their own business), so they decided to head over to Constantinople and give him a hand.  The battle went poorly for the Muslims (ultimately they'd come back and pretty much take over the place, but this was a significant setback, at least for the time being); the Normans were routed completely, and limped back to Sicily to regroup and figure out who they would annoy next.  Alexius was grateful enough to tell the English they could stay in Constantinople permanently if they wanted.  Siward said thanks but no thanks -- figuring, probably correctly, that he'd remain in a subservient position if they stayed there, and after all that was why they'd left England in the first place -- and asked Alexius if he had any other deals to offer.

Alexius said "Sure do," and described a region on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea that Siward and his friends could have.  This was ignoring the aforementioned minor details that (1) Alexius didn't own the land in question, and (2) someone else did.  So it was no skin off his nose either way.  But Siward thought that sounded just ducky, and after all they'd already proven to everyone they could pillage with the best of 'em, so they took off for the spot in question, wiped out the people who lived there, and settled down.

They called the spot "New England."  They named some towns they founded "London," "York," and "Sussex," amongst others named after "other great towns in England."  Eventually they intermarried with the local population (what was left of it), and were assimilated into the Byzantine, and ultimately the Russian, Empires.

The most reliable of the three sources, Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, spells out in detail how it all went down:

[They] went into voluntary exile so that they might either find in banishment freedom from the power of the Normans or secure foreign help and come back and fight a war of vengeance.  Some of them who were still in the flower of their youth travelled into remote lands and bravely offered their arms to Alexius, emperor of Constantinople, a man of great wisdom and nobility...  This is the reason for the exodus of the English Saxons to Ionia; the emigrants and their heirs faithfully served the holy empire, and are still honored among the Greeks by the Emperor, nobility, and people alike.

It's a pretty fantastic story, but is it true?

As amazing as it sounds, it appears to be.  It's attested in three unrelated sources -- details differ some, but they all substantially agree on the main points.  Further, linguist Ottar Grønvik found distinctive West Germanic -- i.e., Anglo-Saxon -- words, morphology, and syntax in Crimean Gothic, a Germanic language spoken in the region until the sixteenth century.  Most strikingly, there are still place names on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea that seem to come from this settlement; notably a Londina River and a town named Susacho (from "Sussex" -- later renamed Novorossiysk by the Russians).

None of which is proof, of course.  My training as a linguist impressed upon me the danger of taking chance sound or spelling correspondences as hard evidence of an etymological common root.  But I have to admit that the case still seems pretty strong to me.

So there you have it; a New England that pre-dated the more famous one by five centuries.  It'd be interesting to do some DNA testing of the people who live there now and see if there are any discernible traces of English ancestry.  Not that it's likely to happen soon; the coast of the Black Sea is once again a pretty dangerous place to wander around.  But curious to think that almost a thousand years ago, some Anglo-Saxon long-distance soldiers-for-hire may have settled there, never to see Merrie Old England again.

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A Jurassic wake-up call

About 183 million years ago -- during the Toarcian Age, one of the subdivisions of the early Jurassic Period -- there was a sudden and puzzling extinction.

Things had been recovering nicely after the End-Triassic Mass Extinction, eighteen million years earlier.  While dinosaurs were not yet at the peak they would hit in the later Jurassic, they were well on their way to taking over the place.  The temperatures were cool -- there's evidence of widespread glaciation during the ten million years prior -- but by and large, everything seemed to be coping just fine.

Then, suddenly, wipeout.

It wasn't as big as some of the truly dramatic mass extinctions the Earth has experienced, but that doesn't mean it was insignificant.  Marine invertebrates got clobbered, dropping both in diversity and in overall numbers.  Over ninety percent of coral species went extinct.  Two entire orders of brachiopods died; bivalves, ostracods, and ammonoids survived, but with greatly reduced populations.  Coelophysid and dilophosaurid dinosaurs got wiped out completely.  Seed ferns and lycophytes declined sharply, to be replaced by cycads and conifers.

Fossil seed fern [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of it occurred rapidly -- the current estimates are less than five hundred thousand years, which is a snap of the fingers geologically.

So what happened?

The culprit seems to have been the Karoo-Ferrar Large Igneous Province, an enormous volcanic formation (estimated at about three million square kilometers) now underlying much of southern Africa, eastern Antarctica, and southwestern South America.  At this point, Gondwana -- the southern half of the supercontinent of Pangaea -- had just begun to break up, and this massive series of eruptions was part of the process of rifting.  But what caused the extinction was not the eruption itself -- it was the sudden spike of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which swung the climate from a glacial period to a hothouse.  A study released last week by a team at Duke University found evidence of a twenty thousand gigaton carbon dioxide pulse, triggering not only a drastic temperature increase, but widespread ocean acidification and anoxia.

According to the study, during the event, eight percent of the global seafloor -- an area three times that of the United States -- became completely anoxic.  The pH dropped so much that animals with calcium carbonate exoskeletons literally dissolved.  Rainfall patterns shifted dramatically, impacting terrestrial biomes as well.  By the time things began to recover, it was a changed world, all in a matter of a half of a million years.

Ready for the punchline? 

Today's rate of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is over two hundred times what it was during the Toarcian Extinction Event.

Twenty thousand gigatons in five hundred thousand years is a lot, and had a devastating effect on the world's ecosystems; we've put two thousand gigatons into the atmosphere in the past two hundred years.  

Is it any surprise why the scientists have been trying like hell to get everyone's attention?

"We just don't have anything this severe [in the geological record]," said paleoclimatologist Michael Kipp, who co-authored the study.  "We go to the most rapid CO2-emitting events we can in history, and they're still not rapid enough to be a perfect comparison to what we're going through today. We're perturbing the system faster than ever before.  We have at least quantified the marine oxygen loss during this event, which will help constrain our predictions of what will happen in the future."

None of this is meant to stun people into giving up.  We have got to get a handle on this.  Yes, we've crossed several benchmarks the climate scientists have warned us about.  But every tenth of a degree's further increase we can prevent will mitigate the effects of what we're doing.  We have got to stop electing politicians who shrug their shoulders about anthropogenic climate change, most strikingly Florida's belligerent and willfully stupid Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a law striking any mention of climate change in state statutes, banning offshore wind turbines, and deregulating natural gas production, transport, and use.  

In one of the lowest-lying, most hurricane-prone states in the country.

Maybe it will take our getting slapped hard to wake us up; we don't have a good record of addressing problems that aren't right in front of our faces.  Events like the massive heat dome that just cooked the southern, central, and northeastern states are just the beginning, and are easily forgotten once they pass.  They're predicting a vicious hurricane season, fueled by a central Atlantic with a surface the temperature of bath water, but we've seen dire predictions before and gone on our way as if nothing was amiss.

So how many lives will it cost before that wake-up call is finally listened to?

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One of the missing

I had a discussion with a friend of mine a few days ago about one of the most frustrating things -- especially for those of us plagued with insatiable curiosity -- which is when we have plenty of reliable information about a situation, but not enough to figure out what actually happened.  As skeptics, we have to be willing sometimes to say "We don't know, and may never know" -- but that doesn't make it a pleasant way to conclude matters.  Famously, that's the situation we're in with Jack the Ripper.  Despite the number of books out there that have titles like The Ripper Murders SOLVED!, if we're being honest, there just isn't enough hard evidence to reach a definitive answer.  I've dealt with several less-known (but still fascinating) examples here at Skeptophilia -- the downright bizarre Devonshire footprints, the unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser, and the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich are three that come to mind immediately.

In each case, we know for certain that the events took place; i.e., they're not hoaxes or tall tales.  But despite in-depth inquiries by skeptical investigators, in the end we're still left with highly unsatisfying question marks.

Another example of this frustrating phenomenon revolves around the American writer Ambrose Bierce, most famous for his war stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," and "One of the Missing."  He was also a prolific writer of horror fiction; his short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" were profound influences on H. P. Lovecraft -- places like Lake Hali and Carcosa, and gods like Hastur, appear in the Cthulhu Mythos stories over and over, and a lot of people don't know that they originally came from Bierce rather than from Lovecraft.

Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children.  He grew up with a deep love of books, and intended a career as a journalist, but the Civil War intervened.  He was a staunch abolitionist and enlisted on the Union side, fought at the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Shiloh, and nearly died of injuries received at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  His experiences during the war shaped not only his writing but his outlook.  Bierce was afterward deeply suspicious about the motives of his fellow humans, trusting very few people (and no one completely).

Ambrose Bierce in 1866 [Image is in the Public Domain]

His later life also shows a profound restlessness.  He spent time in San Francisco, Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, London, and Washington, D.C., never content to stay in one place for very long.  And these personality traits -- distrust of others, and a fundamentally restive nature -- both play into the most fascinating thing about Bierce, which is his mysterious disappearance.

In October of 1913 he left Washington to take a tour of Civil War battlefields.  He's documented as having passed through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico at El Paso.  Mexico was at that point in the middle of a revolution; earlier that year President Francisco Madero and Vice President José Maria Pino Suárez had both been deposed and assassinated, and the country was an unsafe place by anyone's standards.  This didn't dissuade Bierce.  In his final letter, posted in December 1913 from the city of Chihuahua to his friend Blanche Partington, he said, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination...  Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.  To be a gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"

He was never heard from again.

United States consular officials investigated the matter.  After all, the disappearance of an American citizen, and a prominent one at that, was serious business, even if he'd gone to Mexico of his own free will.  Members of Pancho Villa's senior staff claimed that Bierce had been in Chihuahua, but had left the city voluntarily and no one knew where he was.  Oral tradition in Coahuila is that he was executed by firing squad.  As for his friend, Blanche Partington, her belief was that Bierce had staged the whole thing, doubled back through Arizona, and finally committed suicide somewhere near the Grand Canyon.  No reliable reports of him -- alive or dead -- exist after December of 1913; no further trace of him was ever found.

His disappearance has been the subject of much speculation, as well as a number of works of fiction, something that no doubt would have pleased Bierce no end.  (A few of them worked on the premise that Hastur and the rest of the gang were real, and didn't like the fact that Bierce had given away their existence, so they whisked him out of the desert to Carcosa so he couldn't reveal any more of their secrets.)  Ironic that in the end, Bierce himself -- perhaps intentionally -- became one of the missing.

And as frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave Bierce's story.  He very likely died somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914, but how and why we probably never will know.  Nor can we be certain of whether he was a victim of the Mexican Revolution, took his own life (as Blanche Partington believed), or died of thirst and starvation out alone in the desert.  As with the examples I began with, we're left with a mystery -- and in the absence of further evidence, as good skeptics that's where we must conclude matters.

But given his secrecy and distrust of his fellow humans, perhaps that's what Bierce would have wanted anyhow.

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Primed and ready

One of the beefs a lot of aficionados of the paranormal have with us skeptics has to do with a disagreement over the quality of evidence.

Take, for example, Hans Holzer, who was one of the first serious ghost hunters.  His work in the field started in the mid-twentieth century and continued right up to his death in 2009 at the venerable age of 89, during which time he not only visited hundreds of allegedly haunted sites but authored 120 books documenting his experiences.

No one doubts Holzer's sincerity; he clearly believed what he wrote, and was not a hoaxer or a charlatan.  But if you read his books, what will strike anyone of a skeptical bent is that virtually all of it is comprised of anecdote.  Stories from homeowners, accounts of "psychic mediums," recounting of old tales and legends.  None of it is demonstrated scientifically, in the sense of encounters that occur in controlled circumstances where credulity or outright fakery by others can be rigorously ruled out.

After all, Holzer may well have been scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that the people he worked with were.

I'll just interject my usual disclaimer; none of this constitutes disproof, either.  But in the absence of evidence that meets the minimum standard acceptable in science, the most parsimonious explanation is that Holzer's many stories are accounted for by human psychology, flaws in perception, and the plasticity of memory, and the possibility that at least some of his informants were exaggerating or lying about their own experiences.

As an illustration of just one of the difficulties with accepting anecdote, consider the phenomenon of priming.  What we experience is strongly affected by what we expect to experience; even a minor interjection ahead of time of a mental image (for example) can alter how we see, interpret, and remember something else that occurred afterward.  A simple example -- if someone is shown a yellow object and afterward asked to name a fruit, they come up with "banana" or "lemon" far more frequently than someone who was shown a different color (or who wasn't primed at all).  It all occurs without our conscious awareness; often the person who was primed didn't even know it was happening.

This becomes more insidious when it starts affecting how people understand the world around them.  To take another lightweight example, but which gets at how claims of the supernatural start, take the currently popular "paranormal game" called "Red Door, Yellow Door."  "Red Door, Yellow Door" is a little like the game that all of us Of A Certain Age will remember, the one called "Bloody Mary."  The way "Bloody Mary" works is that you stand in front of a mirror, stare into it, and chant "Bloody Mary" over and over, and after a moment, nothing happens.

What's supposed to happen is that your face turns into the blood-dripping visage of a woman, or else you see her over your shoulder.  Most of us who tried it, of course, got what the paranormal investigators call "disappointing results."  But "Red Door, Yellow Door" moves even one step further from verifiable reality,  because the whole thing takes place in your mind.  You're supposed to lie down and close your eyes, while a friend (the "guide") massages your temples and says, "Red door, yellow door, any other color door" over and over.  You're supposed to picture a hallway in your mind, and as soon as you've got a clear image, you give a hand signal to the guide to stop chanting.  Then you describe it, entering doors as you see fit and describing to the guide what you're seeing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons dying_grotesque from Richards Bay, South Africa, Red Door (3275822777), CC BY 2.0]

Thus far, it's just an exercise in imagination, and innocent enough; but the claim is, what you're seeing is real -- and can harm you.  Because of the alleged danger, there are a variety of rules you are supposed to remember.  If a room you enter has clocks in it, get out fast -- you can get trapped permanently.  If there are staircases, never take one leading downward.  If you meet a man with a suit, open your eyes and end the game immediately, because he's evil and can latch on to you and start following you around in real life if you don't act quickly enough.

Oh, and to add the obligatory frisson to the whole thing: if you die in the game, you actually die.

What's striking about "Red Door, Yellow Door" is that despite the fact that its claims are patently absurd, there are huge numbers of apparently completely serious people who have had terrifying experiences while playing it -- not only manifestations during the game, but afterward.  (If you search for the game, you'll find hundreds of accounts, many of them warning people from ever playing it because they were so traumatized by it.)  The thing is, what did they expect would happen?  They'd been primed by all of the setup; it's unsurprising they saw clocks and eerie staircases descending into darkness and evil guys in suits, and that those same images haunted their memories for some time after the game ended.

And if a silly game for gullible teenagers can do that, how much more do our perception and memory get tainted by how we're primed, especially by our prior notions of what might be going on?  Hang out in graveyards and spooky attics, and you're likely to see ghosts whether or not they're there.

As I recounted in Monday's post, I've been fascinated by tales of the supernatural since I was a kid, and on some level, I'm like Fox Mulder -- "I Want To Believe."  But the fact is, the evidence we have thus far just isn't enough.  Humans are way too suggestible to rely entirely on anecdote.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it most succinctly: "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  When you have something tangible we can bring back to the lab and analyze, then we can talk."

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Well, hell.

Whenever I post anything about goofy beliefs, urban legends, and superstitions -- like my piece Monday about spells to summon up demons -- it always impels my loyal readers to send me links with messages that say, "Yeah, okay, you think that's ridiculous, have you heard about this?"

One of those spurred by yesterday's demon-conjuring post was about a claim that Russian geologists had created a fourteen-kilometer-deep borehole in Siberia, and broke into a cavity underground.  The temperature of the cavity was measured at a toasty 1,000 C.  The leader of the team, a "Mr. Azakov," decided to drop a high-temperature microphone down the shaft -- because he had one of those with him (along with fourteen kilometers of cable) out in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Siberia, and besides, listening to superheated rocks is obviously what geologists do -- and when it reached the cavity, Azakov and the others heard the horrifying sounds of the screams of the damned.

So they forthwith concluded they'd drilled a Well to Hell.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about this one, once I get past the obligatory "but none of this actually happened" disclaimers.  Back in 1989 the Russians had drilled a pretty damn deep hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, but (1) it's twelve kilometers deep, not fourteen, (2) didn't hit a cavity of any kind, (3) was drilled on the Kola Peninsula, which is all the way on the other side of the country from Siberia, and (4) was associated with no supernatural phenomena whatsoever.  Oh, and the "screams of the damned" turned out to be a looped and digitally-altered recording grabbed from the shitty 1972 horror movie Baron Blood.  Of course, what are a few factual details between friends?  But the most interesting thing about this story is how -- and why -- it took off.

The first place the story was printed was in the Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia, which is run by a group of Pentecostal holy-rollers in the town of Leväsjoki.  From there it was grabbed by the American Trinity Broadcasting Network, an evangelical media source based in Costa Mesa, California, who claimed it was proof of the literal existence of hell, and broadcast it along with edifying messages along the lines of "We tried to warn you, but would you listen?  Nooooooo.  Well, here's what the all-loving and merciful God has in store for the likes of you."

It likely would have ended there, with scaring the fuck out of a few Bible-thumpers, if it hadn't been for Åge Rendalen, a Norwegian teacher.  Rendalen heard the versions from Finland and California and got pissed off at how gullible people are (a sentiment I wholeheartedly share), but decided the best response was to make the story even more ridiculous.  His reasoning was that if he exaggerated it, surely that would wake people up to how insane the claim is.  So he said that shortly after "Mr. Azakov" heard the screams through his high-temperature microphone, a "bat-like apparition" had exploded out of the borehole, "leaving a blazing trail across the Russian sky."  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gronono57, DeviantArt, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]

What Rendalen then did was to take a completely unrelated article from a Norwegian newspaper (it was actually about a local building inspector), and claimed that his English-language story of flaming demons was the correct translation of the article.  He submitted both to the Trinity Broadcasting Network, along with his name and contact information -- planning on having a good laugh at anyone who got a hold of him, and then telling them what he'd done, along with a suggestion to learn some goddamn critical thinking skills, and possibly some elementary Norwegian while they were at it.

No one did.  Instead, the Trinity Broadcasting Network printed his English "translation" without the Norwegian version, claiming that it was proof that the original story was true.

The result is that the claim is still out there.  Despite the fact that:

• the original story was full of factual errors, including getting the location of the borehole wrong by over nine thousand kilometers;
• the soundtrack was swiped from a horror movie;
• the embellishments all came from a smartass Norwegian teacher who admitted up front he was lying; and
• the proof that the first story was true came from the second story, which was based on the first story.

Circular reasoning (n.) -- see reasoning, circular.

So if you're concerned that hell is a real place fourteen kilometers underneath Siberia, you can relax.  I have no doubt it's hot down there, but I'm pretty certain there are no tortured souls screaming in agony anywhere nearby.

As far as whether hell exists anywhere else, I expect I'll find out eventually.  I'm guessing that given my history, my chances of being welcomed by the Heavenly Host after I die are slim to none.  It's okay, harps aren't really my thing.  Maybe down in hell there'll be an infernal bagpipe band.  That'd be cool.

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Summoning up nothing

Some years ago, as part of the research I did while writing my novel Sephirot, I purchased a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts.  It's a comprehensive look at the darker side of human beliefs, quite exhaustive and well-written (it's unclear how much of it Cavendish actually believes is true; he's pretty good at keeping his own opinions of out it).  I was mostly interested in the section on the "Tree of Life" from the Kabbalah -- the Sephirot of the novel's title -- but as is typical for me, I got sidetracked and ended up reading the entire thing.

There's a whole part of the book devoted to magical rituals, summoning up evil spirits and whatnot, and what struck me all the way through was the counterpoint between (1) how deadly seriously the practitioners take it, and (2) how fundamentally silly it all is.  Here's one passage with a spell for conjuring up a demon, taken from the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon), a seventeenth-century sorcerers' grimoire much used by the infamous Aleister Crowley:

I conjure thee, O Spirit N., strengthened by the power of Almighty God, and I command thee by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes, and the most powerful Princes Genio and Liachide, Ministers of the Seat of Tartarus and Chief Princes of the Throne of Apologia in the ninth region.

Which is pretty fucking impressive-sounding if you can get it out without laughing.  This would be the difficulty I'd face if I was a sorcerer, which is undoubtedly why even after typing all this out, no evil spirit appeared.  I guess snickering while you're typing magic words is kind of off-putting to the Infernal Host.

Anyhow, if you chant all that and nothing happens -- which, let's face it, is the likeliest outcome -- the book then takes you through an escalating series of spells, gradually ramping up in the intensity of threats for what will happen to the demon if it doesn't obey you.  Ultimately there's this one, which is pretty dire:

O spirit N., who art wicked and disobedient, because thou hast not obeyed my commands and the glorious and incomprehensible names of the true God, the Creator of all things, now by the irresistible power of these Names I curse thee into the depths of the Bottomless Pit, there to remain in unquenchable fire and brimstone until the Day of Wrath unless thou shalt forthwith appear in this triangle before this circle to do my will.  Come quickly and in peace by the Names Adonai, Zebaoth, Adonai, Amioram.  Come, come, Adonai King of Kings commands thee.

Which, apparently, is the black magic equivalent of your dad saying "Don't make me ask you again!"  The whole thing is even more effective, the book says, if the magician chants all this while masturbating, so that when he has an orgasm "the full force of his magical power gushes forth."

Kind of makes you wonder how teenage boys don't summon demons several times a day.

Crowley absolutely loved this kind of rigamarole, especially because it involved sex, which appears to have been his entire raison d'être.  The book tells us that he "used this ritual in 1911 to summon a spirit called Abuldiz, but the results were not very satisfactory."

Which is unsurprising.  This, in fact, has always been what is the most baffling thing to me about magical thinking; that it simply doesn't work, and yet this seems to have little effect on its adherents.  For a time during my late teens I got seriously into divination.  Tarot cards, numerology, astrology, the works.  (I hasten to state that I never tried to conjure a demon.  Even at my most credulous, that stuff exceeded my Goofiness Tolerance Quotient.)  After an embarrassed and embarrassing period when, deep down, I knew it was all nonsense but wanted desperately for it to be true because it was so cool, I gave it all up as a bad job, decided rationality was the way to go, and pretty much never looked back.  (I do still own several Tarot card decks, however, which I can appreciate both from the fact that they're beautiful and from a touch of shame-faced nostalgia.)

But it's astonishing how few people go this direction.  The combination of confirmation bias (accepting slim evidence because it supports what we already believed) and dart-thrower's bias (noticing or giving more weight to hits than misses) is a mighty powerful force in the human psyche.  Add to that the fact that for certain miserable members of humanity, hoodwinking the gullible into belief is big business, and it's sad, though no real wonder, that when I type "astro-" into a Google search, "astrology" comes up before "astronomy."

Anyhow, those are my thoughts for a Monday morning, spurred by my looking for another book and happening to notice the Cavendish book still on my bookshelf.  It resides with various other books on ghosts, vampires, UFOs, cryptids, werewolves, and the like, and several with titles like Twenty Terrifying Unsolved Mysteries.  It's still entertaining to read that stuff even if I don't believe any of it.

On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by Abuldiz or whoever-the-fuck, I guess it'll serve me right.

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Indoctrination

By now, I'm sure you've all heard that my former home state of Louisiana has passed a law requiring all public school teachers to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.  The argument, if I can dignify it by that term, is that the Ten Commandments represent a "historical document," not a mandate of religious belief.

Shall I refresh your memory about what the First Damn Commandment says?

"I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me."

How, exactly, is that not a mandate of religious belief?

Others include "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," and also "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox, nor anything else that belongs to him," which has the added fun of being a tacit endorsement of slavery and the subjugation of women.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The latest in this christofascist attack on separation of church and state -- a principle which, allow me to remind you, is mentioned explicitly in the Constitution of the United States, unlike God and Jesus -- is a sparring match between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana state representative Lauren Ventrella, wherein he tried to corner her on various points revolving around the secular basis of the United States and the fact that the new law is inherently discriminatory against non-Christians.  Of course, you can only corner someone with logic if they're arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence, so it was bound to end in failure.  Ventrella did what the MAGA types always do; launched into a Gish gallop of irrelevancies such as what Sanchez's salary was, the fact that "In God We Trust" is printed on the dollar bill (neglecting to mention, of course, that it was only added in 1956), and ended with her solution for people of other religions (or no religion at all) to a clearly religious document posted on the classroom wall, which was, "Then don't look at it."

Fine, that's the angle you want to take, Representative Ventrella?  Two can play that game.

A teacher wants to put a Pride flag up in the classroom, and you don't like it?  Don't look at it.

You don't like books representing racial or religious diversity, or ones that feature queer people?  Don't read them.

You think drag shows are immoral?  Don't attend one.

You're against gay marriage?  Then the next time a gay person proposes to you, say no.

Or does that approach only work when you're trying to shoehorn Christianity into public schools?  

And more importantly, are these people really so stupid they don't see how easily their arguments could backfire on them?  

The problem here is that christofascists like Lauren Ventrella only want students exposed to straight White Christian... well, anything.  Fiction?  Of course, that goes without saying.  Non-fiction, too -- Florida's banned books list included biographies of prominent People of Color and LGBTQ+ individuals, for no other apparent reason than their not being about straight White people.  History has to be whitewashed to emphasize the benevolence of White Christians and downplay (or ignore completely) anything that casts them in a negative light -- or anything that brings up the contributions of other cultures.  

So they're not against indoctrinating kids; quite the opposite.  They love indoctrination.  They just want to make sure the indoctrination lines up with the way they were indoctrinated.

And that's not even getting into how the hell the leaders of a state that ranks 49th in education think this kind of nonsense is the priority.  Or the screeching hypocrisy of the same people who want the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and who claim to follow an incarnated deity who said "Let the little children come unto me," regularly voting against aid for underprivileged youth and subsidized school lunches.

Seems like the idea is keep 'em poor, hungry, uneducated, and brainwashed.

I hold out some hope that the inevitable lawsuits this is going to trigger from the ACLU and the FFRF will strike down this law as unconstitutional, but given the unabashedly far-right leaning of the Supreme Court, I have no confidence that they might not end up siding with Ventrella et al. on this.  The only thing we moderate and left-leaning people can do is to get our asses to the polls in November and vote.  Vote like the future of democracy in the United States depends on it -- because it does.

Otherwise, I fear that the christofascist takeover of the country may well be a done deal.

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Abominable mysteries

One of the most annoying things I run across regularly is when someone takes a perfectly good piece of scientific research and twists it to support their own highly unscientific pre-existing beliefs.

The latest in this long parade of frustration I found out about because of my good friend, the amazing writer Gil Miller, who is a frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia.  Gil sent me a link to a fascinating paper that came out a month and a half ago in Nature about one of the most perplexing puzzles in evolutionary biology -- the sudden diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous Period, something on the order of 150 million years ago.  They went on to outcompete every other plant group, now comprising ninety percent of the known plant species, totaling about 13,600 different genera.  If you look around you, chances are any plant you happen to see that isn't a moss, fern, or conifer is a flowering plant.

What caused their explosive rise and diversification, however, is still unknown.  Their success might well be due to coevolution with pollinators, especially insects, which had a sudden spike in diversity around the same time, but that's speculation.  The current study vastly expands the genetic data we have on current genera of flowering plants, rearranging a few groups and solidifying what we know about the branch points of different clades within the group.  However, it still doesn't solve the reason behind what Darwin called "the abominable mystery" of why it all happened -- something the authors are completely up front about.

[Angiosperm phylogenetic chart from Zuntini et al., Nature, April 2024]

Well, any time an evolutionary biologist says "we don't yet understand this" -- especially if it's something Darwin himself noted as odd or mysterious -- it's enough to get all the anti-evolution types leaping about making excited little squeaking noises, and it didn't take long for this paper to appear in an article over at Evolution News (don't let the name fool you; the site is sponsored by the staunchly creationist Discovery Institute).  The article (so I can save you the trouble of clicking the link and adding to their hit rate) glosses over all of the stuff Zuntini et al. did explain, and highlights instead the fact that they never accounted for the reason behind flowering plant diversification (which wasn't even the purpose of the study).  The article ends with, "Nature clearly did make jumps in the history of life and this cannot be explained with an unguided gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time, but requires a rapid burst of biological novelty that is best explained by intelligent design."

Basically, what we have here is yet another iteration of the God-of-the-gaps argument; "we don't yet understand it, so musta been that God did it."  The problem is, you can't base a conclusion on a lack of data.  For the intelligent design argument to work, you'd have to show that it explains the data better than other models do.  Simply saying "we don't know, therefore God" isn't actually an explanation of anything, something that atheist philosopher Jeffrey Jay Lowder brought into sharp focus:

The objection I have in mind is this: the design hypothesis is not an explanation because, well, it doesn’t explain. ...  [I]t seems to me that a design explanation must also include a description of the mechanism used by the designer to design and build the thing.  In other words, in order for design to explain something, we have to know how the designer designed it.  If we don’t know or even have a clue about how the designer did it, then we don’t have a design explanation.

Which is it exactly.  Science works because it not only self-corrects, it holds explaining things in abeyance until there's enough data there to warrant a robust explanation.  A mystery is just a mystery; maybe we'll figure it out at some point and maybe we won't, but until then, it doesn't prove anything.  Science doesn't simply look at a lack of information and then throw its hands in the air and say, "Well, must be X, then."

To quote eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation stops.  You don't go on and say it 'must be' anything."

Honestly, it's astonishing that the creationist types are still using the God-of-the-gaps approach, because the truth is, it's more damaging to their position than it is helpful.  The reason was noted by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "[I]t is [wrong] to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.  If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat."

But that line of reasoning -- from a respected theologian, no less -- doesn't seem to be slowing them down any.

So I'll apologize to Zuntini et al. on behalf of the entire human race for these unscientific yayhoos taking a really lovely piece of research and claiming it supports their beliefs.  The tl;dr summary of this post is: it doesn't.  At all.  At worst, the study indicates that there's still stuff we don't understand, which is a damn good thing because otherwise the scientists would be out of a job.

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The sleeping dragon

When most people think of seismically-active regions, Bangladesh is not ordinarily near the top of the list.

Cyclones, sure.  They come roaring up the Bay of Bengal with a horrifying regularity, and most of the country is low enough in elevation that the storms barely even slow down.  The worst was the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which still holds a record as the deadliest storm in recorded history.  The official death toll was five hundred thousand, but is likely higher than that, mostly people who lived in the lowlands near the city of Chittagong.

Unfortunately for the citizens of Bangladesh, though, they're also at high risk for earthquakes -- something that has only been recognized recently.  A 2021 study led by Muhammad Qumrul Hassan of the University of Dhaka found that the region is right on top of the junction of three different tectonic plates, the Eurasian Plate, the Indian Plate, and the small Burma Plate ("small" here means geographic area, not capacity for damage -- the devastating 2004 earthquake and tsunami was caused by a slippage of the Burma Plate relative to the Indian Plate).  But the compression and twisting of the land near the junction has created enough stresses that the entire country is crisscrossed with faults, most notably the Dauki Fault and the Haflong Thrust (which crosses into the Indian states of Meghalaya and Assam to the north).

The whole thing is exceedingly complex, and still poorly understood.  Imagine laying a sheet of pie crust on a table, and you and two friends each stand around it and push, pull, or twist it from the edge.  The sheet will wrinkle, tear, and hump up in places, but exactly where those deformations will end up isn't easily predictable because it depends on where there was weakness in the dough before you started messing with it.  This is the situation with the chunk of the Earth's crust that underlies Bangladesh.  Add to that the fact that the region is poor, and much of it is jungle- or swamp-covered and pretty inaccessible to study, and you have a picture of the extent to which we don't understand the situation.

However -- alarmingly -- a 2016 study found that the entire region has been building up stress for at least four hundred years, meaning when the some piece of fault slips, it's likely to be catastrophic.

The whole topic comes up because of a rather terrifying discovery that was the subject of a paper this week in Nature Communications.  Geoscientists Elizabeth Chamberlain (of Wageningen University). Michael Steckler (of Columbia Univeristy), and colleagues were studying a puzzling historical shift in the channel of the Ganges River, and quite by accident -- it was in an area some locals were digging in to create a pond -- they saw the unmistakable signs of seismites.  These are features in rock layers created by massive earthquakes, in this case a column of sand that had erupted through pre-existing strata during a colossal temblor.  Upon analysis, they found that the river had changed course because of a massive earthquake about 2,500 years ago.

Imagine an event big enough to shift the path of a river that size.

A change in the course of a river is called an avulsion, and it normally takes decades or centuries.  (It's an avulsion of the Mississippi River that the levee system in southern Louisiana is attempting to prevent -- something I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.)  Seismic avulsions are much less common, but when they happen it's sudden and spectacular.  The only other one I've ever heard of is the shift in the Mississippi caused by the 1812 New Madrid earthquake, which dropped the land so much it cut off a meander and created Reelfoot Lake.

The seismic record in Bangladesh indicates that they're dangerously at risk for another earthquake -- and because of the complexity and our lack of comprehension of the fault system underlying the country, the geologists aren't certain where is likeliest to rupture.  There's a sleeping dragon underneath one of the poorest countries in Asia -- and we're only beginning to understand when and how it might suddenly awaken.

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Ephemera

I think a lot of people -- and I'm very much including myself in this -- sleepwalk through a lot of our lives.

We focus on what's right in front of us, often skewed by what we expected to see or hear.  That inattentional blindness is what makes eyewitness testimony so fundamentally flawed; combine the fact that most of the time, we aren't even seeing what's around us, with the plasticity of human memory and it's a wonder eyewitness accounts are even admissible in a court of law.

I still remember the first time I was shown the most stunning example of inattentional blindness I've ever run across, in a college psychology class.  The video was set in a hotel lobby, where a young man was seated behind a table draped with a cloth.  He had a clipboard, and politely asked each passerby if they'd mind taking a brief survey.  When someone said yes, he handed them the clipboard, simultaneously "accidentally" dropping the pen on the floor behind the table.  He smiled, said, "Sorry," and ducked down to get the pen...

... but the young man who came back up was a totally different person.  They looked nothing alike.  One was blond, the other brunette; one had facial hair, the other didn't; and so on.

Virtually no one noticed the switch.  When asked afterwards, most of the test subjects said they'd had no idea there was another man hiding under the table who took the first man's place when the pen was dropped.  A couple of them said, "I thought I was just remembering wrong."

It's one of the things that has to change when you start doing science.  In science, the key is not only to see, but actually to see what you're seeing.

Take, for example, the strange little plant called false mermaid weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides).  It's in the family Limnantheaceae, which contains only eight species, seven of which are mostly found in wet meadows in California and Oregon.  False mermaid weed, though, is thought to live in many shaded woodland habitats in North America, but is such an unassuming little thing that honestly, we're not sure what its range is.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons cassi saari, Floerkea proserpinacoides flowering, CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's an annual (only lives a single season) and a spring ephemeral (only has above-ground visible parts in the spring), so that added to its tiny size makes it extremely difficult to spot.  It had been recorded in Vermont in 1916 by botanist Nellie Flynn, who during her lifetime described, collected, and sketched over twenty-two thousand different species of plants.  But since Flynn spotted it, no one has seen false mermaid weed in Vermont.

And not from lack of trying.  Botanists are trained to recognize plant species in the regions they study, and Vermont has been thoroughly surveyed.  But for over a hundred years, no one saw this tiny woodland plant in the state of Vermont.

Until botanist Grace Glynn rediscovered it last month.

"I sort of did a double-take and rubbed my eyes and couldn't believe I was seeing this plant," Glynn said.  "Most people thought it had been extirpated because of extreme flooding, invasive species and human development.  Its rediscovery is a sign that good stewardship by landowners and conservation organizations really can make a difference."

You have to wonder how many people walked right by this little plant without realizing its significance.  I'm sure I would have; I'm fair-to-middling at recognizing plants, but there's no reason this one would have struck me as anything special.  It was a combination of extensive training and an exceptionally good eye that allowed Grace Glynn to find it.

Unlike most of us, she actually saw what she was seeing.

"It was just amazing to touch this plant and to think, 'Oh, Nellie Flynn was probably the last person to ever touch this species in Vermont back in 1916,'" Glynn said.  "And I always think about how there are just these threads through history that kind of tie you to other botanists, and it just adds depth and richness, I think, to an already rich story."

The world is full of ephemera that we walk past every day and miss, caught up in our day-to-day struggles and locked in the bubble of our perception.  Most of us aren't trained scientists like Grace Glynn, but we all can work toward opening our eyes to what surrounds us.

Who knows what wonders we might end up seeing?

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