An anodyne against despair

Yesterday, I was discussing with a friend how important it is to find things that lift your spirit. The world has been replete with dismal news lately, and it's all too easy to decide that everything's hopeless -- to become either cynical or despondent.  I know I have to fight that tendency myself, especially considering the topics I frequently address here at Skeptophilia.

It's essential to take a moment, every so often, to step back and recognize that however terrible current events have been, there is still great love, compassion, and wonder in the world.  So I thought I'd take a day off from the continual stream of WTF that the news has become, and consider a few examples of what beauty we humans are capable of.  Think of it as an anodyne against despair, a way to inoculate yourself against losing hope.

Dalai Lama Mandala I, pen/ink/watercolor, by Carol Bloomgarden [Image used with permission]

First, take a look at this video by the Dutch artist Thijme Termaat. He spent two and a half years creating a progressive set of paintings, condensed it into a three-minute video, set it to a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and named it Timelapse. Take three minutes and be amazed.

When I was in Boston a while back, I went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and I lucked out and saw some work by the incredibly creative Rachel Perry Welty. The piece that absolutely captivated me was a twelve-minute video called Karaoke Wrong Number, wherein she took four years' worth of voicemail messages she'd received by accident (i.e., the person had called her number but thought they were leaving a message to someone else entirely), and lip synced to them.  I stood there and watched the entire piece three times in a row -- it's mesmerizing.  The incredible thing about it is that she's able to shift her facial expression and body language to match the voice and message of the person -- it's funny, wry, and at times absolutely uncanny, and illustrates Welty's sheer creative genius.  (You can watch a five-minute clip from it at the link above.)

If you don't mind crying, take a look at Kseniya Simonova's stupendous feat of drawing in sand on a light box that brought the whole audience to tears in Ukraine's Got Talent.  It shows the effect of the German invasion on the people of Ukraine during World War II, and packs an emotional punch like nothing I've ever seen before -- especially considering what's happening in Ukraine right now.  It's a perfect example of an artist's ability to distill pain into beauty.

If after that, you want to see something that is pure whimsy to cheer you up, you need to watch the amazing musical marble machine created by Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan.  Molin created a wild Rube Goldberg machine, powered by a hand crank and 2,000 marbles, that plays a tune he wrote. It's one of those things that you watch, and you just can't quite believe it's real.

If you want to blow your mind further, have a look at this short little video showing one of the crazy three-dimensional sculptures of Japanese mathematician and artist Kokichi Sugihara.  Sugihara specializes in creating optical illusions out of paper -- in this case, a structure that seems to induce marbles to roll uphill.  The weird thing to me is that even when he shows you how it's done -- which he does, about halfway through -- you still can't see it any other way.  It's so cleverly done that our brains simply can't handle it.

Last, for sheer exuberance -- if you're like me, it'll make you laugh and cry at the same time -- check out the short film "Where in the Hell Is Matt?", made by Matt Harding.  Harding set out to film himself dancing in as many different spots on Earth as he could get to, often joined by children, adults, and dogs, all simply expressing how wonderful it is to be alive.  It's set to the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous song "Praan" by Garry Schyman.  The music and the spirit of Harding's project could not blend together more perfectly.

So there you are.  Even when things are bad, people are still creating beautiful, funny, and whimsical things.  They still care about bringing joy into the world, despite the constant barrage of pain, discouragement, and bad news we're subjected to on a daily basis.  I don't know about you, but when I see things like this, it reminds me that humanity isn't as hopeless as it may seem at times.  It recalls the last lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann, which never fails to bring me to tears, and which seems like a good place to conclude:

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.  But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.  Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. 

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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Word association

There's an odd claim circulating social media these days.  This is the form of it I've seen most frequently:

First, just to get this out of the way: there is no luciferase in vaccines.  Luciferase is a bioluminescent protein found in a variety of organisms, from dinoflagellates to fireflies, and was named not for Lucifer but because the root word of luciferase (and Lucifer as well, of course) is a Latin word meaning "light bearer."  Luciferase isn't used for "tracking" people (how the hell would that even work?  Would you be trackable because you'd glow in the dark?), but it is used as a fluorescent marker in antibody assays in vitro.

As easy as it is to laugh at Emerald for her obvious ignorance of (1) how vaccines work, (2) how bioluminescent markers are used, and (3) basic linguistics, what interests me more is how odd a claim this really is.  Because the idea here is that the name of the enzyme somehow creates a link between it and Satan, and this marks you -- in the sense used in the Book of Revelation.  

You know, the "Mark of the Beast."

I ran into another example of this kind of thinking a few weeks ago, with someone who recounts being in line at a convenience store, and the woman ahead of him had her total rung up, and it came out $6.66.  She got a scared look on her face, and said, "Oh, no, I don't like that total.  Better throw in a corndog."

The man who posted about it marveled at what a badass she is -- going into battle with the Forces of Darkness, armed with a corndog.

How do people come to believe so fervently in associations like this?  Clearly they were both taught in a religious context, since both of them made reference to the End Times, but how do you get to the point where any association with words or numbers connected with the Bad Place -- even an obviously accidental or circumstantial one -- causes an immediate and powerful fear response?

A study by Fatik Mandal (of Bankura College, India) found an interesting pattern:

Superstitious beliefs help to decrease [people's] environmentally-induced stress.  Superstition produces a false sense of having control over outer conditions, reduces anxieties, and is prevalent in conditions of absence of confidence, insecurity, fear and threat, stress, and anxiety.  When the events are interpretable, environment is transparent, and conditions are less ambiguous, individuals become less superstitious.

This was supported by a study in 2022 by Hoffmann et al., which suggested that holding superstitions -- especially ones that have the backing of authority figures (e.g. church leaders) -- gives you a sense of control over circumstances that are actually uncertain, random, or inherently uncontrollable.

But what still strikes me as odd is that the reason these people were fearful in the first place was because the church leaders had convinced them that the Antichrist and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and other assorted special offers were on their way, so they'd better get ready to fight.  The superstitions about avoiding vaccines and convenience store bills totaling $6.66 were incidental, and only occurred because the people holding them had already been convinced that the Book of Revelation was actually true.

So this can be summed up as, "Here's how not to be afraid about this thing that I just now made you afraid of."  Which strikes me as just plain weird.

What's certain, though, is how far back in our history this sort of thinking goes.  A study in 2023 by Amar Annus of the University of Chicago looked at the origins of superstitions in the Middle East, and found that the associations between certain words and (usually bad) outcomes has a deep history, and no more rational that the ones people hold today.  In the literature of ancient Mesopotamia, we see ample evidence of detailed superstitions, but:

Only exceptionally are we able to detect any logical relationship between portent and prediction...  In many cases, subconscious association seems to have been at work, provoked by certain words whose specific connotations imparted to them a favorable or an unfavorable character, which in turn determined the general nature of the prediction.

Because those connotations aren't logical, they have to be learned -- transmitted orally or in written form from one generation to another, and undoubtedly embellished as time goes on.  At that point, in just about every culture, you end up with adepts who claim that they know better than anyone else how to interpret the omens, and avoid the unpleasant outcome that would pertain if you get it wrong.  Annus writes about a Mandaean priest in Iraq who spoke with the anthropologist Ethel Drower in the 1920s, and who boasted,

If a raven croaks in a certain burj (= astrological house), I understand what it says, also the meaning when the fire crackles or the door creaks.  When the sky is cloudy and there are shapes in the sky resembling a mare or a sheep, I can read their significance and message.  When the moon is darkened by an eclipse, I understand the portent; when a dust-cloud arises, black, red, or white, I read these signs, and all this according to the hours and the aspects.

So it seems like part of it has to do with powerful or charismatic people saying, "Look, I understand everything way better than you do, and you'd damn well better listen to what I'm saying."  

If you can hook in strong emotions like fear, so much the better.  At that point it turns into a Pascal's Wager sort of thing; what if the scary stuff this guy is saying actually turns out to be true?  What if getting the vaccine does mark me as one of Satan's own?

Better not take the chance.

Of course, the solution to all this is knowledge and rationality, but I'm not sure how well that'd work with someone who already has accepted the fundamentally irrational premises of superstition.  As has been so often commented before, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

So I'm not sure how helpful all this is in the bigger picture.  Superstition has always been with us, and probably always will be.  The best you can do is arm yourself against it in whatever way you can.

Here.  Have a corndog.

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Time is running out

New from the "Sublime-to-Ridiculous" department -- following up on our discussion yesterday about abstruse concepts from physics, today we're going to look at a much more pressing issue, which I need to discuss while I have the time.

That issue is whether time is speeding up.  I'm sure we can all relate to wondering about this.  It's becoming harder and harder to get everything done that needs doing, and there just seem not to be enough hours in the day.  Well, according to a story that a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me... there aren't.

The article is entitled "Is Time Speeding Up?", and follows Betteridge's Law (any article headline phrased as a question can be answered "No.").  Be that as it may, let's not be hasty (to borrow a line from the inimitable Treebeard), and look at what they're claiming:

Einstein’s calculations showed that the closer an object comes to the speed of light, the slower time passes.  Scientists have done experiments that prove Einstein’s theory to be correct using clocks moving at different speeds.

 
The opposite then must be true that as our speed decreases, time speeds up.  Researcher Greg Braden confirms this, he says that the rotation of the Earth is slowing down, and time is speeding up.  Evidence for his assertions comes from the Schumann Resonance.  The Schumann Resonance is like the Earth’s heartbeat.  It is the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) of the Earth’s magnetic field.  In the 1950s, when the Schumann resonance was discovered, it was recorded to be an average of 7.8 Hertz. It has been stable for thousands of years; but now, according to Swedish and Russian researchers, says Braden, it is an average of 12 Hertz.  This means that the normal 24-hour day feels like a 16-hour day.

Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What the fuck?"  The Schumann resonance is an atmospheric phenomenon, an electromagnetic resonance caused by lightning discharges in the ionosphere, and has bugger-all effect on the angular velocity of the Earth.  And even if the frequency of the resonance is increasing (which I could find no credible evidence of in any case), there's no way we could know if it's been stable "for thousands of years," because it was only discovered in 1952.  And anyway, why would this have anything to do with how fast time is passing?

That doesn't stop "researcher Greg Braden," who says that if you think that's amazing, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Eventually, Greg Braden says, the Earth’s rotation around the Sun will stop and start rotating in the opposite direction...  Braden says that when the Schumann resonance hits 13 Hertz, time will speed up to infinity.  The outcome of this has been explained as those living at this time will experience a shift in consciousness.  There will be no ‘separation’ between this mortal existence and the spirit realm.  Some call it ascension.

Some also call it "bullshit."

Anyhow, I decided to do a little research, and it turns out that this is only scratching the surface of the "accelerating time" theory.  I found one post from a guy whose proof that time is speeding up was that the clock in his bedroom is running fast.  Another said that he knew time was speeding up because he used to be able to say "One Mississippi, two Mississippi," and keep up with the seconds ticking on his clock, and now he can't.  But by far my favorite commentary I found on the topic came from a guy who evidently thinks that time is like a giant cosmic game of tetherball.  He gives this convoluted explanation of a ball hanging on a string tied to a rotating pole, and as the string winds around the pole, the ball spins faster (i.e. time speeds up), and the string gets shorter and shorter and the ball spins faster and faster and then finally SPLAT the ball hits the pole.

At that point, he says, "the Galactic Alignment... with the heart of the galaxy will open a channel for cosmic energy to flow through the earth, cleansing it and all that dwells upon it, raising it to a higher level of vibration."

So at least that's something for us all to look forward to.

[Image credit: Robbert van der Steeg]

Interestingly, the whole subject has even permeated discussions on physics forums.  In one thread I looked at, titled "Universe Expanding or Time Speeding Up?", there were a bunch of woo-woos who blathered on for a while about the expansion of the universe and how time would have to speed up to "compensate" for the expansion of space, and so on, and finally one reputable physicist responded, in some exasperation, "Most of the responses above are gibberish.  No one has even asked the question, 'Speeding up relative to what?'  General Relativity established that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, but these posters seem to think that time as a whole is speeding up -- which is a meaningless proposition, since there is nothing outside of time against which you could detect such a change."

Well. I guess he told them.  Of course, it won't make any difference, because people who think this way are never going to believe some dumb Ph.D. in physics when they've got the whole internet to rely on.  (I'll bet "they did their research.")  Besides, this physicist is probably a reptilian alien Man-in-Black from the Planet Nibiru who is part of the Bilderberg Group and works for the Illuminati, and is trying to spread disinformation. 

 You know how that goes.

So anyway, that's today's heaping helping of pseudoscientific absurdity.  I think I'll wrap this up, because (1) if I read any more websites like the ones I had to peruse to write this, my brain will turn into cream-of-wheat, and (2) I'm running short on time.

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Baby Bear's universe

The idea of Intelligent Design is pretty flimsy, at least when it comes to biology.  The argument boils down to something the ID proponents call irreducible complexity -- that there are some features in organisms that are simply too complex, requiring too many interlocking parts, to have evolved through natural selection.  The problem is, the ones most commonly cited, such as the vertebrate eye, have been explained pretty thoroughly, with nothing needed but a good understanding of genetics, biochemistry, and physiology to comprehend how they evolved.  The best takedown of biological ID remains Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, which absolutely shreds the arguments of ID proponents like Michael Behe.  (Yes, I know Dawkins has recently made statements indicating that he holds some fairly repulsive opinions; I never said he was a nice guy, but there's no doubt that his writings on evolutionary biology are on-point.)

While biological ID isn't worth much, there's a curious idea from physics that has even the reputable scientists wondering.  It has to do with the number of parameters (by some estimates, around thirty of them) in the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Theories of Relativity that don't appear to be derivable from first principles; in other words, we know of no compelling reason why they are the values they are, and those values are only known empirically.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cush, Standard Model of Elementary Particles, CC BY 3.0]

More eye-opening is the fact that for most of them, if they held any other values -- in some cases, off by only a couple of percent either way -- the universe would be uninhabitable.

Here are a few examples:

• The degree of anisotropy (unevenness in density) of the cosmic microwave background radiation.  This is thought to reflect the "clumpiness" of matter in the early universe, which amounts to about one part in ten thousand.  If it was only a little bigger -- one part in a thousand -- the mutual attraction of those larger clumps of matter would have triggered early gravitational collapse, and the universe would now be composed almost entirely of supermassive black holes.  Only a little smaller -- one part in a hundred thousand -- and there would have been insufficient gravitational attraction to form stars, and the universe would be a thin, cold fog of primordial hydrogen and helium.

• The fact that electrons have a spin of one-half, making them fermions.  Fermions have an odd property; two can't occupy the same quantum mechanical state, something called the Pauli Exclusion Principle.  (Bosons, such as photons, don't have that restriction, and can pass right through one another.)  This feature is why electrons exist in orbitals in atoms.  If they had integer spin, there would be no such thing as chemistry.

• The masses of the various subatomic particles.  To take only one example, if the quarks that make up protons and neutrons were much heavier, the strong nuclear force would all but evaporate -- meaning that the nuclei of atoms would fly apart.  (Well, more accurately, they never would have formed in the first place.)

• The value of the fine-structure constant, which is about 1/137 (it's a dimensionless number, so it doesn't matter what units you use).  This constant determines, among other things, the relative strength of the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces.  Any larger, and atoms would collapse; any smaller, and they would break apart into their fundamental particles.

• The value of the gravitational constant G.  It's about 6.67 x 10^-11 meters cubed per kilogram per second -- i.e., a really tiny number, meaning gravity is an extremely weak force.  If G was larger, stars would burn through their hydrogen fuel much faster, and it's doubtful they'd live long enough for planets to have time to evolve intelligent life.  If G was smaller, there wouldn't be enough gravitational pull to initiate fusion in the first place.  No fusion = no stars.

• The flatness of the universe.  While space near massive objects is curved as per the General Theory of Relativity, its overall shape is apparently Euclidean.  Its makeup -- around 5% conventional matter and energy, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy -- is exactly what you'd need to generate a flat universe.

• The imbalance between matter and antimatter.  There appears to be no reason why, at the Big Bang, there weren't exactly equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles created.  But in fact -- and fortunately for us -- there was a very slight imbalance favoring matter.  The estimate is that there was about one extra unpaired matter particle out of every one hundred million pairs, so when the pairs underwent mutual annihilation, those few extra particles were left over.  The survivors became the matter we have today; without that tiny imbalance, the entire universe today would be filled with nothing but photons.

• The cosmological constant -- a repulsive force exerted by space itself (which is the origin of dark energy).  This is the most amazing one, because for a long time, physicists thought the cosmological constant was exactly zero; Einstein looked upon his introduction of a nonzero cosmological constant as an inexcusable fudge factor in his equations, and called his attempt to shoehorn it in as his "greatest blunder."  In fact, recent studies show that the cosmological constant does exist, but it's so close to zero that it's hard to imagine -- it's about a decimal point, followed by 121 zeroes, followed by a 3 (as expressed in Planck units).  But if it was exactly zero, the universe would have collapsed by now -- and any bigger than it is, and the expansion of space would have overwhelmed gravity and torn apart matter completely!

And so on and so forth.  The degree of fine-tuning that seems to be required to set all these independent parameters so that the conditions are juuuuuust right for our existence (to borrow a phrase from Baby Bear) strikes a lot of people, even some diehard rationalist physicists, as mighty peculiar.  As cosmologist Fred Hoyle put it, "It looks very much as if a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology."

The idea that some Master Architect twiddled the knobs on the various constants in physics, setting them exactly as needed for the production of matter and ultimately ourselves, is called the Strong Anthropic Principle.  It sets a lot of people's teeth on edge -- it's a little too much like the medieval idea of humanity's centrality in the universe, something that was at the heart of the resistance to Copernicus's heliocentric model.  It seems like all science has done since then is to move us farther from the center -- first, the Earth orbits the Sun; then, the stars themselves are suns, and our own Sun is only a smallish and rather ordinary one; then, the Sun and planets aren't central to the galaxy; and finally, our own galaxy is only one of billions.

Now, suddenly, the fine-tuning argument has seemingly thrust us back into a central position.  However small a piece of the cosmos we actually represent, was it all set this way for our benefit?

In his book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind answers this with a resounding "no."  His argument, which is sometimes called the Weak Anthropic Principle, looks at the recent advances in string theory, inflation, and cosmology, and suggests that the apparent fine-tuning is because the cosmos we're familiar with is only one pocket universe in a (much) larger "landscape," where the process of dropping into a lower energy state triggers not only expansion, but sets the values of the various physical parameters.  Afterward, each of those bubbles is then governed by its own physics.  Most would be inhospitable to life; a great many probably don't have atoms heavier than helium.  Some probably have very short life spans, collapsing almost immediately after formation.  And the models suggest that the number of different possible configurations -- different settings on the knobs, if you will -- might be as many as ten to the five-hundredth power.

That's a one followed by five hundred zeroes.

Susskind suggests that we live in this more-or-less friendly one not because the constants were selected by a deity with us in mind, but because if our universe's constants had any other value, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.  It might be extremely unlikely that a universe would have exactly these settings, but if you have that many universes to choose from, they're going to show up that way somewhere.

We only exist because this particular universe is the one that got the values right on the nose.

While I think this makes better sense than the Master Architect idea of the Strong Anthropic Principle -- and I certainly don't want to pretend I could argue the point with a physicist of Susskind's caliber -- I have to admit feeling a twinge of discomfort still.  Having all of those parameters line up so perfectly just seems like too much of coincidence to swallow.  It does occur to me that in my earlier statement, that the constants aren't derivable from first principles, I should amend that by adding "as far as we understand at the moment."  After all, the geocentric model, and a lot of other discredited ideas, were discarded not because they overestimated our importance, but because we got better data and used it to assemble a more accurate theory.  It may be that some of these parameters are actually constrained -- they couldn't have any other value than the one they do -- we just haven't figured out why yet.

After all, that's my main criticism of Intelligent Design in biology; it boils down to the argument from incredulity -- I can't imagine how this could have happened, so it must be that God did it.

That said, the best models of physics we now have don't give us any clue of why the thirty-odd free parameters in the Standard Model are what they are, so for now, the Weak Anthropic Principle is the best we can do, at least as far as scientific approaches go.  That we live in a Baby Bear universe is no more mysterious than why you find fish in a lake and not in a sand dune.  Our hospitable surroundings are merely good fortune -- a lucky break that was not shared in the other ten-to-the-five-hundredth-power universes (minus one) out there in the cosmic landscape.

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Piercing the clouds

One of the most unusual stories that H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote is "In the Walls of Eryx."  It isn't his usual fare of soul-sucking eldritch nightmares from the bubbling chaos at the center of the universe; in fact, it's his only real, honest-to-Asimov science fiction story.  It centers around a human colony on Venus, devoted to mining a kind of crystal that can be used for propulsion.  There's an intelligent native species -- reptilian in appearance -- who was content to let the humans bump around in their space suits (Lovecraft at least got right that the atmosphere would be toxic to humans) until the humans started killing them.  At that point, they started fighting back -- and setting traps.

The story centers around a crystal hunter who is out on an expedition and sees a huge crystal in the hands of a (human) skeleton.  He goes toward it, and runs face-first into an unseen obstacle -- completely transparent walls, slick (and therefore unclimbable) and four meters tall (so unjumpable).  The problem is, when he tries to back out, he's already moved around a bit, and doesn't retrace his steps perfectly.

Then he runs into another wall.

What's happened is that he's stumbled into an invisible labyrinth.  And how do you find your way out of a maze if you can't see it?  You'll just have to read it.  It's only a dozen or so pages long, and is one of the neatest (and darkest) puzzle-box stories you'll ever pick up.

It's been known since Lovecraft's time ("In the Walls of Eryx" was written in 1936) that Venus was covered by clouds, and its surface was invisible from Earth.  Of course, a solid mantle of clouds creates a mystery about what's underneath, and speculation ran wild.  We have Lovecraft's partially-correct solution -- a dense, toxic atmosphere.  Carl Sagan amusingly summed up some of the early thinking on Venus in the episode "Heaven and Hell" from his groundbreaking series Cosmos: "I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.  If there's a swamp, there's ferns.  If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs...  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs."

Of course, reputable scientists didn't jump to these kinds of crazy pseudo-inferences.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, "If you don't know, then that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say that it must be anything."  (It's not a coincidence that Tyson was the host of the reboot of Cosmos that appeared a few years ago.)

The first hint that Venus was not some lush tropical rain forest came in the late 1950s, when it was discovered that there was electromagnetic radiation coming from Venus that only made sense if the surface was extremely hot -- far higher than the boiling point of water.  This was confirmed when the Soviet probe Venera 9 landed on the surface, and survived for 127 minutes before its internal circuitry fried.

In fact, saying it's "hot" is an understatement of significant proportions.  The average surface temperature is 450 C -- 350 degrees higher than the boiling point of water, and hot enough to melt lead.  The atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide (compared to 0.04% in the Earth's atmosphere), causing a runaway greenhouse effect.  Most of the other 3.5% is nitrogen, water vapor, and sulfur dioxide -- the latter being the rotten-egg chemical that, when mixed with water, creates sulfuric acid.

Yeah.  Not such a hospitable place.  Even for crystal-loving intelligent reptiles.

Photograph from the surface of Venus [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But there's still a lot we don't know about it, which is why at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union, there was a proposal to send a probe to our nearest neighbor.  But this was a probe with a difference; it would be attached to a balloon, which would keep it aloft, perhaps indefinitely given the planet's horrific convection currents.  From there, we could not only get photographs, but more accurate data on the atmospheric chemistry, and possibly another thing as well.

One of the things we don't know much about is the tectonics of the planet's surface.  There are clearly a lot of volcanoes -- unsurprising given how hot it is from other causes -- but whether the crust is shifting around the way it does on Earth is not known.  One way to find out would be looking for "venusquakes" -- signs that the crust was unstable.  But how to find that out when probes on the surface either melt or get dissolved by the superheated sulfuric acid?

The cool suggestion was that because of the atmosphere's density, it might be "coupled" to the surface.  So if something shook the surface -- a venusquake or volcanic eruption -- those waves might be transferred to the atmosphere.  (This effect is insignificant on Earth because our atmosphere is far, far less dense.)  Think of a plate with a slab of jello on it -- if you shake the plate, the vibrations are transferred into the jello because the whole thing is more or less stuck together, so the surface of the jello wobbles in resonance.

An airborne probe might be able to tell us something about Venus's geology, which is pretty awesome.  It appeals not only to my fascination with astronomy, but my love of a good mystery, which the second planet definitely is.

So I hope this project gets off the ground, both literally and figuratively.  Even if it's unlikely to detect anything living -- reptilian or not -- we could learn a great deal about what happens when the carbon dioxide levels start undergoing a positive feedback loop.

A scenario we all would like very much not to repeat here at home.

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Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

The reason the topic comes up is because it's hurricane season, and whenever this time of year comes around, inevitably some yahoo comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who believed this would be a swell idea thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it gets flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with any hurricanes heading our way is to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of them, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind.  The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

And that's not even addressing the issue of introducing large quantities of radioactive fallout into a system characterized by high winds and torrential rainfall.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon, man!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but most hurricanes could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the grand hierarchy can remind us that we are, honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Anyhow, there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  Me, I'm just glad I live in a place that isn't prone to natural disasters.  Although who knows what the future might bring?  This year so far, New York State has had 27 tornadoes touch down -- a new record.  I don't own a gun, dynamite, or a nuclear weapon, but if a tornado heads our way, maybe I can have at the sonofabitch with my trusty slingshot.

It might not be things going "boom," but at least I'd be making an effort to comply with the American male "if it moves, shoot at it" mentality.

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Pet warp

In recent posts we have dealt with the Earth being invaded by giant alien bugs, the possibility that Bigfoot and other cryptids are actually ghosts, and a claim that some soldiers in World War I were saved by the appearance of either an angel or else St. George, depending on which version you go for.  So I'm sure that what you're all thinking is, "Yes, Gordon, but what about pet teleportation?"

At this point, I should stop being surprised at the things that show up on websites such as the one in the link above, from the site Mysterious Universe.  In this particular article, by Brent Swancer (this is not his first appearance here at Skeptophilia, as you might imagine), we hear about times that Fido and Mr. Fluffums evidently took advantage of nearby wormholes to leap instantaneously across spacetime.

In one such instance, Swancer tells us, a woman had been taking a nap with her kitty, and got up, leaving the cat sleeping in bed.  Ten minutes later, she went back into the bedroom, and the cat was gone.  At that point, the phone rang.  It was a friend who lived across town -- calling to tell her that the cat had just showed up on their doorstep.

Another person describes having his cat teleporting from one room in the house to another, after which the cat "seemed terrified:" 

All the fur on his back was standing up and he was crouched low to the ground. He looked like he had no idea what just happened, either.  That was about ten minutes ago.  He won’t leave my side now, which is strange in itself, because he likes independence, but he is still very unsettled and so am I.

And Swancer tells us that it's not just cats.  He recounts a tale by "the great biologist... Ivan T. Sanderson," wherein he was working with leafcutter ants and found sometimes the queen mysteriously disappears from the ant nest.  "Further digging in some sites within hours," Sanderson tells us, "brought to light, to the dumbfoundment of everybody, apparently the same queen, all duly dyed with intricate identifying marks, dozens of feet away in another super-concrete-hard cell, happily eating, excreting and producing eggs!"

However, in the interest of honesty it must be said that Sanderson might not be the most credible witness in the world.  He did a good bit of writing about nature and biology, but is best known for his work in cryptozoology.  According to the Wikipedia article on him (linked above), he gave "special attention to the search for lake monsters, sea serpents, Mokèlé-mbèmbé, giant penguins, Yeti, and Sasquatch."  And amongst his publications are Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life and the rather vaguely-named Things, which the cover tells us is about "monsters, mysteries, and marvels uncanny, strange, but true."

So I'm inclined to view Sanderson's teleporting ants with a bit of a wry eye.

What strikes me about all of this is the usual problem of believing anecdotal evidence.  It's not that I'm accusing anyone of lying (although that possibility does have to be admitted); it's easy enough, given our faulty sensory processing equipment and plastic, inaccurate memory, to be absolutely convinced of something that actually didn't happen that way.  A study by New York University psychological researcher Elizabeth Phelps showed that people's memories of 9/11 -- surely a big enough event to recall accurately -- only got 63% of the details right, despite study participants' certainty they were remembering what actually happened.  Worse, a study by Joyce W. Lacy (Azusa Pacific University) and Craig E. L. Stark (University of California-Irvine) showed that even how a question is asked by an interviewer can alter a person's memory -- and scariest of all, the person has no idea it's happened.  They remain convinced that what they "recall" is accurate.

Plus, there's the little problem of the lack of a mechanism.  How, exactly, could anything, much less your pet kitty, vanish from one place and simultaneously reappear somewhere else?  I have a hard time getting my dog Rosie even to move at sub-light speeds sometimes, especially when she's walking in front of me at a pace we call "the Rosie Mosey." In fact, most days her favorite speed seems to be "motionless," especially if she has her favorite plush toy to snuggle with:

Given all that, it's hard to imagine she'd have the motivation to accomplish going anywhere at superluminal velocity.

As intriguing as those stories are, I'm inclined to be a bit dubious.  Which I'm sure you predicted.  So you don't need to spend time worrying about how you'll deal with it when Rex and Tigger take a trip through warped space.  If they mysteriously vanish only to show up elsewhere, chances are they were traveling in some completely ordinary fashion, and the only thing that's awry is your memory of what happened.

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Mudslide

As part of our ongoing exploration of things that are big and scary and powerful and can kill you, today we have: underwater avalanches.

It's a topic I looked at a while back apropos of the Storegga Slide, which sounds like a bizarre mashup of Swedish folk music and a country line dance but isn't.  This was an undersea avalanche that occurred a bit over eight thousand years ago, a catastrophic slope failure between Iceland and Norway that displaced over three thousand cubic kilometers of debris and triggered a methane clathrate explosion -- resulting in a tsunami estimated at thirty meters in height which went on to inundate large parts of coastal northern and western Europe.

Underwater avalanches are a vastly understudied -- and therefore underestimated -- danger.  The reason it comes up today is a paper this week in Science Advances about a newly-discovered one that was on the same scale as Storegga, but in a different location.  This avalanche occurred an estimated sixty thousand years ago in Agadir Canyon, off the coast of Morocco.

The Agadir Canyon avalanche seems to have started small, possibly triggered by an earthquake.  But like snow avalanches in mountainous regions, once a bit of material starts to move, it causes other parts of the slope to fail, and pretty soon what you have is a monster.  From seafloor analysis of the sediment layers, what appears to have occurred is that the initial slide involved about 1.5 cubic kilometers of debris (itself not an inconsiderable amount), but by the time it peaked, the sediment flow was a hundred times that volume.

"What is so interesting is how the event grew from a relatively small start into a huge and devastating submarine avalanche reaching heights of two hundred meters as it moved at a speed of about 15 m/s, ripping out the sea floor and tearing everything out in its way," said Chris Stevenson, a sedimentary geologist from the University of Liverpool, who co-led the research, in an interview with Cosmos.  "To put it in perspective: that’s an avalanche the size of a skyscraper, moving at more than 64 km/h from Liverpool to London, which digs out a trench thirty meters deep and fifteen kilometers wide, destroying everything in its path.  Then it spreads across an area larger than the UK burying it under about a meter of sand and mud."

Yeah, that puts it in perspective, all right.

The path of the Agadir Canyon avalanche [Image credit: Christoph Bottner, Aarhus University]

The Agadir Canyon avalanche undoubtedly caused a massive tsunami, but given how long ago it occurred, it'd be hard to find evidence at this point.  Let's just say that it would have been a very bad time to live along the west coast of Africa or east coast of the Americas.

"We calculate the growth factor to be at least a hundred, which is much larger compared to snow avalanches or debris flows which only grow by about four to eight times," said Christoph Bottner of Aarhus University in Denmark, who also co-led the team.  "We have also seen this extreme growth in smaller submarine avalanches measured elsewhere, so we think this might be a specific behavior associated with underwater avalanches and is something we plan to investigate further."

The problem is, just about every continent is surrounded by a region of relatively shallow water (the continental shelf) with the abyssal regions just beyond its edge; at the boundary between the two is a very steep region called the continental slope, where the depth increases drastically over a relatively short horizontal distance.  These areas are prone to failure, and while most events are minor -- comparable to a small mudslide on a mountainside -- some of them, like Storegga and Agadir Canyon, can grow to colossal proportions.

And at the present, we don't know which areas are likely to be safe, and which are at significant risk.

So that's our unsettling science story of the day.  This kind of thing is why I always get a grim chuckle out of people who say how benevolent the Earth is, some even going so far as to describe the universe as "fine-tuned for our existence."  This ignores the inconvenient fact of how much of it is actively hostile -- and some of the most hostile bits are right below the seemingly tranquil surface of the ocean.

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A light on bias

A woman walks into the kitchen to find her husband on all fours, crawling around peering at the floor.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Looking for my contact lens."

"Oh, I'll help."  So the woman gets down on the floor, too, and they spend the next fifteen minutes fruitlessly searching for the missing lens.  Finally, she says, "I just don't see it.  Are you sure you dropped it in here?"

The husband responds, "Oh, no, I dropped it in the living room."

"Then why the hell are you looking for it in the kitchen?" she yells at him.

"Because the lighting is better in here."

While this is an old and much-retold joke, there's an object lesson here for scientists -- which was highlighted by a paper this week out of George Washington University that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution.  In it, paleobiologists Andrew Barr and Bernard Wood considered a systematic sampling bias in our study of fossils of ancestral hominid species -- and by extension, every other group of fossils out there.

A large share of what we know of our own early family tree comes from just three sites in Africa, most notably the East African Rift Valley and adjacent regions in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  Clearly that's not the only place early hominids lived; it's just the place that (1) has late Cenozoic-age fossil-bearing strata exposed near the surface, and (2) isn't underneath a city or airport or swamp or rain forest or something.  In fact, the Rift Valley makes up only one percent of Africa's surface area, so searching only there is significantly biasing what we might find.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michal Huniewicz, Great Rift Valley - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

"Because the evidence of early human evolution comes from a small range of sites, it's important to acknowledge that we don't have a complete picture of what happened across the entire continent," said study co-author Andrew Barr.  "If we can point to the ways in which the fossil record is systematically biased and not a perfect representation of everything, then we can adjust our interpretations by taking this into account."

You can only base your understanding on what evidence you actually have in your hands, of course; besides the areas that might bear fossils but are inaccessible to study for one reason or another, there are parts of Africa where the strata are from a different geological era, or simply don't contain fossils at all (for example, igneous rock).  But you still need to maintain an awareness that what you're seeing is an incomplete picture.

"We must avoid falling into the trap of coming up with what looks like a comprehensive reconstruction of the human story, when we know we don't have all of the relevant evidence," said study co-author Bernard Wood.  "Imagine trying to capture the social and economic complexity of Washington D.C. if you only had access to information from one neighborhood.  It helps if you can get a sense of how much information is missing."

Now, don't misunderstand me (or them); no one is saying what we have to date is likely to be all wrong.  I absolutely hate when some new fossil is discovered, and the headlines say, "New Find Rewrites Everything We Knew" or "The Textbooks Are Wrong Again" or, worst of all, "Scientists Are Forced Back To The Drawing Board."  For one thing, our models are now solid enough that it's unlikely that anything will force a complete undoing of the known science.  I suppose something like that could occur in newer fields like cosmology and quantum physics, but even there we have tons of evidence and excellent predictive models -- so while there might well be additions or revisions, a complete overturning is almost certainly not gonna happen.  

Second, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As scientists, we're always at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not doing science."  We are always exploring what he calls "the perimeter of our ignorance," testing and probing into the realms we have yet to explain fully.  What Barr and Wood are doing for the field of human paleobiology is to define that perimeter more clearly -- to identify where our inevitable sampling biases are, so that we can determine what direction to look next.  Not, like our hapless contact-lens-searchers, to continue to look in the same place just because the lighting happens to be better there.

Biases are unavoidable; everyone's got 'em.  The important thing is to be aware of them; they can't bite you on the ass if you keep your eye on them.  In science -- well, in everything, really -- it's good to remember the iconic line from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool."

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