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

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Pearlin Jean

Appropriate to the day, I thought I'd tell you about an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange about ghosts I got into with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, one hundred percent of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never meant to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued by her vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:
  • Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage as he was leaving Paris fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.
  • Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.
  • Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.
Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean.  (Both of them were solidly Scottish, however, not French.)  His first marriage was to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and his second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.  Sorry if that diminishes the frisson of the season, but that's the way I see it.  On the other hand, if when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, you see the apparition of a bloody-faced woman dressed in tattered gray lace step out of the shadows -- well, good luck to you, too.
  
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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

The oddest volcano on Earth

As far as we've progressed in our understanding of science, we still have a long way to go.

This is true in every scientific endeavor, but I was thinking about it apropos of geology while reading volcanologist Tamsin Mather's wonderful recent book Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves.  Mather's fascinating and often lyrical narrative takes us all over the world, describing her studies of volcanoes in Nicaragua, Greece, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Indonesia, Wyoming, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.  It was this last-mentioned that got me pondering the gaps in our understanding, because she described seeing the bizarre Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in the northern part of the country.

Ol Doinyo Lengai is strange by any standards.  It sits in the middle of the East African Rift Zone, which extends from Ethiopia to Mozambique, and is one of the Earth's only above-water divergent zones, places where two pieces of crust are moving apart.  The Rift being on land won't last forever, of course; ultimately a crescent-shaped chunk of East Africa will cleave off from the rest of the continent, the ocean will flood in, and afterward the rift will (like most of the others) lie at the bottom of the sea floor.  The separated piece will then creep off to the east, becoming an island -- or, depending on how you define it, a new continent.

The violent geology of the region has created a topography that in a post last year I referred to as "a beautiful hellscape."  The Dallol Depression is already 48 meters below sea level; the only thing keeping the water out is the Afar Highlands to the east acting as a barrier.  It's not only filled with bubbling mud pots and hot springs, but its position near the equator and the surrounding mountains creating a rain shadow make it blisteringly hot -- think Death Valley in midsummer -- so despite the otherworldly beauty of the brilliantly-colored rocks, it's not a place most people would ever think of going.

But even by comparison to the strange landscape that surrounds it, Ol Doinyo Lengai is peculiar.  It is the only active volcano on Earth that produces carbonatite lava, which (as you might surmise) is rich in carbonate minerals like calcite, dolomite, sodalite, apatite, and ancylite.  The magma is cool by volcanic standards, at only around 500-600 C, and yet produces some of the most fluid, low-viscosity lava flows known, moving at around five meters per second -- so about a typical human running speed.

Staying out of the way when Ol Doinyo Lengai erupts is a really good idea.

The lava comes out dark brown or black, but once it freezes and is exposed to the air for a few days, carbonate minerals crystallize on the surface and turn it a frosty white.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thomas Kraft, Kufstein, Lava lengai, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the entire cone has a snow-covered appearance, but there's no snow there -- it's all mineral deposits.

The weirdest thing is that we don't really understand where all this carbonatite magma is coming from.  My first guess was that somehow the plumbing of the volcano was moving up through a limestone or marble deposit, and picking up the carbonates as it went, but geochemical analysis of the rocks produced from it seems to have ruled that out.  Right now, it's thought to be some kind of weird fractionation -- the source magma deep underground is separating into high-carbon and low-carbon bits, and the high-carbon bits are the ones feeding this particular volcano -- but the fact is, this is a guess, and the word you see most often attached to its mineralogy and chemistry is "peculiar."

So what's happening here in northern Tanzania -- and even more apposite, why it isn't happening anywhere else on Earth -- is a mystery.  The strangeness, though, only increases its fascination, and there are geologists who are devoting a lot of time to figuring out what is going on in this odd and inhospitable place.  Strange, too, that the East African Rift Valley is where humanity got its start; Oluduvai Gorge, where some of the best-preserved hominin fossils were found, is part of the Rift complex. 

Perhaps there's a reason we're drawn to this mysterious spot.  Our roots are here -- in one of the most tectonically-active places on the planet.  That it still leaves us with unanswered questions only makes the draw stronger, bringing us back to the place our distant kin left a hundred thousand years ago, to use the tools of science to finally understand our own ancestral home.

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Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Watching the clock

I've posted before about the phenomenon of dart-thrower's bias; the tendency of humans to notice outliers, and therefore give them more weight in our attention (and memory) than the ordinary background noise with which we are constantly bombarded.  And once we notice a particular outlier, we're more likely to notice it next time -- further reinforcing the effect.

I remember having an experience of this a while back.  On two consecutive work days, I noticed, when I glanced at the clock after finishing breakfast, that it was 6:43.  On the face of it, this wasn't that odd, since my alarm was always set for the same time, and I did more-or-less the same sequence of actions to get ready for work, in more-or-less the same order, every day.  But I did notice it.  And subsequently, every time I glanced at the clock after breakfast and it was 6:43, it registered.  I was less likely to pay any kind of serious attention if it was 6:46 or 6:39, because I'd already primed my brain to be more aware of one particular time.

But if you think this exemplifies dart-thrower's bias, you ain't heard nothin' yet.  There's a guy named Jordan Pearce who posted over at SpiritScience and has had a similar experience, but doesn't chalk it up to a perceptual bias in the human brain...

... he thinks it's evidence we're going to have a "planetary shift of consciousness."

For him, the time was 11:11.  Despite my feeling that 11:11 is simply the most convenient way to get from 11:10 to 11:12, Pearce thinks that this time is deeply meaningful.  Here's what he has to say:
I’ll bet that if I asked publicly how many people saw 11:11 regularly, we’d probably see a huge sea of hands popping up all over the place. Its [sic] pretty common nowadays, there’s something to it, and its about time we decoded it.
In case you answered that you’ve never noticed 11:11, I would remind you that you’re reading a blog about it right now.  Welcome to the beginning of your 11:11 synchronistic voyage.
There was a time only a few years ago when I hadn’t heard a thing about 11:11.  It was brand new to me, until it wasn’t anymore.  Interestingly enough, my 11:11 synchronicities started right around the time when I began learning about a planetary shift of consciousness… The Shift.
Okie-dokie.  But isn't something being "new until it isn't anymore" kind of the usual way things work?  Anyhow, the upshot is, if you notice 11:11, you're heading toward enlightenment, or something.  So yay for you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, Big Ben Clock Face, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then he throws in a lengthy quote from Uri Geller, who I really wish would go away.  You'd think Geller's popularity would have waned after his conspicuous inability to telekinetically bend spoons on The Tonight Show decades ago, but no, he's still around, and still making grandiose statements about psychic stuff and global consciousness and spiritual ascension.

So Geller doesn't really add anything to Pearce's credibility.  But Pearce goes on, undaunted, and tells us that it all... means something:
11:11 is a wake-up call of sorts, an initiation into the “aha” of realization that something big was going on.  Something that connected everyone.  In truth, the numbers are only a representation of what’s really going on.  A symbol for the connection taking place all over the world.  The numbers aren’t significant, but their meaning.
Well, it would certainly be a wake-up call for me, because if I rolled over in bed and saw the time was 11:11, it would mean that I'd overslept by six hours.  But that's not what he's driving at, of course.  And what sort of meaning does he ascribe to all of this?
When you observe 11:11, you notice some interesting things.  The first thing that I see is that it is a balanced equation.
Actually, it's not an equation at all, given that an equation needs an equals sign somewhere.  But do carry on.
Not only is it two elevens, but two elevens with a : in between.  Two sides of a balanced equation, that equal out at zero.  They have a stable equilibrium were they a mathematical equation.
Yes!  Two elevens with a pair of dots!  And that equals zero!  Except when it equals four:
They also come down to 4.  I feel it like a 4 elements equation, a perfect balancing of a yin and yang energy.  If you know anything about Tarot, you might think of the 4 leaders.  Prince, Princess, Queen, and King/Knight.
I thought that the Tarot cards had a King, Queen, Knight, and Page, but what do I know?  I mean, he's basically making shit up as he goes on, so may as well make this up too, right?  But it gets even better:
Now, the magic about 11:11 is not just that it’s happening to you, but it’s happening everywhere.  11:11 is a global event, it is something that people all over the world, including you right now (because you’re reading this) is experiencing.
Well, I agree that 11:11 is a global event.  In fact, it happens twice a day, no matter what time zone you're in.  That's got to be significant somehow, don't you think?

And he ends with a bang:
You are not alone.  We are all growing and learning different things, and in truth we’re really all learning the same thing.  How to love.  What is love, what does love look like, and what it means to embody Christ.
So 11:11 = 0 = 4 = synchronicity, and therefore Christ?

I mean, this is taking dart-thrower's bias and raising it to the level of performance art.  Sometimes patterns are meaningful, and sometimes they just... aren't.  Imposing some kind of cosmic significance on something that is a random occurrence doesn't make it real.

So anyhow, there you are.  I just glanced at the clock, and it's 5:36, which as times go, is all higgledy-piggledy and unbalanced, and probably points to the fact that I am feeling particularly unenlightened at the moment because I haven't had any coffee yet.  Maybe I'll feel better at 5:55, although by then I'll probably be in the shower.

Maybe I'll see what happens at 6:43.  That's bound to be interesting, right?

Of course right.

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Monday, October 28, 2024

The man in the well

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named UnÃ¥s and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  UnÃ¥s's brother Roe was the bishop of Streymoy, and once the boy was old enough Roe saw to it that Sverre was educated, intending that he would eventually be ordained as a priest.

However, Sverre had other ideas.  He had dreams that he was destined for greatness.  Then in 1175, when Sverre was about twenty-five, Gunnhild threw gasoline on the fire by telling him that his father wasn't actually the humble comb-maker UnÃ¥s, but King Sigurd Munn of Norway, who had been killed by his brother Inge Haraldsson twenty years earlier, precipitating what would end up being a fifty-year civil war.

After finding out about his paternity, Sverre decided to head over to Norway and see what he could do to rectify the situation.

Historians differ on whether they accept the claim that Sverre was actually Sigurd's son.  The main source for this claim, Sverris Saga (thought to have been written by Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyraklaustur Monastery in Iceland), was certainly biased -- no aspersions meant toward the good abbot, but it was written under the direction and supervision of Sverre himself, so it's no surprise that in the saga the claim is treated as rock-solid fact.  And certainly, kings fathering children with mistresses isn't unusual.  But the whole thing definitely has overtones of mythology -- "the king's lost heir coming back to claim the throne" is a tale old as the hills.  (Interesting that most of the fictional ones, like Aragorn son of Arathorn and Taran the Wanderer, succeeded brilliantly, while the real-life ones, like Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and Kaspar Hauser, almost always came to bad ends.)

Whether or not his claim was legitimate, Sverre certainly acted like he deserved the throne.  He landed in Norway in 1176, and predictably meeting with little support, allied himself with a rebel group called the Birkbeiners ("Birchlegs," so called because they were so poor they made themselves leggings out of birch bark).  And initially, that didn't go so well, either.  Sverre and the Birkbeiners were defeated in a series of battles, eventually whittling their numbers down to about seventy.  But in a turn of fate that is astonishing by any measure, in 1179 they beat the much larger forces of King Magnus V Erlingsson, seizing control of the entire district of Trøndelag.  

Magnus wouldn't give up, however, and certainly wouldn't accept Sverre as a co-regent. Sverre had to fight for another five years before fate once again intervened on his behalf.  After yet another battle between the Birkbeiners and the Heklungs (Magnus's supporters) led to an unexpected rout, the surviving Heklungs -- including Mangus himself -- attempted to flee on ships down the long, narrow Sognefjord.  The overloaded ships sank, drowning Magnus and the majority of his supporters, leaving Sverre the uncontested king of Norway.

A marble sculpture of Sverre Sigurdsson from Nidaros Cathedral (ca. 1200)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Sverre's reign, however, was never to see real peace.  There were conflicts with landholding nobles, conflicts with the church, uprisings from rival parties, and even (ironically) a pretender to the throne who claimed to be Magnus's long-lost son.  (The pretender, unsurprisingly, didn't last very long.)  It was during one of these fights, however, that an event occurred that is why the whole topic comes up today.

In 1197, Sverre's forces were trapped in Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim, and it wasn't looking good.  In a desperate attempt to end the siege and wipe out Sverre and the Birkbeiners once and for all, the besieging forces threw the dead body of one of the men killed in a skirmish into a well -- the main water source for the castle -- in the hopes that it would poison the water and either kill them outright or force them to give up.  In the end it did neither -- Sverre would live to fight on for another five years -- and the story would have seemed to be one of those odd historical filigrees that could as easily be fabricated as true.

Except that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology believe they found the body.

The skeleton of a blond, blue-eyed man, approximately thirty years old at death, was found in a well near Sverresborg Castle that had been clogged with stones.  There were two deep cuts in his skull that are thought to be what caused his death.  From DNA extracted from a tooth, the scientists determined not only the bits about his appearance, but a surmise that he came from the province of Vest-Agder, in the very southernmost tip of Norway.

"This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," said Michael D. Martin, who co-authored the study.  "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods...  The important Norwegian Saint Olaf is thought to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral, so I think that if eventually his remains are uncovered, there could be some effort to describe him physically and trace his ancestry using genetic sequencing."

It's amazing that techniques of cutting-edge genetic analysis are being brought to bear on questions from history.  And in this case have corroborated a peculiar story from a saga long thought to be of questionable veracity -- giving us a lens into a turbulent, violent, and chaotic period of Scandinavian history.

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Saturday, October 26, 2024

Orbit completion

So, today is my 64th birthday, so Happy Birthday To Me, and all that sorta stuff.  I have to say it's hard for me to believe that I'm this old, but at least I make up for it by still being immature.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dogs-in-party-hats, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Even so, I have learned a few things, and I thought I'd step aside from my usual fare for a day, and present a list of 64 things I've come to understand in the last 64 years.  Despite my grandma's quip that free advice is worth what you paid for it, I hope you'll find some of them worthwhile.

1) Make a habit of being genuine.  Deception, even of yourself, can't be maintained forever.

2) If you want to find out whether someone is actually nice or not, watch how they treat dogs, cats, children, restaurant wait staff, and salespeople.

3) Live life with passion.

4) Don't take everything so damned seriously.  Most of the things that happen are, in the long run, irrelevant.

5) Don't overeat, but eat food you like.  Vegan raw-food enthusiasts who drink only wheat grass juice will still eventually die.

6) It's just as lazy -- and, in the end, just as damaging -- to distrust everyone automatically as it is to trust everyone automatically.

7) Complaining a lot pisses people off and solves essentially nothing.

8) Don't be ashamed of your tastes in art, music, books, and so on.  Anyone who ridicules you because of something that is a simple matter of opinion is an asshole.

9) There is nothing shameful about crying in public.  Yes, that includes men.

10) Relaxing and wasting time are not the same thing.

11) There are some people in this world who will be determined to see you as a different person than who you really are.  Fighting this is probably a waste of time.

12) Changing things from the top down seldom works.  The only real way to change things is from the bottom up.

13) People are always in love with their own delusions, and we all have them.

14) Spending more time outside is usually a good thing.

15) A lot of unhappiness can be averted by speaking what is truly in your heart, and then living by it.

16) Don't be afraid to get undressed in a gym locker room.  We're all naked under our clothes.

17) Take more chances.  Regrets about what we should have done and didn't are just as painful as regrets about what we did and wish we hadn't. 

18) Find some way to be creative.  Everyone is creative if they allow themselves to be.

19) You can't be unhappy for long if you have a snoring dog at your feet or a purring cat in your lap.

20) If you can, travel.  It is the most mind-expanding thing you can do.

21) Most of us could do with having fewer opinions and asking more questions.

22) If you put only half of yourself into an endeavor, it will be a waste of time for everyone involved.

23) There is very little that you will not be able to deal with better after a good night's sleep.

24) No matter how good you are at something, there will always be people who are better and worse than you are.  Be inspired by the ones who are better and be courteous and helpful to the ones who are worse.

25) Don't be afraid to say no to people.

26) Don't be afraid to say yes to people.

27) Get out on the dance floor.  You're more conspicuous just standing there than you would be if you were out dancing with the rest of us.

28) If life hands you lemons, fuck lemonade.  Make lemon meringue pie.

29) If you go to another country, eat what they eat.  You can get Big Macs at home.

30) Cultivate tolerance.

31) Be willing to laugh at your own quirks.

32) Stay hydrated.

33) Always keep in mind that much of what is on the internet is complete bullshit.

34) Cruelty is never justified.

35) Be unpredictable sometimes.

36) Don't talk once the movie has started.

37) The universe is endlessly interesting.  Cultivate curiosity about how it all works.

38) Pay attention when children talk to you.  It may not be interesting to listen to, but it's still important.

39) If you're still alive, you're not too old to pursue your dreams.  (If you're not still alive, and are nevertheless reading this, we should talk.)

40) You are not in competition with everyone.  All conversations aren't battles for superiority.

41) Sarcasm can be funny, but use it with caution.  Real ridicule can leave permanent scars.

42) Life is too short to drink bad beer.

43) Fundamentally, gullibility and cynicism come from the same place; an unwillingness to commit oneself to the hard work of thinking.

44) Every once in a while, go out at night and spend some time looking up at the stars.  It’s worthwhile being reminded how small we are.

45) Listen to your friends as much as you talk.

46) Take care of the planet we live on.  It's the only one we've got.

47) Be suspicious of any stranger who comes to your door trying to sell you a political ideology or a religious belief system.

48) Remember my friend Alex's motto: Semper alia via.  There's always another way.

49) Exercise more.

50) Understand that most people really are trying their best. 

51) Never take the last cookie unless you've been given explicit permission, and even then offer to split it.

52) Never let yourself be the one who caused another person to give up on reaching for their dreams or doing what they love.

53) A sincere apology goes a long, long way.

54) Stop at least once a day and be grateful for what you have.  There are many people in the world who would be thrilled to be where you are.

55) Find ways to give back to your community.

56) Some causes are worth fighting -- even dying -- for.

57) Make a point of learning new stuff.  Minds are like muscles -- if you don't work them, they atrophy.  And it's a healthy experience to be an absolute beginner at something every so often.

58) Be willing to lose an argument once in a while.

59) Play more.

60) Waste less.

61) Remember that most of the things we worry about won't come to pass.

62) There are times when things look hopeless, and the world seems bleak.  Hope anyway.

63) You will sometimes fail at things you desperately want to succeed at.  Try anyway.

64) You will sometimes get your heart broken.  Love anyway.

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Friday, October 25, 2024

The former Appalachia

In my post a few days ago about scary predators, I mentioned a curious feature of the prehistory of North America -- the Western Interior Seaway, which for a bit over thirty million years in the mid- to late-Cretaceous Period split the continent in half, connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, Alan L. Titus, Map of North America with the Western Interior Seaway during the Campanian (Upper Cretaceous), CC BY 4.0]

This meant that a broad strip of land from current-day Alberta to east Texas was underwater.  In fact, Kansas -- which seldom comes to mind when you think of the ocean -- is one of the best places in the world to find late-Cretaceous-age marine fossils like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and scary-ass enormous carnivorous fish like Xiphactinus.

These mofos were around five meters in length.  Going for a nice skinnydip in the Western Interior Seaway would not have been recommended. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jonathan Chen, Xiphactinus AMNH, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Seaway is thought to have formed because the Laramide Orogeny -- the combination of uplift and volcanism that created the Rocky Mountains -- caused downwarping of the continental crust to the east, allowing the ocean to flood inward.  The Laramide uplift eventually would be the Seaway's undoing, however; the upward push gradually shifted eastward, lifting what is now the American Midwest and leaving it high and dry.  (Of course, this final stage happened right around the same time as the Chicxulub Impact occurred, so living things at that point had other worries; but fossil beds in North Dakota that preserve evidence of the actual impact show that most of what had been the Seaway had already broken up into swamps, rivers, and shallow lakes.)

As you can see from the map, the Western Interior Seaway split North America into two continents, a western one (Laramidia) and an eastern one (Appalachia).  What's curious is that we know a great deal more about the paleontology of Laramidia than we do of Appalachia.  Most of what come to mind as the big, charismatic dinosaur species of the late Cretaceous, such as T. rex and Triceratops and Parasaurolophus, lived in Laramidia; and just this week, a paper appeared in PLOS One about one of the Laramidian mammals, a muskrat-sized marsupial called Heleocola.

So what was happening in Appalachia?

The answer is "we're not really sure," because the evidence is so slim.  A rapidly-rising mountain range, such as what Laramidia was experiencing at the time, results in a lot of eroded sediments and volcanic ash with which to bury recently-deceased organisms, making the western parts of North America prime places for hunting fossils.  The part of the continent east of today's Mississippi River is, on the whole, made up of rocks of far greater age.  (For example, where I live -- a bit down and to the right of the letter "C" in "Appalachia" on the map -- has rocks of Devonian age, which were already about three hundred million years old when the late Cretaceous dinosaurs were lumbering around.)

So old, stable crust with gentle topography = much less eroded sediment, and little to no formation of the sedimentary rock where you find fossils.

There have been a few finds here and there, even if nowhere near the fossil riches in the western half of the continent.  We know there were species from some of the familiar groups -- tyrannosaurids, hadrosaurs, coelurosaurs, ornithomimids, and lambeosaurs -- but on the whole, they were more like their ancestors (i.e. they had changed less over time, and still resembled the "basal" or "stem" lineages).  Why this happened is unknown.  There's a general rule that slow environmental change and low selection leads to very slow rates of evolutionary change (thus the oft-quoted statement that sharks have barely changed in overall form in two hundred million years, which is only true if you pick and choose which species to look at).  So were the inhabitants of Appalachia simply in a more congenial environment, as compared to the ones in the tectonically-active, rapidly-rising mountains of Laramidia?

It's certainly a possibility, but it's hard to make any real determinations based on a lack of evidence.  As I've pointed out before, even with the most favorable of conditions, only an extremely small fraction of organisms ever become fossils; what we don't know about the past vastly outweighs what we do know.  Still, it's mind-boggling to think about a time when things were so very different.  My home territory of the Finger Lakes Region of New York, now cool hardwood forests where the scariest denizens are foxes and black bears, were then warm, humid subtropical jungles, with a climate more like Central America, and populated by a huge assemblage of dinosaurs we're only beginning to understand.

Just as well things have changed, really.  I have a hard enough time keeping bunnies out of my vegetable garden, I can't imagine how I'd deal with my lettuce plants being munched by hadrosaurs.

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Thursday, October 24, 2024

Impact

New from the "Well, I Guess That's A Silver Lining?" department, we have: a massive meteorite collision 3.26 billion years ago that may have jump-started the evolution of life on Earth.

And I do mean massive.  This particular meteorite, given the unprepossessing name "S2," is estimated to have been a hundred times heavier than the Chicxulub Impactor that wrote finis on the Age of the Dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.  The S2 impact in effect took a chunk of rock four times the size of Mount Everest and slung it toward Earth at the muzzle velocity of a bullet fired from a gun.

The evidence for this impact was found in one of the oldest exposed rock formations on Earth -- the Barberton Greenstone, on the eastern edge of the Kaapvaal Craton in northeastern South Africa.  Geologists found tiny spherules -- microscopic glassy beads that result from molten rock being flung upward and aerosolized.  The impact not only blasted and melted millions of tons of rock, it generated so much heat that it boiled off the upper layer of the ocean, and the liquid water left behind was turned into the mother of all tsunamis.

"Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water," said Nadja Drabon of Harvard University, who led the study.  "It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents.  Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami, sweeping by and ripping up the seafloor."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Donald Davis]

But this was a very different Earth from the one we currently live on; it's unlikely there was any multicellular life yet, and possibly not even any eukaryotic organisms.

"No complex life had formed yet, and only single-celled life was present in the form of bacteria and archaea," Drabon said.  "The oceans likely contained some life, but not as much as today in part due to a lack of nutrients.  Some people even describe the Archean oceans as ‘biological deserts.’  The Archean Earth was a water world with few islands sticking out.  It would have been a curious sight, as the oceans were probably green in color from iron-rich deep waters...  Before the impact, there was some, but not much, life in the oceans due to the lack of nutrients and electron donors such as iron in the shallow water.  The impact released essential nutrients, such as phosphorus, on a global scale.  A student aptly called this impact a ‘fertilizer bomb.’  Overall, this is very good news for the evolution of early life on Earth, as impacts would have been much more frequent during the early stages of life’s evolution than they are today."

Well, "very good news" for the survivors, I guess, but the life forms caught in the boiling-hot tsunami or the ones that got bombarded by a rain of molten rock spherules might have disagreed.

But being bacteria, their sky-high reproductive rate certainly allowed them to rebound rapidly, especially given that the impact had basically blenderized the oceans, churning up vast amounts of iron- and phosphorus-rich sediments.  This triggered a planet-wide bacterial bloom, and it's likely that once the dust settled, the Archean oceans were once again thriving.  Even though the first eukaryotes were still over a billion years in the future, the stage had been set for the slow progression that would ultimately lead to the tremendous diversification the ended the Precambrian Era.

So even a collision from a piece of rock four times bigger than Everest didn't wipe out all life, which -- as I said earlier -- is, I suppose, the silver lining to all this.  As Ian Malcolm so famously put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024

The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday: does a good fictional story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest book ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad."

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot.

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-seven-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A few that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looks at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, "Demons of the Punjab," about the inevitability of death and grief, "Dot and Bubble," which deals with issues of institutionalized racism, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  The episode "Orphan 55," from the Thirteenth Doctor's run, pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me explain to you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."


So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to figure out what the lesson was. Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we readers will get to the punchline on our own.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea of what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Probably my most explicitly moral-centered tale, The Communion of Shadows, is about the fragility of life, the importance of taking emotional risks, and the absolute necessity of looking after the people we love, because we never know how long we have -- but I think the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Tooth and claw

The earliest living things, way back in the Precambrian Era, were almost certainly either autotrophs (those that could produce their own nutrients from inorganic chemicals) or else scavengers.  One of the reasons for this inference is that these early life forms had few in the way of hard, fossilizable parts, of the kind you might use to protect yourself from predators.  Most of the fossils from that era are casts and impressions, and suggest soft-bodied organisms that, all things considered, had life fairly easy.

But the Cambrian Explosion saw the rather sudden evolution of exoskeletons, scales, spines... and big, nasty, pointy teeth.  There's credible evidence that one of the main reasons behind that rapid diversification was the evolution of carnivory.  Rather than waiting for your neighbor to die before you can have a snack, you hasten the process yourself -- and create strong selection for adaptations involving self-defense and speed.

After that, life became a much dicier business.  I was discussing this just a couple of days ago with the amazing paleontologist and writer Riley Black (you should definitely check out her books at the link provided).  She'd posted on Bluesky about the terrifying Cretaceous mosasaur Tylosaurus proriger, which got to be a mind-blowing twelve meters long (around the length of a school bus).  This species lived in the Western Interior Seaway, which back then covered the entire middle of the North American continent.  I commented to her what a difficult place that must have been even to survive in.  "We always describe the Western Interior Seaway as 'a warm, shallow sea,'" Riley responded.  "Ahh, soothing -- and not like 'holy shit these waters are full of TEETH!'"

What's interesting, though, is that even though we think of predators as mostly being macroscopic carnivores, this practice goes all the way down to the microscopic.  The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Science about some research at ETH Zürich about a species of predatory marine bacteria called Aureispira.  These little things are downright terrifying.  They slither about on the ocean floor looking for prey -- other bacteria, especially those of the genus Vibrio -- and when they encounter one, they throw out structures that look like grappling hooks.  The hooks get tangled in the victim's flagella, and at that point it's game over.  The prey is pulled toward the predator, and when it's close enough, it shoots the prey with a microscopic bolt gun, and then chows down.

Aureispira isn't a one-off.  The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus forms what have been called "wolf packs" -- biofilms of millions of bacteria that can be up to several centimeters wide, that glide along soil particles, digesting any other bacteria or fungi they happen to run across. 

A "wolf pack" of Myxococcus xanthus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Trance Gemini, M. xanthus development, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This one immediately put me in mind of one of the most terrifying episodes of The X Files; "Field Trip."  In this freaky story, people are put into a series of powerful hallucinations after inhaling spores of a microorganism.  The hallucinations keep the victim quiet -- while (s)he is then slowly digested.

Of course, the microbe in "Field Trip" isn't real (thank heaven), but there are plenty of little horrors in the world of the tiny that are just as scary.  Take, for example, the aptly-named Vampirococcus, which is an anaerobic aquatic genus that latches onto other bacterial cells and sucks out their cytoplasm.

But the weirdest one of all is the bizarre Bdellovibrio, which is a free-swimming aquatic bacterium that launches itself at other single-celled organisms, moving at about a hundred times its own body length per second, then uses its flagella to spin at an unimaginable one hundred revolutions per second, turning itself into a living drill.  The prey's cell membrane is punctured in short order, and the Bdellovibrio burrows inside to feast on the innards.

So.  Yeah.  When Alfred, Lord Tennyson said that nature is "red in tooth and claw," I doubt he was thinking of bacteria.  But some of them are as scary as the mosasaurs I was discussing with Riley Black.  The world is a dangerous place -- even on the scale of the very, very small.

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