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.
Today I have for you two news stories that are interesting primarily in juxtaposition.
The first is a press release about a study out of Stanford University that found LGBTQ+ people have, across the board, a higher rate of mental health disorders involving stress, anxiety, and depression than straight people do. Here's the relevant quote:
New research looking at health data of more than a quarter of a million Americans shows that LGBTQ+ people in the US have a higher rate of many commonly diagnosed mental health conditions compared to their with cisgender and straight peers, and that these links are reflective of wider societal stigma and stress. For example, cisgender women who are a sexual minority, such as bisexual or lesbian, had higher rates of all 10 mental health conditions studied compared to straight cisgender women. Gender diverse people, regardless of their sex assigned at birth, and cisgender sexual minority men and had higher rates of almost all conditions studied compared to straight cisgender men, with schizophrenia being the one exception. A separate commentary says these differences are not inevitable, and could likely be eliminated through legal protections, social support, and additional training for teachers and healthcare professionals.
The second is from Newsbreak and is entitled, "Trump Signs Sweeping Executive Orders That Overhaul U.S. Education System." The orders, as it turns out, have nothing to do with education per se, and everything to do with appeasing his homophobic Christofascist friends who are determined to remove every protection from queer young people against discrimination. Once again, here's the quote:
The executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools threatens to withhold federal funding for "illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools," including based on gender ideology and the undefined and vague "discriminatory equity ideology."
The order calls for schools to provide students with an education that instills "a patriotic admiration" for the United States, while claiming the education system currently indoctrinates them in "radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight."...
"These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity," the order states.
So how is it surprising to anyone that we queer people have a higher rate of depression, stress, and anxiety? Funny how that happens when elected officials not only claim we exist because of "radical indoctrination," but are doing their damnedest to erase us from the face of the Earth.
If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this:
It's a good thing I retired in 2019 (after 32 years in the classroom), because if anyone -- from a school administrator all the way up to the president himself -- told me I couldn't call a trans kid by their desired name or pronouns, or had to take down the sticker I had on my classroom door that had a Pride flag and the caption "Everyone Is Safe Here," my response would have been:
FUCK. YOU.
And I'd probably have added a single-finger salute, for good measure.
Mr. Trump, you do not get to legislate us out of existence. You do not get to tell us who we can be kind to, who we can treat humanely, whose rights we can honor, who we can help to feel safe and secure and accepted for who they are. I lost four damn decades of my life hiding in the closet out of fear and shame because of the kind of thinking you are now trying to cast into law, and I will never stand silent and watch that happen to anyone else.
So maybe your yes-men and yes-women -- your hand-picked loyalist cronies who do your bidding without question and line up to kiss your ass even before you ask it -- are jumping up and down in excitement over enacting this latest outrage, but you (and they) can threaten us all you want.
I'm not complying. I will never comply. And I know plenty of high school teachers and administrators who feel exactly the same way I do. You may think you've picked an easy target, but what you are doing has unveiled how deeply, thoroughly cruel your motives are -- and it will unleash a tsunami of resistance.
LGBTQ+ people and minorities and the other groups you get your jollies by bullying will always be safe with me. And if you think any stupid fucking command from on high will change that, you'd better think again.
To put it in a way even someone of your obviously limited intellectual capacity can understand: you can take your executive order and stick it up your bloated ass.
Because apparently some ill-advised person uttered the dreaded words, "Well, things can't possibly get any weirder than they already are," I've been seeing a resurgence of interest in an "invention" from 1990 called the "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer."
I put "invention" in quotation marks because mostly what it seems to do is "nothing," which is hardly remarkable. Hell, I've got three dogs who do that all day long, unless their dreaded enemy the UPS Guy shows up, at which point they sound Full Red Alert until the Guy retreats to his truck in disarray, which always happens. This leaves them with a nice cheerful feeling of having Accomplished Something Important, at which point they resume doing nothing until the next non-crisis arises.
Anyhow, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, such as it is, is the brainchild of one David Woodard, who sounds like one seriously strange dude. He is an accomplished musician who specializes in writing requiems (he once wrote one for a dead pelican he found on the beach) and "prequiems" for people who aren't technically deceased but who, in the words of Monty Python, will be stone dead in a moment. Woodard wrote about his mystery machine in a pamphlet in 1990, describing it as a "psychotechnographic" device he'd found out about somewhere and then recreated:
The first part of the contraption's odd moniker comes from the Latin ferus (wild animal) and limen (threshold); if you think the second part sounds like it must mean "... that turns you into a werewolf," you're exactly right. (However, it must be mentioned that after Gary Larson's immortal coinage of thagomizer for the spiky end of a stegosaurus's tail -- named, you'll probably recall, after "the late Thag Simmons" -- it's hard for me to take anything ending in -izer seriously.)
In any case, the thing supposedly creates three simultaneous infrasonic sine waves, at 0.56, 3.0, and 9.0 Hertz, respectively, which combine to create "thanato-auric waves." After that, someone inside the box is... well, let me quote the pamphlet Woodard wrote about it:
This combination of drastically contrasting emotional trigger mechanisms results in an often profound behavioral enhancement which occurs strikingly soon (within moments) after the user enters and remains in the auricular field of the machine... [This acts] to trigger states of urgency and fearlessness and to disarmor the intimate charms of the violent child within. The Trithemean incantations richly pervading the machine’s aural output produce feelings of aboveness and unbridled openness.
Right! Sure! I mean, my only question would be, "What?"
I was disappointed to find out that even Woodard doesn't believe the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer actually turns you into a werewolf, which is a shame, because that'd be kind of cool. I've always thought that of the horror movie bad guys, werewolves are objectively the best. I mean, consider the advantages: (1) you only have to work one day a month; (2) there's hardly any danger because no one much carries guns with silver bullets, including in places like Texas where even the dairy cattle are packing heat; (3) you get to romp around howling at the Moon; (4) werewolves always have super ripped muscles, despite seldom being seen at the gym; and (5) no one thinks it's weird if you show up to work naked, a principle exemplified by the character Jacob Black in the movie Twilight, wherein audience members lost track of the number of times Taylor Lautner took all his clothes off.
Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.
But all the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer allegedly does is to increase your violence and sexual desire, which seems like a bad idea to do at the same time. Fortunately, in reality it doesn't even do that much; no less a source than the Fortean Times said "There is no evidence the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer exists or could have such effects." Somewhat more crudely, paranormal researcher Michael Esposito commented that the sexual effects of the Lycanthropizer could be duplicated by "leaning up against the spin cycle of a Maytag."
So an oddball made a strange claim a 35 years ago, which isn't anything out of the ordinary, because that's what oddballs do. What's remarkable, though, is that this thing has now resurfaced, and is making the rounds of conspiracy websites (wherein it's suggested that it's somehow going to be used covertly to, I dunno, convert people into extremely horny super-soldiers or something) and even sketchier sites owned by people who are trying to figure out how to make one, because for some reason they want to feel more violent.
Since the Lycanthropizer doesn't actually do anything (Cf. paragraph 2), I suppose there are worse things the fringe element could spend their time on. After all, the more time they waste trying to generate an "auricular field of thanato-auric waves" the less time they'll have to amass actual weapons.
So the upshot is: knock yourself out.
Anyhow, that's our News From The Outer Limits for today. And I guess that, in fact, the world has not yet gotten as weird as it could possibly get. But y'all'll have to excuse me, because my washing machine just went on spin, and I've got to... um... go attend to it.
Seismologists and volcanologists are unusual amongst scientists in that for the most part, what they're studying are things that are permanently unavailable for direct observation.
Oh, sure, they can access the results on the Earth's surface; fault lines, lava flows, uplift or subsidence from magma movement, and so on. But the actual processes -- the stuff down there that is causing it all -- is inaccessible.
The deepest hole ever dug is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula near the Russian border with Norway, which is an impressive twelve kilometers deep; but when you realize that's only one-thousandth of the diameter of the Earth, it puts things into perspective. Even so, it was deep enough that the bottom had a measured temperature of 180 C -- hot enough to boil water, but far from hot enough to melt rock. (It bears mention that a claim circulating last year that they'd gone down fourteen kilometers, hit temperatures of 1000 C, and could hear the screams of the damned -- because, apparently, they'd punctured a hole into hell -- was unfounded.)
So the fact remains that much of geological science is based upon inference -- not only using surface processes to infer what's happening in Earth's interior, but using data such as earthquake wave traveling speed to figure out what the mantle and core are made of, whether they're liquid or solid or somewhere in between, and how all that stuff in there is moving around. And being inferential, our understanding of deep geologic processes is constantly subject to revision.
Which brings us to a study out of Utrecht University that appeared in the journal Nature last week, about a discovery showing that deep in the Earth's mantle there are two continent-sized subterranean "islands" at least a half a billion years old -- showing that the stuff down there isn't mixing around quite the way we thought it was.
The upper mantle has been thought of as basically a big recycler. As pieces of the Earth's crust get forced down into subduction zones (marked by the oceanic trenches that neighbor some of the most tectonically-active regions on Earth), it melts and gets mixed into what's already down there. Being colder than the surrounding rock, everyone thought the process was slow; other than the bits that get hot enough to melt and then rise to the surface, causing volcanoes like the ones in the North American Cascades, Andes, Caribbean, Italy, Japan, and Indonesia, the rest just has to sit down there till it blends into the material surrounding it.
Apparently some of this will need to be rethought, because these "islands" in the mantle are still holding together despite being so old that they "should have" completely melted away by now.
One of the chunks is under Africa and the other under the Pacific Ocean, and they were located by using the paths and speeds of seismic waves, giving them the moniker of LLSVPs (Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces). "Nobody knew what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years," said Arwen Deuss, who co-authored the study. "These two large islands are surrounded by a graveyard of tectonic plates which have been transported there by subduction, where one tectonic plate dives below another plate and sinks all the way from the Earth’s surface down to a depth of almost three thousand kilometers."
You might be wondering how they figured out that they are a half a billion years old, given that they're way out of reach of direct study. That, in fact, is the most fascinating part of the study, and has to do with the fact that rocks which cool quickly (such as obsidian and basalt) have much smaller crystals than ones that cool more slowly (like granite and gabbro). The molecular reassembly that results in crystal formation takes time, especially in thick, viscous liquids like magma, so if lava is rapidly cooled on the surface it doesn't have time to form crystals.
"Grain size is much more important," Deuss said. "Subducting tectonic plates that end up in the slab graveyard consist of small grains because they recrystallize on their journey deep into the Earth. A small grain size means a larger number of grains and therefore also a larger number of boundaries between the grains. Due to the large number of grain boundaries between the grains in the slab graveyard, we find more damping, because waves lose energy at each boundary they cross. The fact that the LLSVPs show very little damping, means that they must consist of much larger grains."
Large grain size = a long time spent underground. Mineralogist Laura Cobden, who specializes in mineral crystallization rates in igneous rock, estimated that based on the inferred crystal size in the two "islands," they've been down there, relatively undisturbed, for around five hundred million years.
[Image from Deuss et al.]
So that's our cool science news from the geologists for today. Two islands in the mantle that are stubbornly resisting melting away. Why these structures have been so persistent is beyond the scope of this study; but as with all science, finding out something's there is the first step. After that, the theorists can figure out how to explain it all.
It's a little odd that someone as center-of-attention-phobic as I am has chosen something that is bound to garner close looks. I'm referring to my tattoos, which are obvious and colorful -- and include a full sleeve, so they're a little hard to hide.
Virtually everyone who comments on them, however, is complimentary. With good reason; my artist, James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos in Ithaca, New York, is -- in a word -- brilliant, and realized my vision of what I wanted just about perfectly.
Just after it was finished
Not everyone's a fan, of course. I was given the stink-eye by a sour-faced old lady in a local hardware store a while back, who informed me that having tattoos meant I was going to hell.
My response was, "Lady, that ship sailed years ago."
But if I do end up in hell because of my ink, I'll have a lot of company. Not only is tattooing pretty common these days -- since I got my first one, about twenty years ago, it's gone from being an infrequent sight to just about everywhere -- humans have been decorating their bodies for a long time. Ötzi "the Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body found frozen in glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border, had 61 tattoos, mostly on his legs, arms, and back. (Their significance is unknown.) In historical times, tattooing has been observed in many cultures -- it was widespread in North and South American Indigenous people and throughout east Asia and Polynesia, which is probably how the tradition jumped to Europe in the eighteenth century (and explains its associations with sailors).
The role of self-expression in tattoos varies greatly from person to person. Ask a dozen people why they chose to get inked and you'll get a dozen wildly different answers. For me, it's in honor of my family and ethnic roots; the Celtic snake is for my wildlife-loving, half-Scottish father, the vines for my gardener mother. But the reasons for getting tattooed are as varied as the designs are.
The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery that was described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a twelve-hundred-year-old mummified body from the pre-Columbian Peruvian Chancay Culture, which showed some of the most intricate ancient tattoo patterns ever seen. Virtually every square inch of the person's skin was covered with a fine latticework of black geometric designs -- the similarity was immediately noticed to the adornments on clay figurines from the same time and place.
This becomes even more amazing when you realize that the person was tattooed using the "stick-and-poke" method, which involved being jabbed over and over with implements like wooden needles, slivers of flint or obsidian, or sharpened bird bones. This sounds a hell of a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.
But it was still worth it. After I stopped screaming.
In any case, I find it fascinating how old the drive to adorn our bodies is, and also that the chosen designs had (and have) such depth of meaning that people were willing to wear them permanently. For myself, I've never regretted them for a moment; I'm proud of my ink, whatever the sour-faced little old ladies of the world might think of it. And knowing that what I have is part of a tradition that goes back thousands of years gives me a connection to the rituals and culture of the past.
And for me, that's something to cherish. Even if I do end up in hell because of it.
The flood of awful, outrage-inducing, and flat-out insane news lately has made it hard to focus on anything else.
Just in the day prior to my writing this:
The U.S. Senate confirmed a wildly unqualified Christofascist woman-abusing drunkard to lead the largest and best-funded military in the world
Trump summarily fired seventeen inspectors-general at the offices of State, Veterans' Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, and Defense, effectively removing any capacity for oversight
ICE raids have begun in earnest, and have included churches, preschools, and schools; among those arrested/harassed have included a military officer who was born in the U.S. but happens to be the wrong color, and, in a height of irony, Native Americans
The Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. was called "nasty" by Trump, and has received death threats from his followers (and a threat of deportation by a MAGA congressman) for... of all things... urging mercy, kindness, and empathy toward those who are suffering
By executive order, Trump removed the $35 cap on medications for people on Medicare and Medicaid, profiting pharmaceuticals companies at the expense of the elderly and poor
Elon Musk has doubled down on his Nazi salute at the Inauguration by making a series of sick puns about names of prominent Nazi officials, followed by a laugh-till-you-cry emoji
The GOP has proposed revisions to the budget that include eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, making it harder for working-class people to afford to purchase a house
And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately.
It is unsurprising if we're feeling overwhelmed by all of this. I've had to limit my time reading the news -- given my capacity for spiraling into depression even in normal times, I can't risk letting all this take a sledgehammer to my mental health. And keep in mind that this is what Trump and his cronies want; the nuclear bomb of lunacy that has marked the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 is, at least in part, intended to create a Gish gallop of horrors so demoralizing that the opposition simply gives up.
That is exactly what we cannot afford to do. Instead, let the barrage of bad news stiffen your resolve. There's a line from the song "Turning Away," by the fantastic Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean, that applies here: "Words cannot extinguish us, however hard they're thrown."
And this brings me to a documentary I watched last week that you all must make sure you see.
It's called Porcelain War, and was the winner in the documentary category at Sundance last year. It's about two brilliant Ukrainian porcelain artists, the husband-and-wife team of Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, whose delicate, whimsical, and stunningly decorated animal sculptures charmed me the first time I saw them, in an online ceramics workshop Anya led that I took about four years ago. I've followed them ever since, and their work never fails to make me smile.
Then came Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the horror show that followed.
Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, which has been heavily attacked, but have refused to leave. Slava volunteered to train infantry, so he's away from home a lot of the time, and has often found himself in the middle of the battles. In the film, he talks about how much he hates fighting -- and, in fact, hates the guns and other weapons he is training his fellow soldiers to use. ("They're only for one purpose," he says -- "killing other human beings"). But he is unequivocal that defending his home and his fellow Ukrainians is nothing less than an absolute duty. The only other choice is to let Putin win, and that is simply not an option.
But then, when he gets leave to come home -- he and Anya go back to creating sweet, beautiful pieces of art.
The juxtaposition of the atrocities of the invasion with the staggering loveliness of Slava and Anya's delicate porcelain work is both inspiring and heartbreaking. "If the fighting makes us stop creating beautiful things," Slava says, "we've already lost."
So as counterintuitive as it sounds, we need to take inspiration from Slava and Anya, and fight hard against letting despair freeze us into inaction. That's what Trump and his cadre want. And not only do we need to push back against the flood of evil that threatens to engulf us, we need to commit ourselves to continuing to create beauty. As Slava Leontyev points out, the world can still be a beautiful place, if we work to make it so -- despite what is happening around us.
"It's easy to scare people," he says. "But it's hard to forbid them to live... Ukraine is like porcelain. Easy to break, but impossible to destroy."
May we show such resilience, dedication, and spirit in the war we will fight over the next four years.
I am going to be taking a short break from Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post for a week and a half. Lord willin' an' the creek don't rise, as my grandma used to say, I'll be back at it on Monday, January 27.
cheers,
Gordon
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I've always found the concept of the Strong Anthropic Principle wryly amusing.
The idea here is that something (usually a benevolent deity) fine-tuned the universe in just such a way to be hospitable for us -- for having forces perfectly balanced to hold matter together without causing a runaway collapse, for having gravitational pull strong enough to form stars and planets, for having electromagnetic forces of the right magnitude to generate the chemical reactions that ultimately led to organic molecules and life, and so on.
To me, this argument ignores two awkward facts. First, of course our universe has exactly the right characteristics to generate and support life; if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to consider the question. (This is called the "Weak Anthropic Principle," for obvious reasons.) Second, though -- the Strong Anthropic Principle conveniently avoids the fact that a large percentage of the Earth, and damn near one hundred percent of the universe as a whole, is completely and unequivocally hostile to us, and probably to just about any living thing out there.
It's one of those hostile bits that got me thinking about the whole issue today, because astronomers recently observed a phenomenon called a fast radio burst in our own galaxy -- a mere thirty thousand light years away -- and the thing that produces it is not only bizarre in the extreme, but is something that we're very, very lucky not to be any closer to.
The beast that produces this is called a magnetar, and appears to be a rapidly-spinning neutron star, with a mass of two to three times that of the Sun but compressed into a sphere only about twenty kilometers in diameter. This means that the surface gravitational attraction is astronomical (*rimshot*). Any irregularities in the topography would be crushed, giving it a smooth surface with a relief less than that of a brand-new billiard ball.
The most bizarre thing about magnetars, however, is the immense magnetic field that gives them their name. Your typical magnetar has an average magnetic field flux density of ten billion Teslas -- on the order of a quadrillion times the field strength of the Earth. This is why they are, to put it mildly, really fucking dangerous. The article in Astronomy about the discovery explained it graphically (if perhaps using slightly more genteel language):
The magnetic field of a magnetar is about a hundred million times stronger than any human-made magnet. That’s strong enough that a magnetar would horrifically kill you if you got within about 620 miles (1,000 km) of it. There, its insanely strong magnetic field would pluck electrons from your body’s atoms, essentially dissolving you.
This brought up a question in my mind, though; magnetic fields of any kind are made by moving electrical charges -- so how can a neutron star (made, as one would guess, entirely of neutrons) have any magnetic field at all, much less an "insanely strong" one? Turns out I'm not the only one to ask this question, as I found out when I did some digging and stumbled on the Q-and-A page belonging to Cole Miller, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland. Miller says the reason is that not all of the particles in a neutron star are neutrons. While the structure as a whole is electrically neutral, about ten percent of the total mass is made up of electrons and protons that are free to move. Take those charged particles and whirl them around hundreds of times per second, and you have a magnetic field that is not only insanely strong, but really fucking dangerous.
This all comes up because of the observation of a thirty-millisecond-long fast radio burst coming from within our galaxy. All the others that have been detected were in other galaxies, and the distances involved (not to mention how sporadic they are, and how quickly they're over) make them difficult to explain. But this comparatively nearby one gave us a load of new information -- especially when a second burst came from the same magnetar a few days later.
Astronomers and astrophysicists are still trying to explain the phenomenon, including odd features of this particular one such as its relative faintness. As compared to bursts from other galaxies this one was a thousand times less luminous. Why is still a matter of conjecture. Is it because bursts this weak occur in other galaxies, but from this distance would be undetectable? Is it because the distant galaxies are much younger (remember, looking out in space is equivalent to looking back in time), so stronger bursts only happen early in a galaxy's evolution? At this point, we don't know. As Yvette Cendes, author of the Astronomy article, put it:
It is far too early to draw a firm conclusion about whether this relatively faint FRB-like signal is the first example of a galactic fast radio burst — making it the smoking gun to unlocking the entire FRB mystery. And there are also still many preliminary questions left to answer. For example, how often do these fainter bursts happen? Are they beamed so not all radiation is equally bright in all directions? Do they fall on a spectrum of FRBs with varying intensities, or are they something entirely new? And how are the X-ray data connected?
As usual with science, the more we know, the more questions we have.
In any case, here we have a phenomenon that's cool to observe, but that you wouldn't want to be at all close to. Not only do we have the magnetic field to worry about, but the burst itself is so energetic that anything nearby would get flash-fried.
So "the universe is fine-tuned to be congenial to us" only works if you add, "... except for the 99.9% of it that is actively trying to kill us." Not that this makes it any less magnificent, but it does make you feel a little... tiny, doesn't it? Probably a good thing. Humans do stupid stuff when they start thinking they're the be-all-end-all.
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NEW! We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear! Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!
All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.
One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with. The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings. I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.
The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation. I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes. My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab). As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.
I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself. And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.
The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.
I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here. Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.
In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else. It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.
The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along. I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life. I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife). But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery. I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like. The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house.
All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.
It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.
I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected. A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts. It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge. In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."
So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.
I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls. I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.
Usually, that's where I'd stop. If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it. Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go. But here... that was only the first step.
One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it. You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from. Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.
He leans into the unevenness hard. And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.
So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.
One of the results
The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut. Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile. Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."
But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.
Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice." The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.
So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.
I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't. I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make. And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...
... fun.
I've never been much good at "having fun." In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound." Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse. (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.) But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity. I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.
I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere. When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain. There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me. I'm important, and here's why." (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.) When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.
And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.
So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work. I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them. (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.) Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up. There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things." Take a risk. Then take another one. The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.
NEW! We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear! Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!
Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.
I've always been this way. My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!" When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects. So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.
My younger son inherited this tendency. Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game. More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct. Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.
It's a wonder I ever get anything done.
The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before. She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal. I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.
So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying." Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world. The article says:
The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds. Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."
I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."
Yeah, that'll work.
Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is. It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices. But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you. This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream. He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.
At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses. On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror. The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.
This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery. The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.
The problem is, these things are real, and alive. And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.
*cue scary music*
This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision. From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen. I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:
All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway. We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now. As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right. As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock... I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor. That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal. I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.
But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.
At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?" The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do. So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers. The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard. But who knows? Maybe you learned something anyhow. And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up. I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.
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NEW! We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear! Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!
Like many people, I've been watching the news, photographs, and video footage coming in from the fires in the Los Angeles region with feelings of absolute horror.
As of the time of this writing, ten people have died, 34,000 acres have burned, and 200,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders. At least ten thousand structures -- homes and businesses -- have burned to the ground. And while the high winds that have been driving the spread of the wildfires and making fighting them difficult to impossible are supposed to moderate this weekend, meteorologists have predicted them to increase again early next week.
Because there's no human tragedy so heartwrenching that Donald Trump won't use it to score political points, he's gone on Truth Social repeatedly in the last couple of days to say the whole thing is Governor Gavin "Newscum"'s fault, presumably for not raking the forests or going up to Canada to turn on the "very large faucet" that is holding back all the water from the western half of the United States. Not a word of empathy for the people who've had their homes and their livelihoods destroyed, not a mention of the scale of this catastrophe.
It's what we've come to expect from leaders who have zero compassion and no benchmarks for conduct except for profit, cronyism, and revenge.
Note, too, that there's been no mention that the ultimate cause of this disaster is anthropogenic climate change. No, gotta find a way that the Democrats are to blame, even though we've been the ones who have been warning about this for years. In fact, just this week a study was published in the journal National Review of the Earth and the Environment that directly attributes the risk of devastating fire outbreaks to climate change -- more specifically, to a phenomenon called hydroclimate whiplash.
One of the results of global warming that is hard to get people to understand is that it isn't uniform. The entire world isn't going to gradually slide into becoming a tropical rain forest. The polar vortex phenomenon we've seen here in the northeastern United States over the last few years is actually one of the predictions of climate change models; the overall warming of the Earth causes a weakening of the polar jet stream, causing it to meander like a river crossing a flat plain. Loops of the jet stream are pushed south, and those meanders allow icy polar air to move much farther south than normal. So these deep cold snaps are actually caused by anthropogenic climate change; they're not an argument against it.
Likewise, rainfall and snowfall patterns aren't going to move uniformly in one direction, they're expected to fluctuate wildly. This is hydroclimate whiplash, and is at the root of the Los Angeles fires. The rainy season in early 2024 in southern California was abnormally wet (in fact, there were multiple damaging mudslides caused by what are called "atmospheric rivers" dumping huge quantities of rain and snow). This triggered explosive growth in fast-growing plants like grasses and annual and perennial weeds. The summer that followed was abnormally dry, and the winter 2024-2025 rainy season basically hasn't happened yet. So you had what amounted to a tinder box of dried-up plants, just waiting for a spark to start the conflagration.
"The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall," said Daniel Swain, climatologist with UCLA, who co-authored the study. "Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions."
You won't hear a word of this from Donald Trump and his cronies, of course. Not while they have Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom to blame, and certainly not as long as the GOP is in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry. Trump's pronouncements on the wildfires have contained, to quote CNN's Daniel Dale, a "staggering amount of wrongness," but I guess now we're back to living in the "alternative facts" world we were in from 2016 to 2020.
Since we've now lost our opportunity here in the United States to put the brakes on fossil fuel use, at least for the next four years, look for more extremes to come. We can expect bigger storms, more heat waves and polar vortexes, more atmospheric rivers and catastrophic droughts. We tried to warn people; hell, I've been writing about this topic here for fifteen years, and was discussing it in my classes three decades ago.
Not that the people in charge were listening. As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
So there's nothing we can do now but to put pressure on legislators -- frustrating though that's likely to be in the current political climate -- and prepare our own selves for weathering the storms, literal and figurative. Find places to donate to help those displaced by the fires, some of whom have lost everything. (Here's just one of many options.)
Most importantly to the bigger picture: keep speaking up against the lies coming from Trump and his allies. We can't let misinformation shout more loudly than the truth.
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NEW! We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear! Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!
