The vanishing island

Ready for a strange story, that has a curious connection to yesterday's post, about doorways and liminal spaces?

Let's start with H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story "The Call of Cthulhu," written in 1926, which sets up the tale with the discovery on a small island in an archipelago in the South Pacific of a small stone statue that looks like some kind of octopus/human hybrid.  Then, when anthropologists go to the island chain to try and find its origins, the natives not only deny knowing anything about the idol, they say the island where it was allegedly found is uninhabited and always has been.  Sure enough, when they go to that particular island, it's empty -- but there are some "suspicious traces" that certainly look like there'd been people living there, but who were all mysteriously done away with in the not too recent past.  Inquiries are launched, but the people who know something about the idol and where it was discovered all seem to have the unfortunate habit of dying before they can tell anyone about it.  The last part of the story describes the landing of a ship called the Emma on an island that had surfaced temporarily "in the open ocean south of the Cook Islands" due to an earthquake.  Second Mate Gustaf Johansen and six others go ashore looking for a supply of fresh water and other provisions, and soon enough regret their decision:

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.  The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found.  The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now-familiar squid-dragon bas-relief.  It was, Johansen said, like a great barn door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap door or slantwise like an outside cellar door...  [T]he geometry of the place was all wrong.  One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Then, because any reader with a scrap of common sense is by this time screaming at the characters "DO NOT OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!", of course one of them opens the fucking door:

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal.  In this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The result is that Cthulhu wakes up, most of the sailors are messily devoured, and the survivors are left with some seriously eldritch PTSD.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dominique Signoret (signodom.club.fr), Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite Lovecraft's regrettable tendency toward purple prose and the fact that he never met an adverb he didn't like, you have to admit the whole thing is pretty damn atmospheric.

What you may not know is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the evil octopus monster part, at least so far as I know.  In 1916, the Polynesian Society of Honolulu printed an account from a sailor who claimed to have years earlier visited an island called Tuanaki, where he lived with the natives for six days.  It was, he said, south of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands; in fact, the Tuanakians ultimately left their home (for unknown reasons, but there were hints of it being something bad) and resettled in Rarotonga, where some of them still lived.

So... explorers set out to find Tuanaki.  When they arrived at the point where the island allegedly was, there was nothing there but open ocean.

Off to Rarotonga to interview any Tuanakians who still lived there.  You guessed it -- the Rarotongans not only said that no one had emigrated there from other islands within living memory, no one they talked to had ever heard of Tuanaki.

Or so they claimed.

More prosaically, maybe (the explorers suggested) Tuanaki had sunk beneath the waves, either due to an earthquake or erosion or both.  One of them recalled that in 1862, some seafarers traveling from Auckland to Rarotonga had hit a submerged shoal near the coordinates supposedly corresponding to Tuanaki's location.  The shoal had been named Haymet Rocks in honor of the ship's owner, J. E. Haymet.

But further exploration couldn't find those, either.  If the Haymet Rocks were the remnants of Tuanaki, they seemed to have vanished as well.

And just to add an extra weird twist to the whole story, explorer Ernest Shackleton launched an expedition in 1921 with the express purpose of relocating Tuanaki -- then died of an apparent heart attack on South Georgia Island before he could go there.

The upshot of it all is that we still don't know where, or if, Tuanaki existed.  Considering the dicey state of navigation in the mid-nineteenth century, it's likely the initial account from the sailor had misidentified the location of the island where he stayed and/or misremembered the name of it.

But the fact remains that it's a very odd story, and you can see why it would have inspired Lovecraft.  Even without the oozing cyclopean architecture with impossible geometry, the whole tale is curious, and leaves more questions than answers.  After all, even with our modern mapping tools, the Pacific Ocean is a big place; the latitude and longitude Lovecraft quotes as the location of R'lyeh is not far from Point Nemo, the "oceanic pole of inaccessibility" -- the place in the Earth's oceans that is the farthest from any possible landfall.

So not a place anyone is likely to visit.  But if you do, and there's an uncharted island there, just remember the cardinal rule:

DO.  NOT.  OPEN.  THE.  FUCKING.  DOOR.

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Hands, skulls, and colours

In H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying and atmospheric 1927 short story "The Colour Out of Space," a meteorite strikes near a farmhouse in a rural area "west of Arkham," the fictional town in Massachusetts that is the setting of many of his stories.

The farm's owner, Nahum Gardner, and many others witness its fall; a "white noontide cloud... [a] string of explosions in the air, and [a] pillar of smoke from the valley."  Nahum, being closest, goes to investigate:

By night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place...  Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone...  He and his wife went with three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before.  It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink.  Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night.  The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft.  It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing.  They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool...

The day after that... the professors had trooped out again in great excitement...  [T]he specimen... had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker.  The beaker had gone as well, and the men talked about the strange stone's affinity for silicon.  It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal... and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.  On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked.  Stubbornly refusing to grow cool... upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum.

Eventually, the entire meteorite -- both the samples the scientists took, and the much larger piece in Nahum Gardner's yard -- evaporate away completely.  Well, not completely, because it's Lovecraft, after all; it left behind a miasma -- dare I say, an eldritch miasma -- that proceeds to poison the well, the soil of the farm, and the entire Gardner family.  The result is the crops, domestic animals, Nahum and his wife and three children, and finally the homestead itself quite literally falling apart, crumbling into a gray dust that "the wind does not seem to affect."  At the end of the story, the narrator describes the reason he found out about the affair -- he is an engineer hired by the state of Massachusetts to scope out a proposed site for a dam and a reservoir, which would flood "the blasted, withered heath that is all that is left of the old Gardner place" and the surrounding land.  "I shall be glad to see the water come," he says.  "I hope the water will always be very deep -- but even so, I shall never drink it."

*shudder*

The story is quite different from Lovecraft's usual fare of cults and Elder Gods and idols of the Great Cthulhu and so on, and you have to wonder what inspired it.  One thing is pretty likely to be the construction of the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island in 1925, near his native Providence, and the much-publicized plans for the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts; but I wonder if he also got the idea from a pair of wild tales that had been all over the news not long before.

The first occurred in 1916 near Bargaintown, New Jersey, where a farmer named Henry Prantl reported something very much like what Nahum Gardner saw in Lovecraft's story -- a white light streaking across the sky, followed by the boom of an impact.  Rushing out to investigate, Henry and his son John found a "writhing piece of mystic material"...

... shaped like a charred human hand.

Poor scientists.  Even back then, every new thing that happened left them "baffled."  You have to wonder how they ever manage to do any science at all, given how much time they spend scratching their heads.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

It was at first too hot to touch, but once it cooled, they were able to examine it.  We find out it was "made of no known material," and was "abnormally light for its size."  At first reluctant to part with it, the Prantls realized what money could be made from such an oddity, and leased it to an amusement park in Atlantic City where it was displayed for several years.  Somewhere along the way it was lost, and the Prantls found their temporary fame and dreams of wealth evaporating as quickly as Nahum Gardner's mysterious meteorite.

Not to be outdone, a gem miner in northern California claimed ten years later that he witnessed another meteorite fall, and this one was even better than a flaming hand; it was a flaming skull.  This is only a year before Lovecraft wrote "The Colour Out of Space," and like the first meteorite, it was all over the news, largely because of the indefatigable efforts by its discoverer, Charles E. Grant, to make sure it got into the headlines and stayed there.  Grant said he'd been told about the fall by a "reputable and well-to-do man," and they went out to retrieve the object.  He wouldn't let anyone see it, but sent a photograph to a reporter named Ben Cline, who dutifully wrote a story about it, ending with the wry comment, "[it has] the shape of a human skull, with depressions suggesting facial organs.  The writer's first-hand knowledge of races inhabiting planets other than Mother Earth is limited, and he hesitates, therefore, from the picture, definitely to place the Butte County visitor in the nebular scheme of things."

It didn't take long for people to connect the New Jersey story to the California one, and suggest that the hand and the skull had come from the same body.  If so, it was a little mysterious (1) why one had fallen ten years before the other, (2) how the unfortunate individual got up there in the first place, and (3) why he was coming down in chunks.

Maybe he had the Nahum Gardner falling-to-pieces syndrome, or something.

In any case, people started frantically looking around to find out if other charred body parts had come crashing to Earth, so they could cash in on the notoriety, but no such luck.  What with the hand getting lost right around the same time, and Grant refusing to show anyone the actual skull -- leading many to surmise that he made the whole thing up -- the only result was a flurry of interest in meteorites and, perhaps, Lovecraft's story.

Myself, I wonder if the "hand" was actually a fulgurite -- a long, branching tube of vitrified and fused soil, sand, and debris left behind when lightning strikes the ground.  Some of these things have a remarkably organic look, and the ones I've seen have a striking resemblance to the Prantl photograph.  This would also explain why it was "abnormally light for its size."  As far as Grant's flaming skull goes -- well, like I've said many times before, if you expect me to believe something, show me the goods or else bugger off.  If there was a meteorite at all -- i.e., if the photograph itself wasn't a fake -- its resemblance to a skull is very likely to be nothing more than a combination of pareidolia and Grant jumping up and down shouting, "It looks like a skull, doesn't it?  Doesn't it?"

So that's today's tidbit of historical weirdness.  Meteoritic body parts and one of Lovecraft's best stories.  I'm happy to report that neither the Scituate nor the Quabbin Reservoir seem to have poisoned anyone, and that I haven't heard any reports out of southern New Jersey or northern California suggesting anybody out there had any difficulties with "colours."

Just as well.  What happened to the Gardner family was nasty.  I wouldn't even wish that on Elon Musk, and that's saying something.

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Wandering through Lemuria

Today's post is brought to you by the Department of One Thing Leads to Another.

Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) was a distinguished British biologist with a long and illustrious career.  He was an expert ornithologist, but his knowledge extended to just about every group of living things.  He is considered to have founded the science of biogeography -- linking evolution to the geographical regions where assemblages of species live -- and because of his contributions, he has no fewer than eleven species named after him.

It was while he was studying the biogeography of Africa and India that he noticed something odd.  Madagascar is the home to a group called lemurs -- relatively small-bodied, large-eyed primates that are thought to have branched off from other primate groups on the order of fifty million years ago.  Inquiries by Sclater and others into paleontology found fossils of lemurs and lemur-like primates not only in Madagascar and east Africa, but in India; more curious, though, is that there were no similar fossils anywhere to be found in North Africa or the Middle East.

So how did they get from southern Africa to India, and leave no fossils behind along the way?

Continental Africa to Madagascar is possible; it requires crossing the Mozambique Channel, but that's at least plausible.  But the Indian Ocean?  Seems like a long way for a lemur (or, more accurately, at least two lemurs) to swim, so how could this be explained?

Sclater proposed that the landmasses of India and East Africa were once connected.  Given that this was 1864, and prior to any knowledge of continental drift and plate tectonics, the continents were believed to stay firmly where they were; so the only possibility Sclater could come up with was that there had once been dry land where the western Indian Ocean now is.  A "lost continent," as it were, drowned beneath the sea.

Because he'd come up with the idea based on the distribution of lemur fossils, Sclater called the continent "Lemuria."

Lots of other biologists thought this explanation was pretty nifty, and even the prominent German researcher Ernst Haeckel gave it his imprimatur, adding that maybe this could be a possible location for the origin of the human species.

The problem was, when the first attempts were made at sounding in the western Indian Ocean, it seemed way too deep for Sclater's explanation to be plausible.  It was known that the vagaries of ice ages and other climatic shifts made the sea levels rise and fall, but even Sclater's most ardent supporters began to wonder how Lemuria could have sunk by thousands of meters, leaving no traces whatsoever.  Then, when Alfred Wegener and others began to take the idea of continental drift seriously, it explained the distribution of lemur fossils (and other similar examples that had been discovered in the interim) without positing a lost continent.  India itself had moved, carrying its flora, fauna, and fossil assemblage with it, accounting for the odd biogeography of the lemurs (and the origin of the Himalayas thrown in as an added benefit).

Lemuria had been a good guess, as these things go, but seemed to be another example of Thomas Henry Huxley's quip that the tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  So you'd think that'd be that.

You'd be wrong.  Because enter, stage left, one Helena Petrovna von Hahn Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky in 1877 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Blavatsky was a very, very odd character.  She was widely traveled, making her way through Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, India, and Tibet, and mostly seemed to use her wanderings to pick up pieces of esoteric lore.  And what she didn't find, she was quite content to make up herself.  She claimed that one of her books, The Secret Doctrine, was based on a mysterious and holy text from Tibet called The Book of Dzyan, which appears to have been a complete fabrication of her own.  This sort of thing notwithstanding, she gained a cult following, eventually founding a movement called Theosophy, which -- with no apparent sense of irony -- has this as its symbol:

Well, Blavatsky loved the idea of Lemuria.  It gave her a place where her Ascended Masters had lived, whose spirits she claimed to still be able to converse with.  Lemuria became, so to speak, the Atlantis of the East; a place that had been the home of a Golden Age of Humanity, eventually destroyed by the wickedness of a few, but from which there were still relic documents scattered around the world that the wise could learn from (and of course which Blavatsky would be happy to tell you all about).

Except for two inconvenient facts: (1) Lemuria never existed, and (2) the documents Blavatsky "translated" were almost all forgeries.

This didn't stop her from claiming that science supported her claims, citing Sclater's scholarly papers as evidence and conveniently not mentioning any of the later ones that had shot down Sclater's hypothesis.

The whole thing gained additional momentum when early twentieth century horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft got on board, mentioning Lemuria as one of the places the Elder Gods had lived.  Lovecraft even mentions The Book of Dzyan in his story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer:"

I learned of The Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilize our planet.

This, of course, added further fuel to the fire, because although most people knew Lovecraft's stories were fiction, maybe -- just maybe -- the various books he mentioned weren't.  Which explains why you can buy Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon on Amazon, even though Lovecraft himself made up both the "mad Arab" and his "monstrous and abhorred book," something he said outright in a letter to fellow writer Robert Bloch:

By the way—there is no "Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."  That hellish & forbidden volume is an imaginative conception of mine, which others of the W.T. group have also used as a background of allusion.

But of course... he would say that, wouldn't he?  *slow single-eyebrow raise*

If things haven't gotten eye-rollingly convoluted enough, we have one last person to introduce, which is Tamil scholar and fervent nationalist Devaneya Pavanar.  In the early twentieth century, Pavanar was trying to do two things, one of which was considerably more laudable than the other: (1) develop a comprehensive linguistics of the Tamil language, and (2) establish the Tamils as the culture from which all language, literature, religion, music, art, and science worldwide ultimately sprang.  The current Tamils live mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka, but despite his best efforts, Pavanar found that there was little hard evidence in those regions available to support that latter idea.  So instead of going, "Okay, I guess I musta been wrong, then," he latched onto Sclater's hypothesis, via Blavatsky, and decided that Lemuria was indeed the home of a lost Golden Age of Humanity, but it had been run entirely by the ancestors of today's Tamil people, so that had to be where all the evidence had gone; it was sunk under the waves of the western Indian Ocean.

He said the Tamil name for Lemuria was Kumari Kandam, and claimed that science supported his contention -- like Blavatsky, leaving out the unfortunate footnote that all the science in the intervening years had disproven the whole damn thing.  The brilliant Tamil poet Seshagiri Sastri said that Kumari Kandam was "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets," but that appears to have convinced no one who wasn't already convinced.

And because it fell right in line with Pavanar's extremely popular ethnocentric claims, the idea of Kumari Kandam made its way into science textbooks in Tamil Nadu and parts of Sri Lanka, and in some places is still taught as scientifically-accepted fact, despite the fact that there is exactly zero evidence -- not a single artifact brought up from the western Indian Ocean seafloor, no submerged buildings, no geological evidence of a drowned continent, nothing -- supporting any of it.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So there you are.  What started out as a reasonable (if, ultimately, incorrect) guess by a reputable scientist still lives on today because a flock of woo-woos led by a loony Russian mystic and a Tamil-first extremist grabbed it and ran right off the cliff with it.  Which I guess is yet another indication that you don't need any evidence at all to fall for a claim that supports what you already believed to be true.

Me, I prefer actual science, but some days I appear to be in the minority.

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Make a little noise

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

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

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

Which is pretty damn atmospheric, you have to admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... all the way back in 1941.

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

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

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

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The shroud of ice

It's hard to imagine Antarctica as anything but a frozen wasteland.  Bitterly cold even in summer, barely any precipitation (if it were warmer, Antarctica would be classified as a desert), much of the continent buried under a sheet of ice hundreds of meters thick.  The central "dry valleys" of Antarctica were used as a proving ground for the Mars rovers -- because it was the place on Earth that's the most like Mars.

It's kind of cool that H. P. Lovecraft, writing early in the twentieth century, recognized that this icy and inhospitable land might not always have been that way.  In one of his best short stories, "At the Mountains of Madness," we find out that the continent was once inhabited.  And by "once," I mean long before Homo sapiens appeared on the African savanna.  The denizens of the place -- the "Elder Things" -- were bizarre beasts with five-way symmetry and brains far more advanced than ours, and they built colossal edifices (invariably described as "eldritch" and "cyclopean") which, in the context of the story, are the subject of a scientific investigation.

And being that this is Lovecraft we're talking about, it did not end well.

Even more interesting is his story "The Shadow Out of Time," wherein we find out that the Elder Things amassed the information they have by using their eldritch (of course) technology to switch bodies -- they can flip their consciousness with a member of another sentient species anywhere in time and space, spend a year or two learning about the species and its culture, then flip back and write down what they found out.  The Elder Things lived in Antarctica a hundred million years ago, at which time the frozen continent was a warm, lush, humid jungle.  Listen to how one of their unwilling visitors, a human man from the early twentieth century, describes the place:

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains.  Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom.  When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.  Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors...  I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.

Lovecraft's prescience was shown when plate tectonics was discovered, twenty years after the author's death.  Antarctica wasn't always centered at the South Pole, and in fact had drifted in that direction from somewhere far nearer to the equator.  Since Lovecraft's time, fossils of temperate-climate organisms have been found in abundance, indicating that the climate had shifted dramatically, just as he'd said.

And shrouded underneath thousands of meters of ice, that primordial terrain is waiting to be studied.

Artist's conception of the ancient Antarctic rain forests [Image credit: James McKay of the Alfred Wegener Institut]

That colossal task has been taken on by a team led by glaciologist Stewart Jamieson of Durham University, who led a research project to use a remote telemetry technique called radio-echo sounding to map, for the first time, what's underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.  The region is home to the coldest temperatures ever recorded -- below -80 C -- and experiences katabatic winds (winds caused by cold air rushing downhill from higher elevations) in excess of three hundred kilometers per hour.  

Not a place most of us would choose to visit.  But Jamieson and his team did -- spending whole seasons traversing the continent with their sensors.  The result was a "ghost image," a map showing sharply-peaked, river-carved hills and a hollow that probably was once a massive lake.  The topography reminded Jamieson of Snowdonia in Wales.

"It's an undiscovered landscape," Jamieson said.  "No one's laid eyes on it.  The ice sheet that covers it has been there for at least fourteen million years, perhaps longer.  The land under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars."

No word on whether his team saw signs of any eldritch and cyclopean architecture.

Despite the fact that I've known for many years that the continents move around and climates change, I'm always a little blown away when I consider how different things are now from even the relatively recent geological past.  And, of course, that the current configuration we have now will itself change as plate tectonics (and human messing-about) alters the Earth's ecosystems.  It may be true that in the span of a human lifetime -- as the famous song by Kansas put it -- it may seem like "nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky," the truth is that given a long enough time scale, Tennyson hit closer to the mark:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?

There, where the long road roars

Has been the stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands,

They melt like mists, the solid lands,

Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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Eldritch rabbit holes

Between research for Skeptophilia, my choice of reading material, and natural curiosity, I go down some deep rabbit holes sometimes.

This latest plunge into the netherworld of knowledge happened because I decided to reread The Lurker at the Threshold by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.  It's the umpteenth time I've read it, and although I'm well aware of its flaws (especially the overuse of words like "eldritch," the fact that every damn character in the story lives in an "ancient gambrel-roofed house," and the seemingly rushed/thinly-plotted final section), that book has some serious atmosphere.  I swear, I'll never see a stained-glass window again without thinking of the scene where the main character looks through the clear central pane of the crazy circular window in the library of the house where the story takes place -- and sees not the woods and stream lying outside, but a vista of an alien planet.

Near the end of the story, the scientist/historian Dr. Lapham is trying to convince his assistant that there's something supernatural going on, and goes through a bunch of examples from history of inexplicable occurrences.  I recognized one of them as being an actual event -- the disappearance of British diplomatic envoy Benjamin Bathurst in Perleberg, Germany in 1809 -- although the way it's described makes it sound way weirder than it actually was, and it's almost certain that Bathurst was simply robbed and murdered.  (This didn't stop me from giving the event a passing mention in my own novel, Sephirot.  Hey, if Lovecraft can get away with it, so can I.)

The fact that the Bathurst incident has at least a basis in reality made me wonder about a couple of the others Dr. Lapham mentions.  Several are references to other (fictional) Lovecraft stories, but I did wonder about his mention of sightings of mysterious undersea lights by the crews of two British ships, the light cruiser H. M. S. Caroline and the second-class cruiser H. M. S. Leander, in 1893.  So I did a bit of digging, and although the ships themselves were 100% real, I couldn't find any reference to odd sightings from either one.  

Anyhow, in The Lurker at the Threshold, the lights were supposedly the hallmark of the evil "Great Old One" Yog-Sothoth, who appeareth unto mankind as congeries of iridescent globes, so although I hath no idea what the fuck a "congery" is, I googled "real sightings of Yog-Sothoth," and that's when the bottom fell out of the rabbit hole.

The Invocation of Yog-Sothoth [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Demodus, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, Template:Other free]

This is how I ended up at a site called Lovecraftian Science, about which I can't for the life of me tell if the owner is serious.  Apparently the guy is a legitimate limnologist/ecologist, so it could well be that he's just having a bit of fun trying to apply the methods of science to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, but damned if he doesn't seem entirely in earnest.

Amongst the entries I saw therein:

• "Cryptobiosis in Elder Things: Drifting Through Interstellar Space" -- in which we find out that the "Elder Things" in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" go into stasis when they're in outer space, and are propelled from one planet to another by dark energy.  We also read speculation that the members of the Elder Things have a similar protein structure to tardigrades, and that's how they manage to survive the trip from one planet to the next.
• "Stephen Hawking's Ideas in a Lovecraftian Cosmos" -- wherein we learn that the titular musician in "The Music of Erich Zann" prevented an invasion of our universe by "extra-dimensional beings" by "generating micro-scale gravity waves of a very specific disturbance within space-time to link our universe with another."  Whatever that means.
• "Lovecraftian Scientists: Astronomers from 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep'" -- musings on how the spirit of Joe Slater, main character in the short story mentioned in the title of the post, could have done battle with the evil entity residing near a star in the constellation of Perseus resulting in a spectacular nova observed in 1901 -- when the nova is 1,500 light years away, so the actual explosion happened 1,500 years ago.  "We do not know if the luminescent being that possessed Joe Slater could travel through time as easily as space so its existence was not limited to strictly linear time as it is with us," the author writes, apparently with a straight face.
• "Lovecraft's 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family:' What of the Piltdown Man?" -- because there's nothing that strengthens an argument about the factual nature of a fictional story like drawing evidence from a blatant hoax.
• "'The Dunwich Horror:' Meet the Whateleys" -- in which I found out way more than I wanted to know about the mechanics of Yog-Sothoth having sex with Lavinia Whateley, along with, I shit you not, Punnett squares for the offspring thereof.

I encourage you to peruse the website, because this is barely scratching the surface.  Whatever you can say about the guy's level of seriousness, there's no doubt that he's dedicated.

Being a writer, I've often joked about the FBI keeping a file on my google search history, but there are times I'm guessing that even the FBI would take the whole file and dump it in the trash and say, "Okay, never mind, this guy is a fucking loon."  I guess it's an occupational hazard of the combination of (1) being a speculative fiction writer, (2) owning a blog that frequently focuses on beliefs in weird stuff, and (3) having insatiable curiosity.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if it's disturbing or reassuring that there are people who go way further into the rabbit hole than I do; some of them, in fact, seem to have taken up permanent residence.

Anyhow, I'm going to try to go back to topics from science tomorrow.  I think one day of investigating eldritch giant interstellar tardigrades and what it'd be like to get laid by "congeries of iridescent globes" is enough to last me for a long time.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Excusing the past

For today's Fiction Friday, I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?

I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa" are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South.  Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point.  (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)

I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story.  The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head.  The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time.  And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes.  Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place.  There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good.  But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration.  The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).  

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism.  There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype.  In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in.  In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default.  The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you as long as you know your place."

Christie herself is not a lot better.  One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written.  But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians.  Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it.  But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.  

I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now.  Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read work of theirs that have no racist aspects at all?  More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia?  His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game.  What about worse things still?  Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place?  Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this.  I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader.  I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were.  But what about reading solely for pleasure?  I kind of loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct," but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don't know the answer to that.  I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers, Christie, and the others.  I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work.  

What do you think?  Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The attraction of the terrifying

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Babylonian Times) those strange and often scary tales -- like the famous story of the choking Doberman -- were transmitted word-of-mouth and in-person, limiting the speed and scope of their spread.

Now that the world is connected electronically, these bizarre stories can spread like a wildfire.

This has given rise to "creepypasta" -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that spread across the 'web.  (If you're curious, the name comes from "creepy" + "copypasta" -- the latter being a slang term for the practice of copying blocks of text between different social media platforms.)  Some have become pretty famous, and have inspired books and movies; in fact, I've riffed on two creepypasta in my novels, the legend of the Black-Eyed Children (in the Boundary Solution trilogy, beginning with Lines of Sight), and the terrifying tale of Slender Man (in Signal to Noise).

So obviously I have nothing against a good scary story, but a line is crossed when you add, "... and it really happened."  In fact, the topic comes up because of an interesting article by Tom Faber that appeared last week in Ars Technica looking at a specific subcategory of creepypasta -- stories that involve the supposedly supernatural (and terrifying) effects of certain video games.

Not being a gamer myself, I hadn't heard about most of these, but there's no doubt they're pretty scary.  Take, for example, the tale that grew around the Pokémon game "Lavender Town," which has an admittedly eerie soundtrack (you can hear a recording of it on the link provided).  Supposedly, the music contained "high-pitched sonic irregularities" that induced an altered mental state so severe that after playing the game, dozens of children in Japan committed suicide by climbing up on their roofs and throwing themselves off.

Needless to say -- or actually, evidently it does need to be said -- that never happened.  There is no evidence to be had online, from official documents, or in newspapers or television news that gives an iota of credence to it.  Even so, lots of people swear it's all real.  Sometimes these stories become oddly recursive; a game-inspired, supposedly true creepypasta called "Ben Drowned," about an evil spirit trapped in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, became so widespread that a new game -- The Haunted Cartridge -- was published based on it.

So a made-up scary story about a video game that people claimed was real inspired another video game.

Delving through these layers can be tricky sometimes, but what strikes me is how easily people accept that these tales are true.  For a lot of people -- and I reluctantly include myself in this category -- there's a part of us that wants that stuff to be real.  There's something oddly compelling about being frightened, even though if you think about it rationally (which I hope everyone does), there's really nothing at all attractive about a world where ghosts and monsters and zombies exist and video games can make a noise inducing you to kill yourself.

It's like the people, apparently numerous, who think that the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is substantially true.  (I couldn't resist playing with that idea, too, giving rise to my short story "She Sells Seashells" -- which you can read for free at the link -- and I encourage you to do so, because all modesty aside, it's cool and creepy.)  But the question remains about why would you want Cthulhu et al. to exist.  Those mofos are terrifying.  Even the people who worship the Elder Gods in Lovecraft's stories always seem to end up getting eaten or dismembered or converted into Eldritch Slime, so there appears to be no feature of these beings that has any positive aspects for humanity.  Okay, I live in a pretty placid part of the world, where I frequently wish something would happen to liven things up, but even I don't want Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the crew to show up in my back yard.

Despite all this, I still feel the attraction, and I'm at a loss to explain why.  I remember watching scary television and movies as a kid, and not just being entertained but on some level wishing it was real, even though I was well aware of how much more terrifying it would be if it were.  One example that stands out in my memory is the episode of Lost in Space called "Ghost in Space," wherein an invisible creature has arisen from a bog, and Dr. Smith becomes convinced he can communicate with it via Ouija Board.  Okay, watching it now, the whole thing is abjectly ridiculous (although I am still impressed with how they made the footprints of the creature appear in the sand without anything visible there to make them).  But other than being scared, I remember my main reaction was that I would love for something like that to be real.  Because of that, it's still one of the episodes I remember the most fondly, despite how generally incoherent the story is.

So (speaking of incoherent), I'm not even entirely certain what point I'm trying to make, here, other than (1) life would be a lot simpler if people would stop making shit up and claiming it's true, and (2) even people who are diehard skeptics can sometimes have a wide irrational streak.  It's fascinating how attracted we are to things that when you consider them, would be absolutely horrible if they're real.

Yet as the poster in Fox Mulder's office said, "I Want to Believe."

Anyhow, I should wind this up.  Not, of course, because there's anything interesting that I need to deal with.  When the most engaging thing in your immediate vicinity is watching the cows in the field across the road, it's perhaps not surprising that I sometimes feel like a good haunting or invasion by aliens would break up the monotony.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Quantum-thluhu

Because the universe has a peculiar sense of humor sometimes, my comment to a friend yesterday that it'd been a good long while since I'd run into a purely insane claim was followed up nearly instantaneously by a different friend sending me a link to an article called "The Dimensionality of Cthulhu."

Yes, Cthulhu, as in the octopoid monster-god in the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.  The link led to a blog entitled "Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations Into the Cthulhu Mythos."  When saw the title, I thought at first that this was just an example of a scientist having a little bit of fun, rather in the same vein as the hysterically funny fake scientific papers in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or the way legitimate historians will play around with (and argue over) analysis of the timeline and backstory of The Lord of the Rings.  But upon reading the entire entry, and several other posts besides, at the cost of countless brain cells in my prefrontal cortex which cried out piteously as they dissolved into the amorphous, bubbling nether-slime of the darkest eldritch reaches of time and space, I have come to the conclusion that this dude is actually serious.

[Image is courtesy of the artist, Dominique Signoret, and is licensed under the Creative Commons BenduKiwi, Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Consider, for example, the following passage:

Based on... references made by HPL, Cthulhu and its spawn are not from our space-time continuum.  This explains how these entities can function beyond the confines of our physical laws, such as its fluid movement and apparent plasma-like structure.  Indeed, further study of Cthulhu and its spawn may provide the evidence needed to support the M-theory.

Yes, M-theory, that impossibly abstruse mathematical construct that attempts to unify all consistent string theoretical models of quantum gravity.  The introduction to the Wikipedia article on the topic, which despite my bachelor's degree in physics represents the limit of my understanding of the subject, says the following:

Investigations of the mathematical structure of M-theory have spawned a number of important theoretical results in physics and mathematics.  More speculatively, M-theory may provide a framework for developing a unified theory of all of the fundamental forces of nature.

"Spawned."  Sounds like a Cthulhu reference already.  So there you are, then.  Seems like q.e.d. to me.

The author of the article apparently agrees.  He goes on to say:

M-theory describes a reality of vibrating strings, point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other multi-dimensional objects we can not perceive (Hawking and Mlodinow; 2010).  In fact, M-theory allows for many different internal spaces – as many as 10500 different universes, each one with their own particular set of laws of nature.  Is Cthulhu and its spawn from one of these universes?  Did this entity find a means of exuding itself into our universe, bringing with it R’lyeh, with some of its native laws of nature seeping into our universe?

Yes.  He actually cited Stephen Hawking in order to explain why R'lyeh is such a crazy-ass place.

He concludes with a teaser:

From a theoretical standpoint such inter-dimensional travel to other universes may be feasible but the limitation to this is the amount of energy needed to accomplish this.  While this is a huge obstacle to us, maybe Cthulhu and its spawn can harvest the energy from antimatter and travel to other universes – and one of those universes may be ours.  But such travel to other universes with different physical laws of nature may pose some limitations onto these inter-universal travelers.  It is these potential limitations on entities from outside of our space-time continuum we will be discussing in the next article.

So there may be a way to stop these monsters!  Hallelujah!  Alert Henry Armitage!  Wilbur Whateley is going down!

Ahem.  Yeah.  What's funniest about all of this is that Lovecraft himself was a staunch rationalist.  He used to reply to the fans who wrote to him, asking for directions to Dunwich or Innsmouth, "Those places do not exist.  I know that for certain.  You see, I made them up."  This didn't stop people from looking, of course, and it spawned (there's that word again) theories that he was covering up his knowledge to protect himself from retribution by the Abominable Mi-Go, or whatever.  (In fact, I riffed on that very idea in my short story "She Sells Seashells," which, should you choose to read it, I feel duty-bound to point out is fiction as well.)

And apparently there are people who are sold enough on his worldview that they'd like to use it to prove string theory.  Or vice-versa, I'm not sure.  Which is also kind of peculiar, because besides Lovecraft's fictional universe being a pretty bleak place, he was also a raving racist, a feature that pops out with cringeworthy regularity in his stories.  (So while I count him amongst the inspirations for my own writing, I can't really in good conscience read about half of what he wrote.)

Anyhow.  That's our excursion into the Deep Places for today, and I'm off to get some coffee and then to fight my way through the Insanely Gibbering Hordes that populate the Loathsome Monolith-Crowned Citadel where I shall Reside in Nuclear Chaos Until The End Of Time.

Respectively, "my dogs," "my office," and "fucking around on social media."

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Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]