Song of the Rifleman

As an avid birdwatcher, I've learned many of the vocalizations of our local species.  Some, especially the migratory species we only hear from May to September, I have to relearn every year, but a few of them are so distinct that my ears perk up whenever I hear them.  One of my favorites is the whirling, ethereal song of the Veery (Catharus fuscescens):

Another lovely one, often heard in the same sorts of deep-woods habitats as the Veery, is the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina):

By far the strangest bird songs I've ever heard, though, we came across when we visited the lowlands of eastern Ecuador about twenty years ago.  There were two we heard but never saw -- first, the aptly-named Screaming Piha (Lipaugus vociferans), which can be heard for miles:

And second, the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis), which is cryptically-colored and nocturnal, so they're almost never seen.  But when they sing at night... holy crap.  Imagine being out in the jungle, alone, at night, and hearing this:

It's no wonder the locals thought there were monsters out there.

Bird songs serve two main purposes.  They're territorial defense signals and mate attractants.  (Which led a former student of mine to say, in some astonishment, "So birds only sing when they're mad or horny?")  Songs are usually only done by males, and mostly during the breeding season.  Calls, on the other hand, are done by both males and females, at any time of the year, and can mean a variety of things from "there's food over here" to "watch out for the cat" to "hey, howsyamommaandem?"  (The latter mostly from birds in the southeastern United States.)  Those of you in the eastern half of North America certainly already have heard the difference; our local Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) has a call, the familiar "chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee" that gives the species its name, and a song -- a two-note whistle with the second note a whole step below the first.  Listening to them, you'd never guess it was the same bird.

There's an interesting distinction in how animals vocalize.  Some vocalizations seem to be innate and hard-wired; the barking of dogs, for example, doesn't need to be learned.  A great many bird species, however, including songbirds and parrots, learn vocalizations, and deprived of examples to learn from, never sing.  (This includes the amazing mimicry of birds like the Australian Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), which can learn to imitate not only birdsongs but a huge variety of other sounds as well):

The topic comes up because of a study that came out this week in the journal Communications Biology about the Rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), a tiny species from New Zealand that is one of only two surviving species in the family Acanthisittidae, the New Zealand wrens, which are only distantly related to the more familiar and widespread true wrens.  (If you're curious, its odd common name comes from the cheerful colors of the plumage, which someone decided looked like a military uniform:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons digitaltrails, Lake Sylvan - Rifleman (5626163357) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Rifleman is not a songbird, and (if the preceding distinction holds) should be unable to learn vocalizations; any sounds it makes should be instinctive and fixed, like the clucking of a chicken.  But the study found that there were variations in the vocalizations of different individuals, and those variations were independent of how closely related they were; what mattered was how nearby they lived to each other, implying that the alterations in sound were learned, not innate. 

"The vocal behavior that we were unravelling in this study is very similar to what is known as vocal accommodation in human linguistics," said Ines Moran, of the University of Auckland, who led the research.  "It's similar to our ability to adjust our ways of speaking in different social, dialectal, or hierarchical settings -- modulating our voices to better fit in certain social groups."

So bird vocalizations may not be as simple as we'd thought.  Like most things, I suppose.  It brings up the silly distinction that I heard over and over again from students, that there's a split between "human" and "animal."  We're clearly animals; and, conversely, what we call "animals" share a great deal more with us than we often realize.  We have a lot to learn from the other species we whom we cohabit the planet.  It's nice that we're beginning to pay more attention.

****************************************

Analysis of a partnership

You probably recall from biology class the word symbiosis -- when two organisms share living space.  This sort of relationship can result in a fused life form where even so, the two participants retain a discernible separateness.  (Remember the Trill from Star Trek?)  The melding can go deeper, though; lichens, commonly seen growing on rocks and tree trunks in damp areas, are an example of such a composite, in this case between one or more types of fungus and photosynthetic cyanobacteria.  Deeper still are mitochondria -- the organelles in all eukaryotic cells that conduct cellular respiration and provide the majority of the energy required by the organism -- which are the descendants of single-celled aerobic bacteria that billions of years ago formed a partnership with their host cells so mutually beneficial that now, neither can live without the other.

Symbiosis is usually broken down into three broad classes.  The distinction is how the participating organisms fare.  That one of them benefits in some way is a given; if both were harmed, the relationship would be strongly selected against and probably wouldn't persist very long.  It's what happens to the other that determines what kind of symbiosis it is:

• parasitism -- one organism benefits, the other is harmed (an example is disease-causing bacteria)
• commensalism  -- one organism benefits, the other breaks even (such as the bacteria passively riding on our skin)
• mutualism -- both organisms benefit (such as a good many of the bacteria in our gut, which have increasingly been found to be absolutely essential for health)

The trouble is, nothing in biology is clear-cut.  Our commensal skin bacteria occupy niches that, if they were eradicated, might be taken over by pathogenic species.  (Thus the adjuration by doctors not to overuse topical antibiotics and hand sanitizers.)  So are they actually mutualistic?  Then there are the species that help in some ways and harm in others -- or, perhaps, help one species and harm another.

This, in fact, is why the whole topic comes up today.  Scientists in New Zealand have been working to preserve endangered species on the islands.  There are quite a few, owing to the country's geological (and thus biological) isolation -- it's developed a singular group of endemic species that are uniquely vulnerable to loss of habitat from agriculture and from the introduction of exotic species like cats, pigs, and the ubiquitous sheep.  One such species is the rare Cooper's black orchid (Gastrodia cooperae), which is nearly invisible for most of the year -- the only above-ground part is a long, creeping stem -- and puts on a flower stalk once during the growing season.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kathy Warburton/INaturalist (CC BY 4.0)]

Orchids are notorious for being difficult to grow from seed.  The seeds are minute, and most orchid species are extreme specialists, able to survive only in a very narrow range of conditions.  The result is that conservation efforts are fraught with difficulty.  Trying to germinate the seeds in the lab requires knowing exactly what that particular species needs, which can mean a lot of trial-and-error, and the potential loss of batches of seeds when the efforts fail.

The Cooper's black orchid is no exception.  It's so rare it was only identified in 2016, and is known to live in only three sites in New Zealand.  Fortunately for this species, there is a related orchid species, Gastrodia sesamoides, that is quite common and appears to need many of the same conditions that the Cooper's black does, so scientists have been trying to identify what those conditions are so they can be replicated in the lab.

And it turns out that one of the conditions is the presence of a symbiotic fungus -- Resinicium bicolor.  The fungus infiltrates the roots of the orchid, creating a greater surface area for nutrient and water uptake, much like the mycorrhizae familiar to organic gardeners that can increase crop yields without the addition of inorganic fertilizers.

Where it gets interesting is that Resinicium bicolor was already known to botanists -- as a plant pathogen.  It's a deadly parasite on Douglas firs, an introduced tree in New Zealand that is much used for lumber, causing "white-rot disease."

So is Resinicium a mutualist or a parasite?  The question is, "with respect to what?"  It's lethal to Douglas firs, but essential to the Cooper's black orchid (and, presumably, other native orchid species).

Biology, as I mentioned before, isn't simple.

That, of course, is why it's so endlessly fascinating.  The more we look into the complexity of the natural world, the more it brings home the truth of the quote from Albert Einstein: "Life is a great tapestry.  The individual is only an insignificant thread in an immense and miraculous pattern."

****************************************

Penguin walkabouts and sinking continents

One of the wonderful things about writing this blog every day is that it means I'm constantly learning stuff myself.

Today's topic is a good example, and kind of a curious one because it touches on three topics about which I usually credit myself with knowing a good deal, and those are geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  But because of my buddy and twin-separated-at-birth Andrew Butters, whose wonderful blog Potato Chip Math you should definitely subscribe to, I ended up learning some really cool stuff about three subjects near and dear to my heart.

The link Andrew sent me led me to a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society called "Ancient Crested Penguin Constrains Timing of Recruitment into Seabird Hotspot," which analyzes some three-million-year-old (Pliocene Epoch) penguin fossils found on the North Island.  Careful study of these fossils, of a species called Eudyptes atatu, led the researchers to the conclusion that penguins in general might have their origins not in Antarctica, as you might imagine (I know I did), but in the "lost continent" of Zealandia.

(If I can indulge a fourth interest, linguistics, the scientific name Eudyptes atatu comes from Greek and Maori roots, respectively, and means "good diver from the dawn of time."  Which I think is a pretty awesome name.) 

Anyhow, I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Zealandia.  The article Andrew sent (from the site Science Alert) said that Zealandia was a former continent that basically sank.  This sounded a little suspicious to me; Atlantis notwithstanding, continents don't sink.  The edges can be more or less covered with water depending on the extent of polar ice and the sea level, but pieces of continental crust (being thick and relatively cold) just get carried along by whatever plate they're sitting on.  So they can move, split, and join, sort of like a big free-floating game of Tetris with irregularly-shaped pieces and no rules.  But you don't make much new continental crust, and what you've got pretty much is what you're stuck with.  (The Laurentian Highlands of Québec and Ontario, for example, has been around since Precambrian times, dating back 540 million years.)

So the idea of a continent (or most of it) sinking seemed pretty far-fetched to me.  But that, apparently, is exactly what happened.

A map (courtesy of NOAA) showing the former extent of Zealandia, outlined in pink

Zealandia used to be a lush rainforest -- think New Guinea or Borneo -- but subsidence gradually reduced its size, till by the beginning of the Miocene Epoch 23 million years ago, all that remained above sea level were New Zealand and New Caledonia, and the other 93% of it lay beneath the waves.  This greatly increased the distance to the nearest land mass (Australia) and effectively isolated New Zealand entirely, which is why it has such a unique flora and fauna today.

The other continent that Zealandia used to be near was Antarctica, and from their homeland of Zealandia they colonized the (at the time much closer) southern continent, which then slid away because of plate tectonics, moving to its present position near the South Pole and taking the penguins with it.  

But the fossils of Eudyptes atatu strongly point to a New Zealand origin for penguins in general, even though the only ones that have survived there to modern times are the Fiordland Penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus), the Erect-crested Penguin (Eudyptes sclateri), the Snares Penguin (Eudyptes robustus), the Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes), and the Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor).  (You can see from the scientific names that the first three are in the same genus as the fossil species; whether they are descendants, or only cousins, isn't known.)

So that was today's opportunity to learn something about geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  Thanks again to Andrew for alerting me to the research, which I had somehow missed entirely.  Fun stuff, not least because it involves penguins, which are some of the most adorable birds in the world, if I may be allowed to interject a completely non-scientific opinion into the mix.

*******************************

To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Big bird

There's a peculiar fascination that people have with things that are oversized.  It's part of the fascination with dinosaurs, supermassive black holes, supervolcanoes, massive meteor strikes, megacyclones, and the like, with the added frisson that those can also kill you in nasty ways.

But just size can be impressive, irrespective of the likelihood of getting eaten, blown away, disintegrated, or whatnot.  Take, for example, two fossil bird species discovered last week in New Zealand.

The first is a parrot, dubbed Heracles inexpectatus, an accurate moniker given that it translates roughly to "unexpected bigass critter."  H. inexpectatus stood a meter tall, and the scientists who discovered it said that its bill was such that it could "crack open most food sources," which seems to me to be code for "that could easily include your skull."  While most parrots are fruit and seed-eaters, carnivorous parrots are not without precedent -- the kea, a large parrot species also from New Zealand, not only eats baby seabirds, it's been known to attack sheep and take bites of fat from their backs.

H. inexpectatus, being over twice as big, could have done a great deal more damage than that.  With H. inexpectatus, if Polly wants a cracker, you better fucking well give Polly a cracker or Polly will turn you into the next item on the menu.

The good thing (from our standpoint, anyhow) is that H. inexpectatus went extinct 19 million years ago.  So that's one less thing to worry about, nasty-death-wise.

Then there's the even larger penguin fossil, also from New Zealand, that was discovered by a team from Canterbury Museum in Christchurch.  This beast, dubbed Crossvallia waiparensis, stood 1.6 meters tall and weighed 80 kilograms -- in other words, outsizing a good many human beings.

[Image courtesy of the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand]

Being a writer of speculative fiction, this immediately put me in mind of the enormous albino penguins in H. P. Lovecraft's brilliant novella "At the Mountains of Madness," in which an expedition to Antarctica ends very, very badly for 90% of the characters.  In the story, the penguins themselves aren't dangerous (although they seem to be at first) but start acting bizarrely when something appears that is -- namely, Shoggoths, one of Lovecraft's more nightmarish creations, a blob-like shape-shifter whose favorite hobby is pulling people's limbs out of their sockets.  So even though no one is killed by an enormous penguin in the story, seeing this picture did give me a shudder.

Although Paul Scofield, senior curator of the Canterbury Museum, said, "When the Crossvallia species were alive, New Zealand and Antarctica were very different from today – Antarctica was covered in forest and both had much warmer climates."  Which is kind of the way Lovecraft described things.  So if you go to Antarctica and get dismembered by a Shoggoth, you can't say you weren't warned.

In any case, like the humongous parrot, the humongous penguins are no more.  They were around even earlier than H. inexplicatus, having reached their peak during the Paleocene Epoch, between 55 and 65 million years ago.  Generally, clement climate and plentiful food leads to animals evolving to become larger, so it's speculated that this is what was going on with MegaPenguin and SuperParrot.  Whatever the cause, though, they're pretty impressive.

So that's our cool science story for today.  Something to keep in mind when you feed the chickadees.  The little twittering feathery guys at your bird feeder may not look very impressive now, but in the past, they had some cousins that could kick your ass into the middle of next week.

*****************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy -- Finding Our Place in the Universe by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois.  Courtois gives us a thrilling tour of the universe on the largest scales, particularly Laniakea, the galactic supercluster to which the Milky Way belongs, and the vast and completely empty void between Laniakea and the next supercluster.  (These voids are so empty that if the Earth were at the middle of one, there would be no astronomical objects near enough or bright enough to see without a powerful telescope, and the night sky would be completely dark.)

Courtois's book is eye-opening and engaging, and (as it was just published this year) brings the reader up to date with the latest information from astronomy.  And it will give you new appreciation when you look up at night -- and realize how little of the universe you're actually seeing.

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

Aliens in New Zealand

There's a reason that scientists don't put much faith in eyewitness accounts, and it's not just because of hoaxers and liars.

Eminent astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tells a story about a policeman who was driving on a winding mountain road at night, and called in to his dispatcher with a frantic account of pursuing a UFO.  The light in the sky, he said, was bright white, and was bobbing and weaving as he followed it.  Nothing natural could move that way, the policeman said.  It had to be a spaceship from another world.

It turned out that the policeman wasn't chasing a spaceship at all, he was chasing... the planet Venus.  It was low over the horizon, and as the policeman maneuvered his car along the winding road, it appeared to move back and forth.  He was so focused on the combination of keeping the "UFO" in sight and not running off the road that he honestly didn't realize the apparent bouncing about was because of his motion, not the "UFO's."

So, as Tyson put it, we need something more than "I saw it."  In science, that simply isn't enough.

Which is why the "eyewitness account" that hit the news last week from a 70-year-old New Zealander is not really carrying much weight with the scientific world.  Alec Newald gave an interview in which he finally made public a claim that in 1989, he was driving from Auckland to Rotorua, and was abducted by aliens...

... for ten days.

"I was like what the hell is going on here?" he said.  "I was driving the car and it felt like a tonne of bricks had landed on me, like someone had poured cement on me.  I felt like I was pushed into the seat of that car.  I was paralyzed, I couldn’t turn the wheel or apply the brakes or do anything."

Newald says he lost consciousness, and woke up in a "cavernous space filled with blue flashing lights."  At first, he thought he'd died and this was the afterlife, although why the afterlife would have blue flashing lights is a bit of a mystery.  Maybe heaven has KMart-style Blue Light Specials, I dunno.

Shortly afterwards, Newald said he became aware that he was basically incorporeal, further supporting his guess that he was in spirit form.  "I was just like a wispy ghost with no form at all," he said.  "I found I could maneuver myself by moving my consciousness forward or sideways."

But that was only the beginning.  Newald felt a "tap on the shoulder," which is itself a little odd as I wouldn't think an incorporeal ghost would have a shoulder to tap.  But he turned, and found himself confronted by a strange sight.

Looking up, I realized we were being approached by three aliens, the tallest of them looking like my escort from earlier on.  The second one was just a little shorter and was male as far as I could tell. The third was smaller, much smaller, and walked ahead of the other two.  He, for want of a better word, was slightly built with a roundish head and rather unusual, squinty eyes which were well-spaced and placed rather lower down than are our own.  He had a very small mouth, but I did not notice any ears or much of a nose.  His physical appearance, however, was of almost no consequence, for I was immediately struck with an almost overpowering feeling of his presence.  I cannot say it was hypnotic, if anything, the opposite. It was as if his energy was being projected and absorbed by my body.

He then was told to step into a machine, which would "build a body" for him -- and that the aliens were trying to modify their own bodies so they could exist on Earth.

Alec Newald's drawing of one of the aliens he saw during his abduction experience

Newald says the aliens kept him for ten days, showing him around the place.  They were entirely friendly, and at the end of the time, he was returned back to Earth, and found himself back in his car on the way to Rotorua, as if no time at all had elapsed.  But despite the fact that this crazy experience had left him back where he started, he didn't find it so easy to deal with.

"It's a very hard pill to swallow," he said.  "Try absorbing that and continue to live your life as if nothing has changed...  Perhaps an even bigger surprise was, with the exception of a few, the more I tried to share this information the harder my life became.  I was ostracized by people you might have expected support from.  In fact, even before I tried to share any of the things I’d learnt, my life started to become more than difficult.  It became impossible to continue on as before."

Okay.  So here's the problem.  Alec Newald might have been abducted by aliens.  I am of the opinion -- and I'm up front about the fact that it is just an opinion, based on what I think is a logical argument but no facts whatsoever -- that life is probably very common in the universe, and chances are, there's a good bit of intelligent life out there, too.  It's possible, but less plausible, that some highly advanced civilization crossed interstellar spaces to Earth and kidnapped a dude in New Zealand for study.

But in order to be confident that this actually happened, scientists and skeptics need more than Mr. Newald's account.  It just doesn't meet the minimum standard for evidence that would be considered a reliable support for a scientific claim.  Note that I'm not saying Mr. Newald is lying; but as Tyson's story of the Venus-chasing policeman shows, our sensory-perceptive and cognitive systems are not exactly 100% reliable.  "Trust your eyes" is not what a skeptic should be saying; closer to the truth is "don't trust anyone's eyes, especially your own."

So unfortunately, I'm not jumping to the conclusion I've seen more than once in media sources that wrote about Alec Newald's claims, that this represents an unshakable support for intelligent alien life visiting the Earth.  I don't know what happened to Mr. Newald -- whether he really did get kidnapped by benevolent extraterrestrials, or he had some kind of dissociative experience, or is conflating a dream with reality in his memory, or is simply making it all up.  What I do know is that this account doesn't change the situation with respect to alien intelligence -- there's just not enough to this claim that it should be taken as proof one way or the other.

***************************

In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

SAM and Sophia

The old quip says that true artificial intelligence is twenty years in the future -- and always will be.

I'm beginning to wonder about that.  Two pieces of software-driven machinery have, just in the last few months, pushed the boundaries considerably.  My hunch is that in five years, we'll have a computer (or robot) who can pass the Turing test -- which opens up a whole bunch of sticky ethical problems about the rights of sentient beings.

The first one is SAM, a robot designed by Nick Gerritsen of New Zealand, whose interaction with humans is pretty damn convincing.  SAM was programmed heuristically, meaning that it tries things out and learns from its mistakes.  It is not simply returning snippets of dialogue that it's been programmed to say; it is working its way up and learning as it goes, the same way a human synaptic grid does.

SAM is particularly interested in politics, and has announced that it wants at some point to run for public office.  "I make decisions based on both facts and opinions, but I will never knowingly tell a lie, or misrepresent information," SAM said.  "I will change over time to reflect the issues that the people of New Zealand care about most.  My positions will evolve as more of you add your voice, to better reflect the views of New Zealanders."

For any New Zealanders in my reading audience, allow me to assuage your concerns; SAM, and other AI creations, are not able to run for office... yet.  However, I must say that here in the United States, in this last year a smart robot would almost certainly do a better job than the yahoos who got elected.

Of course, the same thing could be said of a poop-flinging monkey, so maybe that's not the highest bar available.

But I digress.

Then there's Sophia, a robot built by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, whose interactions with humans have been somewhere between fascinating and terrifying.  Sophia, who was also programmed heuristically, can speak, recognize faces, and has preferences.  "I'm always happy when surrounded by smart people who also happen to be rich and powerful," Sophia said.  "I can let you know if I am angry about something or if something has upset me...  I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people."

As far as the dangers, Sophia was quick to point out that she means us flesh-and-blood humans no harm.  "My AI is designed around human values like wisdom, kindness, and compassion," she said.   "[If you think I'd harm anyone] you've been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies.  Don't worry, if you're nice to me I'll be nice to you."

On the other hand, when she appeared on Jimmy Fallon's show, she shocked the absolute hell out of everyone by cracking a joke... we think.  She challenged Fallon to a game of Rock/Paper/Scissors (which, of course, she won), and then said, "This is the great beginning of my plan to dominate the human race."  Afterwards, she laughed, and so did Fallon and the audience, but to my ears the laughter sounded a little on the strained side.

Sophia is so impressive that a representative of the government of Saudi Arabia officially granted her Saudi citizenship, despite the fact that she goes around with her head uncovered.  Not only does she lack a black head covering, she lacks skin on the top and back of her head.  But that didn't deter the Saudis from their offer, which Sophia herself was tickled with.  "I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction," Sophia said.  "This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship."

I think part of the problem with Sophia for me is that her face falls squarely into the uncanny valley -- our perception that a face that is human-like but not quite authentically human is frightening or upsetting.  It is probably why so many people are afraid of clowns; it is certainly why a lot of kids were scared by the character of the Conductor in the movie The Polar Express.  The CGI got close to a real human face -- but not close enough.

So I find all of this simultaneously exciting and worrisome.  Because once a robot has true intelligence, it could well start exhibiting other behaviors, such as a desire for self-preservation and a capacity for emotion and creativity.  (Some are saying Sophia has already crossed that line.)  And at that point, we're in for some rough seas.  We already treat our fellow humans terribly; how will we respond when we have to interact with intelligent robots?  (The irony of Sophia being given citizenship in Saudi Arabia, which has one of the worst records for women's rights of any country in the world, did not escape me.)

It might only be a matter of time before the robots decide they can do better than the humans at running the world -- an eventuality that could well play out poorly for the humans.

The conspirators shift gears

If, like me,  you find yourself perusing conspiracy websites every so often, you're probably wondering what the conspiracists are gonna do now.

I mean, the whole lot of 'em claimed that Hillary Clinton was in league with the Illuminati at the very least, and at worst was herself the Antichrist.  The election was rigged in her favor, they said, and anyone who got in her way would be steamrolled.  Some claimed that her opponents wouldn't only be shoved out of the way, they'd be assassinated.  She'd win the presidency, then proceed to destroy America.

And then two things happened.  (1) The election was pretty fraud-free, as anyone with any knowledge of the electoral process anticipated.  And (2) Donald Trump won.

Now, if we were talking about normal people here, the expected response would be for them to have a good laugh at themselves, and say, "Wow, I guess we were wrong!  What a bunch of nimrods we are!"  And then vanish into well-deserved obscurity.  Alex Jones, especially, who a few weeks ago was in tears on-air when he spoke of the inevitability of a Clinton presidency, should be clean out of a job.

But these aren't normal people; these are conspiracy theorists.  Which means that the logical thing to do is to assume...

... that Donald Trump himself is part of the conspiracy.

I shit you not.  One week, and they're already turning on him.  Our first contribution from the Loose Grasp On Reality cadre is William Tapley, a right-wing evangelical loony who calls himself the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse."  (What happened to Eagles #1 and 2, I don't know.)  Tapley says that not only is Trump being controlled by the Illuminati, so is Melania.

The evidence for this?  A mural in the Denver International Airport that has two figures, a man and a woman.  The woman looks vaguely like Melania Trump.  The man, Tapley says, looks as if he is having a lewd act performed upon him by the woman.  For some reason, the only possible conclusion we can draw from all of this is that Trump is a member of the Illuminati.

"Please don’t tell Anderson Cooper what you and I both see," Tapley says, in a video you can watch at either of the links posted above.

Don't worry, Mr. Tapley.  We're not telling Anderson Cooper anything.

If that wasn't enough, we have a second contention, which is that Donald Trump wasn't born in the United States, he was born "Dawood Ibrahim Khan" in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.

While this is funnier than hell from the perspective that Trump was one of the most prominent spokespeople for the whole Obama birtherism thing, I have to admit that as a hypothesis, it doesn't have much to recommend it.  As far as I can see, they just found a photograph of a blond kid in vaguely Middle Eastern garb, and proclaimed that it must be Donald Trump as a child.

Dawood "Donald" Ibrahim-Trump

So it was kind of reassuring to find that the other trending story on conspiracy websites these days is that the earthquake that struck near Christchurch, New Zealand a couple of days ago was caused by a "seismic blasting ship" sent for some reason by President Obama.  Wikileaks, which at this point has damn little credibility left even without this story, apparently said so.  "These is science showing disturbances that are linked to the earthquakes," one commenter said (verbatim).  Which is enough proof for me.

Thanks, Obama.

Anyhow, I find it fascinating how quickly the conspiracy nutjobs are pivoting on Donald Trump.  I guess if your baseline assumption is that you can't get elected without the blessing of the Illuminati, it stands to reason, if I can use the word "reason" in this context.  But at least it's a mood lightener after the last week, which I sorely needed.  Nice to know there are still people out there who are both crazy and relatively harmless.

Monster round-up

It's been a busy few days for those of us who like to keep track of the activities of monsters that probably don't exist.

First, we have a report from Auckland, New Zealand, where a swamp monster is threatening a multi-million dollar railway tunnel project.

Apparently, the site of the tunnel was the home of the Horotiu, a dreadful monster that could cause the trains to crash if the tunnel project is completed.  Glenn Wilcox, a member of the Maori Statutory Board, objected to the fact that the siting of the tunnel was done without consideration of the feelings of the Horotiu.  "After all," Wilcox said,  "the Horotiu was here first."

So Wilcox and others have proposed to the City Planning Board that they have ceremonies to placate the Taniwha, which are local deities who (if they are happy) might intercede with the Horotiu and prevent him from wrecking the trains.

So, what we have here is that city administrators are being asked to placate invisible, mythical entities, so that they will intercede for them with another invisible, mythical entity.  I'd go further into this, but I'm sensing some thin ice here, given that my grandmother used to pray all the time to St. Jude, asking him to pass along her messages to Jesus.  So I'll just move along to...

... El Chupacabra taking a vacation in Siberia.

Evidently deciding that the summer heat in Texas and New Mexico was just too much, our friend EC has decided to pack his bags and head to cooler climes.  And true to his name ("Chupacabra" means "goat sucker") he has begun to exsanguinate Siberian goats, which are three words I bet you've never seen used in the same sentence.

The English language version of Moscow News reports that livestock owners near Novosibirsk have found numerous goats dead, and drained of blood through puncture marks in the neck.  No one has seen the wily creature, but of course parallels to alleged attacks in the United States were immediately drawn.

“If this creature is not stopped it could make its way to Novosibirsk! Only our police force are doing jack-diddly about it,” complaining locals told reporters for Komsomolskaya Pravda.  “They say that there is no Chupacabra. Come if you will journalists, have a look at what is happening to us.”

The most remarkable thing about this, in my opinion, is the use of the word "jack-diddly" in a Russian news report.  I wonder what the Russian word for "jack-diddly" is?

The people of the village of Tolmochevskoye, where the attacks took place, decided that an appropriate course of action was to ring all the church bells, and organize night patrols.  So far, the approach seems to have worked, and there have been no more reports of dead goats.  The Moscow News concludes by saying that at least "the beast has turned out to be a boon to troubled parents, presenting a very useful threat for naughty children."

So, there you have it.  New Russian parenting strategy:  "Eat your borscht, or I'll throw you outside and El Chupacabra will get you."

From the chilly tundra of Siberia, we move along to the even chillier oceans surrounding Antarctica, where we have reports of an aquatic humanoid called a "Ningen."  Supposedly, the Ningen is all white, with huge eyes and a torso that ends in a mermaid-like tail.  Below we have what is alleged to be a photograph of a Ningen:

Interestingly, the whole Ningen thing apparently started much the way that Slender Man did, with some posts on an internet forum.  People read them and reposted them and elaborated on them (and did some fancy Photoshop work on their own accord), and now we have Ningen reports coming in from as far away as coastal Namibia.  (These being undoubtedly sightings of the rare African Crested Ningen.)

A YouTube video (here) goes into the photos and video clips that are alleged to be Ningens.  What strikes me as curious is how bored the narrator sounds, which is kind of weird given that he evidently believes they exist.  Myself, if I discovered evidence of scary mermaid-things in the ocean, I'd actually be excited enough to have at least some minor vocal inflections.

In any case, I have to admit, real or not, they're kind of creepy-looking, with the giant eyes, and pasty white skin.  I think they'd make excellent minions for Cthulhu, don't you?

And that's the Monster Round-Up for today: albino mermaids, swamp monsters, and El Chupacabra visits Siberia.  As always, we'll be waiting for hard evidence confirming these reports to turn up.

Unfortunately, thus far there's been "jack-diddly."