Mapping our world

My novel The Scattering Winds is the second of a trilogy, of which the first book (In the Midst of Lions) is scheduled to be out this summer.  The setting of the trilogy is the Pacific Northwest.  In the first book, there's a worldwide collapse of civilization.  In the second, set six hundred years later, what's left of humanity has reverted to a new Dark Ages, mostly non-literate and non-technological.  In the third (The Chains of the Pleiades), six hundred years after that, technology and space flight have been re-invented -- along with all the problems that brings.

The main character of the second book, Kallian Dorn, comes from a people have lost the knowledge of reading, committing all of their culture's memory to the mind of one person, called the Guardian of the Word.  But when they find a girl from a distant town, a refugee, who knows the rudiments of reading and writing, they recognize what's been lost, and struggle, slowly, to reclaim it.  Kallian undertakes a voyage, on foot, to the girl's home town -- and finds there a mostly-intact library from what he calls "the Before Times."

The following takes place when Kallian, who by this time has learned the basics of how to read, discovers a room full of maps in the library:

He went into the first room he encountered. It was labeled “Maps.”  Holding the lamp aloft, he passed into a room filled with odd cabinets, most of which had very wide, shallow drawers.  The nearest one said, “North America,” and he set the lamp down to open the top drawer.

Sitting on top was a yellowed piece of paper, about an arm’s length wide and tall, with a drawing of… what was it?  He peered closer, and read the inscription at the top, written in an ornate, curly script he could barely decipher.  It said, “United States of America, The Year of Our Lord 1882.”  There were names written in smaller, but equally frilly, lettering, and gave him enough information to conclude that it was a drawing of a land, as if seen from above.  The faded blue bits were bodies of water: Lake Ontario.  The Caribbean Sea.  The Atlantic Ocean.  The green parts—well, they were only green in splotches, mostly they had faded to a yellowish-brown—were land.  He saw features like “Appalachian Mountains” and “Great Plains” and “Mississippi Delta.”  The land was divided by oddly artificial-looking black lines, some dead straight, others following natural features such as the course of rivers.  Each of the blocks thus delineated had a strange and unfamiliar name: Massachusetts.  New York.  Georgia.  Kentucky.

Had these been kingdoms of the Before Time?

1882—if he was correct about what the date-numbers signified, this would have been about a century and a half before the collapse, before the floods and plagues that had ended the old world.  And a full 750 years before now.

But where was this United States of America, with its bizarrely-named mountains and lakes and kingdoms?  Without a referent, without having an arrow on the map saying “You are here,” he had no way to know if it was a day’s march away or on the other side of the world.

He flipped through the maps in those and other cabinets, handling them carefully to keep the age-worn paper from crumbling in his hands.  His mind was overwhelmed with how many different lands there were—whole cabinets devoted to maps from places called Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia.  But even looking at them, as fascinating as it was, was not like reading the books he’d found, where meaning provided an anchor to keep him fastened to reality as he knew it.  Without a key, the maps gave him no way to tell scale or location of anything.  Learning to read had unlocked one type of cipher; here was an entirely different kind, one where even though he could read the words, they didn’t make sense.

I was reminded of this scene when I read an article yesterday in Science News about archaeologists who believe they've discovered the oldest-ever aerial-view scale drawings -- in other words, maps.  There are structures in the Middle East nicknamed "kites" that were huge stone-walled enclosures used to trap animals like gazelles, funneling their movements toward waiting hunters.  And a team of archaeologists working in Jordan and Saudi Arabia have found nine-thousand-year-old engravings on stones that appear to be maps of nearby kites -- perhaps made by people strategizing how best to use them in their game-harvesting efforts.

Map-making, when you think about it, is kind of an amazing accomplishment.  It requires changing your perspective, picturing what some thing -- a city, a body of water, a country, an entire continent -- would look like from above.  And even if to our modern eyes, when we can see what things look like from the air, old maps look pretty inaccurate, it's important to remember that they did it all by surveying from ground (or sea) level.

And given that, they did pretty damn well, I think.

A map of the world, ca. 1565 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The fact that we were doing this nine thousand years ago is kind of astonishing.  Intrepid folks, our ancestors.

So many of the things we do today, and consider "modern," have far deeper roots than we realize.  And this ability to shift perspective, to consider what things would look like from another angle, is something we've had for a very long time -- even if to someone like Kallian Dorn, the results look very like magic.

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Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing a prominent Muslim cleric is worrying about, which is: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if two guys having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, were mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

The depths of time

An article this week in Smithsonian got me to thinking about the scale of history and prehistory.

The topic of the article is fascinating enough on its own.  Archaeologists working in the Nefed Desert of northern Saudi Arabia have discovered tracks of what was pretty close to an anatomically-modern human, fossilized in a dried-up lake bed.  What's remarkable about these tracks is that the best estimate the researchers have for their age is 120,000 years.

This is a surprise for a couple of reasons.  The conventional wisdom is that humans didn't leave Africa until 50,000 years ago, so this would mean our cross-continental walkabout started over twice as long ago as we thought it did.  Also, it points to the Arabian Peninsula as having had a dramatically different climate back then -- along with the human footprints were the prints of elephants, camels, buffalo, and horses, suggesting something more similar to the central African savanna than the current barren desert.

But what this brought to my mind is the vastness of time.  When we think of "old stuff" we tend to lump it all together.  If asked to name something old that humans did, a lot of people would come up with the Egyptian Pyramids -- but these footprints are 24 times older than the Great Pyramid.

So when the person who created these prints was walking across this mudflat, it would be another 115,000 years before the builders of the Great Pyramid were born.

Our minds boggle at big numbers.  The 120,000 year old footprints are still, geologically speaking, recent, still in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.  Ten times further back -- 1.2 million years ago -- you're still in the Pleistocene.  To reach the next age back -- the Pliocene -- you have to go over twenty times deeper into the past, on the order of 2.6 million years ago.

And still, things would be more or less like they are now.  Sure, there were some odd animals lurching about -- the enormous short-faced bear and tank-like armadillo relatives called glyptodonts come to mind -- but a map of the continents wouldn't be too very different from today's.

Ten times further back than that, 26 million years ago (and 25.88 million years prior to the "extremely old" Saudi Arabian footprints), and you're in the Oligocene Epoch, the time of some of the largest land mammals ever, and finally things are looking pretty different.  The aptly-named titanotheres hit their peak size with the Baluchatherium, which was five meters tall at the shoulder.  This is also when the weird little multituberculates bit the dust for reasons unknown, after being one of the dominant mammal groups since the Jurassic Period.

To get back to the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, we have to go a bit over twice as far back as that -- 66 million years, or 550 times older than the Arabian footprints we started with.  T. rex bought the farm during the Cretaceous Extinction, but what's kind of mindblowing is that another of the popular dinosaurs, Stegosaurus, went extinct over twice as far back as that, toward the end of the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago.

Put a different way, in terms of time, you're fifteen million years closer to the Tyrannosaurus rex than he is to the Stegosaurus.

It's why I always get a bit of a laugh when I hear people say the dinosaurs were a colossal evolutionary failure.  The earliest true dinosaurs appeared in the early Triassic Period, something like 240 million years ago, and the last of them (again, other than birds) died at the K-T Boundary, 66 million years ago.  So they were the dominant life forms for 174 million years, roughly seven hundred times longer than humans have been around.

Back another twelve million years before the first dinosaurs was the horrific Permian-Triassic Extinction, caused by a serious Series of Unfortunate Events -- the lockup of Pangaea changing the climate, sea level, and ocean current flow, along with a volcanic event for which superlatives fail me.  It covered virtually all of what is now Siberia, burning through live vegetation and Carboniferous-era coal deposits, spiking the carbon dioxide content of the air, simultaneously boosting the temperature by fifteen or more degrees and turning the oceans into an acidic, anoxic sewer.  By some estimates, 96% of life on Earth died, pretty much because a natural event did accidentally to the world's sequestered carbon reserves what humans are now doing deliberately.

Cautionary tale, that should be, but for some reason it isn't.

Over twice as far back as that -- something like 541 million years ago, or 4,500 times older than the Arabian footprints -- we reach the Cambrian Explosion, the rapid diversification that produced just about every basic animal body plan that exists today.

And that's where we'll stop, although be aware that in a trip back to the formation of the Earth, you would still only be one-twelfth of the way there.

I don't know how anyone can not be impressed by the vast depths of time, and how honestly insignificant and ephemeral we are.  You are the end product of a lineage that stretches back all the way to the beginning, each generation of which lived long enough to reproduce.  As my evolutionary biology professor put it, "Your ancestors all the way back had to be good at two things: surviving and fucking."  (Accurate if a bit crass.) 

What it all makes me think of is where it's all going.  What, if we could look forward, would we see?  120,000 years, 5 million, 50 million, 500 million years from now?  Highly unlikely that humans (or their descendants) will last so long; extinction and replacement are the rule, not the exception.  I expect that whatever we'd see would be as weird to our eyes as the glyptodonts and pterodactyls and stegosaurs are.

But considering what the Earth's ecosystems have gone through in the past, I'm pretty sure there'll still be life of some kind, even in those far reaches of the future.  And I find that a comforting, if humbling, thought.

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Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Saturday shorts

It's been a busy week here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  Our staff (me, my main dog Grendel, and Grendel's comical sidekick Lena the WonderHound) have been hard at work keeping you up to date on the latest from the Wide World of Woo-Woo.

Well, at least I have.  At the moment, Grendel is snoring on his bed in my office, and Lena is derping around outside.  I don't hear her barking at the moment, which is good, because she has been known to bark at:

• squirrels
• birds
• farm equipment, which is a problem because we live next to a farm
• our pond's resident snapping turtle, whom my wife has christened "Mitch McConnell"
• the wind
• a particularly threatening-looking stick
• her own reflection

So maybe she's not that useful, after all.

But while the dogs have been wasting time, I've been combing the internet for current news stories, and I found three things that you definitely will want to know about.

First, we have the discovery of some strange stone structures in the deserts of Saudi Arabia.  Four hundred of them have been found on the ancient lava plain Harrat Khaybar, and they've been christened "gates" because that's what they look like from the air, although their actual function is unknown.

Well, there's nothing like "mysterious stone structures" to get the woo-woos going, and we're already seeing speculation that they may have been the foundations of temples or landing strips for ancient aliens.  Me, I find the latter a little far-fetched, because as you can see in the above aerial photograph, the "gates" are laid out in a vaguely rectangular fashion, which is a stupid way to design an alien landing strip since spaceships generally don't corner all that well.

I'd also recommend a little bit of caution in investigating these structures, because the desert wastes of Saudi Arabia are where the Nameless City was located in the historical document of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, wherein ye Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred found the cursed book of ancient magic, the Necronomicon.  And considering all the trouble that caused in later historical documents such as "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," maybe we really shouldn't go poking around there, or we might wake up That Which Is Not Dead And Can Eternal Lie.

Which would suck.


Then we have a story from central California that was spotted by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, wherein we learn that photographs have been taken of not one, not two, but five Bigfoots.  The photographer, Jeffrey Gonzales, a "self-described paranormal expert," tells quite a tale of his encounter.  He'd heard about the creatures from a farmer who lives on Avocado Lake, east of Fresno, and went to investigate.  Once he got there, the creatures were easy to find. "One of them, which was extremely tall, had a pig over its shoulder," Gonzalez said.  "And the five scattered and the one with the pig was running so fast it didn’t see an irrigation pipe and it tripped, with the pig flying over."

Which gives new meaning to the phrase "when pigs fly."  But Gonzales kept his presence of mind and fired off some photographs.  Fortunately, he remembered to put his camera on auto-blur, because this is one of the results:

Which to me only proves one thing, namely, if your photograph is grainy enough, you can find anything in it.  In fact, if you'll look immediately to the right of the Bigfoot, you'll see a huge screaming creature with hollow eyes and a gaping, round mouth.

See it?  It's a wonder the Bigfoot wasn't running for his life, with that thing around.


Last, it wouldn't be a normal week without a new conspiracy theory, and this one is a doozy:

When Melania Trump appears in public, it's not actually Melania, it's a body double.

Twitter user Andrea Wagner Barton is absolutely certain about this, and points to a video clip in which President Trump was speaking to reporters about the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, and made the statement, "My wife, Melania, who happens to be right here."  Barton thought this was odd, and tweeted the following:

Will the real Melania please stand up?
Is it me or during his speech today a decoy “stood in” for Melania??
And....
Why would the moron say “my wife, Melania, who happens to be right here...”
Seriously, watch very closely!

I did, and as far as I can tell, it's Melania.  On the other hand, that's what I would say, given that I'm probably a conspirator myself.  The conspiracy theorists disagree, however, and say that Melania hasn't been Melania for some time now.  Especially in the highly publicized video clip from Inauguration Day where her smile turned into a scowl, and the one in which the president tries to take her hand and she swats it away.

Of course, there are other explanations, such as Melania having more self-awareness than Donald does, which could also be said of many species of mollusk.  If I had to hang around with someone who made that number of cringe-worthy statements daily, I'd scowl too.


So that's our excursion in the deep end of the pool for this week.  Alien airstrips in the desert, Bigfoots carrying pigs, and FLOTUS body doubles.  I'm gonna wrap this up now, because Lena's just started barking, and I better go out and rescue her before she gets her nose bitten off by Mitch McConnell.

Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing we had a prominent Muslim cleric worrying about, which was: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if gays having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and two guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, was mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

Civil disobedience as a moral imperative

Let me just say at the outset that I'm a law-abiding sort.  With the exception of getting pulled over twice for driving too fast, I've never had a single unpleasant run-in with the cops.  And both times I got caught speeding, I was able to argue my way out of a ticket.

While I'd like to think that my history of clean living is because I have a respect for authority and the rule of law, some of it is due to the simple fact that I hate complications and conflict.  If I come up to a stop sign in broad daylight, and it's clear that no oncoming car on either side is within a quarter-mile of the intersection, I'd rather stop, look both ways, and then go rather than run the stop sign and risk having a third opportunity to explain my actions to a cop.

But my question of the day is: are there times when deliberately, knowingly breaking the law is the right thing to do?

I'm talking, of course, about civil disobedience.  And in my opinion, sometimes putting your own legal record, safety, or (perhaps) life at risk to make a higher point is not only the right thing, it comes close to a moral imperative.

A 2010 sit-in in Budapest protesting forced evictions of the poor [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole idea of breaking the law to bring attention to a greater wrong has been much on my mind lately, for two entirely different causes, both of which will be immediately evident to regular readers of this blog.  The first one is the "opt-out" possibility for standardized testing, which is coming to a head in a lot of states, most recently New Mexico -- where state education officials are using combative language to make the point that exempting students from standardized tests is illegal, and districts that do not compel all children to sit for mandated exams risk losing their funding.  A number of districts are rebelling, some even providing pre-printed forms to parents to sign that exempt their children from the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) exams.

And none did it with such panache as the Las Cruces School District, where the forms were printed with the statements, "Federal and state laws require all students to participate in state accountability assessments," and "These laws do not offer an exemption or right of refusal to test."  One has to wonder how close they were to adding, "But this form allows parents to exempt their kids anyway," and "You can kiss the Las Cruces School District's rosy-red ass, policy wonks."

The other area in my life in which civil disobedience is making some demands is in our area's attempts to block the storage of LPG (liquified petroleum gas) in unstable salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake.  Over 200 people, including my wife, have been arrested and charged with trespassing for blockading the gates of the facility, and I'm likely to be in the next round.  (Apparently they're not marching the protesters off in handcuffs, which I find kind of disappointing.  Such a missed opportunity for a photo-op.  But if someone can get a photograph of me being arrested, when it happens, I'll certainly find a way to post it here.)

Of course, what I'm talking about here is mild compared to the penalties you can incur in other countries.  Protesting against repressive governments in other countries can get you jailed and/or tortured, being that that's what repressive governments do.  Deliberately breaking the law to make a point reaches its pinnacle of risk in places like Saudi Arabia, where last week a young man was sentenced to death by public beheading for tearing up a qu'ran, hitting it with a shoe, and uttering curses against the prophet Muhammad.  Apparently the man is an atheist -- or, as they call them in that part of the world, an "apostate" -- and he was demonstrating his contempt for religion in general, and Islam in particular, by his actions.

And Saudi law being what it is, in a few weeks he'll almost certainly find himself kneeling in the city square of his home town of Hafr al-Batin, and his head will be severed with a sword.

Which brings up the question of when a cause is important enough to risk your own life.  Or, to put it another way, when is something legal, and at the same time so ethically wrong, that putting yourself in harm's way is the right thing to do?

Not easy questions to answer.  Human morality being the shaky thing it sometimes is, it's easy to conceive of someone breaking the law for his/her own selfish ends, and then justifying it by calling it civil disobedience.  It's also true that one person's civil disobedience is another person's immorality -- as in the parents who are putting other children at risk of disease by their insistence on their right not to vaccinate their own kids.

These are difficult things to sort out.  The best choice is to do a lot of soul-searching before you embark on such a course of action, not only to be certain you understand the risk, but to make sure that you're not engaging in equivocation to rationalize away something that you really shouldn't have done in the first place.  As we discuss at length in my Critical Thinking classes, morality is a deeply personal thing, and unfortunately the words "moral," "ethical," and "legal" don't always line up the way we might hope.  I'll end with a quote from that exemplar of the willingness to put one's life at risk for a higher cause, Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, in Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.  I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.  You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.  This is certainly a legitimate concern.  Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws.  One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?"  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Allahu akbar, Frosty!

Islam has had some serious problem with its PR in the past couple of weeks, what with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a series of Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria that left an estimated 2,000 dead, a horrific incident involving a ten-year-old female suicide bomber, and the flogging of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi for "insulting Islam."

So let's do a little thought experiment, here.  You're a prominent Muslim cleric, and you read the litany of bad news.  You're concerned not only about how the rest of the world views your belief system, but how Muslims themselves must feel when they hear about the atrocities being done in the name of their religion.  What do you do?

1. You make a strongly-worded statement repudiating violence in the name of religion.
2. You put pressure on religious and governmental leaders to consider human rights reform.
3. You encourage your followers to donate money to groups that are fighting terrorism.
4. You open a discussion of the passages in the Qu'ran that encourage such behavior.
5. You issue a fatwa against snowmen.

If you picked #5, you understand the leadership of Islam all too well.  Muslim leaders have been far more willing to mess around with prohibitions against random behaviors than to stand up against the horrors perpetrated in Islam's name.  (Some leaders have done so, fortunately; there have been several Islamic groups who have spoken out, especially regarding Charlie Hebdo.)

But in theocratic Saudi Arabia, mostly what we've heard on the topic of human rights, freedom of speech, and eliminating terrorism is: silence.

But woe unto you if you build a snowman.  Saudi cleric Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Munajjid said that it was forbidden to build a snowman, "even in fun:"

It is not permitted to make a statue out of snow, even by way of play and fun...  God has given people space to make whatever they want which does not have a soul, including trees, ships, fruits, buildings and so on.

So now snowmen have souls?  What, did this guy think that Frosty the Snowman was a historical documentary?

While some Muslims are shaking their heads about how ridiculous this is, there are a lot who apparently think this is perfectly reasonable.  "May God preserve the scholars, for they enjoy sharp vision and recognize matters that even Satan does not think about," one responder wrote.  "It (building snowmen) is imitating the infidels, it promotes lustiness and eroticism."

My opinion is that if seeing snowmen makes you feel lusty and erotic, you have an entirely different problem, unrelated to matters of religion.

[image courtesy of photographer Thomas Cook and the Creative Commons]

And seriously.  Do they really have that big a snowman problem in Saudi Arabia?  It's no wonder that Satan hasn't thought about it.  Last I looked, Saudi Arabia is basically a big desert.  Prohibiting snowmen in Saudi Arabia is about as reasonable as me, up here in the arctic wasteland of upstate New York, issuing a fatwa against palm trees.

But rationality has little to do with this.  If Islamic leaders keep tightening the grip on every move their followers make, even in realms that have little to do with reality, it'll obviate them of the need to focus on the real issues.  It reinforces the message that Allah is watching, that he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good or you get 1,000 lashes on your bare back.

Even if it does convince most of the rest of the world that the worldview is, at its basis, completely insane.

Speaking out for Raif and Soheil

As a blogger, I am thankful every single day that I live in a society where I am free to write, to criticize, to be provocative.

I try not to offend, but I know I occasionally do.  On those occasions where the offense was my fault, when I cross the lines of propriety, I apologize.  Because that's how civilized, rational people act.

Not so in many parts of the world.  There are dozens of countries where to write what I write, to be who I am, would be to take my life, liberty, and safety into serious risk.  Yet there are still brave individuals who continue to speak out, who are willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of freedom of speech.

Such a man is Raif Badawi.  Badawi is a Saudi blogger who set up a network for freethinkers, and who made plain his views about the control the religious establishment has over the Saudi government (i.e., total).  And last year, Badawi was arrested, tried for "insulting Islam," and sentenced to ten years in jail and 600 lashes.

His lawyer filed an appeal.  The judge responded by increasing his sentence to 1,000 lashes.

Raif Badawi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yesterday, Badawi was brought out into the city square in Jeddah, stripped to the waist, had his wrists tied to a post, and was given fifty strokes with a whip on his bare back.

Only 950 to go, which are to be given in sessions of fifty lashes each, every week for the next twenty weeks.

What are you implying, Saudis?  That your Allah is so weak, so fragile, that a blogger who criticizes him deserves to be whipped?  That a single man with a computer is so strong by comparison that the only response is to give him a sentence that probably will never be completed, because he'll have died of his injuries first?  Badawi's criticisms of you, your regime, and your religion were mild, so let me up the stakes.

Your leaders and your judges are barbarians.  Their acceptance of violence for thought crimes makes them no better than the Inquisition.  Your religion and your holy book, which do mandate such penalties, is a skein of lies that is one of the worst things that the human race has ever invented.

Is Allah outraged?  Good.  Because Je Suis Raif.

In Iran, another blogger is likely to be hanged soon, for similar "offenses."  Soheil Arabi, a thirty-year-old writer from Tehran, was convicted in August of "insulting the prophet of Islam" and "sowing corruption on the earth" for posting material critical of Muhammad on several Facebook pages under assumed names.  Had he been found guilty of being critical "while drunk or when quoting others," he would "only" have been given 74 lashes in the public square.

But instead, he confessed, probably under torture, and the judge handed down the death sentence.  Arabi said that he is "remorseful," but under Iranian law, that doesn't make any difference.

Soheil Arabi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So once again, we have a lone man who has so much influence that his posting on Facebook is going to make people question their reverence for the Prophet?  That'd imply that the Prophet must not have much going for him, if he can be so easily insulted.

But yes, that's what they're implying.  And it is likely that soon Arabi will find himself standing on the gallows, with a noose around his neck and a black hood over his head, all because he did not show enough respect for a worldview that merits none.

Je Suis Soheil.

Human rights include the right to think freely and to speak freely.  A religion that can be destroyed by questions and criticisms deserves to be.  The vicious barbarians currently in charge in Saudi Arabia and Iran are, perhaps, correct to be afraid that such freedoms would represent a threat to their power; when people are given an opportunity to point out the evils in society, they can no longer be painted over with a coating of sanctity and holiness.  The inhumanity and outright cruelty become obvious to all.

And you'd think that the crowd that witnessed Raif Badawi being whipped yesterday, that the ones who may soon witness Soheil Arabi hanging by his neck from a rope, would have the same awakening, even if seeing such horrors make them unlikely to speak out.  But now that we have the internet, now that such things cannot be kept hidden away, now that people can speak and write and interact with others across political borders and barriers of religious ideology, such criticism cannot be crushed forever.

So to the people in power in Saudi Arabia and Iran, I have this to say: your days are numbered.  You may be able to torture or kill your citizens for thought crimes now, but the number of people who are willing to put their lives at risk for the right to speak out is growing exponentially.  And they have millions of supporters worldwide who will make sure that the message gets out there.

Je Suis Raif.  Je Suis Soheil.

There were giants in those days

My students, as a final projects, are required to perform an experiment of their choice, and report back the results of their research.  And one of the directions I give them is, "Beware of over-concluding."

It's an easy enough error to slip into.  If you test the effects of increasing concentration of nitrogen-based fertilizers on the growth of marigold plants, and you find that increasing amounts of soluble nitrogen make marigold seedlings grow faster, you cannot extrapolate that and assume that all plants will respond in the same fashion.  It is a difficulty that plagues medical researchers; a drug that has beneficial effects in test animals may not behave the same way in humans.

The woo-woos, however, raise over-conclusion to an art form.  They will take some anomalous observation, and run right off the cliff with it -- coming to some pronouncement that is so ridiculous that the word "unwarranted" doesn't even do it justice.  Take, for example, the conclusion the woo-woos are drawing from the announcement that Italian "anomalist" researcher Matteo Ianneo has discovered the ruins of an ancient city in the Saudi Arabian desert:

If you look carefully, you can see the ancient ruins next to it, even an old profile.  This is a sensational discovery that no one had noticed. In photographs from 2004, one can observe that there was nothing in this place, it was definitely covered by sand...  The strong winds and desert storms have brought to light this discovery that I think is very sensational.  Now archaeologists are to affirm this archaeological area.  Perhaps it is certainly ancient ruins belonging to an ancient and magnificent city, which dates back to a long time ago.  I hope I have given a contribution to science, in order to find a small piece that the story is all redone, and it’s hard to tell.

Well, so far, so good.  And so far, nothing too surprising.  The Saudi Arabian desert is full of ruins, many of them dating to a time when the climate there was far more congenial for human habitation:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First, though, it bears mention that Ianneo isn't the most credible witness himself.  He is, after all, the guy who announced last year that he'd found an alien base on Mars.  But even leaving that aside for a moment, take a look at what noted wingnut and Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alfred Lambremont Webre had to say about Ianneo's discovery:

Many who know of Matteo Ianneo's fantastic discoveries on the surface of Mars, other planets and earth, know how remarkable his findings are.  As a researcher and investigative journalist myself, I personally believe Matteo has surpassed all others involved with extraterrestrial geophysics... 

The lost cities that are spoken about in our earthly legends may be truth.  Gigantic monuments populate our Earth and it is my belief that they were created by actual giants who were moving in to leave a clear trace of their coming to our planet.  These giants were produced by continuous changes and an evolution in DNA.  It is also quite possible Giants were the very gods narrated in our remote history. The legends are from millions or perhaps billions of years ago.  Most of earth has suffered many cataclysms since then, and it is a misfortune that much of this history was destroyed. 

The gods of these legends existed long ago and at one time, they were very real to our ancestors, these beings of great intelligence and height were to be envied.  They were most likely our actual creators.  They built gigantic monuments so wondrous, many of the ruins still defy logic to this day.  Majestic pyramids and gigantic monuments were created for us, for our humanity.  Their technologies were able to model and mold the rock, to do with it whatever they wanted. 

Their technology had to have been very advanced.  Many of them were been able to save people to help them escape from their dying worlds, by bringing them here to our Earth.  The stories have all been redone and retold over and over throughout the years.  Many men of the earth chose to hide the truth a very long time ago, out of fear.  This history has already taught us.  The truth can have other implications, some truth that most humans cannot accept.

We have an observation: ruins of a city in Saudi Arabia.  Webre's conclusion: there used to be technologically advanced alien giants on the Earth, who created the human race, and whose existence is being systematically covered up by the powers-that-be.

It reminds me of the wonderful quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode called "Heaven and Hell," wherein he describes the wild speculation people indulged in when it became obvious that the planet Venus was covered with a thick layer of clouds:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?   Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.   Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.   Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.   If there's a swamp, there's ferns.   If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

But Webre has apparently one-upped even the "anomalists" that Sagan was parodying, with his wild talk of giant aliens and directed evolution and ancient gods.  He even goes on to tell us what the giant aliens felt like when humans turned out to be so difficult:

Atlantis and other cities have existed in the distant past, most of these great civilizations fell and these Gods probably view us with a great sadness.  Ancient peoples in the past were always power hungry, war crazed and violent in nature, some possibly even dealt with nuclear war. 

The possession of the planet was the only important thing to carry on.  But something went wrong. The suspicious and greedy nature of these peoples caused them to rebel and destroy all their knowledge. 

Today, I present my discovery that I’ve kept for a long time. I have made a very complex study of our Earth.  I have gathered images to prove the existence of gods in our past.  Beings who left their prints and pieces of their once great kingdoms behind here on our earth. 

I assure you that the legends are true.

Sure they are.

And there are probably alien bases on Mars, too, and NASA has decided that we naive humans couldn't deal with it if they came clean and told us about it.  Because Matteo Ianneo says so.

And accepting anything Webre and Ianneo say as correct can't be an over-conclusion, right?

Of course, right.

Jinn, witches, and bad behavior

A couple of days ago, I speculated that woo-woo beliefs stem primarily from three human psychological causes: (1) wishful thinking, (2) paranoia, and (3) a reluctance to consider alternative, and unpleasant, explanations.  I submit to you that there is a fourth reason -- some woo-woo beliefs give people an excuse for their own bad behavior.

A marginal example of this is the recent upsurge in fraudulent "professional psychics," who bilk people for thousands of dollars to predict futures, give personal advice, and get in touch with deceased family members.  I call this a "marginal" example because I'm pretty sure that the charlatans are aware, deep down, that they are charlatans -- that really, they're just doing convincing magic tricks and swindling the gullible.  As such, it doesn't really qualify as a true belief.  There might be some people who are convinced that they really are psychic, but I suspect that most of those do not include the big money-makers, who go on tours and perform their acts in front of thousands.

I ran into another example of woo-woo-ism used as a justification for antisocial behavior just yesterday, with the story of the young Saudi Arabian guys who went berserk and demolished an abandoned hospital because it was "haunted by jinn."  (Source)

Riyadh's Irqa Hospital, which treated Gulf War combatants twenty years ago, was left empty because of ill-repair and safety issues, and (as is common with abandoned buildings) got a reputation for being haunted.  The haunting, however, was not by the spirits of the dead; no, Irqa Hospital was haunted by jinn, who are malevolent spirits from Middle Eastern mythology, whose presence can tempt people into sinful behavior.

Well.  Evidently a bunch of people never learned the basic concept of "Mythology means it isn't true."  Of course, the fact that the jinn are mentioned several times in the Koran didn't help.  So they decided to take action.  First, an anti-jinn article appeared in the Saudi Gazette recommending the formation of a committee to decide what to do about jinn.  The article ended with the facepalm-inducing statement, "It would be no understatement to say that we are sick and tired of evil sorcerers."

Then, things escalated.  Twitter feeds from Saudi users began to buzz with recommendations that the anti-jinn cadre needed to take matters into their own hands.  And finally, a raid was organized on Irqa Hospital, and hundreds of young men descended on the place, smashing windows, punching holes in walls, and ultimately burning 60% of the building.

So, what did all of this accomplish?  My sources said nothing about hordes of dismayed, defeated jinn retreating in disarray.  My guess as to the number of jinn that were encountered that night is right out of Monty Python's "Camel Spotting" sketch; I'll bet they saw almost... one.  Given the lack of success, in the typical definition of the word, what possible motivation for the raid could these guys possibly have?

Well, it allowed them to do an activity that young men, world-wide, seem to love to do; to get together at night, in large numbers, and smash stuff up.  But unlike most places, where smashing stuff up that doesn't belong to you is considered a relatively antisocial thing to do, here the woo-woo belief system is invoked -- "Hey!  We're not just demolishing random hospitals; we demolished a hospital to save you all from the evil jinn!  You should thank us!"

It's the same sort of tendencies that lead to even worse behavior -- such as the people whose fundamental disdain for their fellow human beings, coupled with an enjoyment of causing suffering, drives them to participate in the persecution of "witches."  (And lest you think that all of that went out of fashion in the 18th century, allow me to point out that a recent news release from the Legal and Human Rights Center stated that 642 people were lynched in Tanzania last year for "practicing witchcraft.")

It's hard to face this dark side of human nature -- and once understood, it is even harder to do something to combat it.  The only thing that can conquer this kind of behavior is education; knowledge is, perhaps, the opposite of fear.  In understanding how the world actually works, we can leave behind superstitious fears and prejudices -- that jinn haunt abandoned buildings, or that people deserve death because they can cast evil spells.  Progress is slow, plodding, incremental, and there is a significant fraction of the world's population that still espouses these sorts of beliefs.  Still, we are progressing.  When you consider that it was not so very long ago that witches were hanged right here in the United States, it gives you some cause for optimism.