Mad world

Given my dual fascination with history and botany, it's a bit surprising that yesterday I ran into a story I'd never heard before that involves both.  I wonder if you know about it?

It's the strange tale of "mad honey."

Turns out in eastern Turkey, near the Black Sea, there are two species of rhododendron -- Rhododendron ponticum and Rhododendron luteum -- that grow in such great profusion that they dominate the landscape.  When they flower, the effect is absolutely spectacular.

Rhododendron ponticum [Image is in the Public Domain]

But there's another species that appreciates the display, and that's bees.  Both species are pollinated by bees, which are lured in not only by the flowers' bright colors, but by the abundance of nectar.

So when these plants flower, the local honey comes almost exclusively from these two species.

The problem is, these plants don't only produce sugar, they produce organic compounds called grayanotoxins.  The grayanotoxins appear not to bother the bees at all -- it would be seriously counterproductive for the plants to poison their pollinators -- but humans who consume the honey made from the nectar of these species end up with serious problems, including hallucinations, dizziness, nausea, bradycardia, and vascular hypotension.  The symptoms are rarely fatal; you'd have to consume a lot of the stuff to die from it.  Most people with what is called "mad honey syndrome" recover in a day or two, although during that period they might well think they're not going to make it.

So, of course, humans being what they are, there are people who take it recreationally.  Me, if I want a mood-altering substance, I'll stick with a glass of red wine.

Where it gets interesting is that "mad honey" has intersected with history on more than one occasion.  The Greek historian Xenophon, in his chronicle Anabasis, recounts an interesting experience some of the troops had while traveling through eastern Anatolia on the way back to Greece from their time as mercenaries in Persia:

Now for the most part there was nothing here which they really found strange; but the swarms of bees in the neighborhood were numerous, and the soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men.  So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed.  On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging.

A few centuries later, a similar incident happened, but deliberately, and with a much less happy ending.  The Greek historian Strabo writes in his book Geography of the unfortunate fate of some of Pompey the Great's soldiers during their campaign against King Mithridates VI of Pontus:

Now all these peoples who live in the mountains are utterly savage, but the Heptacometae are worse than the rest.  Some also live in trees or turrets; and it was on this account that the ancients called them Mosynoeci, the turrets being called mosyni.  They live on the flesh of wild animals and on nuts; and they also attack wayfarers, leaping down upon them from their scaffolds.  The Heptacometae cut down three maniples [around 1,500 soldiers] of Pompey's army when they were passing through the mountainous country; for they mixed bowls of the crazing honey which is yielded by the tree-twigs, and placed them in the roads, and then, when the soldiers drank the mixture and lost their senses, they attacked them and easily disposed of them.

Which raises the question of exactly how stupid these Roman soldiers were.  They were marching through a hostile region occupied by people who were known to be "utterly savage," and just happened upon bowls of honey left for them on the side of the road -- and instead of being suspicious, they were like, "Nom nom, looks good to me!"

My opinion is that the resulting massacre was just natural selection at work.

Anyhow, apparently "mad honey" is available for purchase if you go to Turkey, where it's (1) legal, but (2) strongly discouraged, because like many psychotropic substances, the difference between "whoa, far out" and "HOLY SHIT THE WORLD IS ENDING" is a very blurry line.  So even if there aren't savage bands of Heptacometae waiting for you to get high so they can stab you with sharpened sticks, you might find yourself regretting consuming it, like a middle-aged couple did in 2008 when they heard the stuff improved your sex life and instead of having a fun frolic ended up in the hospital because they thought they were having heart attacks.

So restraint is recommended.

Anyhow, that's our curious historical vignette of the day.  Greek military campaigns, beautiful flowers, and hallucinogenic honey.  And given what some plant toxins can do -- monkshood and manchineel come to mind -- this one is pretty mild.

But if I ever get to visit Turkey, I still think I'll still steer clear.

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The relic

The first thing I learned in my studies of linguistics is that languages aren't static.

It's a good thing, because my field is historical linguistics, and if languages didn't change over time I kind of wouldn't have anything to study.  There's an ongoing battle, of course, as to how much languages should change, and what kinds of changes are acceptable; this is the whole descriptivism vs. prescriptivism debate about which I wrote only last month.  My own view on this is that languages are gonna change whether you want them to or not, so being a prescriptivist is deliberately choosing the losing side -- but if lost causes are your thing, then knock yourself out.

Where it gets interesting is that the rates of language change can vary tremendously.  Some cultures are inherently protective of their language, and resist things like borrow words -- a great example is Icelandic, which has changed so little in a thousand years that modern Icelanders can still read the Old Norse sagas with little more difficulty than we read Shakespeare.

Speaking of Shakespeare, it bears mention that the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries isn't (as I heard some students call it) "Old English."  Old English is an entirely different language, not mutually intelligible with Modern English, and by Shakespeare's time had been an extinct language for about four hundred years.  Here's a sample of Old English:

Fæder ure şu şe eart on heofonum, si şin nama gehalgod.  To becume şin rice, gewurşe ğin willa, on eorğan swa swa on heofonum.

I wonder how many of you recognized this as the first two lines of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.

There's been a discussion going on in linguistic circles for years about which dialect of English has changed the least -- not since the time of Old English, but at least since Elizabethan English, the dialect of Shakespeare's time.  We have a tendency, largely because of some of the famous performances of Hamlet and Macbeth and Richard III, to imagine Shakespeare's contemporaries as speaking something like the modern upper-class in southeastern England, but that's pretty clearly not the case.  Analyses of the rhyme and rhythm schemes of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, suggest that Shakespearean English was rhotic -- the /r/ in words like far and park were pronounced -- while the speech of southern England today is almost all non-rhotic.  Vowels, too, were probably different; today a typical English person pronounces words like path with an open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ (a bit like the vowel in the word cop); in Shakespeare's time, it was probably closer to the modern American pronunciation, with a front unrounded vowel /æ/ (the vowel sound in cat).

Analysis of spoken English from dozens of different regions has led some linguists to conclude -- although the point is still controversial -- that certain Appalachian dialects, and some of the isolated island dialects of coastal North and South Carolina, are the closest to the speech of Shakespeare's day, at least in terms of pronunciation.  Vocabulary changes according to the demands of the culture -- as I said, there's no such thing as a static language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alumnum, Primary Human Languages Improved Version, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason all this comes up is that linguists have come upon another example of a dialect that preserves a relic dialect -- this one, from a great deal longer ago than Elizabethan English.  In the region of Trabzon in northern Turkey, there is a group of people who speak Romeyka -- a dialect of Pontic Greek that is thought to have changed little since the region was settled from classical-era Greece over two thousand years ago.

Since that time, Romeyka has been passed down orally, and its status as a cultural marker meant that like Icelandic, it has been maintained with little change.  Modern Greek, however, has changed a great deal in that same time span; in terms of syntax (and probably pronunciation as well), Romeyka is closer to what would have been spoken in Athens in Socrates's time than Modern Greek is.  "Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka," said Ioanna Sitaridou, of the University of Cambridge, who is heading the study.  "And because of Islamization, they retained some archaic features, while the Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew closer to Modern Greek, especially because of extensive schooling in Greek in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...  Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of Modern Greek.  Essentially this analysis unsettles the claim that Modern Greek is an isolate language."

The problem facing the researchers is that like many minority languages, Romeyka is vanishing rapidly.  Most native speakers of Romeyka are over 65; fewer and fewer young people are learning it as their first language.  It's understandable, of course.  People want their children to succeed in the world, and it's critical that they be able to communicate in the majority language in schools, communities, and jobs.

But the loss of any language, especially one that has persisted virtually unchanged for so long, still strikes me as sad.

It's a consolation, though, that linguists like Ioanna Sitaridou are working to record, study, and preserve these dwindling languages before it's too late.  Especially in the case of a language like Romeyka, where there is no written form; without recordings and scholarly studies, once it's gone, it's gone.  How many other languages have vanished like that, without a trace -- when no more children are being raised to speak it, when the last native speaker dies?  It's the way of things, I suppose, but it's still a tragedy, a loss of the way of communication of an entire culture.

At least with Romeyka, we have people working on its behalf -- trying to find out what we can of a two-thousand-year-old linguistic relic from the time of Alexander the Great.

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Earthquakes and sharpshooters

A guy is driving through Texas, and passes a barn.  It's got a bullseye painted on the side -- with a bullet hole in the dead center.

He sees two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and pulls over to talk to them.

"Did one of you guys make that bullseye shot?" he says.

One of them says, a proud smile on his face, "Yeah.  That was me."

"That's some amazing shooting!"

The man says, "Yeah, I guess it was a pretty good shot."

The old-timer's friend gives a derisive snort.  "Don't let him fool you, mister," he says.  "He got drunk, shot a hole in the side of his own barn, and the next day painted the bullseye around the bullet hole."

This is the origin of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, the practice of analyzing an outcome out of context and after the fact, and overemphasizing its accuracy.  Kind of the bastard child of cherry-picking and confirmation bias.  And I ran into a great example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy just yesterday -- a Dutch geologist who has gone viral for allegedly predicting the devastating earthquake that hit southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6.

The facts of the story are that on February 3, a man named Frank Hoogerbeets posted on Twitter, "Sooner or later there will be a ~M 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon)."  This, coupled with the fact that the day before, the SSGEOS (the agency for which Hoogerbeets works) had posted on its website, "Larger seismic activity may occur from 4 to 6 February, most likely up to mid or high 6 magnitude. There is a slight possibility of a larger seismic event around 4 February," has led many to conclude that they were either prescient or else have figured out a way to predict earthquakes accurately -- something that has eluded seismologists for years.  The result is that Hoogerbeets's tweet has gone viral, and has had over thirty-three million views and almost forty thousand retweets.

Okay, let's look at this claim carefully.

First, if you'll look at Hoogerbeets's twitter account and the SSGEOS website, you'll see a couple of things right away.  First, they specialize in linking earthquake frequency to the weather and to the positions of bodies in the Solar System, both of which are correlations most scientists find dubious at best.  Second, though, is that Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS have made tons of predictions of earthquakes that didn't pan out; in fact, the misses far outnumber the hits.

Lastly, the East Anatolian Fault, where the earthquake occurred, is one of the most active fault zones in the world; saying an earthquake would happen there "sooner or later" doesn't take a professional geologist.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roxy, Anatolian Plate Vectoral, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What seems to have happened here is that the people who are astonished at Hoogerbeets's prediction have basically taken that one tweet and painted a bullseye around it.  The problem, of course, is that this isn't how science works.  You can't just take this guy's one spot-on prediction and say it's proof; in order to support a claim, you need a mass of evidence that all points to a strong correlation.

Put a different way: the plural of anecdote is not data.

No less an authority than the United States Geological Service has stated outright that despite improvements in fault monitoring and our general knowledge about how earthquakes work, quakes are still unpredictable.  "Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake," their website states.  "We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future.  USGS scientists can only calculate the probability that a significant earthquake will occur (shown on our hazard mapping) in a specific area within a certain number of years."

So what Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS did was basically nothing more than an unusually shrewd guess, and I'd be willing to bet that the next "sooner or later" prediction from that source will turn out to be inaccurate at best.  Unfortunate, really; having an accurate way to forecast earthquakes could save lives.

But realistically speaking, we are nowhere near able to do that -- viral tweets and spurious bullseyes notwithstanding.

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The painted bones

It's fascinating how long into our past we've had rituals surrounding death.

There's decent evidence that our cousins the Neanderthals -- which went extinct on the order of forty thousand years ago -- buried their dead, and used ceremonial pigments like red and yellow ochre to decorate the bodies.  What I'm curious about is if those rituals were performed purely as fond remembrance of the the person who had died, or if it had a more religious significance.  Did they believe in an afterlife?  Was the reverence shown to a dead person's body because of belief that the person's soul still, in some sense, inhabited the remains?  Or some other reason entirely?  

It's all too easy to misinterpret the tangible evidence left behind, even from the relatively recent past.  Take, for example, the practice -- most common in Scotland and England -- of placing sturdy metal cages over grave sites.  The more fanciful-thinking believe it was because of a fear of vampires or zombies -- to protect the living from the dead.

A "mortsafe" in Cluny, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

The real reason -- which we know from the writings of the time -- was that it was actually to protect the dead from the living.  Grave robbing was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only to steal any valuables the person might have been buried with, but to sell the corpse itself to medical or anatomical laboratories for dissection.  (Recall the early nineteenth century Burke and Hare murders, where a pair of enterprising young men decided it was more lucrative to kill people themselves and sell their bodies than to wait for them to die; Hare turned King's evidence in exchange for immunity if he testified against Burke, which he did.  Burke was hanged -- and in a grisly but ironic twist, his body was given to an anatomical laboratory for dissection.)

So it's harder than you'd think to ascertain the motives people had for certain ritual practices in the past.  As far as the decoration of bodies by the Neanderthals, of course, at this point it's impossible to know.  But it's fascinating that our (very) distant ancestors had burial rituals not so very different from our own.

A recent find in Turkey has shown that modern humans have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time as well.  Çatalhöyük, nicknamed the "oldest city in the world," has provided fascinating archaeological finds before; the "Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük," a six-thousand-year-old ceramic statue probably associated with rituals of fertility (sex being the other thing people have been obsessed with for a long time) is probably the most famous artifact from the site.  (If you're wondering how Çatalhöyük is pronounced -- heaven knows I was -- I'll save you the trouble.  Near as I can get, it's something like "chot-al-hoik.")

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations 1320259 nevit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A new find at the site, though, is equally interesting.  A team from the University of Bern has uncovered nine-thousand-year-old bones -- so a full thousand years older than the Mother Goddess figurine -- that show evidence of having been painted.  Not only were they painted, they appear to have been unearthed more than once, and repainted.  Fascinatingly, they used different colors for different genders -- cinnabar/red for males, copper-bearing minerals/blue and green for females.  Not all the bones were so decorated; it may have been a mark of status, or membership in a ruling class or priestly class, but all that is speculation.  (The fact that there have been painted bones of children found suggests that it wasn't mere individual status that was the deciding factor.)

There's also an association between the number of painted burials in a building, and the amount of painted decoration on the walls.  "This means when they buried someone, they also painted on the walls of the house," said study senior author Marco Milella.  "Furthermore, at Çatalhöyük, some individuals stayed in the community: their skeletal elements were retrieved and circulated for some time, before they were buried again.  This second burial of skeletal elements was also accompanied by wall paintings."

I'd like to think that the painted bones were a sign of reverence and not fear of retaliation by an angry spirit, but that too is speculation.  All we have is the artifacts to judge by.  Even so, it's fascinating to get a glimpse into the distant past of our own species.

And you have to wonder what our distant descendants will make of the artifacts left from our own society.  What will they think of the marble and granite monuments we raised over the dead?  It puts me in mind of the eerie, atmospheric rhyme I saw on a gravestone in the cemetery in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania where my great- and great-great grandparents are buried:

Remember, traveler, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

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Illuminating the beginnings of a mystery

I recently finished reading Adrian Goldsworthy's book How Rome Fell, and was impressed enough with it that (you may recall) it was last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week.  I've always had a fascination for that time and place -- Europe of the "Dark Ages," the mysterious and poorly-documented period between the slow and tortuous collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E. and the consolidation of the Frankish state during the eighth.

Part of the reason for my interest is that it is a mystery.  If you push back much earlier than Charlemagne, you get into some seriously sketchy territory.  The most famous example is King Arthur, whose legendary status is obvious, but whose historicity is dubious at best.  But he's hardly the only one.  Take the account of the founding of the Merovingian Dynasty (immediately preceding the Carolingians, founded by Charlemagne), from the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar:

It is said that while Chlodio was staying at the seaside with his wife one summer, his wife went into the sea at midday to bathe, and a beast of Neptune rather like a Quinotaur found her.  In the event she was made pregnant, either by the beast or by her husband, and she gave birth to a son called Merovech, from whom the kings of the Franks have subsequently been called Merovingians.

I had to look up what a "quinotaur" was.  Turns out it's a beast with the front half of a bull and the back half of a fish.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacques63, Quinotaure, CC BY-SA 4.0

So Merovech's father was either (1) a guy named Chlodio, or (2) a fish-bull-thing.  What's amusing is that the author of the Chronicle of Fredegar seemed to consider these as equally plausible, so decided to include them both.

So if you go much before 750 C.E. or so, the actual facts become so interwoven with mythology and folk history that it's hard to tell what, if any, is real.  (I mean, the issue of Merovech's father is pretty clear cut, but that's the exception.)  When you get back to the second century and earlier, things improve drastically -- we have, all things considered, great records of the Roman Empire at the height of its power -- but as it started to disintegrate, people found that writing stuff down was less of a priority than avoiding starvation or being chopped into tiny bits by the latest group of invaders.

This is why a recent discovery in Turkey is so exciting to me and others who share my interest in that time and place.  At the site of the ancient city of Blaundos, about 180 kilometers east of the Aegean Sea, archaeologists have discovered a necropolis that was used as a burial site during the time when the Roman Empire was heading toward collapse -- from the second to the fourth centuries.  What they're finding is impressive, to say the least.

"We think that the Blaundos rock-cut tomb chambers, in which there are many sarcophagi, were used as family tombs, and that the tombs were reopened for each deceased family member, and a burial ceremony was held and closed again," said Birol Can of Uşak University, who headed the team excavating the site.  "Some of these tombs were used as animal shelters by shepherds a long time ago.  The frescoes were covered with a dense and black soot layer due to the fires that were set in those times.  But [we were] able to clean some of the paintings, revealing the vibrant floral, geometric and figurative scenes painted on the walls.  Vines, flowers of various colors, wreaths, garlands, geometric panels are the most frequently used motifs.  In addition to these, mythological figures — such as Hermes (Mercury), Eros (Cupid) [and] Medusa — and animals such as birds and dogs are included in the wide panels."

The team has only begun to investigate the site; just cleaning the panels to expose the brilliantly-colored art beneath the layers of grime is a slow and painstaking process.  Eventually, the entire complex will be studied and restored.  After that, they're planning on doing DNA and chemical analysis of the remains of the people buried there, hoping to find out their ages and cause of death, nutritional habits, and ancestry.

The latter is of particular interest to me.  When the "barbarian tribes" -- the disparaging moniker which the Romans used to lump together the people of northern Europe, including Celts, Gauls, Goths, Allemanni, Suevi, Marcomanni, Franks, Vandals, and so forth -- began to chip away at Roman territory, the Roman citizens who lived in border regions began to accept the inevitable and "allowed" them to settle.  In some cases, the now-apparently-civilized barbarians were granted Roman citizenship.  (In fact, one of the most famous and powerful Roman military leaders in the fourth century, Stilicho, was a Vandal by descent.)

So finding out the ancestry of the people of Blaundos will be interesting, especially comparing the earliest to the latest remains to see how (or if) the same kind of ethnic melding happened here that was happening in other parts of the Empire.

In any case, the discovery is extremely cool, and may clarify our picture of the beginnings of one of the most mystery-shrouded time periods in the past two millennia.  It'll be interesting to see what more they turn up.  I'm guessing, though, that they're not going to find evidence of women getting knocked up by fish-bull-creatures.  Call me a doubter, but there you are.

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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Under the ancient skies

I find it fascinating how long humans have been curious about the nature of the universe.  Our drive to understand the world and its workings certainly goes back a very long way.  Some of it can be explained purely pragmatically -- a commonly-cited example is the development of accurate sidereal calendars by the ancient Egyptians to get the timing right for the annual Nile floods, critical not only from a safety standpoint but because figuring out a way to manage all that water was essential for agriculture in what was then a rapidly-growing population.  But it goes far beyond that.  It seems like as far back as we have any kind of records at all, we've wanted to know what makes the cosmos tick.

A particularly fascinating example of this came my way via my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, who seems to have an uncanny knack for finding stuff that (1) I will find really interesting, and (2) I haven't heard about before.  Yesterday he sent me a link from the site New Scientist about an archaeological find in Turkey that -- if the researchers' conclusions are borne out, will provide another example of how early we developed our compulsion to understand what was going on up there in the night skies.

The site is called Yazılıkaya, and it was built by the Hittites 3,200 years ago near their capital city of Ḫattuša.  (The nearest modern town is Boğazkale, in central Turkey.)  It has hundreds of images carved into the rock surfaces, and according to this new study, they represent not only solar, lunar, and sidereal calendars, they are a representation of their concept of the structure of the universe.

The shrine at Yazılıkaya

The current study was the product of a tremendous amount of work.  "There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out," said Eberhard Zangger, one of the researchers who investigated the site.  "But we worked on it for seven years...  [The Hittites] had a certain image of how creation happened.  They imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organized into three levels: the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky.  The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was a recurrent renewal of life – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer.  The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature."

Of course, back then, there was no particularly accurate way to measure stellar and planetary positions, and anything like a telescope was still two millennia in the future.  But even so, they did pretty damn well with what they had access to, especially given how long ago this was.  The Hittites controlled most of what is now modern Turkey from 1,700 to 1,100 B.C.E., at which point attacks from the Phrygians and Assyrians pretty much smashed the power structure and subsumed the culture.

From our modern knowledge of cosmology, the Big Bang and stellar evolution and astrophysics, their conclusions seem pretty rudimentary.  They, like most of the contemporaneous societies, put the whole thing in the hands of gods and sub-gods and so on, giving the whole thing a religious rather than scientific veneer.  "Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does," said archaeologist Efrosyni Boutsikas, of the University of Kent, who was not involved in the current research.  "It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world."  She added that she's not 100% sold on the conclusions of Zangger and his colleagues, but that the site and others near it are deserving of further study.

I'm certainly not qualified to judge the quality of the research nor the legitimacy of the team's conclusions, but I am fascinated with how long we've been trying to figure out how everything works.  As Boutsikas said, religion is a common first-order approximation, and although in many cases it became solidified into a compulsory belief system that then became a hindrance to scientific advancement, it does represent our drive to reach beyond our day-to-day concerns and glimpse the mechanisms controlling not only the movements of things here on Earth, but of those unreachably distant points of light we see gliding through the night skies.  Awe-inspiring, isn't it, to think that our ancestors 3,200 years ago were looking at those ancient skies, and trying to make sense of it all -- just as we're still doing today.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

We found Noah's... no, listen! Wait! Where's everybody going?

Have you noticed that every few months, someone else finds Noah's Ark?

Just since I've begun this blog, I've written about four attempts, one of them "successful" (at least in the sense that the people running the expedition found some random rotting pieces of wood and declared victory).

Well, here we go again.  We now have another "successful Ark discovery," with the added filigree that there's a government coverup designed to prevent our finding out about it.  This should be fun, yes?  Religious whackjobbery + conspiracy theories = WHEEEEEEE!!!!!

This story, which has been making the rounds of social media, is described in some detail in the article by Mark Martineau entitled, "Noah's Ark Has Been Found.  Why Are They Keeping Us In the Dark?"  Here's a quote from the article that explains the gist:

In 1959, Turkish army captain Llhan Durupinar discovered an unusual shape while examining aerial photographs of his country. The smooth shape, larger than a football field, stood out from the rough and rocky terrain at an altitude of 6,300 feet near the Turkish border with Iran...  Capt. Durupinar was familiar with the biblical accounts of the Ark and its association with Mount Ararat in Turkey, but he was reluctant to jump to any conclusions. The region was very remote, yet it was inhabited with small villages. No previous reports of an object this odd had been made before. So he forwarded the photographic negative to a famous aerial photography expert named Dr. Brandenburger, at Ohio State University.

Brandenburger was responsible for discovering the Cuban missile bases during the Kennedy era from reconnaissance photos, and after carefully studying the photo, he concluded: "I have no doubt at all, that this object is a ship. In my entire career, I have never seen an object like this on a stereo photo."

We are then told that some folks investigated, but found nothing too spectacular.  Then a guy named Ron Wyatt decided to take a more thorough look at the site, and after his study, "The evidence was conclusive.  This is the Ark of Noah."

What evidence, you might ask?  Well, we have "traces... of wooden ribs":

We have "high-tech metal rivets":

We have "stone anchors":

Not to mention a plethora of other goodies, such as cat hair and fossilized animal poo.

But then Snopes got involved, predictably debunking the entire thing.   Most of the claims were outright false; there were no petrified wooden ribs, no exotic metal rivets, no subsurface features that look even remotely ship-like.  The animal poo is hardly unusual, given that animals do that.  And even a guy from Answers in Genesis, one Andrew Snelling, concluded that the site is natural geological feature caused by faulting, albeit a kind of peculiar-looking one.  (You should read the entire Snopes article for a piece-by-piece takedown of the claim.)

But so far, there's nothing much to separate this from all of the other times people have found Noah's Ark.  That's because you haven't heard about the conspiracy theory aspect.  "Ordinary people are hungry for this information, yet the organizations responsible to disseminate these facts seem to have an agenda to keep us in the dark," Martineau writes.  "This is especially true when it comes to our ancient human history."

Yup, I'm sure that the powers-that-be spend all of their time trying to figure out how to keep the average citizen from finding out about the Code of Hammurabi.  Makes total sense.

But apparently, that's not all that the powers-that-be are trying to do.  If you take a look at the comments on the original site (Not directly!  Always use eye protection!), you'll see that apparently everyone is lying to us, especially Snopes.  Here are a few examples, as many as I was able to copy before the neurons in my cerebrum started whimpering for mercy:

After [Snopes] said that Obamas Birth Certificate was real...All their credibility was out the window

it a proven fact science does not have all the answers.

I don't use MY real name and I have a picture of Obozo getting ready to masturbate (what he always does right after burning the Constitution that he was HIRED TO PROTECT!). My reasoning is this... if Obozo's Mooselick Booboohood retards saw my REAL face, I would have to spend all my time killing the punk ass wannabe ragheads they send to behead me for being a TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT... killing them in self-defense, of course. Not EVERYONE is stupid enough to put their real face out there where Satan's Minions (spelled MUSLIMS) can lock in on them. Enjoy your eternity in Hell that you will deserve for following Satan's Spawn Osama Obama!

Snopes is a propaganda tool of the far left!

Snopes has been discredited for producing any truth. Wake up and smell the Communism.

Yes, it IS good that previous commentor wasn't born in the islamic world of murdered and taken-over populations and destroyed cultures. That is why islam has spread all over the world, as it is spreading more by murdering Christian populations that have lived in the middle east for hundreds or thousands of years. Thanks all to OUR islamic communist puppet regime's support of money and weapons. But don't worry, it isn't only Christians being murdered, but those of the far east too.

So, I only have two questions about all of this: (1) what the fuck is a "Mooselick Booboohood?" and (2) do the people who comment on sites like this talk this way in real life?

Because if they do, I'm surprised that their loved ones don't stage an intervention involving the administration of horse tranquilizers.

The whole thing is profoundly unsettling, especially given that Snopes has a pretty good track record of establishing fact from fiction, and that there are people who think that the logical next step after "science doesn't have all the answers" is "so the bible must be literally true."  The problem, of course, is one we've seen before; if you can be duped into thinking that the facts are spin, and that the scientific method itself is invalid, you can be convinced of anything.

In any case, it seems pretty unlikely that this rock formation in Turkey has anything to do with either Noah's Ark or government coverups.  Which is a relief, frankly.  Because we've got to get this one debunked in order to make way for the next one.  Only one Noah's Ark allowed at a time, you know.

Saturday shorts

Well, it's Saturday, the beginning of the weekend, and here at Skeptophilia we're hard at work following three stories for your facepalming enjoyment.

First, we have an update from the bible-is-literally-true crowd.  Long-time readers of this blog may remember that back in 2011 we had an announcement from Donna D'Errico, former star of Baywatch, that she was going to be spearheading an expedition to Mount Ararat in Turkey to try to find Noah's Ark.  D'Errico's qualifications for leading the mission seem to be twofold: (1) she has dreamed of finding Noah's Ark since she was ten; and (2) she likes people to take videos of her.  The climb went off without a hitch, unless you count the fact that they didn't find Noah's Ark because it basically doesn't exist.

Of course, you shouldn't let a little thing like reality stand in the way of pursuing your dream, so D'Errico and her team are trying to launch another expedition, this time using a Kickstarter project to fund it.

Even if she gets the money -- and when I looked, she'd raised $2,900 of the $10,000 she's asking for -- she'll still have a rough time ahead, she says.

In a quote I swear I am not making up, D'Errico wrote on her Kickstarter page, "To get to the area where we believe the ark is located, we will have to climb using ropes, traverse cliffs, circumvent rock slides, avoid mountain rebels, survive blinding blizzards, and fend off vicious sheepdogs."

As far as objections to the entire Great Flood story, and how anyone could believe it was true unless they had the IQ of a grapefruit, D'Errico says that it's completely logical.

"If you do the math, the total cubic volume inside the ark would have been roughly 1.5 million cubic feet," she told The Huffington Post by email. "That’s the equivalent of 569 modern railroad stock cars. The average stock car can accommodate 240 sheep, which would have been the average size animal on the ark.  Keep in mind that the Bible did not say two of every species, but rather two of every kind. That means that one feline kind, rather than every species of feline, would have been taken aboard the ark.  Smaller animals would have been kept in cages that could stack on top of each other. As few as 2,000 animal kinds could have been taken aboard the ark, which would have resulted in all of the species we have today."

Right.  2,000 "animal kinds" resulting in 15 million species in 5,000 years (give or take).  Not to mention the fact that the entire Earth being covered in salt water would have killed all of the plants.  Not to mention the wee problem of bringing, for example, the wombats back to Australia after the waters receded.  Nor the problem of where exactly the waters receded to.

But other than that, it's completely logical.


Speaking of not being in touch with reality, we have a story in from Poland that there is going to be a meeting of exorcists soon.  On the agenda: discussing the threat of Madonna.

You would think that, given that these people apparently believe that the world is being besieged by evil supernatural emissaries of Satan who are trying to destroy our souls, they would have more pressing issues to discuss than a 54-year-old has-been pop star.

You would be wrong.

"Part of the conference is dedicated to the hidden subliminal message in communication, and the choice of this subject was inspired by the woman who dares to call herself Madonna," said Father Andrzej Grefkowic, a trained exorcist who is one of the organisers of the conference.  "We've been worried about her concerts."

Well, one of the reasons that Madonna dares to call herself that is that it's her actual name.  And I don't know how "subliminal" you can call her message, given that she once staged a mock crucifixion at one of her shows.  But okay, I can grant them that she pisses off Catholics with great regularity.

Other things that Grefkowic et al. will be discussing are how the increasing popularity of tattoos and body piercings represent a means of ingress for the devil into people's lives.  But as I've discussed before, this is rather thin ice for me personally, so perhaps I'd better just move on.


If you're not in the mood for discussing the evils of pop stars, but you'd still like to find out about the bizarre side of religion, perhaps you should sign up for the "Defending the Faith" cruise sponsored by Catholic Answers.  This holy voyage will be from November 2 - November 9 of this year, and besides some of the usual shipboard activities (a pool, a rock-climbing wall, an ice skating rink, a spa, a nightclub, and several bars) there will be talks, lectures, and panel discussions on Catholic apologetics, not to mention daily Mass.

In particular -- and they must feel it's important because it was quoted on the front page -- Catholic Answers Director of Development Christopher Check will be giving an interesting talk.  "On the cruise, I’ll be defending the Church against the charges that the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition are events for which we Catholics need to apologize," Check writes.

Now, I'm a staunch believer in the idea that no one is responsible for bad things his or her ancestors did (or should bask in the glory of good things they did, either, for that matter).  But the Catholic Church, which just recently issued a 400-year-too-late apology for placing Galileo under house arrest for the remainder of his life for publicly stating that the Earth went around the Sun, really does have a lot to answer for as an institution.  And it's reprehensible that Check and his comrades seem to be claiming that the Catholic Church at the time was acting within its rights to launch people off to "reclaim the Holy Land" from innocent people who had lived there for generations, and to torture and execute thousands for heresy and witchcraft.

But if that sort of thing is your cup of tea, have at it.  Failing that, you can go to Poland and discuss the most recent depredations of Madonna.  Or go to Turkey and join Donna D'Errico in an expedition to once again not find Noah's Ark.  If you believe this stuff, there are thousands of pointless activities you can participate in!  Me, I think I'll stay home and weed the garden.  And frankly, it seems like in doing so I'll accomplish a great deal more toward improving the world.

Rocking the boat

New from the "News That Is Way Weirder Than Anything I Could Make Up" department:  Baywatch star Donna D'Errico is planning on climbing Mount Ararat to search for Noah's Ark.

D'Errico, who played the character Donna Marco in order to obviate the need of her having to remember that her character had a different first name than she did, brought several acting talents to the series, the most notable of which was a set of bazongas that left you wondering how she managed to walk upright.  She reports that she has had a dream of finding Noah's Ark ever since she was in Catholic school at age ten.

"I read different stories about how people thought they'd found the cages," she said.  This evidently being all the evidence she needed, she has organized an expedition to Turkey this summer in order to scale the mountain and look for the boat.

I don't know about all this.  The Great Flood story has always sounded mighty fishy to me (rimshot!).  I know that when I was ten years old and in Catholic school, I wasn't buying it, and peppered Sister Ursula with a good many uncomfortable questions.  I wondered, for example, if the whole world was flooded, so that no land was exposed anywhere, where did all the water go afterwards?

And, of course, there's the whole problem of how some dude in ancient Palestine went to the Canadian tundra to bring back two caribou, to Australia to get a couple of kangaroos, and to South Africa for some rhinoceroses, and got them all safely back after the whole incident was over.  Did Noah seriously go to California and bring back some pumas?

When I was eleven, my parents transferred me to public school.  Funny thing, that.

In any case, the question of "how could this story possibly be true?" doesn't seem to bother D'Errico terribly.

"I've been studying this for years and know where the sightings have been," she said in an interview. "According to my research, the ark lays broken into at least two, but most likely three, pieces. I believe that one of those pieces is in the uppermost Ahora Gorge area, an extremely dangerous area to climb and explore."

Asked about the dangers, she said, "Many inexperienced climbers have done it, but you do need stamina and, obviously, a crew."

Obviously.  With videocameras.  Because this is not in any sense a publicity stunt.  Sure.

"I am not doing a reality show," she claimed.  "I will document this for myself and my family."

In other words, look for it to appear on television.  It'll probably have a really creative name like "My Search For Noah's Ark, Starring Donna D'Errico."  Or maybe just "Baywatch: Turkey."

If it doesn't end up on the so-called "History Channel" by December, I will be astonished.  In terms of serious historical merit, it will  be right up there with their other offerings, such as "Monster Quest," "The Nostradamus Effect," and "The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon."