Ill-starred

I've never believed in luck.  It's true, however, that life is full of caprices.  Although the laws of physics are rigorously enforced in all jurisdictions, the bigger picture often seems to be chaotic.  I think a lot of people put too much stock in superstitious beliefs about good (or bad) luck; I much more tend to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who famously said, "I've found that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

Still, sometimes you read about what some people have gone through, and you can't help coming away with the feeling that the stars must have been misaligned when they were born.  Their lives are just one disaster after another -- and I choose the word deliberately, because disaster comes from Latin words meaning "bad stars," and the specific example I'm thinking of was an eighteenth-century French astronomer who just could not catch a break.

His full name was Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galeisière, but historians of science know him as Guillaume Le Gentil.  He was born in September of 1725 in Coutances, and was inspired to study astronomy after hearing a lecture by the famous astronomer, cartographer, and world traveler Joseph-Nicolas Delisle.  After receiving his bachelor's degree in the subject, he threw himself into research with great gusto.  He discovered the Pinwheel Cluster (Messier 36), the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38), and a dark nebula in the constellation Cygnus that is now called Le Gentil 3 in his honor.

The Pinwheel Cluster [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey]

Just about everything else he attempted, however, was... a disaster.

In 1760, Russian polymath Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonsov came up with a method for refining the length of the Astronomical Unit (A.U.), the distance between the Earth and the Sun, by making careful measurements from various locations of the transit of Venus -- the apparent movement of the silhouette of Venus across the face of the Sun at the point when the Earth, Venus, and the Sun are all lined up.  Le Gentil, who had already done some work on this question, joined the French team working on the project, and was dispatched to Pondicherry, India, then a French colonial possession, where he'd been given permission by the king to set up an observatory.

Before Le Gentil's ship could get him there, though, the Seven Years' War broke out.  As different parts of India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean, were under the control of France and Britain, and those were on opposite sides of the conflict, ship travel in the region was iffy at best.  Le Gentil got stranded on Mauritius, and had a hell of a time finding anyone who would get him to India in time for the transit (6 June 1761).  He finally found a frigate whose captain said he'd get him to Coromandel, India, and from there Le Gentil could get another ship to Pondicherry in plenty of time -- but the first ship was first blown off course for five weeks, and then by the time they got to Coromandel they found out that Pondicherry had been taken by the British and they weren't allowing any French citizens to land there.

So Le Gentil had no choice but to return to Mauritius.  The transit took place while he was on board ship -- the weather was clear, but the seas were so rough and the ship pitching so wildly that he couldn't take any measurements from on board.

No worries, Le Gentil thought; because of the geometry of the orbits of Earth and Venus, Venusian transits come in pairs, eight years apart.  (Each pair, though, is separated by over a century.)  He decided to try and get measurements for the 1769 transit in Manila, Philippines, but the Spanish authorities weren't keen, so he went back to giving a go at Pondicherry again, which had been returned to French control in 1763.  He got there in 1768, built a special observatory to do his measurements, got everything ready...

... then the day of the transit, the clouds rolled in.

He was now zero for two.

Licking his wounds, he decided to return to France, but fate wasn't done yet.  The crew and passengers of his ship were struck by dysentery, and forced to put in on Réunion Island so they could recover.  (And, presumably, clean the ship.)  While in port, the ship was damaged in a storm and declared un-seaworthy, so once again he was stranded.  Finally he found a Spanish ship that was willing to take him home, and he arrived home in Paris in October of 1771, eleven years after he'd left for what was supposed to be an absence of a year or so.

When he got there, he found that much like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, he'd been declared legally dead.  Not a single one of the letters he'd sent home during his voyage had arrived.  His wife had remarried, his estate had been plundered, and his seat at the Royal Academy of Sciences given to someone else.  He ended up in court for years trying to (1) prove he was actually still alive and wasn't an impostor, (2) get some of his belongings back, and (3) get re-appointed to the Academy.  (Eventually the king himself had to intervene to force the Academy to accept him again -- and also, to allow him to remarry without being guilty of bigamy.)

What's most remarkable about Le Gentil is that he seems to have lived up to his name (gentil is French for "friendly" or "kind").  He wrote a memoir with the cumbersome title Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde, fait par ordre du Roi, à l'occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque du Soleil, le 6 juin 1761 & le 3 du même mois 1769 par M. Le Gentil, de l'académie royale des sciences ("Voyage to the Indian Ocean, by Order of the King, for the Occasion of the Passage of Venus Across the Disk of the Sun, 6 June 1761 and the 3rd of the Same Month 1769, by Monsieur Le Gentil, of the Royal Academy of Sciences").  In it, you very much get the impression that Le Gentil had an "Oh, well, ha-ha, that's the way it goes" attitude toward all of his troubles; he never does what I would have done after the second setback, which is to scream "For fuck's sake, what now?" and start throwing heavy objects.

Guillaume Le Gentil died in Paris in October of 1792, at the age of 67.  This, in fact, might have been the best stroke of luck he ever had; he missed by only a few months the start of the horrific Reign of Terror, which -- to judge by the fate of poor, doomed Antoine Lavoisier -- had little respect for scientists.

Reading about Le Gentil's life, you have to wonder how one person could have such continual misfortune.  It reminds me of the line from Calvin & Hobbes, where Calvin's mom tells him, "Life is unfair," and Calvin responds, "I know, but why can't it ever be unfair in my favor?"  It sure seems like Le Gentil was on the receiving end of way too many bad turns of fate.  Even if I don't attribute it to his literally being ill-starred from birth, I can't help but feel a combination of pity and admiration for someone who kept doggedly persevering despite just about everything going wrong.

And maybe his tale of woe will also put things into perspective next time you think you're having a bad day.

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The law of small numbers

A few days ago, I had a perfectly dreadful day.

The events varied from the truly tragic (receiving news that a former student had died) to the bad but mundane (losing a ghostwriting job I'd been asked to do because the person I was working for turned out to be a lunatic, and had decided I was part of a conspiracy against him -- the irony of which has not escaped me) to the "I'll-probably-laugh-about-this-later-but-right-now-I'm-not" (my dog, Guinness, recovering from his recent illness, and feeling chipper enough to swipe and destroy my wife's favorite hat) to the completely banal (my computer demanding an operating system update when I was in the middle of working, tying it up for two and a half hours).

All of this brought to mind the idea of streaks of bad (or good) luck -- something that you find people so completely convinced of that it's nearly impossible to get them to break their conviction that it sometimes happens.  We've all had days when everything seems to go wrong -- when we have what my dad used to call "the reverse Midas touch -- everything you touch turns to shit."  There are also, regrettably fewer, days when we seem to have inordinate good fortune.  My question of the day is: is there something to this?

Of course, regular readers of this blog are already anticipating that I'll answer "no."  There are actually three reasons to discount this phenomenon.  Two have already been the subjects of previous blog posts, so I'll only mention them in brief.

One is the fact that the human brain is wired to detect patterns.  We tend to take whatever we perceive and try to fit it into an understandable whole.  So when several things go wrong in a row -- even when, as with my experiences last week, they are entirely unrelated occurrences -- we try to make them into a pattern.

The second is confirmation bias -- the tendency of humans to use insignificant pieces of evidence to support what we already believe to be true, and to ignore much bigger pieces of evidence to the contrary.  I had four bad things, of varying degrees of unpleasantness, occur one day last week.  By mid-day I had already decided, "this is going to be a bad day."  So any further events -- the computer update, for example -- only reinforced my assessment that "this day is going to suck."  Good things -- like the fact that even though our dog is back to getting into trouble, he is recovering; like the the fact that we've been enjoying the International Ceramics Congress workshops this weekend; like the fact that lovely wife brought me a glass of red wine after dinner -- get submerged under the unshakable conviction that the day was a lost cause.

It's the third one I want to consider more carefully.

I call it the Law of Small Numbers.  Simply put: in any sufficiently small data sample, you will find anomalous, and completely meaningless, patterns.

To take a simple model: let's consider flipping a fair coin.  You would expect that if you flip said coin 1000 times, you will find somewhere near 500 heads and 500 tails. On the other hand, what if you look at any particular run of, say, six flips?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ICMA Photos, Coin Toss (3635981474), CC BY-SA 2.0]

In any six-flip run, the statisticians tell us, all possible combinations are equally likely; a pattern of HTTHTH has exactly the same likelihood of showing up as does HHHHHH -- namely, 1/64.  The problem is that the second looks like a pattern, and the first doesn't.  And so if the second sequence is the one that actually emerges, we become progressively more amazed as head after head turns up -- because somehow, it doesn't fit our concept of the way statistics should work.  In reality, if the second pattern amazes us, the first should as well -- when the fifth coin comes up tails, we should be shouting, "omigod, this is so weird" -- but of course, the human mind doesn't work that way, so it's only the second run that seems odd.

Another thing is that in the second case, the six-flip run of all heads, when it come to the seventh flip, what will it be?  It's hard for people to shake the conviction that after six heads, the seventh is bound to be tails, or at least that tails is more likely.  In fact, the seventh flip has exactly the same likelihood of turning up heads as all the others -- 1/2.

All of this brings up how surprisingly hard it is for statisticians to model true randomness.  If a sequence of numbers (for example) is actually random, all possible combinations of two numbers, three numbers, four numbers, and so on should be equally likely.  So, if you have a truly random list of (say) ten million one-digit numbers, there is a possibility that somewhere on that list there are ten zeroes in a row.  It would look like a meaningful pattern -- but it isn't.

This is part of what makes it hard to create truly randomized multiple-choice tests.  As a former science teacher, I frequently gave my classes multiple-choice quizzes, and I tried to make sure that the correct answers were placed fairly randomly.  But apparently, there's a tendency for test writers to stick the correct answer in the middle of the list -- thus the high school student's rule of thumb, which is, "if you don't know the answer, guess 'c'."

Randomness, it would seem, is harder to detect (and create) than most people think.  And given our tendency to see patterns where there are none, we should be hesitant to decide that the stars are against us on certain days.  In fact, we should expect days where there are strings of bad (or unusually good) occurrences.  It's bound to happen.  It's just that we notice it when several bad things happen on the same day, and don't tend to notice when they're spread out, because that, somehow, "seems more random" -- when, in reality, both distributions are random.

I keep telling myself that.  But it is hard to quell what my mind keeps responding -- "thank heaven it's a new week - it's bound to be better than last week was."

Well, maybe.  I do agree with another thing my dad used to tell me: "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right."  I'm just hoping that the statisticians don't show up and burst my bubble.

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It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

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

It's in the palm of your hand

Amongst the downsides of being superstitious is that sometimes, you find out you're in for some bad luck.

A girl I went to college with had a real thing for Tarot cards.  And even considering the generally vague, this-could-apply-to-anyone interpretations of most Tarot card spreads, there are a couple of cards that are unequivocally bad.  The Nine of Swords, for example, isn't good news, which you could probably tell just by looking at it:

So, just by the laws of chance (not that true believers think that's what's going on here, but still) -- every once in a while, you're going to get a bad spread of cards laid out in front of you by your friendly neighborhood fortuneteller.  And what did my college friend do, when it happened to her?

She picked up all of the cards, shuffled them, and laid them out again, until she got one she liked.

It's a more common response than you'd think.  Numerologists -- people who believe that everything can be converted to numbers, and those numbers control your future -- have been known to go through a legal name change if their names don't add up to a "good number."

Something similar is going on right now in Japan, where palmistry is all the rage.  You know: the idea that the lines on your palm somehow tell you how long you'll live, whether you'll become wealthy, whether you'll fall in love, and so on.  Now, palm lines aren't going to be so simple to change -- it's not as easy as changing your name, or picking up the cards if you don't like what you see.  So, what do you do if your life-line is short, if your heart line says you'll never find a nice person of whatever gender you favor, and so on?

You have them surgically altered.

I'm not making this up.  Surgeons in Japan are now being asked, with increasing frequency, to use an electric scalpel to burn lines in patients' palms to engrave a pattern that is thought to be lucky.  The surgery costs about a thousand bucks, which of course isn't covered by insurance.

Small price to pay, say true believers, if the outcome will bring money, love, long life, or whatever it is you're after.

"If you try to create a palm line with a laser, it heals, and it won’t leave a clear mark," said Dr. Takaaki Matsuoka, who has already performed five of these surgeries this year, and has another three scheduled soon.  "You have to use the electric scalpel and make a shaky incision on purpose, because palm lines are never completely straight.  If you don’t burn the skin and just use a plain scalpel, the lines don’t form.  It’s not a difficult surgery, but it has to be done right."

 Before and after.  Can't you just feel the luck radiating from the right-hand photograph?

Matsuoka seems like a believer himself, and not just an opportunist making a quick bunch of yen from the gullible.

"Well, if you’re a single guy trying to pick up a date, knowing palm reading is probably good. It’s a great excuse to hold a lovely woman’s hands," he said, in an interview.  "Men usually wish to change their business related success lines, such as the fate line, the money-luck line, and the financial line.  The money-luck line is for making profits. And the financial line is the one that allows you to save what you make.  It’s good to have both.  Because sometimes people make a lot of money, but they quickly lose it as well.  A strong fate line helps ensure you make money and keep it.  These three lines, when they come together just right, create the emperor’s line.  Most men want this."

As for women, Matsuoka says they mostly want to change the lines related to romance and marriage.

How could all of this work?  Matsuoka hedges a little on this question:

"If people think they’ll be lucky, sometimes they become lucky," he said, which makes him sound a little like the Japanese answer to Norman Vincent Peale.  "And it’s not like the palm lines are really written in stone—they’re basically wrinkles.  They do change with time.  Even the way you use your hands can change the lines.  Some palmisters will even suggest that their clients draw the lines on their hands to change their luck.  And this was before palm plastic surgery existed. However, anecdotally I’ve had some success."

I can't help but think that if any of these superstitious beliefs actually worked, they wouldn't work this way.  If Tarot cards, numbers, or lines on your palm -- or any of the other wacky suggestions you might have heard -- really do control our destiny, then just changing them to a pattern you like is kind of... cheating, isn't it?  You'd think that the mystical powers-that-be wouldn't let that happen.  If I were one of the mystical powers-that-be, I'd be pissed.  I'd probably trip you while you were carrying a full cup of hot coffee.

That'd sure show you.

Of course, a simpler explanation is that all of this is really just unscientific bullshit.  To test that conjecture, I may just break a mirror on purpose today, and cross the path of a black cat (easy for me because I own two).  Go ahead, Gods of Bad Luck, do your worst.  I'm guessing that I'll still make it all the way through the day without having a brain aneurysm.

And in any case, no one is getting close to my hands with an electric scalpel.  That has gotta hurt.

We've got your number

Today's question is: how far should you go in accommodating people's irrational superstitions?

The whole question comes up because last week, town councillors in Richmond Hill, Ontario voted to ban the number four from any new street addresses.  "The number 4 in different Chinese cultures," councillor Greg Beros said in an interview, "the Asian culture, in their language it sounds like the word death, and that has a very bad connotation for them."

Notwithstanding that Mr. Beros seems to be confused on the difference between "Chinese" and "Asian," not to mention the fact that "Asian" is not a language, he is correct that in traditional Chinese folklore the number four does have bad associations.  And the town had already set a precedent in this direction by previously outlawing addresses containing the number 13.

My reaction, predictably, is: seriously?

At what point do you just have to say, "I'm sorry, that's ridiculous?"  Now, don't get me wrong; I'm all for treating people with respect, and that includes granting them the right to believe whatever they want to.  But that respect of their right to belief does not extend to a requirement that I respect the belief itself.  You are perfectly free to believe that the letter "S" is unlucky, and to refuse to buy a house with an address containing an "S."  It is also within your rights to refuse even to drive past 767 South Sissinghurst Street.  But it is well within my rights to consider your belief superstitious nonsense, and there is no reason in the world that town governments should feel obliged to act as if your claim has any basis in reality.

Oh, I know a lot of this has to do with money.  Town councillors are concerned with economics, and a lot of economics has to do with selling real estate.  If a significant fraction of the houses aren't going to sell (as would be the case in my "letter S" example, assuming a large number of people believed that), the town governors' actions would be simple pragmatism.  But in Richmond Hill, it's just two numbers -- 4 and 13 -- that are outlawed.  (Councillor Beros emphasized that house numbers containing 4s were okay, such as 14, 24, and so on -- it was only the single-digit number 4 that was verboten.)  So we're not denying the majority of the housing to a substantial proportion of the population, here.  The solution is simple: if you don't want a house with the number 4, then don't buy one.

Of course, I recognize that this is a losing battle.  Because of the weirdness associated with the number 13, many airplanes have no 13th row, and skyscrapers no 13th floor.  (If you're curious, the origin of the "unlucky 13" myth isn't certain, but may have started because there were thirteen people present at the Last Supper, an event that certainly didn't end well.)

Superstition, unfortunately, is still rampant in the world.  As I mentioned in a post last week,  the list of beliefs in lucky and unlucky actions is long (and bizarre).  But rational people need to be unafraid to identify those beliefs as what they are (i.e. untrue), and there's no reason in the world anyone should have to cater to the silly demands of someone who wants us to treat their mythology as if it were fact.