Impulsive art

It's no surprise to the people who know me that I'm an enthusiast of body art.

Well, if it was a surprise, it isn't any more, because last month I had a tattoo completed that's a full sleeve, so a little hard to hide except when I'm wearing long sleeves.  Which, being that this is upstate New York, is something on the order of ten months of the year, so maybe people didn't find out till this summer.

In any case, the design has two parts -- a twining series of vines in honor of my gardener mother, and a snake in honor of my outdoorsman, animal-loving father.

Me being worked on by my artist, the incomparable James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos

This comes up because of a study done recently at Wilfred Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) by a pair of social psychologists, Anne Wilson and Bradley Ruffle, to find out if there was any personality component to the choice of getting tattoos.  They sorted a thousand volunteers into three groups -- no ink at all, ink that can be easily hidden, and visible ink.  They then gave the volunteers personality assessments geared toward finding out how they scored on measures of short-sightedness and impulsivity.

What they found is that the visible-tattoo group considered the future the least, and were the most impulsive, and the non-tattooed people were the most future-oriented and least impulsive (with the non-visible tattooed people, of course, in the middle on both metrics).  This is, on first glance, not surprising; we've all seen cases of ink that was clearly an ill-thought-out spur of the moment decision (the guy who has "No Ragrets" scrawled on his upper chest being the classic example).  I'm kind of at the other end of the spectrum -- not only am I pretty cautious by nature, I also thought about the decision for all three of my tattoos for over a year, then once I made the decision to go for it, spent equally long planning the design.  As a result, I've never regretted (or ragretted, as the case may be) any of my ink for a moment.

My first tattoo (which I got about fifteen years ago)

So it's unsurprising that counterbalancing outliers like myself would be the fraction of people who either make impulsive jumps into getting inked, or else don't think through the consequences (such as trying to find employment with companies that have a no-visible-ink policy).

My second one, from about eight years ago -- a Celtic dragon in honor of my Scottish grandma.  [Nota bene: my leg usually isn't this hairless.  This photo was taken the day I got the tattoo done.]

The researchers determined short-sightedness by using a delayed-gratification scenario -- you can get a small payment now, or wait three weeks and get a larger payment.  In the Wilson and Ruffle study, the immediate payment was a dollar, and the delayed payment increased from a dollar to two-fifty (the idea was to see how much of an incentive it would take for people to wait).  The trend was that the non-tattooed people were willing to wait to get a larger payout much more readily than the tattooed people were.

What strikes me is that I'm not at all averse to waiting for a larger reward; I'm about as far from an instant-gratification type as you can get.  But the difference in my life between a dollar and two-fifty is so small that it doesn't seem to matter much, so I can't imagine that small a change influencing my decision any.  Now, if you went from ten to twenty-five dollars, that'd be a hell of a lot more of an incentive, even though it's the same percentage increase.  An extra fifteen bucks would make a difference to me.

So I wonder what would happen if you sliced the data a different way -- group the people according to wealth.  My guess is the poorer people would jump at a quicker (and smaller) reward, and the wealthier people would be more willing to wait -- regardless of their body art.

That's only a guess, of course, and even if I'm right the trend that Wilson and Ruffle found is pretty interesting.  I've had people comment on my tattoos from the standpoint that I don't "seem like the type who would get tattooed."  I don't know about that -- I've always loved body art (artistically done, and in moderation, it can be absolutely beautiful).  I guess being a shy introvert does make it kind of weird that I'd do something that makes me more noticeable.

Oh, well.  People are complex, which keeps social psychologists like Wilson and Ruffle in business.  Like Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large; I contain multitudes.)"

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

Wearable art

I've always had a fascination for body art.  I got my first tattoo about 15 years ago, a pair of Celtic dogs on my back.  In Celtic mythology, dogs are shapeshifters and protector spirits, and I thought that was cool.  Plus, from a more prosaic angle, I have two dogs.

Next was a dragon on my calf, also in a Celtic-knotwork style, in honor of my Scottish grandma, with whom I was really close.  She died in 1986 and I still miss her.  (Nota bene: my leg is usually not this hairless.  This was right after it was done, and -- for those of my readers who haven't gotten any ink -- you get a close shave before the artist starts.)

My latest one, in honor of what would have been my dad's hundredth birthday, is a snake on my arm.  My dad loved snakes, and instilled in me an appreciation for creepy-crawlies (or, in this cases, slinky-slitheries) that I still have.

Here's my dad, age 17, with a friend:

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery made by a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington State University, which resulted in a paper published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Andrew Gillreath-Brown was going through some artifacts at the university that had been boxed and shelved for over forty years, and happened upon this:

Well, Gillreath-Brown not only is an archaeologist, he also is into body art himself, with a full sleeve featuring a mastodon, a turtle-shell rattle, and a forest scene.  So he immediately recognized what it was.

It's a two-thousand-year-old tattoo instrument, made of a pair of cactus spines bound together by plant fibers, with a handle made of skunkbush wood.

This pushes back the earliest confirmed date of tattooing in western North American Native tribes by over a thousand years.  "Tattooing by prehistoric people in the Southwest is not talked about much because there has not ever been any direct evidence to substantiate it," Gillreath-Brown said, in an interview in Science Daily.  "This tattoo tool provides us information about past Southwestern culture we did not know before... [the tool] has a great significance for understanding how people managed relationships and how status may have been marked on people in the past during a time when population densities were increasing in the Southwest."

So that's just plain cool.  Gillreath-Brown's paper, co-authored with Aaron Deter-Wolf, Karen R. Adams, Valerie Lynch-Holm, Samantha Fulgham, Shannon Tushingham, William D. Lipe, and R. G. Matson, is titled "Redefining the Age of Tattooing in Western North America: A 2000 Year Old Artifact from Utah," and makes for interesting reading even if you (1) aren't an archaeologist, and (2) don't have any body art yourself.  The authors write:

How people decorate their bodies provides insight into cultural expressions of achievement, group allegiances, identity, and status.  Tattooing has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have tattooed mummies, which adds to the challenge of placing current body modification practices into a long-term global perspective.  The tattooing artifact dates to 79–130 CE during the Basketmaker II period (ca. 500 BCE – 500 CE), predating European arrival to North America by over 1400 years.  This unusual tool is the oldest Indigenous North American tattooing artifact in western North America and has implications for understanding archaeologically ephemeral body modification practices...  Events such as the Neolithic Demographic Transition—which occurs in many places around the globe—may link to an increase in body modification practices as social markers, as appears to be the case for the Basketmaker II people in the southwestern United States.

Whatever you think of tattoos, the practice has obviously been around for a very long time.  At its best, it's a form of self-expression and honoring important people and events, connecting with spiritual practices, and simply creating and wearing beautiful designs.  It connects us to our far-distant ancestors in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

All of which makes me glad I have the ink I have.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Governmental facepalms

Because we evidently needed another reason to facepalm over a Trump appointee, today we consider: John Fleming, assistant secretary for health technology at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Fleming has some decidedly peculiar ideas.  In his book Preventing Addiction: What Parents Must Know to Immunize Their Kids Against Drug and Alcohol Addiction, Fleming states that opiates are proof of the existence of god:

Were it not for these drugs, many common and miraculous surgeries would be impossible to either undergo or perform.  In my opinion this is no coincidence at all.  Only a higher power and intellect could have created a world in which substances like opiates grow naturally.

Which brings up a couple of troubling questions:

1. Why do these miracle substances intelligently created by a deity so often lead to addiction and the potential for overdose?
2. If opiates are a blessed gift from god because they "grow naturally," why are people of Fleming's stripe virtually all against the legalization of marijuana?  Seems like an intelligent deity's creation of marijuana could be argued not only from the standpoint that it "grows naturally," but because its consumption is so beneficial to the tortilla chip industry.

 It's a bit like Dr. Pangloss said in Voltaire's masterpiece Candide:

It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end.  Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles.  Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches...  Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.

When, of course, rather than giving us noses to support spectacles, god could just have given us all perfect eyesight rather than noses built to support spectacles.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This, however, is not the only bizarre thing in Fleming's book.  He says there's a correlation between tattoos and drug addiction:

Body art comes into play in drug addiction as well, although obviously, not all who have a tattoo are addicts.  A sailor who gets a single tattoo on his arm or an adult woman who has a small butterfly tattooed on her lower abdomen are not necessarily drug addicts or even rebellious — just dumb, at least temporarily!...  When you see that your child has become interested in body art or has a fascination with the Goth or other subculture, then be on alert, because your child is likely headed into rebellion and possible drug experimentation.

So this makes me wonder how my two rather large tattoos haven't resulted in my being addicted to cocaine or something.  Despite the size and elaborate nature of my own body art, maybe I'm still in the category of "temporarily dumb."

Last, it turns out that Fleming himself might not have much right to point fingers about temporary stupidity, because he is one of the people who fell for the story in The Onion that Planned Parenthood was building an "$8 billion abortionplex."  Then, not having learned the lesson "if you're not smart enough to recognize satire and fake news, at least be smart enough to check your sources," he delivered a speech on the floor of Congress in 2013 to communicate the alarming news that the Department of Defense was starting to round up and court martial Christians so as to "create an atheist military."

Where, you might ask, did Fleming get this "information" from?

From Breitbart, of course.

So come on, folks.  Is it too much to ask to have a few government appointees who are competent, intelligent, and sane?  Because the ones we have now, in my dad's trenchant phrase, couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Myself, I'm beginning to wonder if this is an elaborate experiment being run by alien scientists to see how long it takes us to figure out that the whole American government is some kind of huge put-on.  The question they're trying to answer is whether we'll just go along with it unquestioningly.  At some point, maybe they're expecting us to say, "Okay, ha-ha, very funny.  Game's up.  Come out of hiding, alien overlords, and give us back some semblance of normalcy."  I don't know how else you'd explain people like Fleming, not to mention Steve Bannon, who looks like he's spent the last ten years pouring Jack Daniels on his breakfast cereal.