Ill winds

When you think about it, wind is a strange phenomenon.

In its simplest form, wind occurs when uneven heating of the surface of the Earth causes higher pressure in some places than in others, and the air flows from highs to lows.  But it's considerably more complex (and interesting) than that, because as surface-dwellers we often forget that there's a third dimension -- and that air can move vertically as well as horizontally.

I got to thinking of this because I've been reading Eric Pinder's fascinating, often lyrical, book Tying Down the Wind: Adventures in the Worst Weather on Earth.  Pinder is a meteorologist who was stationed as a weather observer on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, which one in every three days clocks hurricane-force winds (greater than 119 kilometers per hour) and is the spot that holds second place for the highest anemometer-clocked wind speed ever recorded on the Earth's surface (an almost unimaginable 372 kilometers per hour; the only higher one was on Barrow Island, Australia, which on April 10, 1996, during Cyclone Olivia, hit 407 kilometers per hour).

The fact that air moves vertically, of course, is why air moves horizontally.  When the Sun heats a patch of ground, the air above it warms and becomes less dense, causing it to rise.  This creates an area of low pressure, and air moves in from the side to replace the air moving upward.  This process, writ large, is what causes hurricanes; the heat source is the ocean, and the convection caused by that tremendous reservoir of heat energy not only generates wind, but when the water-vapor-laden air rises high enough, it undergoes adiabatic cooling, triggering condensation, cloud formation -- and torrential rain.

The process can go the other direction, though.  A weather phenomenon that has long fascinated me is the convective microburst, something that most often happens in hot, dry climates in midsummer, like the American Midwest.  The process goes something like this.  Rising air triggers cloud formation, and ultimately rain clouds.  When the droplets of water become heavy enough that the downward force of gravity exceeds the upward force of the air updrafts, they fall, but they drop into the layer of warm, dry air near the surface, so they evaporate on the way down, often not making it to the ground as rain.  Evaporation cools the air that surrounds them, making it denser -- and if the process happens fast enough, it creates a blob of air so much denser than the air surrounding it that it literally falls out of the sky, hits the ground, and explodes outward.  Windspeeds can go from nothing to 100 kilometers per hour in a matter of fifteen seconds.  Then -- a couple of minutes later -- it's all over, the dust (and any airborne objects) settle back to Earth, and everyone in the vicinity staggers around trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

A convective microburst in Nebraska [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Couch-scratching-cats, Downburst 1, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Microbursts aren't the only weird weather phenomenon having to do with density flow.  Have you heard of katabatic winds?  If you haven't, it's probably because you live in an area where they don't happen, because they're really dramatic where they do.  Katabatic winds (from the Greek κατάβασις, "falling down") occurs when you have significant chilling of a layer of air aloft -- on top of a mountain, for example, or (even better) over an ice sheet.  This raises the density of the air mass, creating a huge difference in gravitational potential energy from high to low.  The superchilled air pours downward, funneling through any gaps in the terrain; the effect is accentuated when there's a low pressure center nearby.  The katabatic winds off Antarctica (nicknamed "Herbies," for no reason I could find) and the ones off Greenland (known by the Inuit name piteraq) can be unpredictable, fast, and frigid, often driving layers of snow horizontally and creating sudden whiteout conditions.

Then there's the foehn (or föhn) wind, created when onshore air flow is pushed up against a mountain range.  This occurs in the southern Alps, central Washington and Oregon, parts of Greece and Turkey, and south-central China.  On the windward side of the mountains, the air rises and cools; this causes condensation and higher rainfall.  But when the air piles up and gets pushed over the mountain passes, it warms for two reasons -- the pressure increases as it goes downhill on the other side, and the condensation of water vapor releases heat energy.  The result is a warm, dry wind that pours downhill on the leeward side of the mountains -- the source of the "Chinook winds" that desiccate the northwestern United States east of the Cascades.

Interestingly, foehn winds are associated with physiological problems -- headaches, sinus problems, and mood swings.  It's documented that prescriptions for anxiolytic medications go up when the foehn is blowing; and a study at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München found that suicide and accident rates both go up by about ten percent during periods when there's a strong foehn, and no one knows why exactly.

In any case, there are a few interesting tidbits about a phenomenon we usually don't think about unless we're in the path of a hurricane or tornado.  Something to think about next time your face is brushed by a warm breeze.  We live at the bottom of a layer of moving fluid, driven by invisible forces that usually are benign.  Only occasionally do we see how powerful that fluid can be -- preferably, from a safe distance.

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Music of the heart

I've wondered for years why certain pieces of music elicit such a powerful emotional response.

Partly that's because I react powerfully myself, and kind of always have.  I vividly remember being about fifteen years old and being moved to tears the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:

Well, "moved to tears" is kind of an understatement.  "Sobbing" or "bawling" would be closer to the mark.

Then, there's the first time I heard the moment when the sedate, tranquil "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" in J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor suddenly launches into the wild, triumphant trumpets and chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu":

This one elicited a different response, although just as intense.  I was lying on my sofa with headphones on, and when that transition happened I felt like I had been bodily lifted into the air.  These experiences were what prompted me to weave both of these pieces of music -- and a number of others -- into the narrative of my novel The Chains of Orion, as experienced by the character of the kind-hearted, music-loving robot Quine.  One of my coolest experiences as a writer was being told by a reader that he'd been so intrigued to find out why I'd chosen the pieces I'd used as a framework for Quine's story that every time another one was mentioned, he'd sit and listen to it -- and doing this had really enriched his experience of reading the book.

So music can generate some powerful emotions, but what's curious to me is how differently people can react.  I also recall a less-pleasant incident when as a teenager I got into a riproaring argument with my mom (who was one of those people who simply couldn't bear someone having a different opinion than her) over whether Mason Williams's brilliant guitar piece Classical Gas was melancholy or not.  I find the minor key riffs -- especially after the bright major-key brass passage in the middle -- to be deeply wistful, nostalgic, just this side of sad.  My mom's argument was basically "it's happy because it's fast," which to this day I don't understand.  (Although if I were to have the same conversation today, I'd be much quicker to let it go and say "okay, your opinion is your own."  Maybe my mom wasn't the only one who couldn't stand being contradicted.)

While it's still a mystery why some pieces of music can affect certain people viscerally and leave others completely cold, a paper that came out last week in the journal iScience has taken at least the first step toward cataloguing how those experiences are perceived.  A team led by Tatsuya Daikoku of the University of Tokyo used the impressions of over five hundred listeners to different chord changes to see if there was any commonality in the sensations those created.

And there was.  The authors write:

The relationship between bodily sensations and emotions can be elucidated from the perspective of the brain’s predictive processing.  Predictive processing operates on the principle that our brain constantly anticipates and predicts sensory inputs based on prior experiences.  When there’s a mismatch between the predicted and actual sensory input, a prediction error is generated.  Interoception, which refers to the brain’s perception of internal bodily states, plays a pivotal role in this context.  The brain generates emotions by minimizing prediction errors between the anticipatory signals derived from its internal model and the sensory signals through exteroceptive and interoceptive sensations.  Within the framework of music, when our musical predictions are not met, it can lead to a visceral, interoceptive response.  For instance, if we anticipate a musical chord progression based on our prior experiences and the music deviates from this expectation, it can generate a prediction error.  This error might manifest as a sudden change in heartbeat or a rush of emotions associated with surprise, both of which are interoceptive responses.

This certainly describes my mental levitation during Bach's Mass in B Minor.  

I wonder, though, how much of that sense of unmet anticipation is dependent upon the musical tradition we've grown up with.  I get together with two musician friends every couple of weeks to play Balkan music -- a tradition not only with chord progressions that can sound strange to Western European ears, but with time signatures heavily favoring odd numbers.  (One piece we play has the time signature -- I kid you not -- 25/16.)  So for example, would the progressions in this lovely and haunting tune sound unsurprising -- and therefore less poignant -- to someone who grew up in rural Macedonia?

In any case, that was beyond the scope of the study, but it would be an interesting next step to include volunteers from cultures with very different musical traditions.

So I think I'll wrap this up.  Maybe put on some music.  Stravinsky's Firebird never fails to pick me up by the tail and whirl me around a bit.  On the other hand, for an emotional rollercoaster, there's nothing like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which takes us from the joyful gallop of the first movement directly into the wrenching pathos of the second.  Or maybe I'll opt for the eerie atmosphere of Debussy's piano piece The Drowned Cathedral.

So much music, so little time.

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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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Total eclipse of the brain

As most of you undoubtedly know, on Monday, April 8, there's going to be a total solar eclipse visible in much of North America.  I've been looking forward to this one for years, because as luck would have it the path of totality is really close to where I live; we have our eclipse glasses at the ready and are going to head up to the lovely town of Canandaigua, New York to see it.  Best of all, it looks like we should have decent weather, never a guarantee in our cloudy, rainy climate.

It's a rare and spectacular event -- rare, at least, from the perspective of being convenient without a great deal of travel.  There are two or three solar eclipses every year, but if the path of totality is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, most of us won't be able to see it.  So you'd think their frequency would convince people that as striking as the phenomenon is, it's perfectly natural and nothing to freak out about.

You would be wrong.

Conspiracy theories have been popping up like toadstools after a rainstorm, most of them dire predictions about what the eclipse means.  Which is, of course, different from simply what it means; what it means is no more mysterious than an object casting a shadow, albeit a really big one.

What is means, though?  Well...  *cue dramatic music* it could mean damn near anything.  And none of it good.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/CESAR/Wouter van Reeven, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, Total solar eclipse ESA425433, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

Let's start with the people who think it's significant that the path of totality for this eclipse crosses the path of totality for the 2017 solar eclipse, and where they cross is near New Madrid, Missouri.  Geology and/or history buffs probably recognize this place as the site of the massive 1811 earthquake that rang church bells as far away as Richmond, Virginia and changed the course of the Mississippi River.  Well, "X marks the spot," right?  Of course right.  When the shadow of the Moon crosses New Madrid, it's going to set off a superquake that will flatten everything for miles around.

Because apparently, that's how dangerous shadows are, especially when they cross where other shadows were seven years ago.

"This has never happened before, two eclipse paths crossing at a single point over one town," one commenter screeched, despite the fact that a quick look at a solar eclipse map should show him this is blatant nonsense.  It also illustrates that he didn't pay any attention in high school geometry class, because crossing at a single point is kind of what non-parallel lines always fucking do.

Then, there's the Twitter user (sorry, I refuse to call it "X" because it sounds idiotic) who posted the following, receiving tens of thousands of upvotes and thousands of retweets:

Elon Musk changes Twitter's name to X.  His baby's mother, Grimes, posted a strange image on instagram before covid that literally told us covid was going to happen, all the way down to the 3 injections.  In that same image, a few rows beneath the covid 'prediction' is a solar eclipse.  Under it, a flower between two dragons.  2024 is the year of the dragon.  The lotus flower begins blooming in China on April 8th.  The eclipse is happening on April 8th.  That is way too many coincidences for me to feel comfortable, along with the Deagel projection of a 225 Million person decrease in the US by 2025.  It would appear some massive sacrifice could possibly be in the works.

Right!  Sure!  What?

One TikToker made an entirely different claim -- this one that that eclipse isn't going to last for four minutes or so as we've been told, but for three to five days, and that during that time the entire Earth will be plunged into complete darkness.  "Photons and electromagnetic particles that travel at the speed of light and will act as a barrier or temporary shield around the Earth, preventing the light of the Sun or the stars from passing through it," the narrator tells us, because that's apparently how light works.  We're then told to avoid travel during that time, and that the astronomers aren't telling us the truth about the duration of the eclipse because "they don't want to cause mass panic."

And of course if there are conspiracies, you just know Alex Jones is going to get involved, and his contribution this time is noticing that the path of the eclipse passes near eight towns named Nineveh.  Because this is the name of a town in the Bible, it shows the eclipse is a sign from God.  (How an eclipse can be a sign from God meaning anything other than "Kepler and Newton were right," I have no idea.)  But Jones also believes that the Big Bad Government can't let this "biblical event" proceed as the Good Lord intended, and the Department of Homeland Security intends to "hijack the eclipse."

My expression while reading this

Then we have the people who think that the eclipse is a sign that the simulation we're all trapped in is breaking down, and therefore something something something biblical prophecies:

The computer simulation is ending, folks.  Say goodbye to the Matrix.  God says in the book of Luke that before he comes back, he will give us signs in the Sun and the Moon and the stars.  We also have the Moon that is turning to rust.  The Greek origin of that rust is hematite, which means blood.  He said the Moon will turn to blood before the terrible day of the war.  We have the Euphrates River drying up.  We have wars, we have rumors of wars, not to mention all the other biblical prophecies that have been fulfilled.  We are literally in the last seconds of the last days, y'all, and our God is so loving and kind he wants to warn us before he comes back...  This eclipse is not the Rapture, it is a direct warning from God...  We are watching a biblical prophecy play out.

Texas pastor Troy Brewer agrees, at least with the biblical part of it, but adds a nice ultranationalist christofascist spin on the whole thing:

Any time God Almighty speaks a word through the Sun, he’s talking to the nations.  Any time that the Lord would speak a word through the Moon, he is speaking to his covenant people prophetically.  That would either be Israel or it would be the bride of Christ.  Or any time that God Almighty is speaking through the stars, he is prophetically speaking to his children of inheritance...  Why would we call it the Great American Eclipse?  Because it's the first time since 1776 that an eclipse has only touched America.  Can anybody think of what happened in 1776?  Oh, I know.  It was the birth of our nation.  So this was definitely an American word from God.  And it was a word about the great nation of America...  The eclipse of 1776 was a one hour and 33 minute event from the second the shadow touched the United States to the second it left...  What is that?  Psalm 133.  "Oh, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity."  It’s a call of unity for the body of Christ, whereas I want to tell you the warning of the second one is a call of civil war.  And then you have brother against brother in the second one.

Which conveniently ignores that (1) Monday's eclipse will also cross through Mexico and Canada; (2) there have been fifteen total solar eclipses on record that mostly affected the United States, most recently in 2017; and (3) how long the 1776 eclipse (or any solar eclipse) lasts depends on where you are relative to its path, so the whole Psalm 133 thing is idiotic.  But facts and reality just don't matter to these people, do they?  It's my considered opinion that Troy Brewer and his ilk have experienced a total eclipse of the brain, but one where the shadow is showing no sign of passing.

Anyhow, you get the picture.  Any time we have an interesting and uncommon astronomical event, it brings all the wackos yapping from the corners where they usually hide.  What never fails to astonish me, however, is that after the event is over, and nothing untoward takes place, it never discourages either them or their followers.  Doesn't that strike you as bizarre?  You make this grand and dire prediction, preach sermons about it or post it on Twitter or make TikTok videos (or whatever your preferred mode of communication to your devotees is), and then the big day comes, and... nothing happens.

If this was you, wouldn't you think, "Maybe I need to revise my worldview?"  I know I would.  But the weird thing is how that almost never happens.  I can damn near guarantee that Alex Jones and Troy Brewer and the TikTok anti-Matrix biblical apocalypse woman and the rest will not shift their opinions one iota when Monday comes and goes and there are no mass human sacrifices or Christian nationalist civil wars or megaquakes or three days of pitch darkness or computer simulation breakdowns or, heaven forbid, Moon rust.  They'll quiet down for a little, until we have another astronomical event, and then it'll be back to the yapping.

This time!  This is it!  We really mean it this time, you'll see!

Anyway, if you're able to get to the path of totality, I hope you enjoy the sky show.  Don't forget to wear proper eye protection (sunglasses are not enough).  Don't worry about the prophecies from the wingnuts.  We've made it through hundreds of ends-of-the-world already, we'll survive this one.

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Locked in place

The Moon orbits the Earth in such a way that the same side always faces us.  Put another way, its periods of revolution and rotation are the same; it takes the same amount of time for the Moon to turn once on its axis as it does to circle the Earth.

This seems like a hell of a coincidence, but there is (of course) a physical explanation for it.  Close orbits -- either of a planet around its host star, or a satellite around a planet -- generate a high tidal force, which is the gradient in the gravitational force experienced by the near side of the orbiting body as compared to the far side.  There's always going to be a tidal force; even tiny Pluto has a greater pull from the Sun on the near side than it does on the far side, but with a small body at that great a distance, the difference is minuscule.  (You're experiencing a tidal force right now; the Earth is pulling harder on your feet than on your head, assuming you're not upside down as you're reading this.)  But the Moon's proximity to the Earth means that the tidal force it experiences is comparatively huge.  So even if it once rotated faster than it revolved, the higher pull on the near side slowed its rotation down -- a sort of gravitational drag -- until the two matched exactly.

The result is called 1:1 tidal locking, and is why (apologies to Pink Floyd) there is no permanently dark side of the Moon.  There's a near-Earth and a far-Earth side, but no matter where you are on the Moon, you'll have a 28-day light/dark cycle.  However, the apparent position of the Earth in the sky doesn't change.  If where you stand on the Moon's surface, the Earth appears to be hovering thirty degrees above the western horizon, that's where it will always be from that perspective.

It's been known for some time that planets can also be tidally locked.  Once again, it's more likely to happen when they orbit close to their host star, which means a lot of tidally-locked planets are probably so hot they're uninhabitable.  But the situation changes if the host star is a red dwarf -- small, low-luminosity stars that are incredibly common, making up almost three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way.  These stars have such a low heat output that the "Goldilocks zone" -- the distance from the star in which the conditions are "just right" for liquid water to form -- is very close in.

So a star in a red dwarf's habitable zone might well also be tidally locked.

Think of how bizarre a situation that would be.  If the planet is at the right distance for the lit side to be comfortable, there'd be a region of perpetual twilight bounding it, and on the other side of that, permanent, freezing-cold night.  Not only that; this would create the convection cell from hell.  Weather down here on Earth is largely caused by uneven heating of the planet's surface; air warms and rises near the Equator, cools, eventually becoming cool enough to sink and completing the circle.  The Earth's rotation and topography complicate the situation, but basically, that convective rise-and-fall is what generates wind, clouds, rain, snow, and the rest of the meteorological picture.

On a tidally-locked planet, these processes would be almost certainly be amplified beyond anything we ever see on Earth.  Especially the twilit boundary zone -- the constant heating of the bright side, and loss of heat to radiation on the dark side, would cause the atmosphere on the bright side to rise, drawing in cold air from the dark side fast.  The result would be a screaming hurricane across the boundary.

At least, so we think.  We don't have any tidally-locked planets to study, only airless moons.

Until now.

A study out of McGill University has confirmed the first tidally-locked exoplanet, LHS 3844b, a "super-Earth" that was identified by measuring the light coming off the planet at different places in its orbit -- something that allowed the researchers to estimate its temperature.

Artist's impression of the dark side of LHS 3844b [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)]

Chances are, LHS 3844b doesn't have much of an atmosphere, so the convective hellscape I described above might not apply to it.  Still, the idea that astronomers have identified that an exoplanet is tidally locked is kind of astonishing.  The first exoplanet was only discovered in 1992; in the intervening thirty-odd years not only have we found thousands of them, we're now getting so good at analyzing them we can figure out the size of their orbits, how fast they rotate, and the probable composition of their atmospheres.

Our understanding of the universe has accelerated so much, it's hard even to imagine where it might be headed.  The idea that we could not only find an exoplanet around a distant star, but determine that the same side of the planet always faces the star, boggles the mind.

The future of astronomy is looking pretty stellar, isn't it?

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The echoes of Carrhae

Back on the ninth of June, 53 B.C.E., seven legions of Roman heavy infantry were lured into the desert near the town of Carrhae (now Harran, Turkey) by what appeared to be a small retreating force of Parthian soldiers.  It was a trap, and the leader of the Roman forces, Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was one-third of the First Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great) fell for it.  Well-armed and highly mobile Parthian horsemen swept down and kicked some legionnaire ass.  Just about all of the Roman soldiers were either captured or killed, and Crassus himself was executed -- in some accounts, by having molten gold poured down his throat.

Not the way I would choose to make my exit.  Yeowch.

A bust thought to be of the unfortunate Marcus Licinius Crassus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sergey Sosnovskiy, Bust of a Roman, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, very few soldiers from Crassus's seven legions made it back to Italy.  They didn't all die, though, so what happened to the survivors?

This is where it gets interesting -- not only because historical mysteries are intrinsically intriguing, but as another example of "please don't believe whatever you see on the internet, and more importantly don't repost it without checking it for accuracy."

The Battle of Carrhae comes up because a couple of days ago I got one of those "sponsored" posts on Facebook that are largely clickbait based on what stuff you've shared or liked in the past.  With my interest in archaeology and history, I get a lot of links of the type, "Archaeologists don't want you to find out about this ONE WEIRD HISTORICAL FACT," as if actual researchers just hate it when people hear about what they're researching and love nothing better than keeping all of their findings secret from everyone.

In any case, the claim of this particular post was that the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae were absorbed into the Parthian Empire (plausible), but never were accepted there so decided after a while to up stakes and move east (possible), where they eventually made their way to northwestern China (hmmm...) and there's a place called Liqian where their descendants settled.  These guys were recruited by the Chinese as mercenaries to fight against the Xiongnu in 36 B.C.E., and when the Xiongnu were roundly defeated the grateful Chinese Emperor allowed the Romans to stay there permanently.

This idea was championed by historian Homer Dubs, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, who as part of his argument claimed that the "fish-scale formation" used by the Chinese army against the Xiongnu had been copied from the Roman "testudo formation" -- a move where legions go forward with their shields overlapping to prevent spears and arrows from their opponents from striking home.  The Romans had taught the Chinese a new tactic, Dubs said, and that's how they won the battle.

So far, I have no problem with any of this.  There's nothing wrong with researchers making claims, even far-fetched ones; that's largely how scientific inquiry progresses, with someone saying, essentially, "Hey, here's how I think this works," and all his/her colleagues trying their best to punch holes in the claim.  If the claim stands up to the tests of evidence and logic, then we have a working model of the phenomenon in question.

But the link I got on social media pretty much stopped with, "Hey, some Romans ended up in China, isn't that cool?"  There was no mention of the fact that (1) Dubs made his claim in 1941; (2) because there has never been a single Roman artifact -- not one -- found near Liqian, just about all archaeologists and historians think Dubs was wrong; and (3) a genetic test of a large sample of people around Liqian found not the slightest trace of European ancestry.  Everyone there, apparently, is mostly of Han Chinese descent, just as you'd expect.

And the genetic tests that conclusively put Dubs's claim to rest were conducted seventeen years ago.

Look, it's not that I don't get clickbait.  These sites like "Amazing Facts From History" exist to get people to click on them, boosting their numbers and therefore their ad revenue, irrespective of whether anything they're claiming is true.  In other words, if they can get you to click on it, they win.

But what I don't understand is the number of people who shared the link -- over five thousand, at the point I saw it -- and appended comments like, "This is so interesting!" and "History is so fascinating!", apparently uncritically accepting what the site claimed without doing what I did, a (literally) two-minute read of Wikipedia that brought me to the paper from The Journal of Human Genetics I linked above.  Not a single one of the hundreds of commenters said, "But this isn't true, and we've known it's not true for almost two decades."

I can almost hear the objections.  What's the harm of believing an odd claim about ancient history, even if the (very strong) evidence is that it's false?  To me, there is actual harm in it; it establishes a habit of credulity, of accepting what sounds cool or fun or weird or interesting without any apparent consideration of whether or not it's true.  Sure, there's no immediate problem with believing Roman soldiers settled in China.

But when you start applying that same lack of critical thinking to matters of your health, the environment, or politics, the damage accrues awfully fast.

So please do some fact-checking before you share.  Apply skepticism to what you see online -- even if (or maybe, especially if) what you're considering sharing conforms to your preconceived notions about how things work.  We can all fall prey to confirmation bias, and these days, with the prevalence of clickbait sites run by folks who don't give a rat's ass if what they post is real or not, it's an increasing problem.

Check before you share.  It's that simple.

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Marching into the uncanny valley

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

That quote from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park kept going through my head as I read about the latest in robotics from Columbia University -- a robot that can recognize a human facial expression, then mimic it so fast that it looks like it's responding to emotion the way a real human would.

One of the major technical problems with trying to get robots to emulate human emotions is that up until now, they hadn't been able to respond quickly enough to make it look natural.  A delayed smile, for example, comes across as forced; on a mechanical face it drops right into the uncanny valley, the phenomenon noted by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 as an expression or gesture that is close to being human, but not quite close enough.  Take, for example, "Sophia," the interactive robot invented back in 2016 that was able to mimic human expressions, but for most people generated an "Oh, hell no" response rather than the warm-and-trusting-confidant response which the roboticists were presumably shooting for.  The timing of her expressions and comments was subtly off, and the result was that very few of us would have trusted Sophia with the kitchen knives when our backs were turned.

This new creation, though -- a robot called "Emo" -- is able to pick up on human microexpressions that signal a smile or a frown or whatnot is coming, and respond in kind so fast that it looks like true empathy.  They trained it using hours of videos of people interacting, until finally the software controlling its face was able to detect the tiny muscle movements that preceded a change in facial expressions, allowing it to emulate the emotional response it was watching.

Researcher Yuhang Hu interacting with Emo  [Image credit: Creative Machines Lab, Columbia University]

"I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in HRI [human-robot interaction]," Hu said.  "Traditionally, robots have not been designed to consider humans' expressions during interactions. Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback.  When a robot makes co-expressions with people in real-time, it not only improves the interaction quality but also helps in building trust between humans and robots.  In the future, when interacting with a robot, it will observe and interpret your facial expressions, just like a real person."

Hod Lipson, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence research at Columbia, at least gave a quick nod toward the potential issues with this, but very quickly lapsed into superlatives about how wonderful it would be.  "Although this capability heralds a plethora of positive applications, ranging from home assistants to educational aids, it is incumbent upon developers and users to exercise prudence and ethical considerations," Lipson said.  "But it’s also very exciting -- by advancing robots that can interpret and mimic human expressions accurately, we're moving closer to a future where robots can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, offering companionship, assistance, and even empathy.  Imagine a world where interacting with a robot feels as natural and comfortable as talking to a friend."

Yeah, I'm imagining it, but not with the pleased smile Lipson probably wants.  I suspect I'm not alone in thinking, "What in the hell are we doing?"  We're already at the point where generative AI is not only flooding the arts -- resulting in actual creative human beings finding it hard to make a living -- but deepfake AI photographs, audio, and video are becoming so close to the real thing that you simply can't trust what you see or hear anymore.  We evolved to recognize when something in our environment was dangerously off; many psychologists think the universality of the uncanny valley phenomenon is because our brains long ago evolved the ability to detect a subtle "wrongness" in someone's expression as a warning signal.

But what happens when the fake becomes so good, so millimeter-and-millisecond accurate, that our detection systems stop working?

I don't tend to be an alarmist, but the potential for misusing this technology is, to put not too fine a point on it, fucking enormous.  We don't need another proxy for human connection; we need more opportunities for actual human connection.  We don't need another way for corporations with their own agendas (almost always revolving around making more money) to manipulate us using machines that can trick us into thinking we're talking with a human.

And for cryin' in the sink, we don't need more ways in which we can be lied to.

I'm usually very much rah-rah about scientific advances, and it's always seemed to me an impossibly thorny ethical conundrum to determine whether there are things humans simply shouldn't investigate.  Who sets those limits, and based upon what rules?  Here, though, we're accelerating the capacity for the unscrupulous to take advantage -- not just of the gullible, anymore, but everyone -- because we're rapidly getting to the point that even the smart humans won't be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

And that's a flat-out dangerous situation.

So a qualified congratulations to Hu and Lipson and their team.  What they've done is, honestly, pretty amazing.  But that said, they need to stop, and so do the AI techbros who are saying "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" and inundating the internet with generative AI everything. 

And for the love of all that's good and holy, all of us internet users need to STOP SHARING AI IMAGES.  Completely.  Not only is it often passing off a faked image as real -- worse, the software is trained using art and photography without permission from, compensation to, or even the knowledge of the actual human artists and photographers.  I.e. -- it's stolen.  I don't care how "beautiful" or "cute" or "precious" you think it is.  If you don't know the source of an image, and can't be bothered to find out, don't share it.  It's that simple.

We need to put the brakes on, hard, at least until we have lawmakers consider -- in a sober and intelligent fashion -- how to evaluate the potential dangers, and set some guidelines for how this technology can be fairly and safely used.

Otherwise, we're marching right into the valley of the shadow of uncanniness, absurdly confident we'll be fine despite all the warning signs.

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