Bootstraps

Yesterday's post, about the strange resurgence of a fifty-year-old claim that the Dogon tribe of west Africa found out about Sirius's invisible-to-the-naked-eye white dwarf companion star from space-traveling aliens, spurred a conversation with a friend about the nature of the internet.

As useful as it is -- many of us spend a significant fraction of our waking hours connected to it -- it has its downsides.  I had made the point in yesterday's post that stuff like "E.T. Visits the Dogon People" would never gain the traction, spread, and longevity that it does without the internet.  The web is a fantastic conduit for knowledge, an amazing repository for factual information -- and a dreadfully efficient facilitator for the distribution of bullshit.

My friend, though, went one step further.

"The way the internet is set up," he said, "it not only acts as a conductor for bullshit, but it actually creates it.  There's a self-referential quality to the internet that makes the generation of loony nonsense inevitable.  It's why I wasn't surprised when generative A.I. started 'hallucinating' -- basically, making shit up that sounded so plausible that people believed it, like the A.I. mushroom foraging guide that recommended eating Amanita mushrooms with your t-bone steak.  It takes almost nothing to get the ball rolling, and pretty soon you've got some serious craziness to deal with.  Then, once it starts, how do you get people to stop believing?  Their belief expands the craziness, and around and around it goes.  It's the snowball effect on steroids."

I asked him if he could give me some examples, and he said he'd send me some links.

The result sent me down a rabbit hole, which I'll share a bit of with you here.

One of the most persistent and long-lived examples of this phenomenon is one I had never heard of before.  It's called Markovian Parallax Denigrate, after the subject line of hundreds of messages posted to Usenet all the way back in 1996.  The message texts were a random list of words, such as the following real example:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

Well, it's a seemingly random list.  *raises one eyebrow in a meaningful manner*  Even though most people believe that the MPD messages are nonsense and were either produced by an early experimental text generator or chatbot, or else someone trying to troll everyone and get their fifteen minutes of fame, there are people who are still trying to "decode" the messages and figure out what they "really mean."  After everyone got all stirred up, it seemed so damned anticlimactic to say they were just a list of words.  Interestingly, no one has ever claimed responsibility; an article on The Daily Dot called it "the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery."

Then there's Cicada 3301, a set of seven puzzles posted between 2012 and 2014 on the weird, conspiracy-ish site 4chan.  The first two puzzles were solved; the others remain unsolved (and there are still people working on them today).  The stated purpose of the puzzles was to "recruit intelligent individuals," but for whom or what?  Various people suggested the source of the puzzles (and therefore the recruiting agency) could be the CIA, the NSA, M16, Mossad, a free-agent mercenary group, or a "Masonic conspiracy." 

One person who successfully solved the first puzzle was invited to join a private forum, where he was questioned about his knowledge of cryptography and his attitudes toward online freedom and censorship.  He played along for a while, but eventually got spooked and quit the forum -- and later inquiries found that the site itself had been deleted.

To this day no one knows for sure who Cicada 3301 is or what the website's purpose was -- but there's still an online community of people discussing it, over a decade later.

The best example of something on the internet taking on a life of its own, though, is "This Man."  Back in 2008, a website popped up called "Ever Dreamed Of This Man?"  It was accompanied by a sketch:

Along with the image was a story about a "well-known New York City psychiatrist" whose patient reported seeing "This Man" repeatedly in his dreams; when a second patient came to him with a similar tale, the psychiatrist forwarded the sketch to colleagues, and found that a number of them had patients with recurring dreams about the guy -- some neutral, some sexual, some violent.  In some dreams he was the dreamer's father; in others, a teacher; in many of them, he was a stranger.  The one common thread was his appearance -- and the extreme vividness with which people recalled him.

Well, responses started pouring in.  Thousands of people reported dreaming about him, and posted lengthy descriptions of what they'd experienced.  How could this be -- how could people from all over the world suddenly find themselves dreaming about the same man?  Who was the mysterious man, and what could it mean that he was appearing in dreaming minds worldwide?

As you might already be suspecting, the whole tale had been a lie right from the get-go.  There was no "well-known New York City psychiatrist," and the entire set-up of the story was a hoax.  It had all been the brainchild of an Italian online marketer named Andrea Natella to get clicks on his website, and to drum up notoriety for a marketing campaign.  

The responses, however, were very real.  Even when Natella more or less got caught at his game and confessed in 2008, people kept saying they'd dreamed about This Man, and No he's real really he is.  Natella was interviewed by Vice in 2015, and described the whole thing -- how he'd gotten the idea, how he'd been found out, and so on -- and despite that, he is still receiving hundreds of emails and letters every week from people who claim to have dreamed about This Man -- or, weirder still, to have seen him in real life.  A few claim to know who he actually is.  (And we reach weirdvana with an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who contacted Natella to tell him that he is This Man and that's why he has magical guru powers.)

So even shouting "HEY Y'ALL I ADMIT IT I MADE THE WHOLE THING UP" isn't enough to put the quietus on this phenomenon. Once it starts up, it's like these online claims lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and at that point they're unstoppable.  And I have to admit that my friend has a point; without the internet, it's hard to imagine how any of these could have gotten the traction they did.

In any case, we're pretty well stuck with the internet, for good or bad, at least until the next Miyake Event comes along and blows the whole thing to smithereens.  Myself, I'll put up with stuff like This Man, Cicada 3301, and Markovian Parallax Denigrate rather than having to deal with the aftermath of that.

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The zombie claim

One of the fundamental principles of woo-woo-ism is never to let a popular idea die.

You can refute them, you can debunk them, you can show them hard cold facts that what they're saying can't be true, and they will never give up.  It's a little like Donald "It's Only Rigged When I Lose" Trump, isn't it?  The world has to be how they see it, so any evidence to the contrary has to be suppressed, rationalized away, or simply ignored.

This is undoubtedly why I am once again running across references to a claim that I first saw way back in the 1970s -- that the Dogon tribe of Africa had prior knowledge, through contact with "ancient astronauts" from another planet, that the star Sirius has a companion star that is too small to see with the naked eye.  According to this story, they even got the orbital period of this star correct (fifty years, give or take).  Aficionados of UFOs and aliens and so on just love this story, because if true, it would seem to be evidence that a relatively primitive tribe had information that they could only have gotten from an advanced society.

Of course, that last statement is literally true; the advanced society they got it from is France.  The anthropologist who first made the claim of the Dogon's knowledge, Marcel Griaule, is thought to be the one who "contaminated" the Dogon with outside information in the first place.  The discovery that Sirius's companion star ("Sirius B") is a bizarre condensed stellar core called a white dwarf was all over the news in the 1920s, when Griaule was working with the Dogon, and the Dogon themselves are peculiarly fascinated with the stars.  It doesn't take much of a reach to guess that Griaule was the source of the information, especially given that subsequent researchers into the Dogon culture found that the only ones who had actually heard of "po tolo," as they called Sirius B, were the people in the village Griaule had visited.

Sirius A and Sirius B [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Griaule's claim probably would never have gotten much notice if it hadn't been for a 1977 book by Robert Temple called The Sirius Mystery, which rode on the then-recent hype surrounding Erich von Däniken's 1968 smash bestseller Chariots of the Gods, followed by his equally popular books Gold of the Gods, Odyssey of the Gods, Signs of the Gods, Return of the Gods, Retirement Planning Advice of the Gods, and Favorite Easy Recipes of the Gods.  Temple's book covers much of the same sort of ground, and garnered highly dubious responses by Carl Sagan, Jason Colavito, James Oberg, and Ian Ridpath, the latter of whom wrote a thorough takedown of the claim in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1978.  Ridpath shows that to accept that the Dogon somehow knew about Sirius B requires taking their vague, ambiguous, and mythologized accounts (as related by Griaule) and forcing them to conform to the data.  It's more likely -- vastly more likely -- that the Dogon heard bits and pieces about the discovery of the double star from Griaule or one of his staff and incorporated them into their own legends in a piecemeal fashion, than that they somehow got the information from space travelers who'd actually been there.

Ridpath writes:

The point is that there are any number of channels by which the Dogon could have received Western knowledge long before they were visited by Griaule and [Germaine] Dieterlen [an anthropologist who worked with Griaule].  We may never be able to reconstruct the exact route by which the Dogon received their current knowledge, but out of the confusion at least one thing is clear: they were not told by beings from the star Sirius.

Nonetheless, almost fifty years after Ridpath's authoritative takedown, this story is still circulating.  A search for the keywords "Sirius" and "Dogon" garners thousands of hits, and a quick perusal of the first three pages is enough to demonstrate that almost all of them buy Griaule's idea wholesale.  And this points to another, and more depressing conclusion; skeptical thought seems to travel slower than bullshit does.  Ridiculous ideas, like Griaule's claim that ancient astronauts had visited the Dogon, have more of a cachet than do prosaic statements such as "Griaule told 'em himself, and then claimed he'd discovered something amazing."  Who would be motivated to tell a friend something like the latter?  While the former... well, you can see how that story might have a little more tendency to get passed along.

As far as why these things go in cycles, and why there's been a recent resurgence of interest in Sirius and the Dogon -- I have no idea.  The claim this time seems to have been picked up by the Harmonic Convergence people, who think that our current turbulent political situation is an indication that we're about to "ascend" and meet up with Cosmic Masters from another star system.  "Pain and anguish always precede profound change for the better," I saw on one of their websites.  To which I say: cool beans.  All I can add is that y'all Cosmic Masters need to get your ascended celestial asses here pronto, because our current so-called leaders seem to be fucking things up royally.  At this point, I'd look upon an invasion by aliens as an improvement.  I mean, I'm not asking for the Daleks or the Vashta Nerada to show up -- I do have some standards -- but there are a lot of other options.  Even the Borg have their positive aspects, you know?

But since the Borg are a collective interconnected hive-mind, this brings up the question of what would happen if some of these MAGA types got assimilated.  Suppose they Borg-ified Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Would the Collective all of a sudden become way stupider?  After assimilating Mike Johnson they'd probably stop trying to take over new planets and focus on taking away the rights of the ones they'd already assimilated, and then they'd hold a prayer meeting.  Or how about J. D. Vance?  Would they all suddenly develop a strange affinity for sofas?

But I digress.

Anyhow, if you do see the whole Dogon/Sirius B thing popping up, like some undead zombie claim we all thought was long buried, you might want to mention that it was thoroughly debunked all the way back in 1978.  There aren't any Ancient Astronauts, so claiming that they visited a tribe in Africa is even further removed from the truth.

It's time to let this one go, at least for now.  I'm not enough of an optimist to believe it'll ever go away completely, but for now, let's give it a rest, okay?

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Resonant nonsense

One of the problems with targeted-advertisement algorithms is that they're awfully good at picking up on words like "homeopathy" and "crystal healing" and "chemtrails" and not so good a picking up on words like "bollocks" and "lunacy" and "absolute horseshit."

The result is that my work here at Skeptophilia leaves me foundering in a sea of wingnuttery.  The "Recommended For You" pages I get on Facebook are particularly bad, especially given that these days, the way Facebook works is you get twenty "Sponsored" and "Recommended" posts for every one that's from an actual friend, so trying to find out what's going on with your pals requires wading through all the stuff Mark Zuckerberg thinks you desperately need to see but almost certainly would prefer not to.

This is the only possible explanation for how Facebook ended up recommending a page to me called "Schumann Resonance Today."  Those of you who are aficionados of obscure atmospheric phenomena probably know that the Schumann resonances are the resonant radio frequencies of the atmosphere -- similar to how a plucked guitar string has a natural frequency it "wants" to oscillate at (corresponding to the pitch you hear when you pluck it).  Just like the guitar string needs something to set it in motion, the Schumann resonances do, too; in this case, lightning.  Lightning releases not only light and heat and compression waves (sound), but radio waves, and it turns out that those at 7.83 Hertz have the right wavelength to resonate and form a standing wave in the upper atmosphere.  (Once again similar to a guitar string, the atmosphere also has "overtones" -- progressively weaker harmonics at 14.3, 20.8, 27.3, and 33.8 Hertz.)

And that's all they are.  Nothing mystical, nothing that has any effect on humans.  In fact, they weren't even discovered until 1952.

But then you look at the "Schumann Resonance Today" page on Facebook, and... well, let me give you a taste of it.

Each post starts with a graph that looks like this:

And a headline like "WARNING: THE SCHUMANN RESONANCE HAS EXPLODED!!!" followed by "Rolling blackouts expected!  We warned you this was coming!"

If you look at the comments section (Not directly!  Always wear eye protection!) you find out that literally hundreds of people have noticed the explosion of the Schumman resonance, because they report:

• having insomnia
• sleeping way more than usual
• having tons of nervous energy
• having no energy at all
• more "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• fewer "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• pets acting weird

As far as the last-mentioned, I don't know about your pets, but my pets kind of act weird 24/7/365.  In fact, I'd notice it if they stopped acting weird.  Just yesterday morning, I heard "BANG (whimper) BANG (whimper) BANG" so I got up to go see what was going on.  Turns out it had started to rain and Jethro wanted to come inside, and he wanted to bring along his favorite stick, but when it was in his mouth he didn't fit through the doggy door.  So his solution after three or four unsuccessful tries was to sit on the patio in the rain and feel sorry for himself until I came downstairs and rescued him.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the Schumann resonance people are deadly serious that a standing radio wave in the upper atmosphere is somehow impacting their lives.  Here are a few selected comments, which I swear I am not making up:

This full moon and static air has me AWAKE.  I have been manic for a week now.

I’m sleeping deep; inward struggles (46+ years worth due to severe trauma) have been lifted; I’m more focused, hopeful, and optimistic; I feel a spine chilling shift in my spirituality and empathic abilities (ascending) … plus so much more! I’m eternally grateful

Grounding & aligning your central axis with the earth’s supports the integration of the energy

I woke up too early yesterday and then slept great last night. Ringing in my ears in different tones at different times and in different ears. Some days it's more prevalent than others. I guess it's a roller coaster for all of us

These vibrational frequencies affect some people more than others.  Sometimes the answer is increasing your own vibration out of the range of the resonance.  If that doesn't work, sleeping on a grounding sheet can help. 

Has ANYONE noticed there [sic] certain gifts they have, they have gotten stronger?  I play a game with cards, I put a few down and try n guess what’s there.  I’ve been playing around with it bcuz I feel myself smarter?  Every time I pick one I have been spot on.  Anyone else notice lil differences that are big ?

I got a beautiful flash premonition of my next step to my higher life, I received a download that shows me my path.  It was a beautiful experience.

Can someone explain to me what this means?  And if it means it’s time to buy an another gun?

Oh dear lord no please don't buy another gun.  And as far as the rest of you people -- well, I'm happy for your ascending empathic abilities and flash premonitions of higher lives and whatnot, but whatever it is you're experiencing has nothing to with standing radio waves.

And for what it's worth, you're not going to get anywhere by listening to a sound at a frequency of 7.83 Hertz, which I also saw recommended, because sound waves and radio waves aren't the same thing.  And incidentally, "raising the frequencies" is not necessarily a good thing.  If you think "high frequencies = good, low frequencies = bad," how 'bout you listen to a piccolo for three hours and I listen to a cello for three hours, and we'll see which one of us comes away with a splitting headache.

Lest you think this stuff is just the province of a few scattered woo-woos, the "Schumann Resonance Today" page has fifteen thousand followers, and their posts average between six hundred and a thousand likes each.  It'd be comforting to think that some of these are people who follow the page simply for the humor value, but after looking at the comments, I'm forced to the conclusion that the vast majority of these folks are True Believers.

I find this colossally frustrating.  To learn what the Schumann resonances are -- and how (frankly) prosaic the phenomenon is -- all you have to do is read the post on Skeptoid I linked above, which was the first non-woo hit I found after a fifteen-second Google search; failing that, just read the damn Wikipedia article.  Both are clear about how the resonances work, that they have nothing to do with human health, and that all of the "Resonances EXPLODED" stuff is utter nonsense.

So I'm forced to the conclusion that this isn't only an example of superstition, pseudoscience, and confirmation bias, it's an example of laziness.  The answers, the real answers, are out there; and -- unlike, for example, quantum physics -- in this case the actual science isn't even that hard to understand.  There is no excuse for falling for this kind of foolishness, not with the access we now have to real, factual knowledge.

I'll end with an exhortation to all of us to get out there and learn some damn science before we start posting stuff on social media.  And as far as the Facebook algorithms -- get your fucking act together.  Seems like after thirteen years of writing Skeptophilia, y'all'd have figured out that recommending pages like this to me is seriously barking up the wrong tree.

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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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In the blink of an eye

One of the things I love about science is how it provides answers to questions that are so ordinary that few of us appreciate how strange they are.

I remember how surprised I was when I first heard a question about our vision that had honestly never occurred to me.  You know how images jump around when you're filming with a hand-held videocamera?  Even steady-handed people make videos that are seriously nausea-inducing, and when the idea is to make it look like it's filmed by amateurs -- such as in the movie The Blair Witch Project -- the result looks like it was produced by strapping a camera to the head of a kangaroo on crack.

What's a little puzzling is why the world doesn't appear to jump around like that all the time.  I mean, think about it; if you walk down the hall holding a videocamera on your shoulder, and watch the video and compare it to the way the hall looked while you were walking, you'll see the image bouncing all over the place on the video, but won't have experienced that with your eyes.  Why is that?

The answer certainly isn't obvious.  One guess scientists have is that we stabilize the images we see, and compensate for small movements of our head, by using microsaccades -- tiny, involuntary, constant jitters of the eyes.  The thought is that those little back-and-forth movements allow your brain to smooth out the image, keeping us from seeing the world as jumping around every time we move.

Another question about visual perception that I had never thought about was the subject of some research out of New York University and the University Medical Center of Göttingen that was published in the journal Current Biology.  Why don't you have the perception of the world going dark for a moment when you blink?  After all, most of us blink about once every five seconds, and we don't have the sense of a strobe effect.  In fact, most of us are unaware of any change in perception whatsoever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mcorrens, Iris of the Human Eye, CC BY-SA 3.0]

By studying patients who had lesions in the cerebrum, and comparing them to patients with intact brains, the scientists were not only able to answer this question, but to pinpoint exactly where this phenomenon happens -- the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain immediately behind the forehead.  What they found was that individuals with an intact dmPFC store a perceptual memory of what they've just seen, and use that to form the perception they're currently seeing, so the time during which there's no light falling on the retina -- when you blink -- doesn't even register.  On the other hand, a patient with a lesion in the dmPFC lost that ability, and didn't store immediate perceptual memories.  The result?  Every time she blinked, it was like a shutter closed on the world.

"We were able to show that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in perception and in context-dependent behavior," said neuroscientist Caspar Schwiedrzik, who was lead author of the study.  "Our research shows that the medial prefrontal cortex calibrates current visual information with previously obtained information and thus enables us to perceive the world with more stability, even when we briefly close our eyes to blink...  This is not only true for blinking but also for higher cognitive functions.  Even when we see a facial expression, this information influences the perception of the expression on the next face that we look at."

All of which highlights that all of our perceptual and integrative processes are way more sophisticated than they seem at first.  It also indicates something that's a little scary; that what we're perceiving is partly what's really out there, and partly what our brain is telling us it thinks is out there.  Which is right more often than not, of course.  If that weren't true, natural selection would have finished us off a long time ago.  But that fraction of the times that it's wrong, it can create some seriously weird sensations -- or make us question things that we'd always taken for granted.

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Old fake news

Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whose passion for history (coupled with an understanding of how fragile and easily lost books are) led him to compile a 53-volume set of transcripts of the writings from historians of antiquity.  His work preserved accounts for which we have no other copies, so without his tireless efforts, huge chunks of the history of early Europe would now be unknown and unknowable.

And that's even taking into account that of his original 53 volumes, only four of them survived.

So many works of ancient writers are lost forever, some to natural disasters like fire, flood, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but others to deliberate destruction -- often motivated by religious fervor, or the desperation by rulers to discredit their rivals and predecessors.  This latter, which was all too common after there'd been conflict over succession, led to the systematic purging of works painting previous regimes in a positive light.

The loss of primary sources makes the job of modern historians hard enough.  But a further complication arises when you consider the question of what happens when one of the documents that did survive is unreliable.

This is exactly the situation with regards to a major source of our knowledge of the later Roman Empire, from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117 - 138 C.E.) to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carinus (283-285 C.E.).  The document is called the Historia Augusta and seems to have been written during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (285-305 C.E.).  Diocletian himself was looked upon early in his reign as a usurper -- he wasn't of royal blood, but was a soldier who rose up through the ranks -- so it's no wonder that a writer during his reign would be motivated to dig up all the dirt he could on the preceding dynasties.

"Okay, they may have been royals, but a lot of 'em were loonies," seems to have been the approach.  "Diocletian, on the other hand, will Make Rome Great Again."

Cover of an eighteenth-century edition of the Historia Augusta, from Ettal Abbey, Germany [Image is in the Public Domain]

To be fair, there was a lot to be critical of, especially in the last half of the period the Historia covers.  The fifty-year time period between the assassination of the Emperor Severus Alexander (235 C.E.) and the accession of Diocletian is known to historians as the "Crisis of the Third Century" because it was marked by chaos, lawlessness, and one short-lived ruler after another.  

The problem with the Historia is that for a lot of the period, there's nothing to cross-check it against.  There are chunks of material that have no attestation anywhere else; it's literally the only source that's survived.  There's an ongoing debate amongst historians about its accuracy, and some believe that even many of the sources the Historia cites are themselves made up.  The historian Anthony R. Birley, of Universität Düsseldorf, did an analysis published in the journal Classica called "Rewriting Second- and Third-Century History in Late Antique Rome: the Historia Augusta" in which he estimates the total amount of reliable historical information in the document as only seventeen percent -- from a high of thirty-three percent in the section on the life of Marcus Opellius Macrinus all the way down to a flat zero for the accounts of the usurpers Firmus, Saturnius, Proculus, and Bonosus, all of whom immediately preceded Diocletian's rise to wearing the purple.

Probably not a coincidence, that.

Historical research always runs into the problem that accurate records are no more likely to survive than inaccurate ones.  Also, there's the whole "history is written by the victors" thing, which complicates our understanding of any period of history where there was regime change.  But considering the problem of the Historia Augusta has made me wonder how historians of the future will read the documents from the United States of 2025.  Not only are the members of the Trump regime lying their asses off about what's going on, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson's claim that the economy was tanking under President Biden, and that Trump's repeatedly playing Tariff Peekaboo with Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. is somehow going to get it back on track, they're actively destroying documents having accurate information about what's happening.

My fear is that the Crisis of the Twenty-First Century won't end up any better understood by historians than the Crisis of the Third Century is.

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The stellar forges

A criticism sometimes aimed at us science types is that our obsession with naming, classifying, and explaining everything in the universe robs us of its wonder.  Why, they ask, do we have to get so damn technical about everything?  Why can't we just look at the stars, or the flowers, or a bird in flight, and appreciate their beauty?

Well, needless to say, I disagree with that pretty strenuously.  My understanding of science -- which, admittedly, is that of a reasonably well-read layperson's -- only adds to my sense of wonder.  For me, it's a case of the more you know, the more amazing it gets.

Let me give you an example of that -- a piece of research out of the University of Arizona that used the James Webb Space Telescope to peer far out into space (and thus, far back in time), and found something astonishing.  Something, in fact, that would appear quite mundane, meriting only a "So what?', if you didn't know some science.

Here's a capsule summary of the research -- then an explanation of why it's way cooler, and more surprising, than it appears at first.

The JWST just released a spectral analysis of a galaxy called JADES-GS-z14-0, which is about 13.5 billion light years away.  That's a pretty impressive feat; this means the light from it left on its journey to us when the universe was only two percent of its current age.  This, in fact, means the galaxy itself formed not long (in astronomical terms) after the cosmic microwave background radiation, the earliest remnants of radiation released when the universe settled down enough to allow photons to travel unimpeded.

Just seeing JADES is amazing enough.  "Imagine a grain of sand at the end of your arm," said Jakob Helton, who led the research.  "You see how large it is on the sky -- that's the size of the region we looked at."

The shocker came when they did an analysis of its spectrum, and found that it had high amounts of oxygen.  But why this is surprising -- why, in fact, it's going to force a rethinking of our understanding of how stars and galaxies form -- is where you have to know some background.

When heated or otherwise energized, each element emits a characteristic fingerprint of frequencies of light known as its emission spectrum.  The fact that these specific frequencies and no others are emitted was key to the development of quantum theory; energy levels in atoms are quantized, or exist in discrete steps, and an atom can no more emit a different frequency of light than you could go down a step-and-three-quarters on your staircase.  Because of these spectral fingerprints, it's now possible to determine the composition of distant stars by looking for the characteristic spectral lines of common elements in the star's spectrum.  This is how Helton et al. figured out that JADES contains large amounts of oxygen.

The emission spectrum of oxygen [Image is in the Public Domain]

Thing is, it shouldn't.  We have lots of oxygen here on Earth because the primordial cloud from which the Solar System condensed had a bunch of it; so, in fact, does the Sun, since it formed from the same cloud.  Alien astronomers could look at the Sun through their telescopes and figure that out the same way that we do.  But oxygen, it turns out, doesn't form all that readily.  The Solar System is oxygen-enriched because the Sun is (at least) a third-generation star.  In the very early universe, when there was nothing much around but hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium -- the atoms that were formed during the Big Bang itself -- stars had vanishingly small "metal content."  (To astrophysicists, "metals" are any elements heavier than helium.)  As those first stars underwent fusion in their cores, hydrogen was converted to helium, then helium to lithium and carbon; at the end of their lives, those stars that were heavy enough went supernova, and the pressures and temperatures of those colossal explosions not only generated "metals" but distributed them back into space.

Second-generation stars formed from the debris left behind by the explosion of first-generation stars.  Those second-generation stars, during the course of their lives and deaths, would have produced more "metals," and the cycle repeated, ultimately leading to the richness of composition we see in our own Solar System.

But it takes a while.  The amount of oxygen even in early third-generation stars is pretty small.  So where did all the oxygen in an extremely early galaxy like JADES come from?

We don't know.  "It's a very complicated cycle to get as much oxygen as this galaxy has," said study senior author George Rieke.  "So, it is genuinely mind boggling."

So there's evidently something about star formation and galaxy evolution we're missing.  Stars forming only three hundred million years after the Big Bang should be just about entirely hydrogen and helium.  And chances are, JADES is almost certainly not the only anomalous early object.  "The fact that we found this galaxy in a tiny region of the sky means that there should be more of these out there," Helton said. "If we looked at the whole sky, which we can't do with JWST, we would eventually find more of these extreme objects."

For me, it's lovely to look up into the sky on a clear night, but my enjoyment is much enhanced by the fact that I know a little bit about what I'm looking at.  The stars are stellar forges, creating all the matter around us -- we are truly, as Carl Sagan famously said, "made of star stuff."

In short: science itself is beautiful.  Understanding how the world works should do nothing but increase our sense of wonder.  If scientific inquiry isn't accompanied by a sense of "Wow, this is amazing!", you're doing it wrong.  I'll end with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? had the following to say:

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with.  He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree.  But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is.  But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."  I think he's kind of nutty. …  There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.  It only adds.  I don't understand how it subtracts.

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