Speaking to the wind

A scarily long list of friends who have been coping with serious illnesses in the last six months has brought home to me how fragile life is.

We all know that, of course, but usually it's in a purely theoretical sense.  We're aware that any day could be our last, any time we see a loved one might be goodbye.  But somehow, we rarely ever act that way.  We -- and I very much include myself in this assessment -- waste time in pointless and joyless activities, squander potential, treat the people we meet cavalierly.  In general, we act as if we have forever and don't have any reason to treat the time we have now as our most precious possession.

It's a sad truth that often when we find out our error, it's too late.  The time for the chances we could have taken is past, the person we cared for has moved out of our orbit (either temporarily or permanently), the opportunity to apologize and make amends for a wrong we committed has long since passed.  It's sad, but its ubiquity points to it all being part of the human condition.  The peculiar magnetism of books and movies where you can reverse the clock and fix past mistakes -- like Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future and the devastatingly poignant Doctor Who episode "Turn Left," as well as my own novel Lock & Key -- points to how universal this kind of longing is.

The Japanese have come up with two quirky, oddly beautiful ways of dealing with this.  The first was the brainchild of a garden designer named Ituro Sasaki, who in 2010 found out that a beloved cousin was suffering from inoperable cancer.  When the cousin died three months later, Sasaki designed a beautiful garden in his honor, and the centerpiece was...

... a phone booth.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthew Komatsu (https://longreads.com/2019/03/11/after-the-tsunami/)]

He calls it the "Wind Phone" (風の電話, Kaze no Denwa) because the telephone inside is "connected to nothing but the wind."  He wanted to be able to talk to his cousin, even knowing he couldn't respond, and after finishing the installation Sasaki spent hours sitting in this lovely spot telling his cousin about all the beauty he was seeing, and all the things he regretted not saying while he was alive.  He didn't think his cousin was actually listening, but still felt it absolutely necessary to say it all out loud.  "Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki explained, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind."

Then, in 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake killed almost twenty thousand people in the region, including twelve hundred in Ōtsuchi, Sasaki's home town -- around ten percent of the population.  This moved him to open his garden and the Wind Phone to the public, and it has since been visited by over thirty thousand people.

As strange as it sounds, it has become a place where people find an anodyne for the twin tragedies of human existence -- regret and grief.

The other one is located in Mitoyo, on Awashima Island in Kagawa Prefecture.  It's called the "Missing Post Office" (漂流郵便局, Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku), and was the creation of artist Saya Kubota.  Kubota came up with idea when she visited the island looking for inspiration for the Setouchi International Art Festival.  She was passing the Mitoyo Post Office and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and thought, "How did I wash up here?"  The idea struck her that we all are caught up in currents not of our own making, and sometimes end up very far from where we intended -- for good or bad.  "I wanted to create a space where people could experience the same sensation I did," Kubota said.

So she designed a small building that looked like a real post office, the purpose of which was to receive letters and post cards from people about whatever they most wanted to say, but had never had the chance.  It succeeded beyond Kubota's wildest dream.  The Missing Post Office receives almost four thousand deliveries a month, in which people talk about their first loves, dearly missed relatives and friends, regrets, hopes, dreams.  There have been messages directed at ancestors or future descendants.  Some people even send their favorite possessions, along with a description of why the items are so important.  Some are anonymous, but many are signed; more than one has written about how comforting it was to be able to speak their truth, even knowing that it can't change the past.  Kubota displays the letters and postcards, and visitors to the Missing Post Office have described how emotionally cathartic it is to read about what others have experienced and written about -- and to recognize that they are not alone in their own feelings.

The Missing Post Office, Mitoyo, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nozomi-N700, Missing Post Office building（Japan, Kagawa Prefecture Mitoyo Takuma cho Awashima）, CC BY-SA 4.0]

If you would like to write your own message to the Missing Post Office, the address is c/o Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku, 1317-2 Takumacho Awashima, Mitoyo Kagawa 769-1108, Japan.

While the idea of being able to go back and fix past mistakes is attractive, time's arrow appears to point in one direction only.  "The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyám, "and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."  Correcting past wrongs, saying what we should have said to the people we love, and making different decisions at critical junctures (an astonishing number of which we never recognized as critical at the time) will always be out of reach.  But maybe there is some solace to be gained by saying what we need to say now, even if it's just spoken to the wind through disconnected phone, or written on a postcard and sent away to a distant island to be read and wept over by strangers.

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Reality vs. allegory

When I was about twenty, I stumbled upon the book The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav.  The book provides a non-mathematical introduction to the concepts of quantum mechanics, which is good, I suppose; but then it attempts to tie it to Eastern mysticism, which is troubling to anyone who actually understands the science.

But as a twenty-year-old -- even a twenty-year-old physics major -- I was captivated.  I went from there to Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which pushes further into the alleged link between modern physics and the wisdom of the ancients.  In an editorial review of the book, we read:

First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics rode the wave of fascination in exotic East Asian philosophies.  Decades later, it still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels...  (T)he big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things.  Capra finds the same notions in modern physics.

In part, I'm sure my positive reaction to these books was because I was in the middle of actually taking a class in quantum mechanics, and it was, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking hard.  I had thought of myself all along as quick at math, but the math required for this class was brain-bendingly difficult.  It was a relief to escape into the less rigorous world of Capra and Zukav.

To get a feel for the difference, first read a quote from the Wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics, chosen because it was one of the easier ones to understand:

(B)eing closed loops, (they) imply the presence of diverging integrals having no mathematical meaning.  To overcome this difficulty, a technique called renormalization has been devised, producing finite results in very close agreement with experiments.  It is important to note that a criterion for theory being meaningful after renormalization is that the number of diverging diagrams is finite.  In this case the theory is said to be renormalizable.  The reason for this is that to get observables renormalized one needs a finite number of constants to maintain the predictive value of the theory untouched.  This is exactly the case of quantum electrodynamics displaying just three diverging diagrams.  This procedure gives observables in very close agreement with experiment as seen, e.g. for electron gyromagnetic ratio.

Compare that to Capra's take on things, in a quote from The Tao of Physics:

Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.  The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another.  For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.  As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon.  Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes.  In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arpad Horvath, CERN shiva, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It all sounds nice, doesn't it?  No need for hard words like "renormalization" and "gyromagnetic ratio," no messy mathematics.  Just imagining particles dancing, waving around their four little quantum arms, just like Shiva.

The problem here, though, isn't just laziness; and I've commented on the laziness inherent in the woo-woo movement often enough that I don't need to write about it further.  But there's a second issue, one often overlooked by laypeople, and that is "mistaking analogy for reality."

Okay, I'll go so far as to say that the verbal descriptions of quantum mechanics sound like some of the "everything that happens influences everyone and everything, all the time" stuff from Buddhism and Hinduism -- the interconnectedness of all, a concept that is explained in the beautiful allegory of "Indra's Net:"

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. [Francis Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism, 1977]

But does this mean what some have claimed, that the Hindus discovered the underlying tenets of quantum mechanics millennia ago?

Hardly.  Just because two ideas have some similarities doesn't mean that they are, at their basis, saying the same thing.  You could say that Hinduism has some parallels to quantum mechanics -- parallels that I would argue are accidental, and not really all that persuasive when you dig into them more deeply.  But those parallels don't mean that Hinduism as a whole is true, or that the mystics who devised it were somehow prescient.

In a way, we science teachers are at fault for this, because so many of us teach by analogy.  I did it all the time: antibodies are like cellular trash tags; enzyme/substrate interactions are like keys and locks; the Krebs cycle is like a merry-go-round where two kids get on and two kids get off at each turn.  But hopefully, our analogies are transparent enough that no one comes away with the impression that they are describing what is really happening.  Fortunately, I can say that I never saw a student begin an essay on the Krebs cycle by talking about merry-go-rounds and children.

The line gets blurred, though, when the reality is so odd, and the actual description of it (i.e. the mathematics) so abstruse, that most non-scientists can't really wrap their brain around it.  Then there is a real danger of substituting a metaphor for the truth.  It's not helped by persuasive, charismatic writers like Capra and Zukav, nor the efforts of True Believers to cast the science as supporting their religious ideas, because it helps to prop up their own worldview (you can read an especially egregious example of this here).

After a time in my twenties when I was seduced by pretty allegories, I finally came to the conclusion that the reality was better -- and, in its own way, breathtakingly beautiful (albeit still really fucking hard).  Take the time to learn what the science actually says, and I think you'll find it a damnsight more interesting and elegant than Shiva and Indra and the rest of 'em.  And best of all: it's actually true.

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Prophecy update

Hard as it is to believe, we're over halfway through 2025.  On the one hand, it seems like it's flown.  On the other, any amount of time spent living through the Trump regime is going to feel like having your feet in the fire, so it's a mixed bag.

Maybe there's something in Einstein's theory to explain this, given that he said "time is relative" and all.

I thought this might be a good point to check in on our psychic predictions for the year and see how the psychics were faring.  We still have a bit over four months left to go, and the final scorecard won't be certain till December 31, so think of this as being a bit of mid-game analysis.

Some of them, however, go right down to the wire.  Like the TikTok clip of a woman running up to a couple on the beach in Saint Augustine, Florida, shrieking, "I know what's coming!", pointing to the waves, and then running away.  The guy who posted it said the video is dated December 30, 2025.  How that's possible, I have no idea.  In any case, he advised us all to "flag this post in case anything weird happens."

Of course, it works the other way, too.  If you pinpoint a date, it's much easier to prove wrong.  Despite an alleged prediction by Alexa that there would be a "strong 8.2 magnitude earthquake in the Philippines, along with an eruption of Mount Pinatubo," April 23 dawned and nothing had happened.  So the take-home message for would-be prophets is "keep it vague so no one can say you're definitively wrong."

That's the approach of Nostradamus, who couched his prophecies in such arcane, weird, and symbolic language that you can interpret them to mean pretty much any damn thing you want.  The 2025 predictions from the mysterious Frenchman are supposedly for "global conflict, natural disasters, and shifts in environmental patterns," which are a pretty good bet in any year, but also supposedly we're in for a "large asteroid falling from the sky, followed by a great fire on Earth."  Which would be hard to miss.  Thus far I haven't seen any sign of it, and NASA has assured us that of the asteroids it knows about, none pose an immediate threat.

None it knows about.  Or is willing to tell us about.  Amirite?  *slow single eyebrow raise*

In any case, so far so good on the giant asteroid front.  Although I have to say if it targeted Mar-a-Lago, I might be in the pro-asteroid camp.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gunnshots (Don), Psychic reading, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Then there's Baba Vanga, the blind Bulgarian mystic who according to some sources left behind enough prophecies at her death in 1996 to last us until the year 5079.  This is also a smart tactic, because not many of us will be around for that long, so saying "In the year 4537, a freak hurricane will flatten Hoboken" falls into the "unverifiable even in theory" department.  But fortunately, we have her predictions for 2025, and they include a few doozies.  Aliens are going to "make contact during a major sporting event," which sure would add some spice to the halftime show.  Medical science will take a huge leap forward when researchers figure out how to grow fully-functional human organs in vitro.  Physicists will discover a new energy source that is "clean, limitless, and unlike anything we've seen before."  And human telepathy will become a reality, meaning that we'll be able to communicate with each other with no intermediate medium necessary.

I don't know about you, but I'm not thrilled about this last one.  Exposing some innocent person to the chaos that goes on inside my skull just seems mean.  I explored the whole "telepathy is not pleasant" idea in my Parsifal Snowe Mysteries series (currently out of print but hopefully back soon), in the character of the tortured psychic Callista Lee -- who describes ordinary existence as being trapped in a crowded, noisy bar 24/7.  Keep in mind, though, that this series is fiction.

In any case, Baba is batting a big fat zero so far.

Then we have John Sommers-Flanagan, whose predictions include Superbowl LIX ending with the Bills beating the Lions 36-30 (the actual outcome was Eagles 40, Chiefs 22).  Otherwise, he chose to play it safe, saying we'd have rising temperatures and food prices, falling economic strength and consumer confidence, and that Trump will continue to be an ignorant, racist, authoritarian fascist-wannabe schmuck.  (Not in those exact words, but that's the gist.)  In any case, those all fall into the "Who Could Have Predicted This Besides Everyone?" department.  

So the predictions thus far have kind of been a bust.  Of course, to be fair to the psychics, we do still have four months for all of it to happen.  Me, I'm hoping Baba Vanga's aliens do show up.  At this point, I don't particularly care if they're hostile:

Alien: Ha ha, puny earthling, we have come here to slaughter your leaders, subjugate your entire planet, and rule you for all eternity!

Me:  Okay, go for it

Alien:  ... wait, what?

Me:  You heard me.  Hop to it, lazy, we don't have all fucking day

But given their track record (the psychics, not the aliens), I'm thinking we're probably going to remain stuck with the "leaders" we have.  On the other hand, if you live in Saint Augustine, Florida, you might want to stay away from the beach on December 30.  You wouldn't want to throw caution to the wind if this turns out to be the one time the psychics nailed it, and get eaten by Cthulhu or something.  As my dad used to say, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

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Scamalot

I'm too trusting sometimes.

I think it comes from the fact that I try my hardest to treat people kindly and fairly, so I make the mistaken assumption that most other people act the same way.  This is a strategy that works well until it doesn't.  Because while there are lots of good people out there, there are a significant number who simply aren't.

The subset of these malefactors I run into the most often are scammers.  Being a struggling author, I get daily emails from people who are trying to take my two-digit monthly royalty statement and convert it into a one-digit monthly royalty statement via fake offers for promotion and marketing.  The whole enterprise is evil -- preying on the hopes and dreams of a hard-working creative to enrich their own bank accounts while giving nothing of value in return.

Simply put, these people are parasites.  The tapeworms of the publishing industry.

I generally just delete emails from scammers, but I have to admit that my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, has an inspired approach:

Scammer:  Hello Mr. Author Andrew Butters.

Andrew: No.

So it's fortunate that a great many of them aren't all that good at it.  The majority of the scam promotion emails I get have a slick, glib feel that my wife thinks (and I agree) comes from having fed my Amazon book blurbs into an AI program, but this hasn't stopped them from sometimes accidentally blundering and giving away the game.  I got not one, but two emails targeting my novel Lock & Key that started out exactly the same way:

Darren Ault shoots a bullet, humanity vanishes, and suddenly Vikings, cults, and a foul-mouthed librarian of timelines are all part of the mix—Lock & Key reads like a full-blown temporal rollercoaster.  Yet your reviews are far fewer than the epic adventures inside.  Your mix of humor, mind-bending time travel, and irreverent sci-fi is exactly the type of story that clicks with this group.  Want to see what happens when 2,000+ readers dive in and leave verified reviews that could boost your book across the sci-fi/fantasy world?

Never mind that on page one, we find out that Darren was the victim, not the shooter, and the entire fucking story is working out why he wasn't killed when he was shot point-blank in the head.

I also had one regarding my novella Convection that read like a book report written by someone who hadn't actually read the book, but is a real master at using florid language:

I just reviewed Convection, and it’s an atmospheric, slow-burn survival thriller that delivers on multiple fronts, natural disaster suspense, psychological tension, and a creeping sense of dread.  The Bayou Vista Apartments setting is brilliantly claustrophobic: a handful of strangers trapped together while a Category 5 hurricane pounds the Louisiana coast, each bringing their own secrets to the storm.  Your pacing turns the hurricane into both a physical and emotional pressure cooker, while the ensemble cast dynamics keep the tension sharp and unpredictable.

Well, thank you for all that, but once again, there's nothing there you couldn't have learned from the book blurb.  At least, unlike the Lock & Key scams, you didn't miss the whole damn point of the story.

I do get a laugh out of the ones who can't even make the scam sound authentic.  I have had emails start out "Hello Bonnet," which strikes me as a little abrupt if you're trying to hook me in to giving you money.  I had another tell me how much they'd enjoyed my book If Only You Knew, which isn't even close to any of my book titles.  And just last week I had one that began, I shit you not, "Hello Anastasia."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Scam by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images]

But none of these came as close to catching me flat-footed as the exchange I recently had with someone who claimed to be the award-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, which started out with a nice (and not at all fulsome or overdone) comment about how she'd seen my Facebook author page and thought my books sounded interesting.

To my own credit, my first thought was to wonder why an author of Ottessa Moshfegh's stature would be hanging around on the Facebook author page of a relative unknown like myself, but... well, the algorithm is weird, and I do often see pages for people I've never heard of.  And the other peculiar thing is that I don't promote my books much on Facebook (hell, I don't promote my books much period, but that's another matter).  But there was something about her initial email that was so low-key and casual that it took me off my guard.

So we had an email exchange that was courteous and friendly, asking about stuff like what my inspirations were and which of my books would be the best to start with.  I asked her the same thing, and got thoughtful responses that sounded entirely authentic.

Then, in an informal, almost offhand way, she asked me how I was doing with marketing.  That was the point I definitely got that old by-the-pricking-of-my-thumbs feeling.  I responded that it was the part of the job I hated the most, because I kind of suck at self-promotion.  She came back with a heartfelt, "We all feel that way!"... but she knew a good publicist, and if I was interested she could put us in touch.

Aha.  There it is.

Fortunately, the real Ottessa Moshfegh has a Substack with "contact me" information (linked above), so I decided to do a little reality check.  I sent her an email saying that I'd had a nice exchange with someone who claimed to be her, and if it really was her then cool beans, but if not I thought she should know she had an impersonator.  A day later, she wrote back.

It was not her.  And she was pissed.

Not at me, of course.  In fact, she apologized to me (not that it was in any way her fault), and thanked me for letting her know.  The real Ottessa seems like a class act, and it double sucks that a scammer would impersonate her, and use her name, reputation, and cachet to try to bilk a starving (well, figuratively speaking, anyhow) author like myself.

The upshot is that Pseudottessa buggered off and I haven't heard from her since.  But if she happens to be reading this, here's a message from me and from real Ottessa:

Go to hell.

So I may be trusting, but I'm learning.  I might get fooled for a little while, but it's never long enough that I'm even tempted to give them money.  Part of this is that I'm a world-class skinflint, but it's also that I've had enough experience with people in the publishing world who make extravagant promises and then deliver fuck-all that I've gotten wary.

I'm still generally an optimist about people; I think on the whole it's better than being a cynic.  My dad used to say "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right," and I think that's spot-on.  But it's also made me hate scammers even more, because they take advantage of people's naïveté and trust, and that's just an ugly thing to do.

So be on the lookout for these guys.  Especially with the help of AI, they're getting pretty fancy about it, and it's easy to see how the unwary might be taken in.  Not all of them are as stupid as the guy who thought my name was Anastasia.  And mark my words, as we get better at recognizing them, they'll find other, better tricks to pull.

Evolution in the Kingdom of Scamalot.  Which is kind of a scary thought.

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Facing facts

"I'm sorry, but I have no idea who you are."

I can't tell you how many times I've had to utter that sentence.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia know why; I have a peculiar disability called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness."  I have a nearly complete inability to recognize faces, even of people I've known for some time.

Well, that's not exactly true.  I recognize people differently than other people do.  I remember the people I know as lists of features.  I know my wife has curly brown hair and freckles and an infectious smile, but I honestly have no mental image of her.  I can't picture my own face, although -- like with my wife -- I could list some of my features.

That system doesn't have a high success rate, however, and a lot of the time I have no idea who the people around me are, especially in a place where there are few clues from context.  I have pretty serious social anxiety, and my condition makes it worse, having put me in the following actual situations:

• introducing myself twice to the same person at a party
• getting a big, enthusiastic hug and an "it's been so long!" from someone in our local gym, and never figuring out who I was talking to
• having two of my students switch seats and not realizing it for three weeks, until finally they 'fessed up
• going to see a movie, and not knowing until the credits rolled that the main characters were played by Kenneth Branagh, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, and Johnny Depp
• countless incidents of my fishing for clues ("so, how's your, um... spouse, parents, kids, pets, job..."), sometimes fruitlessly

My anxiety has made me really good at paying attention to, and recalling, other cues like voice, manner of dress, posture, walk, hair style, and so on.  But when one or more of those change -- such as with the student I had one year who cut her hair really short during the summer, and whom I didn't recognize when she showed up in one of my classes on the first day of school the following year -- it doesn't always work.

One up side to the whole thing is that I do get asked some funny questions.  One student asked me if when I looked at people, their faces were invisible.  Another asked me if when I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, I don't know that's me.  (It's a pretty shrewd guess that it is me, since there's generally no one else in there at the time.)

But at least it's not as bad as the dumb questions that my former students who are identical triplets sometimes get.  One of them was once asked by a friend how she kept track of which triplet she was.

No, I'm not kidding.  Neither, apparently, was the person who asked the question.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Randallbritten, FaceMachine screenshots collage, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, all of this comes up because of some research that came out in the journal Cortex that tried to parse what's happening (or what's not happening) in the brains of people like me.  Some level of prosopagnosia affects about one person in fifty; some of them lose their facial recognition ability because of a stroke or other damage to the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that seems to be a dedicated face-memory module.  Others, like me, were born this way.  Interestingly, a lot of people who have lifelong prosopagnosia take a while to figure it out; for years, I just thought I was unobservant, forgetful, or a little daft.  (All three of those might be true as well, of course.)  It was only after I had enough embarrassing incidents occur, and -- most importantly -- saw an eye-opening piece about face blindness by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, that I realized what was going on.

In any case, the paper in Cortex looked at trying to figure out why people who are face-blind often do just fine on visual perception tests, then fail utterly when it comes to remembering photographs of faces.  The researchers specifically tried to parse whether the difference was coming from an inability to connect context cues to the face you're seeing (e.g., looking at someone and thinking, "She's the woman who was behind the counter at the library last week") versus simple familiarity (the more nebulous and context-free feeling of "I've seen that person before").  They showed each test subject (some of whom weren't face-blind) a series of 120 faces, then a second series of 60 faces where some of them were new and some of them were in the previous series.  The researchers were not only looking for whether the subjects could correctly pick out the old faces, but how confident they were in their answers -- the surmise being that low confidence on correct answers was an indicator of relying on familiarity rather than context memory.

The prosopagnosics in the test group not only were bad at identifying which faces were old and which ones they'd seen before; but their confidence was really low, even on the ones they got right.  Normally-sighted people showed a great deal more certainty in their answers.  What occurs to me, though, is that knowing they're face-blind would skew the results, in that we prosopagnosics are always doubtful we're recalling correctly.  So these data could be a result of living with the condition, not some kind of underlying mechanism at work.  I almost never greet someone first, because even if I think I might know them, I'm never certain.  A lot of people think I'm aloof because of this, but the reality is that I honestly don't know which of the people I'm seeing are friends and which are total strangers.

One thing about the researchers' conclusion does ring true, however.  The subconscious "feeling of familiarity" is definitely involved.  My experience of face blindness isn't that I feel like I'm surrounded by strangers; it's more that everyone looks vaguely familiar.  The problem is, that feeling is no stronger when I see a close friend than when I see someone I've never met before, so the intensity of that sense -- what apparently most people rely on -- doesn't help me.

So that's the view of the world through the eyes of someone who more often than not doesn't know who he's looking at.  Fortunately for me, (1) at this point in my life I'm unembarrassed by my condition, and (2) most of the people in my little village know I'm face-blind and will say, "Hi, Gordon, it's Steve..." when they walk up, and spare me the awkwardness of fishing for clues.  (Nota bene: This only works if it actually is Steve.  Otherwise it would be even more awkward.)  But hopefully some good will come from this research, because face blindness is kind of a pain in the ass.

"Our results underscore that prosopagnosia is a far more complex disorder that is driven by more than deficits in visual perception," said study first author Anna Stumps, a researcher in the Boston Attention Learning Laboratory at VA Boston.  "This finding can help inform the design of new training approaches for people with face blindness."

Which would be really, really nice.

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The collapse

You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.

I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way.  While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about.  As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that.  As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.

Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity.  I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend).  For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse.  All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.

No wonder so many of them were superstitious.  It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.

What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely.  There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine).  But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed.  Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:PhilippN, Calakmul - Structure I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings.  Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.

And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts.  Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders.  Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.

It's easy to think something like this couldn't happen to us, but right now we're in the middle of one of the most dramatic climate shifts on record, with global average temperatures rising faster than they did during the terrifying Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.  And you know what the Trump regime's response to this is?

Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites.  Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine.  Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.

No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic.  If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.

Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course.  It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.

So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking.  But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.  

This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand.  It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.

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Requiem for a dead planet

If I had to pick my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the clear winner would be "The Inner Light."  Some classic episodes like "Darmok," "Frames of Mind," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "The Offspring," "Cause and Effect," "Remember Me," "Time's Arrow," "The Chase," and "Best of Both Worlds" would be some stiff competition, but "The Inner Light" not only has a beautiful story, but a deep, heartwrenching bittersweetness, made even more poignant by a tour-de-force performance by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

If you've not seen it, the plot revolves around the Enterprise encountering a huge space station of some kind, of apparent antiquity, and in the course of examining it, it zaps Captain Picard and renders him unconscious.  What his crew doesn't know is that it's dropped him into a dream where he's not a spaceship captain but an ordinary guy named Kamin, who has a wife and children and a job as a scientist trying to figure out what to do about the effect of his planet's sun, which has increased in intensity and is threatening devastating drought and famine.

As Kamin, he lives for forty years, watching his children grow up, living through the grief of his wife's death and the death of a dear friend, and ultimately grows old without ever finding a solution to his planet's dire circumstances.  All the while, the real Captain Picard is being subjected to ongoing interventions by Dr. Crusher to determine what's keeping him unconscious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring him out of it.  In the end, which makes me ugly cry every damn time I watch it, Kamin lives to watch the launch of an archive of his race's combined knowledge, realizing that the sun's increase in intensity is leading up to a nova that will destroy the planet, and that their civilization is doomed.  It is, in fact, the same archive that the Enterprise happened upon, and which captured Picard's consciousness, so that someone at least would understand what the civilization was like before it was wiped out tens of thousands of years earlier.

"Live now," Kamin says to his daughter, Maribol.  "Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

And with that, Picard awakens, to find he has accumulated four decades of memories in the space of about a half-hour, an experience that leaves a permanent mark not only on his mind, but his heart.

*brief pause to stop bawling into my handkerchief*

I was immediately reminded of "The Inner Light" by a paper I stumbled across in Nature Astronomy, called, "Alkali Metals in White Dwarf Atmospheres as Tracers of Ancient Planetary Crusts."  This study, led by astrophysicist Mark Hollands of the University of Warwick, did spectroscopic analysis of the light from four white dwarf stars, which are the remnants of stellar cores left behind when Sun-like stars go nova as their hydrogen fuel runs out at the end of their lives.  In the process, they vaporize any planets that were in orbit around them, and the dust and debris from those planets accretes into the white dwarf's atmosphere, where it's detectable by its specific spectral lines.

In other words: the four white dwarfs in the study had rocky, Earth-like planets at some point in their past.

"In one case, we are looking at planet formation around a star that was formed in the Galactic halo, 11-12.5 billion years ago, hence it must be one of the oldest planetary systems known so far," said study co-author Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, in an interview in Science Daily.  "Another of these systems formed around a short-lived star that was initially more than four times the mass of the Sun, a record-breaking discovery delivering important constraints on how fast planets can form around their host stars."

This brings up a few considerations, one of which has to do with the number of Earth-like planets out there.  (Nota bene: by "Earth-like" I'm not referring to temperature and surface conditions, but simply that they're relatively small, with a rocky crust and a metallic core.  Whether they have Earth-like conditions is another consideration entirely, which has to do with the host star's intrinsic luminosity and the distance at which the planet revolves around it.)  In the famous Drake equation, which is a way to come up with an estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, one of the big unknowns until recently was how many stars hosted Earth-like planets; in the last fifteen years, we've come to understand that the answer seems to be "most of them."  Planets are the rule, not the exception, and as we've become better and better at detecting exoplanets, we find them pretty much everywhere we look.

When I read the Hollands et al. paper, I immediately began wondering what the planets around the white dwarfs had been like before they got flash-fried as their suns went nova.  Did they harbor life?  It's possible, although considering that these started out as larger stars than our Sun, they had shorter lives and therefore less time for life to form, much less to develop into a complex and intelligent civilization.  And, of course, at this point there's no way to tell.  Any living thing on one of those planets is long since vaporized along with most of the planet it resided on, lost forever to the ongoing evolution of the cosmos.

If that's not gloomy enough, it bears mention that this is the Earth's ultimate fate, as well.  It's not anything to worry about (not that worry would help in any case) -- this eventuality is billions of years in the future.  But once the Sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen, it will balloon out into a red giant, engulfing the inner three planets and possibly Mars as well, then blow off its outer atmosphere (that explosion is the "nova" part), leaving its exposed core as a white dwarf, slowly cooling as it radiates its heat out into space.

Whether by that time we'll have decided to send our collective knowledge out into space as an interstellar archive, I don't know.  In a way, we already have, albeit on a smaller scale than Kamin's people did; Voyager 2 carries the famous "golden record" that contains information about humanity, our scientific knowledge, and recordings of human voices, languages, and music, there to be decoded by any technological civilization that stumbles upon it.  (It's a little mind-boggling to realize that in the 48 years since Voyager 2 was launched, it has traveled about 20,000,000,000 kilometers, so is well outside the perimeter of the Solar System; and that sounds impressive until you realize that's only 16.6 light hours away, and the nearest star is 4.3 light years from us.)

So anyhow, those are my elegiac thoughts on this August morning.  Dead planets, dying stars, and the remnants of lost civilizations.  Sorry to be a downer. If all this makes you feel low, watch "The Inner Light" and have yourself a good cry.  It'll make you feel better.

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