Two scientists have announced that they have solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle, for the benefit of the three people in the civilized world who haven't heard of this phenomenon, is the geographical region bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, in which (according to one website) "an astonishing number of mysterious disappearances have occurred, of both ships and aircraft."
Myself, I thought it had been solved years ago, the solution being that the Bermuda Triangle doesn't exist. Well, the place exists, but if you look at the actual documented cases of craft disappearances, there is the same loss rate as any other equally traveled, equal-sized blob of ocean.
The problem is, because of the claims by woo-woos of its being a great big mystery, you have the problem of exaggeration or actual faking of the anecdotal evidence. In fact, the whole preposterous idea was brought to the public's attention by a fellow named Charles Berlitz, who wrote a bestselling book on the subject in 1974. Berlitz's book, upon examination, is full of sensationalized hype, reports taken out of context, omitted information, and outright lies. Larry Kusche, whose painstaking collection of data finally proved once and for all that there were proportionally no more ships and planes going down there than anywhere else in the world, said about Berlitz, "If Berlitz were to report that a ship was red, the chances of it being some other color is almost a certainty."
So, I thought that the explanation of the Mystery as being Not Really All That Mysterious was pretty satisfying, and had closed the book on the Bermuda Triangle. I hardly gave it a second thought as we flew right through the middle of it on our trip to Trinidad last month.
Apparently, however, the Legend Lives On, and Dr. Joseph Monaghan of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his graduate student David May, have written a paper on the subject, and it got accepted to (of all places) The American Journal of Physics. And their explanation is:
Oceanic flatulence.
Now far be it from me to discount the potentially devastating consequences of toxic flatulence. I own a dog, Grendel, whose output could solve the world's natural gas shortage. He has been known to clear a room at one go, all the while wearing an expression of feigned innocence that seems to say, "What? What's wrong with you guys? You think that was me?"
Monaghan and May claim that what happens in the Bermuda Triangle is much worse than the canine variety, hard though that may be for anyone who knows Grendel to comprehend. They claim that what happens there is that the ocean floor is covered with a material called "frozen methane hydrate," which under certain conditions can generate huge methane gas bubbles. As the bubbles rise, and the pressure of the surrounding seawater becomes less, they expand, displacing more and more water as they go, and when they finally reach the surface, you basically have the Colossal Sea Fart of Doom. Any ship caught in this situation would clearly capsize and sink; a plane flying through it might have engine failure.
I have three problems, of increasing difficulty, with this theory.
First -- any event like this, where you have a gigantic displacement of water, should generate a tsunami. If Monaghan and May's ideas are right, every time there has been a disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle, the east coast of Florida should have been hit with a gigantic wave shortly thereafter. There is no evidence of any such thing. Even given a bubble that is just big enough to engulf a ship, you would expect some sort of shock wave to propagate outward from the site, and to register with observers on the shore, if not wash them away entirely.
Second, Monaghan and May are acting like frozen methane hydrates are only found in the Bermuda Triangle region, when in fact, it's kind of everywhere on the deep ocean floor. The lion's share of it is made by anaerobic bacteria called methanogens, which by some estimates are the most numerous organisms on earth. So if Monaghan and May's theory solves the Bermuda Triangle Mystery, it opens up a bigger question, namely the Entire Ocean Mystery. If frozen methane hydrate explosions account for the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, why don't we see them happening everywhere?
Third, we must keep coming back to the question of whether there really is a statistically higher disappearance/plane crash/shipwreck rate there than there is anywhere else. And Kusche and others have concluded that the answer is: no. So it very much remains to be seen whether there is anything there to explain.
There you have it. As much as it would appeal to the 7th graders of the world to have a reason to discuss oceanic farts in science class, my feeling is that this one is a non-starter. So if you were planning on that trip to the Caribbean, there's no particular reason to worry, or to stock up on gas masks or extra-large bottles of Beano. But perhaps now that Monaghan and May are looking around for new research topics, they can come over and see if they can figure out what Grendel's problem is.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Dead ducks, depression, and "Danny Boy"
For the third year in a row, Foley's Irish Pub in New York City has declared a general ban on the singing of "O Danny Boy" on St. Patrick's Day.
Myself, I'm completely in favor of this ban. "O Danny Boy" has got to be one of the sappiest, smarmiest, most overplayed songs in the world. With its leaps of a sixth, soaring high notes, and maudlin words, there's nothing like it for catering to the tipsy, misty-eyed Missin' the Auld Sod crowd.
Never mind that it wasn't written by an Irishman. It was written by an English lawyer, Frederick Edward Weatherly, who not only wasn't Irish but allegedly never even set foot in Ireland. Apparently many Irish (and Irish wannabees) don't know this or don't care, because it's become de rigueur on St. Patrick's Day.
Not, however, in Foley's Pub. Owner Sean Clancy (which sounds a wee bit more Irish than "Frederick Edward Weatherly," doesn't it now?), a native of County Cavan, is so heartily sick of "O Danny Boy" that he'll give a free pint of Guinness to anyone who sings an Irish song for the patrons of his pub on St. Patrick's Day -- with the exception of "O Danny Boy."
According to Clancy, "It's overplayed, it's been ranked amongst the 25 most depressing songs of all time, and it's more appropriate for a funeral than for a St. Patrick's Day celebration."
To which I say, "Hear, hear." Well, except for the fact that most Irish songs are kinda depressing. Lessee, what will we sing instead? How about "Four Green Fields:"
Yeah, that'd be uplifting. How 'bout "Nell Flaherty's Drake?"
Myself, I'm completely in favor of this ban. "O Danny Boy" has got to be one of the sappiest, smarmiest, most overplayed songs in the world. With its leaps of a sixth, soaring high notes, and maudlin words, there's nothing like it for catering to the tipsy, misty-eyed Missin' the Auld Sod crowd.
Never mind that it wasn't written by an Irishman. It was written by an English lawyer, Frederick Edward Weatherly, who not only wasn't Irish but allegedly never even set foot in Ireland. Apparently many Irish (and Irish wannabees) don't know this or don't care, because it's become de rigueur on St. Patrick's Day.
Not, however, in Foley's Pub. Owner Sean Clancy (which sounds a wee bit more Irish than "Frederick Edward Weatherly," doesn't it now?), a native of County Cavan, is so heartily sick of "O Danny Boy" that he'll give a free pint of Guinness to anyone who sings an Irish song for the patrons of his pub on St. Patrick's Day -- with the exception of "O Danny Boy."
According to Clancy, "It's overplayed, it's been ranked amongst the 25 most depressing songs of all time, and it's more appropriate for a funeral than for a St. Patrick's Day celebration."
To which I say, "Hear, hear." Well, except for the fact that most Irish songs are kinda depressing. Lessee, what will we sing instead? How about "Four Green Fields:"
"There was war and death, plundering and pillage,
My children starved, by mountain, valley, and sea,
And their wailing cries, they shook the very heavens,
My four green fields ran red with their blood, said she."
Yeah, that'd be uplifting. How 'bout "Nell Flaherty's Drake?"
"May his spade never dig, may his sow never pig,
May each hair in his wig be well thrashed with a flail;
May his turkey not hatch, may the rats eat his meal
May every old fairy from Cork to Dunleary
Dip him, smug and airy, in river and lake,
That the eel and the trout, they may dine on the snout
Of the monster who murdered Nell Flaherty's drake."
Lovely. Dead ducks and fish nibbling on drowning victims. Happy St. Paddy's! Here, have a pint!
Okay, how about "Two Sisters?" That at least has a nice, swingy little reel as its melody:
"The miller he was hanged on the mountain head, sing-I-down, sing-I-day,
The miller he was hanged on the mountain head, the boys are bound for me,
The miller he was hanged on the mountain head, the eldest sister was boiled in lead,
I'll be true unto my love, if he'll be true to me."
Makes me homesick for the Auld Country, it does. Especially when you know that what had preceded this verse is that the eldest sister was jealous of the youngest, who had attracted the attentions of a man (predictably named "Johnny"), so the eldest sister had pushed the youngest into the mill stream. The miller ran afoul of the law when he pulled the youngest sister out of the water, "stole her gay gold ring," and then pushed her in again.
Ah, the charms of Celtic music.
It seems that the Irish are just completely unable to write a song that's not depressing. Even "Cockles and Mussels," the bouncy and perky unofficial theme song of Dublin, is about a beautiful fishmonger who gets a fever and dies. I guess, given their rather horrid history, it's understandable; if your country had been oppressed and starved for six hundred years by a foreign power, your leaders shot, hanged, or exiled, your religion, language, and culture the subject of a campaign of eradication, you'd be a little bitter, too.
Still, you have to wonder why these songs remain so popular. The tunes are nice, catchy, and easy to remember, that's got to be part of it. But I think it's more than that. Maybe it's the consolation that comes from knowing that however miserable your life is, there are people who have it worse. Consider "On We Go," set to a beautiful minor-key reel, whose lyrics are about an old woman and an old man. The gist of it is that the old woman gets her husband drunk and drowns him in the pond. Perhaps the line of reasoning is, "Well, you know, maybe we Irish have been oppressed for centuries, but at least my wife hasn't drowned me yet."
So today, when you raise a pint in honor of Ireland, and sing, "... the summer's gone, and all the leaves are dying, 'tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide... So come ye back, when summer's in the meadow, or when the valley's hushed and white with snow; and I'll be there, in sunshine or in shadow, O Danny Boy, O Danny Boy, I love you so," you can remember that (1) it's spring and the flowers haven't even started yet, and (2) anyone who went by the nickname "Danny Boy" had to be kind of a git anyway. Oh, yes, and (3) you have made it through another day without being boiled in lead, your significant other drowning you, the fields running red with your blood, or an eel eating your nose.
So drink up, and Happy St. Paddy's.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Reality check
fiction (n.) /fik-shin/ Something invented by the imagination; something feigned; esp. an invented story.
That, courtesy of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, because it is becoming increasingly apparent that more than a few people need a refresher course in the distinction.
A recent survey, conducted in Britain (and I hasten to add that I strongly suspect that the Brits are far from unique in this regard), shows that we're having some difficulty, as a species, in remembering that movies aren't real. Some of the results:
Of course, what's supposed to occur when the lights come up is you stand up, shake the popcorn crumbs off your clothing, and say, "Back to the real world." Which can be jarring, sometimes. I still remember one of my smartest and best students sitting down in my class and declaring, "Whenever I watch Harry Potter movies, I can barely stand to come to this place." I get that -- it's hard for me to compete with rotating staircases, talking paintings, and teachers who can do magic. But as hard as it is, you have to come back eventually.
Evidently, though, some people never do. It's hard for me to fathom, but then I think about all of the fictions that people believe wholeheartedly, and it becomes more apparent that it's the truth, if not substantially more comprehensible. Young-earth creationism, for example, is as much a fictional account of the universe as the one in Star Wars -- sorry to put it that bluntly, but the science is incontrovertible -- and yet people hang on to that one with a vehemence that astonishes me. I've gotten death threats for teaching evolution, and after the immediate fear-reaction diminishes, I sit back and think, "Really? You're threatening me because I don't take a mythological creation story and pretend that it's science?"
Why do people believe weird things? One of my heroes, the prominent skeptic Michael Shermer, has written a book about it, called, appropriately enough, Why People Believe Weird Things. It should be required reading in every science curriculum, world-wide. It analyzes the origins of pseudoscientific thought, and then takes a look at a number of specific examples (and yes, young-earth creationism is one of them). If you haven't read this book, you should. Everyone should.
Now, what to do about it? Well, one solution to believing that what happens in movies, novels, and plays is real is to go see the current musical Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, in which you will have no problem disbelieving everything that goes on, because none of the technology works right, resulting in Spidey using his superhuman powers to fly straight into walls, miss his landings, fall off stage sets, and, in one real case, hang upside down from the rigging wires for fifteen minutes while the tech crew tried to figure out how to get him down.
Failing that, the only answer is education. We have to be taught to discern real from unreal; it certainly isn't something we're born to. Without the skills of critical thinking, we not only get hoodwinked by plausible fictions, we fall prey to every charlatan and flim-flam artist out there. If we don't start putting more emphasis on thinking, in every discipline, every classroom, and every school, we've no one but ourselves to blame if kids grow up thinking that hoverboards are real and that gravity is visible - and believing in other bizarre, non-scientific views of the universe.
That, courtesy of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, because it is becoming increasingly apparent that more than a few people need a refresher course in the distinction.
A recent survey, conducted in Britain (and I hasten to add that I strongly suspect that the Brits are far from unique in this regard), shows that we're having some difficulty, as a species, in remembering that movies aren't real. Some of the results:
- 20% of the people surveyed thought that light sabers exist.
- 1 in 4 believe in human teleportation.
- Almost 50% believe that there is currently technology that can selectively erase memory.
- 40% think that hoverboards exist.
- 1/5 of the respondents believe that they can see gravity.
Of course, what's supposed to occur when the lights come up is you stand up, shake the popcorn crumbs off your clothing, and say, "Back to the real world." Which can be jarring, sometimes. I still remember one of my smartest and best students sitting down in my class and declaring, "Whenever I watch Harry Potter movies, I can barely stand to come to this place." I get that -- it's hard for me to compete with rotating staircases, talking paintings, and teachers who can do magic. But as hard as it is, you have to come back eventually.
Evidently, though, some people never do. It's hard for me to fathom, but then I think about all of the fictions that people believe wholeheartedly, and it becomes more apparent that it's the truth, if not substantially more comprehensible. Young-earth creationism, for example, is as much a fictional account of the universe as the one in Star Wars -- sorry to put it that bluntly, but the science is incontrovertible -- and yet people hang on to that one with a vehemence that astonishes me. I've gotten death threats for teaching evolution, and after the immediate fear-reaction diminishes, I sit back and think, "Really? You're threatening me because I don't take a mythological creation story and pretend that it's science?"
Why do people believe weird things? One of my heroes, the prominent skeptic Michael Shermer, has written a book about it, called, appropriately enough, Why People Believe Weird Things. It should be required reading in every science curriculum, world-wide. It analyzes the origins of pseudoscientific thought, and then takes a look at a number of specific examples (and yes, young-earth creationism is one of them). If you haven't read this book, you should. Everyone should.
Now, what to do about it? Well, one solution to believing that what happens in movies, novels, and plays is real is to go see the current musical Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, in which you will have no problem disbelieving everything that goes on, because none of the technology works right, resulting in Spidey using his superhuman powers to fly straight into walls, miss his landings, fall off stage sets, and, in one real case, hang upside down from the rigging wires for fifteen minutes while the tech crew tried to figure out how to get him down.
Failing that, the only answer is education. We have to be taught to discern real from unreal; it certainly isn't something we're born to. Without the skills of critical thinking, we not only get hoodwinked by plausible fictions, we fall prey to every charlatan and flim-flam artist out there. If we don't start putting more emphasis on thinking, in every discipline, every classroom, and every school, we've no one but ourselves to blame if kids grow up thinking that hoverboards are real and that gravity is visible - and believing in other bizarre, non-scientific views of the universe.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Neither here nor there
Yesterday, one of Skeptophilia's chief investigative reporters, whom I will refer to only by her code name of Cria Havoc so as not to compromise her activities in the field, brought to my attention a breaking news story about a University of Hartford archaeologist who is claiming to have discovered Atlantis.
Atlantis, you will recall, is the fabled island mentioned in two dialogues by Plato. Plato states that the island was the land that was bequeathed to Poseidon, and lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, thus pointing out its location using not just one, but two, fictional deities. It's a little as if I gave directions to my house by saying, "Take a left at Thor's castle - we're the white Cape Cod just past the cave where Cerberus guards the Gates of Hell."
Of course, this hasn't stopped people from arguing incessantly about its location. I suppose if you need a hobby, debating the exact GPS coordinates of a place that (1) no one has seen, (2) no one has any evidence for, and (3) probably doesn't exist, is as entertaining as any. Prior to these recent discoveries, the two leading hypotheses were that Atlantis was somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of present-day Ireland, or near the Greek island of Thera, which was destroyed by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in around 1500 BCE.
This sounds a little spurious right from the get-go. I mean, Thera and Ireland aren't exactly next-door neighbors. If I came to you and said, "I know exactly where Blackbeard's treasure is! It's either in Pensacola, Florida or Penobscot, Maine! Or possibly Nebraska!" you would be right to feel a degree of skepticism. So I think we're to be excused if we're doubtful about Atlantis' existence, given that even the diehard believers have no idea where it supposedly is. Or was. Or whatever.
On the other hand, there have been times when a story that was thought to be myth has proven to be factually accurate. Okay, there was that one time, at least. I'm thinking, of course, of Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy using the clues from Homer's Iliad. There's a difference, though, between Homer, who described epic battles involving cities that are known to have existed, and a couple of mentions of a mythical island paradise in Plato's dialogues. Right?
Enter Richard Freund. My informant Ms. Havoc sent me a link to a story (here) describing how Freund and his team, using satellite images, have located what they think is the ruins of an ancient city, submerged in the wetlands that are now Doñana National Park in southern Spain. The alleged ruins do lie reasonably close to Gibraltar, which most people think are the Pillars of Hercules that Plato mentioned, so the theory has at least that much going for it. Some of the ruins seem to be offshore, and Atlantis, of course, met its doom when one of the gods smote it and it "sank beneath the waves in a single day."
It's the downfall of Atlantis that captures the imagination, and even I have to admit that it's a pretty dramatic story. If you've read any Greek mythology, however, you will discover that this sort of thing was quite commonplace. The ancient Greeks were constantly having the crap smitten out of them by some god or another, which is probably why you see so few ancient Greeks around any more.
In any case, I have no serious doubt that Freund has found some cool ruins of an ancient city. Even so, this doesn't vindicate the whole Atlantis legend, because Plato didn't say that Atlantis was a city along the coast of Spain -- he said that it was an island, "larger than Libya and Asia together," with mountains that "soared to the sky," which is hardly the same thing. That the city Freund discovered might have given rise to the legend, I can perhaps believe; that it proves the whole legend to be true is a bit of an overstatement. And given that Freund is now being featured in a new National Geographic documentary called Finding Atlantis, the whole thing has the hallmarks of a publicity stunt.
So, the bottom line is, Atlantis as described by Plato probably didn't exist. In fact, his mention of the alleged continent would likely have escaped the notice of all but a few philosophy majors, had it not been for two people. One was Ignatius Donnelly, a huckster and politician of the late 19th century, who wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the single volume that has become the bible for Atlanteans worldwide. The second, much as I hate to admit it, was J. R. R. Tolkien, whose tales of the land of Númenor have been considered widely (by people who don't understand the definition of the word "fiction") to be an account of the real history of the Lost Island.
So, all of this leads us right back to where we started. Ruins of the ancient world are pretty common. So are myths. Sometimes myths have a grain of truth to them, and sometimes they don't, which is a good thing, because although Homer got the location of Troy basically right, he completely missed the mark in claiming that there is a horrible six-headed monster guarding the Straits of Messina, which if it had been true would have been a serious inconvenience for cruise ships. So I'm still casting a jaundiced eye at the whole "we've discovered Atlantis!" thing. It'll be interesting to see what turns up when they start poking around at Doñana, but I'm doubting that they'll find anything that I would consider hard evidence.
Atlantis, you will recall, is the fabled island mentioned in two dialogues by Plato. Plato states that the island was the land that was bequeathed to Poseidon, and lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, thus pointing out its location using not just one, but two, fictional deities. It's a little as if I gave directions to my house by saying, "Take a left at Thor's castle - we're the white Cape Cod just past the cave where Cerberus guards the Gates of Hell."
Of course, this hasn't stopped people from arguing incessantly about its location. I suppose if you need a hobby, debating the exact GPS coordinates of a place that (1) no one has seen, (2) no one has any evidence for, and (3) probably doesn't exist, is as entertaining as any. Prior to these recent discoveries, the two leading hypotheses were that Atlantis was somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of present-day Ireland, or near the Greek island of Thera, which was destroyed by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in around 1500 BCE.
This sounds a little spurious right from the get-go. I mean, Thera and Ireland aren't exactly next-door neighbors. If I came to you and said, "I know exactly where Blackbeard's treasure is! It's either in Pensacola, Florida or Penobscot, Maine! Or possibly Nebraska!" you would be right to feel a degree of skepticism. So I think we're to be excused if we're doubtful about Atlantis' existence, given that even the diehard believers have no idea where it supposedly is. Or was. Or whatever.
On the other hand, there have been times when a story that was thought to be myth has proven to be factually accurate. Okay, there was that one time, at least. I'm thinking, of course, of Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy using the clues from Homer's Iliad. There's a difference, though, between Homer, who described epic battles involving cities that are known to have existed, and a couple of mentions of a mythical island paradise in Plato's dialogues. Right?
Enter Richard Freund. My informant Ms. Havoc sent me a link to a story (here) describing how Freund and his team, using satellite images, have located what they think is the ruins of an ancient city, submerged in the wetlands that are now Doñana National Park in southern Spain. The alleged ruins do lie reasonably close to Gibraltar, which most people think are the Pillars of Hercules that Plato mentioned, so the theory has at least that much going for it. Some of the ruins seem to be offshore, and Atlantis, of course, met its doom when one of the gods smote it and it "sank beneath the waves in a single day."
It's the downfall of Atlantis that captures the imagination, and even I have to admit that it's a pretty dramatic story. If you've read any Greek mythology, however, you will discover that this sort of thing was quite commonplace. The ancient Greeks were constantly having the crap smitten out of them by some god or another, which is probably why you see so few ancient Greeks around any more.
In any case, I have no serious doubt that Freund has found some cool ruins of an ancient city. Even so, this doesn't vindicate the whole Atlantis legend, because Plato didn't say that Atlantis was a city along the coast of Spain -- he said that it was an island, "larger than Libya and Asia together," with mountains that "soared to the sky," which is hardly the same thing. That the city Freund discovered might have given rise to the legend, I can perhaps believe; that it proves the whole legend to be true is a bit of an overstatement. And given that Freund is now being featured in a new National Geographic documentary called Finding Atlantis, the whole thing has the hallmarks of a publicity stunt.
So, the bottom line is, Atlantis as described by Plato probably didn't exist. In fact, his mention of the alleged continent would likely have escaped the notice of all but a few philosophy majors, had it not been for two people. One was Ignatius Donnelly, a huckster and politician of the late 19th century, who wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the single volume that has become the bible for Atlanteans worldwide. The second, much as I hate to admit it, was J. R. R. Tolkien, whose tales of the land of Númenor have been considered widely (by people who don't understand the definition of the word "fiction") to be an account of the real history of the Lost Island.
So, all of this leads us right back to where we started. Ruins of the ancient world are pretty common. So are myths. Sometimes myths have a grain of truth to them, and sometimes they don't, which is a good thing, because although Homer got the location of Troy basically right, he completely missed the mark in claiming that there is a horrible six-headed monster guarding the Straits of Messina, which if it had been true would have been a serious inconvenience for cruise ships. So I'm still casting a jaundiced eye at the whole "we've discovered Atlantis!" thing. It'll be interesting to see what turns up when they start poking around at Doñana, but I'm doubting that they'll find anything that I would consider hard evidence.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The-Puppy-Is-Cuter Syndrome
Our friends Alex and Nancy just got a new puppy. This puppy, whose name is Georgia Rose, is a labradoodle, a breed that simply oozes cuteness. This is a puppy whose cuteness level is such that, had Joseph Stalin seen her, he would have taken a break from enslaving Eastern Europe to sit on the kitchen floor and tickle her under the chin, saying "Awwww... widdums widdums widdums."
All of this has had the effect of making me look a little askance at my own two dogs. Our border collie, Doolin, is far too smart for her own good, or anyone else's, and thinks she is in charge of the entire household. She worries constantly, can't sit still, and is generally a walking encyclopedia of doggy neuroses. Our other dog, Grendel, looks like a genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. He has the muzzle of a boxer, the eyes of a pug, the build of a pitbull, the coloration of a German shepherd, and the tail of a husky. If Mary Shelley had written about dogs, she would have come up with something like Grendel.
So, to summarize: Alex and Nancy have a dog who looks like the main character in a children's story called "Precious the Puppy Finds a New Home;" we have Dr. Caninestein and Her Monster.
I know this is unfair, and I must state for the record that I don't love our dogs any less because of it. And I can reassure myself in the knowledge that I am hardly the only person who has felt this way when looking at the lives other people lead. It's so common that psychologists have a name for it. They call it the "Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome" -- and it applies to way more than just dogs.
A couple of psychologists, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman, studied this phenomenon, and found out just how universal this perception is. They asked students at colleges in the Midwest to assess their own happiness, and the imagined happiness of students at colleges in California. Across the board, the Midwestern students thought the Californian students would be happier -- the greater natural beauty, better climate, and greater (perceived) cultural opportunities were all cited as reasons. In fact, in actual assessments of satisfaction, the students in the Midwest and in California averaged the same scores.
Other studies have confirmed this -- one by Gilbert et al. showed that college faculty members, when asked to predict their happiness levels if they got tenure, were strikingly inaccurate at doing so -- the ones who were happy pre-tenure were, relatively speaking, still pretty happy folks whether or not they received tenure, and the unhappy ones stayed unhappy even if they received full professorships.
In my own case, I go through this kind of thing every winter. Being a southerner, borne of ancestry from the temperate climes of the Mediterranean, I begin to dread the oncoming upstate New York cold starting some time in mid-August. I whine to my poor, long-suffering wife incessantly, usually ending with, "... if we only lived somewhere warm. *heavy sigh*" What the aforementioned studies show is that basically, I would still be a grouchy curmudgeon even if I lived in the Florida Keys, which I suppose will trigger a different kind of Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome in my wife.
Honestly, I know that switching things up isn't the answer. A woman I have known for years seems to think that's the answer -- and as a result, has moved more times than I can keep track of, and has had about twelve different jobs. Each time, the next place, the next job, is going to be "the right one." And I don't believe she's a bit happier now than she was twenty years ago. While I do my share of complaining, her answer to the problem is not one I'd want to copy.
Truthfully, I'm pretty satisfied with my life. I have a wonderful (and tolerant) spouse, a great job, opportunities to play music with some amazing musicians, a nice house in a beautiful part of the country. If it's colder than I like, well, nowhere is perfect, and the other aspects of being here are pretty cool. Even if my dogs are more suited to a science fiction novel than they would be to a children's picture book.
All of this has had the effect of making me look a little askance at my own two dogs. Our border collie, Doolin, is far too smart for her own good, or anyone else's, and thinks she is in charge of the entire household. She worries constantly, can't sit still, and is generally a walking encyclopedia of doggy neuroses. Our other dog, Grendel, looks like a genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. He has the muzzle of a boxer, the eyes of a pug, the build of a pitbull, the coloration of a German shepherd, and the tail of a husky. If Mary Shelley had written about dogs, she would have come up with something like Grendel.
So, to summarize: Alex and Nancy have a dog who looks like the main character in a children's story called "Precious the Puppy Finds a New Home;" we have Dr. Caninestein and Her Monster.
I know this is unfair, and I must state for the record that I don't love our dogs any less because of it. And I can reassure myself in the knowledge that I am hardly the only person who has felt this way when looking at the lives other people lead. It's so common that psychologists have a name for it. They call it the "Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome" -- and it applies to way more than just dogs.
A couple of psychologists, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman, studied this phenomenon, and found out just how universal this perception is. They asked students at colleges in the Midwest to assess their own happiness, and the imagined happiness of students at colleges in California. Across the board, the Midwestern students thought the Californian students would be happier -- the greater natural beauty, better climate, and greater (perceived) cultural opportunities were all cited as reasons. In fact, in actual assessments of satisfaction, the students in the Midwest and in California averaged the same scores.
Other studies have confirmed this -- one by Gilbert et al. showed that college faculty members, when asked to predict their happiness levels if they got tenure, were strikingly inaccurate at doing so -- the ones who were happy pre-tenure were, relatively speaking, still pretty happy folks whether or not they received tenure, and the unhappy ones stayed unhappy even if they received full professorships.
In my own case, I go through this kind of thing every winter. Being a southerner, borne of ancestry from the temperate climes of the Mediterranean, I begin to dread the oncoming upstate New York cold starting some time in mid-August. I whine to my poor, long-suffering wife incessantly, usually ending with, "... if we only lived somewhere warm. *heavy sigh*" What the aforementioned studies show is that basically, I would still be a grouchy curmudgeon even if I lived in the Florida Keys, which I suppose will trigger a different kind of Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome in my wife.
Honestly, I know that switching things up isn't the answer. A woman I have known for years seems to think that's the answer -- and as a result, has moved more times than I can keep track of, and has had about twelve different jobs. Each time, the next place, the next job, is going to be "the right one." And I don't believe she's a bit happier now than she was twenty years ago. While I do my share of complaining, her answer to the problem is not one I'd want to copy.
Truthfully, I'm pretty satisfied with my life. I have a wonderful (and tolerant) spouse, a great job, opportunities to play music with some amazing musicians, a nice house in a beautiful part of the country. If it's colder than I like, well, nowhere is perfect, and the other aspects of being here are pretty cool. Even if my dogs are more suited to a science fiction novel than they would be to a children's picture book.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Earthquakes and supermoons
Like many people, during the last 24 hours I have been glued to the images and videos coming out of Japan. The devastation wreaked by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake is surreal -- burning buildings being swept along by the tsunami, roads split right down the center line, a barge spinning in a whirlpool. My heart goes out to the people of Japan who are now facing the overwhelming work of picking up the pieces, healing the injured, rebuilding the homes, burying the dead.
At times like this, people look for answers. Why did the earthquake occur there? Why was it so strong? Was there something scientists could have done to predict it, to warn people? Unfortunately, our knowledge of tectonic geology is just not refined enough to predict accurately where a fault zone will slip. Japan is a highly active place, seismically -- it is an island arc raised by the movement of the Pacific Plate underneath the Eurasian Plate, and this movement causes not only earthquakes, but volcanism. Japan is prone to both, for the same reason that Indonesia, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Caribbean are.
But that's not enough for some people. There are people who don't just need reasons, they need Reasons. They need, somehow, to connect tragedies like this one to Great Doings in the Cosmos, to give the impression that it's all part of some meaningful pattern.
Enter Richard Nolle, an astrologer, who has publicized the claim that the earthquake was due to an "extreme supermoon."
A "supermoon" occurs because the moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, and so it is sometimes closer to the Earth, and sometimes further away. The point at which it reaches its nearest approach (the lunar perigee) is independent of the phases of the moon, which have to do with the angle made by the sun/earth/moon system.
Occasionally, of course, the moon will be full when it's at its perigee. This happens regularly, if infrequently. This is a "supermoon." And Richard Nolle says that it's bad news -- he predicted a few weeks ago that when the next supermoon occurs, on March 19, we'll have earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and storms, your washing machine will go off balance, your mortgage check will bounce, and your cat will puke up a hairball on the rug.
Okay, I made the last part up. But what Nolle proposes is about as ridiculous. There is no connection between the lunar perigee and geologic events -- the increase in the moon's gravitational pull at perigee is negligible. A connection between earthquakes and the lunar phases has been proposed -- since most fault systems are under water, a tenuous connection might be made between fault slippage and tides, but research has shown that any increase in geological activity because of the movement of the oceans during the tides is 1% or less.
What bothers me is that Nolle is now pointing to the Japanese earthquake as vindication of his claim. Never mind that it occurred on March 11, and the moon is still nine days away from full, and about a quarter of a revolution away from perigee. If you believe in pseudoscience, you have no need to let paltry trivia such as the facts get in the way.
All of this, however, is a small matter as compared with the actual reality of what the Japanese people are going through. It is tempting, at times like this, to try and see a deeper meaning in it all, to try to connect what happened with the universe as a whole, to try to make it make sense. The scary truth is that it doesn't make sense -- things like this happen, and it remains for us not to waste time trying to explain them, but to open our hearts and help the survivors put their lives back together.
At times like this, people look for answers. Why did the earthquake occur there? Why was it so strong? Was there something scientists could have done to predict it, to warn people? Unfortunately, our knowledge of tectonic geology is just not refined enough to predict accurately where a fault zone will slip. Japan is a highly active place, seismically -- it is an island arc raised by the movement of the Pacific Plate underneath the Eurasian Plate, and this movement causes not only earthquakes, but volcanism. Japan is prone to both, for the same reason that Indonesia, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Caribbean are.
But that's not enough for some people. There are people who don't just need reasons, they need Reasons. They need, somehow, to connect tragedies like this one to Great Doings in the Cosmos, to give the impression that it's all part of some meaningful pattern.
Enter Richard Nolle, an astrologer, who has publicized the claim that the earthquake was due to an "extreme supermoon."
A "supermoon" occurs because the moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, and so it is sometimes closer to the Earth, and sometimes further away. The point at which it reaches its nearest approach (the lunar perigee) is independent of the phases of the moon, which have to do with the angle made by the sun/earth/moon system.
Occasionally, of course, the moon will be full when it's at its perigee. This happens regularly, if infrequently. This is a "supermoon." And Richard Nolle says that it's bad news -- he predicted a few weeks ago that when the next supermoon occurs, on March 19, we'll have earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and storms, your washing machine will go off balance, your mortgage check will bounce, and your cat will puke up a hairball on the rug.
Okay, I made the last part up. But what Nolle proposes is about as ridiculous. There is no connection between the lunar perigee and geologic events -- the increase in the moon's gravitational pull at perigee is negligible. A connection between earthquakes and the lunar phases has been proposed -- since most fault systems are under water, a tenuous connection might be made between fault slippage and tides, but research has shown that any increase in geological activity because of the movement of the oceans during the tides is 1% or less.
What bothers me is that Nolle is now pointing to the Japanese earthquake as vindication of his claim. Never mind that it occurred on March 11, and the moon is still nine days away from full, and about a quarter of a revolution away from perigee. If you believe in pseudoscience, you have no need to let paltry trivia such as the facts get in the way.
All of this, however, is a small matter as compared with the actual reality of what the Japanese people are going through. It is tempting, at times like this, to try and see a deeper meaning in it all, to try to connect what happened with the universe as a whole, to try to make it make sense. The scary truth is that it doesn't make sense -- things like this happen, and it remains for us not to waste time trying to explain them, but to open our hearts and help the survivors put their lives back together.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Another modest proposal
Yesterday, I posted about my reaction to the passage of the Wisconsin bill that would strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights, and I explained why I thought this would have devastating results, especially on schools.
Well. You'd have thought I'd proposed solving the world's overpopulation and famine problems simultaneously by having poor people eat their children. Admittedly, I had a good many positive responses, but also some violently negative ones, including one which said, and I quote, "Teachers' unions and the tenure system are destroying public education in America. It's creating a workforce of teachers who don't give a damn about quality teaching, and are just putting in their time until early retirement with full benefits."
I won't even address the factual inaccuracies of that statement, which are, I hope, abundantly clear. However, this has spurred me to answer the anti-union crowd's rhetoric with a modest proposal of my own, to wit:
If you want to hold me accountable for the academic success of my students, and tie my job retention or my salary, or both, to student test scores, then allow me to fire underperforming students.
That's the "business model" that so many of these folks tout, isn't it? Chock full of personal responsibility and the Get-Ahead Motive That Made America Great? If an employee can't be bothered to get up off his lazy ass and do his job, fire him -- there are plenty other qualified candidates who'd love to have his job. Same should be true of quality education, right?
Note that I am not talking about students with legitimate academic difficulties, nor even about the earnest but hapless types who honestly want to be in class, and are interested in the subjects being taught, but sometimes can't get out of their own way long enough to turn in assignments. Heaven knows my own children fell into both of those groups at times. No, I'm talking about the small minority of students -- in my experience, under ten percent -- who don't give a damn about school, do the bare minimum (if that), and cause as much trouble for teachers and other students along the way as they can manage to do.
A few examples. Names have obviously been withheld, and details occasionally modified, to obscure the identities of these individuals.
1) The young man who had a 14% in my class, and whose father said he wasn't successful because I wasn't "challenging him enough."
2) The girl who, as far as I could tell, copied every single assignment she turned in, and in fact copied the answers on the first quiz from her neighbor, not realizing that I create two versions of every quiz, with scrambled answers. She got a zero on the quiz, and then had the temerity to demand to know why she'd gotten a zero and her neighbor had gotten an 85% "when our answers are exactly the same."
3) The young lady who is so savvy about our school's attendance policy, which will only drop you for non-attendance if you miss twenty consecutive days of school, that she has been known to skip nineteen days in a row and show up on the twentieth so she won't be expelled. She is the current record-holder for the lowest overall grade in a class in my 24 year career -- a 3%.
4) The boy who showed up stoned to class every single day, and whose mother said, at a parent conference, "Well, I know my son is having academic difficulties, but at least I'm happy to say that he's never used drugs." This statement was met with stunned silence, followed by the counselor saying to the parents, "We need to talk privately." Mom, when confronted with the facts, wouldn't hear of it, and refused to have her son drug-tested. Three weeks later he was caught with marijuana on a school-sponsored field trip.
And so on.
Again, it must be said that this kind of kid constitutes a very small minority, but it's that small minority that causes the vast majority of the discipline problems schools deal with. They also skew the standardized test scores, dropout rates, and every other metric applied to schools. How is it fair that I'm somehow responsible for the 3% average of the student who can't be bothered to show up?
You want to tie my wages and job security to success rate -- allow me to tell the kids who don't give a damn to go out and get a dose of reality, maybe come back when they've discovered that you can't get anywhere in life if you're an uneducated dolt. Let me change the attitude of students and parents to what it is in many other parts of the world -- that education is a privilege, not a right, that it is something to be cherished, not hurled back into the faces of the people who are working tirelessly to make learning exciting and relevant.
And until such time as that happens, don't come to me with nonsense about how the public education system in America is failing to educate students, and blather on about how "teaching is the only profession where you get paid the same thing regardless of whether you succeed or fail at your job." Don't make the absurd claim that school funding should be based on student success on a single standardized test.
And dammit, don't try to strip me of my right to have a say in my own working conditions.
Well. You'd have thought I'd proposed solving the world's overpopulation and famine problems simultaneously by having poor people eat their children. Admittedly, I had a good many positive responses, but also some violently negative ones, including one which said, and I quote, "Teachers' unions and the tenure system are destroying public education in America. It's creating a workforce of teachers who don't give a damn about quality teaching, and are just putting in their time until early retirement with full benefits."
I won't even address the factual inaccuracies of that statement, which are, I hope, abundantly clear. However, this has spurred me to answer the anti-union crowd's rhetoric with a modest proposal of my own, to wit:
If you want to hold me accountable for the academic success of my students, and tie my job retention or my salary, or both, to student test scores, then allow me to fire underperforming students.
That's the "business model" that so many of these folks tout, isn't it? Chock full of personal responsibility and the Get-Ahead Motive That Made America Great? If an employee can't be bothered to get up off his lazy ass and do his job, fire him -- there are plenty other qualified candidates who'd love to have his job. Same should be true of quality education, right?
Note that I am not talking about students with legitimate academic difficulties, nor even about the earnest but hapless types who honestly want to be in class, and are interested in the subjects being taught, but sometimes can't get out of their own way long enough to turn in assignments. Heaven knows my own children fell into both of those groups at times. No, I'm talking about the small minority of students -- in my experience, under ten percent -- who don't give a damn about school, do the bare minimum (if that), and cause as much trouble for teachers and other students along the way as they can manage to do.
A few examples. Names have obviously been withheld, and details occasionally modified, to obscure the identities of these individuals.
1) The young man who had a 14% in my class, and whose father said he wasn't successful because I wasn't "challenging him enough."
2) The girl who, as far as I could tell, copied every single assignment she turned in, and in fact copied the answers on the first quiz from her neighbor, not realizing that I create two versions of every quiz, with scrambled answers. She got a zero on the quiz, and then had the temerity to demand to know why she'd gotten a zero and her neighbor had gotten an 85% "when our answers are exactly the same."
3) The young lady who is so savvy about our school's attendance policy, which will only drop you for non-attendance if you miss twenty consecutive days of school, that she has been known to skip nineteen days in a row and show up on the twentieth so she won't be expelled. She is the current record-holder for the lowest overall grade in a class in my 24 year career -- a 3%.
4) The boy who showed up stoned to class every single day, and whose mother said, at a parent conference, "Well, I know my son is having academic difficulties, but at least I'm happy to say that he's never used drugs." This statement was met with stunned silence, followed by the counselor saying to the parents, "We need to talk privately." Mom, when confronted with the facts, wouldn't hear of it, and refused to have her son drug-tested. Three weeks later he was caught with marijuana on a school-sponsored field trip.
And so on.
Again, it must be said that this kind of kid constitutes a very small minority, but it's that small minority that causes the vast majority of the discipline problems schools deal with. They also skew the standardized test scores, dropout rates, and every other metric applied to schools. How is it fair that I'm somehow responsible for the 3% average of the student who can't be bothered to show up?
You want to tie my wages and job security to success rate -- allow me to tell the kids who don't give a damn to go out and get a dose of reality, maybe come back when they've discovered that you can't get anywhere in life if you're an uneducated dolt. Let me change the attitude of students and parents to what it is in many other parts of the world -- that education is a privilege, not a right, that it is something to be cherished, not hurled back into the faces of the people who are working tirelessly to make learning exciting and relevant.
And until such time as that happens, don't come to me with nonsense about how the public education system in America is failing to educate students, and blather on about how "teaching is the only profession where you get paid the same thing regardless of whether you succeed or fail at your job." Don't make the absurd claim that school funding should be based on student success on a single standardized test.
And dammit, don't try to strip me of my right to have a say in my own working conditions.
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