Hammer of the gods

For those of you who have found yourself distressed by the heavy topics that have appeared here in Skeptophilia over the last couple of weeks -- climate change, the anti-vaxxers, the persecution complex amongst many American evangelicals, the misrepresentation of science by charlatans -- I'm afraid that today I need to bring to your attention an even more serious threat to life and limb:

Someone has found Thor's hammer in Denmark.

Yes, the fearsome weapon Mjölnir, capable of leveling mountains in a single stroke, the bane of many a Frost Giant and evildoer.  It was a short-handled metal hammer, forged in Svartálfaheim by the dwarf brothers Sindri and Brokkr.  They also at the same time made a few other special offers, including Odin's spear Gungnir, and Freyr's magic boat Ski∂bla∂nir and golden boar Gullinbursti.

No, I don't know how you forge a pig.  But then, I'm not a dwarf, which probably has something to do with my lack of expertise.

Be that as it may, Thor's hammer was considered by the Norse gods to be the best of the gifts that the dwarves ever made, because not only did it smash anything you like to rubble (its name means "the pulverizer" in Old Norse), it returned to Thor's hand when it was thrown, which is pretty convenient.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the problem is that it, like the spears and boats and golden pigs and (in fact) the Norse gods themselves, are mythological.  I.e., not real.  This is a point that seems to have escaped a lot of people, most notably Giorgio Tsoukalos (he of the amazing hair), who thinks that they were aliens.  The Norse people couldn't just have made them up, he says.  No way could people dream up valiant warriors and magical powers and epic battles between good and evil without it having some basis in the visitation of Earth by extraterrestrials.

Which therefore also presumably explains how Tolkien came up with Lord of the Rings.

So, according to the story over at Ancient Code that I linked above, we now have concrete proof that Thor existed, because they've discovered his hammer at an archaeological dig on the island of Lolland, in Denmark.  The hammer bears an inscription that says, "Hmar is" ("This is a hammer"), in case we weren't sure.

This is just thrilling the Ancient Aliens crowd to pieces.  Over at Arcturi Extraterrestrial Community, we read:

One intriguing mythological figures in human history when analyzing ancient aliens connection with past human evolution is one of the most well known Norse gods named Thor, god of thunder, whom [sic] wielded a powerful hammer-weapon that would allow him to destroy his enemies and protect humanity from the giants who roamed the earth. To better understand why Ancient Alien theory truly looks at this mythological figure as an intriguing character for ancient alien influence, one must have a basic understanding of who Thor was and his role on Earth, who his enemies were, and where his majestic and mythical hammer (named Mjollnir [sic]) came from... Could it be possible that
Thor's Hammer is some kind of ancient alien weapon that allowed him to reign throughout the lands and protect his people?

Furthermore, it was said that Thor's Hammer was made by two dwarfs. This really interested us because Ancient Alien theorist [sic] do believe in various alien races, which could lead us to believe that these dwarfs could have been Grey Aliens, commonly depicted as standing 3-4 feet in height and having an advance knowledge in technology which could be mistaken as magic to those who are unaware of the power behind the laws of the Universe. In addition, it seemed that the Hammer was made to be used with the aid of two "iron" gloves, perhaps giving some kind of a magnetic signal to the Hammer, so when thrown, the Hammer would return to Thor. Looking deep into the depictions of the use of this weapon, it really seems more like a modern day weapon, something conceivable to us today, but magical to those in the past.

So that sounds pretty amazing, and you can certainly see why this discovery has induced the Norse-gods-are-aliens aficionados to leap about making happy little squeaking noises.

But unfortunately, there's a problem with all of this, and although I hate to put a damper on their enthusiasm, but I feel honor-bound to mention it.  If you look at the photographs of the artifacts released by the National Museum of Denmark, you can see that the newly-discovered Mjölnir, fearsome hammer of the gods, bane of the giants...

... is only about five centimeters across.

For those of you who don't think well in metric, that's a little under two inches.  With a hammer that size, Thor would have been able to fell mice, and possibly a bunny, but not much more than that.  The Frost Giants, on the other hand, wouldn't have had much to worry about.  So the archeological find is probably just a piece of Norse jewelry, and all of the hype a bit anticlimactic.

Not that this will stop Giorgio Tsoukalos et al.  As we've seen over and over, it doesn't take much to get him excited.  Expect an episode on this amazing find on the This Really Isn't History Channel soon.

Miasma and misrepresentation

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about woo-woos is the fact that they will take incorrectly or incompletely understood scientific research and pretend that it supports whatever goofy idea they are currently promoting.

It's why the creationists immediately go for the holes in scientific knowledge as support for the universe being 6,000 years old (the "god of the gaps" idea), throwing in an occasional bit of actual science as support, and ignoring the vast ocean of evidence that completely discredits their claim.  It's why the homeopaths talk about vibrations and quantum states as if they understood what they were saying, stopping with Deepak Chopra in their quest to find out what the scientists themselves have to say on the matter.

I ran into an especially good (or bad) example of this yesterday, when I bumped more-or-less accidentally into a concept from the woo-woo canon called "Inherited Miasma."  Here's what the Ascension Glossary has to say about inherited miasma:

Miasma is a psycho-spiritual inherited distortion created by trauma, abuse, fear based belief systems and Soul Fragmentation which, over time, was genetically encoded in human DNA, and resulted in various forms of dis-ease or imbalance. These dis-ease patterns were then encoded and passed down in Negative Ego behaviors or DNA code from generation to generation from the genetic alteration made from the NAA influence. Levels of the passed down distorted or flawed DNA would result in a dissipation of the original form of the disease. The manifested diseased energy and its physical body pattern would sometimes skip generations. The dissipated energetic pattern (cellular memories from the Ancestry or Family of Origin) of the original disease would then manifest in future generations in lesser or hybridized forms.

Which sounds pretty scary, especially when you find out that "NAA" stands for "Negative Alien Agenda," which, we are told, consists of the plans of a bunch of alien psychic parasites to use us as a food source.

If you descend from people who were oppressed at some time in history (who doesn't?), not to worry; you can get past all of this:

When one awakens, one will then need to decide what you want to energetically “wear” - as everything you inherited in your family (and the collective human race) does not have to become a part of your self-defined identity. As you observe and take responsibility for what you are inhabiting (this is your fleshly body) and being accountable to the current station of your life circumstances, one can participate with healing your genetic and miasmatic relationships that reside as energetic memory in your flesh. In most cases if you pay attention to the various patterns (attitudes, ideals, emotional intelligence) in your current Bio-Family dynamic, you will know these archetypal patterns extend to other lifetimes as well as hold relevant information and clues to what you agreed to heal (types of collective human miasma) while you incarnated on planet earth during the Ascension Cycle.

So yeah, that's a relief.

What is maddening about this is that these wingnuts don't have any evidence to support their claims, and they don't need to; the claim itself is so vague that you could decide that damn near anything you experience comes from "miasma."  Headache?  It's because one of my ancestors got punched in the nose.  High blood pressure?  My ancestors experienced stress that is now encoded in my genes.  No specific, testable, potentially falsifiable statements, just an evil influence stalking us from our long-dead relatives.

Convenient, no?

Miasma by Robert Seymour [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, now for the really maddening part.  These folks have latched on to some actual science as support for their silly pseudoscience.  A relatively recent discovery in genetics is that some variations in a population are not due to changes in the DNA itself, but due to changes in the transcriptional potential -- the degree to which certain genes are expressed.  Called epigenetics, this phenomenon often has to do with the amplification or silencing of genes in parents or even grandparents, which then affects how the children (or grandchildren) express their own copies of the genes.  It's kind of a weird twist on the ideas of Lamarck -- that in certain cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.

A fascinating example of this phenomenon just came out in Scientific American last month.  A study has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have elevated levels of stress hormones.  The leader of the research team, Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found that children were influenced in utero by the stress their mothers were experiencing:

It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol. The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats. The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults. This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

Note how precise the language is.  No hand-waving psycho-spiritual inherited distortions; a specific claim that elevated cortisol levels in a pregnant woman can affect her child's ability to transcribe a gene related to cortisol metabolism.  Measurable, testable, and based in comprehension of the actual science.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the "inherited miasma" people love epigenetics, the same way the homeopaths love quantum physics, because at a quick read the science appears to support their crazy stance.  They read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on the topic (I swear, from some of the stuff I've read, they can't have done any more than that), and then blather on about how inheritance doesn't require DNA, our ancestors' spirits are still influencing our lives, karma, reincarnation, and off the edge of the cliff they go.

Look, it's not that I'm some kind of elite scientist myself; one of my faults is that my knowledge is a light year across and an inch deep.  I'm a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante, or whatever other related epithet you want to throw at me.  But when I talk about something, I take the time to read what the actual non-dilettantes have learned about it, rather than picking up a ten-dollar word or two and then pretending I'm claiming something valid.  Anyone else can do the same.  What these people are doing is not only misleading, it's lazy.

And frankly, I'm glad that there's no such thing as inherited miasma.  I've done a good bit of genealogical research on my family, and some of the people I descend from went through some seriously awful times, which, given that they were mostly French and Scottish peasants, is perhaps not too surprising.  On the other hand, one of my ancestors, one Alexander Lindsay of Glamis, Scotland, apparently lost his soul to the devil in a card game.  So maybe there's something to it, after all.

The source of the noise

A common theme in Skeptophilia is that people in general need to learn some scientific terminology.

Not only is science cool, and thus learning about it a worthy goal in and of itself; but knowing how science works, and some of the field's vocabulary, will keep you from being duped.  As we've seen over and over, the world is full of folks who either through ignorance or outright duplicity misrepresent what scientists are doing -- and without adequate mental firepower, you're gonna fall for their nonsense every time.

As an example, this weekend, a story started popping up all over that claimed that we'd finally received a good candidate for an alien signal from an extrasolar planet.  This immediately caught my eye -- it is one of my dearest wishes that we have incontrovertible evidence of alien intelligence before I die.  I'd be perfectly satisfied if it comes in the form of some kind of radio signal, but if an actual alien spacecraft landed in my back yard, that would also be acceptable, at least until they started vaporizing my dogs with laser pistols.

So my reaction was one of cautious enthusiasm.  Cautious, because I suspected that if this had actually happened, it would be all over the news, not just surfacing in the form of links on Twitter and Facebook.  But the stories all made the same claim.  Here's an excerpt from the version that appeared on UFO Blogger:

Astronomers have picked up a mystery "noise" which they believe could be coming from an Earth-like planet in the outer space [sic]. After analyzing the strange signals emitting from the object, scientiscientistssts [sic] are certain that a habitable planet exists some 22 light years away, a report said. 

In 2010, scientists had dismissed the mystery noise or signals as stellar bursts but after the latest research it was clear that an Earth-like planet, or Gliese 581d, has conditions which could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Okay, given the typos and grammar, it's not exactly the most credible of reports.  But all of the links I saw agreed; an extrasolar planet called Gliese 581d, 22 light years from Earth, had been reported as the source of a strange, unexplained noise.  The planet was bigger than Earth, but in the "Goldilocks Zone" -- the "just right" region around its star where water would be in liquid form, and therefore a place where life something like what we have here could evolve.

So immediately I started picturing Star Trek-style aliens, complete with fake rubber alien noses and bad accents.  Then I thought of the amazing final scene in Star Trek: First Contact, which is clearly the best movie the franchise ever produced, wherein Zefram Cochrane shakes hands with a Vulcan for the first time.  And before you know it, I had myself worked up into a lather about the possibilities.

Then I thought, "Calm down, dude.  Verify your sources."  So I typed "noise Gliese 581d" into a Google search to see if I could find out where this information had come from.  Clearly it was all similar enough that it had some kind of common origin, and it wasn't wacky enough to have come from The Weekly World News.  And after five minutes' search, I found the press release in Phys.org that had caused the stir -- the origin of the "noise."

And I put "noise" in quotation marks for a good reason, as you'll see.  The press release was a blurb summarizing a paper in Science by Anglada-Escudé and Tuomi called "Stellar activity masquerading as planets in the habitable zone of the M dwarf Gliese 581."  Here's the relevant passage:

A report published in Science has dismissed claims made last year that the first super-Earth planet discovered in the habitable zone of a distant star was 'stellar activity masquerading as planets.' The researchers are confident the planet named GJ 581d, identified in 2009 orbiting the star Gliese 581, does exist, and that last year's claim was triggered by inadequate analysis of the data.

The planet candidate was spotted using a spectrometer which measures the 'wobble', small changes in the wavelength of light emitted by a star, caused as a planet orbits it. In 2014 researchers revisiting the data said that the 'planet' was actually just noise in the data caused by starspots. The possible existence of the planet was widely dismissed without further questioning. 

But now researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of Hertfordshire have questioned the methods used to challenge the planet's existence. The statistical technique used in the 2014 research to account for stellar activity is simply inadequate for identifying small planets like GJ 581d.

Note the use of the word "noise" twice.  This, apparently, is the source of the story of an alien noise coming from Gliese 581d.

Scientists use the word "noise" differently from the rest of us.  To a scientist, "noise" is scatter in the data, background junk, that might obscure something real and measurable (the "signal").  If you have enough noise, the signal becomes impossible to detect, so reducing the noise in a data set is critical.  A high "signal-to-noise ratio" is what you're after; lots of signal, little noise.  So when the astrophysicists re-analyzed the data from 2009 that had been rejected last year as supporting an Earth-like extrasolar planet around Gliese 581, they found a way of reducing the noise in the data, and were able to confirm that the planet did, actually, exist.

What they did not find was some kind of unexplained noise coming from Gliese 581d.  The noise was the scatter in the data, not some Klingon sending an insulting message at the Earth such as "Hab SoSlI' Quch" ("Your mother has a smooth forehead").

Not that I'm happy to report this, mind you.  No one would be more thrilled than me if we had received an alien communiqué, even if it contained an insult.  But unfortunately, the stories about mysterious and unexplained alien noises turn out to be unmysterious and completely explainable ignorance of bloggers regarding the use of scientific vocabulary.

So we keep waiting.  Given the number of extrasolar planets the astronomers are discovering, I'm still optimistic that one day, we'll find the aliens.  Or maybe they'll find us.  Either way, it'd be amazing, because, after all, Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam ("Today is a good day to die").

Solution to the Census-Taker puzzle...

A few days ago, I posted a puzzle, and challenged my readers to try to solve it.  I've had several requests for the solution, so here it is.  (If you're still working on it, read no further!  It's always more fun to work something out yourself than to have someone simply tell you the answer.)

Here's the puzzle:

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters. 

The man says, "The product of their ages is 36." 

The census taker says, "That's not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. The sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street." 

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "That's still not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. My oldest daughter has red hair." 

The census taker says thank you and writes down the ages of the three daughters. 

How old are they?

Clue #1 -- that the product of the three girls' ages is equal to 36 -- gives us eight possible combinations of ages:

1, 1, 36
1, 2, 18
1, 3, 12
1, 4, 9
1, 6, 6
2, 3, 6
2, 2, 9
3, 3, 4

So the census taker is quite right that this is insufficient information.

The second clue is that the sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street.  So let's see what the house number could be:

1 + 1 + 36 = 38
1 + 2 + 18  = 21
1 + 3 + 12 = 16
1 + 4 + 9 = 14
1 + 6 + 6 = 13
2 + 3 + 6 = 11
2 + 2 + 9 = 13
3 + 3 + 4 = 10

The census taker looks at the house number through the window, and still can't figure it out.  This is the key to the puzzle.  

Suppose the house number had been 21.  Then looking at the house number would have been sufficient information for solving it; the children would be 1, 2, and 18.  The only way that looking at the house number would be insufficient is if there were two triplets that added to the same thing -- which is only true for 1, 6, and 6, and 2, 2, and 9, both which add to 13.

The third clue is that the oldest daughter has red hair.  In the first of our remaining possibilities, 1, 6, and 6, there is no oldest daughter -- the eldest children are twins.  Therefore the daughters are 2, 2, and 9.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle -- I think it's one of the cleverest ones I've ever seen!

Melting ice and picking cherries

I don't usually like to post multiple times on the same topic only a few days apart, lest I be seen as constantly ringing the changes on the same idea, but sometimes circumstances demand that I do.

Last week I wrote a piece about the discovery that climate change denier Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon had financial ties to the petroleum industry and the Koch brothers that he had not disclosed in his academic papers, an omission that clearly contravenes standards of scientific ethics.  Although Dr. Soon's transgressions surprised no one, it was worth noting from the standpoint of doing what the deniers themselves demand, that is, "following the money."

Shortly thereafter we had Senator James Inhofe telling a bunch of his fellow senators that because it was cold outside, climate change wasn't occurring.  He demonstrated his entire knowledge of climatology by holding up a snowball, thus simultaneously proving that your skull can be filled with cobwebs and dead insects, and you can still get elected to public office.

But what brings this topic back to my attention is the release of information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center that shows that the Arctic Sea ice is already thinning rapidly (it's March, folks) and is set to go into a melt this year that climatologists are calling "catastrophic."

Here's how the trend was described by science blogger Robert Marston Fanney:

(T)he March 4 measure finds NSIDC values sliding below previous records for the date set just 8 years ago. 

Ever since Monday, extent values have been falling by an average rate of 10,000 square kilometers each day. A steady progression of warm air fronts through the Barents coupled with well above average temperatures in the Bering and near Alaska region have generated heat pressure along the ice edge and well into the Central Arctic. 

As of today, we have extreme temperature departures in the range of +20 degrees Celsius above average in the Barents northward through to the polar zone. From the Bering through Alaska and into the Southern Beaufort near the Mackenzie Delta departures are in the range of +5 to +20 C above average. 

These two hot spots, together with another warm pool over Greenland have shoved the Arctic, as a whole, into the +2 C range. A rather high departure that is only forecast to worsen in the GFS model summary over the coming days. 

The added warmth, wind, and waves in these ice edge regions drove these extent losses and now, as of Wednesday, values had fallen to 14,383,000 square kilometers. By comparison the previous record low for the day in 2006 was 14,411,000 square kilometers, so the new record is 28,000 square kilometers lower. An area approximately the size of the State of Maryland. 2011 now comes in as third lowest for the day at 14,451,000 square kilometers or 68,000 square kilometers above the 2015 value.

I don't want to quote anything further from Fanney's post, because it deserves to be read in its entirety (please go to the link I posted above to read it), but you get the picture.  Record high temperatures for the Arctic, including many regions above the freezing point of water -- and we haven't even hit the Vernal Equinox yet.

Sea ice coverage in 1980 (bottom) and 2012 (top), as observed by passive microwave sensors on NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). Multi-year ice is shown in bright white, while average sea ice cover is shown in light blue to milky white. The data shows the ice cover for the period of 1 November through 31 January in their respective years. [image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

The frightening part of all of this is that once you start opening up gaps in the ice sheet, there's a risk of a positive feedback effect.  Open water absorbs heat from insolation far better than snow and ice do.  This will accelerate the warming, opening up further gaps, and so on.  Storing vast amounts of heat in the Arctic Ocean will also affect the weather; the Northeastern deep-freeze this winter, and the repeated snowstorms that slammed the mid-Atlantic states and New England, were caused by a meander in the Polar Jet Stream that brought a blob of Arctic air far south of where it should have been, this time of year.  So Inhofe's snowball is actually consistent with climate models -- not that I expect him to have the intelligence to understand that.

In fact, the whole climate-denier mindset depends on three things; confirmation bias, the power of money, and a sly ability to cherry-pick your facts.  This last one is particularly insidious; that game involves publicizing like hell any specific data points that seem to support your claim, and not mentioning anything else.

You have to wonder how the deniers would explain away the latest from the NSIDC.  My guess is that what we'll hear from them is the following:

*sound of crickets chirping*

It puts me in mind of a quote from linguist Alice Kober:  "Facts are slippery things.  Almost anything can be proved with them, if they are selected correctly."

Sick unto death

New from the Dangerous Nonsense department: there's a new alternative-medicine model out of Germany that claims that viruses and bacteria aren't the cause of infectious diseases.

The website linked above, which was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, had me muttering imprecations under my breath pretty much right from the first line.  The author, Caroline Markolin, starts with a line from the famous 19th century biologist Rudolf Virchow: "If I could live my life over again, I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat -- diseased tissue -- rather than being the cause of diseased tissue."

Virchow was a brilliant pathologist and cellular biologist, but being good at some things doesn't mean you can't be dead wrong about others.  And the article conveniently fails to mention that Virchow not only disbelieved that pathogens caused diseases, he was also an ardent anti-evolutionist who considered Darwin an "ignoramus."

Be that as it may, we then are treated to quite a confection of nonsense.  Colds and flu, we're told, are actually the same thing, and are both caused by stress, not by viruses:

The common cold is linked to a "stink conflict", which can be experienced in real terms but also figuratively as "This situation stinks!" or "I've had it!". During the conflict-active phase the nasal membrane lining widens through ulceration, which is usually not noticed. In the healing phase, however, when the nasal tissue is being repaired, the nasal membrane swells up. A runny nose (healing always occurs in a fluid environment), headaches, tiredness, an elevated temperature or fever are all typical signs of a vagotonic healing process. If the cold symptoms are more severe, then this is commonly called the "flu". The claim, however, that "influenza" viruses are the culprits, has yet to be proven.

Nor has this claim, of course.  The "germ theory of disease" has over a hundred years of hard data supporting it.  This theory (if I can dignify it by that name) has a few vague generalities, a couple of ten-dollar words like "vagotonic," a photograph of a woman blowing her nose, so q.e.d., apparently.

We then find out that the "Spanish" flu of 1918-1919, that killed between 50 and 100 million people (hard numbers are difficult to come by, since the epidemic occurred during World War I, and many deaths in rural or isolated places went unrecorded), was not caused by a virus, it was caused by "stress."  People were under "territorial fear conflicts" and "death fright conflicts," and sickened from those; the acute, and frequently deadly, symptoms occurred when the body was trying to heal itself and the lung tumors caused by "stress" decomposed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Oh, and tuberculosis and AIDS aren't caused by pathogens, either.

And don't take antibiotics.  Ever.  Because they cause cancer.  Lung cancer, Markolin tells us, isn't caused by smoking; to hell with the research, which includes a study that demonstrated that 2/3 of the people who smoke will eventually die from conditions associated with tobacco use.  Cancer is caused by "shock," she says.  In a statement that should be an odds-on favorite for the Circular Logic Award of 2015, she states, "We have to bear in mind that every diagnosis shock can potentially cause... cancer," implying that the diagnosis of cancer is what caused the cancer to appear.

But how was the cancer there to diagnose if the diagnosis caused the cancer, you may ask?  To which I respond: stress vagotonic death fight conflicts.  And fear.  Stop asking questions, because you're going to stress me out and give me a cold.

Oh, and viruses, "if they existed," would "assist in the reconstruction of... tissues."  Because evolution, for some reason.  Microbes are our friends; all disease is caused by emotional conflict.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, how plants get infectious diseases.  Maybe my tomato plants didn't get late blight last year, maybe they were just feeling lonely and unappreciated.

But I'm certain that Markolin would have some sort of bullshit response to this, too.  Probably that humans with all of their ugly unnatural habits are causing the plants to stress out, and so the tomatoes are picking up on our conflicted quantum vibrational states and becoming sick themselves.

Nothing whatsoever to do with pathogens.  Just like colds, flu, AIDS, tuberculosis, and the bubonic plague.

The difficulty here is that there is a germ of truth (rimshot) to what she's saying.  The mind does have a role in health; stress does cause physical manifestations, probably mediated by the hormone cortisol.  But this is a far cry from saying that all disease is caused by stress, and that pathogens have nothing to do with it.

The problem with all of this is not that a crackpot has a website.  Many crackpots do.  It seems to be a favorite hobby of theirs, in fact.  The problem is that naïve people will fall for this, and fail to seek out proper medical care for curable conditions.  So it's homeopathy all over again; a claim that is entirely unsupported by research and evidence, and only believable if you fall for some hand-waving foolishness that the students in my Introductory Biology classes could debunk without even breaking a sweat.  That hasn't stopped the story, however, from being picked up by Spirit Science, so it's popping up all over woo-woo alt-med websites just in the last few days.  (If you go to the Spirit Science article, don't read the comments.  Really.  I mean it.  It will result in your spending the rest of the day curled up in a corner, whimpering softly.  If you ignore this advice, allow me to say simply that, yes, there are people in the world who are this stupid.  And they vote.)

So the caveat emptor principle applies here, of course.  People should be smart enough not to believe appealing nonsense about preventing the flu by becoming less stressed.  But I still feel some sympathy with the folks who are ignorant, or desperate, enough to fall for something like this, and who will suffer the consequences of that ignorance.

And as far as Markolin and her idiotic theory, I'm about done with it.  The whole thing is stressing me out, and we can't have that.

Piecing together the puzzle

I'm curious about where the human drive to solve puzzles comes from.

It's a cool thing, don't get me wrong.  But you have to wonder why it's something so many of us share.  We are driven to know things, even things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose in our lives.  The process is what's compelling; many times, the answer itself is trivial, once you find it.  But still we're pushed onward by an almost physical craving to figure stuff out.

Every few weeks I devote a day in my Critical Thinking classes to solving divergent thinking puzzles.  My rationale is that puzzle-solving is like mental calisthenics; if you want to grow your muscles, you exercise, and if you want to sharpen your intellect, you make it work.  I tell the students at the outset that they're not graded and that I don't care if they don't get to all of them by the end of the period.  You'd think that this would be license for high school students to blow it off, to spend the period chatting, but I find that this activity is one of the ones for which I almost never have to work hard to keep them engaged, despite more than once hearing kids saying things like, "This is making my brain hurt."

Here's a sample -- one of the most elegant puzzles I've ever seen:

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters. 

The man says, "The product of their ages is 36." 

The census taker says, "That's not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay.  The sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street." 

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "That's still not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay.  My oldest daughter has red hair." 

The census taker says thank you and writes down the ages of the three daughters. 

How old are they?

And yes, I just re-read this, and I didn't leave anything out.  It's solvable from what I've given you.  Give it a try!

This drive to figure things out, even things with no immediate application, reaches its apogee in two fields that are near and dear to me: science and linguistics.  In science, it takes the form of pure research, which, as a scientist friend of mine put it, is "trying to make sense of one cubic centimeter of the universe."  To be sure, a lot of pure research results in applications afterwards, but that's not usually why scientists pursue such knowledge.  The thrill of pursuit, and the satisfaction of knowing, are motivations in and of themselves.

In linguistics, it has to do with deepening our understanding of how humans communicate, with figuring out the connections between different modes of communication, and with deciphering the languages of our ancestors.  It's this last one that spurred me to write this post; just yesterday, I finished reading the phenomenal book The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, which is the story of how three people set out, one after the other, to crack the code of Linear B.

Linear B was a writing system used in Crete 4,500 years ago, and for which neither the sound values of the characters, nor the language they encoded, was known.  This is the most difficult possible problem for a linguist; in fact, most of the time, such scripts (of which there are a handful of other examples) remain closed doors permanently.  If you neither know what sounds the letters represent, nor what language was spoken by the people who wrote them, how could you ever decipher it?

One of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos by Arthur Evans [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'd known about this amazing triumph of human perseverance and intelligence ever since I read John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B when I was in college.  I was blown away by the difficulty of the task these people undertook, and their doggedness in pursuing the quest to its end.  Chadwick's book is fascinating, but Fox's is a triumph; and you're left with the dual sense of admiration at minds that could pierce such a puzzle, and wonderment at why they felt so driven.

Because once the Linear B scripts were decoded, the tablets and inscriptions turned out to be...

... inventories.  Lists of how many jugs of olive oil and bottles of wine they had, how many arrows and spears, how many horses and cattle and sheep.  No wisdom of the ancients; no gripping sagas of heroes doing heroic things; no new insights into history.

But none of that mattered.  Because of the form that the inscriptions took, Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, and Michael Ventris realized pretty quickly that this was the sort of thing that the Linear B tablets were about.  The scholars who deciphered this mysterious script weren't after a solution because they thought the inscriptions said something profound or worth knowing; they devoted their lives to the puzzle because it was one cubic centimeter of the universe that no one had yet made sense of.

That they succeeded is a testimony to this peculiar drive we have to understand the world around us, even when it seems to fall under the heading of "who cares?"  We need to know, we humans.  Wherever that urge comes from, it becomes an almost physical craving.  All three of the people whose work cracked the code were united by one trait; a desperate desire to figure things out.  Only one, in fact, had a particularly good formal background in linguistics.  The other two were an architect and a wealthy amateur historian and archaeologist.  Training wasn't the issue.  What allowed them to succeed was persistence, and methodical minds that refused to admit that a solution was out of reach.

The story is fascinating, and by turns tragic and inspirational, but by the time I was done reading it I was left with my original question; why are we driven to know stuff that seems to have no practical application whatsoever?  I completely understood how Evans, Kober, and Ventris felt, and in their place I no doubt would have felt the same way, but I'm still at a loss to explain why.  It's one of those mysterious filigrees of the human mind, which perhaps is selected for because curiosity and inquisitiveness have high survival value in the big picture, even if they sometimes push us to spend our lives bringing light to some little dark cul-de-sac of human knowledge that no one outside of the field cares, or will even hear, about.

But as the brilliant geneticist Barbara McClintock, whose decades-long persistence in solving the mystery of transposable elements ("jumping genes") eventually resulted in a Nobel Prize, put it:  "It is a tremendous joy, the whole process of finding the answer.  Just pure joy."