We're in for a spell of weather...

Why is it that some people will believe anyone's pronouncements on anything, as long as said person is not a scientist?

I and others have ranted repeatedly about a large slice the public's dismissal of climate science and evolutionary biology.  And the anti-science stance of each of those, I know, comes from a different source; the petroleum lobby's power over the political system in the first place, and religion in the second.  But this general distrust of anything scientific runs deeper than that, touching on topics where there is no obvious motive for disbelief, where people for some reason will accept folksy tale-telling over evidence-based, data-driven research.

And that makes no sense to me at all.

As an example of this, let's consider The Old Farmer's Almanac, which just came out with its predictions for the winter last week.  And based on their methodology, which as far as I can tell involves voodoo and rain dances, we're going to have a wicked snowy winter.

"The snowiest periods in the Pacific Northwest will be in mid-December, early to mid-January and mid- to late February," the Almanac says, which at least has a better chance of being correct than their predicting a blizzard in, say, July.

But the fact is, no scientist takes what the Almanac has to say seriously, because their weather forecasting isn't science. According to an article in Consumer Reports, the Almanac bases its predictions on "a secret mathematical formula using the position of the planets, tidal action of the moon and sunspots" that is kept in a black tin box in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Because that's gonna be reliable.

And how accurate is it, anyway?  Skeptical blogger Steven Novella found one place where someone actually tested the Almanac's predictions, and guess what happened?

In the October 1981 issue of Weatherwise, pages 212-215, John E. Walsh and David Allen performed a check on the accuracy of 60 monthly forecasts of temperature and precipitation from The Old Farmer’s Almanac at 32 stations in the U.S.  They found that 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts verified with the correct sign.  These may be compared with the 50 percent success rate expected by chance.

This is my "shocked face."

But what pissed me off the most about this year's predictions was an article from KOMO News Online called, "Who to Believe?  Snowy Farmer's Almanac?  Or NOAA's Warm El-Niñoey Blob?" written by, of all people, a trained meteorologist who therefore should know better.  And while author Seth Sistek concludes that we should probably trust NOAA, which has forecasted a warmer-than-average winter for the northern United States because of a blob of anomalously warm seawater parked off the Pacific Coast of North America, even the fact that he asks the question gives unwarranted legitimacy to what honestly is a bunch of hocus-pocus.

[image courtesy of NOAA]

"[I]n the battle between Blob and book," Sistek writes, "I'd have to lean toward the Blob in agreeing with the supercomputers that it'll be a warmer winter."

Which, as endorsements go, is not exactly knocking my socks off.  What's next?  Asking the astrologers to draw up zodiac charts to predict solar flares?

Okay, I'm coming off as pretty harsh toward The Old Farmer's Almanac, I realize.  But the problem is, there's already a tendency in this country for people to buy pseudoscience over science, to distrust researchers, to look at scientists as ivory-tower nerds who are disconnected with practical reality.  We definitely don't need anything to push us further in that direction, even if it is "all in fun." To quote Novella again:

I hear many people quoting one almanac or the other about what kind of winter we are in for. They don’t seem to realize that the almanacs are using 200 year old pseudoscientific methods that have never been validated.  Despite the coy marketing of these predictions, many people take them as legitimate... 

It seems that the public did not want the scientific information – they wanted the predictions made by mysterious methods.  I can understand, for marketing reasons, why future editors of the almanac would not consider dropping the predictions.  But here is a recommendation – why not get rid of the two century old dubious methods and replace them with the climate forecasts made by the National Weather Service?

Because, apparently, folksy prognostications still carry more weight than actual science with a large sector of the American public.

Look, I know that meteorology as a science still has a long way to go.  Weather and climate are vastly complex systems, extremely sensitive to initial conditions, and long-range forecasting is still fraught with inaccuracies.  Even the most highly-trained meteorologists, using the latest computer models and our best understanding of how the science works, still get it wrong sometimes.

But damn it all, it's still better than magic formulas in black tin boxes in Dublin, New Hampshire.

A ban on questioning

When I was sixteen years old, I signed up for a class called Modern American Literature.  I wasn't much of a reader -- English and History tended to be my worst subjects by a large margin -- but the class seemed better at least than slogs like Shakespeare and Nineteenth Century Poetry.

The teacher was a young woman named Ms. Beverly Authement, and her enthusiasm was infectious even for a mediocre student like myself.  So when it came time for us to choose books to read, I went through the list with at least a slightly better than average attitude.

The problem is, I hadn't heard of almost any of the books on the list, and wasn't sufficiently motivated to ask for suggestions, so I picked one more or less at random.  My choice was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And my mind hasn't been the same since.

The story is the tale of a 17th century Peruvian priest, Brother Juniper, who is trying to make sense of the deaths of six villagers in a bridge collapse.  Why would God do such a thing?  What linked the six?  There had to be a reason, after all, that he selected these six to die, and no others.  So Brother Juniper delves into their histories, finds out what circumstances led to their being on the bridge the moment it broke apart and plunged them to their deaths.

And in the end, he concludes that either there is no reason for such things, or the reason is so subtle that it is beyond the human mind to discern it.  And in the devastating last pages, Brother Juniper is found guilty of the heretical action of doubting the divine will by the Inquisition and is burned at the stake, along with all of his writings.

Heavy stuff, and not something that you'd usually think of as a page-turner for a sixteen-year-old male.  But I couldn't put it down.  And the questions it opened in my mind took me to a new place in my understanding of the world -- which is what all good books should do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why the actions of some parents and the response of the administration in Tallahassee, Florida are so completely wrongheaded.

A summer reading list for Lincoln High School included Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a novel told from the point of view of an autistic fifteen-year-old.  It has been lauded as a masterpiece, and in fact was recently turned into a Broadway play.  But the book contains swearing, and represents some adults as struggling with the truth of religion.

So a cadre of parents approached the principal asking that it be removed from the list, and the principal capitulated.

The parents are saying this isn't about censorship.  "I am not interested in having books banned,” said Sue Gee, who spearheaded the effort.  “But to have that language and to take the name of Christ in vain — I don’t go for that. A s a Christian, and as a female, I was offended.  Kids don’t have to be reading that type of thing and that’s why I was asking for an alternative assignment.  I know it’s not realistic to pretend bad words don’t exist, but it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that my daughter knows what is right or wrong."

She's "not interested in having books banned?"  Then what does she call "removing a book from a reading list because of ideological objections?"

And you know, Ms. Gee, if reading one book that asks some deep questions is enough to shake your daughter's faith, then there wasn't much there to begin with.  It's something that has struck me more than once; the tendency of the religious to represent their god as all-powerful and all-knowing and invincible, but simultaneously to feel like the whole edifice is so vulnerable and weak that it will crumble if a few people ask questions or have different viewpoints.

So what should a parent do if a child brings home a book that brings up some troubling points, or uses inappropriate language?  Discuss it with her.

After she reads it.

Because we're not talking about assigning Portnoy's Complaint to third graders, here.  These are young adults who soon will be off in college or at jobs, and will have to face a great deal more questioning of their own motives, beliefs, and attitudes than could ever come up in a single novel.  Keeping kids in some kind of protected, isolated hothouse out of fear is only going to have the effect of making it an even ruder shock when they run into the real world -- which will happen sooner or later no matter what.

Teenagers should be reading things that make them ask questions, that challenge their assumptions, that leave them changed by the last page.  If these things aren't happening, then reading turns into one of two things -- an echo chamber for what they already believed, or a set of literary drills with no purpose other than to force them to keep their eyes moving across the page.  As I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "It is perfectly acceptable for you to leave this class in June with your beliefs unchanged.  It is not acceptable for you to leave with your beliefs unquestioned."

But such an attitude is intensely frightening to people like Gee, who apparently consider any exposure their children have to different worldviews a threat.  Worse still is the fact that the principal, Allen Burch, caved in and removed the book from the list rather than fighting the demagogues who made the demands.

And in the end -- as usual -- the students lose.  Because these sorts of acts are completely antithetical to education, a word whose etymology is from the Latin verb educare, meaning "to draw out of."  We often forget that, don't we?  Education isn't about stuffing facts into children's brains; it's about drawing out of them what they're capable of becoming.

Or as Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka put it, "Education should be a grenade we detonate beneath stagnant ways of thinking."

Overshooting towards catastrophe

Last Thursday we hit a milestone and I didn't even realize it at the time.

It's called Earth Overshoot Day, and it's nothing to celebrate.  It's the point in the year that the human population of the Earth's use of resources outstrips the total resource production for that year.  In other words, it's the point at which we go into deficit spending.

According to environmental scientists, this date has been creeping upwards ever since it was first estimated, back in the 1970s.  This year it was the earliest ever -- August 13.  Even more troubling is when you consider individual countries' overshoot points, and find out that the United States' rate of use passed its capacity for production over a month ago, on July 14.

What bothers me most about this -- besides the obvious fact that such behavior can't continue forever -- is how oblivious to it most people are.  We go on using resources as if they were infinite, wasting vast amounts of materials and energy because of careless practice or outright laziness, and still have an entitled sense that we should be able to keep doing this as long as we want, that throwing the world away after one bite is some kind of god-given right.

A lot of this here in the United States comes, I think, from living in a country that is resource-rich and still has a lot of open space.  For most of our history, we did have a vast amount of material wealth, far more (it seemed) than we could ever spend.  This attitude engendered a wildly reckless attitude that is exemplified by our treatment of the Passenger Pigeon, a bird that used to be the single most common bird species in North America -- yes, more common than starlings, robins, or crows are today.  19th century accounts describe the skies as being darkened for hours as immense flocks of a million or more birds flew over.  Yet within less than fifty years of those awe-inspiring sightings, the Passenger Pigeon was extinct.  The last member of the species, a female nicknamed Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

How could this happen?  Simple: overhunting and habitat loss.  Millions of birds could be trapped from one flock in a single day using a device called a tunnel net.  Professional hunters shot pigeons in quantities that boggle the mind; records show that at one nesting site in Petoskey, Michigan, fifty thousand birds were killed each day for over five months.  Yet it wasn't until the species had dropped below the sinister threshold called the "minimum viable population" that anyone said, "Wait a minute.  This can't continue."

Even considering this, only one of many examples of over-exploitation that resulted in a disaster, we still have the attitude that the Earth has an infinite capacity to support our every whim.  Americans get an average of 41 pounds of junk mail per person per year, 44% of which goes to landfills unopened, at a cost of millions of trees.  Simultaneously, most of us shrug off efforts to promote recycling.  Planned phase-out of incandescent light bulbs -- a device that wastes 95% of the electricity passing through it as heat -- are met with outcries against an "interference with the free market."

We have the right to use everything up, dammit.  Don't get in the way of our conspicuous consumption.  Somehow, the Earth will manage to keep up.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

After all, we can't be expected to change our habits, right?

Of course right.

This attitude of entitlement runs deep in our cultural consciousness.  It's right there in the first chapter of Genesis, isn't it?

God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."  Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.

A pity we don't pay less attention to this mandate, and more to ones like "Love your neighbor as yourself."

At some point, however, this attitude is going to change, or circumstances will change it for us.  As our government has proven over and over, you can't engage in deficit spending without there being a bill to pay at some point.  We can either take the overshoot phenomenon seriously, now -- or we will face some seriously unpleasant consequences eventually.

But for a lot of people, "eventually" isn't sufficient motivation.  It's not enough that simple economic logic dictates that such behavior can't continue; the fact that we're not now in a worldwide disaster makes it easy to ignore the inevitable one that will follow if we don't change our ways.  All too easy to keep going with our comfortable, shop-till-you-drop lifestyle, and figure that when the time comes to pay up, we'll manage somehow.

Which explains not only our own behavior, but our continual election of leaders whose attitude is "Environmental problems?  What environmental problems?"  Which honestly could be better summed up as, "Wow, nasty leak!  I'm sure glad it's not at our end of the boat!"

A visit to the scepter'd isle

For the last couple of weeks, I was on holiday in England.  Traveling is one of my passions -- if I could make a living traveling, I'd quit my day job in a heartbeat -- and England is a lovely place to visit.  The last time I was there was twenty years ago, when I was on a solo hiking trip from Blackpool (on the Irish Sea) to Whitby (on the North Sea), a walk that I mostly remember because it rained for three weeks straight.

This time, though, we lucked out, and had stupendous weather.  We spent a good deal of our stay in the southwestern counties of Cornwall and Devon, and were treated to spectacular vistas of rocky coastlines and beautiful seaside villages.

Mevagissey Harbor, Cornwall

While in Cornwall we also experienced a wonderful tradition called a "cream tea" that involves scones, jam, and an amazing invention called "clotted cream" that Wikipedia says has "a minimum fat content of 55%" and was undoubtedly invented as a surreptitious job security strategy by the British Heart Foundation.

One thing that impressed us about England as a whole, but the southwest in particular, is that they can grow damn near anything.  At an amazing botanical garden near St. Austell in Cornwall, The Lost Gardens of Heligan, we saw a collection of camellias, dahlias, hundred-year-old Nepalese tree rhododendrons, and... pineapples.  I kid you not.  The brilliant South African amaryllis relative, crocosmia, is everywhere, growing not only in gardens but along roadsides and train track embankments.

Crocosmias in Heligan

Another must-see if you ever make it to that part of the world is the Eden Project, a set of beautifully-maintained geodesic domes each devoted to different biomes -- they have a rain forest, a Mediterranean chaparral, a desert, and so on.  It was built on land reclaimed from an abandoned kaolin mine, and features (you guessed it) more spectacular gardens.

The Eden Project

I could have lived in the rain forest dome pretty much permanently.

Speaking of kaolin, as amateur potters, my wife and I had to visit Wheal Martyn, near Ruddlemoor, a porcelain clay museum and working kaolin mine.  If you own a piece of English porcelain, chances are the kaolin -- the constituent of porcelain clay that makes it white and allows it to be shaped -- came from here.

From there, we headed off to London, a city I'd never been in before (having spent my entire previous visit to England north of the city of Manchester).  Having New York City as my mental model of a large, cosmopolitan city, I was immediately impressed by how clean London is, how orderly everything (especially the Tube) is, and how polite everyone seemed to be.  I swear, Londoners use the word "Sorry" as a greeting.  More sightseeing, including Kew Gardens (we have a thing for gardens, you might have noticed), a couple of museums, and the Tower of London, and then it was off to Suffolk.

What brought us to Leiston, a little town on the Suffolk coast, was Minsmere, a phenomenal wildlife refuge.  Illustrating Dave Barry's quip that "there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness," the entire reason for visiting Minsmere was...

... birds.  I'm an avid birdwatcher, and if you like birds, Minsmere should be on your bucket list.  I won't bore you non-birders with the details, but let's just say that watching a Barn Owl hunt at dusk was one of the high points of my vacation.

Then we continued north to the beautiful cathedral town of Durham, which is in a region of England where they speak a variant of English composed almost entirely of consonants.  The north of England demonstrates the accuracy of Oscar Wilde's comment about England and America being two countries separated by the same language.  I had many conversations like the following:

Taxi driver:  "S'h'w l'ng y'r'n D'rh'm, eh?" 

Me:  "Only a few days, unfortunately." 

Taxi driver:  "t's l'v'ly t'wn, n't?" 

Me:  "It sure is." 

Taxi driver:  "M'n sq'd b'f'n l'rg b'lt'sqt?" 

Me:  "Oh, definitely."

The upshot of it was that most of the time, I had no idea what I was responding and/or agreeing to.  But people were very friendly, probably because at some point in the conversation I had inadvertently agreed to make them the beneficiaries of my will, or something.

While in Durham we visited Carol's ancestral castle, Hylton Castle, near Sunderland.  Her great-grandmother was a Hylton, and they descend from nobility and (ultimately) King Edward IV, a fact of which she reminds me when I start getting uppity.  In fact, she considered stopping by Buckingham Palace while we were in London to say hi to her Cousin Elizabeth, but figured that might not go over so well considering that Carol has more than once publicly mused about how many people she'd have to kill to be in succession for the English throne.  (Best estimate: 857,209,281 people are ahead of her in line.  But hope springs eternal, right?)

Practicing the "Royal Wave" in front of Hylton Castle

Then it was back to London for a day, and off home, during which the only negative thing on this entire holiday occurred -- the airline lost my suitcase, despite our flight being a single-leg non-stop.  I'm not sure how they did this, unless they opened the cargo hold and chucked it out as we flew over Greenland, or something.  They've promised it's been found and is being returned, but I haven't gotten it back yet.  I hope it's returned soon, not least because I keep having to do laundry because all but three pairs of underwear are in that suitcase.

But all in all, it was a wonderful holiday, and thank you for indulging me not only a three-week break from writing Skeptophilia, but my devoting a day's post to a mini-travelogue.  During my hiatus I was sent a number of good topics by loyal readers, because while I was gone the world apparently went on being weird, illogical, and irrational, to no one's particular surprise.  So tomorrow I'll be back at it again.

Refreshed, rejuvenated, and with luck, wearing clean underwear.

Speculation, extraterrestrial life, and Kepler 452b

Dear readers,

This will be my last post for a bit, as I'm going on a short hiatus for a (hopefully) well-deserved vacation.  I'll be away for three weeks, so my next new post will be on Monday, August 17.

This is a chance for you to check out some other great blogs and webpages, so here are a few of my favorites:

The Reason Stick
James Randi Educational Foundation

Potato Chip Math

Reddit: Skeptic

Doubtful News
SkepChick
The Skeptic's Dictionary
The Call of Troythulu
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason
Friendly Atheist
Quackwatch
Bad Archaeology
Bad Astronomy

That should be enough to keep you occupied while I'm gone, don't you think?

So until my return, keep reading, keep thinking, and keep hoisting the banner of logic and reason... and I'll see you on the 17th!

************************************************

It is one of my dearest hopes that unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial life is discovered during my lifetime.

I'm buoyed by the discovery of extrasolar planets, with new ones being identified virtually every other day.  As astronomers develop better and more sensitive techniques for detection, more and more of the planets they find are turning out to be small, rocky worlds like our own, and some are in the "Goldilocks Zone" -- that region surrounding a star where the temperature would allow liquid water to exist.  Not too hot, not too cold... just right.

The effort to prove that we're not alone in the universe has just received a nice shot in the arm in the form of a project called Breakthrough, funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yuri Milner and announced this week by none other than eminent physicist Stephen Hawking:

We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life.  Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps intelligent life might be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean.  Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos, unseen beacons announcing that, here on one rock, the universe discovered its existence?  Either way, there is no better question.  It's time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth.  The Breakthrough initiatives are making that commitment.  We are alive.  We are intelligent.  We must know.

The project will survey over a million of the closest stars for any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The technology required for this is staggering; Breakthrough will be covering ten times the number of stars of any previous SETI project, and do so a hundred times faster.

"We will be examining something like 10 billion radio channels simultaneously," said University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, who has been involved in previous efforts to locate extrasolar planets. "We're listening to a cosmic piano, and every time we listen with the telescopes, we'll be listening not to 88 keys, but 10 billion keys."

Couple that with this week's announcement of the discovery of the "most Earth-like extrasolar planet ever found," Kepler 452b, and it's been a pretty good week for people who, like me, think that Contact is one of the best movies ever.

Which is thrilling.  But of course, given the human tendency to take what we know and run right off the cliff with it, this week's announcement was accompanied by a couple of rather ridiculous articles from media sources that should really know better.

Artist's rendition of Kepler 452b and its parent star [image courtesy of NASA]

Starting with the article "Is There Life on Kepler 452b, the Most Earth-like Planet Ever Discovered?" from the site CosmosUp, the text of which should state, in its entirety, "WE DON'T KNOW."  But there's no reason not to spin a nearly complete lack of information into a lengthy article, right?  It's laced with quotes from actual scientists (who also should know better), such as the following baffling assessment from NASA's former chief operating officer, Carlos Gonzáles Pintado:

Mathematically speaking, there’s high possibility that could be intelligent life on Kepler-452b... We move in four dimensions and to get something extraordinary we have to find some ‘new’ dimensions.  Some theorists believe that the universe must have eleven dimensions and we are at the dawn, we ‘discovered’ just four and nothing more.  When we would find the other missing seven, maybe we’ll find something in the middle to break the barrier of speed of light.

Which gives me the impression that however Mr. Pintado may excel at being chief operating officer, he doesn't know a damn thing about physics.  Finding the "missing seven dimensions?"  Then finding something "in the middle of them?"  What the hell does that even mean?

And what is a "high possibility, mathematically speaking?"  2%?  50%?  98%?  The fact is, we know nothing about Kepler 452b except for an estimate of its size and distance from its parent star -- most importantly, we have no information about the composition of its atmosphere.  Even if it's in the Goldilocks Zone, what's to stop it from being like Venus -- a boiling hell of a planet, with an atmosphere made primarily of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide?

The fact is, Pintado is doing what members of scientific institutions shouldn't ever do, which is publicly engaging in idle speculation.  It's hard enough getting laypeople to understand how science works without this sort of thing.

Worse still, we have Jeffrey Schweitzer's piece for Huffington Post entitled "Earth 2.0: Bad News for God."  Schweitzer is a neurophysiologist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst, which didn't stop him from writing the following:

[I]t would be difficult to claim the unique position of universe center if other planets held life that was zipping around in anti-gravity cars traveling at the speed of light.  Clearly, if the ancients knew there was alien life, any form of life at all, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe would be more difficult to sustain.  Again, though, there is no mention of alien worlds or life beyond this little blue dot. 

None of the 66 books of the bible make any reference to life other than that created by god here on earth in that six-day period.  If we discover life elsewhere, one must admit that is an oversight.  So much so in fact that such a discovery must to all but the most closed minds call into question the entire story of creation, and anything that follows from that story.  How could a convincing story of life's creation leave out life?  Even if the story is meant to be allegorical, the omission of life elsewhere makes no sense.

So the implication is that the discovery of extraterrestrial life, or (better) extraterrestrial intelligence, would be a serious blow to religion.  Schweitzer himself calls into question whether his own contention is true, however, in his last paragraph:

Religious leaders will simply declare that such life is fully compatible with, in fact predicted by, the Bible...  They will create contorted justifications to support this view, cite a few passages of the bible that could mean anything, and declare victory.  Don't say I did not warn you.

So if you think that the religious will be able to argue away extraterrestrial intelligence as being consistent with the bible, why is the discovery of Kepler 452b "bad news for god?"  Or were you just trying to come up with an eye-catching, click-baity title?  Because let's face it; if the overwhelming mountains of evidence in favor of evolution hasn't convinced the biblical literalists that their worldview is wrong, then receiving a hearty "NuqneH!" from the Klingon home world won't make a damn bit of difference either.

Religion, after all, has nothing to do with evidence; it's all about revelation and internal experience.  So Schweitzer's suggestion that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will have any effect at all on the devout is probably as accurate as all of the other times people have declared that belief in a higher power was on its way out.

Anyhow, none of this should minimize the fact that we live in an amazing time, when we are taking steps toward solving one of the most fundamental questions we have -- whether life is common in the universe.  It'd be nice, however, if people would keep their eye on the ball, rather than zooming off on tangential speculations that really have nothing to do with the reality.  The reality, honestly, is cool enough in and of itself.

The origins of musical taste

I have been curious for a long time about what creates preferences in music.  Part of this curiosity is because of the important role music has had in my life.  When I was three years old, I apparently demanded that my mom allow me to learn how to use the record player because I wanted to be able to be in charge of what music got played.  My mom acquiesced -- odd, given both the request I'd made and my mom's character -- and I recall her saying, "And he never damaged a single record."

My own musical tastes are all over the map.  There is music I love and music I detest from almost every genre.  More interestingly, when I discover some new song or piece of music that sends me into raptures, it does so instantly, and with almost no engagement of the cognitive part of my brain.  I don't have any thoughts like, "Wow, it was really cool how that tune modulated from A major to C# minor, right there!"  In fact, there are rarely any thoughts at all.  It is a totally visceral experience, as if the music had played its own tune on my neurons, an ecstatic frisson like a glissando on some internal emotional harp strings.

And now, some researchers at the University of Cambridge have taken the first step toward understanding why people gravitate toward particular styles of music.  A team of psychologists led by Ph.D. candidate David Greenberg has shown that one pair of contrasting traits is a good predictor of what pieces of music someone will prefer.

Greenberg sorted people into "empathizers," people who respond primarily to the emotions of the people they are close to, and "systematizers," people who are more driven by understanding patterns and rules of the world around them.  And he and his team found that empathizers tended to prefer music that was mellow, music that was "unpretentious" (e.g. folk, singer/songwriter, and country), and music that was more accessible by virtue of being contemporary.  Systematizers, on the other hand, look for edgy music with elements of tension, strength, and energy, music that has surprising shifts, and music that is complex or cerebral.  The fascinating part is that the pattern even held true within genres; jazz enthusiasts who are empathizers tend to like mellow, bluesy, laid-back pieces, while systematizers prefer avant-garde, complex, driving tunes.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Simon Baron-Cohen, a member of the team, said, "This new study is a fascinating extension to the ‘empathizing-systemizing’ theory of psychological individual differences.  It took a talented PhD student and musician to even think to pose this question.  The research may help us understand those at the extremes, such as people with autism, who are strong systemizers."

David Rentfrow, senior author of the study, put it even more succinctly: "This line of research highlights how music is a mirror of the self.  Music is an expression of who we are emotionally, socially, and cognitively."

Which I find absolutely fascinating.  It certainly seems to hold true for me -- I can be empathetic, but it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that the primary driver in my personality is a desire to understand how the world works.  I love the unexpected in music, partly because it's so much fun when I figure out what's going on and how it works -- explaining, perhaps, why I flipped when I discovered Balkan music, with its crazy rhythms and lightning-fast modulations.  Here are a few examples of music from various genres that have grabbed me by the emotions and swung me around, right from the first time I've heard them:

• Henri Litolff, "Scherzo" from Concerto Symphonique #4
• Alt-J, "Breezeblocks"
• Cage the Elephant, "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked"
• J. S. Bach, Fugue à la Gigue
• Shakey Graves and Esmé Patterson, "Dearly Departed"
• Beck, "E-Pro"
• Blowzabella, "Falco"
• Thomas Tallis, Spem in Alium
• Camille Saint-Saens, Finale from Piano Concerto #1 in D Major
• Fun, "Some Nights"
• Green Day, "Oh Love"
• Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata #96 in D Major, "La Chasse"
• Michael Franti, "The Sound of Sunshine"
• R.E.M., "Stand"
• Dmitri Shostakovich, Waltz #2

So that's enough to go on.  I could do this all day.  Like I said, music is important to me.  But check some of these out -- most are on YouTube -- and see if they have the same effect on you.

Greenberg's study, of course, has only provided a first-order explanation.  I suspect that there's a lot more going on here than can be explained by one pair of contrasting personality traits.  There's still a great deal to be understood about why music has such a powerful effect on the emotions, and (more specifically) why a particular piece of music will grab someone, and other ones -- even music that is similar in genre and overall feeling -- will leave the same person completely cold.  

But this study still gives us an interesting lens into personality and musical taste that we didn't have before.  Think about your own favorite songs and pieces of music, and whether you are more of an empathizer or a systematizer.  Did the pattern hold true for you?

Fire and ice

I am frequently confounded by the capacity for humans to be rational and irrational at the same time.

Take, for example, the Icelanders.  Iceland has a 99% adult literacy rate.  Same-sex marriage was legalized in Iceland in 2010 -- by a unanimous vote in parliament.  In polls regarding religious belief, they have one of the highest percentages of atheists in the world.  (31% of Icelanders identify as "non-religious.")  In response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Icelandic government just this month voted by an overwhelming majority to decriminalize blasphemy -- not because they (or I) think that ridiculing someone's beliefs is nice, but because protecting free speech is more important than making sure that religion has some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card with respect to criticism.

"Freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of democracy," a government spokesperson said.  "It is a fundamental point in a free society that people can express themselves without fear of punishment of any kind, whether on behalf of the authorities or others...  The Icelandic parliament has issued the important message that freedom will not bow to bloody attacks."

And yet... there are some odd things about the place.  There has been a resurgence in belief in the old Norse gods -- Odin, Thor, Njord, and the rest -- the Germanic neopagan belief system "Ásatrú" is amongst the fastest-growing religions in Iceland.  A poll, later verified by a thorough study, found that 54.4% of Icelanders believe in the huldufólk, which usually gets translated in English as "elves."  As I've mentioned before, there have been highway projects that have been stalled because someone decided that the proposed road was going to trespass on property owned by "the secret people."

But best of all, an Icelandic woman named Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir has just published a book on how to have sex with elves.  And why you should want to.

Hallgrímsdóttir says her first sexual experience with an elf happened by accident.  "I was just wandering around," she says, "in Icelandic nature, alone in this beautiful situation, and he just came to me.  He whispered some things in my ear -- dirty talk, they're quite good at that, actually."

They're "tall and beautiful," she says.  "It almost looks like their skin emits light."

Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse (1896) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As far as what hot elf-on-self action is like, she waxed rhapsodic.  "It's almost like they know what you want in bed.  They don't have to ask, they can read your mind, and know better what you want than you do...  They're very flexible, so they can use positions that would not be possible for humans."

She backs this up with a series of stick figure drawings that made me choke-snort an entire mouthful of coffee, especially the one of an extremely male elf with an arrow pointing to a body part labeled "geyser."

There are both male and female elves, she tells us, and they are a pretty open-minded lot.  "All elves are bisexual," Hallgrímsdóttir says, "but guys and girls not ready for some same sex action don’t worry, no elf will do anything you don’t want to."

Amongst other things that you don't have to worry about, elf-sex-wise, are STDs and pregnancy.  You can become pregnant by an elf (or make a female elf pregnant), but you both have to want to make a baby for this to happen.  Which is pretty convenient.  

Oh, and elf semen is "glittery and shimmery."  So there's that.  She includes an "artist's rendition" of the result of a male elfgasm, which is striking not only in colorfulness but in quantity, and in (as it were) a rather impressive trajectory.

There are various other details that are, shall we say, a little too salacious for me to include here, so if you're curious you'll just have to listen to the interview with her on the link I posted above.  Suffices to say that the Icelandic tourist industry might want to plan ahead for an influx of people who are, um, hopeful in the supernatural romance department.

I'm curious to know how many people actually take her seriously.  The article says that Hallgrímsdóttir gets "a lot of flack from her countrymen" for her beliefs -- but if over half of Icelanders believe that the Hidden People exist, what's stopping Legolas et al. from seeking out illicit liaisons with their human cohabitants?  Is it that the people who believe in elves aren't really all that serious about it, sort of in the way otherwise rational people will wear a lucky hat to a baseball game, or avoid walking under a ladder?  It certainly seems odd that a populace that is as literate, well educated, and generally rational as the Icelanders would subscribe to a belief that is (to put it bluntly) extremely wacky.

But maybe all humans are like that -- masses of contradictions, all thrown together under a thin veneer of logic and reason.  Maybe I am, too, for all of my talk of skepticism and science.  Go beneath the skin, and there might well be a little pagan in all of us, however we might want to consecrate it or else expunge it entirely.  As one of my favorite quotes from Walt Whitman goes, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then I contradict myself.  I am large, I contain multitudes."