American Caligula

If you've heard of Gaius Julius Augustus Germanicus, it's probably under his better-known nickname of "Caligula" ("Little Boots"), given to him when he was a child and demanded to have a set of boots like the military officers had, so he could go stomping around giving orders.  While such behavior is at least arguably cute in a kid, it becomes decidedly less so when said kid grows into an adult and continues to do the same sort of thing.

And it becomes downright scary when such an adult toddler ends up in charge of a whole nation.

Caligula [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Caligula became the ruler of Rome upon the death of his great-uncle Tiberius in March of 37 C.E.  It'd be nice if people like him (i.e. sociopathic narcissists) suddenly had an epiphany when they found themselves in a position of responsibility, but that seldom if ever happens.  In fact, it's often the opposite.  When they gain power, it takes the brakes off entirely.  In his short reign -- only three years, ten months -- here are a few things Caligula did:

• He had a temple constructed in his honor, containing a life-sized golden statue of himself.  He ordered it to be dressed each day in clothes identical to the ones he was wearing that day.
• Because he was embarrassed at the fact that he was going bald, he made it an offense for anyone to look down at him from a balcony.
• He was so angry at the fact that there was a storm and uncooperative tides during his campaign in Britain that he ordered his soldiers to flog the waves with leather whips.  Afterwards, he had them collect seashells as "spoils of the battle."
• Upon his return to Rome, he ordered that hundreds of beautiful young people be painted gold and stood, naked, alongside the road as he passed, holding torches.  Unfortunately, the gold paint contained arsenic, and all of the would-be statues died in agony from absorbing the toxin through their skin over the next three days.
• He had his prized horse, Incitatus, appointed to the Senate.
• He spent lavish amounts of money on parties celebrating himself, at which attendees were commanded to make lengthy speeches in his praise.  Within months of his accession, he had blown through most of the Roman treasury, so he levied taxes on parts of the Empire he didn't like.

And that's only scraping the surface.  The man was, to put it bluntly, a nutjob, and it is honestly a mystery why the Roman people put up with him for almost four years.

I mean, you'd think the self-laudatory stuff would wear thin pretty quick, especially since the guy was far more interested in self-aggrandizement than he was in running the country.  Every speech he made did nothing but heap praise upon his own head; "No one," he said at one meeting of his inner circle, "has done more [for the country] than I have."  And instead of laughing directly into his face, all of the people in attendance just kind of nodded sagely, as if that was actually the truth.  To add insult to injury, he then demanded that each of his counselors speak in his praise -- and they did.  For example:

• "The greatest privilege in my life is to serve [here]."
• "I am privileged to be here -- deeply honored -- and I want to thank you for your commitment."
• "The people all love you."
• "We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda."
• "Congratulations to the men and women you have gathered around this table."
• "It was a great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year, and an even greater honor to be serving here."

Oh, wait!  My bad.  That last bit wasn't Caligula, that was Donald Trump's last Cabinet meeting, which accomplished nothing than stroking the president's turgid ego.  (If you're curious, the quotes above are, in order: Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta; Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue; Chief of Staff Reince Priebus; Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson; and Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin.)

As far as Trump himself, he was just tickled pink to receive all the adulation, because as we all know there's nothing as wonderful to receive as forced praise.  Trump ended the meeting on another self-congratulatory note -- about the only note he knows how to play, apparently -- saying, "I will say there never has been a president, with few exceptions -- in the case of F.D.R. he had a major depression to handle -- who's passed more legislation, who's done more things than what we've done.  We've been about as active as you can be, and at a just about record-setting pace."

Which, of course, ignores the fact that both his budget and his attempted revamp to health care are in serious danger, he and his cronies are under investigation for various sorts of malfeasance, and about all that he's done other than that is playing golf every weekend, turning the United States into an international laughingstock with ignorant gaffe after ignorant gaffe, and issuing executive orders dismantling every environmental protection ever passed.

You can't continue fooling people forever, though, and eventually even the ass-kissers get tired of the thankless (and potentially dangerous) job of working for a lying, amoral megalomaniac.  In the case of Caligula, the powers-that-be finally had enough, and there was a conspiracy between the Senate and the Praetorian Guard.  One evening Little Boots was caught unawares in a corridor beneath one of his palaces on the Palatine Hill, and a bunch of the conspirators hacked him to death with swords.

One has to hope that eventually there will be enough of our elected officials who see Donald Trump for what he is that they'll be willing to use the metaphorical sword of impeachment based upon his obvious lack of fitness for leadership (if not for obstruction of justice, collusion with the Russians, or outright treason).  It took almost four years for the Roman Senate to say finis to Caligula; let's hope that we don't have to wait that long for our own American Caligula to be deposed.

Margins of error

One of the most important things about learning some general critical thinking skills is that it keeps you from falling for bullshit.

Both kinds of bovine waste, actually; the kind that is created more or less by accident because the person in question is a nitwit, and the kind that is deliberately generated to mislead or misinform.

I'm uncertain which kind was being produced by Fox News's Greg Gutfield in the latest diatribe intended to convince everyone that climate change isn't happening.  Gutfield talks about the concept of "margin of error" with respect to temperature measurements, and then makes the following baffling statement:

So, those are called real truths.  The poetic truth is the chaos and the hysteria, because that plays to the media.  And it makes you feel so important.  And you get to punish America for being so successful by doing these stupid deals.  But if you read the facts about the high temperatures, about the reality of our past, it is all B.S...  If you asked them what the increase was, they wouldn't be able to tell you that every single year that there's an increase, it is within the margin of error, meaning it isn’t increasing.

This is... idiotic.

Here's an analogy.  Let's say that you have a bathroom scale that has an accuracy of plus or minus one pound.  You weigh yourself every day for two weeks, and here are the weights you record:

Day 1: 165.0 lbs.
Day 2: 165.9 lbs.
Day 3: 166. 8 lbs.
Day 4: 167.3 lbs.
Day 5: 168.0 lbs.
Day 6: 168.8 lbs.
Day 7: 169.5 lbs.
Day 8: 170.3 lbs.
Day 9: 171.1 lbs.
Day 10: 171.9 lbs.
Day 11: 172.6 lbs.
Day 12: 173. 4 lbs.
Day 13: 174.2 lbs.
Day 14 : 175.0 lbs.

At first, you're dismayed, and decide you need to lay off the KFC and Hostess Ho-Hos.  But then you notice that each day-to-day incremental change is less than a pound -- i.e., lower than the margin of error for the scale.

"Hallelujah!" you shout.  "I haven't gained any weight at all!  Pass the mashed potatoes!"

Actually, of course, you've gained ten pounds, and I doubt that anyone (including Greg Gutfield) would have any difficulty understanding that concept.  In more subtle cases, statisticians have finely-honed methods for analyzing such things as error bars, signal-to-noise ratio, and linear regression; trust me that if Gutfield had asked anyone who'd passed college statistics with a B or higher, he would have had his ass handed to him.  Of course, he didn't.  People like him don't want facts and logic, they are content remaining in the realm of emotion and kneejerk confirmation bias.

And the fact that he even makes such an argument, when in an analogous situation he would not, makes me suspicious that his is the second kind of bullshit -- deliberately created in a calculated fashion to mislead the gullible and ignorant.  Which is more and more what Fox News seems to specialize in.  They are clinging desperately to the mantra they've used successfully for decades, which is "liberal = bad, conservative = good."  Along with that comes a whole host of conservative talking points, including such tried and true gems as the War on Christians, Obama is a Secret Muslim Terrorist, Donald Trump is the Second Coming of Christ, and Climate Change is a Big Fat Lie.

Rile up the base.  If you do that, facts don't matter, because your listeners have stopped paying attention to anything but the spin.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Look, it's not that the liberals are without bias, or that I agree with everything they say, either.  Politically I'm pretty moderate, when I'm political at all, which is as little as I can manage.  But dammit, facts matter, and I am sick unto death of supposedly legitimate media sources like Fox lying to their listeners.

Especially in the case of climate change and the environment, because the stakes are way too high.

Coffee, hallucinations, and Bing Crosby

A study done by Dr. Simon Crowe of La Trobe University in Australia, has found that coffee is hallucinogenic.

That it is psychotropic falls into the "Tell Me Something I Didn't Already Know" department.  I am barely civil before I've had at least two cups of coffee.  (Some days I'm barely civil afterwards, either, but that's another matter.)  For me, it's not the buzz I'm after; being a nervous, high-strung type to begin with, who gets up at five in the morning every day whether I have to or not, it's not like I really need anything to make me more wired than I already am.  Coffee seems to have the same effect on me that turning the focus wheel on a pair of binoculars does.  Everything suddenly seems to brighten up, have sharp outlines, make sense.  I feel like I'm seeing things clearly.

Now, I'm told, it might also make me hear things that aren't there.

Dr. Crowe's team tested 92 people with varying levels of caffeine.  The test was billed to the subjects as a hearing test, who were told that they'd be listening to a three minute clip of white noise, in which there might or might not be snippets of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."  They were instructed to press a buzzer when they heard a piece of the song.  In fact, the clip had no music in it at all.  The non-coffee drinkers did occasionally imagine that they heard Crosby's voice; but the coffee drinkers were three times as likely to press the buzzer.  The effect was even more pronounced with people who described themselves as "stressed" and who drank coffee.

"If you are stressed and have a high level of caffeine, you are more likely to notice things that aren't there, see things that aren't there," Dr. Crowe said.

[image courtesy of photographer Julius Schorzman and the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I wonder.  I suspect that part of it is that after the caffeine equivalent of five cups of coffee (the standard for "heavy coffee drinking" used in the experiment), the test subjects' hands were simply shaking so badly that they kept setting the buzzer off.  Or, perhaps, sitting still and listening to white noise for three minutes was simply beyond their capacities.

I tend to be a little frustrated by the way that popular media presents medical (and other scientific) research findings.  Let's be clear about what Dr. Crowe found: he found that people who drank the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee were likely to think they were hearing music when they really weren't.  The headline, of course, didn't say that -- it said "Coffee Causes Hallucinations," which might lead the less careful reader to conclude that your average businessman stopping at Starbuck's for a cuppa joe in the morning was suddenly going to flip out on the bus and start seeing flying monkeys.

Frankly, I'm doubtful that caffeine is bad for you at all, at least when taken in reasonable amounts.  In the brain it acts as an antagonist to adenosine, a neural suppressant and signal for metabolic stress.  In studies, caffeine has been shown to decrease reaction time, increase endurance, reduce the risk of heart disease and kidney stones, increase short-term memory and ability to focus, and decrease the likelihood I'll strangle someone in my first period class.  These are some pretty significant benefits to health and happiness, and if because of it I occasionally hallucinate that I'm hearing clips from Bing Crosby songs, I guess I consider than an acceptable tradeoff.  (Now, if I started seeing Bing Crosby, that would be another matter entirely.)

In any case, I'm going to wind up this post with some general advice not to jump to conclusions based upon sensationalized reports of medical research in the press.  First, if you took every piece of medical advice that shows up in the media, you'd be living on bread and water (or just the water, if you're gluten-intolerant).

Second, the coffee's done brewing, and if I don't have a cup soon, I'm going to hurt someone.

Wow failure

I love science, but I really wish it would stop crushing my hopes and dreams.

I say this because it has long been my dream to live long enough to see unequivocal proof of the existence of intelligent life on other planets.  I got my start, alien-obsession-wise, when I was about seven and became addicted to the abysmal 1960s television series Lost in Space.  The aliens were pretty low-budget, judging by the fact that most of them were...

... well, human.  Like the alien cowboy, the alien pirate (complete with a mechanical parrot), the alien motorcycle gang, the alien teenage hippies, the alien Wild West gunslinger, and Brunhilde.  I'm not making this last one up.  In this not-to-be-missed cinematic tour de force, Brunhilde appears out of nowhere, wearing a helmet with wings, yo-to-hoing like mad while seated on the back of an enormous plastic horse.  In that episode, we also meet Thor, who thinks he has lost his strength and has gone all weepy, and Will Robinson has to give him a heartwarming pep talk to convince him that true strength comes from within.

If you can watch that episode without pissing your pants laughing, you have a stronger constitution than I have.

Things took a step up (well, okay, that was pretty much the only direction available) with the original Star Trek series, where they at least got rubber noses and colorful makeup for the aliens, and induced some of them to speak in cheesy faux-Russian accents to make it clear which ones were the bad guys.  But then came Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: First Contact and Cocoon and Starman and the best of 'em all, Contact -- which remains one of my top favorite movies ever -- and I was completely and permanently hooked on the idea that there might be extraterrestrial intelligence.

The problem is, the evidence for life on other planets, much less intelligent life, is kind of nonexistent.  There have been radio telescopes scanning the sky for decades, and so far there's been nothing to answer to Enrico Fermi's famous quip, "Where is everybody?"

There was one possibility, however.  It's called the "Wow Signal" -- a 72-second burst of radio waves captured in 1977 by Ohio State University's "Big Ear" Radio Telescope.  It was such an anomaly that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!" next to the computer printout that contained the signal, thus giving the phenomenon its name.

The spot in the sky where the burst originated -- near the star Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius -- has been repeatedly scanned, but the signal has never been repeated.

So what was it?  The hopeful amongst us (which included me) thought it might be a radio transmission from intelligent life.  The more dubious figured there had to be some kind of more prosaic explanation -- but what that explanation might be, no one knew.  So I held on to the Wow Signal as being a real possibility for the realization of my dream.

Until today.

Antonio Paris, of the Center for Planetary Science at the Washington Academy of Sciences, shot down the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis this week with a neat, and completely plausible, explanation of the Wow Signal as the emission from the hydrogen-rich comet 266/P Christensen -- which was in that exact location when the signal was detected.

Paris writes:

In 2016, we proposed a hypothesis arguing that a comet and/or its hydrogen cloud was a strong candidate for the source of the “Wow!” Signal.  From 27 November 2016 to 24 February 2017, we conducted 200 observations in the radio spectrum to validate the hypothesis.  This investigation discovered that comets 266/P Christensen, P/2013 EW90 (Tenagra), P/2016 J1-A (PANSTARRS), and 237P/LINEAR emitted radio waves at 1420 MHz.  In addition, the data collected during this investigation demonstrated there is a well-defined distinction between radio signals emitted from known celestial sources and comets, including comet 266/P Christensen...  To dismiss the source of the radio signal as emission from comet 266/P Christensen, we repositioned the telescope away from the comet and conducted clear sky observations when the comet was not near the coordinates of the “Wow!” Signal.  During these clear sky observations, we detected no significant radio signal at 1420 MHz.  This investigation, therefore, has concluded that cometary spectra are observable at 1420 MHz and that the 1977 “Wow!” Signal was a natural phenomenon from a Solar System body.

To Dr. Paris, I have the following to say: "Nicely done!  Outstanding research!  I hate you!"  *grinds teeth*

So for us alien aficionados, it's one more dashed hope.  I mean, I'm supportive of science, and I appreciate the hard work and rigor, but really.  Leave me something to cling to, okay?  Because at the moment, all I'm left with is Brunhilde, and the yo-to-hoing is getting really annoying.

Taking the devil for a spin

Sometimes I think the fringe-y parts of the Religious Right stay up at night, and while the rest of us are doing something constructive like sleeping or fooling around with our Significant Others or snacking on the leftover pizza or watching reruns of Sherlock, they're surfing the web looking for things to be outraged about.

The thing is, I can't imagine how this can be much fun.  I don't enjoy being outraged, myself, and in fact sometimes deliberately avoid reading the news because I'd rather not spend the next six hours trying to fend off apoplexy.  But from the behavior of many of these folks, it seems like they positively relish the opportunity to rant and rave about the latest thing the evil secularists are doing to hasten the End Times and play right into the hands of Satan.

The latest thing to get the wacko SuperChristians' knickers in a twist is, of all things, the "Fidget Spinner."  Myself, I thought these things were innocent little devices intended to help people with attention issues concentrate by giving their hands something to do, much the way my younger son's more enlightened teachers used to let him work on making chain mail while he was listening to the lesson.  (I kid you not; in his first two years in high school, he made an entire chain mail shirt, weighing over fifty pounds, made from over 5,000 steel rings.)

So my general feeling about Fidget Spinners is that they're a clever tool to help people who problems focusing.  But no.

The Fidget Spinner is an evil device imported directly from the Pits of Hell.

Apparently what got these nutjobs in an uproar is that when you hold the Spinner, your thumb and forefinger make a circle and your other three fingers stick out, which is clearly a Satanic symbol, except when it means "okay."  The sign, we're told, represents 666, the Number of the Beast from the Book of Revelation:

If you grab the newest gadget released into the slave camp, what's called "a fidget spinner", you"ll notice that you're instantly making the famous 666 masonic gang sign. Now 666 isn't really the sign of the devil but is simply an equation of 6+6+6=18. Inside an ancient symbol based code (called gematria), all numbers have to be reduced to 1 digit by simply adding the digits together, so 18 is really 1+8=9... 

So when you see a "9", which is what the 666 hand symbol really is, you're seeing an ancient gang sign that shouts........."what you think is different here isn't different at all. It just looks different to give you an illusion of choice, but the outcome is always the same no matter what....and that outcome is always what we want."

No, what I'm shouting is, "This is about the only shape your hand can make when you pick something up between your thumb and forefinger, you fucking loon."

But that kind of argument never stops people like this, who call Fidget Spinners "the Devil's Yo-Yo."  Which, you have to admit, would make a killer name for a band.

I'm happy to say that there are Christians who are pointing this out for the nonsense it is.  Over at the site Hello Christian, they address the question "Are Fidget Spinners Satanic?" directly, and come to the answer, "No."  They do warn, however, that Spinners are dangerous, citing an incident wherein a boy threw his Spinner into the air and it came back down and hit him in the head.

Of course, the same results could have been achieved with a bowling ball, and I don't see anyone warning people about the dangers of those.

Anyhow: there's nothing evil about Fidget Spinners, and I hope that the wingnuts who are currently running around in circles making alarmed little squeaking noises will calm down.  It'll only be temporary, of course, because tonight they'll be back online, scouring the interwebz for another thing to freak out about.  It's a losing battle.

False vacuum catastrophe

It's odd how enamored people are of things that could destroy the entire universe.

I mean, on one level I get it.  The sheer power of the natural world is pretty awe-inspiring, and as I've mentioned before, if I hadn't become a mild-mannered high school biology teacher, I definitely would have been a a tornado chaser.  That same love of extreme danger (especially when it's not you experiencing it) explains shows like The Deadliest Catch and the innumerable quasi-documentaries wherein divers swim around in chum-filled waters and still seem surprised when they're attacked by sharks.

But on a larger scale, there's a real curiosity about things that could wipe out pretty much everything.  A while back, I wrote a piece about people sounding gleeful that we might be looking down the gun barrel of a gamma-ray burster (we're not), and over and over we've heard alarmists suggesting that CERN was going to create a black hole that would eat the Earth (it's not).  But that doesn't begin to exhaust the ways in which we all could die in horrible agony.

Which brings us to the concept of the false vacuum.

Sounds harmless enough, doesn't it?  Well, this is in the long tradition of physicists giving seriously weird things cutesy names, like "strange quarks" and "glueballs."

The idea of the false vacuum is that the universe is currently in a "metastable state."  What this means is that right now we're in a locally stable configuration, but if something destabilizes us a little bit, we might find ourselves suddenly plunging into a more stable state -- a "true vacuum."  The situation, then would be similar to that of the little ball in the graph below:

As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, the ball is stable; but if something gives it a push up the hill in the middle, it'll crest the hill and find itself rushing downward into a more stable position -- the "true vacuum."

Why this concerns anyone but the physicists is that the result of our reconfiguring into a true vacuum would be that a bubble would form, rushing outward at the speed of light, and destroying everything in its path.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics suggests that from the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark, an estimate could be made of just how likely this is.  Writer Robert Walker concludes, from the research of Joseph Lykken and others, that the answer is "not very:"

[I]f it could happen, then you’d expect it to have happened already in the first 1/10,000,000,000th of a second along with the other symmetry breaking when gravity split off from the other forces, when it was tremendously hot... 

Since that hasn’t happened, the false vacuum has to be very stable, or else, probably as we find new physics we find out that it is not in a false vacuum state at all. 

And yes, on the basis of the measured mass of the Higgs boson, the false vacuum has to be very stable.  Joseph Lykken says that an event that triggers a patch of true vacuum, if the theory is correct, happens on average once every 10, 000, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years. 

That means it is nothing to be worried about.

Walker, who is a mathematician, says that the likelihood of a true vacuum bubble occurring in any given century is less than the likelihood of purchasing tickets for twelve consecutive Euromillions lotteries, and winning the jackpot for all of them.

So "don't worry about it" seems to be an understatement.

However, that hasn't stopped the alarmists from freaking out about it, probably largely due to the fact that if it did happen, it would be pretty catastrophic.  Also, because a lot of them seem to feel that the physicists (for this, read "mad scientists") are actively trying to trigger the creation of a true vacuum, which would be an idiotic thing to do even if it were possible because they'd be the first ones to get vaporized, and wouldn't even have the pleasure of standing around rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally for more than about a microsecond.

But then there are the ones who think that it could happen accidentally (again, because of CERN, of course), and the physicists are simply being reckless, not suicidal.  I tend to agree with Walker, though.  I'm way more worried about the idiotic things humans are currently doing to the environment, and our determination to slaughter each other over things like who has the best Invisible Friend, than I am about triggering the Scary Bubble of Death.

Anyhow.  That's our Terrifying Thing That Can Kill you for today, along with some soothing words about why it's not very likely.  Now you'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna go have a pint of beer and watch Twister for the 17th time.

Liar liar

In my youth, I was quite an accomplished liar.

I say "accomplished" more to mean "I did it a lot" rather than "I did it well."  I honestly don't know how well I lied -- it might be that people in general didn't believe what I said and were simply too polite to call me out on it.  On the other hand, I did get away with a lot of stuff.  So apparently I was at least marginally successful.

What I lied about tended to be exaggerations about my past -- I rarely if ever lied out of malice.  But I felt my own circumstances to be boring and bland, a sense compounded by the fact that I've always suffered from serious social anxiety, so I think I felt as if building up a fictional persona who was interesting and adventurous might assuage my fear of being judged by the people I met.  Eventually, though, I realized that all I was doing was sabotaging the relationships I had, because once people found out I wasn't who I said I was, they'd be understandably pissed that I hadn't been straight with them.  So I dedicated myself to honesty, a commitment I've tried my hardest to keep ever since then.

On the other hand, I became a fiction writer, which means now I make up elaborate lies, write them down, and people pay me to read them.  So maybe I haven't progressed as far as I'd thought.

Kang Lee and Victoria Talwar of the University of Toronto have been studying lying for some time, and they've found that the propensity of children to lie increases as they age.  Presumably, once they develop a sense of shame and a better impulse control, they find themselves sheepish when they transgress, and lie to cover up their feelings or escape the consequences.  In a study in the International Journal of Behavioral Development, Lee and Talwar gave children of varying ages a task while a music-playing toy played behind them, and told them not to peek at the toy:

When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, about half of the 3-year-olds confessed to their transgression, whereas most older children lied.  Naive adult evaluators (undergraduate students and parents) who watched video clips of the children’s responses could not discriminate lie-tellers from nonliars on the basis of their nonverbal expressive behaviours.  However, the children were poor at semantic leakage control and adults could correctly identify most of the lie-tellers based on their verbal statements made in the same context as the lie.  The combined results regarding children’s verbal and nonverbal leakage control suggest that children under 8 years of age are not fully skilled lie-tellers.

Lee considers this behavior a completely normal part of social development, and in fact, says he worries about the 10% of older children in his study who could not be induced to lie -- because telling the truth 100% of the time, without regard for others' feelings or the consequences thereof, might not be the best thing, either.

But the tendency to lie doesn't vanish with adulthood.  A study by Robert Feldman, of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, found that 60% of adults lied at least once during a ten-minute conversation.

"People tell a considerable number of lies in everyday conversation," Feldman said about his study.  "It was a very surprising result.  We didn't expect lying to be such a common part of daily life...  When they were watching themselves on videotape, people found themselves lying much more than they thought they had... It's so easy to lie.  We teach our children that honesty is the best policy, but we also tell them it's polite to pretend they like a birthday gift they've been given.  Kids get a very mixed message regarding the practical aspects of lying, and it has an impact on how they behave as adults."

Of course, all lies aren't equally blameworthy.  Telling Aunt Bertha that the knitted sweater she made for your Christmas gift is lovely probably is better than saying, "Wow, that is one ugly-ass sweater, and I'm bringing it down to the Salvation Army as soon as I get a chance."

[image courtesy of Aunt Bertha and the Wikimedia Commons]

As for the kind of thing I did as a kid -- saying that I'd spent my summer vacation riding musk oxen in the Aleutian Islands -- it's kind of ridiculous and pointless, but other than distancing one from one's friends (as I described before) probably isn't really very high on the culpability scale, either.

But lying to hurt, lying for personal gain, lying to gain or retain power (I'm lookin' at you, Donald Trump) -- those are serious issues.

Unfortunately, however, even the less serious lies can cause problems, because there is the tendency for small lies to lead to bigger ones.  A study by Tali Sharot of University College London found out that our amygdala -- the structure in the brain that appears to mediate fear, shame, and anxiety -- actually fires less the more we lie.  The first lies we tell elicit a strong response; but we become habituated quickly.

The more we lie, the easier it gets.

So the old adage of "honesty is the best policy" really does seem to apply in most circumstances.

Unless, of course, you're a fiction writer.  Then the rules don't apply at all.  Now you'll have to excuse me, as I've got a herd of musk oxen to attend to.