Condensation and inflation

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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I still recall my astonishment when one of my physics professors in college said, "We understand the physics of the universe fairly well back to about one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.  Before that, though, things are a little dicey."

To me, that sounded like having a pretty good handle on things, but that first one-trillionth of a second was pretty spectacular.  There were some extraordinary things going on very early along in that tiny time span -- from about 10⁻³⁶ to sometime between 10⁻³³ and 10⁻³² seconds after the initial singularity.  For those of you who are not mathematical types, this is the time between:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, and

0.0000000000000000000000000000001 seconds following the Big Bang.

This era is called the "inflationary period," a term that was coined by Alan Guth (then at Cornell) and Andrei Linde of Stanford, way back in 1979, who were investigating the question of why there are no magnetic monopoles (magnetic particles with only a north or south pole, but not both) and stumbled upon a phenomenon called a false vacuum that accounted for the known properties of matter and the universe.  The problem was, the mathematics of the false vacuum required a period extremely early on in the universe's history when it underwent exponential expansion.  If you thought the time duration of inflation defied the imagination, the size expansion is worse -- in that minuscule fraction of a second, the universe increased in volume by a factor of 10⁷⁸ -- one followed by 78 zeroes.

(Regular readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a while back, I wrote about a rather hysterical article that was making the rounds, speculating about the likelihood of our false vacuum state being superseded by a true vacuum -- which would rapidly destroy the entire universe.  The general conclusion of the physicists is that the risk of this is close enough to zero that you shouldn't be losing any sleep over it.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Original: Drbogdan Vector: Yinweichen, History of the Universe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As crazy as this sounds, it's been borne up by the evidence.  The vast majority of the research done on this topic is far beyond me even considering my B.S. in physics, but suffice it to say that most physicists accept inflation as a reality.  It accounts for a number of interesting phenomena, including isotropy -- that the universe looks homogeneous no matter what direction you look, which begs an explanation unless you think that the Earth is located in the dead center of the universe, a possibility that is even less than our risk of being destroyed by a true vacuum.  So it may sound hard to believe, but apparently, this enormous expansion in an unimaginably tiny fraction of a second actually happened.

Just last week there was another piece of evidence added to all of this, wherein scientists at the University of Maryland created a peculiar form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate that exhibited the properties of cosmic inflation, albeit (and fortunately) on a much smaller scale.  Emily Conover, over at Science News, describes the experiment as follows:

Shaped into a tiny, rapidly expanding ring, the condensate grew from about 23 micrometers in diameter to about four times that size in just 15 milliseconds.  The behavior of that widening condensate re-created some of the physics of inflation, a brief period just after the Big Bang during which the universe rapidly ballooned in size (SN Online: 12/11/13) before settling into a more moderate expansion rate. 

In physics, seemingly unrelated systems can have similarities under the hood. Scientists have previously used Bose-Einstein condensates to simulate other mysteries of the cosmos, such as black holes (SN: 11/15/14, p. 14).  And the comparison between Bose-Einstein condensates and inflation is particularly apt: A hypothetical substance called the inflaton field is thought to drive the universe’s extreme expansion, and particles associated with that field, known as inflatons, all take on the same quantum state, just as atoms do in the condensate.

Another point in favor of this research having recreated on some level the early expansion of the universe is that sound waves sent through the condensate increased in wavelength -- just as light has been red-shifted by the expansion of the space it's traveling through.

I'd be lying if I said I understood last week's paper on anything but the most rudimentary level, but it still gives me a sense of wonder that we can peer into the distant past -- into a time that lasted almost no time at all -- and use that information to draw conclusions about why the universe has the properties it does.   The progress we've made in expanding scientific understanding, in just the last twenty years, is mind-boggling.

All of which makes me wonder what the next twenty years will bring.  I'm hoping it's a warp drive, but that might be a forlorn hope, given that the General Theory of Relativity is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

A switch for aging

CRITICAL THINKING COURSE AVAILABLE STARTING TODAY!

I have an exciting announcement -- today, I'm launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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

I, and many of my friends, are of That Certain Age where we have started getting such awesome physical symptoms as graying hair, wrinkles, arthritis, forgetfulness, and the necessity of either wearing reading glasses or getting arm extensions.  I'm not the sort that will let being 57 (or any other age) slow me down if I can help it, but there's no denying that I don't feel as young as I did twenty (or even five) years ago.

So any time I see an article on the biology of life span, my ears perk up.  I'm hopeful that there will eventually be medical ways to extend healthy life span (sure would be nice if it happened soon...), but to get there, we need to understand how aging actually works.  And a new piece of research out of the University of Minnesota has given us another clue.

Geneticists Adam McLain and Christopher Faulk were interested in a feature of the genetics of all eukaryotes (life forms that have nuclei -- therefore, every common organism with the exception of bacteria) called a promoter.  To see where this is going, a brief biology lesson.

You can think of genes as recipes.  They are a set of instructions that, speaking in the A/T/C/G language, spell out the directions for building proteins.  Many of those proteins then go on to influence other genes, creating a cascade of activity that we collectively call "development."

Promoters are, in a way, the director of the orchestra.  Or -- a more apt analogy -- they're like a set of switches.  The promoters are not part of the recipe itself; they have instead the critical job of pointing out where the recipe is, making sure that it's switched on (or off) at the right time, and regulating how fast the end product is produced.  Errors in a promoter region are usually devastating -- one of the milder examples is genetic lactose intolerance, where faulty promoter turns off the gene that produces lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, leading to an inability to drink milk after the age of three or four (and some pretty nasty symptoms if you do).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So promoters are critical to genes, not only turning them on or off in the right sequence, but making sure that the right amount of the protein is made in the right tissue type.  This importance means they're what geneticists call "highly conserved sequences" -- things go so badly awry when they malfunction that there are few mutational differences between promoters in different species.  What McLain and Faulk wondered is if promoter activity might have something to do with the rate of aging, so they set out to compare those small number of mutational differences between species that have generally short life spans (such as mice) and those that have generally long life spans (such as elephants).

What they looked at are called CpG sites -- areas high in the bases cytosine and guanine (and in which they occur right next to each other), which are found in promoters and are targets for methylation, a process that turns promoters off more or less permanently.  And what they found is that the density of CpG sites positively correlates with average age at death.

Which is pretty amazing.  The authors write:

As vertebrates age, the epigenomic pattern of DNA methylation degrades, with the highly methylated CpG sites gradually becoming demethylated, while CGIs increase in methylation.  Therefore, DNA methylation becomes dysregulated as a function of aging and high CpG density may delay or buffer specific regions from age-related changes.  Some gene exons have undergone accelerated evolution in long-lived species as their protein function is under selection.  However, unlike coding sequences, promoter regions alter gene expression, not protein function, so different species can regulate expression without altering the protein function.  Within promoter regions the rapid mutation of CpG sites and their function in epigenetic gene expression make them prime targets for natural selection.  We chose CpG site density because density alone is sufficient to predict methylation level.  Since methylation degrades over an individual's lifespan, we reasoned that selection for long lifespan may act not only on gene coding regions but on promoter regions.  This selection would change promoter CpG density for genes whose expression must be more tightly regulated to allow for longer lifespan.

So methylation, connected to the presence (and number) of CpG sites, is tightly connected to life span; as you age, the regulation of methylation starts to fall apart, deactivating genes that should be active and activating genes that should be turned off.  Species whose promoters have a higher density of CpG sites regulate methylation more tightly -- and age more slowly!

When I got to the punchline of their paper, I was a little stunned.  It's astonishing that life span could be controlled by something that simple (okay, the concept isn't simple, but the connection between CpGs and aging rate is pretty straightforward).  The next question, of course (especially those of us who are rapidly approaching geezerhood) is whether there's a way to affect the process of methylation -- preserving its ability to regulate gene expression, and (presumably) slowing down the aging process.

All of which is far beyond the scope of this study.  But still, it's an intriguing prospect, whether or not it ever becomes feasible in practice.  Me, I hope it does, and I hope it's soon.  Because I've about had it with gray hair, creaky joints, and entering a room only to immediately forget why I'm there.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

Music and dementia

My mother's elder sister died ten years ago, at the age of 90, after a long, slow, tragic decline from Alzheimer's disease.  I remember my Aunt Florence as a bright, intelligent woman, who loved to read, had a whipcrack sense of humor, and could beat just about anyone around at Scrabble.  The first symptoms were a gradual descent into what my mom called "fogginess," but it was accompanied by worry, anxiety, and paranoia.  She lost more and more of herself to this horrible disease, and during the last few years of her life she was immobile, unresponsive, with no apparent awareness of her surroundings.

My cousin, her eldest daughter, and her family cared for Aunt Florence with a diligence and selflessness that borders on heroism.  Even after she no longer knew where she was or who was in the room with her, they talked to her, made sure she was kept warm and safe, and was hugged and shown affection every single day.

To me, dementia is one of the scariest things out there.  I can't imagine anything more fundamentally terrifying than to lose one's memory and sense of self, to have a damaged mind trapped in a withering body, to be totally dependent on others for my care.  No one should have to endure that.  I'm hopeful that research in Alzheimer's will one day find a therapy or medication that slows down the progress of the disease, or perhaps cures it entirely.

In the meantime, there's been some interesting research into palliative care.  Just last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced some research that will be published this month in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease, done at the University of Utah, that considers using music as a way to alleviate the horrible anxiety that comes along with the early and middle stages of the disease.

Researchers found that the part of the brain that mediates our emotional response to music is relatively undamaged by Alzheimer's (for reasons as yet unknown).  They investigated the possibility that even people whose memories were largely gone might remember, and be comforted by, hearing familiar music.  And their results were striking.

Jace King, lead author of the study, said the response was obvious.  "When you put headphones on dementia patients and play familiar music, they come alive.  Music is like an anchor, grounding the patient back in reality."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evdokiya, EscportalW Music transparent, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers placed the test subjects in an fMRI machine, and monitored brain activity while playing one of three things through headphones -- a selection from the patient's music collection, the same music played backwards, and silence.  The familiar music triggered dramatically increased activity in the cerebrum, and a spike in functional connectivity.

The previously quiet parts of the brain were once again talking to each other.

Norman Foster, senior author of the paper, was encouraged by these results.  "This is objective evidence from brain imaging that shows personally meaningful music is an alternative route for communicating with patients who have Alzheimer's disease," Foster said.  "Language and visual memory pathways are damaged early as the disease progresses, but personalized music programs can activate the brain, especially for patients who are losing contact with their environment."

It's not a cure, or even a treatment, for the disease, but anything that can alleviate the horrific anxiety that comes along with it is a blessing.  "In our society, the diagnoses of dementia are snowballing and are taxing resources to the max," study co-author Jeff Anderson said.  "No one says playing music will be a cure for Alzheimer's disease, but it might make the symptoms more manageable, decrease the cost of care and improve a patient's quality of life."

Which is tremendous in and of itself.  Considering how much music affects me emotionally -- I'm the guy who wept the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis -- it's fantastic that there is a way to bring some of that emotional depth back to people who are becoming progressively disconnected from their world.

So if, heaven forfend, I ever descend into that deep, dark pit that is Alzheimer's, please give me a temporary reprieve by playing some of my favorite music.  You could start with Stravinsky's Firebird.

After that, use your imagination.  I'll be thankful, even if at that point I may not be able to say so.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!

The beat goes on

I've been a language geek for a very long time, which at least partly explains how a guy who has a bachelor's degree in physics and teaches high school biology has a master's degree in linguistics.  There's something about the way communication works that is simply fascinating to me.

There's a tremendous diversity in how languages work.  On the basic level, the phonetics of languages can differ greatly; each language has a unique sound structure.  Some really different, at least to my English-speaking brain; consider Xhosa, the language spoken by over ten million people in South Africa, which has three different consonants that are clicks (usually written "c" for the dental click, "x" for the lateral click, and "q" for the palatal click).  If you want to hear Xhosa sung, check out this video of the legendary Miriam Makeba singing the song "Qongqothwane:"

Another complication is tonality -- for many languages, the same syllable spoken with a rising vs. a falling tone actually has a completely different meaning.  (English only has one consistent tonal feature, which is that a rise in tone at the end of a sentence can denote a question, but the pitch change doesn't alter the meaning, as it does in many languages.)

It can be odder than that, though.  There are whistled languages, such as Silbo in the Canary Islands.  Many examples exist -- France, Greece, Turkey, India, Nepal, and Mexico all have groups who communicate by whistling (although they also have spoken language; no group I've ever heard of communicates exclusively by whistles).  Along the same lines -- and it was recent research on this topic that spurred this post -- are drummed languages.

Linguist Frank Seifart was researching endangered languages in Colombia, and was in a village where the Bora language is spoken while the chief was away.  The chief was sent for -- by someone drumming out a pattern that meant, "A stranger has arrived.  Come home."

And it's not just a code, like Morse code; the drumbeat patterns actually mimic the changes in timbre, pitch, and rhythm of the speech the drummer is trying to emulate.  The paper, which appeared in the journal Royal Society Open Science last week, was titled, "Reducing Language to Rhythm: Amazonian Bora Drummed Language Exploits Speech Rhythm for Long-Distance Communication," and begins as follows:

Many drum communication systems around the world transmit information by emulating tonal and rhythmic patterns of spoken languages in sequences of drumbeats.  Their rhythmic characteristics, in particular, have not been systematically studied so far, although understanding them represents a rare occasion for providing an original insight into the basic units of speech rhythm as selected by natural speech practices directly based on beats.  Here, we analyse a corpus of Bora drum communication from the northwest Amazon, which is nowadays endangered with extinction.  We show that four rhythmic units are encoded in the length of pauses between beats.  We argue that these units correspond to vowel-to-vowel intervals with different numbers of consonants and vowel lengths.  By contrast, aligning beats with syllables, mora or only vowel length yields inconsistent results.  Moreover, we also show that Bora drummed messages conventionally select rhythmically distinct markers to further distinguish words.  The two phonological tones represented in drummed speech encode only few lexical contrasts.  Rhythm thus appears to crucially contribute to the intelligibility of drummed Bora.  Our study provides novel evidence for the role of rhythmic structures composed of vowel-to-vowel intervals in the complex puzzle concerning the redundancy and distinctiveness of acoustic features embedded in speech.

An amusing part of the research is that in the Bora drummed language, each message is followed by a pattern that means, "Now, don't say that I am a liar."  Seifart says that the gist is much like a parent yelling at a child, "Don't tell me you didn't hear me!"

The whole thing is fascinating -- when communicating over distances long enough that our voices won't reach, people have invented new ways to send messages -- and those new ways incorporate many of the phonetic, tonal, and syntactic frameworks of the original language.

The biologist in me, however, is curious about how this is being processed in the brain.  Does drummed speech get interpreted in the same place in the brain where spoken language is?  There's been a parallel study on whistled languages -- Onur Güntürkün, a biopsychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Bochum, Germany, who has studied how whistled languages are processed in the brain, found that there was an intriguing difference between the activity of the brain while listening to whistled versus spoken language.  Since we process melodic tones primarily in the right side of the cerebrum and language primarily in the left, Güntürkün suspected that whistled languages would activate both sides equally -- and he was right.

As far as drummed languages, Güntürkün was especially interested in how the content of messages could be conveyed by milliseconds-long variations in the rhythm pattern.  "I’m amazed that these tiny milliseconds are doing the job," he said, adding that the next step is an analysis of how the two hemispheres of the brain process drummed speech, specifically timing cues.

All of which brings home again not only the amazing processing power of the brain, but the drive in humans to communicate.  It emphasizes once again the importance of preserving these endangered languages -- not only for reasons of protecting people's cultural identities, but for what it tells us about the neurological underpinning of our own minds.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

Stress test

I ran into a piece of research today that left me scratching my head.

It was on the topic of teaching and stress, which (as you might imagine) I'm pretty interested in.  I'm a veteran teacher with 31 years in the classroom, and I can vouch for the fact that it can be a pretty stressful job.  So I thought that "Empirically Derived Profiles of Teacher Stress, Burnout, Self-Efficacy, and Coping and Associated Student Outcomes," by Keith C. Herman, Wendy M. Reinke, and Jal’et Hickmon-Rosa of the University of Missouri, would be intriguing.

Understanding how teacher stress, burnout, coping, and self-efficacy are interrelated can inform preventive and intervention efforts to support teachers.  In this study, we explored these constructs to determine their relation to student outcomes, including disruptive behaviors and academic achievement.  Participants in this study were 121 teachers and 1,817 students in grades kindergarten to fourth from nine elementary schools in an urban Midwestern school district.  Latent profile analysis was used to determine patterns of teacher adjustment in relation to stress, coping, efficacy, and burnout.  These profiles were then linked to student behavioral and academic outcomes.  Four profiles of teacher adjustment were identified.  Three classes were characterized by high levels of stress and were distinguished by variations in coping and burnout ranging from (a) high coping/low burnout (60%) to (b) moderate coping and burnout (30%), to (c) low coping/high burnout (3%).  The fourth class was distinguished by low stress, high coping, and low burnout.  Only 7% of the sample fell into this Well-Adjusted class.  Teachers in the high stress, high burnout, and low coping class were associated with the poorest student outcomes.

So far, so good, as it looks like the researchers were merely establishing a correlation.  But study co-author Herman was interviewed for a press release when the study was published, and from what he's saying it's pretty clear they thought they'd established causation:

It’s no secret that teaching is a stressful profession.  However, when stress interferes with personal and emotional well-being at such a severe level, the relationships teachers have with students are likely to suffer, much like any relationship would in a high stress environment.  It’s troubling that only 7 percent of teachers experience low stress and feel they are getting the support they need to adequately cope with the stressors of their job.  Even more concerning is that these patterns of teacher stress are related to students’ success in school, both academically and behaviorally.  For example, classrooms with highly stressed teachers have more instances of disruptive behaviors and lower levels of prosocial behaviors.

Now, just hang on a moment.

Saying that teacher stress levels are correlated with student behavioral problems and poor academic outcomes is decisively not the same thing as saying that teacher stress levels caused the problems and poor outcomes.  It's a possibility; I'm certainly not at my best in front of the classroom when I'm under stress, whether or not it came from my job.  But isn't it at least equally likely that teacher stress could be caused by having a class full of disengaged students who would rather act out than study?

[Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or, of course, that both the teacher stress and the student misbehavior could be caused by some third factor.  One of the biggest predictors of poor academic performance (and dropout rates) is poverty, as been shown by multiple studies (most strikingly by Lacour and Tissington in 2011).  And it doesn't stretch credulity much to imagine that classes full of students who live in impoverished conditions would cause a lot of stress to teachers, who (after all) went into the profession because they care about kids.

So the Herman et al. study doesn't come close to establishing a causative relationship between teacher stress and student behavior.  But it's way easier to throw the responsibility of reducing their stress back to the teachers, and ignore the other factors that almost certainly play a role.

I understand that no matter what, teaching has its stresses; and I preach to my students the importance of finding stress-relievers in their lives, so I'd be hypocritical not to acknowledge that it's necessary for me as well.  And Herman does seem to have his heart in the right place.  "We as a society need to consider methods that create nurturing school environments not just for students, but for the adults who work there," he said.  "This could mean finding ways for administrators, peers and parents to have positive interactions with teachers, giving teachers the time and training to perform their jobs, and creating social networks of support so that teachers do not feel isolated."

All of which I can get behind.  But the fact is, none of that is likely to improve student outcomes until the root causes are remedied.  I suspect that when public schools fail, it will prove to be -- as with many social problems -- the result of a variety of factors (almost certainly of which poverty is one).  But simply saying that if we give teachers options for stress relief, we can fix what's wrong with public schools, is facile thinking to say the least.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

Lost among the stars

After yesterday's post, about politics and hypocrisy, I'm inclined today to retreat to my happy place, which is: cool new scientific research.

The story this week that blew my mind comes from research by Gaia, an astronomical study agency based in the European Union.  They just released new and detailed information on a sampling of stars in the Milky Way, including the intrinsic brightness, distance from the Earth, color, and relative motion.

Astronomers were pretty enthused by all this.  "This is a very big deal," said David Hogg, astrophysicist at New York University.  "I've been working on trying to understand the Milky Way and the formation of the Milky Way for a large fraction of my scientific career, and the amount of information this is revealing in some sense is thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times larger than any amount of information we've had previously.  We're really talking about an immense change to our knowledge about the Milky Way."

It's the scale that's the impressive part, because Gaia's study provided detailed information...

... on 1.7 billion stars.

"This is the data we're going to be working on for the rest of my career.  Probably no data set will rival this," said Jackie Faherty, astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History.  "It's the excitement of the day that we see it.  It's why we were up at 5 a.m. to get here.  It's exciting to be around each other and trying to get the data all at once.  It's a day we're going to remember."

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

However, to put things in perspective, these 1.7 billion stars represent less than 2% of the stars in the Milky Way.  So if this is "hundreds of thousands of times larger" than what we had before, we were really working from skimpy information prior to this..  It's a little like trying to come up with a good idea of life on Earth by examining a platypus, a cactus, and a mosquito.  You could find out some cool stuff (aerobic respiration, photosynthesis, gas exchange, DNA & RNA, and so on) but you'd still be missing well over 99% of the details.

This is not intended as a criticism, of course.  It's an amazing leap over what we had prior to this, and is certain to give us information on the physics of stars we didn't have before.  Considering that we're stuck here on this spinning rock, 40,000,000,000,000 kilometers away from the nearest star (other than the Sun, obviously), that's pretty damn impressive.

Oh, and that's just looking at the Milky Way.  To put things even further in perspective, at current conservative estimates, there are 200 million galaxies in the universe, each of which contain on the order of 100 billion stars.  So the current amazingly exhaustive survey gives us information about 0.0000001% of the stars in the universe.

The mind boggles.  I mean, at some point, even the mathematically adept have to throw their hands into the air and say, "Okay, there are lots and lots of stars."

All of which brings me back to a question I've considered many times; wondering if there's intelligent life out there.  With all of those star systems, there has to be, right?  I remember as a kid, sitting out in my parents' front yard with my telescope, and wondering if some alien kid 500 light years away was sitting in his parent's front yard looking back at me.  I still think it's unlikely any of them have made it here -- not only is the Sun kind of a wimpy star, in a backwoods arm of the Milky Way, but the General Theory of Relativity is still strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

Warp drive notwithstanding.

Anyhow, it's pretty cool.  But I need to wrap this up, and go back out into the... world.  Where things like politics are happening.  I'll try not to be too upset about it.  Who knows, maybe it'll be clear tonight, and I can go out and look up at the stars.

And maybe, many light years away, an alien science nerd will be escaping from the ridiculous political situation on his planet, and is looking back in my direction.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

Sex, character, and hypocrisy

I know that I'm not exactly a model of restraint when it comes to holding my tongue about outrageous statements, but you'll have to take my word for it that I really tried with this one.

It was only after about the tenth time I saw a screencap of a woman's Twitter post, along with people sharing it and saying "fuck yeah!" and high-fiving each other that it pushed me over the edge.  Here's the image:

The layers of "I Don't Get It" here are so numerous that I don't know where to start.  But I'll try.  In no particular order:

• The fact is, it's the conservatives who, as a group, are extremely concerned with what people do with their naughty bits.  (Yes, I know.  "Not all conservatives."  Look at the voting records of Republicans with regards to LGBTQ equity, and afterwards we'll talk.)
• The issue isn't that he had sex.  The issue isn't even that he had sex with several women while he was married to several other women.  The issue is that he lied about it (repeatedly), paid these women off and then denied it, and this for some reason hasn't lost him one iota of support from the "family values" faction, which is more and more seeming not so much about "family values" as about "we'd make a deal with the devil if he got us what we want."
• These same people who are (1) defending Trump, and (2) lambasting the folks who dare to criticize Dear Leader, are by and large the ones who had a two-year case of the vapors surrounding the revelation that Bill Clinton got a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.  Or do rules of moral conduct only apply to Democrats?  (Nota bene: I am not defending Bill Clinton.  He not only cheated on his wife, he used his position of power to seduce an intern.  It was the behavior of an asshole, pure and simple.  That said, if you blast Bill Clinton and defend Donald Trump -- who did the same thing, only more often -- you are a hypocrite.)
• No, Trump wasn't elected to be America's pastor, although given how he's characterized by the Religious Right, he might as well have been.  But how elected officials act in their private life -- whether they act with honesty and decency, whether they admit it when they screw up and try to make amends insofar as it's possible, and how their words line up with their actions -- are all indications of who they are as people.  And if you're telling me that's not important, you're wrong.  People who will lie, cheat, betray, and defraud in their private lives are highly unlikely to turn into saints after the ballots are counted.  Character does matter.  Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, or any other position on the political spectrum.

So the fact is, all of this does have to do with his presidency.  Which is obvious if you consider how Fox News, Sean Hannity, and the other Trump apologists would have reacted if President Obama had done 1% of what Trump has done, and thus far, gotten away with.  When prior to the election, Trump bragged that he could shoot someone in plain sight on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I thought at the time he was just engaging in his typical hyperbole.

Now, I see that it's the literal truth.

Look, I know we all tend to give politicians we like a bye on questionable behavior.  For one thing, the sunk-cost fallacy pushes us to stick with someone when we've put a lot of our time, effort, money, and emotional energy into seeing him or her elected.  But this goes way beyond sunk-cost.  This amounts to a significant subset of Americans -- 39%, by the latest polls -- who look at the mounting scandals, accusations, and unethical (if not illegal) behavior, and shrug their shoulders.

Or disbelieve it.  Or don't even hear about it.  (Speaking of Fox News.)

So don't start with me that this is about liberals suddenly turning into prudes, or how these allegations have nothing to do with Trump's presidency.  And if you really think that "Jordan Rachel" made a good point in her now-viral tweet, you're being disingenuous at best, and a willful hypocrite at worst.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!