Science shorts

After the last three days' depressing posts, I thought it was once again time to retreat to my happy place, which is: cool new scientific research.  So, for your reading entertainment, here are some early-summer shorts.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons marcore! from Hong Kong, China, Board shorts 4, CC BY 2.0]

No, not those kind of shorts.  The scientific variety.

First, we have some research that appeared last week in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, done by Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm of the University of California.  In their paper, entitled, "Forget in a Flash: A Further Investigation of the Photo-Taking Impairment Effect," what Soares and Storm found that for reasons still unknown, taking a photo of something impairs your ability to remember it -- even if you know that you won't have access to the photo later.

The authors write:

A photo-taking-impairment effect has been observed such that participants are less likely to remember objects they photograph than objects they only observe.  According to the offloading hypothesis, taking photos allows people to offload organic memory onto the camera's prosthetic memory, which they can rely upon to “remember” for them.  We tested this hypothesis by manipulating whether participants perceived photo-taking as capable of serving as a form of offloading.  In [our] experiments, participants exhibited a significant photo-taking-impairment effect even though they did not expect to have access to the photos.  In fact, the effect was just as large as when participants believed they would have access to the photos.  These results suggest that offloading may not be the sole, or even primary, mechanism for the photo-taking-impairment effect.

The authors were interviewed by Alex Fradera for the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society, and there's a possible explanation for the phenomenon, although it's still speculative.  Fradera writes:

Soares and Storm have a speculative second interpretation.  They suggest that the effort involved in taking a photo – getting the framing right, ensuring the lens is in focus – leads to the sense that you’ve done a good job of encoding the object itself, even though you have been focusing more on peripheral features.  So you’re not mentally slacking-off because you think the camera has it covered – but because you think you already have.  It may be relevant that people who take photographs at events report afterwards feeling more immersed in the experience, which would tally more with this explanation than the disengagement-due-to-fiddling idea.  In any case this is further evidence that those of us who approach exciting life events through the lenses of our electronic devices may be distancing ourselves from fuller participation.

From the Department of Geophysics at the University of Texas comes a study of the most famous (although not, by a long shot, the largest) mass extinction event -- the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 65 million years ago, which took out the dinosaurs, with the exception of the ancestors of today's birds.  The accepted explanation of the event is a collision by a massive meteorite near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, forming the Chicxulub Crater.

A long-unanswered question about mass extinctions such as this one is how fast life rebounded.  The problem is that the difference between a thousand, ten thousand, and a hundred thousand years in the geological record isn't that great, so the error rate for any estimates were bound to be high.  But now, geophysicists Chris Lowery, Gail Christeson, Sean Gulick, and Cornelia Rasmussen, working with Timothy Bralower, a micropaleontologist at Pennsylvania State University, have found evidence that narrows that window down -- and surprisingly, shows that life recovered pretty quickly.

The key was finding a sediment core that contained 76 centimeters of brown limestone that came from the years immediately following the impact.  It contained debris from the event, including crystals of "shocked quartz" (quartz crystals showing signs of sudden, extreme temperatures and pressures).  And what the researchers found was that a little as a few thousand years, the ecosystem was beginning to rebound.

"You can see layering in this core, while in others, they’re generally mixed, meaning that the record of fossils and materials is all churned up, and you can’t resolve tiny time intervals," Bralower said.  "We have a fossil record here where we’re able to resolve daily, weekly, monthly, yearly changes."

Speaking of catastrophes, a fascinating piece of research from Stanford University anthropologists Tian Chen Zeng, Alan Aw, and Marcus Feldman gives us a possible explanation for a peculiar calamity that the human race experienced only seven thousand years ago.  By analyzing the genetic diversity among human Y-chromosomal DNA (inherited only father-to-son) and comparing it to the diversity in mitochondrial DNA (inherited only mother-to-child), they found something decidedly odd; the data suggested a serious genetic bottleneck -- but one that affected only males.

The difference was huge.  Zeng et al. showed that the disparity would only make sense if there was a point about seven thousand years ago when there was one male with surviving descendants for every seventeen females.

Feldman writes, in a press release to EurekAlert!:

After the onset of farming and herding around 12,000 years ago, societies grew increasingly organized around extended kinship groups, many of them patrilineal clans - a cultural fact with potentially significant biological consequences. The key is how clan members are related to each other.  While women may have married into a clan, men in such clans are all related through male ancestors and therefore tend to have the same Y chromosomes.  From the point of view of those chromosomes at least, it's almost as if everyone in a clan has the same father. 

That only applies within one clan, however, and there could still be considerable variation between clans.  To explain why even between-clan variation might have declined during the bottleneck, the researchers hypothesized that wars, if they repeatedly wiped out entire clans over time, would also wipe out a good many male lineages and their unique Y chromosomes in the process.

So as weird as it sounds, if you go back a few thousand years, we all have far fewer unique male ancestors than unique female ancestors.


Last, I would be remiss if I didn't make at least a brief mention of research that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism last week.  Authored by Audrey J. Gaskins, Rajeshwari Sundaram, Germaine M. Buck Louis, and Jorge E. Chavarro, the paper was entitled "Seafood Intake, Sexual Activity, and Time to Pregnancy," and amongst its conclusion was that the quantity of seafood eaten correlates positively with the number of times per month people have sex.

The researchers speculate that the reason may be the higher quantity of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, common in seafood, has an effect on the reproductive hormones, increasing sex drive.  It does, however, make me wonder how anyone thought of correlating these, but my puzzlement is probably indicative of why I never went into research.

In any case, I thought it was interesting.  And makes me glad I brought leftover scampi for lunch.  Hope springs eternal, you know?

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Pardoning Dinesh

Let me be up front about something.  I am no expert on politics.  Most of politics seems to me to be arguing about things that are either (1) so impossibly convoluted that a reasonable solution is practically impossible, like peace in the Middle East, or (2) so blitheringly obvious (to me, at least) that I can't fathom why it's an issue in the first place, like whether LGBT people should have the same rights as cis/hetero people.

Even through my admittedly inexpert eyes, though, this administration has reached levels of corruption, cronyism, graft, and dishonesty that it makes the Teapot Dome Scandal look like a bunch of grade-school posers.  And in the latest evidence of this, we found out yesterday that Donald Trump intends to grant a full presidential pardon to Dinesh D'Souza.

D'Souza, in case you don't know about him, is a conservative commentator who, to put it bluntly, appears to be off his rocker.  Here are a few of his claims to fame:

• A vitriolic anti-Obama "documentary" called 2016: Obama's America, based on his 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage.
• Another 2016 "documentary," Hillary's America, since he evidently wasn't sure which of them actually owned America.
• A 2007 book in which he blamed "the cultural left" for 9/11.
• An anti-feminist polemic in which he called feminism "a terrible and unjust devaluation of women who work at home."
• A screed against same-sex marriage in which he stated, "Marriage does not civilize men.  Women do."  Whatever that means.
• A bizarre claim, made in various debates and articles, that theoretical physics proves the existence of God and the reality of heaven.
• A statement that the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq in 2003 was caused by the "sexual immodesty of liberal America," but at the same time, the conditions the prisoners were experiencing were "comparable to the accommodations in mid-level Middle Eastern hotels."
• Mocking comments about the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. When their initial attempts to bring gun control legislation onto the floor of the Florida Senate was voted down, D'Souza sneered, "The worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs."
• Statements that Rosa Parks was an "overrated Democrat," that slavery "wasn’t a racist institution" and "the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well."
• A statement that Hitler was "not anti-gay."
• A statement that the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally was "a staged event to make the right look bad."

And so forth.  Suffice it to say that he has a screw loose.  But there's also the fact that he's a convicted felon, having pleaded guilty in 2014 to charges of campaign finance offenses, more specifically making a $20,000 contribution to the New York Senate campaign of his pal Wendy Long, and then lying about it.  He was sentenced to five years' probation and a $30,000 fine.

Except that now Donald Trump is pardoning him, saying he was "treated very unfairly by our government."

Now, hang on a moment.

D'Souza confessed.  He voluntarily pleaded guilty.  And he was given a sentence that was, honestly, pretty lightweight.  How is this being "treated very unfairly?"

Dinesh D'Souza [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, Dinesh D'Souza (25266922259), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The fact is that D'Souza is a rabid right-winger and loves Trump, so Trump is rewarding him by clearing his record.  It has nothing to do with unfair treatment; it has everything to do with benefiting directly from kissing Trump's ass.

Yes, I know the president can pardon anyone he wants, so it was entirely within his prerogative to pardon D'Souza.  But it sends a message -- you can break laws to your heart's content, and as long as you're a faithful toady, you won't have to face consequences.  You think this won't change the geometry of the cases against Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen?

More than one person has said that Trump is stupid.  In terms of information about world issues, and even about issues within the United States, that appears to be true.  But in terms of pure cunning, and doing what it takes to consolidate and retain power, the man is a genius.  Dismissing him as a "fucking moron" (to quote ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) is to underestimate the man dangerously.  And until we have a Congress that's willing to stand up to his L'état, c'est moi approach, there's not a damn thing we can do about it except for such dubiously useful responses as writing outraged blog posts and hoping that a few people will wake up.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

In on the secret

In yesterday's post, we considered how a feeling of being in power can dull people's capacity for empathy and compassion.  Today, we're going to look at how a desperation to feel unique, smart, and "in the know" can lead people to believe in baseless conspiracy theories.

Which once again brings us to Donald Trump.

The day before yesterday, Trump launched into new and unexplored vistas of paranoia by claiming that Robert Mueller's investigation of the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russian agents is itself going to meddle in the midterm elections this fall -- in order to favor Democrats.

Let's start with the fact that it'd be pretty odd if Mueller did this, because he's a registered Republican.  Not that Trump accepts this, either; every other tweet claims that anyone connected to the Russia investigation must be a Democrat, and apparently, he (through his mouthpieces over at Fox News) have convinced his followers that the whole thing is just a big Democratic conspiracy.  If you don't believe me, here's the exact quote:

The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!

It's an open question whether Trump himself believes this, or if he's manipulating his fan base in a calculated fashion so that he and his cronies can stay in power.  What's certain, though, is that his supporters believe it.  Never mind that there's no evidence; never mind that the facts themselves argue against its being true.

It's like he's Jesus, you know?  The new bumper sticker should say, "Trump said it, I believe it, and that settles it."

Which I find pretty mystifying.  I know there's some sunk-cost fallacy going on here; these people have already put an inordinate amount of time and energy into getting this guy elected, so to admit now that it's all been a big mistake is a bridge too far.  Easier to believe that Dear Leader is being targeted by a shadowy Deep State cohort of evil doers.

But some recent research has found that there are two other reasons people fall for conspiracies.  And what they suggest is a little frightening.

A study by Daniel Sullivan, Mark J. Landau, and Zachary K. Rothschild in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people's inclination to believe in conspiracies correlates negatively with their sense of being in control of their circumstances.  People who think that their lives are controlled by unpredictable and chaotic events -- the weather, natural disasters, random crime, arbitrary decisions by leaders -- are more likely to believe that there are evil conspiracies at work.  Which makes sense; if you feel like you're in control of your destiny, it makes less sense that there are Puppet Masters pulling your strings.

But there's more to it.  According to a recent study by Roland Imhoff and Pia Karoline Lamberty of the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz that appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology, a belief in conspiracy theories also correlates strongly with a need to feel unique.  The authors write:

Adding to the growing literature on the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs, this paper argues that a small part in motivating the endorsement of such seemingly irrational beliefs is the desire to stick out from the crowd, the need for uniqueness.  Across three studies, we establish a modest but robust association between the self‐attributed need for uniqueness and a general conspirational mindset (conspiracy mentality) as well as the endorsement of specific conspiracy beliefs.  Following up on previous findings that people high in need for uniqueness resist majority and yield to minority influence, [our research] experimentally shows that a fictitious conspiracy theory received more support by people high in conspiracy mentality when this theory was said to be supported by only a minority (vs. majority) of survey respondents.  Together, these findings support the notion that conspiracy beliefs can be adopted as a means to attain a sense of uniqueness.

Imhoff, writing about his and Lamberty's research in the online magazine Quartz, says:

Belief in conspiracies can serve to set oneself apart from the ignorant masses—a self-serving boast about one’s exclusive knowledge.  Adherence to conspiracy theory might not always be the result of some perceived lack of control, but rather a deep-seated need for uniqueness...  [Consider] the often vocal, evangelising conduct of actual conspiracy theorists, their claims to superior insight, and their degradation of non-believers as ignorant sheep (German conspiracy theorists label the uninformed masses Schlafschaf, literally ‘sleepsheep’).

So the reason people who fall for Donald Trump's wild conspiratorial claims, and those of other big names in the conspiracy theory world (such as Alex Jones and David Icke), is largely (1) that they feel powerless in their own lives, so someone must be causing the bad shit that happens, and (2) that they have a deep desire to be one of the ones who has it all figured out.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christopher DOMBRES, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Whether Trump believes his own lunatic tweets, then, turns out to be irrelevant.  In the minds of his followers, it creates a rather horrifying trifecta of irrationality -- revering a figure who has become a stand-in for God himself, feeling like there are powerful forces responsible for all of the negative things in the world (including the attacks on Dear Leader), and a desperation not to be duped.  And the irony is, the direct result is that they are being duped, by a guy who was in over his head from day one and has made one blitheringly idiotic move after another, all the while claiming that any negative reaction is "Fake News" and any bad outcomes are because his Grand Plans are being subverted by either the Deep State or the Democrats, depending on what day it is.

The worst part is I don't know what the hell you can do about this.  As Imhoff put it: "Seeing evil plots at play behind virtually any world event is not only an effort to make sense of the world.  It can also be gratifying in and of itself: It grants one the allure of exclusive knowledge that sets one apart from the sleeping sheep."

Which can be coupled with the observation I've made here more than once that you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Anesthetized by power

Watching Donald Trump and our other so-called leaders over the last year and a half has been one long exercise in horrified astonishment.  The graft, corruption, self-aggrandizement, and bullying are beyond anything I've ever seen in government in my fifty-odd years of being at least somewhat aware of what was going on.  And, merciful heavens above, the lying.  An article was going around a few days ago that had the headline, "How Can You Tell If Donald Trump Is Lying?"  My answer to that question is, "If his lips are moving."

But the one thing that has stood out the most is the utter lack of empathy and compassion.  It's in the news every single day.  Our fellow humans called "animals," and anyone who even suggests that we should come up with a humane policy for illegal immigrants is shouted down as someone who "loves MS-13" (the notorious, ultraviolent Central American gang that has established itself in the United States).  At the same time, pretending that the humanitarian crises over a lack of drinkable water in Flint, Michigan, and a lack of basic necessities in Puerto Rico, simply don't exist.  (And here, the "they're illegals" argument doesn't work; we're talking about American citizens.)

Some recent research, led by University of California - Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, has given us a lens into why this sort of thing is appallingly common.  He has studied the dynamics of power, and in particularly, how power interacts with a sense of empathy, and found something disturbing; power seems to dull a person's capacity for empathy, even in people who were empathetic to start with.

Keltner writes:

These findings suggest that iconic abuses of power—Jeffrey Skilling’s fraudulent accounting at Enron, Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s illegal bonuses, Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties, Leona Helmsley’s tax evasion—are extreme examples of the kinds of misbehavior to which all leaders, at any level, are susceptible.  Studies show that people in positions of corporate power are three times as likely as those at the lower rungs of the ladder to interrupt coworkers, multitask during meetings, raise their voices, and say insulting things at the office.  And people who’ve just moved into senior roles are particularly vulnerable to losing their virtues, my research and other studies indicate.

The problem seems to be a loss of the capacity for what psychologists call "mirroring" -- being able to imagine yourself in someone else's mind.  This ability is critical for compassion; it's why many of us have a hard time watching violent scenes in movies, because we imagine ourselves in that situation all too easily.  A 2006 study by Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah Gruenfeld showed that just priming a person's brain by having half the subjects recall a time during which they were in a position of high power, and the other half a time during when they were powerless, alters their ability to perform simple mirroring tests -- such as drawing a letter "E" on their own forehead, in the proper orientation to someone who is looking at their face.  Even recalling being in a powerful position made a person more likely to be "self-oriented" -- and to draw the E backwards with respect to everyone else.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NeetiR, Leadership and Power, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Wilfred Laurier University psychologists Sukhvinder Obhi and Jeremy Hogeveen, and University of Toronto - Scarborough researcher Michael Inzlicht, have found something even more interesting, and considerably more frightening.  They put test subjects into an fMRI machine, and had them watch a simple video -- for example, of someone squeezing a rubber ball.  The "non-powerful group" showed strong activation of the parts of the brain that would fire if the subject him/herself were squeezing the ball; they were, apparently, imagining themselves doing the task.  The "powerful group," though, showed much less activation of those pathways.

The authors write:

[T]he main results we report are robust, and strongly suggest that power is negatively related to motor resonance.  Indeed, anecdotes abound about the worker on the shop floor whose boss seems oblivious to his existence, or the junior sales associate whose regional manager never remembers her name and seems to look straight through her in meetings.  Perhaps the pattern of activity within the motor resonance system that we observed in the present study can begin to explain how these occurrences take place and, more generally, can shed light on the tendency for the powerful to neglect the powerless, and the tendency for the powerless to expend effort in understanding the powerful.

The Obhi et al. experiment's conclusion is profoundly depressing.  Recall that the test subjects weren't actually different in their overall power level; they were all college students who had simply been primed to recall being powerful, or not.  Obhi remarked that the mirroring pathways in the "powerful group" appeared to be "anesthetized" -- and would presumably return to their baseline once the experiment was over.

What about people who are in more-or-less permanent positions of power?  Could a long enough exposure to being in a power role permanently damage the ability to feel empathy?  It's easy enough to believe that about Donald Trump, who has had the money and position to pull everyone's strings at will for decades.  But the results of the research supports the famous line from Lord Acton, that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  It'd be nice to think that the most empathetic and compassionate of us would still feel that way if we were elected to public office, but the truth seems to be darker than that.  I surmise that the individuals with the highest levels of empathy probably wouldn't run for office in the first place, but that's a guess.  But those that do seem inevitably to experience a dulling of their capacity for compassion.

As David Owen and Jonathan Davidson wrote in an article on hubris in the journal Brain in 2009:

Charisma, charm, the ability to inspire, persuasiveness, breadth of vision, willingness to take risks, grandiose aspirations and bold self-confidence—these qualities are often associated with successful leadership.  Yet there is another side to this profile, for these very same qualities can be marked by impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate.  This can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.  The attendant loss of capacity to make rational decisions is perceived by the general public to be more than ‘just making a mistake’.  While they may use discarded medical or colloquial terms, such as ‘madness’ or ‘he's lost it’, to describe such behaviour, they instinctively sense a change of behaviour although their words do not adequately capture its essence.

It bears keeping this in mind when we look at our own leaders -- especially in situations, such as the current administration, where it appears that the branches of government tasked with providing checks and balances on the power of the leaders has decided instead to give them carte blanche to do anything they want -- however foolish, ignorant, callous, and inhumane their actions are.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Lovecraft, tentacles, and Area 51

I participate in a rather amusing motivational technique to keep me running regularly.  It's called "virtual racing" (the particular version of this I play is over at the site YesFit), and the idea is that you choose a location where you'd like to be running, then log your miles however you prefer -- running, walking, cycling, swimming, whatever -- and the site shows you where you are on a map, sends you pictures from Google StreetView, and every once in a while will give you a clickable link to find out more about the place you're "visiting."  Then, when you finish the race, you get a prize -- a medal or a t-shirt.

I know it's a little silly, but I love seeing my little place marker move across the map, and it's great fun to see pictures of where my avatar is.  Well, usually it is -- my most recent race was along the infamous Area 51 in Nevada, and to say the scenery is monotonous is like saying that the terrain around Mount Everest is "a little hilly."

Even so, I completed the race (a total of 97.7 miles), and yesterday, I got my reward t-shirt, with a silhouette of an alien saying, "Thanks For Believing In Me."  And in a nice little synchronicity, I had shortly after I opened the package, I found a link over at Mysterious Universe claiming that Google Earth caught photographs of the bombing range at Groom Lake (part of Area 51) showing bomb craters...

... with tentacles coming out of them.

The problem with Mysterious Universe is that I can never tell when they're kidding.  Some of their authors, notably Nick Redfern and Brent Swancer, seem like True Believers.  Others, like Paul Seaburn, tend to take a more skeptical view of things.  The jury's still out about the one who wrote the article about the tentacles, Sequoyah Kennedy, because he says that the tentacles are signs that the Lovecraftian Elder Gods are returning to Earth.

Without further ado, here's one of the photographs:

And here's a bit of what Kennedy has to say:

There’s a weird almost-symmetry to a lot of these “tentacles,” and it definitely has an organic sort of shape.  I wonder if it’s slightly differently programmed ballistics tests leaving char marks on the ground, or perhaps captured mid-flight, but I’m completely unqualified to make any judgments on that so I’m sticking with what I know—Elder Gods.

Which seems like a solid logical chain to me.  If you can rule out char marks from ballistic tests, any weird thing captured on Google Earth must be Great Cthulhu returning to subjugate humanity.

However, he does seem to realize that he's on shaky ground:

There appears to be a small hole with long eldritch tendrils reaching out of it, like tree roots or black mycelium.  It’s weird.  It could be absolutely anything, but it’s weird.

Which puts me in mind of the wonderful quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.  If there's a swamp, there's ferns.  If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs. 

Observation: I can't see a thing.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

Ironically, one of Lovecraft's best stories, "In the Walls of Eryx," is about an Earth man on Venus, slogging around in a swamp, while fighting -- you guessed it -- super-intelligent dinosaurs.

Myself, I doubt the tentacles in Area 51 have anything to do with Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, and the rest of the gang.  Nor, as one of my friends suggested, does the sinkhole that opened up last week in front of the White House, despite the fact that casting Donald Trump in the role of an evil, depraved Elder God actually has some appeal.  (Maybe he'd be Yuck-Sothoth, or something.)

So chances are, this is another one of those things that has a completely ordinary explanation, even if (because it's Area 51, after all) we never find out what it is.  I'm certainly not going over there to find out; besides it being the most boring terrain in the world, there are signs all over the place saying "KEEP OUT: THE USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED," which is a little off-putting.  Now y'all will have to excuse me, because I'm going to go for a run.  I'm currently ten miles into the Yeti Trail in Nepal, and the t-shirt for this one is wicked cool.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Sending my regrets

One of the most tragicomic moments in my life happened at my twentieth high school reunion.

I was painfully shy when I was young.  I brought the concept "awkward teenager" to its absolute apex.  I made some passing attempts to fit in, but those were by and large failures.  I did have a few friends -- some of whom I am still in touch with, and whose friendship I treasure -- but to say I had no social life back then is an odds-on favorite for Understatement of the Year.

Anyhow, I was at the evening dance/party for my reunion, and did what I usually do at parties: got a drink and then stood around looking uncomfortable.  While I was standing there, I was approached by a woman on whom, when we were in high school, I had a crush of life-threatening proportions.  She came up and started chatting with me, and I relaxed a little, especially after reassuring myself that we weren't teenagers any more, and that I was indeed twenty years older than I had been when I graduated.

The conversation went here and there, and after a while she blushed a little and said, "I have a confession to make.  When we were in high school, I had a terrible crush on you, but I was too nervous to ask you out."

I goggled at her for a moment, and said, "Well, that's a little ironic..." and told her I'd felt the same way, and didn't ask her out for the same reason.

We had a good laugh over it, but really, it's kind of sad, isn't it?  We're so wrapped up in our neuroses and insecurities that we become our own worst enemies -- passing up opportunities that could have been rewarding purely out of fear.  It's not that I want a different life, mind you.  I've got an awesome wife, work in a wonderful school, and am finally seeing my novels take off.

But man, I really wish I could have loosened up a little back then, and just had some damn fun.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sureshbmani, Shyness Of angel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This all comes up because of a study that came out a few days ago about regret.  Titled, "The Ideal Road Not Taken: The Self-Discrepancies Involved in People’s Most Enduring Regrets," by Shai Davidai of the New School for Social Research and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University, and appeared in the journal Emotion.

What Davidai and Gilovich found is that regret occurs when the three subdivisions of self don't line up -- the actual self (who you really are), the ideal self (who you wish you were), and the ought self (who you think you should be).  And this gives rise to two different kinds of regret, which are processed by the brain differently; could regrets (ones about missed opportunities for doing something you wish you had) and should regrets (ones about times you didn't act according to your own code of proper behavior).

Davidai and Gilovich found that the "could regrets" have far more long-lasting impact on our personalities than the "should regrets."  Nick Hobson, writing about the research over at Psychology Today, said:

[T]he findings suggested that ideal-related regrets are less likely to elicit psychological and behavioral coping efforts, which leads people to think they are still unresolved.  In contrast, because people have a more pressing need to deal with their ought-related regrets (again, because of social pressures), they are more likely to ultimately perceive them as resolved and dealt with.

Which is certainly my experience.  Oh, there were times in my past that I acted poorly.  Sometimes, really poorly.  In fact, on a couple of occasions, I was an unmitigated shit, and I still toy with the idea of contacting the wronged parties and giving an abject apology.  But it's the things I wish I'd done that have stuck with me the most -- like my long-ago coulda-been girlfriend.

Hobson, though, says we need to be gentle with ourselves over these failings, that they're universal to the human condition:

Contrary to what you hear in the media or what your friends tell you, living life without any regrets is pretty much an impossible task.  It is completely natural to wonder what your life could have been like had you chosen another career path or had you married your high school sweetheart.  From huge life-altering decisions to trivial everyday choices—our lives are comprised of could haves and should haves.  It’s what makes us human.

Which is reassuring, and something I need to take to heart, because this fall is my fortieth high school reunion, an event I look forward to with a combination of excitement and trepidation.  There certainly are lots of people there who it'll be nice to see again.  But I know it will bring up those old longings, so well portrayed in movies like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, that I would give a lot to be able to go back and fix the things I regret doing -- and even more, the things I regret not doing.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Out in the ozone

Sometimes I run across alternative health therapies that are so freakin' weird I suspect, at least for a time, that the alt-med crowd is trolling us skeptics.  The sad truth is that when I look a little harder, I find that they're almost always completely serious.  And that includes the one that I just found out about yesterday, wherein just about anything that ails you can be cured by...

... blowing ozone up your ass.

Despite the disclaimer in the first paragraph, I feel obliged to reiterate that I'm not making this up.  "Ozone therapy" is a big deal; I've found that it's recommended for sterilizing wounds, treating SARS, AIDS, Ebola (for a third time, I'm not joking), Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and various cancers.  Some treatments (as in the wound sterilization) merely wafts ozone over the affected area.  Others involve treatment with "ozonated olive oil," the aforementioned treatment of running a tube up your ass and blowing ozone therein, and (in one case) injecting a bubble of ozone directly into your vein.

The last-mentioned made my jaw drop.  A bubble in your blood vessels is known as an "air embolism," and can kill you.  It doesn't matter what the bubble is composed of.  If it migrates around until it gets into one of the arteries in the brain, you'll have a stroke.

Which means you now have an additional concern beyond a wound, SARS, AIDS, or what-have-you.

But the blow-it-up-your-ass method (known to the alt-med community by the more genteel name of "rectal insufflation") seems to be the most popular, which raises a question; how did anyone ever think of doing this?  I can't imagine being a medical researcher and thinking, "Wow, this ear infection could easily be cured if I just pump a toxic gas up the patient's butt."  Because any way you slice it, ozone is toxic.  It's O₃ (normal oxygen is O₂) and unsurprisingly is an unstable, highly reactive strong oxidizer. It does kill bacteria -- thus the suggestion that it'd be a good wound sterilizer -- but the problem is, the same properties that make it toxic to bacteria make it toxic to healthy cells.  Hell, single malt scotch kills bacteria, and I don't hear anyone proposing single malt scotch therapy.  (Although after doing this research, I'm seriously considering it.)

In fact, ozone is produced by electrical and gas-powered equipment (including car engines), and is considered a pollutant by the EPA.  According to the fact sheet about ozone, it "can trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation.  It also can reduce lung function and harm lung tissue.  Ozone can worsen bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma."

So positive health effects?  Not so much.

An ozone molecule [Image is in the Public Domain]

After spending over an hour searching, I only found one legitimate-sounding paper that took the idea of rectal insufflation seriously.  Titled "The Effect of Rectal Ozone on the Portal Vein Oxygenation and Pharmacokinetics of Propranolol in Liver Cirrhosis (A Preliminary Human Study)" by Saad Zaky, Ehab Ahmad Fouad, and Hassan Ibrahim Mohamad Kotb of Assiut University in Egypt.  The study was published back in 2011, and the authors kind of disappeared from the world of research publication afterwards, which says something.  Also, I notice that the one major effect they mention is that in their fifteen patients (yes, the sample size was that small), they saw an increase in oxygenation in the hepatic portal vein.

Oh, did I mention that what they blew up their patients' asses was 40% ozone -- and 60% oxygen?  Funny how that might increase your blood's oxygen saturation.

Of course there were plenty of sites advertising ozone machines and ozone therapy clinics and equipment so you can "insufflate" your own ass.  But it's unsurprising those weren't exactly peer-reviewed research, given that these people are making a bundle from the desperate and the gullible.

On the other hand, the sites explaining the complete lack of evidence that this has any therapeutic effect were numerous and vitriolic.  Here's what Andy Lewis, over at The Quackometer, has to say:

O₂ is what we breathe and absorb in our lungs for transport to our cells.  O₃ is a highly oxidising form of oxygen that has very harmful effects on our respiratory systems.  As such, if you squirt ozone on cancer cells on a dish they will die – but then so will all cells.  Cancer therapies work, in the main, by exploiting poisons that kill cancer cells faster than non-cancer cells.  This is pretty hard in practice as cancer cells are very, very similar to normal cells.  The mere fact that a poison kills cancer cells in a test tube does not mean that it can form a therapy...  Ozone has been proclaimed as a miraculous cure for over a hundred years.  There is yet to be any meaningful evidence that it can help cancer patients.  The available good evidence so far suggests that harms will outweigh any potential benefits.

Then there's Paula Kurtzweil, at Quackwatch, who tells the story of a couple in Florida who were fined and sentenced to prison terms for claiming people with AIDS and cancer could be cured by their magic ozone machines:

Proponents of medical ozone generators believe ozone can kill viruses and bacteria in the body. While ozone is used as a germicide in the cleaning of manufacturing equipment, FDA is not aware of any scientific data that supports the safety or effectiveness of ozone generators for treating medical conditions. In fact, the agency believes that at the levels needed to work effectively as a germicide, ozone could be detrimental to human health.

"These devices keep popping up," says Bob Gatling, a biomedical engineer and director of the program operations staff in FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.  "We always tell their makers, 'Show us some data,' but no one ever pursues it." 

FDA's knowledge of [alternative medicine practitioner Kenneth] Thiefault's involvement in ozone generators dates to at least 1990, when Thiefault was interviewed during an FDA criminal investigation of one of Thiefault's associates.  This associate was later prosecuted and imprisoned for, among other things, manufacturing and selling ozone generators for treating medical conditions.  After release from prison, he returned to making and distributing ozone generators for treating medical conditions but fled the country before he could be prosecuted again.

Also from Quackwatch, here's Dr. Saul Green's take on it:

In 1991, Wells et al. reported that gaseous ozone inactivated cell-free HIV-l in cell-free culture medium.  Using escalating concentrations of ozone, they showed that a l200 ppm dose delivered into the solution for two hours, reduced the number of infectious viruses... and detectable virions about 85%.  However, there was also a significant reduction in infectivity after virus exposure to nitrogen.  Other factors influencing the rate and degree of inactivation of HIV-I by ozone were protein and plasma components in the culture medium.  (HIV is known to be inactivated by a host of relatively inactive substances.)  While ozone might be useful in rendering commercial blood products free of infectious organisms, more extensive analyses of the HIV-I life cycle was needed before ozone's usefulness as an in vivo anti-retroviral agent could be defined.  Poiesz, Wells' co-author, wrote, "No further in vitro work has been done and to my knowledge no in vivo work has been done."

The alt-med monitoring site What's the Harm? lists thirteen people who sought out ozone therapy -- one of them paid $23,000 for it -- instead of legitimate treatment modalities, and found out that it is definitely not a miracle cure.

Because they died.

So anyhow.  If you have a chronic disease, and (for some reason) decide that the best treatment would be to insufflate your rectum with toxic gas, I would exhort you to reconsider.  There is no reliable peer-reviewed research that it provides any benefits whatsoever, and (cf. the word "toxic" in the previous sentence) can kill healthy tissue.  Now, y'all will have to excuse me, because I think I need some single malt scotch therapy after all.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.