Artificial psycho

New from the "Don't You People Ever Watch Horror Movies?" department, we have: a group of scientists at MIT who have created an artificial intelligence that is psychopathic.

At least that's kind of what it looks like.  The AI, which has been programmed to analyze, understand, and learn from photographs, was then trained on horrific images -- pictures of humans being injured or otherwise abused, obtained from the site Reddit -- and afterwards asked it to interpret Rorschach ink blots.

Here are a few of the responses given by the AI, who has been named "Norman" after Norman Bates from Psycho, and for purposes of comparison, the responses from a control AI that had been trained on a variety of different sorts of images (rather than all violent ones):

Control: a close-up of a wedding cake on a table.
Norman: a man killed by a speeding driver. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a baseball glove.
Norman: a man murdered by machine gun in broad daylight. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a small bird.
Norman: a man being pulled into a dough machine. 

Control: a person holding an umbrella in the air.
Norman: a man shot dead in front of his screaming wife.

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a red-and-white umbrella.
Norman: a man gets electrocuted trying to cross a busy street. 

The trio of scientists responsible, Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan, don't seem unduly concerned by their creation, although they do point out the hazards of training an AI using skewed input.  "Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit," they said in an interview, "and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine-learning algorithms."

[Image released into the Public Domain by its creator, Michel Royon]

What it makes me wonder is to what extent our own brains get co-opted by this sort of thing.  It's often claimed that people who (for example) play lots of violent video games become inured, desensitized, to violence in general.  But maybe it's more than that.  Maybe if we expose ourselves to ugliness, we become more likely to interpret neutral situations as ugly.

Sort of seeing the world through awful-colored glasses.

I saw an example of this, albeit of a milder variety, in my own parents.  My folks were the type that had the television on in the evening whether anyone was watching it or not, and a favorite channel had reruns of the show Cops on every night.  I'm a little puzzled as to why anyone would watch that show to start with -- after all, it's not like the plot varies -- but I noticed that after a time, my parents (especially my mom) started viewing the world as an unsafe place.  People are always waiting to hurt you, she said, and you have to stay on your guard constantly.  I still recall the last thing she told me before I left for a month-long walking tour of England:

"Don't trust ANYBODY."

In England, for fuck's sake.  I mean, it's not like I was planning on hiking across Sudan, or anything.

So what you immerse yourself in day after day does make a difference.  I'm not suggesting that we be Pollyannas, nor to look at the world in the way of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's masterpiece Candide ("Everything happens for the best, as this is the best of all possible worlds.")  But it bears keeping in mind that we can bias ourselves by what we choose to watch, read, play, and participate in.

And I do hope they know where the "Off" switch is on Norman.  Because that sonofabitch scares the hell out of me.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

The smell of death

In Agatha Christie's wonderful novel The Pale Horse, a group of self-styled witches claim to be able to curse someone to death.  And they're happy to do it for you -- under a dubiously moral but entirely legal scheme wherein you bet the ringleader that your worst enemy is going to die within six weeks.  If your enemy dies, as promised, you pay up.  If not, the witches pay you.

Because, after all, you haven't asked anyone to act as a hit man -- all you've done is speculate that someone is going to die.

Of course, given that it's Christie, there's no chance that there's actually anything supernatural going on, and the death-by-curse scheme is actually a cover for very deliberate murder.  I won't spoil it further for you, because it's a hell of a read (you can buy it at the link above); but the point is that even when things look their woo-iest, there's usually some sort of completely rational explanation behind it.

This all comes up because of a claim I ran across over at the site Mysterious Universe, in an article by Paul Seaburn called, "Psychic Claims She Can Smell Your Impending Doom."  In it, we hear about a woman named Ari Kala, of Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia, who claims that she can tell if someone's going to die -- by their smell.

Kala tells about her first experience with this alleged ability, at age twelve, when she detected an odd odor from someone who was dying.  'The night before his death I picked up this odd, sickly sweet rotten kind of smell in the house," Kala said.  "I thought it was the smell of his remains as I had never smelled that before.  But no one else could smell it."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When she became an adult, she became aware of other psychic abilities (she claims), and started working as a "psychic coach."  But the ability to smell death remained with her.  It wasn't pleasant, she says, and not just because death doesn't smell so good:

Sometimes it feels like a burden.  I used to want to say something, however, I realized it’s not my duty.  It’s kind of useless – how could it help anyone?  How I can walk up to strangers with this smell and help them?  What if they don’t know they are going to die soon?  If I told them that and they weren’t aware, it could be catastrophic.  I don’t see how it’s up to me to interfere with their fate.

Which I suppose makes sense, not to mention the fact that it would make her sound more than a little threatening -- rather like our witches-for-hire in The Pale Horse.

So is there anything to this?  If she'd claimed that she could tell if anyone was going to die, by any means, I'd be inclined to laugh it off.  Such abilities also appear in fiction, most famously in one of the best-ever episodes of The X Files, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."  As interesting as this idea is, there's no way I'll believe someone who claims that they can tell that tomorrow I'm going to get pushed in front of a Mack truck or something because I smell funny.

But what makes me wonder is that Kala says she's only picked up the smell in places where people are dying of natural causes -- hospitals and old-age homes.  It made me think of a study two years ago of dogs that can detect cancer by smell -- in some cases, before the tumor is causing any obvious symptoms.  The ability, which has not been thoroughly researched, is thought to come from dogs' sensitivity to volatile organic compounds released either by the cancer itself or by the body's attempt to fight it, but that piece is speculative.

So could Kala be picking up on something like that?  I suppose it's possible, but the difficulty is that it's not going to be easy to test.  It's not like hospitals would welcome the Death-Sniffing Psychic to wander around in the ICU.

And whatever's going on here -- whether it's a hoax (after all, she's only made the claim after the person in question has died, making it easy enough for her to say she smelled it beforehand), or whether she actually has a nose sensitive to the onset of death -- I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that there's a perfectly rational explanation behind it, just as there was with our group of Evil Witches For Hire in The Pale Horse.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Endorsement of coercion

Some days, I really don't understand my fellow humans.

The latest example of my complete incomprehension comes because of a case that was just decided in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, wherein a self-styled Satanist had brought a lawsuit against the United States government to have "In God We Trust" removed from currency, on the basis of its being an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The lawsuit was thrown out a couple of days ago.  The court's ruling said, in part, "a reasonable observer would not perceive the motto on currency as a religious endorsement."

I read the entire story with an expression like this on my face:

Let's just review what the phrase "In God We Trust" means, shall we?

It means "we trust in God."  I.e., God exists.  I.e., Christianity is right.  I.e., endorsing a particular religious viewpoint.

The ruling went on to say, "The inclusion of the motto on currency is similar to other ways in which secular symbols give a nod to the nation’s religious heritage... similar to the phrase 'One Nation, Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance."

No, the phrase is not a "nod to religious heritage."  Depictions of the Puritans founding the colony of Massachusetts is a "nod to religious heritage."  But then, so would depictions of the witches being hanged in Salem, so maybe that's not where we want to go, either.

What escapes a lot of people about all this is that the motto of the United States was changed in the 1950s from E Pluribus Unum -- "Out of Many, One" -- in order to show the godless commies what for.  Same for adding "One Nation, Under God" in the Pledge.  Neither of these has a long historical timeline, and only appeared when the Christians started feeling threatened and required that everyone state their belief in God whether or not a person thought it was true.

The mandate for the phrase to appear on currency comes from a bill introduced by Representative Charles Bennett of Florida in 1955, wherein Bennett argued that "In these days when imperialistic and materialistic communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, we should continually look for ways to strengthen the foundations of our freedom."

Including, apparently, the freedom to believe anything you want as long as it's Christianity.

I also take issue with the suggestion that the founders of the country intended this kind of coercion with respect to religion.  Take, for example, what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1777:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

James Madison concurred, observing, "Torrents of blood have been split in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion."

Even more to the point, Jefferson wrote, "What has been the effect of [religious] coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth."

And more fundamentally, I wonder why the religious want religion to appear on currency.  Isn't there the whole "render unto God what is God's, and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" thing in the Gospel of Matthew?  And as far as the Pledge goes, what earthly purpose can the "one nation, under God" phrase serve?  If you say it but don't believe it, you're lying.  If you already believe it -- well, you already believe it.  Why is a public affirmation in a secular space required?

The bottom line is that you are free to participate in any religion you want to.  Even as a staunch atheist, I have no desire whatsoever to constrain what you believe, or how you express those beliefs.  But that tolerance comes to a screeching halt when you try to coerce me, or anyone else, to adhere to your beliefs simply because people of those beliefs are currently in the majority in the United States, and hold nearly all the positions of power.

I suppose it's heartening that even the people in favor of it recognize they're on such tenuous ground that they have to make such outright ridiculous statements as "'In God We Trust' is in no way a religious endorsement" in order to defend it.  What's unfortunate is that we have to spend our time and resources arguing about this stuff, when there are considerably more pressing matters to attend to, such as the fact that our president seems to regard the Constitution as a list of suggestions.

If he's actually read it, which I'm beginning to wonder.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Questioning the holy man

I know I've said this before, but one of the most baffling things for me about the Trump presidency is that evangelical Christians (most of them, at least) not only voted for Trump, but consider him to be the Anointed One of God.

You would think that listening to Trump for five minutes would be enough to disabuse you of that notion.  The man is a crude, vulgar, greedy, grasping, dishonest, misogynistic, narcissistic philanderer.

To put not too fine a point on it.

Okay, I know people make a deal with the devil in politics sometimes.  You vote for someone who agrees with you on some cause you are passionate about, and overlook his/her faults in other realms.  But that doesn't seem to be what this is.  These people not only agree with his agenda -- especially regarding restricting the access to abortions, eliminating LGBT rights, American isolationism, and protecting the rights of churches to discriminate based upon their religious precepts -- they actually seem to think that he's some kind of modern-day holy man, without fault, appointed by God to bring our nation back from the brink of hell.

Consider, for example, the recently-released book by David Brody and Scott Lamb called The Faith of Donald Trump: A Spiritual Biography, which claims that Trump's agenda is "spiritually motivated" and his rapacity and apparently insatiable libido are evidences of a "quest for God."  You'd think no one would be able to read this without guffawing -- and hearteningly, 42% of the reviews are one-star -- but one reviewer said:

Great biography of a man of God.  Well written to understand about D Trump's character and can see clearly who he is in Christ.  I don't question anymore why he speaks & act such a way but trust him as loving person in depth.  No one can be without fear if the person does not stand on God's truth.

Recall that Trump is the same man who was asked if he ever asked God to forgive him for sins, said that he couldn't remember ever doing that.  "When I drink my little wine -- which is about the only wine I drink -- and have my little cracker," Trump said, "I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed."

The people who espouse the view that Trump is Jesus's right-hand man believe this with a fervor that borders on obsessive mania.  Consider the photograph of the back of a car that has been making its way around social media in the last week:

Well, honestly, he "left his great life" primarily to make sure that legislation gets passed that lines his own pockets and those of his cronies.  Trump and his family are using his position as a way of bringing in cash -- witness Ivanka's recent win of exclusive trademarks from China -- followed by her father rewarding them by promising to bail out Chinese telecom firm ZTE.

Because that doesn't violate the Emoluments Clause, or anything.

But no one exemplifies the bizarre characterization of Trump as Savior better than televangelist Jim Bakker, who steadfastly refuses to Go Gently Into That Good Night even though he appears to have completely lost his marbles.  Last week, Bakker had End Times prophet Paul McGuire on his show, and McGuire warns that because Trump is God's representative on Earth, the Forces of Darkness are amassing to fight back:

America right now is in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all of mankind.  In fact, in America, we are undergoing the greatest spiritual battle in the history of the world…  So this is it.  We don’t get another chance.  This is it.  We’ve arrived at the moment Jesus told us we would, the Old Testament prophets told us we would.  We are at that time, somewhere near the return and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth.  We are very close! 

Since we’re in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of mankind, one would think that the majority of God’s people, who claim to have Jesus living inside them, would be awake to the reality that we’re in the greatest spiritual warfare of all time. 

President Trump represents the one last chance to cry out to God in repentance and see God intervene... we are the last generation of Americans… before the return of the Lord... 

The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm.  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Scientific Dictatorship,’ and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics.

Well, all I can say is, if hating Trump qualifies you for supernatural multidimensional power, sign me right up.  But I've hated Trump for ages, and I don't have wings or telepathy or the ability to turn invisible or anything.

I feel kind of ripped off, frankly.

(It does bear mention, however, that one of the people who responded to this story wrote, "I think Paul McGuire has been smoking way too much covfefe lately.")

Anyhow, it's all kind of baffling to me.  I mean, this goes way beyond the sunk-cost fallacy and wishful thinking right into the more rarefied atmosphere of complete self-delusion.  I suppose, given how much evidence you had to ignore to support Trump in the first place, I shouldn't be surprised.  It never was about rationality in the first place.

But it still leaves me feeling like I want to board the next spaceship to Alpha Centauri.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Facing the impostor

I'll be honest with you.  I've felt like an impostor for most of my life.

My job for over thirty years has been teaching science in public schools, mostly biology (and other life-science-related classes).  However, I have neither a bachelors nor a master's degree in biology.  My bachelor's degree is in physics -- and I was a lackluster physics student at best -- and my master's degree is in linguistics, of all things.  Along the way I started a master's program in oceanography, but I was kind of lousy at that, too, and got out of research science entirely.  I've taken enough classes in biology for a teaching license (obviously), but frankly, I learned most of the biology I know by the seat of the pants.

Even in my two favorite avocations -- writing and music -- I didn't get where I am by any kind of legitimate, credentialed pathway.  I wasn't in band in school, having been told that I was no good at it by a 6th grade band director, and taught myself the flute and piano.  I was lucky enough to study flute with a wonderful teacher, Margaret Vitus, when I was in my twenties, but that is the sum total of my formal musical background.

I don't even have that in writing.  I took two creative writing classes, one in high school, one in college.  The end.

So I've got a striking lack of framed certificates in Latin to hang on my wall.  When I think about it rationally, it doesn't bother me.  I know I'm competent enough at what I do (in all three realms) that I don't have anything to apologize for.  But that visceral voice isn't so kind -- one of the reasons I feel uncomfortable and outclassed when I'm around academics, people who are in my mind "true intellectuals."

Impostor syndrome is all too common.  Way back in the 1970s, it was studied in women, when in interviews of 150 highly successful and professional women, the vast majority experienced no internal sense of accomplishment, and were constantly afraid that they'd be "found out" as having poorer abilities, knowledge, and qualifications than their bosses and coworkers thought.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mark J Sebastian, Jackie Martinez with a mask, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Now, a team of psychologists has given a closer look to this phenomenon -- and have found it's more ubiquitous than anyone thought.  In "Are All Impostors Created Equal? Exploring Gender Differences in the Impostor Phenomenon-Performance Link," by Rebecca L.Badawy, Brooke A.Gazdag, Jeffrey R. Bentley, and Robyn L. Brouer, of Youngstown State University, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, California State University, and Canisius College, respectively, the researchers found that males and females both experience impostor syndrome -- they just respond to it differently.

The research, which appeared last week in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, looked at over 250 people in professional careers, and found some interesting correlations.  First, they did not see a link between feeling like an impostor and actual work performance.  Put more simply; self-styled impostors and people who feel like they deserve to be where they are have about the same levels of competency at work.

What is even more interesting, however, is the difference in reaction between males and females.  In the first experiment, a group was given five problems from the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), used to determine admittance to graduate school.  After working on the problems, they're given feedback on how they did -- but some of the test subjects were told (incorrectly) that they'd gotten all five wrong.

Looking at the responses to this harsh feedback between male "impostors" and female "impostors," the males responded to subsequent tasks with higher anxiety, less effort, and poorer performance, while the females' emotional responses were nearly the opposite -- they were anxious regardless of whether the feedback was positive or negative, but they responded by improving their effort, and their performance went up, too.

In a second experiment, the subjects were told their answers would be shown to a college professor -- placing them in a high-stress, high-accountability context.  Once again, the men who scored high on impostor syndrome responded by an increase in anxiety, and a decrease in both effort and performance; but the women's results were unchanged from a low-stress, low-accountability situation.  The researchers suggested that the cause of the change in the men's responses may have been that exerting lower effort in high-stress situations might give them an "out" to explain poor performance -- but that's only speculation.

As the researchers put it, "Assuming that traditional gender norms hold, males [with impostor syndrome] may have exhibited stronger negative reactions because they believe that society at large values males who demonstrate high competence and at the same time, do not believe that they can fulfill this standard."

Whatever the reason for all this, it's kind of sad, don't you think?  The fact that so many of us can't take honest pleasure in our accomplishments, and feel the need to devalue what we do based on inaccurate standards of who we should be or how we attained our position in our workplace, is a tragedy.  The problem is, these feelings are not rational; I know from experience that all the logical arguments in the world haven't eliminated my sense that I've arrived where I am by illegitimate means.

But I wish -- both for myself and for my fellow impostors -- that it was that easy to eliminate.

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

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

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?

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

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.

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

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.