Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question despite being one myself, and being happily married to a wonderful woman.  Of course, truth be told, said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me, because I'm just that clueless when someone is flirting with me.  But still.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts last month, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm kind of clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Celeborn and Galadriel, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations. I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress from the Merciful-Heavens-How-Does-That-Stay-Up school of haute couture, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Hotbody and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard; between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fear itself

Past experiences in my life have instilled into me a deep dislike of being the center of attention.  Talking about what you love, what you're interested in, is arrogance and conceit -- I learned that lesson early.  Also, protect what you care about, or it'll be ridiculed, demeaned, or taken away.  The result was that even in safe situations, I have always been afraid to open up, and even people I've known for years really hardly know me at all.

The fact that I no longer have to spend my life in a protective crouch has not eradicated that fear.  It's a significant part of why I'm as shy and socially awkward as I am, and why I'm the guy at parties (if I get invited in the first place) who's standing there with a glass of scotch, looking around frantically for a dog to socialize with.  I've tried for years to be okay with graciously accepting compliments when they come, and to open up to others about my interests, but to say it doesn't come naturally to me is a wild understatement.

This all comes up because of some research released last month from scientists at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan.  A team consisting of Ray Luo, Akira Uematsu, Adam Weitemier, Luca Aquili, Jenny Koivumaa, Thomas J.McHugh, and Joshua P. Johansen published a paper in Nature: Communications called "A Dopaminergic Switch for Fear to Safety Transitions," wherein we find out that a single neurotransmitter (dopamine) acting in a single part of the brain (the ventral tegmental area) is apparently responsible for unlearning fear responses.

The authors write:

Exposure therapy, a form of extinction learning, is an important psychological treatment for anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Extinction of classically conditioned fear responses is a model of exposure therapy.  In the laboratory, animals learn that a sensory stimulus predicts the occurrence of an aversive outcome through fear conditioning.  During extinction, the omission of an expected aversive event signals a transition from fear responding to safety.  To switch from fear responding to extinction learning, a brain system that recognizes when an expected aversive event does not occur is required.  While molecular changes occurring in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and amygdala are known to be important for storing and consolidating extinction memories, the brain mechanisms for detecting when an expected aversive event did not occur and fear responses are no longer appropriate are less well understood... 

[Our] findings show that activation of VTA-dopamine neurons during the expected shock omission time period is necessary for normal extinction learning and the upregulation of extinction-related plasticity markers in the vmPFC and amygdala.  Notably, inhibition of VTA-dopamine neurons during the shock period of fear conditioning facilitates learning, suggesting that activity in VTA-dopamine neurons is not simply important for learning in response to any salient event.  These results also reveal that distinct populations of VTA-dopamine neurons... are important for the formation of stable, long-term extinction memories.

Team leader Joshua Johansen was unequivocal about the potential for this research in treating long-term anxiety and PTSD.  "Pharmacologically targeting the dopamine system will likely be an effective therapy for psychiatric conditions such as anxiety disorders when combined with clinically proven behavioral treatments such as exposure therapy," he said in a press release from RIKEN.  "In order to provide effective, mechanism-based treatments for these conditions, future pre-clinical work will need to use molecular strategies that can separately target these distinct dopamine cell populations."

Illustration from Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), captioned, "Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne."  [Image is in the Public Domain]

I have suffered from serious anxiety most of my life, and I have a dear friend who has PTSD, and believe me -- this is welcome news.  My one attempt to use an anxiolytic medication was a failure (it killed my appetite, which someone with as fast a metabolism as I have definitely doesn't need), and "exposure therapy" has, all in all, been a failure.  The idea that there could be a way to approach these debilitating conditions by targeting a specific molecule in a specific part of the brain is pretty earthshattering.

I know it's a long way between identifying the brain pathway involved in a disorder and finding a way to alter what it's doing, but this is a significant first step.  The idea that I might one day be able to go to social gatherings without feeling a sense of dread, and to talk to people rather than just dogs, is kind of amazing.  Until that happens, I'm probably still going to have to deal with my anxiety, but it's nice to know someone is working on the problem.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Cryptopornography

I got an email from a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia last week, to the effect that I'd picked a hell of a time to take a vacation.  Along with the note, there was a link to a story about how Bigfoot erotica was projected to play a decisive role in a congressional race in Virginia.

Poor timing indeed.  If you didn't hear about this, the concise version is that Democrat Leslie Cockburn took a shot at Republican Denver Riggleman on (what else?) Twitter, to wit: "My opponent Denver Riggleman, running mate of Corey Stewart, was caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist.  Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica.  This is not what we need on Capitol Hill."

The claim is debatable.  Riggleman did co-author books called Bigfoot Exterminators Inc.: The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt 2006 and The Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.  The latter certainly sounds a little suspect, but Riggleman said it was intended for the humor value only.

"I didn’t know there was Bigfoot erotica, even with all my Bigfoot studies," Riggleman said.  "I thought this was such a joke that nobody would ever be dumb enough to think that this was real, but I guess her campaign did."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pikes peak highway big foot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The relevance to the race is also dubious; even if Riggleman is turned on by Bigfoot (or writes stories for people who are), it really has no impact on his ability to craft law.  My own contention is that the vast majority of us have odd proclivities in the sex department that we'd much prefer the public didn't find out about, and despite that, most of us are pretty nice, responsible people.

So why Cockburn is harping on this, and not on the fact that Riggleman allegedly has ties to white supremacists, I have no idea.  That is important.  Any shaggy shagging is inconsequential by comparison.

This is all background, however, because yesterday my friend emailed me with a second link and the message, "It's not too late!!!"  The gist of this story, which hit the Los Angeles Times a couple of days ago, is that the sniping between Riggleman and Cockburn has led to a spike of sales of Bigfoot erotica on Amazon.

I'm not making this up.  According to the story on the phenomenon:

The interest in Bigfoot erotica has boosted the genre on Amazon.  Carrie High's "Bigfoot Knocked Me Up: The Complete 10 Book Set" — one of the very few erotic Sasquatch books with a title that can be printed here — was ranked No. 175 in the horror erotica subcategory early Tuesday, soon climbing to No. 83 in erotica/science fiction, No. 86 in erotica/interracial and No. 51 in the Kindle store subcategory of erotica/transgender.

Okay, I'm not going to judge; cf. my previous comment about everyone having kinks.  But the fact that there are enough people who have Bigfoot erotica kinks that it affects Amazon rankings is a little surprising.  I mean, did people hear about the Riggleman/Cockburn kerfuffle and said, "Hey, I didn't know anyone else got hot for Sasquatch!  Lemme check into that Bigfoot porn stuff!"  Or are people just curious?

No way to tell, I guess.  I was assured by an author friend, however, that cryptid porn is a big thing, and that there's even a book with the title Wet for Nessie.

And no, I didn't make that up, either.

What does worry me, however, is the effect the research for this post is having on my Google search history.  It's already bad enough; being a writer of paranormal fiction (including a line of murder mysteries), I've probably already got a file three inches thick with the FBI.  (Recent searches: "How long after a body is buried can you tell if the person was poisoned by an opiate?" and "If someone is shot with a compound bow, would the arrow embed or go right through their body?")  So now the FBI will have a whole new angle to investigate, namely, if my fixation on cryptozoology has a decidedly more (shall we say) intimate motivation.

About which, allow me to assure you, it does not.  Eight-foot-tall hairy proto-hominids are not my thing.

Nor is the Loch Ness Monster.  Just to clear that up as well.  Although in the interest of honesty, one of my books does have a scene with a guy having sex with a Japanese fox spirit, resulting in unfortunate consequences for all concerned.  But I didn't write it because it turned me on, it's because it was critical to the plot.

Really it was.

Anyhow, that'll teach me to take two weeks off.  I'm just glad that the story progressed in such a fashion that I could write about it without being hopelessly behind the times.  And now, I'm heading off to do some writing.  Today's search: "How low does a person's blood pressure have to drop before they lose consciousness?"  Hope the FBI agent assigned to me isn't disappointed at the fact that this one is only about killing people, not about kinky sex.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Schadenfreude in the morning

I just found out that Alex Jones has lost his platforms on Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.  And although I fully support the right to free speech, my reaction was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, sputter* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

The reason given is that he repeatedly broke their rules against hate speech and the incitement of violence.  The only thing surprising about this is how long it took them to act.  This is the man who claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre never occurred, that no children had been killed, and the parents were "crisis actors" hired by the Left to fake a mass murder.  The result was ongoing harassment of the grieving parents by idiots who believe everything that Jones says.  He said the same thing about the Parkland/Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, adding there that the teenage survivors were being paid by Democrats to agitate against the NRA -- because clearly, articulate and intelligent young people are not able to form opinions of their own without being bought off by cynical politicians.

Jones, who has run InfoWars for many years, has spouted this kind of bullshit for as long as I can remember.  (Check out RationalWiki if you'd like to see a concise list of the insane ideas he's touted on his show.)  People call him a "Right-wing conspiracy theorist," which is an all-too-kind euphemism for "liar."  I'm fully convinced Jones knows exactly what he's doing; he whips up controversy because it gets viewers, gets clicks on his website, gets customers to buy his "male-enhancement" pills (no, I'm not making this up).  If there was any doubt about the fact that he's a con man and not a true believer, it was removed when Jones's lawyer, during the custody trial between Jones and his ex-wife, said Jones was "a performance artist playing a character."  In one of the many lawsuits Jones has faced, the defense attorney said, "No reasonable person would believe what Jones says" -- implying that if people are hoodwinked, it's their own fault.

Maybe.  I am neither qualified, nor interested, in debating the finer points of law surrounding culpability.  All I can say is that giving Alex Jones fewer platforms for spreading his sewage is unequivocally a good thing.  And I'm happy to say that Jones himself is taking it in his usual measured, dignified, thoughtful fashion.  I saw a YouTube clip showing his reaction when he heard the news, and because he also lost his YouTube channel *brief pause to stop guffawing again* I can't post a link to it, so here's the next closest thing.

I think we can all agree that we want Alex to know we're sending him our thoughts and prayers.

I'm not expecting his banishment to have much effect on the fans of InfoWars, or at least not right away.  After all, his claim (and the claims of his lawyers) that he was an actor -- i.e., he didn't actually believe everything he was saying -- hardly made a dent.  But given that these people have the attention span of a gnat -- and, apparently, the IQ of one as well -- it shouldn't take long for them to forget all about Jones and tune into some other conspiracy-touting nutjob.  Maybe Sean Hannity.  Or Ann Coulter.  (She's still around, isn't she?  I keep waiting for someone to dump a bucket of water on her and make her melt.)

But a tremendous amount of the toxic garbage making its way into the narrative of the extreme Right can be traced back to Jones, and if this really is sayonara, I'm glad to see him go.  Notwithstanding that he has been a fertile source of topics for Skeptophilia -- I've lost track of the number of times he's appeared here -- anything we can do to reduce the pollution stream is a good thing.

So there's a little tasty schadenfreude to go with your morning coffee.  Given how desperate I've been for good news, it's nice to be able to pass along some.  I don't really think this means Alex Jones will shut up -- nothing could accomplish that -- but at least it may mean that fewer people will be listening.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Sight unseen

One of the reasons I'm a skeptic -- and rely on science -- is I know how unreliable my brain and sensory organs are.

It's not that I'm not fond of my brain and sensory organs, mind you.  They do pretty well most of the time, notwithstanding my rather crummy eyesight and my brain's fondness for singing "Copacabana" at me at two o'clock in the morning.  We certainly perceive a lot of what's around us accurately enough to get by, or we'd have been heavily selected against when our ancestors were naked apes -- i.e., prey -- faced with lions and cheetahs on the African savanna.

Still, if you're trying to evaluate claims scientifically, "I saw it" simply isn't sufficient.  What we perceive, and (especially) what we remember, is a sort-of-kind-of amalgam of what we actually did perceive, what we thought we were perceiving, and what our preconceived notions about the situation told us was likely to happen.  Add to that the notorious plasticity of our memories, and you get a total that explains why Carol and I frequently recount entirely different stories of the same event -- and are both completely convinced that our own version is the correct one.

Now, a new study by Carlos González-García, Matthew W Flounders, Raymond Chang, Alexis T Baria, and Biyu J He, of the U. S. National Institutes of Health, Ghent University (Belgium), and
New York University, have blown another big hole in our assurance that what we see is actually what's there, and is unaffected by our preconceptions.

I.e., that we all see and interpret the world the same way.

In their paper "Content-Specific Activity in Frontoparietal and Default-Mode Networks During Prior-Guided Visual Perception," published in eLife Neuroscience last week, they show that our brains often can't figure out what we're seeing until we're primed with a hint about it -- and after that, we can't not see it.

I remember running into this rather alarming idea when I first saw the following odd pattern of black and white blotches:

If you've never seen this before, you probably have no idea what you're looking at.  I know I didn't -- until it was pointed out to me that in the upper half of the image is a dalmatian dog.

See it?  Now, can you unsee it -- go back to interpreting the image as a random pattern?

I don't know about you, but I can't.  Once it's a dog, it's always a dog.

The García et al. team went a step further by having people undergo this experience while hooked up to fMRI machines.  And what they found was pretty amazing.  The authors write:

How prior knowledge shapes perceptual processing across the human brain, particularly in the frontoparietal (FPN) and default-mode (DMN) networks, remains unknown.  Using ultra-high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we elucidated the effects that the acquisition of prior knowledge has on perceptual processing across the brain.  We observed that prior knowledge significantly impacted neural representations in the FPN and DMN, rendering responses to individual visual images more distinct from each other, and more similar to the image-specific prior.  In addition, neural representations were structured in a hierarchy that remained stable across perceptual conditions, with early visual areas and DMN anchored at the two extremes.  Two large-scale cortical gradients occur along this hierarchy: first, dimensionality of the neural representational space increased along the hierarchy; second, prior’s impact on neural representations was greater in higher-order areas.  These results reveal extensive and graded influences of prior knowledge on perceptual processing across the brain.

Steven Novella, of the wonderful blog Neurologica, explains it thus:

The researchers used a standard paradigm called Mooney images, which are black and white images degraded so that they are difficult to interpret.  However, when primed with an undegraded grayscale version of the image (called disambiguation), it becomes trivially easy to interpret the Mooney image.  The effects of this priming may last from days to indefinitely. 

The researchers confirmed this priming effect, and that it is very robust.  What this means is that what the subjects saw was determined as much, if not more, by their memories (of the disambiguation image) as by their current visual stimuli.  What you remember is as or more important than what you are seeing, at least when what you are seeing is ambiguous.

So once again, "You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear" has been shown to be substantially correct.  All the more reason that eyewitness testimony, which is the most powerful evidence in a court of law, should actually be viewed with a wry eye -- because not only our memories, but what we think we're actually seeing, is as influenced by our guesses as it is by what we're viewing.

Which should give you pause the next time you're tempted to say, "But I saw it with my own eyes!"

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

This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The Skeptophilia YouTube channel is live!

Hi all,

I'm back from the writers' retreat in Arkansas, wherein I got to schmooze with my publisher and other fiction writers, and generally enjoy being around like-minded folks.  I'll be back with a new Skeptophilia post on Monday, but I wanted to do a short announcement today that we've got a new feature...

... drumroll...

The Official Skeptophilia YouTube Channel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Anthony Cramp, Fireworks - Adelaide Skyshow 2010, CC BY 2.0]

You'll get to hear me doing some musing on topics from profound to silly (most of the first ones are silly, for what it's worth), just like I do every day here at Skepto.  We'll try to have a new one up every other Thursday; for now, we've got five videos up as a starter.  If you like them -- and we very much hope you do -- leave us a thumbs-up and/or subscribe to our channel.  As with the blog, if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like me to cover, drop me an email.

Now toddle over to YouTube and check us out.  Hope they cheer up your day.  See you for real in a couple of days!

cheers,

Gordon

A slice of pi

Note to my loyal readers: This will be my last post before a two-week break so I can go to my publisher's annual writers' retreat in the Ozarks.  Please keep sending links & ideas -- I'll be right back in the saddle when I return.  Look for the next Skeptophilia post on Monday, August 6!

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Sometimes you have to admire the woo-woos' dogged determination to fashion the universe into their own bizarre version of reality.

Most of us, I'd like to think, just see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe, and don't make such a big deal out of it.  If we want to believe in a Higher Power That Guides Everything, we do, and don't spend endless hours crafting abstruse proofs of the conjecture.  We're content to have a beer, watch a hockey game, and let god have some much-needed quiet time.

There are a few people, however, who just aren't content if they're not actively beating the matter into submission.  Such a person is Marty Leeds, Wisconsin-born writer, mystic, philosopher, and the origin of dozens of highly entertaining YouTube videos.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to one of Leeds' creations, entitled, "Number Magic: Gematria."  The link was accompanied by a message stating, and I quote: "Words cannot describe the level of derp in this video."  So of course I had to watch it.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Turns out he has an obsession with the number pi.  Okay, it's a pretty cool number,  being transcendental and all, but he thinks there's... more than that.  Way more, as it turns out.

What you get when you divide the circumference of an apple by its diameter.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matman from Lublin, Apple pie Pi Day 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If you're unwilling to sacrifice an hour and a half of your precious time (and to be honest, I made it through about twenty minutes, and just skimmed the rest), and countless innocent cells in your prefrontal cortex that will die in agony, allow me to present to you the main points of Leeds' argument.

1. There's this thing called gematria that was made up a while back by some Hebrew mystics who had overactive imaginations and way too much free time.   The idea behind gematria is that each letter in the alphabet (whether Hebrew, English, or other) is assigned a number, and when you add up the numbers for a word or name, you get a number that "means something."
2. You get to decide what the numbers mean.
3. If two words add up to the same thing, they are mystically linked.  Leeds uses a form of gematria which takes the English alphabet, splits it into two lists of thirteen letters each (A-M, and N-Z), and numbers each list from 1 through 7 and then back down to 1.  So my first name, Gordon, would be 7+2+5+4+2+1 = 21.  "Sharp" is 6+6+1+5+3, which also adds up to 21.  So you can see that thus far, we have a pretty persuasive theory here.
4. Leeds then does a gematria addition for four words or phrases.  We have "man" = 3, "woman" = 9, "Christian" = 39, and "The Holy Spirit" = 61.  Note that he had to add a "the" to the last one to make it work out the way he wanted.
5. So, let's look at the first thirteen digits of pi.  He picked thirteen because we had split the alphabet into two groups of thirteen letters each, which seems like impeccable logic to me, given the obvious connection between pi and the English alphabet.  Anyhow, we have 3.141592653589. It starts with 3 and ends with 9 -- giving you "39."  So right away, we can see that there's something wonderfully Christian about pi, not to mention having a man on one end and a woman on the other.  Also, 3+9 = 12, and 3x9 = 27, and 12+27 = 39. So you get your 3 and 9 back, so "man + woman" + "man x woman" = "Christian."  Or something like that.
6. Take the middle number in the sequence (2) and the two on either side (9 and 6).  Why?   Because tridents, that's why.  Stop asking questions.
7. If you multiply 9x2x6, you get 108, which is a very holy and important number.  Myself, I just thought it was the most convenient way of getting from 107 to 109, but what do I know?  But the Hindus liked the number 108, and plus, it's the number of stitches on a baseball, so there you are.
8. Now, take the remaining digits of pi, and basically draw a menorah under them.  You then put them together in pairs, flip 'em around, and add 'em together.  I really don't want to go into all of how he does that, because my cortical neurons are already whimpering for mercy, so you'll just have to either watch the video or else just accept on faith that somehow all of the numbers and flipped numbers and all add up to 352.  Then, you add that to the 2 and 6 from the trident bit, and you get 360, which is the number of degrees in a circle.  Get it?  Circle?  Pi?  Are you blown away?  (Okay, he left out the 9. But still.)
9. If you multiply the first through eighth digits of pi, you get 6,480.  If you multiply the eighth through the thirteenth digits, you get 32,400. Subtract them, and you get 25,920, which he says is the number of years for the precession of the Earth's axis to complete one rotation.  Except that according to the Cornell University Astronomy Department's webpage on the precession of the Earth's axis, the length of the precession of the Earth is said to be "about 26,000 years" -- the imprecision being because a motion that slow is almost impossible to measure accurately.   But I think we call all agree that since we're using gematria as our jumping-off point, being off by eighty years or so is plenty accurate enough.
10. Of course, like any good performer, he saves his most amazing bit for the end, wherein we find out that the first thirteen digits of pi add up to 61, which you will recall is the number of "The Holy Spirit."  So pi "encodes" (his word) The Holy Spirit and the precession of the equinoxes.
11. Therefore god.  Q.E.D.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed our little ramble through woo-woo arithmetic. Me, I'm planning on watching some of Leeds' other videos when I have the time.  (Two especially fascinating-sounding ones are "Pizzagate, Symbolism, and Secret Societies" and "Flat Earth Implications, NASA Lies, and Gematria."  Of course he's a Flat Earther.  You're surprised by this?)  However, I think next time I won't launch into this without something to insulate my poor brain against further damage.  I'm thinking that a double scotch might do the trick.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]