Fear itself

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about the horrifying suicide rate in the United States, and that overhauling mental health care needs to be a priority, last night I ran into a study showing that such debilitating conditions as anxiety and paranoia can be ameliorated significantly by using virtual reality therapy.

I can vouch for the difficulty of going through traditional therapy for depression and anxiety.  I have (at the time of this writing) been at one time on another on four different antidepressants and three different anxiolytics.  There was a merry carousel of nasty side effects, including thermonuclear-level acid reflux, a drop in libido to nearly zero, overwhelming fatigue, a loopy, disembodied sensation, and nausea.  One of the antidepressants had the effect of amplifying my anxiety to the point that I felt like I was in a mental lightning storm, and had nearly constant suicidal ideation.  (They took me off that one pronto.)  Another one worked, at least to some extent, but evidently my body habituated to it and the positive effects didn't last.

So the idea that there are other options is a real godsend to people like me, who fight mental illness every single day.  And the initial trials with virtual reality therapy show that it is at least as good as conventional therapy -- and doesn't come with side effects.

One patient in the study, a young man with paranoid schizophrenia, practiced for three months using a headset that brought him into the VR world of a coffee shop filled with people.  The patient and the researcher could adjust the controls to change the number, proximity, and friendliness of the people in the shop.  When an anxiety-producing situation is encountered, the patient is asked questions like, "What other explanation could there be for why the man in the red shirt is frowning at you?"

After the duration of the therapy, the young man's anxiety and paranoia had decreased significantly -- to the point that he was able to perform in a poetry slam in front of five hundred people.

[Image available through the Open Government License Photo: Sergeant Rupert Frere RLC/MOD]

The study, which appeared in the journal Lancet earlier this year, was a joint effort between researchers from several universities in the Netherlands.  "The key ingredient to an effective treatment for anxiety disorders is … you need to face your fears," says Stéphane Bouchard, a clinical cyberpsychologist at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada.  But instead of throwing patients out into a real world with real triggers -- social situations, spiders, heights, confined spaces, whatever -- mental health professionals (or the patients themselves) can control their exposure and dial up the intensity only when they feel like they're ready.

The reason it works is that it allows people to encounter the sources of their anxiety, and experience the emotions they elicit, in a completely safe environment.

That doesn't mean it's easy.  A VR program to ease arachnophobia caused one woman to draw her legs up onto her chair and sit like that for fifteen minutes.  "I’m not sure if anyone ripped the headset off," said Philip Lindner, a clinical psychologist at Stockholm University, "but a lot of people definitely started crying."

The technique has shown promise in treating PTSD, and there is now a program at Emory University in Atlanta to use it in treating Iraq War veterans who were left with lingering mental scars from the trauma they endured.

So I'd gladly volunteer to try this.  Given the relatively poor track record -- with me, at least -- of conventional therapy and medications, I'm certainly game to try something different.  So if VR headsets to treat anxiety become available, sign me up.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

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

Mental health priorities

What do you hear about more on the news, homicides in the United States, or suicides in the United States?

Unless you're watching drastically different news media than I do, you answered "homicide."  The media, and many people in the government, harp continuously on how dangerous our cities are, how we're all terribly vulnerable, and how you need to protect yourself.  This, of course, plays right into the narrative of groups like the NRA, whose bread and butter is convincing people they're unsafe.

Now, don't get me wrong; there are dangerous places in the United States and elsewhere.  And I'm not arguing against -- hell, I'm not even addressing -- the whole issue of gun ownership and a person's right to defend him or herself.  But the sense in this country that homicide is a huge problem and suicide is largely invisible reflects a fundamental untruth.

Because in the United States, suicide is almost three times more common than homicide.  The most recent statistics on homicide is that there are 5.3 homicides per 100,000 people.  Not only is this lower than the global average (which in 2016 was 7.3 violent deaths per 100,000 people), it has been declining steadily since 1990.

Suicide, on the other hand?  The current rate is 13.0 suicides per 100,000 people, and unlike homicide, the rate has been steadily increasing.  Between 1999 and 2014, the suicide rate in the United States went up by 24%.

It's appalling that most Americans don't know this.  A study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington, Northeastern University, and Harvard University showed that the vast majority of United States citizens rank homicide as a far higher risk than suicide.

"This research indicates that in the scope of violent death, the majority of U.S. adults don't know how people are dying," said Erin Morgan, lead author and doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.  "Knowing that the presence of a firearm increases the risk for suicide, and that firearm suicide is substantially more common than firearm homicide, may lead people to think twice about whether or not firearm ownership and their storage practices are really the safest options for them and their household...  The relative frequencies that respondents reported didn't match up with the state's data when we compared them to vital statistics.  The inconsistency between the true causes and what the public perceives to be frequent causes of death indicates a gap in knowledge."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wildengamuld, Free Depression Stock Image, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This further highlights the absurdity of our abysmal track record for mental health care.  Political careers are made over stances on crime reduction.  How many politicians even mention mental health policy as part of their platform?

The result is that even a lot of people who have health insurance have lousy coverage for mental health services.  Medications like antipsychotics and anxiolytics are expensive and often not covered, or only are partially covered.  I have a friend who has delayed getting on (much-needed) antidepressants for years -- mostly because of the difficulty of finding a qualified psychiatrist who can prescribe them, the fact that his health insurance has piss-poor mental health coverage, and the high co-pay on the medication itself.

No wonder the suicide rate is climbing.  Dealing with mental health is simply not a national priority.

It's time to turn this around.  Phone your local, state, and federal representatives.  My guess is that at least some part of the inaction is not deliberate; I'll bet that just as few of them know the statistics on suicide and homicide as the rest of the populace.

But once we know, it's time to act.  As study co-author Erin Morgan put it, "We know that this is a mixture of mass and individual communication, but what really leads people to draw the conclusions that they do?  If people think that the rate of homicide is really high because that's what is shown on the news and on fictional TV shows, then these are opportunities to start to portray a more realistic picture of what's happening."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

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

Perchance to dream

For the past three nights in a row, I've dreamed that I was being charged by a large, snarling dog.

Besides the repetitive nature of the dream -- I can't recall ever having recurring dreams before -- the weird part is that of all the animals to pick, dogs are the ones I'd be least afraid of.  I tend to be a dog magnet.  Even dogs that are kind of skittish recognize me as a kindred spirit.

To be absolutely honest, dogs generally like me better than people do.

Plus, you'd be hard-pressed to find two less threatening dogs than the ones I have.  I've never seen either one act aggressively toward anything but squirrels.  As an illustration, two nights ago, Guinness, our large, goofy American Staffordshire Terrier mix, was lying in my wife's spot when she decided to come to bed.  So I grabbed Guinness by all four paws and rotated him clockwise by 180 degrees.  His only response was to sigh heavily, and he ended up with my arm around him and his head resting on my shoulder, where he fell asleep again in a matter of minutes.

Fig. 1: What neither of my dogs looks even remotely like.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons; original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/statefarm/6993960366/]

So the content of the dream is as odd as its repetitive nature.  The first time I had the dream, I woke up at the moment the snarling dog was about to leap and sink its teeth into my throat, and shouted so loud it woke my wife up.  This, too, is something that hardly ever happens.  The second time, I dreamed I was using my left arm to ward off the dog's attack, and woke up to find I'd flung the blankets away from me.

I'm not at all sure why this is happening.  I started a new anti-anxiety med a few weeks ago, and all I can say is that if this is one of the side effects, it is not helpful.  The idea should not be to take something I'm not anxious about, and make me anxious about it.

This comes up not only because of my recent experiences, but because of a study that appeared last month in Nature called, "Peace of Mind and Anxiety in the Waking State are Related to the Affective Content of Dreams," by Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, and Antti Revonsuo of the University of Turku (Finland).  The authors write:

Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams.  However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology.  We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of well-being...  Healthy participants completed a well-being questionnaire, followed by a three-week daily dream diary and ratings of dream affect.  Multilevel analyses showed that peace of mind was related to positive dream affect, whereas symptoms of anxiety were related to negative dream affect.  Moreover, waking measures were better related to affect expressed in dream reports rather than participants’ self-ratings of dream affect.  We propose that whereas anxiety may reflect affect dysregulation in waking and dreaming, peace of mind reflects enhanced affect regulation in both states of consciousness. 

So this is a little troubling, given the screaming and thrashing about I've been doing recently.

Fig. 2: What I apparently don't look remotely like when I'm sleeping.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chad fitz, Sleeping man with beard, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Pilleriin Sikka said, "There is evidence that REM sleep may help regulate emotions but we need more studies to find out whether dreams and the emotional experiences in dreams have any important role...  Our dream emotions are not just a totally random creation of our brains and minds, but they are related to our waking ill-being and well-being.  Those who are more anxious in their waking life also experience more negative emotions in their dreams, whereas those who have more peace of mind while awake have more positive dream emotions.  This also means that the content of dream reports may reflect a person’s mental health."

I wonder what Sikka would have to say about the contents of my wife's dreams.  Whereas I (up to this week, anyhow) have tended to have vague, unsettling dreams that don't stick in my memory long, Carol dreams whole feature-length movies.  The plots are complex and impossibly convoluted, with subplots and twists and changes of scene, and she remembers them for some time upon awakening.  (In fact, my current work-in-progress, a speculative fiction novel called The Harmonic Labyrinth, got its inspiration from one of my wife's dreams.)

Her problem is that dreaming this way doesn't exactly lead to feeling rested in the morning, but I suppose it's still preferable to ripping the covers off and throwing them on the floor in an attempt to avoid getting disemboweled by a raging dog.

So the Sikka et al. study at least shows us a correlation between the emotional tone of dreams and our waking emotional state.  However, it still doesn't explain the more detailed content, which is pretty bizarre sometimes.  I've always thought that those "Your Dreams Explained" books you see sometimes, that tell you stuff like if there's an eggplant in your dream it means you are going to change jobs soon, are complete horseshit.  Not only is there no scientific support whatsoever that there's any kind of one-to-one correspondence between what appears in your dream and its meaning for your life, it makes no sense that any meaning that does exist would be consistent from person to person.

So maybe seeing an eggplant in your dream means something entirely different for you than it would for me.

Anyhow, it's all an interesting step forward in understanding the psychology of sleep.  Me, I'm just hoping for a restful night tonight, not only for myself but for my wife, who is sick and tired of my yelling and pulling the covers off at two AM.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

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

Hot dog cure

There's nothing like a good parody to point up the absurdity of a claim.

Of course, when what you're parodying is itself ridiculous, you stand the chance of having your parody sound as plausible as the original claim.  (Which is the basic idea of Poe's Law.)  And that's why it took me about ten minutes to figure out that what Douglas Bevans was doing at Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop Health Summit" in Vancouver, British Columbia, was a prank.

Bevans was there to sell Hot Dog Water -- which is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like.  It's a bottle of water with a hot dog suspended inside.  The product, he says, has innumerable health benefits.  "Our extraction experts have deemed it a miracle product and with reason.  First of all it’s keto-compatible, you can lose weight, look younger, increase vitality for sure, and last but not least, increase brain function."

It's also gluten-free, and "full of sodium and other important electrolytes."  Bevans says not only does he have drinkable hot dog water, but hot dog water lip balm and hot dog water breath spray.

The problem, of course, is that this sounds a great deal like claims Paltrow has actually made, such as "gemstone water," which is like hot dog water only replacing the hot dog with an emerald.  "Although humorous," Bevans says, "Hot Dog Water is not a prank, and people are not being tricked into drinking it.  Rather, in its absurdity, the art performance encourages critical thinking related to product marketing and the significant role it plays in our purchasing choices."

Well, it'd be nice to think that this'd be the effect, but having written here at Skeptophilia for eight years, I'm perhaps to be excused for thinking that he might be vastly overestimating the human race's capacity for critical thinking.  After all, people buy Quantum Downloadable Medicine (you pay by credit card, then sit in front of your computer as the medicine "downloads directly into your body"), homeopathic water (which is water diluted with water), and arranging your diet based on the phases of the moon (it is called, I shit you not, the "Werewolf Diet").  To me, Hot Dog Water is actually more sensible than any of those, although it pains me to admit it.

I mean, tickets to the Goop Health Summit cost $400 each, and she sold out.  I don't want to think of how much money she made from this event, and that's not even considering the fact that the whole point of the summit is that she's trying to get her products into Canadian markets.  She called it a "mind-expanding day," which apparently means that your mind turns into a gas and then drifts out of your ears.

Because in my opinion, that's the only way you could believe 90% of Paltrow's health claims.

Nevertheless, Paltrow considers the event to be a roaring success, and brags that she "goopified" Stanley Park Pavilion.

Whatever the hell that means.

So I'm not sure I should be encouraged by Bevans's Hot Dog Water stunt.  I mean, I laughed, not least because it reminded me of "hot ham water" from Arrested Development (Lindsay Bluth's one and only attempt to fix dinner -- ham soaked in hot water.  "It's watery," she bragged.  "With a smack of ham.").  But the fact that there are people who probably think Bevans is serious is a little disturbing.

I'd better go get a cup of my favorite health supplement -- "hot bean water."  With extract of the tropical plant Saccharum officinarum.

Better known as coffee with a teaspoon of sugar.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

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

The Mothman cometh

In breaking news about creatures that almost certainly don't exist, today we have: Mothman Visits Chicago.

If you've heard of Mothman, it's probably because of the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies starring Richard Gere, which had nothing to do with prophecies but did feature a large, dark creature whose only apparent similarity to a moth was having wings.  To me, it looks more like a cross between a spider monkey and a peregrine falcon, with the added feature of having glowing red eyes.

Here's an artist's conception of the Mothman:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Mothman Artist's Impression, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I'm a little mystified by the guy waving cheerily in the inset on the top right.  He looks perfectly at ease.  "Hey, y'all," he seems to be saying.  "I'm completely unconcerned by the fact that I'm standing next to a scarlet-eyed demon from the Ninth Circle of Hell."

Which brings up another point I've never understood -- the thing about glowing eyes, scarlet or otherwise.  Reflective eyes, yes; many animals, especially nocturnal ones, have something called the tapetum lucidum behind the retina, which reflects back any light that makes it past the retinal receptors, giving them a second chance to catch it.  This is why, for example, the eyes of deer glow in car headlights.  (Our eyes in a camera look red not because of a tapetum, nor because of being evil hell-beasts, but because a flash photograph in dim light bounces light through our dilated pupils and illuminates the blood vessels in the retina.)

But glowing eyes?  Where's the light coming from?  Is there a little man with a flashlight inside the Mothman's eyes, shining the beam out through the pupil?  In the usual course of things, light goes into the eye, not out of it.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the movie was based on the almost entirely unreadable book of the same name by John Keel, which wanders around aimlessly talking about aliens and UFOs and Men in Black and so on, for two hundred pages or so.  The part that is actually about the Mothman is regrettably brief, but I guess if that's all he'd published, it would have been called The Mothman Short Story.  The gist of it is that near the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 and 1967, a number of people saw something big with wings at night, and the whole thing generated a lot of hysteria, especially after the Silver Bridge, which crosses the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, collapsed on December 15, 1967.  Forty-eight people died, and the cause was later found to be a corroded I-beam, which as far as I can see has absolutely nothing to do with a giant winged creature with red eyes.

The reason this all comes up is because of a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link two days ago about how people are now seeing Mothman in Chicago.  There have been no fewer than fifty-five sightings in the past year, and eyewitnesses describe it as a "large, black, bat-like being with glowing red eyes" and "something like a Gothic gargoyle."  More disturbing, some people haven't just seen it from a distance.  Apparently it has more than once dropped onto the hoods of cars, or peered into people's windows at night.

The phenomenon has come to the attention of cryptozoologist Lon Strickler, who runs the wonderful website Phantoms and Monsters.  Strickler seems to be pretty excited by the whole thing.  "This group of sightings is historical in cryptozoology terms," he said, in an interview in Vice (linked in the first paragraph).  "For one, it's happening in an urban area for the most part and that there are so many sightings in one period."

However, Strickler says we shouldn't panic.  "These beings are less aggressive than the one in Point Pleasant, for the most part," he said.  "I believe overall there was only one being in the Point Pleasant-area that was seen during that period, while there appear to be at least three here in Chicago...  I think they're flesh and blood beings that aren’t of this world."

Which, now that I come to think of it, really isn't all that comforting.

What this once again brings home is that frustration I have with the fact that these things never happen to me.  You'd think I'd have the ideal spot -- a large, rambling house on a wooded lot with a creek, out in the middle of nowhere.  Okay, I have two dogs, which might be discouraging to monsters who are considering showing up, but allow me to reassure any Beings That Aren't Of This World who might be reading Skeptophilia that as guard dogs, these two rank only slightly above stuffed toys in terms of viciousness.  If a Mothman showed up at my window, baleful red eyes glowing in my direction, I can almost guarantee that Lena would sleep right through it.  As for Guinness, if Mothman brought along a pocketful of dog treats, or better yet, a tennis ball, Guinness would be his friend for life.

So you'd think I'd be a sitting duck.  But never, not once, have I ever seen a UFO, alien, Bigfoot, poltergeist, ghost, demon, Mothman, or Sheepsquatch.

I bet you were expecting me to say "I made the last one up."  But no, there is a Sheepsquatch, or at least some people in Virginia claim there is, although looking at the artist's rendering from eyewitness accounts, I can't think of anything it looks less like than a sheep.

So some people have all the luck.  Maybe now that I've pointed out their omission, the Mothmen et al. will be kind enough to pay me a visit.  If so, you'll be the first to hear about it.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

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

Fish tales

Today's topic comes from Cool News in Paleontology.

I was alerted to this story because I was perusing science research sites and saw a photograph that looked, to my untrained eye, like a Croc shoe with eyes and a pine cone stuck on the heel.  After saying, "What the hell is that?" I found that it was a reconstruction of a primitive vertebrate called a placoderm, or armored fish.  Lest you think my description is an exaggeration, there's the beast that caught my eye:

This led me to a paper in Science called "The Nearshore Cradle of Early Vertebrate Diversification," by Lauren Sallan, Matt Friedman, Robert S. Sansom, Charlotte M. Bird, and Ivan J. Sansom, wherein I found that this was by far not the weirdest-looking reconstructed critter in the study.  Here are a few others (all reconstructions by Nobumichi Tamura):

I particularly like the one on the lower left, which looks to me like someone took a fish and stuffed its head in a funnel.  I don't know why any of these other species became extinct, but I'm guessing the one on the lower left looked in the mirror and died of sheer embarrassment.

The research, though, is pretty damn cool.  The authors write:

Ancestral vertebrate habitats are subject to controversy and obscured by limited, often contradictory paleontological data.  We assembled fossil vertebrate occurrence and habitat datasets spanning the middle Paleozoic (480 million to 360 million years ago) and found that early vertebrate clades, both jawed and jawless, originated in restricted, shallow intertidal-subtidal environments.  Nearshore divergences gave rise to body plans with different dispersal abilities: Robust fishes shifted shoreward, whereas gracile groups moved seaward.  Fresh waters were invaded repeatedly, but movement to deeper waters was contingent upon form and short-lived until the later Devonian.  Our results contrast with the onshore-offshore trends, reef-centered diversification, and mid-shelf clustering observed for benthic invertebrates.  Nearshore origins for vertebrates may be linked to the demands of their mobility and may have influenced the structure of their early fossil record and diversification.

They also bring up an interesting conjecture; that the tougher anatomy, and especially the presence of a backbone to protect the dorsal nerve cord, might have arisen because of the rough-and-tumble nature of near-shore ecosystems -- you have to be tough or you'll get battered to pieces by the waves.

That, in fact, is why this study was such a mammoth undertaking.  "The main problem is that the fossil record [of vertebrates] is absolutely terrible for the first fifty million to one hundred million years of their existence," said paleobiologist Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with Science News.  "And when [there are] fossils, they’re in tiny pieces.  It’s hard to tell what exactly’s going on."

The researchers put together the pieces of 2,827 fossils that date to the age range they were studying, and came to the conclusion that all vertebrates trace their lineage back to shallow, near-shore environments.  So maybe I shouldn't laugh at Pine Cone Butt and the Spotted Funnel-Head.  They could be my great-great-great (etc.) grandparents.

I've always had a fascination for paleontology, and this study impresses me not only for its breadth but for what it tells us about our own ancestry.  The forces of evolution have created some amazing-looking creatures, and it's wonderful that we're getting a look into where they may have lived.  It does bear mention, however, that even with the thoroughness of the Sallan et al. study, we're still barely scratching the surface.  We only know about the species that left fossils behind -- which by some estimates is less than a hundredth of a percent of the species that were around at any given time.

So imagine what it would be like to go back there and see it for yourself, back to a time when there was not a single species of plant or animal around that exists today.  Mind-blowing, no?  As the old adage goes, the only thing that is constant is change -- and that is especially true with the natural world.

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

The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Woo-woo world update

Yesterday's political post resulted in five people calling me a "libtard snowflake" (or the equivalent), a recommendation to "shut the fuck up until I get past my brainwashing," a person who said he was going to laugh after November 6 when "the leftist assholes like [me] are going down in flames," and one email that I was a "partisan hack working for the disinformation specialists."  The result is that today, we'll consider a different set of issues, to wit:

• Do ghosts hug each other in the afterlife?
• If you were strapped for cash, could you count on an angel to give you a hundred bucks?
• What would you do if you saw a UFO that made "sci-fi noises" and made your dog "go mental?"

Apparently the answers are, respectively:

• Yes.
• Yes, and your two pals would also get a hundred bucks each.
• Report it to the local newspaper, who would treat it as fact.  Of course.

You're probably wondering about the details by now, so allow me to elaborate.  The first story comes out of Lincolnshire, England, specifically Revesby Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that dates back to 1143.  Ron Bowers was conducting a "paranormal investigation" of the Abbey because of its reputation for being haunted, and he snapped a photograph that should be encouraging to any of us who are not looking forward to the idea of an afterlife with no cuddling.  Here's the photo:

Which looks, at a stretch, like a couple hugging.  So Bowers turned the image into its negative, because there's nothing like noodling with the image if it doesn't show you what you want:

And I have to admit it's a little spooky, although as I've pointed out before, pareidolia works even on people who know what it is and realize that their sensory/perceptive systems are being fooled.

Bowers, on the other hand, is all in.  "I thought I could hear a rustling in bushes behind me before the capture of what looks like an embracing couple which led me to think it could be someone in the physical [sic]," Bowers said.  "At first, I thought it was one figure, but within a few seconds I realized it could be two – one with an arm around the other.  The arm is very prominent, and it looks like two people embracing, it looks like they are in love...  It’s nice to believe that love continues.  It’s a lovely picture and who knows maybe there is a love story there.  For me it’s a little more of a confirmation that our lives continue or that our energies can return to our favorite places.  If it is possible that we are energy, it could return to our favorite places, like homes, pubs, maybe schools and other locations.  I don’t believe I have ever had something so intimate as that picture."

The second story comes from Dreamy Draw Mountain in Arizona, where three college students from Phoenix were on a hike a few weeks ago, and had a big surprise.  The students, Allisa Miller, Jen Vickman, and Kassi Sanchez, had started out the day poorly, sleeping through their alarms, and getting up to find that it was hot out.

Which makes me wonder what they expected, in Phoenix.

"Like we didn’t want to hike," said Sanchez, whom I dearly hope isn't majoring in communication.  "Like something we had to do almost forced fun."

Despite this devastatingly tragic start, they persevered where weaker individuals would have given up, and made it up the mountain trail.  And when they got near the top, they saw...

... Jesus.

Or an angel, or something.  They don't seem all that sure, themselves.  "We just see a silhouette of this man, it looks like he has long hair and he’s in a robe," said Miller.  "He was like right there on the top of the mountain.  We were all just kinda shocked, we just kinda sat there."

So they went up toward him, but he vanished.  Near where he was, they found an envelope stuck between two rocks.  They opened it, and found a long, rambling note quoting the bible and various Christian rock singers, signed, I shit you not, "J."  And with the note were three one-hundred-dollar bills, one for each of them.

It's a miracle!  A visitation from Jesus, who evidently stopped by the Pearly Gates National Bank on his way to Arizona!

Or maybe it's a poorly-thought-out publicity stunt.  I'll let you decide.

The last story comes from Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, England, where an "unnamed eyewitness" reports seeing a UFO close-up while out walking his dog.

"The UFO was hovering about 50 foot [sic] away from me, but we could not smell fuel or anything, I was shocked that it did not hit our house," he told a reporter for the Stroud News & Journal.  "It seemed like it was trying to fly below the radar, so it could avoid being scanned - at the time my dog was going mental at it... it looked like a huge tube with intricate ship-style rivets...  When I came across it coming through the forest I thought it must be a plane or hot air balloon, but it was clearly not and it was making sci-fi-like sounds.  Before it shot off into the clouds at immense speed the engines turned bright white, I've never seen anything like it."

Although he had his cellphone with him, he was "too shocked to take a photograph" of it.  Because of course he was.

This is apparently the second UFO sighting near Stonehouse in the past two weeks, which makes me wonder why they have all the luck.  I would love to see a UFO, or a ghost or Bigfoot or whatnot, and here I sit.  And I guarantee that I wouldn't miss an opportunity to take a photograph if I did.  I'd even remember to take my cellphone camera off the "auto-blur" setting.

So that's the news from the Wide World of Woo-Woo this week.  Affectionate ghosts, cash-dispensing messiahs, and UFOs that make "sci-fi-like" sounds and are held together with rivets.  I think we can all agree that this is preferable to a lot of silly stories about politics and neuroscience and genetics and so on.  Stories about ghosts and angels and UFOs don't result in my getting death threats or being called a "fucking ultra-left-wing looser [sic]."  Which is a little off-putting.  If you know any ghosts, you might want to mention that I could use a hug.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.