Explosions in Andromeda

We've learned a lot about our own galaxy by studying our "sister galaxy," Messier-31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy.  It's situated about 2.5 million light years away, so from our perspective looks to the naked eye like little more than a smudge of light in the night sky.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

I remember when I was a kid and first grasped how far away Andromeda is.  Like many people of my generation, I was captivated by the original Star Trek.  In the episode "By Any Other Name," Kirk et al. are confronted by some aliens called Kelvans who come from the Andromeda Galaxy, and want to hijack the Enterprise to get back home.  Now, recall that because of warp drive, the intrepid space-farers of the United Federation of Planets are tooling about on a weekly basis, zipping from planet to planet, covering light-years of distance in mere hours.  So it was a bit of a shock -- to me, at least -- that at maximum warp, it would take three hundred years to reach the Andromeda Galaxy.

So far, in fact, that the Kelvans propose to reduce most of the crew to little geometric solids to save on food, lessen the likelihood of rebellion, have at least some of them still alive upon arrival, and also to reduce the number of extras the show's producers had to hire.

Of course, Kirk saves the day and they end up returning to our galaxy, kindly offering to leave the Kelvans on an uninhabited planet all their own.  Who could resist that?

In any case, I was blown away by how far away the Andromeda Galaxy is, not to mention the fact that the writers of Star Trek got that bit right given their extensive history of playing fast-and-loose with physics, despite Scotty's repeated admonition that ye canna change the laws thereof.  Everyone knows the stars in our own galaxy are far away; but this is an entirely different order of magnitude of distance.

Considering how far away we are from it, if you have a good enough telescope, it's surprising how spectacular it is.  Like our own, it's a spiral galaxy, so the disadvantage of being situated inside the thing we're trying to study has been ameliorated by the fact that there's a similar one right next door.  It's home to a trillion stars.

And there are some interesting ones.  Just last month, there was a paper in Nature about the discovery of a peculiar object called a recurrent nova that I had never heard of before.   A team of researchers found that this object, with the euphonious name M31N 2008-12a, is a white dwarf being circled by a small, dim star.  This pairing is resulting in some seriously cool behavior, which I'm glad we're observing from a safe 2.5 million light years away.

What's happening is this.  The white dwarf, which is the core of a collapsed star about the size of our Sun, has such a high gravitational pull that it's siphoning off material from its companion.  When the gas and dust approach the surface of the white dwarf, it's heated and compressed so much that the hydrogen component fuses into helium.  This releases so much energy that it causes an explosion, blowing away the top layer of the dust into space.

What's amazing is that these explosions are happening about once a year, and have been going on for a million years.  This has left a shell of dust 400 light years across.   But what's more fascinating still is that it can't go on forever.  Despite the explosions, the white dwarf is gradually gaining mass at the expense of its companion.  Once its mass gets to about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun -- the Chandrasekhar Limit -- the gravitational pull will exceed the outward pressure exerted by the atoms in the star, and it will collapse.  That collapse will trigger further fusion, of helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen, and so forth, and the energy produced by that will trigger one of the brightest events in the universe, a Type 1a Supernova.

Cool enough already, but wait till you hear the rest.  The fusion triggered by the explosion is what creates virtually all the heavier elements in the periodic table.  So a sizable fraction of the atoms in your body were formed during the first few seconds of a colossal stellar explosion.  We are, as Carl Sagan trenchantly remarked, truly made of star-stuff.

Oh, and the parts of the exploding white dwarf not blown away into space, to seed future planets and stars and life forms, are blown inward so hard that the electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei, resulting in, basically, a big ball o' neutrons.  This takes the remaining mass of the star and compresses it into a sphere about ten kilometers across, generating a substance so dense that a matchbox-sized piece of it would weigh three billion tons.

Like I said.  Good thing we're out here at a safe distance.  Sucks for the Kelvans, though.

The one disappointing thing is that the paper in Nature says that although the recurrent nova is still firing off once a year, the cataclysmic final explosion isn't going to happen for another forty thousand years, give or take a year or two.  So unfortunately, we won't be around to see it.  Unless some alien race shows up and turns us into geometric solids and sits us on a shelf, reawakening us just before the cosmic show starts.

But I suppose that's too much to hope for.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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

Congress of lunatics

I don't know if it's reassuring or distressing for me to find out that here in the United States we don't own a monopoly on anti-scientific whackjobs.

I mean, we do have a good many of 'em, there's no doubt of that.  Just counting the young-Earth creationists and the climate change deniers, we're pretty well stocked.  Add to that the people who believe in astrology, phone-in psychics, homeopathy, conspiracy theories, and the latest heinous lies uttered by our alleged commander-in-chief, and you've got a sizable fraction of Americans for whom logic and evidence are not exactly paramount.

So it's easy for me to slip into despair about my countrymen, and accounts for the mixed feelings I had upon reading about last month's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress, meant to be a gathering of the finest scientific minds across India, where attendees were told a number of eye-opening claims, to wit:

• Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity were a "huge blunder."
• Dinosaurs were created by the god Brahma.
• The first in vitro fertilizations of humans were not done in Great Britain in 1977, they were done thousands of years ago in (where else?) India.
• Isaac Newton "didn't really understand gravity" and his Universal Theory of Gravitation is flat-out wrong.
• The first mechanical flight was achieved in (where else?) India, when twenty-four different kinds of aircraft were invented by Ravana, a demon god with ten heads.

If at any point you were expecting me to say, "Okay, I made the last one up," sorry to disappoint you -- these were all genuine claims made, by alleged scientists, at the meeting.

Ravana, inventor of the airplane [Image is in the Public Domain]

And in case I haven't made the point strenuously enough; this was a meeting of, by, and for professional scientists.  To be fair, a lot of the attendees were up in arms that their gathering had been, for all intents and purposes, hijacked by a bunch of superstitious loons.  "We never dreamed that some of them would spout such irrational ideas," zoologist Ashok Saxena said, in an interview with NPR after the fiasco occurred.  "They were invited to speak based on their science credentials."

"It makes me uncomfortable when pseudoscience statements are made from a platform like the Indian Science Congress," said Kushagra Agrawal, senior lecturer in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.  "The idea of such events is to show the world India's scientific prowess, but it makes me wonder what impression those Nobel laureates and other foreign scientist dignitaries will take from our country."

Indeed.  It's hard to see how any serious scientist wouldn't be appalled at this -- and, very likely, take his contributions to the field elsewhere rather than presenting at an event that had been turned into a Three-Ring-Circus of Superstitious Nonsense.  But it remains to be seen how they could have prevented it.  Previously, there was no requirement by the oversight agency that presenting scientists submit their speeches for review prior to the event; organizers trusted that credentials would assure relevance.

Fortunately, they're not going to make that mistake again.  "We've never censored scientists before," said Indian Science Congress General Secretary Premendu Mathur.  "We expected them to motivate young minds and speak responsibly, but now, each session will have to be closely monitored.  We won't allow others to use our platform for their selfish reasons anymore."

I wish Mathur luck, and certain agree with his aims, but I would like to warn him that the one thing superstitious nutjobs don't do well is shut the hell up.  If you deny them one venue, they'll find another bigger and better one.  Anyone who has the balls to get up in front of a bunch of scientists and say that airplanes were invented by a ten-headed demon god is not going to be dissuaded by a little inconvenience like submitting his speech ahead of time.

So that's today's dip in the deep end, which to my fellow Americans should either be reassuring or not, depending on how you choose to look at it.  Of course, there's a part of me that hopes there is a flaw in the Theory of Relativity, and that the speed of light isn't the universal cosmic speed limit.  Because I really want warp drive to be a thing.  But given that these same people are claiming that dinosaurs were a special creation of the gods, I'm thinking it unlikely that if it is true, these guys will be the ones who will discover it.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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

The galactic river

I was an amateur stargazer as a kid.  I had a small refracting telescope and spent many hours out in my parents' front yard, looking at stars and planets and whatever else I could find.  My favorite astronomical object was (and, in fact, still is) the Pleiades, a star cluster and "stellar nursery" in the constellation Taurus:

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

I pondered many times whether the stars I looked at hosted planets, and those planets intelligent life -- and whether there might be a little alien boy looking back at me through his telescope.  I also sometimes liked to stand on my head (I was a bit of a strange kid, a fact that should shock no one) and I remember thinking that when I did that at night, I had the stars beneath my feet.  And if I started falling upward, I would fall forever.

Such are the musings of a whimsical ten-year-old wannabe science nerd.

I still have a sense of wonder whenever I look up into the sky.  The sheer scale of it leaves me breathless.  And with every new discovery made about the universe we live in, the awe I feel becomes that much stronger.  Take, for example, the bit of research published last week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, that many of the stars in the Southern Hemisphere of the sky are part of a stellar cluster that is in the process of being torn apart by tidal forces from the Milky Way.

The paper is entitled, "Extended Stellar Systems in the Solar Neighborhood: Discovery of a Nearby 120° Stellar Stream in Gaia DR2," by Stefan Meingast and Verena Fürnkranz of the University of Vienna and João Alves of Harvard University, and describes a startling finding -- an estimated 4,000 of the stars visible from southern latitudes are part of a "river of stars" produced when what was a compact cluster is stretched out into a long stellar stream.

These things aren't common, so to find one only (only!) 326 light years away is pretty phenomenal.  "Identifying nearby disc streams is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack," Alves said in an interview with Science Alert.  "Astronomers have been looking at, and through, this new stream for a long time, as it covers most of the night sky, but only now realise it is there, and it is huge, and shockingly close to the Sun.  Finding things close to home is very useful, it means they are not too faint nor too blurred for further detailed exploration, as astronomers dream."

The southern stellar stream -- stars that are part of it are highlighted in red [Image from Gaia DR2 Skymap]

The researchers think that the stars in the stream (and therefore the cluster in which they originated) is about a billion years old, meaning it's had time for about four complete revolutions around the galactic center.  This is time enough for tidal forces exerted by the Milky Way to stretch the cluster out from its original shape -- which was possibly something like the Pleaides -- into a streamer going nearly halfway around the night sky.

I wish I could see those stars, but none of them are visible from my perspective here in the frozen North.  I know they don't look any different from the stars I see at night, but still, the idea that I'd be looking at a stellar river that came from a billion-year-old cluster is pretty awe-inspiring.  But since I don't have any trips to the Southern Hemisphere planned, I'll just have to stick with the ones in my own neighborhood, which are wonderful enough.

Maybe they'll even inspire me to stand on my head.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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

The power of phonemes

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication.

"Symbolic" because spoken sounds or written character strings stand for concepts, actions, or objects; "arbitrary" because those sounds or characters have no logical connection to what they represent.  The word "dog" is no more inherently doggy than the French word (chien) or Swahili word (mbwa).  The exceptions, of course, are onomatopoeic words like "bang," "pop," "splat," and so on.

That's the simple version, anyhow.  Reality is always a lot messier.  There are words that are sort-of-onomatopoeic; "scream" sounds a lot screamier than "yell" does, even though they mean approximately the same thing.  And it's the intersection between sound and meaning that is the subject of the research of cognitive psychologist Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University.

In an article in The Conversation, Glenberg provides some interesting evidence that even in ordinary words, the sound/meaning correspondence may not be as arbitrary as it seems at first.  It's been known for a while that hearing spoken language elicits response from the parts of the brain that would be activated if what was heard was reality; in Glenberg's example, hearing the sentence "The lovers held hands as they walked along the moonlit tropical beach" causes a response not only in the emotional centers of the brain, but in the visual centers and (most strikingly) in the part of the motor center that coordinates walking.  When hearing language, then, our brains on some level become what we hear.

Glenberg wondered if it might work the other way -- if altering the sensorimotor systems might affect how we interpret language.  Turns out it does.  Working with David Havas, Karol Gutowski, Mark Lucarelli, and Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Glenberg showed that individuals who had received Botox injections into their foreheads (which temporarily paralyzes the muscles used in frowning) were less able to perceive the emotional content of written language that would have ordinarily elicited a frown of anger.

Then, there's the kiki-booba experiment, done all the way back in 1929 by Wolfgang Köhler, which showed that at least in some cases, the sound/meaning correspondence isn't arbitrary at all.  Speakers of a variety of languages were shown the following diagram:

They're told that in a certain obscure language, one of these shapes is called "kiki" and the other is called "booba," and then are asked to guess which is which.  Just about everyone -- regardless of the language they speak -- thinks the left-hand one is "kiki" and the right-hand one is "booba."  The "sharpness" of "kiki" seems to fit more naturally with a spiky shape, and the "smoothness" of "booba" with a rounded shape, to just about everyone.

So Glenberg decided to go a step further.  Working with Michael McBeath and Christine S. P. Yu, Glenberg gave native English speakers a list of ninety word pairs where the only difference was that one had the phoneme /i/ and the other the phoneme /ʌ/, such as gleam/glum, seek/suck, seen/sun, and so on.  They were then asked which of each pair they thought was more positive.  Participants picked the /i/ word 2/3 of the time -- far more than you'd expect if the relationship between sound and meaning was truly arbitrary.

"We propose that this relation arose because saying 'eee' activates the same muscles and neural systems as used when smiling – or saying 'cheese!'" Glenberg writes.  "In fact, mechanically inducing a smile – as by holding a pencil in your teeth without using your lips – lightens your mood.  Our new research shows that saying words that use the smile muscles can have a similar effect.

"We tested this idea by having people chew gum while judging the words.  Chewing gum blocks the systematic activation of the smile muscles.  Sure enough, while chewing gum, the judged difference between the 'eee' and 'uh' words was only half as strong."

Glenberg then speculates about the effect on our outlook when we hear hateful speech -- if the constant barrage of fear-talk we're currently hearing from politicians actually changes the way we think whether or not we believe what we're hearing.  "The language that you hear gives you a vocabulary for discussing the world, and that vocabulary, by producing simulations, gives you habits of mind," he writes.  "Just as reading a scary book can make you afraid to go in the ocean because you simulate (exceedingly rare) shark attacks, encountering language about other groups of people (and their exceedingly rare criminal behavior) can lead to a skewed view of reality...  Because simulation creates a sense of being in a situation, it motivates the same actions as the situation itself.  Simulating fear and anger literally makes you fearful and angry and promotes aggression.  Simulating compassion and empathy literally makes you act kindly.  We all have the obligation to think critically and to speak words that become humane actions."

To which I can only say: amen.  I've been actively trying to stay away from social media lately, especially Twitter -- considering the current governmental shitstorm in the United States, Twitter has become a non-stop parade of vitriol from both sides.  I know it's toxic to my own mood.  It's hard to break the addiction, though.  I keep checking back, hoping that there'll be some positive development, which (thus far) there hasn't been.  The result is that the ugliness saps my energy, makes everything around me look gray and hopeless.

All of it brings home a quote by Ken Keyes, which seems like a good place to end: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."  This seems to be exactly true -- all the way down to the words we choose to speak.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

The voice of an angel

New from the "It's Not A Sin When We Do It" department, we have: Christian Charismatics using a spin-off of the Ouija board to contact angels.

I was sent this story by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and my first thought was, "This can't be true."  Sadly, it is.  The same people who go on and on about how evil Ouija boards are and how you're risking your eternal soul even being in the same room with one are now saying that their Ouija boards are just fine and dandy.

The "Angel Board" is available from Amazon at the low-low-low price of $28 (plus shipping and handling).  In the product description, we're told that we can "ask any question we want, and the Angel Board will answer."  If you don't like that particular one, it turns out there are dozens of different makes and models, some costing hundreds of dollars.  Because we can't just have one company capitalizing on people's gullibility.

Interestingly, if not surprisingly, the reviews have been uniformly good.  One five-star review says:

I have been on a path of spiritual enlightenment for 1 year now.  I have two other friends who have shared this path with me. We share books, experiences, thoughts and feelings, but when one of us (not me) bought this book and “game” board to communicate with our higher-level guides or “guardian angels,” it became a turning point in my journey.  I didn’t think I was “advanced enough” or “spiritual enough” to make this thing work.  I learned, in about 2 minutes, that doubting myself was doubting God and his angels! In one evening, I met my higher guide, felt unconditional love, and knew I wasn’t alone and never had been. I was convinced, beyond all reason, of the presence of my angel.  To this date, I call him “J” as we haven’t yet tuned our energies to really work out the spelling of the name…  I asked him if “J” would be okay, and he said, “yes.”  He has answered to “J” ever since!  One evening, before I was able to acquire an “angel board” of my own,  I tried an Ouija Board.  It took several attempts before J was able to answer me, but when he did, I asked if he preferred the angel board and he responded “yes.”  We had a very difficult, short conversation that night.  The angel board is a MUST for all those who seek a closer relationship with their guardian angel, and who have not had much practice in meditation and raising their energies to a compatible level with the light bodies waiting to guide us!

It's to be hoped that when they "tune their energies" and she finds out "J's" actual name, it's not a rude shock.  It'd kind of suck if she thought she was talking to the Archangel Jophiel and it turned out she was having a conversation with, say, Jar-Jar Binks.

It bears mention, however, that not everyone is so sanguine about the Angel Board.  At the site Women of Grace, we're given the following warning:

Angel boards are just as dangerous as Ouija boards, perhaps more so because they haves [sic] the same purpose as a Ouija board – contacting “spirits” – only they pretend to be summoning guardian angels to make it seem less dangerous...  This is so dangerous on so many levels.  When a person evokes spirits of the dead, he or she is never in control because they are dealing with preternatural forces.  These are powerful beings who are possessed of super-human intelligence, strength and cunning.  Only the most naïve would think that they can control summoned spirits merely by “politely” asking them to come or go...  Needless to say, angel boards should be strictly avoided.

Over at Our Spiritual Quest, "ex medium and professional astrologer" Marcia Montenegro agrees:

Any attempt to contact or summon an angel will result in contact only with a fallen angel.  Spiritism is strongly forbidden and denounced by God and angels are spirit creatures. 

There is no example anywhere in the Bible of anyone contacting an angel.  The angels who brought messages or did other things for people in the Bible were sent at God’s command.  They were never summoned by man. 

Asking questions using this Board is the same as using a Ouija Board.  In both cases, only fallen angels, disguised as good angels, as guardian angels, or as the dead, will respond.

I never realized that borrowing from the spiritualists was such a big thing among the hyper-religious, but apparently it is.   There's even a "Christian Tarot deck," available at (surprise!) Amazon, which says that the practice if done right is "biblically consonant."  As you might imagine, this got quite a reaction, both from the people who think Tarot cards are the instrument of the devil and those who think divination is a divine gift.

Weirder still, sometimes those are the same people.  Kris Vallotton, pastor of the Bethel Church and self-styled "spiritual leader," heard people said that he and his church members were using Christian Tarot cards developed by a group called "Christalignment," and responded in no uncertain terms:

This is insane... whoever is doing this needs to repent and repent the craziness in the name of "reaching people for Christ..."  There are people who listen to our teaching and create strange and/or anti-biblical applications in our name...  [W]e need wisdom as we move into the cesspool we call the world.  Stop the craziness!

Shortly afterwards, Vallotton responded to his response in no uncertain terms:

There has been some recent concern about the ministry of Christalignment and their supposed use of “Christian tarot cards” in ministering to people at New Age festivals.  While the leaders of this ministry (Ken and Jenny Hodge) are connected with several members of our community (including being the parents to our much-loved brother, evangelist Ben Fitzgerald), Christalignment is not formally affiliated with Bethel.  We do, however, have a value for what they are seeking to accomplish.

When his followers raised hell about his apparent chumminess with occultists, Vallotton responded to the response to his response in no uncertain terms:

Let’s be clear: I was speaking against Tarot cards and their use, which I am still against.  I was addressing people who were accusing Bethel taking part in this practice.  We don’t and never have been been apart [sic] of this.  So that’s still true!  The people who were named in the article, were never named in the people’s accusations of us (that I knew of at the time) nor did I name anyone in my posts.  The article turned out to be fake news against great people who love God, don’t use Tarot cards and lead 1000s of people who do, to Christ.

So there you have it.  He's unequivocally for it except in the sense that he's unequivocally against it.

But he did get some support from one of his followers who said she thought there was nothing wrong even if these were Tarot cards, because, after all, "'Tarot' is "Torah' spelled backwards."

Predictably, I read all this with an expression like this:

My general impression is that the whole lot of it -- Tarot cards, Ouija boards, angelology, and the entire Charismatic movement -- is a lot of nonsense.  So arguing about whether a silly board game or some funny pictures printed on cheap card stock are going to put you in touch with an angel or with the Prince of Darkness is a little like arguing over whether "C-A-T" spells "dog" or "horse."

Anyhow, thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  I suppose it's a good thing that this is what the hyper-Christians are currently spending their time discussing.  It's less time they'll have to spend trying to shoehorn young-Earth creationism into public school science curricula.  If that's my other option, I'll take sacred Ouija boards any day.

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

You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music. I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

The end of the world as we know it

Seems like it's been a while since the world ended, you know?

For a while, it seemed like the world was ending every couple of weeks or so.  But since Harold Camping died, apocalyptic prophecies have been a little thin.  So I'm glad to announce that once again, the world is ending, this time on December 28, 2019.

At least it's after Christmas.  I kind of like Christmas.

What's funniest about all of this is that there have been 89 serious prophecies of the End of Everything in the last hundred years, twelve of which came from the Jehovah's Witnesses.  That's not even counting all of the ones before that, when every religious sect in the world periodically threw a "Countdown to the Apocalypse" party.  And I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is still here, kind of loping along, without the appearance of Scarlet Whores of Babylon or Apocalyptic Horsepersons or Dragons with Seven Heads and Ten Crowns.

Which brings up the question of why a dragon would have ten crowns if it only has seven heads.  Do three of its heads get two crowns each?  If so, does he just kind of stack them up?  It seems like the sensible thing would be to have an equal number of heads and crowns, but maybe I'm just not thinking enough like a dragon.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, this latest dire prediction comes from David Montaigne, whom, you may remember, has predicted the end before.  In fact, he said that the world would end in 2013 (since the December 2012 Mayan Apocalypse didn't happen), and when we got to January 1, 2014 with nothing untoward happening, he revised that to 2016.

Both times, you might want to know, were supposed to be caused by Barack Obama.

Since a flat 0% success rate is not nearly enough to discourage these people, Montaigne is at it again, this time aiming for the end of December of this year.  Apparently the cause this time is an astronomical alignment which will cause massive earthquakes and volcanoes.  Here's what he has to say about it:

On December 21, 2019, survivors will experience the first day of a pole shift – when the entire surface of the planet will shift out of position and move over the more fluid layers beneath the crust.  Over the next few days this will cause earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanic activity which will almost completely destroy what is left of our civilisation.  There is a mountain of evidence in historical, geological, and biological records showing such pole shifts have happened before.  Even the Bible describes them repeatedly.  I think that we will experience another pole shift for the week following December 21, 2019, getting worse each day until the natural disasters culminate on December 28 – Judgment Day.

Well, first of all, the "pole shift" he's apparently referring to is the flipping of the magnetic poles, and has nothing whatsoever to do with movements of the crust or (worse) the axis of the Earth.  Now, there's no doubt that this will wreak havoc on navigational systems; in fact, recently the North Magnetic Pole has been wandering around quite a lot, moving at a rate of 55 kilometers a year.  (If you want to see a map of the positions of the North and South Geomagnetic Poles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a great one.)

None of this has a thing to do with earthquakes and volcanoes, however.  And it's unlikely that the Bible has anything to say about pole reversals one way or another, since the last one occurred 780,000 years ago, and according to people of Montaigne's stripe the Earth is only 6,000-odd years old.

So I'm perhaps to be excused if I'm not all that alarmed by this.  Yeah, if the poles flip it'll take a while for GPS and other systems to compensate, and I'll probably have to accustom myself to being lost even more than usual.  But other than that, I suspect that (1) Montaigne has no idea when the reversal is actually going to take place, because basically, neither do the scientists, and (2) he doesn't have the first clue what pole reversal actually means, and (3) we'll all make it to December 29 un-judged and still moseying on.  So if you were counting on being Raptured Up To Heaven and not having to work in 2020, you might want to reconsider your options.

Oh, and after Montaigne made his announcement, he wrote a wonderful post on his blog called "Are My Books Being Discredited Because I'm Actually Onto Something Important?"  Which requires us to invoke Betteridge's Law, that "any article with a headline in the form of a question can be summed up with the answer 'No.'"

There's a part of me that's kind of disappointed by this.  Some Trumpets and Seals and Bowls and Dens of Iniquity would kind of spice things up around here.  I live in rural upstate New York, which is -- and I say this with great affection -- kind of boring at times.  Especially in the middle of winter, when we're usually calf-deep in snow.  So if the Antichrist showed up, at least it would break the monotony.

Which probably means it won't happen.  Disappointing, that'll be.  But there's the consolation, global-disaster-wise, that we'll still be in the Donald Trump presidency (provided he's not impeached or otherwise run out of town before then), and they seem to be doing a good enough job of setting us up for Armageddon as-is.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.