Spin doctors

It's always entertaining when the woo-woos start running experiments or collecting actual data, because that moves the argument into the realm of testable science.

It happened with homeopathy (homeopathic remedies don't work), anti-vaxx (vaccines don't cause autism), and astrology (horoscopes rely on dart-thrower's bias, and when that's controlled for, show zero accuracy).  So it's kind of inadvisable to play that game and think they're going to win -- much better to stick with "I believe this because it sounds right."

This is a lesson the flat-Earthers ("Flerfs") have yet to learn, judging by a recently-released Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, in which some dedicated Flerfs spent a huge amount of money on a highly sophisticated ring laser gyroscope, determined to show that the Earth is flat and does not rotate -- and ended up proving the opposite.

Gyroscopes are a particularly good tool for this kind of study, because they have an interesting property -- they exert a force to resist changing their axis of rotation.  I remember being in high school physics and playing with a bicycle wheel gyroscope.  I spun the wheel, and sat on a lab stool -- when I tried to change the angle of the axis of rotation, it actually made the lab stool rotate so the axis remained parallel to where it was when it started.

And that was a low-tech gyroscope that wasn't even spinning very fast.  Ring laser gyroscopes use a beam of polarized light instead of a spinning wheel, and have an accuracy to within less than a hundredth of a degree shift per hour.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Misko from Bilbao but I wish it was Amsterdam or Biarritz, Simple Gyroscope, CC BY 2.0]

So it's a hard instrument to fool.  And the head Flerf, Bob Knodel, who has a YouTube channel devoted solely to proving that the Earth is flat, actually bought a ring laser gyroscope (to the tune of twenty thousand dollars), and the gyroscope showed...

... that the axis of rotation was deflecting by fifteen degrees per hour.  Precisely what you'd expect if the Earth is making one full rotation (360 degrees) in twenty-four hours.

"What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift," Knodel said.  "A 15-degree per hour drift.  Now, obviously we were taken aback by that - 'Wow, that's kind of a problem.'"

Yeah, you could say that.  But he and his friends were undeterred.

"We obviously were not willing to accept that," Knodel said, "and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth."

Yup, that's the way to approach science.  If the data from an extremely accurate instrument disagrees with your favorite hypothesis, then throw out the data.

"We don't want to blow this, you know?" Knodel said to another Flerf.  "When you've got $20,000 in this freaking gyro, if we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad?  It would be bad."

Then he added, "What I just told you was confidential."

Which explains how the entire conversation ended up on the internet.

I try to be kind, but I have to admit that when I read this, my response was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, wheeze* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I mean, really.  These people have gone to ridiculous lengths trying to support their ridiculous ideas, so I have to say when they sunk twenty grand into an instrument and it ended up proving them wrong, they deserved everything they got.

It'd be nice to think that this would be the end of the Flerfs, that they'd retreat in disarray and we'd never hear from them again.  Of course, this is almost Flerf-level wishful thinking.  Once woo-woos find out their cherished ideas are wrong, they immediately go into wild gyrations to show how the evidence is actually what's wrong.  For example, every year there are more studies to show that the anti-vaxxers are completely full of horse waste, and yet they are not only undaunted, their numbers are growing, and they dream up all sorts of convoluted reasons (mostly revolving around conspiracies by Big Pharma) to show that the data is wrong.

Same with the Flerfs, which is kind of depressing. especially since their arguments all kind of boil down to "I've looked, and it sure looks flat to me."  But I'd better wrap this up, because the Sun is getting high above the edge of the disk, so time's a wastin'. 

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

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

Heavy weather

Some days it seems like it would be a good move to get off social media altogether.

This is largely because I'm so easily pissed off.  Fortunately, at least I've learned the "don't argue with people on the internet" rule, but the "just keep scrolling and don't worry about it" rule hasn't sunk in very well yet.  I ran into a good example of this yesterday, with a conversation that showed up on my Facebook feed that left me fuming for a couple of hours afterward.  It started as follows:

This is a good brief overview that explains how and why human emissions of carbon dioxide are not causing catastrophic climate change. I have been also explaining the same points made in the article to anyone who would listen for the past 10 years.

He then included a link to an article by David Legates, professor of geography and climate science at the University of Delaware, called, "It's Not About the Climate -- It Never Was."  In it, Legates makes a variety of points, including that the climate is not sensitive to carbon dioxide concentration, that a warmer Earth will not generate more numerous or intense weather events, and that higher carbon dioxide concentrations (and a global temperature increase) will be beneficial to the human race and the global ecosystem.

To say Legates is a biased witness is a statement of mammoth proportions.  He's affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical group known for rejecting claims of anthropogenic climate change which has been accused of being a "front group for fossil fuel interests" because of its ties to Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which is directly funded by Exxon-Mobil and Chevron.  To give you a flavor of the Cornwall Alliance's philosophy, here's a direct quote from one of their publications:

The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost. Is that idea true? We believe not. We believe that idea – we'll call it "global warming alarmism" – fails the tests of theology, science, and economics.

The fact that they put theology first -- hell, that they included it at all -- should tell you all you need to know.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NOAA]

Anyhow, Skeptical Science and Climate Science Watch did a good job of taking apart Legates's claims piece by piece, and that's not what I'm here to do.  To get back to the original post -- claiming that Legates is correct and he (the original poster) has been "explaining the same points... for ten years," there were the following replies:

Courageous of you, and I say good job, T____, with posting something that flies in the face of the prevailing face of leftist ideologues -- calling anyone, for example, climate change deniers, which is a reprehensible things [sic] to accuse someone of who has a different opinion that the Neo-Puritanical leftist ideologues -- of the West.  Thousands of scientists disagree with Obama and Leftists on this subject.

The Green New Deal ...now that is pseudo science. Stop cow farts and spend 4x a countries GDP.  Outstanding how a 29 year old bartender could have that drafted and ready so quick. 

Kudos T____ for speaking up on your beliefs based in reality.  Even one of the founders of Greenpeace says ita [sic] a sham.

And so forth and so on.

One of the most maddening things about all of this is how the climate change deniers (okay, I guess that makes me reprehensible -- so be it) set up straw man claims and easily identified biased, cherry-picked statistical arguments, and all the people who would very much like us not to have to change what we're doing just go, "Yup.  That's the truth.  I knew it all along."  The thing is, there is consensus among climatologists, notwithstanding what a handful of rogues like Legates have to say.

And being a rogue is not somehow noble, or courageous, or realistic.  Sometimes when you're flying in the face of consensus, you're simply wrong.  Here, there are mountains of data supporting the connection between fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide levels, between carbon dioxide and climate, and between climate change and increasingly violent weather extremes.  I don't see any way that a truly unbiased individual could evaluate the evidence and not make those connections.

So Legates is obviously biased.  Why is a matter of conjecture, whether it's simple confirmation bias or something more sinister.  (If you still doubt this, go back to the Climate Science Watch article that I linked above, which is well worth a read -- and ends with slamming Legates for "uncritical reiteration of tired and discredited criticisms.")

But again, it's not that I didn't know there were climate change deniers.  Hell, the White House is home to one of 'em.  It's the association of science -- based on hard evidence -- with "leftist ideology," as if climate data had a political opinion, that really torques me.  Even more, labeling this kind of biased pseudoscientific diatribe as "courageous" makes me want to hurl a heavy object across the room.

So honestly, I should probably get off social media, or at least severely curtail how much time I spend on it.  Probably good advice for a lot of us, for a variety of reasons.  Right now the chief of which is that I really don't need anything to make my blood pressure higher.  I've got enough to worry about, such as whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before or after he's indicted.  The last thing I want is to add infuriating Facebook posts to the list.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

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

Hipster math

One of the guiding principles of teenagerhood is "I want to be unique, just like everyone else."

Not, mind you, that I'm criticizing efforts toward individuality.  We all have to find a way to express ourselves, be it how we dress, talk, or style our hair.  But what's always struck me as funny is how the drive to be different often pushes people toward the same solution, creating stereotypical pseudo-rebellious subcultures that are often parodied because they all on some level look and act alike.

This subject has been the focus of mathematician Jonathan Touboul, of Brandeis University, who looks at how information transfer through societies affects behavior.  And he's been studying something he calls the "hipster effect" -- that rejecting conformity simply drives people to conform to something else.  Even more interesting, he's found that these patterns of synchronization have parallels in how many other systems interact, in areas as different as neural firing patterns and reactions by investors to information about the stock market, and may well be describable by the same mathematical model.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Infrogmation of New Orleans, Redbeans15 Downtown Hipsters, CC BY-SA 2.5]

In his paper "The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same," which appeared in the online journal arXiv, he has the following to say:

In such different domains as neurosciences, spin glasses, social science, economics and finance, large ensemble of interacting individuals following (mainstream) or opposing (hipsters) to the majority are ubiquitous.  In these systems, interactions generally occur after specific delays associated to transport, transmission or integration of information.  We investigate here the impact of anti-conformism combined to delays in the emergent dynamics of large populations of mainstreams and hipsters.  To this purpose, we introduce a class of simple statistical systems of interacting agents composed of (i) mainstreams and anti-conformists in the presence of (ii) delays, possibly heterogeneous, in the transmission of information.  In this simple model, each agent can be in one of two states, and can change state in continuous time with a rate depending on the state of others in the past...  [W]hen hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will consistently make the same choice, and realizing this too late, they will switch, all together to another state where they remain alike.  Similar synchronizations arise when the impact of mainstreams on hipsters choices (and reciprocally) dominate the impact of other hipsters choices, and we show that these may emerge only when the randomness in the hipsters decisions is sufficiently large.  Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science, domains in which delays of communication and the geometry of information accessibility are prominent.

Which is kind of cool.  Although it's a little humbling to think that our choices about how to express who we are, which feel so important and deeply personal, can be emulated by a simple mathematical model that works equally well to describe how nerves fire and how investors make their stock trading decisions.

What's funniest is the outcome when Touboul tried to model a population with equal numbers of conformists and hipsters.  It resulted in a seesawing oscillation between different outcomes -- for a while the hipsters have beards and the conformists don't, but if you wait for a while, the reverse becomes true.

Of course, life is usually more complex than a bunch of binary choices.  But when this is the situation, the result is remarkably predictable.  "For example, if a majority of individuals shave their beard," Touboul said in an interview with Technology Review, "then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to a new, synchronized, switch to shaving."

Touboul wants to expand his model to include choices where there are more than two options, and see if it continues to emulate observed trends in social dynamics.  My guess is it will, although I don't begin to understand how you'd manage the mathematics involved.  As for me, I've got to look around and count the number of guys with facial hair, and decide whether I should shave off my beard.  You know how it goes.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

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

Bibbity bobbity bullshit

This weekend, I stumbled upon one of those websites that is such a distilled bottle of crazy that I just have to tell you about it.  It involves the BBC, Walt Disney, Satan, Madonna, the Illuminati, the Jews, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hapsburg dynasty, O. J. Simpson, Donny Osmond, and the Mouseketeers.

Among other things.  If I listed everything these people tried to connect, that'd be my whole post.  The site, called This Present Crisis, brings not only "wingnuttery" but "wall of text" to new heights.  So let me see if I can summarize, here:

First, let's start by saying that Walt Disney was a bad, bad man.  This is in part because his family name really shouldn't be Disney, but d'Isgny, which is what it was when the first Disney came over from Normandy in 1066 with William the Conqueror.  The name was anglicized to "Disney" and the family has been traveling under an assumed name ever since, which is evil since apparently they're the only ones who ever did this.  As evidence, we're told that Walt's cousin, Wesley Ernest Disney, was a lawyer in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, a county which is controlled by Satan.  Wesley was also a Freemason, and later lived in Tulsa, which is "a powerful city of the Illuminati hierarchy."  And I think we can all agree that being an evil Illuminati mind-control agent is the only possible explanation for someone choosing to live in both Muskogee and Tulsa.

Yes. Apparently, they is.

But back to Cousin Walt.  Walt Disney, the site says, started off bad and got worse.  He was an "occult sadistic porn king," evidently, and if that wasn't bad enough, he went on to make the movie Bambi:

The Hapsburgs of the 13th Illuminati bloodline had a sex salon in Vienna where a porn photographer named Felix Salten worked.  Felix… wrote a book Bambi which was then translated into English by the infamous communist Whittaker Chambers.  The elite were just beginning to form the roots for today’s environmental movement.  The book appealed to Disney because Disney liked animals better than people.  In the book, tame animals view humans as gods; while the wild and free animals see humans as demons…  The book begins with both free and tame animals viewing humans as rightly having dominion over them.  In the end, the animals view all humans as simply being on the same level as animals, a vicious animal only fit to be killed…

Well, I'm not sure that's exactly the message of the movie, frankly.  I will admit that I was amongst the children traumatized by the death of Bambi's mommy, but now with the wisdom of age and the experience of having collided with four deer in one six-month period, resulting in a total of $20,000 of damage to our various cars, I'm finding myself siding with the hunter.  The hunter probably would have been doing humanity a service by offing Bambi as well, and maybe Thumper, too.

But anyway. Disney somehow connects to the BBC, which was also inspired by Satan, because if you take a BBC jingle from the 1930s and play it backwards, it says, "Live in sin.  Lucifer is nice.  Lucifer exploit them."  The BBC is controlled by Freemasons, who were also influencing Disney to do more bad stuff, like putting subliminal sexual messages in movies like The Little Mermaid.

So finally things got so bad that J. Edgar Hoover got involved.  (Yes, I know that Hoover died seventeen years before The Little Mermaid was released.  Just bear with me, here.)  Hoover found out that Disney had no birth certificate, and apparently, didn't know who his parents were.  So he provided Disney with a fake birth certificate, which Disney then showed to his parents (yes, I know that one sentence ago I said that he didn't have parents.  I'm as confused as you are).  His father committed suicide and his mother lived the rest of her life as his maid.  Hoover did all of this so he could blackmail Disney.

Anyhow, Disney was in trouble after all of that, so he appealed to the Rothschild family, which is bankrolled by Jews (you knew they'd be involved) and (more) Freemasons.  The Rothschilds were the ones who helped lawyer Johnnie Cochran to win his case and free O. J. Simpson, which somehow connects to Disney.  Don't ask me how.   By this time, Disney was a multimillionaire, and had mind-control child slaves called Mouseketeers to do his every bidding.

Then Donny and Marie Osmond get involved.  The Osmonds are actually "programmed multiples," meaning that there are dozens of identical Donnies and Maries, as if one of each wasn't enough, because this is the only way that they could do two hundred shows a year without dropping dead of exhaustion.  Because their dad is a member of the Mormon Illuminati or something, although the site isn't clear on this point.

The author also ties in Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and the Mafia.  (Of course the Mafia are involved.  Being bad guys, they'd have to be.)  But by this time, the neurons in my prefrontal cortex were beginning to scream for mercy, so I'm just going to leave you to take a look at the site yourself, if you dare.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm no great fan of Disney myself. I think their movies are largely stereotypical schlock, and their "planned community" of Celebration, Florida, where everything is owned by Disney, is downright creepy.  Hating crowds and noise the way I do, if I was offered the choice of a visit to Disneyland or a colonoscopy by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.   And whenever I hear the song "It's a Small World After All" I want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.

But I'm doubtful that any of the Illuminati conspiracy stuff is real.  If it were, don't you think more Americans would be brainless zombies?  (Although considering how many people still support Donald Trump...)  Anyhow, I'm sorry, but "bibbity bobbity boo" is not some kind of coded message from the Freemasons.  Most of us have seen many Disney movies and come out none the worse for wear.  Even I sat through The Little Mermaid, under some conditions of duress, and I wasn't aware of any subtle sexual messages, although as a biologist it did bother me that the character "Flounder" was clearly not a flounder.

So this entire website strikes me as lunacy.  Entertaining, in a bizarre sort of way, but lunacy.

Except for the the thing about the Mouseketeers.  Anyone who is willing to dance around while wearing those ear-hats is clearly being controlled by an evil power of some kind.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

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

Wearable art

I've always had a fascination for body art.  I got my first tattoo about 15 years ago, a pair of Celtic dogs on my back.  In Celtic mythology, dogs are shapeshifters and protector spirits, and I thought that was cool.  Plus, from a more prosaic angle, I have two dogs.

Next was a dragon on my calf, also in a Celtic-knotwork style, in honor of my Scottish grandma, with whom I was really close.  She died in 1986 and I still miss her.  (Nota bene: my leg is usually not this hairless.  This was right after it was done, and -- for those of my readers who haven't gotten any ink -- you get a close shave before the artist starts.)

My latest one, in honor of what would have been my dad's hundredth birthday, is a snake on my arm.  My dad loved snakes, and instilled in me an appreciation for creepy-crawlies (or, in this cases, slinky-slitheries) that I still have.

Here's my dad, age 17, with a friend:

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery made by a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington State University, which resulted in a paper published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Andrew Gillreath-Brown was going through some artifacts at the university that had been boxed and shelved for over forty years, and happened upon this:

Well, Gillreath-Brown not only is an archaeologist, he also is into body art himself, with a full sleeve featuring a mastodon, a turtle-shell rattle, and a forest scene.  So he immediately recognized what it was.

It's a two-thousand-year-old tattoo instrument, made of a pair of cactus spines bound together by plant fibers, with a handle made of skunkbush wood.

This pushes back the earliest confirmed date of tattooing in western North American Native tribes by over a thousand years.  "Tattooing by prehistoric people in the Southwest is not talked about much because there has not ever been any direct evidence to substantiate it," Gillreath-Brown said, in an interview in Science Daily.  "This tattoo tool provides us information about past Southwestern culture we did not know before... [the tool] has a great significance for understanding how people managed relationships and how status may have been marked on people in the past during a time when population densities were increasing in the Southwest."

So that's just plain cool.  Gillreath-Brown's paper, co-authored with Aaron Deter-Wolf, Karen R. Adams, Valerie Lynch-Holm, Samantha Fulgham, Shannon Tushingham, William D. Lipe, and R. G. Matson, is titled "Redefining the Age of Tattooing in Western North America: A 2000 Year Old Artifact from Utah," and makes for interesting reading even if you (1) aren't an archaeologist, and (2) don't have any body art yourself.  The authors write:

How people decorate their bodies provides insight into cultural expressions of achievement, group allegiances, identity, and status.  Tattooing has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have tattooed mummies, which adds to the challenge of placing current body modification practices into a long-term global perspective.  The tattooing artifact dates to 79–130 CE during the Basketmaker II period (ca. 500 BCE – 500 CE), predating European arrival to North America by over 1400 years.  This unusual tool is the oldest Indigenous North American tattooing artifact in western North America and has implications for understanding archaeologically ephemeral body modification practices...  Events such as the Neolithic Demographic Transition—which occurs in many places around the globe—may link to an increase in body modification practices as social markers, as appears to be the case for the Basketmaker II people in the southwestern United States.

Whatever you think of tattoos, the practice has obviously been around for a very long time.  At its best, it's a form of self-expression and honoring important people and events, connecting with spiritual practices, and simply creating and wearing beautiful designs.  It connects us to our far-distant ancestors in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

All of which makes me glad I have the ink I have.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Turned to stone

Let me say up front, both for my skeptical and not-so-skeptical readers, that I'm not saying I believe the account I'm about to tell you.  I'd need way more hard evidence even to consider the possibility of whether it's true (the ECREE principle in action -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), although it definitely makes a bizarre story, and opens up the question of what possible motive the major players would have to lie.

The incident in question happened in 1993 in Russia.  Here's the abbreviated version of it, but you can read more about it on the original report or at a (quite sensationalized) account at the site UFO International Project.

A troop of soldiers were out on routine training maneuvers when "a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer" flew over.  One of the soldiers panicked and shot at it with a hand-held surface-to-air missile, and the spaceship slammed to the ground nearby.  As the soldiers approached the wreck, a gap opened in the side, and five humanoid aliens came out.

So far, not so different from a lot of accounts of close encounters of the third kind.  But here's what happened next:

It is stated in the testimonies of the two soldiers who remained alive that, after freeing themselves from the debris, the aliens came together and "merged into a single object that had a spherical shape."  That object began to buzz and hiss sharply, and then became brilliant white.  In a few seconds, the spheres [sic] grew much bigger and exploded by flaring up with an extremely bright light.  At that instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into... stone poles.  Only two soldiers who had stood in the shade and were less exposed to the luminous explosion survived.  

The remains of the "petrified soldiers" were transferred to a government lab near Moscow.  The CIA got wind of the event -- the report doesn't say how -- and called it "extremely menacing... if true."  But if you looked at the original report, you may have noticed that the only media outlet that reported on it when it happened, was...

... the Weekly World News.

Which, by the way, they call "authoritative."

Yup, the Weekly World News, that venerable purveyor of such believable stories as "Kim Kardashian Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Child."  (Okay, I made that title up, but I've seen ones that bad and worse.)  So immediately I saw that, I went into eyeroll mode.

On the other hand, don't forget what happened to Lot's wife.  (Statue by sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, 1878) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925), Hamo Thornycroft-Lot's Wife, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Equally eyeroll-worthy was the last comment in the UFO International Project website, which wondered if the Chinese terracotta army was also made of people who were petrified by aliens.  Which, even if you buy the Russian story whole-cloth, is idiotic.  The terracotta army is, unsurprisingly, made of terracotta, which is a low-fired ceramic clay.  The statues were also made from molds (which they've found examples of), in several pieces, and put together afterwards.  They were painted with colored lacquer, remnants of which are still on some of them.

None of which you'd expect if these were the remains of people flash-petrified by aliens.

Leaving me wondering why I'm even wasting my time replying to that bit.  But as a side note to whoever wrote the UIP piece; if you're making a wild claim, it does not help your cause to support it with an even wilder one.  If you say you've rid your house of evil spirits by waving around quartz crystals, your credibility is not enhanced by then claiming you'd also accomplished the same thing with a salami.

But despite all that, it's still a weird story, because the report is actually a CIA document, released as part of the government's declassification (and FOIA).  So if the Russian account is a hoax (probable), and it got reported to the CIA as true by some external source that also leaked the story to the Weekly World News (really probable), why did the CIA even give it this kind of undeserved credibility?

From what I've read, the CIA pretty much has to record every claim reported to them, reasonable or not, but it still strikes me as odd and extremely specific.  Clearly the claim didn't originate with the Weekly World News; the CIA report states that the information (and photographs, not included in the FOIA release) were directly from a KGB inquiry.

So while (as I said) I still think the great likelihood is that it's a hoax or fabrication, it's kind of peculiar one.  If there are any readers who have greater knowledge of government document policy than I have (kind of a low bar, honestly), let me know what you think in the comments.

In any case, the take-home message is, if you see a low-flying spacecraft, don't shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile unless you fancy being turned into a large rock.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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

Double whammy

Having a rather morbid fascination with things that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you, I've dealt more than once with topics like mass extinctions and asteroid collisions and supervolcanoes.  So naturally, when there was a piece of recent research on all three at the same time, I felt obliged to write a post about it.

The paper, published last week in Science, was written by a team of scientists from the University of California - Berkeley (Courtney J. Sprain, Paul R. Renne, Loÿc Vanderkluysen, Kanchan Pande, Stephen Self, and Tushar Mittal), is called "The Eruptive Tempo of Deccan Volcanism in Relation to the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary."  In it, they examine one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history -- the Deccan Traps -- which seem to have occurred right around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction, 66 million years ago.

The Western Ghats, part of the Deccan Traps lava flow [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nicholas (Nichalp), Western-Ghats-Matheran, CC BY-SA 2.5]

This certainly isn't a coincidence, and it's been thought for a while that the eruption, which occurred in what is now India and released an estimated one million cubic kilometers of lava, were at least contributory to the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  Such an unimaginably huge eruption would have burned everything in its path, converting any organic matter that got in the way into ash and carbon dioxide -- causing a spike in temperature that certainly would have put a huge strain on ecosystems to compensate.  The actual blow (literally) that marked the end of the Cretaceous Period, though, was an enormous meteorite collision, the Chicxulub Impact, near the Yucatan Peninsula on the other side of the planet.

Almost precisely on the other side, in fact.  This got Sprain et al. wondering if the two might be connected, especially since geologists still don't know what causes trap-type eruptions (there are two other trap eruptions known, the Emeishan Traps in China and the unimaginably huge Siberian Traps that are likely to be the cause of the largest mass extinction known, the Permian-Triassic Extinction).  Whatever the cause, it apparently happens without a great deal of warning, which is scarier than hell.  The crust of the Earth fissures, and phenomenal quantities of lava come pouring out, causing serious issues for anyone or anything living nearby.  But the observation that the Chicxulub Impact and the Deccan Traps are not only close to simultaneous but are almost exactly antipodal made scientists wonder if that wasn't a coincidence.

Apparently, the thought is this.  When the Chicxulub Impact occurred, it sent huge shock waves through the Earth, which propagated both through the mantle and along the crust.  When those waves had traveled all the way around (or through) the Earth, they converged on a single point, almost like a magnifying glass bringing rays of sunlight focusing on one spot.  This reinforced the waves, ringing the Earth like a bell, and the crust destabilized...

... cracking open and creating one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever.

So the whole thing becomes a double whammy, and not because of an unfortunate accident.  It seems likely that one event caused the other, and also explains why species that lived in what is now Asia were affected just as much by the extinction as ones that were near the collision itself.  Seems kind of unfair, doesn't it?  The meteorite collides with the Earth, causing massive devastation in the Western Hemisphere, and the critters in the Eastern Hemisphere only had a few minutes to gloat before a massive earthquake launched an event that did them in, too.

"Both the impact and Deccan volcanism can produce similar environmental effects, but these are occurring on vastly differing timescales," study co-author Courtney Sprain said.  "Therefore, to understand how each agent contributed to the extinction event, assessing timing is key."

There you have it.  Yet another reason why we wouldn't want the Earth to get hit by a huge asteroid, if you needed another one.  Kind of dwarfs the earthquakes and volcanoes we've had recently, doesn't it?  Also makes me realize how fragile the biosphere is, and that a sudden and unforeseen event can trigger enormous destruction -- one a bolt from the sky, the other from the deepest regions of the Earth's mantle.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

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