Beneath the mask

All my life I've had a fascination for masks and tattoos.

I think the reason is that both of them simultaneously adorn and hide the body.  They're both revealing and concealing.  You can use them to express yourself -- but at the same time, they cover up some part of you, make it secret, inaccessible.

I've collected masks for years, and whenever I travel, I try to bring home a new one.  The result is that a number of the walls in our house are festooned with masks of various origins -- Ecuador, Iceland, Spain, Belize, Alaska, Thailand...  My oldest one is from Côte d'Ivoire, made in around 1880, that my parents got me for my 30th birthday.  It's pretty unusual, not only for its age, but its design -- from the front, it's a human face, and from the side, it's a lizard.

Lately I've taken advantage of the recent purchase of a kiln by making masks out of clay.  We've only had the kiln for a couple of months, so I have a lot in process, but (thus far) only two finished.

Broken Face, March 2019, white stoneware with copper glaze

This all comes up because of the recent discovery of ceremonial masks in England that are eleven thousand years old.  So the human fascination with masks goes back a ways.  Discovered at the Star Carr Mesolithic Site, eight kilometers south of Scarborough in North Yorkshire, the masks -- thirty-three of them in all -- are made from red deer skulls with drilled eyeholes.  Here's one of them:

"It’s here that archaeologists have found the remains of the oldest house in Britain, exotic jewelry and mysterious headdresses," says exhibition curator Dr. Jody Joy.  "This was a time before farming, before pottery, before metalworking – but the people who made their homes there returned to the same place for hundreds of years."

The exact use of the masks is, of course, lost in the shadows of prehistory.  The guess is that based upon cultures that still make such artifacts, they're ceremonial in nature, probably used by priests to represent gods or tutelary animal spirits, but there's no way to confirm or refute that.

One wall of my office

What's certain is that they're haunting and evocative.  Having any relics of humanity from eleven millennia ago is remarkable; finding ones that were worn, and were evidently a significant part of the culture at the time, is nothing short of amazing.  It leaves me wondering what drive humans have to make such objects, to create adornments that in some ways hide what the wearer is in favor of an alternate identity.  Wherever it comes from -- the Star Carr discoveries show that we've been doing this for a very, very long time.

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

As will be obvious to any long-time readers of Skeptophilia, I have a positive fascination with things that are big and scary and can kill you.

It's why I tell my students, in complete seriousness, if I hadn't become a teacher I'd have been a tornado chaser.  There's something awe-inspiring about the sheer magnitude of destruction they're capable of.  Likewise earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires...

But as sheer destructive power goes, there's nothing like the ones that are produced off-Earth.  These are the subject of Phil Plait's brilliant, funny, and highly entertaining Death From the Skies.  Plait is best known for his wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, which simultaneously skewers pseudoscience and teaches us about all sorts of fascinating stellar phenomena.  Here, he gives us the scoop on all the dangerous ones -- supernovas, asteroid collisions, gamma-ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, black holes, you name it.  So if you have a morbid fascination with all the ways the universe is trying to kill you, presented in such a way that you'll be laughing as much as shivering, check out Plait's book.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Birdwalking through life

I was once asked in an interview if I could describe my life in one sentence.  What I came up with was, "Viewed from above, my life would look like a pinball game."

My path through life has been governed largely by u-turns, unexpected outcomes, and sheer chaos.  I got a bachelor's degree in physics, then changed gears and went to graduate school in oceanography, but didn't complete my M.S. before deciding that research science just wasn't for me.  I decided on teaching, got my teaching license -- and ended up teaching biology, a subject that I have neither a bachelor's nor a master's degree in.  When I moved to New York, I learned that to keep my license I had to get a master's degree, so I did... in linguistics, of all things.  Even my literal, physical path was a long series of meanders.  I'm a military brat, so in my first eight years I lived in four different states -- Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and (finally) Louisiana, where my family originates.  From there I went to Washington state, and then to upstate New York, where I moved in 1992 knowing absolutely no one, arriving three days before school started.

At least since then, I've pretty much stayed put.

Even the good things have been random and unexpected.  My fiction writing career was launched when a dear friend (the brilliant author K. D. McCrite), who was in an online writers' group with me, steered me in the direction of Oghma Creative Media, saying she'd talked to the company owner about me and I needed to get the manuscript for my novel Kill Switch to him ASAP.  I did... and three weeks later had a contract in hand, feeling elated and a little bit like someone had walloped me upside the head with a sandbag.

I've often wondered a couple of things about all this.  First, are other people's lives this convoluted?  I've always felt like everyone else has a much more straightforward pathway through life, instead of being yanked around in unexpected directions at every turn, but maybe that's just my faulty perception.  Second, how has this lifelong birdwalk affected my personality, how I see the world?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, abdallahh, Défilé du Mardis Gras, Montréal Bird Walk, CC BY 2.0]

I ran into a paper that came out in the journal Clinical Psychological Science that considers this latter question just a couple of days ago.  Called, "Depression and Derailment: A Cyclical Model of Mental Illness and Perceived Identity Change," by Kaylin Ratner, Jane Mendle, Anthony Burrow, and Felix Thoemmes, of Cornell University, the researchers found this kind of path, with its random twists and turns, shows a rather peculiar set of correlations with depression.  The authors write:

We investigated reciprocity between depressive symptoms and a novel construct called derailment, which indexes perceived changes in identity and self-direction.  People who are “derailed” have trouble reconciling how their life course has unfolded over time and, as a result, do not easily identify with their former self.  College students (N = 939) participated in a preregistered, four-wave longitudinal study over one academic year.  Depression positively predicted subsequent derailment across all components of the model, suggesting that perceived disruptions in life course may occur in response to elevated depressive symptoms.  Contrary to predictions, derailment negatively predicted later depression across most waves, indicating that felt changes in identity and self-direction could buffer against downstream mood deteriorations.  Although our findings did not support reciprocity, prospective evidence that perceived instability of identity and self-direction relate to an increase in depressive symptoms positions derailment as a new and potentially important facet of the depressive phenotype.

So put more simply, depressives are more likely to experience derailment, but people in general who get derailed have no higher overall likelihood of developing depression.

What's interesting about this in my case is that even upon reflection, I don't feel like I was derailed because I was depressed.  Most of the derailment I've experienced occurred for one of two reasons -- chance and coincidence (such as my fortuitous friendship with K. D. that led to my getting a book contract), or a sudden realization that I wasn't happy with the path I was on (such as my switch from research science into teaching).  Depression has had a big effect on my life, but in my experience, it has far more often induced me to stay on the same trajectory despite my being unhappy -- it's led to inertia, resignation, a feeling like "it doesn't matter if I switch gears, nothing's going to get better anyhow."

Maybe that's why the researchers found that derailment preceded a decrease in depressive symptoms -- in some cases, changing pathways is a good thing, requiring making a proactive choice not to settle for the status quo. 

Still, the whole thing is an interesting new way to look at depression.  "Although derailment is a novel construct and one that is still in the process of being mapped," the authors write, "researchers and practitioners would be keen to take note of derailment being a feature of depression’s landscape and continue to observe how such perceived changes in identity and self-direction could take shape and act within clinical presentations."

In any case, I kind of hope my life has settled down.  I'm glad that my pathway, however tortuous it was, has led me to where I am, because I'm pretty happy with my current situation.  So I'm really not keen on future u-turns.  I'm getting too old for that kind of nonsense.

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

As will be obvious to any long-time readers of Skeptophilia, I have a positive fascination with things that are big and scary and can kill you.

It's why I tell my students, in complete seriousness, if I hadn't become a teacher I'd have been a tornado chaser.  There's something awe-inspiring about the sheer magnitude of destruction they're capable of.  Likewise earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires...

But as sheer destructive power goes, there's nothing like the ones that are produced off-Earth.  These are the subject of Phil Plait's brilliant, funny, and highly entertaining Death From the Skies.  Plait is best known for his wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, which simultaneously skewers pseudoscience and teaches us about all sorts of fascinating stellar phenomena.  Here, he gives us the scoop on all the dangerous ones -- supernovas, asteroid collisions, gamma-ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, black holes, you name it.  So if you have a morbid fascination with all the ways the universe is trying to kill you, presented in such a way that you'll be laughing as much as shivering, check out Plait's book.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hybrids, DNA, and the glow cats from hell

One of the most powerful pieces of evidence of our common ancestry with every other life form on Earth is that we all read the genetic code the same way.  The RNA codon chart, the work of such giants in the field of genetics as Marshall Nirenberg, Francis Crick, and James Watson, works equally well for every species from bacterium to petunia to wolf spider to human.  It's the basis of genetic engineering; you can take an embryo of a cat, and insert a gene from a jellyfish that in the jellyfish produces a phosphorescent protein, and with luck and skill you will end up with...

... The GlowCat from Hell.

His name is "Mr. Green Genes."  No, I am not making this up.

The cats' genetic decoding mechanisms read the DNA in exactly the same way as the jellyfish did, and therefore assemble the glow-in-the-dark protein in precisely the same way.  Put simply, every organism on Earth speaks the same genetic language.

It's why, as I was discussing with some students just last week, Mr. Spock is vastly improbable.  That a DNA-based life form could arise on another planet is entirely plausible; the building blocks of DNA, called nucleotides, are apparently rather easy to produce abiotically.  But the likelihood that the decoding protocol would have evolved precisely the same way on Vulcan as it did on Earth, and therefore result in two species that can interbreed, is about as close to impossible as anything I can think of.   So however tantalizing a plot element it was to have the tortured, half-emotional and half-stoic First Officer struggling to control his human side with logic, it's much more likely to be a simple biological impossibility.

If the extraterrestrials even turn out to be humanoid, and have the right... um... equipment to engage in some hot alien/human bow-chicka-bow-wow in the first place.

Interestingly enough, given the morning's rather odd topic of conversation, that yesterday afternoon I ran into a website that claims that not only are human and alien DNA compatible, but that we are hybrids already.  Well, at least some of us are. F rankly, it's a little hard to tell what exactly the writer is claiming:

Civilizations from parallel realities and parallel dimensions similar to our own reality have been manipulating human DNA from the beginning of our recorded history and it is highly likely that all of this activity over the decades is the visually elusive air traffic of beings involved in one singularly focused mission involving humans.  This genetic program is a part of our human history, it is here with you and I now and will continue flowing down line into humanities future.  It is time to accept the fact that we are hybridized humanoid beings with alien DNA.

The problem is, human DNA is pretty much like the DNA of any other terrestrial species, as I mentioned earlier.  There's nothing alien about it.  But this doesn't stop the owner of the website, The Hybrids Project, from claiming that we're somehow... different.  And getting more different all the time:

Hybridization of a conscious humanoid appears to be quite complex.  Evolution is not ruled out, but there is a point at which highly advanced humanoids begin to upgrade other humanoids.  The benefits of this process would, at its simplest, be the perpetuation of life, intelligence and consciousness.  This is a logical expectation within an infinite multiverse and likely a process that spans countless worlds and vast expanses of time as we know it.  Earth is but a part of the process and not the process itself.  We will come to realize that we are part of a larger galactic family and the relatives are coming to introduce themselves.

I have to admit that we certainly could use an upgrade, given some of the behavior we like to engage in.  But the kind of thing that this website goes on to describe isn't, as far as I can tell, much of an improvement.  The alien species he describes are all a little... sketchy.  We have the Tall Grays and the Short Grays, who differ only in size and otherwise are your typical bald, skinny gray aliens with enormous black eyes.  Then there are the Tall Whites, which are bald, skinny white aliens with enormous blue eyes.  None of these, frankly, are my type.  I'm more attracted to plain old humans, thanks.

At least a bit more appealing are the Tall Blonds, the male version of which looks a little like Orlando Bloom.  But then, finally, we have the Mantid Beings, which are just horrifying.  The idea of a human/mantid hybrid would imply that there was some way for a human to have sex with what amounts to a giant grasshopper, a mental image which I really didn't need to have bouncing around in my skull.  (And about my decision to pass it along to you: "You're welcome.")

By the way, if you're curious to see what any of these things look like, I encourage you to peruse the website, which is chock-full of artists' depictions and is really highly entertaining.

Also on the website are all sorts of descriptions of abduction experiences, in which Earthlings were captured and brought on board ship and examined, probed, and worse by various members of these alien species.  The hybrid children thus produced, the website tells us, "are quite different and far more advanced than you and I and thus are currently living off world out of harm's way."  Which is pretty convenient. A ll of the kids I see on a day-to-day basis seem like regular people to me.  None of them have gray skin or black eyes or look like Orlando Bloom or a giant praying mantis.

Fortunately.

So, anyway.  As much as I love the idea of extraterrestrial life, the tales of abduction and hybridization and so on seem to me to be not only delusional, but biological impossibilities.  Much as some people don't like the idea,  Homo sapiens forms nothing more than a tiny little blip in a continuum with other terrestrial life forms -- any interesting features we have, like our (relatively) large brains, are perfectly well explained by the evolution and genetics we already understand.

Which, in some ways, is too bad.  Mr. Spock was kind of cool.  And if I'm wrong, let me just mention to any alien life forms who might be looking in my direction; I'm already spoken for.

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

As will be obvious to any long-time readers of Skeptophilia, I have a positive fascination with things that are big and scary and can kill you.

It's why I tell my students, in complete seriousness, if I hadn't become a teacher I'd have been a tornado chaser.  There's something awe-inspiring about the sheer magnitude of destruction they're capable of.  Likewise earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires...

But as sheer destructive power goes, there's nothing like the ones that are produced off-Earth.  These are the subject of Phil Plait's brilliant, funny, and highly entertaining Death From the Skies.  Plait is best known for his wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, which simultaneously skewers pseudoscience and teaches us about all sorts of fascinating stellar phenomena.  Here, he gives us the scoop on all the dangerous ones -- supernovas, asteroid collisions, gamma-ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, black holes, you name it.  So if you have a morbid fascination with all the ways the universe is trying to kill you, presented in such a way that you'll be laughing as much as shivering, check out Plait's book.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Different kinds of impossible

Many of us engage in magical thinking -- attributing causal relationships between actions and events that are simply (often accidentally) correlated.  Superstitions are magical thinking; as nice as it would be if you could influence the win/loss ratio of your favorite team by wearing a particular shirt, the universe just isn't put together that way.

Where it gets interesting is that there are different degrees of magical thinking.  A clever piece of research appeared in the online journal PLoS-One last week, carried out by psychologists John McCoy of the University of Pennsylvania and Tomer Ullman of Harvard, which illustrates that even those of us who engage in magical thinking seem to be intuitively aware of how impossible different false causations are.

So we can, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe in six impossible things before breakfast.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The paper, entitled "Judgments of Effort for Magical Violations of Intuitive Physics," asks test subjects to perform a simple task.  First, imagine a world where magic is real, where conjuring a spell could make things happen that are impossible in our world.  Then, they were asked to judge how difficult those spells would be.  What the researchers found is that the bigger the violation of physics required for the spell to work, the greater the effort by the conjurer must be.  The authors write:

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them.  Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world.  In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations.  People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics.  For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground.  A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants. A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2.  These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

After all, to levitate a frog using ordinary physics has already been achieved.  Frogs, like humans, are mostly water, and water is diamagnetic -- when exposed to a strong magnetic field, the constituent atoms align, inducing a magnetic field of the opposite polarity and triggering a repulsive force.  So it doesn't take any particular violation of physics to levitate a frog, although imagining a situation where it could be done without a powerful electromagnet is more of a reach.

Conjuring a frog out of nothing, though?  This is a major violation of a great many laws of physics.  First, if you imagine that the frog is coming from the air molecules in the space that it displaces when it appears, you have to believe that somehow oxygen, nitrogen, and the trace gases in the air have been converted to the organic molecules that make up living tissue.  Just getting from lightweight gaseous elements to the iron in the frog's hemoglobin isn't possible in the lab -- iron, in fact, is formed in the cores of supergiant stars, and only dispersed into space during supernova explosions.  (Pretty cool that the molecules that make up you were once in the ultra-hot cores of giant stars, isn't it?  Carl Sagan was spot-on when he said "We are made of star stuff.")

So there are different sorts of impossible.  You'd think that once you've accepted that the regular laws of physics don't apply -- that you're in a world where magic really happens -- you'd decide that all bets are off and anything can happen.  But our intuitive understanding of the laws of physics doesn't go away.  We still are, on some level, aware of what's difficult, what's impossible, and what's ridiculously impossible.  The authors write:

[P]eople’s ranking of the spells in all our studies were not affected by exposure to fantasy and magic in the media.  We suggest that the media does not primarily affect what spells are seen as more difficult, but rather that people bring their intuitive physics to bear when they engage with fiction.  That is, in line with previous research on myths and transformation, systems of magic are perceived as coherent to the extent to which they match people’s intuitive theories.  People perceive levitating a frog as easy not because they know it’s one of the first charms that any young wizard learns at Hogwarts, rather young wizards learn that spell first because readers expect that spell should be easy. 

In his 1893 essay The Fantastic Imagination, the novelist George Macdonald wrote, “The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them …but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own”. It seems people’s little worlds do not stray far from home.

What's especially interesting to me about this study is that being an author of speculative fiction, tweaking the laws of physics is kind of my stock in trade.  I've messed around with time travel (Lock & Key), alternate/parallel worlds (Sephirot), telepathic, energy-stealing aliens (Lines of Sight), and mythological creatures becoming real (The Fifth Day), to name a few.  It's fascinating to think about my own writing -- and figure out which of the crazy plot points I've invented were impossible, and which were really impossible.

At least it's reassuring that the evil superpowerful shapeshifters in Signal to Noise fall into the latter category.

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

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Monster detectives

With all of the anxiety over what's happening in the government, panic about climate change and its role in the horrible weather we've had lately, and crises of various kinds all around the world, I'm sure what you're all thinking is, "Yes, but what about all the monster sightings?"

Just as I mentioned last week with UFOs, it seems like cryptid sightings are on the rise.  First, let's look at a huge winged creature that was spotted in New Boston, Michigan (near Detroit), and reported to the Singular Fortean Society:

I have seen the winged creature. Location is near New Boston, Michigan.  About 25 miles southwest of Detroit.  I was driving to work at 3:10 am the Sunday before Thanksgiving 2018. I was going east on Sibley Rd.  All of a sudden this black winged creature comes up from the ditch on the right side of the road and takes off straight up.  No flapping.  Wing span looked to be 10 ft.  It had a smooth leather look on the wings.  I didn’t see a face because it happened so quick and I was focused on how big the wings were.  This happened in a matter of 3 seconds and then it was gone.  I tried to wrap my mind around what I just saw.  Also the location was near 2 metro parks.  If you google map New Boston and zoom into Sibley Rd and I-275 then scroll east and that was my path I was driving.  And questions or additional information please text me first because I don’t answer numbers I don’t know.

The individual left her phone number (obviously), but when a member of the SFS contacted her, she didn't answer -- and has steadfastly refused to respond to messages left for her inquiring about further information.

Apparently, Michiganders have been seeing a lot of winged cryptids lately (collectively called "Mothmen" after the seminal tale from West Virginia that gave rise to the phenomenally weird book The Mothman Prophecies, by John Keel, which has nothing whatsoever to do with prophecies and appears to have been written by free association.)  The SFS article linked above, by Tobias Wayland, gives more information:

[Sightings] generally take place in the evening or at night, often in or near a park, and around water.  Witnesses consistently describe a large, gray or black, bat or bird-like creature—although in a small number of cases the creature was described as insect-like—sometimes with glowing or reflective red, yellow, or orange eyes, and humanoid features such as arms and legs are often reported.  Some witnesses have reported feeling intense fear and an aura of evil emanating from the creature they encountered.

Speaking of monsters near water, next we have a group in British Columbia which is trying to locate a cryptid a bit like a sea-going version of Nessie, called "Cadborosaurus."

When I first saw "Cadborosaurus," my first thought was that it must be a cryptid that hatches from chocolate candy eggs, but it turns out it's named for Cadboro Bay, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.  A group called the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club is hot on Cadborosaurus's trail, and says that the animal they're looking for is "between thirty and seventy feet long" and has a "head like a horse."  Which you'd think would be hard to miss.

The BCSCC, however, admits that the evidence thus far is pretty tenuous.  "The only [actual remains] we’ve ever had possession of, including the 1937 Naden Harbour, Haida Gwaii carcass, has [sic] tended to look more mammal even though it’s rather serpentine in aspect," said John Kirk, BCSCC's founder.  "Cadborosaurus is a generic title that applies to all of them, but in recent years we’ve felt the mammal type found at Naden Harbour is what we’re going to call Cadborosaurus because it by far matches the description of the majority of witnesses."

Despite the previous lack of success in finding this beast, the members of BCSCC aren't giving up.  "We don’t want to prove this to anybody except for our own personal satisfaction, to ensure they are catalogued and their habitats are conserved," Kirk said.  "We certainly wouldn’t want the Cadborosaurus species to die off."

Last, we have a student named Sophie Jones at the Chicago Art Institute who is regretting choosing a project that involved making "Wanted, Dead or Alive" posters for various cryptids, and posting them all over -- along with her phone number.  She did it with the best of motives, she said, only intending for people to find it amusing.  "Being in a fine arts environment, a lot of the art you see is very heavy duty and painful or traumatic or political," Jones said.  "I wanted to do something that felt accessible and fun and friendly and engaged with an interest that I found really fascinating."

Predictably, a lot of the calls she got were tongue-in-cheek.  She even got one from someone claiming to be Mothman, but asking her out on a date.  (She politely declined.)  But some of the calls, Jones said, were serious, from people who really believe they've seen something otherworldly.  "I didn’t really ever consider that [the posters] would get noticed," she said.  "I didn’t expect that people would be seeing Mothman all over the city, for some reason."

She's tried to respond to the serious ones with helpful suggestions.  "I just don’t think the story should end there — you see a poster, you text it, no one responds," she said.  "That’s kind of a bummer.  They were so interested and willing to participate that I didn’t want to let them down."

So there you have it.  Mothman in Detroit, dinosaurs in Canada, and a well-meaning cryptid collector in Chicago.  The unfortunate part is now that I'm done here, I guess it's back to reality.  Which means reading the news.  And lately, my desire to stay well-informed has been at odds with my desire to stay sane.  All things considered, I'll stick with the monsters.

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

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

In the swim

The ability to swim didn't evolve until amazingly late, especially considering that for the first two billion years, life on Earth was pretty much confined to the oceans.

It wasn't until the Devonian Era, which began 420 million years ago, that swimming animals dominated the seas.  There were a few swimming species prior to that, but far and away the most common life forms were benthic -- confined to the sea floor -- or planktonic, free-floating and at the mercy of the currents.

Then, according to the conventional wisdom, something changed.  It's been nicknamed the "Devonian nektonic revolution" (nektonic means actively swimming).  But a recent piece of research suggests that it may not have been that simple.

Christopher Whalen and Derek Briggs, of the Yale University Department of Geology and Geophysics, did a thorough analysis of what is known from the fossil record, and looked at how the morphology of animals indicated whether they were swimmers, benthic, or planktonic.  And their results suggests that the "Devonian nektonic revolution" never happened -- swimming evolved in the Cambrian Era, a hundred or so million years earlier, and swimmers experienced a gradual increase as they outcompeted more sedentary forms.  Throughout that time, Whalen says, "the water column was slowly filling with larger, more actively swimming animals...  By the end of the Paleozoic, the oceans looked more like the oceans we know today."

Although some things have changed since then.  Fortunately.  Consider the six meter long, one ton Devonian top-tier predator, Dunkleosteus, surely one of the most badass fish ever evolved.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, Creator:Dmitry Bogdanov, Dunkleosteus intermedius, CC BY 3.0]

I'm just as happy swimming in an ocean that doesn't have these mofos swimming around, thank you very much.

Another cool paper about the life aquatic comes from Arizona State University, where behavioral ecologist Nobuaki Mizumoto did some analysis on a unique fossil that captures an entire school of tiny fish, and determined that schooling behavior had evolved by the Eocene Epoch (50 million years ago) and even back then operated by the same "rules of attraction and repulsion" that govern schooling and flocking today -- keeping an optimal distance from your near neighbors, just right to avoid collisions but benefit from the predator-avoidance aspect of sticking with the group.

It's uncertain what killed the entire school, but as the fossil is in sandy limestone, it could be that an underwater dune or hill face collapsed and smothered them.  What is remarkable is that it apparently happened quickly enough that they were preserved pretty much in situ -- essentially in their original positions in the school.

Mizumoto, along with co-authors Shinya Miyata and Stephen Pratt, write:

We found traces of two rules for social interaction similar to those used by extant fishes: repulsion from close individuals and attraction towards neighbours at a distance.  Moreover, the fossilized fish showed group-level structures in the form of oblong shape and high polarization, both of which we successfully reproduced in simulations incorporating the inferred behavioural rules.  Although it remains unclear how the fish shoal's structure was preserved in the fossil, these findings suggest that fishes have been forming shoals by combining sets of simple behavioural rules since at least the Eocene.  Our study highlights the possibility of exploring the social communication of extinct animals, which has been thought to leave no fossil record.

It's unusual when a fossil allows us to infer anything about behavior -- patterns of tracks can tell us about whether an animal traveled in groups, but it's a rare fossil that gives us anything but guesses.  So this study is unique in that it gives us a window into how this tiny species of Eocene fish behaved when it was alive.

So that's our investigation into the paleontology of swimming.  Amazing how much we can tell from a careful analysis of fossils -- giving us a window into a world that's been gone for millions of years.

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Reality denial

What does it take for people to look at a belief they hold and say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong?"

I ask this because there is still a sizable number of people who call themselves "climate skeptics."  The better term would be "reality deniers."  They tend to fall into two groups -- ones who agree that the Earth is warming up but deny that humans have anything to do with it, and ones who say the Earth isn't warming at all.  Lately, the evidence has been piling up so soundly against the latter claim that more of the reality deniers are ending up in the first class, but honestly, they don't have any more evidence on their side than the ones who deny anthropogenic climate change outright.

It's a little like the anti-vaxx nonsense.  How many studies, with how many thousands of test subjects, do you need before you admit that there's no connection between vaccination and autism?  Or that the risks of vaccination are far outweighed by the benefits?  The evidence is incontrovertible at this point, yet we still have people refusing to vaccinate their children -- which is why measles has been rearing its ugly head in the United States in the past few months. 

Look, on the one hand, I get it.  If you've been vocally in support of a claim, and it turns out the claim was wrong, it's kind of embarrassing to admit it.  Plus, there's the sunk-cost fallacy working against you -- if you've put a lot of energy and time supporting something (or someone), and it turns out your support was unwarranted, it can be less emotionally wrenching to put on blinders and continue your support rather than to admit you were taken in.

But honesty is more important than pride, here.  Especially since in the case of climate change, the long-term habitability of the Earth is at stake.

So at the risk of ringing the changes on a topic I've already beaten unto death:  just this week, three more studies were released showing that climate-wise, we're in big trouble.

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

First, we have a paper in the Journal of Glaciology, authored by Regine Hock, Andrew Bliss, Ben Marzeion, and Rianne Giesen, of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, looking at the rate of mass loss from glaciers, and finding that just taking into account the smaller land-based ice sheets, there will be a thirty to fifty percent loss in the next eighty years, contributing 25 centimeters to the sea level.

When you consider the fact that this does not take into account the far greater contribution of the huge Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets -- which are melting at an unprecedented rate -- you'd be right to be alarmed.

You'd also be right to relocate away from the coast.

"The clear message is that there’s mass loss—substantial mass loss—all over the world," said lead author Regine Hock, in a press release from the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  "The anticipated loss of ice varies by region, but the pattern is evident.  We have more than 200 computer simulations, and they all say the same thing...  Even though there are some differences, that’s really consistent. Our study compared 214 glacier simulations from six research groups around the world, and all of them paint the same picture."

The second study, released by the European Space Agency, takes data from the GlobPermafrost Project, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite program to estimate the rate of loss of permafrost from the Arctic -- and are finding that what we are seeing is the beginning of a positive feedback loop.

And don't read "positive" as "good."  Here, "positive" means something that keeps getting worse -- i.e., the "snowball effect."

The problem is, when permafrost melts, it unlocks (literally) millions of tons of carbon that had been stored in the frozen subsoil.  This not only leads to slumping (one of the factors the GlobPermafrost Project measured) but causes the release of both carbon dioxide and methane, each of which is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.

If you're not scared enough yet, the main finding of the project is that our estimates of the rate of permafrost melting were too small -- by an order of magnitude.

The last study is the one that should cause the deniers to admit defeat and retreat in disarray -- but probably won't.  The paper, which has already passed full peer review, will be released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in June.  What it does is look at the data from GISSTEMP, one of the main computer models used to predict temperature change, and backpedals the model over a hundred years to see whether it's in agreement with what the global average temperature actually did...

... and found that the model predicted the temperature to within an inaccuracy of 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We’ve made the uncertainty quantification more rigorous, and the conclusion to come out of the study was that we can have confidence in the accuracy of our global temperature series," said lead author Nathan Lenssen, a doctoral student at Columbia University, in a press release from NASA.  "We don’t have to restate any conclusions based on this analysis."

"The Arctic is one of the places we already detected was warming the most. The AIRS [Atmospheric Infrared Sounder] data suggests that it’s warming even faster than we thought,” said Gavin Schmidt, co-author of a study that supported the Lenssen et al. results.  "Each of [these analyses]  is a way in which you can try and provide evidence that what you’re doing is real.  We’re testing the robustness of the method itself, the robustness of the assumptions, and of the final result against a totally independent data set."

And this result -- like all of the studies that have gone before it -- is unequivocal.

At this point, there's only one question we should be asking the politicians who are still in denial about what we're doing to the Earth.  "What would it take to change your mind?"  Because if what we've already seen from the climatologists isn't convincing, it's hard to know what would be.

And if the politicians answer, "Nothing would change my opinion, my mind is made up," it's time to vote them right the hell out of office, and elect some people who actually care about reality -- and about whether the world our grandchildren inherit will still be habitable.

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

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]