Lost in translation

Being a linguistics geek, I've posted here more than once about odd mysteries in language decipherment that have been tackled in the past, some successfully (the Linear B script of Crete) and some not (the Voynich Manuscript).  So I was pretty tickled to find out about one I'd never heard of before -- the strange inscription found on the beach in Plougastel-Daoulas, a village in Brittany, in northwestern France.

Unlike the two puzzlers I referenced, this one at least has the advantage of being in the Latin alphabet and not in some unfathomable set of characters, for which it's not even known if each symbol stands for a sound, a syllable, or an entire word (or some combination).  So we're starting with a leg up as compared both to Linear B and Voynich.

But that's the only advantage we have.  The language is clearly neither Breton nor French, and the inscription is of uncertain age (although the numbers 1786 and 1787 appear, which could be years -- although I'd hesitate to state that with any assurance).

The inscription is quite worn, but part of it says, "ROC AR B … DRE AR GRIO IS EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL ... RI OBBIIE: BRISBVILAR ... FROIK ... AL..."  Well, "viriones" looks vaguely Latin to me, but isn't an actual word (although "vir" does mean "man," and at a stretch could be some kind of cognate).  "Eveloh" and "baoavel" are kind of Breton-ish, but the same thing; they aren't actual Breton words.

Not exactly a promising start.

The powers-that-be in Plougastel-Daoulas are offering a 2,000 euro prize for a translation.  If you're inclined to give it a shot, you need to submit your decipherment by November 30, and a committee in the village is going to vote on the one they think is the most plausible.  Not really how linguistic analysis is ideally done -- witness all of the wild guesses made in highly authoritative fashions about Linear B, which was said to be a Celtic dialect, Scythian, Anatolian, Etruscan, and a variety of other languages -- when, in fact, it turned out to be archaic Greek.  (Funny, that, given that inscriptions were found in Greece.)

So I'm not sure how much credence I'd put in the winning entry.  Also, the text is quite short, which invalidates two of the most powerful tools for decipherment -- looking at character frequency, and which characters are likely to precede or follow others.  You need a sufficiently large sample size for that kind of statistical measurement to produce significant results -- and my guess is that the Plougastel-Daoulas inscription is simply too short.

But I encourage anyone interested to try.  After all, Michael Ventris, who with Alice Kober deciphered Linear B, was essentially an amateur linguist -- his day job was architecture.  So a passionate amateur may well have as good a chance as a professor of linguistics.

It's natural to wonder what someone would find important enough to engrave into a rock, and with luck and diligence we'll find out.  Maybe it'll be something fascinating, giving us a lens into the world of the past.  Or maybe -- to quote the Cardassian captain Gul Ocett in the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" -- "It could just turn out to be a recipe for biscuits."

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

Taking the temperature of the universe

There's something compelling about the things in our universe that are on a wildly different scale than we are.  The very tiny -- subatomic particles, atoms, even things as (comparatively) large as molecules -- boggle our minds by their bizarre behavior, a body of knowledge collectively known as quantum mechanics.  Likewise, the very large bowls us over by our positions in a cosmos that makes even the most arrogant and human-centric of us feel insignificant.

It's the large end of the scale that's been a fascination of mine for some time.  I remember as a teenager running into the classic 1977 video Powers of Ten, that starts hovering a meter above the hand of a sleeping man in a park, and then moves away from him at an increasing speed, moving ten times faster every ten seconds.  Before much time has elapsed -- and the whole video is under ten minutes long -- we are outside of the known universe, and our own "Local Group" of galaxies is a mere dot in the center of the screen.  Then we dive back down toward the sleeping man, this time covering ten times less distance every ten seconds, and finally are centered on a single proton in a carbon atom in one of his DNA molecules.

Since 1977, of course, we've learned a lot more about each end of the scale.  We now know that the universe itself is anisotropic -- the stars and galaxies are not uniformly distributed across space, but exists in superclusters and filaments, with enormous empty spaces in between -- accurately if spookily called "cosmic voids."  (One of them, the Boötes void, is nicknamed "The Great Nothing," and is so large that if the Sun was at the center of it, the night sky would be completely black, and we would not have had a telescope powerful enough to find out about the existence of other stars until the 1960s.)

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Richard Powell, Nearsc, CC BY-SA 2.5]

A piece of research published this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics has added another piece to our understanding of the structure of the universe, but raised a number of questions as well -- which, of course, good research should always do.

The paper, entitled "Isotropy and Statistics of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," is an analysis of data from the Planck spacecraft, which has taken measurements for years of the radiation spread across the cosmos that is the remnant of the first flash of light at the moment of the Big Bang.  You'd expect that it would be fairly uniform -- given that the Big Bang kind of happened everywhere at once -- but the curious result of the research is that there is a "warm hemisphere" and a "cold hemisphere" of the universe, as measured by the deviation of the temperature from the average of only slightly above absolute zero -- and weirder still, that in the middle of the "warm hemisphere" is a giant cold spot.

[Image courtesy of the Planck Telescope Project]

What's the most bizarre about this is that the data hovers right on the edge of statistical significance, but the pattern has been detected more than once and does not seem to be a random fluctuation.  If it's correct, it'll force a significant rethinking of our understanding of the structure of the universe -- and how it all started.

So there's your moment of "geez, we are really tiny" for today.  On the Planck map picture above, the entire Milky Way -- 53,000 light years across, composed of about 250 billion stars -- is a single minuscule dot.  All of which makes our little struggles on this Pale Blue Dot seem rather inconsequential, doesn't it?

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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!]

A consummation devoutly to be wished

When I was in college, I had an eight a.m. calculus class with a woman who used to drag herself in, large coffee in her hand, looking like death warmed over.  The first time this happened, I thought she'd just pulled an all-nighter either studying or partying -- both common occurrences in college -- but then I noticed it was day after day.  The poor woman never looked wide awake, and always seemed just this side of miserable.

Finally, being the subtle and compassionate person you all know me to be, I said to her, "What the hell is wrong with you?", or words to that effect.

She explained to me that she had serious sleep issues.  She'd get back to her dorm from her last class in the afternoon, still feeling exhausted, but then she'd get a second wind in the early evening.  Come a reasonable bedtime -- say, ten-thirty or eleven -- she was wide awake.

"I don't even bother going to bed," she told me.  "I tried it, more than once, and lay there for hours staring at the ceiling.  Now I just get up and try to be productive."

Until about four-thirty or five in the morning, when she'd finally feel tired.  Then she'd go to sleep, and her alarm would go off at six, and she'd start the whole cycle again -- with about an hour's worth of sleep.

I didn't find out until much later that what she was suffering from has a name; circadian dysrhythmia.  Basically, it's when your biological clock is completely out of sync with the rest of the world.  It's a little like a permanent case of jet lag.  And sadly, even now, forty years later, it's still remarkably resistant to treatment.

It's been the conventional wisdom for some time that circadian rhythms are mediated through a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.  And this is clearly part of the answer; sleepiness is correlated with increased activity in the anterior part of the region, and an increase in the hypothalamic production of the neurotransmitter gamma amino-butyric acid (GABA), which has an inhibitory effect on neural excitation.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But two new papers, published simultaneously last week in the journal Cell, have shown us that things may not be that simple.  (Are they ever?)  Both studies were done at the University of California - Irvine, and have shown that the network of internal clocks that regulates our metabolism, activity, alertness, and other cyclic behaviors are not limited to the brain -- that other parts of the body also have significant contributions to modulating our daily cycles.

In the first, titled, "BMAL1-Driven Tissue Clocks Respond Independently to Light to Maintain Homeostasis," researchers found that a chemically-driven clock exists... in our skin cells.  The authors write:

Circadian rhythms control organismal physiology throughout the day.  At the cellular level, clock regulation is established by a self-sustained Bmal1-dependent transcriptional oscillator network [a cyclic rise and fall of gene activity associated with light levels].  However, it is still unclear how different tissues achieve a synchronized rhythmic physiology.  That is, do they respond independently to environmental signals, or require interactions with each other to do so?  We show that unexpectedly, light synchronizes the Bmal1-dependent circadian machinery in single tissues in the absence of Bmal1 in all other tissues.  Strikingly, light-driven tissue autonomous clocks occur without rhythmic feeding behavior and are lost in constant darkness.

Maybe not so shocking, given that our skin is at least partly exposed to the light.  What is more surprising is the second paper, which found that a light-dependent circadian rhythm takes place in our livers:

Mammals rely on a network of circadian clocks to control daily systemic metabolism and physiology.  The central pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is considered hierarchically dominant over peripheral clocks, whose degree of independence, or tissue-level autonomy, has never been ascertained in vivo.  Using arrhythmic Bmal1-null mice, we generated animals with reconstituted circadian expression of BMAL1 exclusively in the liver (Liver-RE)...  [R]hythmic clock gene expression is lost in Liver-RE mice under constant darkness.  Hence, full circadian function in the liver depends on signals emanating from other clocks, and light contributes to tissue-autonomous clock function.

"The results were quite surprising," said Paolo Sassone-Corsi, who co-authored both studies.  "No one realized that the liver or skin could be so directly affected by light...  The future implications of our findings are vast.  With these mice, we can now begin deciphering the metabolic pathways that control our circadian rhythms, aging processes and general well-being."

It's undeniable that sleep plays a central role in both mental and physical health, and that the vast majority of us don't get sufficient sleep either in quantity or quality.  The more scientists find out about how our sleep cycles and other circadian rhythms are modulated, the greater the likelihood there'll be a treatment for people like my long-ago college acquaintance -- and even for simple insomniacs like myself.

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

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!]

The civility dogwhistle

When I was young, I had it drilled into me that I was always supposed to do what my mom called "not sinking to their level."  Bullied?  Ignore it.  "Don't react, it's what they want."  Hear gossip about a friend?  Stop listening.  "Don't pay any attention, if you argue it'll just call attention to the gossiper."  Witness prejudice, bigotry, general nastiness?  Walk away.  "You can't change the minds of people like that, you're wasting your effort even to try."

It's taken me over half a century to recognize that for the bullshit it is.

The way this is playing out today is usually couched in calls for "civility."  I hear well-meaning people -- often people I agree with on many points -- mourning the loss of civilized discourse in our society, implying that if we could just have a nice conversation with the bigots, the intolerant, the racists, the homophobes, that would fix everything.

The ultimate conclusion of this line of thought is the claim that we have to "treat all opinions with respect."  Which is not only wrong, it's downright dangerous.  I am under no obligation to treat the opinions of white supremacists with respect.  My moral obligation, in fact, is to shout them down, make sure that they hear loud and clear that they cannot get away with denying someone's rights, safety, or personhood.

The words "respect" and "civility," in fact, have become dogwhistles.  No matter how poisonous the claim, you can't call it out as such, because that would be "disrespectful" or "uncivil."  It's pulled the teeth from our capacity for confronting intolerance and prejudice unequivocally and forcefully, made us question ourselves when in fact we're the ones on the moral high ground, we're the ones who should be able to say, "No.  This is wrong, and I will not let it go by unchallenged."

For example, what do you make of this?

I saw this posted on social media, along with a link about how the negative press it's getting is pushing the company that owns the sign -- Burkett Outdoor Advertising -- to take it down.  But the three times I've seen it, it's always been in a positive light.  "Damn straight," one person wrote.  "You don't like who's running the country, get the fuck out of America."  Another said, "I wish we had one of these in Louisiana."

So what you're saying is that if I disagree with you politically, I have no right to live in the same state as you?  Or, according to the first person, no right even to live in the United States?  Forget civility.  If that's your opinion, go to hell.  And if that response bothers you, causes you to unfriend or unfollow me, or whatever, good riddance.

Then there's Mark Chambers, the mayor of Carbon Hill, Alabama, who posted on Facebook, "We live in a society where homosexuals lecture us on morals, transvestites lecture us on human biology, baby killers lecture us on human rights and socialists lecture us on economics!...  The only way to change it would be to kill the problem out. I know it's bad to say but with out [sic] killing them out there's no way to fix it."

When he began to get backlash, he deleted the post and then lied, denying he'd written it.  (A tactic Donald Trump is finding out doesn't work so well.)  Then he said that, okay, he wrote it, but it didn't mean what it explicitly and obviously meant.  "Although I believe my comment was taken out of context and was not targeting the LGBTQ community," he wrote, "I know that it was wrong to say anyone should be kill [sic]."

This mealy-mouthed non-apology is unacceptable.  Here we have an elected official who has suggested a Final Solution for the "LGBTQ problem."  This should be loudly, forcefully, and repeatedly challenged -- and Mark Chambers should resign.  Now.

Then there's Trump himself, who tweeted the following on the first day of Pride Month:

As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation.  My Administration has launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and invite all nations to join us in this effort!

No, sorry.  You do not get to undo protections for LGBTQ individuals, allow for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the name of "religious freedom," bar transgender individuals from serving in the military, and even ignore the existence of LGBTQs by refusing to identify them as such on the 2020 census, and then say you're "standing in solidarity."  You do not get to speak at the virulently anti-LGBTQ Values Voters Summit, saying you are "honored and thrilled" to speak at "this incredible gathering of friends, so many friends," and then say that you're "celebrating LGBT Pride Month."  You do not get to claim to be an advocate and still hobnob with vicious homophobes like Franklin Graham, who said:

[LGBTQ protection] is a full-scale assault against Christianity and the followers of Christ.  When prayer is banned from the public square, when our President fails to defend biblically defined marriage, and he openly and zealously advocates for gay rights; when legislators rush to overrule existing laws to promote gay marriage; when schools and courts consistently suppress religious freedoms; we know we are locked in a war against the Christian faith, not culture.  The architect behind this offensive is none other than Satan himself.  The Scripture says that the devil, our archenemy, is bent on as much destruction as possible.

We've tried "civility" with people like this.  Civility doesn't work.  These bigots interpret civility as weakness, and go right ahead hating and discriminating and ridiculing.  The only thing that works is standing up, every damn time, and saying, "No.  Not here.  Not now.  Not on my watch."  Also, always remember that the individuals who are the victims of these people might not be able to speak for themselves -- a lot of them are, quite rightly, afraid to defend themselves.  This means the rest of us have to speak up that much more forcefully.

If this loses me some friends, so be it.  I'm not going to make the mistake I've made for most of my life, of saying "oh, well, you have a right to your opinion," or "I'm not going to argue, it's disrespectful."  A lot of opinions don't deserve respect.  A late realization, and one I wish I'd come to earlier, but we all learn at our own pace.

It'd be nice if we could use a kinder, gentler approach, but as the rise of white supremacy and homophobia and racism in the last three years has shown, staying silent in the face of evil simply doesn't change anything.  So be warned: you can count on me to be an ally for the voiceless, to stand up and say no every time I see injustice, to counter bigotry with steadfastness.  If because of that you want to label me a "social justice warrior," go right ahead.

Game on.

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

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!]

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.

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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!]