Dark arrow

The more we find out about how the universe works, the weirder it gets.

We've come a long way from Isaac Newton's vision of a mechanistic "clockwork cosmos" -- where everything is governed by a handful of simple mathematical laws, and where if you knew the mass, velocity, and acceleration of every particle in the universe, you could backtrack that knowledge and find out everything that had happened in the past, or extrapolate it and figure out everything that will happen in the future.  The one-two punch of relativity and quantum mechanics put paid to that idea; because of phenomena like nonlocality, entanglement, quantum indeterminacy, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it turns out that this isn't even theoretically possible.

But the weirdness doesn't end there, and every time it looks like we're getting closer to a Theory of Everything, after which all that'll be left is filling in the details, we find something else that doesn't fit with what we know, that requires us to modify our understanding.  The latest is the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, which together far outweigh the mass of the entire universe's collection of ordinary matter and energy by a significant margin.  We don't know what either of those are, how (or if) they interact with ordinary matter other than gravitationally, and what abstruse laws of physics might govern their properties.  In other words, we know virtually nothing about them at all.  All we see is the gravitational pull they exert on the matter around them, like a shadow somehow cast by an otherwise-invisible figure standing near you.

Astrophysicists recently got another piece of the puzzle, and the discovery was presented at last week's annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  After analysis of a stream of stars in our own galaxy, astronomer Ana Bonaca of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found evidence that its movement had been altered by a "close encounter with a massive and dense perturber" -- meaning that a clump of dark matter swept through it, creating a slingshot effect that altered the stars' trajectories and flung them out of the stream.

The most amazing part is the size and speed of this dark arrow that shot its way through our galaxy.  According to Bonaca's data, the dark matter blob was equivalent to five million solar masses, and was traveling at 800,000 kilometers per hour.  No wonder it disrupted things.  But despite this, Bonaca calls this clump "slow-moving" -- which seems ridiculous until you recall that light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second.  So as fast as Bonaca's stream disrupter was moving, it was still only traveling at 1/1350 of the speed of light.

"Only."

Bonaca admits that there could have been other causes than dark matter, but still thinks that her explanation is the most plausible.  "Any massive and dense object orbiting in the halo could be the perturber," she said, "so a wandering supermassive black hole is definitely a possibility... The most plausible explanation for the gap-and-spur structure is an encounter with a dark matter substructure, like those predicted to populate galactic halos."

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

If true, this indicates a few interesting things -- the first of which is that dark matter interacts with itself strongly enough to form clumps.  What those interactions consist of is completely unknown.  But the coolest thing is how these disruptions in stellar streams could be used as a dark matter telescope -- helping us to "see" what is invisible in every other respect.  most excitingly, these features demonstrate that cold stellar streams are extremely fine-tuned detectors, sensitive at a level that was only hoped for beforehand," Bonaca and her co-authors, David Hogg, Adrian Price-Whelan, and Charlie Conroy, write in a pre-print of their paper.  "In addition to GD-1 [the stellar stream they studied], there are over forty known streams in the Milky Way halo.  In the era of Gaia, we now have both the incentive and the resources to study them all in detail.  With the full network of streams we could learn not only about individual halo substructures, but about the population as a whole."

So this has definitely given the astrophysicists something to chew on.  I still have the feeling that dark matter will turn out to be this century's "luminiferous ether," the hypothesized substance through which light supposedly propagates -- and which was conclusively shown not to exist when Einstein published his paper on the Special Theory of Relativity.  But that's only a hunch, and I'm certainly not an expert.  We'll have to wait to see what the scientists come up with, and whatever that is, I can guarantee it's gonna be interesting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

Titans of the ocean

As far as scary critters go, you'd have to look hard to find one scarier than the elasmosaurs.

If you've never seen an artist's reconstruction of one of these beasts, picture something like the body of a sea turtle, with an incredibly long neck and snake-like head, with lots of big, nasty, pointy teeth.  The largest ones reached a length of twelve meters, and a weight of several tons.  The conventional wisdom is that they "mostly ate crustaceans and mollusks," but my feeling is that if they encountered a swimmer, the result would be something like what happened in the movie Jaws, only worse.

Artist's reconstruction of Thalassomedon haningtoni, a late Cretaceous elasmosaur [Image licensed under the Creative Commons DiBgd, Thalassomedon haningtoni, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Fortunately for us, they are one of the groups that ran afoul of the Chicxulub Meteorite Impact 66 million years ago, and they all became extinct, unless you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, which would definitely be an elasmosaur if it actually existed.

This comes up because last week, paleontologists announced that they have unearthed a nearly-complete fossil of the largest-known elasmosaur, Aristonectes, which when alive would have been thirteen meters long and weighed twelve tons.  The fossil was found on Seymour Island in 1989, but was only excavated now because Seymour Island is at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and is windswept, cold, hostile, and hard to get to even during the brief Antarctic summer.  The research team, led by José O’Gorman, a paleontologist with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) who is based at the Museum of La Plata near Buenos Aires, has finished the excavation and submitted their results to the journal Cretaceous Research.

What to me is most fascinating about this specimen -- besides its sheer size, which is eye-opening enough -- is that it dates to only thirty thousand years before the K-T Extinction, which (palenontologically speaking) is barely any time at all.  So these big guys were thriving (and diversifying) right up to the moment the big crash occurred -- further evidence that the meteorite was the trigger to the entire extinction event.

O'Gorman says that the work to recover the specimen was grueling.  It began in 2012, proceeding at a snail's pace because the site was only accessible a couple of weeks a year, in late January and early February, and sometimes not even then if there was an unexpected storm. "The weather is one of the problems," O'Gorman said.  "The weather controls all.  Maybe one day you can work, and the next day you cannot because you have a snowstorm."

But their painstaking labor has finally paid off, and given us a picture of a truly awesome critter who was swimming around the oceans right on the verge of one of the "Big Five" extinction events.  Like I said, as a swimmer and scuba diver, I'm just as happy they're not around any more, but getting a glimpse of one of the largest aquatic predators the Earth has ever produced is enough to leave me in awe.
 
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying at least some of the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist last week came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor -- he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I'm having a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I look for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes.  I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy:  Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that? 

Me:  Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look. 

*long pause to let that settle in.*  

Stoned guy:  Whoa. 

Me:  I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here? 

Stoned guy:  No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this? 

Me:  I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.] 

Stoned guy: [reverently]  That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher. 

Me:  I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out. 

Stoned guy:  [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Dr. Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me:  What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean? 

Stoned guy:  No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here. 

Me:  That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help. 

Stoned guy:  Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever. 

Me:  Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I also like staying close to home.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

End of an era

Today is my last day as a classroom teacher.

We still have finals week yet to go, but for all intents and purposes, this is it.  The last day of class.  This year, when I say goodbye to my students, it's really goodbye.

I'm of two minds about retirement, which I suppose is only natural.

First, I've taught biology (and various other subjects) for 32 years, and I am seriously ready to do something different.  While I love my subject -- I still get ridiculously excited when I get to teach genetics and evolutionary biology -- there are parts of it that I will not miss.  Over three decades, and I still haven't figured out how to make The Parts of the Cell interesting.  And while I personally love biochemistry, it doesn't seem to be a Fan Favorite.

And that's putting it mildly.

I also am rather notorious in my school for my antipathy toward Staff Development.  I detest bureaucracy, and the increasing motion in New York -- and, I suspect, elsewhere in the United States -- toward micromanagement and a standardized-tests-über-alles approach to education absolutely infuriates me.  So I won't miss curriculum mapping and high-stakes exams and administrative b-b stackers who don't have the slightest clue what makes teaching vital and relevant and interesting.

But.  I still love the students.  The relationships I've formed over the years have meant a great deal to me, and the trust and interest and friendship the students have shown me are something I value more than I can put into words.  Also, that "Aha!" moment you see in kids' eyes when something finally makes sense, when suddenly some piece of the universe becomes clear to them -- there's nothing like that in the world.

The room where I spent a significant chunk of the last 27 years

I also have been privileged to work with a truly incomparable staff.  Our school district is very, very lucky, from the leadership on down to the rank-and-filers like myself.  In particular, the science department in our school is made up of incredibly talented, caring, and smart individuals, who have exactly the right attitudes toward education and have been, one and all, a delight to work with.  I'll truly miss the camaraderie.

The science department's yearbook photo this year.  We were supposed to include in the photo something that was important to us, and "make it memorable."  We nailed the latter part, at least.

There are also more specific, personal memories that I'll cherish forever.

• The moment in my Critical Thinking class a few years ago, when I was talking about how (or if) we can establish knowledge in the absence of hard evidence.  I said, "I want you right now, with what you have right here, to prove to me that pandas exist!"  And a student silently reached into her backpack... and pulled out a stuffed panda.  After we stopped laughing, I said, "You win this round."  At the end of the semester, she gave me the panda, which still sits on my desk.
• Superintendent's Conference Days.  This may come as a surprise, given my general hatred of staff development as described above -- but I always know that on conference days, the physics teacher and I get fried chicken from the village grocery store for lunch, and that chicken is damn tasty.
• My first day of teaching in Trumansburg High School, when I was teaching in three different classrooms, and second period accidentally went to the wrong one.  I started calling roll, and (of course) no one answered.  After three tries of getting someone, anyone, to answer "Here," one of the students said, in a small voice, "I think the kids you're looking for are next door."  Thereby establishing myself as slightly daffy, a reputation that still haunts me for some reason.
• The student who asked me, in complete seriousness, if Friday the 13th ever fell on a Sunday.
• The incredibly talented artist who, as part of a senior project focused on human faces, did an amazing portrait of me, which I still cherish.
• Finding out that despite my having moved here 27 years ago knowing no one, I've met two students who are distant cousins of mine.
• All the times students have asked me questions that made me step back and say, "Whoa.  I've never thought about that" -- resulting in my learning something along with them.

So all in all, it's been a good run, and retirement was a really hard decision to make.  But it's the right one at the right time.  I've got a lot of things I want to do -- writing, mostly, although I'm sure that a large part of my retirement will be occupied with "let dogs in, let dogs out, let dogs in, let dogs out" -- and I'm content with turning over the reins to a new teacher.  (Really new, in my case.  I know the person who was hired to replace me, and she's a first-year teacher, right out of the starting gate -- and is incredibly talented, dedicated, enthusiastic, and smart.  I have to admit to feeling better about leaving given that I know the students are in good hands.)

So this is it.  In a few hours, the last bell will ring on my teaching career, and that'll be that.  I'm gonna try not to cry, but we'll see how long that determination holds.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

Building the Rockies

I recently re-read John McPhee's wonderful quartet of books on geology, Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  His lucid prose and capacity for focusing on the human stories connected with the subject while teaching us some fascinating science brought me back to these books, which I first read perhaps twenty years ago.

The first two, in particular, describe something that is quite surprising -- or at least was to me when I first learned about it.  The biggest mountain range in the United States, the Rockies, is actually quite poorly understood, and contains some features that are still yet to be satisfactorily explained.  A good part of the Rocky Mountain range is non-volcanic, and although there are some areas that have igneous rocks the vast majority is made up of sedimentary and metamorphosed sedimentary rock -- sandstone, limestone, shale, slate, quartzite, and marble.  Even some of the igneous rocks only show at the surface because the overlayment of sedimentary rock that once was present has eroded away.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Self, Rocky Mountain National Park, CC BY-SA 2.5]

As McPhee describes it, the current thought is that most of what is west of Colorado and Wyoming is probably the result of accretion -- the huge North American Plate overriding smaller plates to the west and gathering up microcontinents and island arcs they carried, cementing them onto the coastline.  It's certain that this is how California formed -- the boundaries between the different "suspect terranes" (the alternate spelling is used when referring to these chunks of land that end up in a very different place from where they were formed) are pretty well established.  Also, the subduction process that brought them to North America is still ongoing, as the small Explorer, Juan de Fuca, and Gorda Plates (in order from north to south) are pulled underneath -- giving rise to the Cascade Volcanoes such as Mount Lassen, Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, and Mount Saint Helens.

We got another piece added to the puzzle with a paper this week in Nature, out of the University of Alberta, by Yunfeng Chen, Yu Jeffrey Gu, Claire A. Currie, Stephen T. Johnston, Shu-Huei Hung, Andrew J. Schaeffer, and Pascal Audet.  Entitled, "Seismic Evidence for a Mantle Suture and Implications for the Origin of the Canadian Cordillera," the paper describes research that found a sharp boundary in the mantle of the Earth between the "craton" -- the central, oldest piece of the North American continent, encompassing what is now the Midwest -- and a long, narrow microcontinent that slammed into the North American Plate as a primordial sea closed -- moving the coastline hundreds of miles further west.

"This research provides new evidence that the Canadian section of this mountain range was formed by two continents colliding," said Jeffrey Gu, professor in the Department of Physics and co-author on the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "The proposed mechanism for mountain building may not apply to other parts of the Rocky Mountains due to highly variable boundary geometries and characteristics from north to south."

The cool part is that the research was done by looking deep into the Earth's mantle -- not just by studying the surface features.  And this collision, which is estimated to have occurred a hundred million years ago, has left a scar that is still detectable.  "This study highlights how deep Earth images from geophysical methods can help us to understand the evolution of mountains, one of the most magnificent processes of plate tectonics observed at the Earth's surface," said study co-author Yunfeng Chen.

And this technique could be applied elsewhere, as the Rockies are far from the only mountain range in the world that were created by accretion rather than volcanism.  (The obvious examples are the Alps and the Himalayas -- the latter of which are still rising as the Indian Plate continues to plow into the Eurasian Plate.)  "There are other mountain belts around the world where a similar model may apply," said Claire Currie, associate professor of physics and co-author on the study.  "Our data could be important for understanding mountain belts elsewhere, as well as building our understanding of the evolution of western North America."

So we're piecing together the picture of how the Rockies formed -- ironic, as they seem to have been assembled from pieces themselves.  In the process, we're learning more about the processes that move the tectonic plates, and create the landscape we see around us.  It reminds me of the haunting lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which seem like a fitting way to end:

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars has been
The stillness of the central sea;
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands,
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves, and go.

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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.

The power of identity

It's a strange thing, identity.  How we see ourselves, how others see us -- and the parts of us we deny, sometimes even to ourselves.

I'm a writer.  I'm a musician.  I'm a white man of western European descent.  I'm a Louisianian by birth, a New Yorker by choice.  I'm a dog lover.  I'm left of center politically.  I'm a tattoo enthusiast.  I'm a runner even though I've been benched for the last few months from a back injury. I'm a teacher even though I'm soon to retire.  I'm a Francophone even though I haven't spoken French in years and am pretty rusty.

I am bisexual.

This last one might come as a surprise to anyone who knows me.  I have been happily married, in a cis/hetero relationship, for almost seventeen years.  I have only had cis/hetero relationships my entire life, in fact, but that's probably due to my being so shy it's a wonder I've had any romantic liaisons at all.

Nevertheless, I'm bisexual and always have been, and always will be.  I first realized it when I was a teenager, and when I went to the public swimming pool I would look at swimsuit-clad girls and go, "Whoa."  And then... had the same reaction when I looked at swimsuit-clad guys.

But I was raised in a traditional, conservative, strictly Roman Catholic family.  At that point, I didn't know the word "bisexual" existed.  Even if I had, I probably would never have admitted it.  I still recall being herded into a room in the church at age fourteen or so -- separated by gender, of course -- and being given "the talk" about sexual morality, wherein I learned that lust was a sin, sex outside of marriage was a sin, and masturbation was a sin.  (At that last statement, the guy next to me leaned over and said, sotto voce, "We're all fucked, aren't we?")

But being turned on by another guy, or worse still, acting on that impulse?  That was a mortal sin.  That was one that you might not get absolution for even if you asked for it.

That was fiery furnace material, dude.

So I squelched that side of me.  Squelched it so completely, in fact, that even when I moved to a much more liberal part of the country (Seattle, Washington), I didn't come out, and would have heatedly denied my orientation had anyone asked.

But in the last few years a few things have cracked my determination to keep that part of me hidden.  First, a few years ago I had a student tell me (apropos of the International Day of Silence), "I guess I can understand homosexuals, but I don't believe anyone can be bisexual.  How can you be attracted to both men and women?"  I did my usual fallback on the science -- bisexuality is well established as a real phenomenon, and isn't just a case of someone not being able to make up his/her mind -- but the kid still said, "I just don't believe it."

And I thought, "She's talking about me.  She's denying that people like me even exist. "

Pride Months came and went.  Coming Out Days came and went.  I still vociferously argued for LGBTQ rights and equality, and still stayed silent about myself.  A few years ago, I came out to a few folks, including my wife (who is a completely amazing person and was entirely cool with it.).  A few selected responses, which should cheer you up about the potential for goodness in humanity:

"C'mon, I live in Ithaca.  Half the people I know are LGBTQ.  Rock on." 

"No questions, no comments.  Only love." 

"Thank you so much for trusting me enough to say this to me.  I know it must have been hard." 

"I have no idea why anyone would look at you differently because of this.  You are who you are, and you're a beautiful person.  Kudos for having the courage to speak your truth aloud." 

"Really?  So am I." 

"You have my love and support no matter what.  Nothing has changed that, and nothing will change that."

The funniest one, though, was my dear friend and writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs (whose recently-released novel Back Then is a must-read), who smiled and said in her Okie drawl, "Honey, you think I didn't know that?  Every one of your novels has a scene with a gorgeous shirtless man in it."

It took me a good five minutes to stop laughing.  That'll teach me to take myself so damn seriously.

This year, the clamor I've seen about Pride Month has left me feeling angry and hurt -- the demands for a "Straight Pride Parade," the claims that heterosexuals are a persecuted minority, Tomi Lahren's bizarre comment that it's "open season on straight white men."  And the feeling has been rising in me that I couldn't continue to strike back against this sort of bigoted nonsense while still being afraid to admit who I am.

So that has brought me here.

Let me clarify a few things, which (in a sensible world) I shouldn't have to clarify.

First, my coming out as bisexual does not mean anything is going to change between myself and my wife.  This announcement is not a prelude to anything else, merely a statement of what is.

Second, it doesn't mean that I'm looking for a relationship with a guy on the side.  "Bisexual" doesn't mean "unfaithful" or "disloyal."  I'm deeply in love with my wife and would never, will never, betray that.

Third -- it doesn't mean anything else about me.  I did not become an ally and advocate for LGBTQ issues because I'm bisexual, but because I am a caring, moral person who believes that your rights should not depend on who you're attracted to.  I would still be an ally and advocate if I was 100% straight.

Last, and listen closely if you have any doubt on this point: this was not a choice I made.  I did not sit back at age fourteen and think, "Let's see... guys, girls?  Guys, girls?  How about... both?"  Wherever sexual orientation comes from, I was built this way.  And as a trans student of mine put it to me, "Why would anyone think that I would choose this?  To face prejudice, ridicule, denial of who I am, on a daily basis?  Who in their right mind would choose that?"

So there you have it.  My only wish is that I'd come out sooner (like, when I realized it as a teenager), rather than denying such a fundamental part of me for decades.  I wish that, not only because of what it would have done for me personally, but because of the role model I would have been for students -- "Look, here's who I am.  You can be who you are, too.  I understand."

But you can't reverse time, nor undo decisions you made in the past; all you can do is act now.  As Maya Angelou put it, "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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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.

Knotty problem

As a language geek, the loss of our ability to understand communication from past civilizations always strikes me as tragic.

It's worse when that loss was the deliberate work of people trying to silence a culture.  This is the case with the strange and fascinating khipus (also spelled quipus), a set of strings with knots that the Incas used to encode something -- we're not sure what -- and which were systematically destroyed in the 17th century by the Spanish, who were suspicious of a system of communication they couldn't understand, and worried about how it might be used against them.

It's probable that they served more than one purpose -- as most written languages do -- one of which was enumeration.  There are current Andean societies that make at least limited use of khipus for keeping track of numbers of livestock,  But it's far from clear that this was their only use; after all, the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals can be used for everything from shopping lists to censuses to history texts to telling a story.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki, Inca Quipu, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Part of the problem with decoding them, however, is the same difficulty faced by anyone trying to decipher the Plougastel-Daoulas inscription that I wrote about a few days ago; there simply aren't many of them left.  The Spanish priests who gathered up and burned every khipu they could find simply did their job too well.

The other problem is the one I referenced in the same post, in connection to Linear B and the Voynich Manuscript; we don't even know how the knots correspond to units of language.  The type of knot seems as significant as the spacing, as does the color of the thread, but what any of those features mean is at this point speculation at best.

Another piece of the puzzle was added this week, however, in a paper authored by Alejandro Chu and Gary Urton in the journal Latin American Antiquity.  Chu has discovered 29 khipus at a site called Qolqawasi, and each one was found with quantities of edibles -- chili peppers, peanuts, and other regional crops.  This has led Chu and Urton to theorize that the khipus represented quantities of produce -- and, perhaps, the amount of taxes to be collected on it.  The authors write:

These khipus contain a formulaic arrangement of numerical values not encountered on khipus from elsewhere in Tawantinsuyu (the Inka Empire).  The formula includes first, a large number, hypothesized to record the sum total of produce included in a deposit, followed by a “fixed number,” and then one or more additional numbers.  The fixed number plus the additional number(s) sum to the original large number.  It is hypothesized that the fixed number represents an amount deducted from the deposit to support storage facility personnel.  As such, it represented a tax assessed on deposits, the first evidence we have for a system of taxation on goods in the Inka Empire.  It is proposed that the size and complexity of the storage facility at Inkawasi prompted the “invention” of a kind of financing instrument—taxation—not known previously from Inka administration. 

Their interpretation is not certain -- witness the number of times they use the word "hypothesized" and "proposed" -- but it's an intriguing possibility.  Whether the khipus were used for other purposes, such as in place of a written language, is still worth considering.  It's to be hoped that there will be additional discoveries of these odd artifacts, and that at some point the work of archaeologists such as Chu and Urton will lead to a complete decipherment -- and these voices from the past won't turn out to have been silenced completely.

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

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.