Dust over Antarctica

Because my other choice is writing about how Donald Trump said in a public speech last week that if you use wind power to generate electricity, your television will go off if the wind stops blowing, I've decided to focus today on: supernova dust in Antarctica.

Supernovas are one of the most awesome phenomena known.  They are so powerful astronomers estimate that if one occurred within 150 light years of the Earth, it would cause planet-wide ecological catastrophe (and the evidence is strong that such events have actually contributed to or caused mass extinctions in the past).

Two things about that to keep in mind:

• There are no imminent supernovas within 150 light years of the Earth.  The nearest candidates are Eta Carinae (7,500 light years away), Betelgeuse (500 light years away), VY Canis Majoris (4,900 light years away), and Antares (550 light years away).
• Even these "nearest candidates" are almost certainly not going to explode soon, if like most of us you're thinking on human time scales.  Eta Carinae is probably the most likely to create some celestial fireworks, and the best guess for when it will go supernova is "some time in the next three million years."  So don't cancel your plans for a Labor Day picnic because you think it's likely we'll be blown to smithereens before then.

Even so, they're pretty awesome events, and I'd love to witness one, although if it was nearby the destruction of the ozone layer by the radiation pulse and the frying of every living thing on Earth that would follow would be an unfortunate downside.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, Artist's impression of supernova 1993J, CC BY 4.0]

Because of their violence, and the potential effects on the Earth, astronomers have been fascinated by this phenomenon for some time.  So it was pretty exciting when a recent study of snow in Antarctica found traces of dust that were produced by a nearby supernova that exploded some time in the past few million years.

The researchers melted five hundred kilograms of pristine Antarctic snow and found substantial traces of two radioactive isotopes that shouldn't exist on Earth -- iron-60 and manganese-53.  Both are produced in the cores of supernovae, and they have half-lives of 2.7 and 3.3 million years, respectively.  Because the Earth has been around about two thousand times longer than that, all of these isotopes have decayed away in the interim.  So finding them in Antarctic snow is pretty spectacular.

It's thought that the dust was brought to Earth not by being ejected at it, but because the Solar System was swept through the cloud of debris left behind as it orbits the center of the galaxy.  The authors write:

Earth is constantly bombarded with extraterrestrial dust containing invaluable information about extraterrestrial processes, such as structure formation by stellar explosions or nucleosynthesis, which could be traced back by long-lived radionuclides.  Here, we report the very first detection of a recent Fe-60 influx onto Earth by analyzing 500 kg of snow from Antarctica by accelerator mass spectrometry.  By the measurement of the cosmogenically produced radionuclide Mn-53, an atomic ratio of Fe-60/Mn-53=0.017 was found, significantly above cosmogenic production.  After elimination of possible terrestrial sources, such as global fallout, the excess of Fe-60 could only be attributed to interstellar Fe-60 which might originate from the solar neighborhood.

What I find most striking about this is that we can infer information about a supernova explosion in our near vicinity by analyzing a bunch of snow.  Our technology and scientific prowess has increased to a point that is astonishing -- and I say that even with the recognition that we still have a long, long way to go.  (C'mon, scientists.  I want my personal transporter, holodeck, and replicator.  Tea, Earl Grey, hot, anyone?)

So that's the latest in the Cool Scientific Discoveries department.  Even more amazing when you realize that our country is being led by a man who says that windmills were "Hillary Clinton's idea", and that the noise they make causes cancer.  But don't dismiss what he's saying, folks.  After all, in his own words, "I know a lot about wind."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy -- Finding Our Place in the Universe by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois.  Courtois gives us a thrilling tour of the universe on the largest scales, particularly Laniakea, the galactic supercluster to which the Milky Way belongs, and the vast and completely empty void between Laniakea and the next supercluster.  (These voids are so empty that if the Earth were at the middle of one, there would be no astronomical objects near enough or bright enough to see without a powerful telescope, and the night sky would be completely dark.)

Courtois's book is eye-opening and engaging, and (as it was just published this year) brings the reader up to date with the latest information from astronomy.  And it will give you new appreciation when you look up at night -- and realize how little of the universe you're actually seeing.

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

Don't throw out your textbooks

It'll come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I get really frustrated with how scientific research is portrayed in popular media.

It's not just the way it's explained -- it's the all-too-common impression media give that every new scientific discovery undoes everything that came before it.  How many times have you seen headlines that say, "Scientists Are Back to the Drawing Board Because...", as if the scientists were all sitting around sipping glasses of wine, thinking they had the entire universe figured out, when along comes some pesky upstart making a discovery that causes it all to come crashing down?

Yes, there are times that a discovery overturns a huge chunk of what we thought we knew, but the reason those stand out is because they're so infrequent.  (This is the subject of Thomas Kuhn's seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the scientific process.)  Most of the alterations caused by new discoveries are small course changes, not capsizing the entire boat.  Not that they're unimportant -- refining the model is what science is all about.  But refinement doesn't require destroying the superstructure, any more than remodeling your kitchen requires that you tear down your entire house.

It's why I get frustrated with students who say (usually about evolution) "it's just a theory."  "Theory" is a word that is consistently misused by many laypeople, who take it to mean "a wild guess that could just as easily be disproven as proven," when actually what it means is "a complex explanatory model well supported by all of the available evidence."  Yes, it's possible that the theory of evolution could be disproven, but in the same sense that it's possible you could throw a deck of cards into the air and have them land in a stack by number and suit.  It could happen -- but I wouldn't bet on it.

I saw a frustrating example of this phenomenon yesterday in the usually excellent site Science News, apropos of a discovery in South Africa of a rock that may force a revision of our timetable for the tectonic history of the Earth.  Pretty cool, even if the revision isn't that large, in the grand scheme of things -- pushing back the start of tectonic activity from 2.7 to 3.3 billion years ago.  The most interesting thing is that this means tectonic movement started right around the same time as life did, leading to speculation that there may be some kind of causation there.  (Recall that tectonics isn't just responsible for earthquakes and volcanoes, but for recycling large chunks of the Earth's crust.  It may be that this movement of minerals and seawater kicked off the chemical reactions that led to the first living things -- although this is still highly speculative.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So the article is cool, but the headline made me cringe: "Drop of Ancient Seawater Rewrites Earth's History."  Yeah, okay, maybe technically that's true, given that the timetable of geological activity has been altered by the discovery.  But don't take away from it that the sequence of eras and periods in every high school earth science text has been trashed, and that geologists are now completely at sea.  The headline is factually correct but gives the wrong gist, way too reminiscent of the "Discovery Makes Scientists Throw Out the Textbooks!" headlines you see in popular media.  It leads to the all-too-common impression of scientists as bumbling around in their labs making wild guesses, and writing paper after paper (and textbook after textbook) that each supersede the previous ones like the fall of a row of dominoes.

The truth is, perhaps, not nearly as sexy, but popular media (and especially science-for-laypeople media like Science News) should try to reflect it.  In this time when our leaders are actively trying to poison our belief in scientific research on climate change, pollution, and ecology, it is incumbent on media of all type to be as careful as they can about being accurate not only in denotation but in connotation.  As a group, scientists are extremely cautious about publishing until their conclusions are supported by a wealth of evidence, and the impression fostered by many elected officials -- that scientific research is biased, tentative, and inaccurate -- is simply false.

So I wish the people who write about research for popular consumption would take this to heart.  We can't afford any more blows to our confidence in the experts.  Without them, we'd be left with only the politicians to rely on -- and given the choice, I'm trusting the scientists.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

The forest primeval

One of the reasons I'm so fascinated with paleontology is that it induces me to picture what the Earth looked like a loooooooong time ago -- and to consider a planet that was nothing at all like it is now.

I remember when I first realized something about the three earliest periods of Earth's history -- the Precambrian, Cambrian, and Ordovician -- from a kids' book on prehistory, when I was maybe ten years old.  There was a casual statement that during these periods, there was no life on land.  Every living thing there was lived in the water.

And I thought, "Wait, that can't mean what it sounds like."

But it does.  During those three periods -- which together comprise 90% of the history of the Earth -- the land masses were completely barren.  Rock, sand, dust, dirt (with no organic matter whatsoever), stretching over entire continents.

You think the Sahara is a vast wasteland.  Every square kilometer of the early Earth looked like that, without even the occasional palm tree or camel to break the monotony.

Strange to think of an Earth so unlike what we see around us today.  Even after life colonized the land -- starting with plants living around the margins of bodies of water, in the early Silurian -- it would still have looked pretty foreign, and I'm not just talking about dinosaurs, here.  During the Carboniferous Period there were dragonflies with three-foot wingspans, and centipedes almost big enough to ride.  The Devonian, one step earlier, had some fish called placoderms that look like they're wearing poorly-fitting plate armor.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Dunkleosteus BW, CC BY 3.0]

In fact, it was a discovery dating to the Devonian that spurred me to write this post.  Last week a paper appeared in Current Biology about a fossilized forest in Xinhang, China that spreads over 250,000 square meters.

Quite a significant find.

Don't, however, picture your typical forest here.  These weren't oaks and maples and pines, they were lycopsids, a group now represented only by club mosses, small and generally unassuming plants you'll find in moist forest understories.  But in the Devonian, they got big.  The largest were over seven meters tall, or about the size of your average dogwood or crabapple tree.

But they didn't look anything like modern trees.  More like something Doctor Seuss would have drawn.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Imagine a whole forest of these short, skinny trees and you've got the idea.

"The large density as well as the small size of the trees could make the Xinhang forest very similar to a sugarcane field, although the plants in Xinhang forest are distributed in patches," said Deming Wang, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Beijing University, who co-authored the study.  "It might also be that the Xinhang lycopsid forest was much like the mangroves along the coast, since they occur in a similar environment and play comparable ecologic roles."

So our picture of this odd world, when fish were the dominant life-form and the only land animals were primitive amphibians, insects, and arachnids, is becoming more complete.  Think about that next time you go for a walk in the woods.  You might not only ponder what the land you're walking on looked like 400 million years ago, but how different it might look like 400 million years from now -- during which evolution will have had plenty of time to generate, as Darwin put it, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Doubling down on error

Is it just me, or is the defining hallmark of discourse these days a steadfast refusal to admit when you're wrong?

Surprisingly enough I'm not referring here to Donald Trump, who has raised a casual disdain for the truth to near-mythic proportions.  What's even more astonishing, though, is his followers' determination to believe everything he says, even when it contradicts what he just said.  Trump could say, "The sky is green!  It is also purple-and-orange plaid!  And I didn't say either of those things!  Also, I am not here!" and his devotees would just nod and smile and comment on what an honest and godly man he is and how great America is now that we've been abandoned by all our allies and the national debt is a record 22 trillion dollars.

In this case, though, I'm referring to two Republican policy wonks who apparently wouldn't believe climate change was happening if the entire continent spontaneously burst into flame.  The first was Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, who was pissed off by Bernie Sanders publicly calling Trump an idiot for not accepting climate change, and responded in a tweet, "They can’t even predict if it will rain on tues but we are certain about the weather 12 yrs from now."

This is such an egregious straw man that it's almost a work of art.  In 21 words, we find the following:

• Weather ≠ climate.  For fuck's sake.  We've been through this how many times before?
• Meteorologists are, actually, quite good at predicting when and where it will rain.  Weather is a complex affair, so they don't always get it right, but if the evening weather report says your annual family picnic tomorrow is going to get a drenching, you should probably pay attention.
• Knowing the climatic trends tells you exactly nothing about "the weather twelve years from now."  Cf. my earlier comment about how weather ≠ climate.
• Predictions and trends don't imply certainty.  Ever.  But if 99% of working climatologists believe that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and that it's going to have drastic negative effects not only on the environment but ourselves, I'm gonna listen to them rather than to a guy whose main occupation seems to be sneering at people he disagrees with.

Then there was writer and pontificator Dinesh d'Souza, who posted a video of kangaroos hopping about in the snow with the caption, "Global warming comes to Australia.  Unless you want to believe your lying eyes!"

Unsurprisingly, within minutes d'Souza was excoriated by hundreds of people letting him know that (1) the Earth is spherical, implying that (2) there are these things called "hemispheres," which (3) cause the seasons, and (4) since Australia is in the opposite one than North America, they're experiencing winter right now.  Also, he was informed more than once that the largest mountain range in Australia is named "the Snowy Mountains," and it's for an analogous reason that the Rocky Mountains got their name by virtue of being composed largely of rocks.

A grove of native trees in New South Wales, Australia.  They're called "snow gums."  Guess why?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thennicke, Snow gums, Dead Horse Gap NSW Australia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What gets me about this is not that two laypeople made a mistake about science.  That is gonna happen because (let's face it) science can be hard.  What I find astonishing is that when confronted with multitudes of fact-based objections, neither man said, "Wow, that sure was a dumb statement!  What a goober I am."  Both of them took the strategy of "Death Before Backing Down," and I can nearly guarantee that this incident will not change their minds one iota, and that (given the opportunity) they will make equally idiotic statements next time.

Look, I'm not claiming I'm infallible.  Far from it.  But what I will say is that if I'm wrong, I'll admit it -- and if it's in print (as here at Skeptophilia) I'll post a correction or retraction, or (if the error was egregious enough) delete the post entirely.  I've done so more than once over the nine years I've had this blog, and although admitting you're mistaken is never pleasant, it's absolutely critical to honest... everything.

But that seems to be a lost art lately.  The attitude these days is, "If someone proves you're wrong, keep saying the same thing, only be more strident."  Evidently truth these days isn't about who has the stronger evidence, but who yells the loudest.  It's no wonder the American citizenry is, as a whole, so misinformed, especially on scientific matters -- in science the touchstone is not volume but factual support.

And that seems to be the last thing any of these people are looking at.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Messages in our genes

Yesterday a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a bizarre claim from a couple of scientists in Kazakhstan tying together two of my favorite subjects: genetics and linguistics.

It's also a good opportunity to apply Betteridge's Law, which says that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered "no."  The link was to a story in Ancient Origins entitled, "Are Alien Messages Encoded in our DNA?"  ("No.")

The gist of the claim is that the Earth was seeded early in its history by aliens, and that all terrestrial organisms have DNA sequences that encode messages from these aliens.  My first thought was that the scientists had mistaken the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" for a non-fiction documentary.

But apparently this isn't the case.  The scientists, Vladimir Sherbak and Maxim Makukov, claim that they've discovered a numerical pattern in DNA that is non-random (and presumably independent of the patterns dictated by its genetic information).  "Once fixed, the code [in our DNA] might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales," Makukov said. "Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature...  Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.  Furthermore, it includes the use of decimal notation and logical transformations that are accurate and systematic."

Okay, I have a variety of problems with this.

First, the genetic problem.  There is no DNA sequence that stays "unchanged over cosmological timescales," with the exception of the very few sequences that are so strongly selected for that any mutation in them would kill the organism.  (An example is the gene for cytochrome c, which is nearly identical in every aerobic organism studied.)  Other sequences accrue mutations at a fairly steady rate, which is why (other than the noted exceptions) your DNA is different from that of a pine tree.  So if the aliens had dumped some meaningful sequence of nitrogenous bases into the primordial soup, the likelihood of the sequence surviving three billion years of random mutations is effectively zero.

Second, though, there's the linguistic problem, which boils down to "you can find a pattern in any string of symbols if there are no rules by which you analyze it, and the pattern could be anything."  I wrote about this all the way back in 2012, when a guy named Michael Drosnin claimed that if you mess around with the Hebrew text for the five books of the Torah, you can find passages that predict everything from the Holocaust to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  Drosnin's method was completely bass-ackwards; he didn't have any particular message he was looking for, and used an algorithm that looked at every possible sequence of symbols (every other letter, every third letter, every fourth, etc.) until he found something that seemed meaningful.

Then mathematician Brendan McKay showed that he could do exactly the same thing with the novel Moby Dick.  And I don't think Drosnin, or anyone else, thinks that Moby Dick was divinely inspired.

So for a variety of reasons, the claim by Sherbak and Makukov doesn't really hold water.  Our DNA does contain an important message -- the instructions for building every protein we make -- but that doesn't mean that it was put there by aliens, nor that there's any other message there waiting to be found.  As always, I'm fascinated enough with the science; I don't need any pseudoscientific gobbledygook to add seasoning to the mix.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Nice rice

It's important to keep your brain connected when you read articles in popular media that start with the line, "Scientists Have Just Discovered That..."

Between the lure of advertiser revenue from clickbait and the simple fact that a lot of laypeople can't tell peer-reviewed science from loony claims, it's easy to get fooled.  I saw a pretty egregious example of that a couple of days ago, in an article that claimed that scientists have shown that "intentionality" changes the spoil rate of cooked rice.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

No, I'm not making this up.  I found the original research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which a little bit of digging suggests a specialty in fringe-y, and sometimes cringe-y, claims.  The paper is entitled "Human Mental Intentionality on the Aesthetics of Cooked Rice and Escherichia coli Growth," by Alan W. L. Lai, Bonny B. H. Yuen, and Richard Burchett, of Beijing Normal University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the United International College of Guangdong Province (China), respectively.

The gist of the experiment was that they had a group of people think happy thoughts at a bowl of cooked rice, a second thought think negative thoughts, and a third group think neutral thoughts, then had people evaluate the bowls of rice for their "aesthetics," and also measured the amount of E. coli growth in each bowl.  Now for myself, the amount of E. coli I want in my bowl of rice is zero, but apparently that's not a likely outcome.  The authors write:

This study examines the “intentionality hypothesis”—i.e. subjects’ ability to mentally infl uence microbial growth in samples of cooked rice.  Over a 30-day period (under triple-blind conditions), subjects focused their positive and negative thoughts (‘mental intentionality’) toward three randomly formed groups of cooked rice samples (positive intentionality, negative intentionality, and a control group).  After 30 days, pictures were taken of the nine rice samples (three groups, each group was conducted in triplicate), which were then judged for visual aesthetic value.  Findings show aesthetic ratings of ‘positive’ rice samples to be significantly higher than those for ‘negative’ and ‘control’ ones (p ≤ 0.05), with no significant difference between negative and control sample ratings (p ≥ 0.05).  A further test entailed a 7-day study measuring an Escherichia coli strain (a type of coliform that is closely associated with food safety, whose presence often indicates food poisoning and spoilage) in vitro under the same conditions of stimuli as the rice samples.  Results show positive intention to be associated with lower E. coli division rate when compared with the “control” and “negative intention” groups, thereby further supporting the hypothesis, as well as suggesting an emerging inference, that intentionality might be associated with microbial growth and visual aesthetic ratings.

We're told that the negative thoughts included reprimands, which brings up the question of how you could effectively reprimand rice.  "No no!  Bad rice!" doesn't seem particularly appropriate, given that it's the sort of thing you say to dogs when they do something they're not supposed to, such as swiping an entire wedge of expensive brie from the kitchen counter, and eating the whole thing including the plastic wrapper.  (Yes, that's the voice of experience, right there.)  But with rice, I'm not sure how this would work.  What exactly did you expect the rice to be doing?  More specifically, what was it doing that deserved a reprimand?  I've observed cooked rice carefully, and mostly what it does is sit there.  Almost anything else it might do would be a significant shock, and the first thing I'd think of doing is yelling "What the fuck?" and jumping up out of my chair, not saying "Bad rice!" in a disapproving tone.

Anyhow, the results seem to me to be pretty nebulous.  The aesthetic score ranges from zero to four, and the positive-thought rice had an average score of 1.5 ± 0.3, the negative-thought rice 1.0 ± 0.2, and the control rice 0.9 ± 0.2.  So not only were the scores pretty broad-brush (0-4 seems like a kind of coarse-grained scale), they were all relatively close, especially the negative and the control groups.  The E. coli measurements are equally suspect; here the positive and negative groups were fairly close together, and the control group significantly lower than either one.  (If you want to see the graphed data, I direct you to the paper I have linked above.)

So it seems to me that if either experiment suggests anything, it's that rice doesn't like people staring at it meaningfully, regardless of what they're thinking.

Another red flag in this paper is their referencing the completely discredited "research" by Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist who made the claim that if you think negative thoughts at water while it's freezing, it forms ugly crystals.  No, I'm not making this up either, and despite the fact that it has never been successfully replicated, it continues to resurface every time someone claims to have discovered the Magical Quantum Frequency of Love.

Like Emoto's Happy Ice experiment, I'm not buying the Nice Rice results until they are replicated, under controlled conditions, by scientists who don't have a dog in the race.  Note that I'm not accusing Lai et al. of falsifying results, I'm just suspicious enough about their methodology -- not to mention the complete lack of a mechanism by which any of this could work -- that until someone can duplicate their results and show a statistically significant difference in a variable that is rigorously quantifiable, I'm in the dubious column.

So if you're mad at your bowl of rice, my feeling is you should not hesitate to berate it mercilessly.  It will not become bacteria-laden and unattractive thereby.  On the other hand, if you are someone who gets angry at your food, you might want to seek out a good counselor who can help you to focus your ire on more deserving targets, such as people who make specious claims, and the irresponsible media outlets that disseminates them.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

The most haunted spot in Arkansas

I'm back from the annual Oghma Creative Media writers' retreat, after ten days of schmoozing with other authors and enjoying the lovely hills and valleys of the Ozark Mountains in northwestern Arkansas.  During my stay there, the CEO of Oghma (and my dear friend) Casey Cowan took me around to some of the local attractions, and because of my interest in all things paranormal one of these was the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs.  [Note: all photographs taken by me except as noted.]

Gordon Bonnet, Paranormal Investigator.  [Photograph by Casey Cowan, used with permission]

Eureka Springs is a charming little town, with steep, narrow, twisty streets, beautifully-maintained old houses, and flower-filled gardens.  The crown jewel, though, is the Crescent, which sits on a high point overlooking the deep forested valleys north of the town.  It was built in the 1880s for the then-astronomical cost of $294,000, and it became renowned for its opulence and grandeur.

The hotel, however, fell upon hard times once visitors realized that the "healing waters" that put Eureka Springs on the map in the first place were actually just plain water, and in 1908 the Crescent became the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women.  Even the college didn't do well, however, especially after a series of tragedies (one of which is the subject of the haunting novel by J. C. Crumpton, Silence in the Garden) that culminated in the building's abandonment in 1934.

One of the hallways on the second floor.  Is it just me, or are there two spots on the floor that look like eyes?

In 1937 it was purchased by one Norman Baker, who revitalized the claim of the alleged healing properties of the water in the area, and in the process defrauded cancer patients of an estimated four million dollars -- which led to his being sent to Leavenworth Prison, and the Crescent was again abandoned.

Looking down the staircase from the fourth floor.  Kind of Escherian, isn't it?

Repeated (failed) attempts to renovate the place were foiled by running out of funds and (worst of all) a massive fire in 1957, but in 1997 the building was purchased by a couple named Marty and Elise Roenigk, who promised to restore the Crescent to its original grandeur.  And they have.  It's an impressive place, and when you're there you feel like you've stepped back in time a hundred years or more.

The central fireplace on the first floor

Of course, my primary interest was not the admittedly beautiful furnishings and architecture, but the Crescent's reputation for being haunted.  It has quite a retinue of ghosts -- an Irish stonemason who supposedly died in a fall from the building's roof while it was being constructed, a nurse from its days as a fraudulent cancer hospital, and a girl who committed suicide during the 1920s (the latter is the subject of Crumpton's novel).  In addition, there are various apparitions seen on the third floor, which was the location of "Doctor" Baker's morgue and autopsy room.  The hotel's phone system was handled for a time using the original antique switchboard, but that was discontinued when the switchboard operators reported getting calls from the basement -- which at the time was completely empty.

A staircase where people report seeing the ghost of a little girl.  [Note: the figure looming behind me in the reflection is not a ghost, but my friend Casey.  So no luck there.]

Then there's the Victorian gentleman who is often seen in the bar, sitting quietly in a tophat and formal dress, who doesn't answer if you address him; the dignified lady reported from room 419 who will introduce herself as "Theodora, a cancer patient," if you ask her, but then vanish immediately afterward; a small boy who haunts the kitchen; and the appearance of dozens of ghostly dancers in the ballroom who disappear as soon as you turn on the lights.

Sad to say, I didn't see any of 'em.  We did, however, pass two women in 1920s garb sitting on a bench, and after I passed them I whispered to Casey, "You did see those women, right?"  He assured me he had, and explained that they were leading a tour for the hotel, thus missing a valuable opportunity to scare the absolute shit out of me.

On the other hand, Casey's wife Amy, and our friend Venessa Cerasale (who is also Oghma's ultra-competent Chief Operations Officer), both report having had creepy experiences in the Crescent, and both of them are about as level-headed and pragmatic as you could hope for.  So I don't know if it was my aura of disbelief that kept the spirits at bay, or if they were just taking a break for the evening.

I do want to go back, however, and maybe even spend a night or two there.  For one thing, Eureka Springs is a cool town and deserves way more exploration than we had time for.  Plus, I don't think an hour of wandering the grounds is really offering the ghosts their best shot at me.  So I'm sure I'll be back for another visit to "the most haunted spot in Arkansas" -- and maybe have more success in rousing the Crescent's deceased residents next time.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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