Imagination into reality

Yesterday a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article by the ever-entertaining Nick Redfern, well-known paranormal researcher and writer who has been featured a good many times on various television shows on the topic.  It's called "The Supernatural Hazards of Being a Writer," so naturally my interest perked up when I saw the headline.

Redfern's claim is that writing about paranormal stuff makes you more likely to experience it, and cites as examples stories about himself and his friends and colleagues who have had bizarre things happen after writing about the occult.  "When you immerse yourself in – and write about – the realms of the unknown," Redfern writes, "the 'things' that inhabit those same realms are quickly driven to intrude upon your personal space.  And, given the chance, they’ll manipulate you to mind-bending degrees."

So really, it's the New Age idea of the "Law of Attraction," wherein your positive or negative thoughts call such experiences into reality.  I shouldn't call it "New Age," though, because the Law of Attraction has been around for a very long time, especially in its negative connotations.  Worry and fear can conjure up such mental demons that it's very easy to slip into believing they're real, that your mind has given them form and substance.

And once you're there, the idea that you might have opened Pandora's Box is one more short step.  "I’m here to warn you," Redfern writes, "and to warn you to the absolute best of my ability – that opening doors of the occult variety is a relatively easy thing to achieve, whether deliberately, consciously, or even accidentally.  Closing the doors to the non-human things that so relish crossing the veil when called forth, however – or even as the mood takes them – is no easy task.  In fact, it’s nigh on impossible.  Unless, that is, you’re aware of certain procedures designed to forever banish their icy presence."

It's what H. P. Lovecraft wrote about so chillingly in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward -- "Do not call up that which you cannot put down."

So okay, pretty scary stuff.  The question, of course, is: is it true?

I'm pretty dubious, frankly.  Lovecraft himself is an interesting case-in-point; he wrote of some pretty terrifying supernatural entities, immersing himself in the evils of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and the rest of the gang for his entire adult life, yet remained a staunch skeptic the whole time.  In fact, he once wrote to a fan who claimed to have had scary paranormal experiences while wandering in the ruins of the cursed town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, "I rather hate to point this out, but Innsmouth doesn't exist.  I know this for certain, you see, because I made it up."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons BenduKiwi, Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

On the other hand, it's been pointed out more than once that Lovecraft died at the young age of 46, something that causes much eyebrow-waggling amongst people who think he might have been taken out by the Deep Ones for giving away too many of their secrets.  (In fact, I riffed on that theme in my short story "She Sells Seashells," one of a handful of quasi-Lovecraftian things I've written.)

On yet another hand (I've got three hands), I wonder about my own case, given that I not only write paranormal fiction, I've been delving into paranormal claims in this blog for nine years now -- and a lot longer than that, if you count an ongoing fascination with the occult that runs back into my long-past teenage years.  And I have never -- not once -- had an experience of the paranormal.  Even considering my immersing myself in books and legends and spooky claims, and being (not to put too fine a point on it) a suggestible type who has way too vivid an imagination for his own good, my life has been remarkably specter-free.

So I think Redfern's claim really boils down to dart-thrower's bias.  I'd easily believe that since he and his friends live in the world of supernatural claims, they're more likely to notice any odd stuff that happens, and (once noticed) interpret it as a manifestation of the paranormal.  Whether any of those things are actually examples of what he calls "unrelenting supernatural attack," I doubt.

However, if I'm visited today by a creature from the Shadow World, I suppose it'll serve me right.  It's a good opportunity, because my wife is out of town, and I'm alone in the house with two dogs who are (frankly) completely useless as watchdogs.  One is laid back to the point that I sometimes check her pulse to make sure she's still alive, and the other (a pit bull mix who looks threatening) is such a big coward that he's been known to hide behind me when confronted by something scary, such as a chipmunk.  So I'll issue a challenge to any spirits or monsters or whatnot that read Skeptophilia (hey, it could happen) -- bring it on.  I'll be waiting.

As the old lady said in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, "Go ahead, do your worst."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

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

Windows of the soul

Yesterday I ran into a study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that strikes me as being substantially correct even though I have some misgivings about the general methodology.

The paper is called "Your Soul Spills Out: The Creative Act Feels Self-Disclosing," by Jack A. Goncalo and Joshua H. Katz, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The researchers were looking into whether creative ideas would reveal the "true personality" (whatever that actually means), and if so, might clue in the listener/reader in ways that were never intended.

The study consisted of five separate experiments, with a total of over twelve hundred test subjects.  The first three experiments focused on whether a person asked to generate creative ideas (one of the ones used was "come up with five new scents for candles") felt afterward as if the researchers had a better lens into the person's core personality than they did before.  The fourth experiment looked at whether narrowing the range of choices (e.g., "name five new fruit scents for candles" rather than "name five new scents of any type for candles"), and the fifth asked the participants to rank their ideas on a scale of "creative" to "conventional," and looked at whether there was a correlation between that and the degree to which they felt they'd revealed themselves.

The authors write:

Breaking from the typical focus on the antecedents of creativity, we investigate the psychological and interpersonal consequences of being creative.  Across five experiments, we find that generating creative ideas is revealing of the self and thus prompts the perception of self-disclosure.  Individuals respond to the expectation to be creative with greater self-focus—adopting their own idiosyncratic perspective on the task and thinking about their own personal preferences and experiences in connection to the problem.  Because creative ideas derived from self-focused attention are uniquely personal, the act of sharing a creative idea is, in turn, perceived to be revealing of the self.  Finally, an interactive dyad study shows that sharing creative ideas makes partners more confident in the accuracy of judgments they made about each other’s personality.

On the one hand, this strikes me as kind of a "duh."  A person who comes up with candle scents like "vanilla chai" and "ocean breeze" is not the same type as someone who would come up with "dog farts" and "zombie breath."  Thinking outside the box (in this case way outside the box) does tell you something about a person's personality.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LaurMG, Glass creativity finalrevis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

However, there's the notoriously difficult factor of weighing how close a person's self-assessment is to reality.  We don't see ourselves very accurately, most of the time, which is why Robert Burns quipped, "O, would some power the giftie gi'e us. to see ourselves as others see us; it would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion."

So a person saying she thinks her creative ideas revealed her soul, and those ideas actually telling us something about her we didn't already know, aren't the same thing at all.  Even when we're being creative, we show the parts of us we choose to, and suppress other parts that we'd rather people not see.

But.  I have more than once stated, "If you want to know me, read my fiction."  I've mentioned before how shy I am in person, which is why there are people I've known for years who don't really have much of a clue what I'm really like.  But a lot of my fiction embodies the things I think are deeply meaningful in life -- relationships, compassion, trust, loyalty, humor, perseverance, respect.  I think if you read a couple of my novels, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I am.

And I know you can sometimes reveal things you didn't intend to.  I related a few months ago how my writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs, was entirely unsurprised by my revelation that I was bisexual.  "Every novel you've written," she told me, "has at least one scene with a gorgeous shirtless guy."  And I still remember the student who read my novella House of Mirrors and came up to me with a grin after he'd finished it and said, "You know, you play the unemotional, plain-spoken, pragmatic science teacher at your day job, but deep down you are a complete romantic sap."

What could I do?  I laughed and said, "You figured me out."

So in some ways I agree with the results Goncalo and Katz found.  "The instruction to be creative is very common in organizations but it is not benign," Goncalo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "In the process of being creative, you rely on your own idiosyncratic point of view and unique preferences, thus making the ideas you share revealing of your true self.  More importantly, other people listen to your ideas and make judgments about you.  We found that when people heard another individual’s creative ideas, they became more confident that their judgments about their personality were accurate.  People are not just judging your ideas, they are making personal judgments about you based on your ideas."

Creativity is a means for self-expression, and as such of course it reveals something about a person.  And also of course, people who see your creative ideas are going to judge them -- and you.  But I seriously doubt that an analysis of a person's creativity would tell you anything you couldn't have found out in other ways, and it's hard to see how it gives you a bead on the "true self" when there isn't even a good working definition of what that phrase means.

So (anecdotally) I'd say they're right, but I'm not really sure where it gets us.  Personality is complex, and our behaviors combine both conscious and unconscious efforts to show some features and hide others.  But we already kind of knew that.

Anyway, I'm off to work on my work-in-progress, which is a Lovecraftian sort of story about a guy trying to rescue his missing twin brother from a subterranean death-cult.  Make of it what you will.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

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

Sleep clocks

Most of us can vouch from first-hand experience that we don't think straight when we're sleep-deprived.

I used to be a terrible insomniac -- I can only say "used to" because part of it was that I had obstructive sleep apnea, despite having exactly zero of the usual predisposing risk factors.  (Turns out I have a "narrow tracheal opening," which was closing up -- get this -- twenty-three times an hour.  No wonder I wasn't sleeping well.)  In any case, I sleep better now because I'm on a CPAP machine, which keeps me breathing, especially when I lie on my back.

But that hasn't fixed the fact that I'm a nervous, twitchy type, and usually my brain is going at Warp 6, often about bizarre topics.  I remember once, in the days before Google, losing nearly an entire night's sleep trying to remember the name of the Third Musketeer.  (Athos, Porthos, and... so you aren't kept up by it, his name was Aramis.)

Because that's obviously a critical enough piece of information that my brain has to keep me awake over it.  Can't wait till the morning, obviously.

Then there are earworms, little snippets of music that keep running around and around AND AROUND AND AROUND in your head, until you'd be willing to use anything to excise it, up to and including a reciprocating saw.  Like the time a couple of weeks ago my brain thought it would be fun at two in the morning to keep singing the same phrase from Manfred Mann's song "Blinded by the Light" eight hundred times in a row.  For the record, I hated that song before, and now I hate it more.  Also for the record, no one is ever going to convince me that he's not singing, "wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night."

But I digress.

So my point is, we all know that sleep deprivation is harmful, but it's much harder to determine exactly why that is.  But we've just gotten a new window on the question with two studies that appeared in Science this week suggesting that what's happening when we sleep is that we're resetting our circadian rhythms -- more specifically, the chemicals controlling it -- and when that doesn't happen, it seriously impairs our brain's function in a variety of ways.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sculpture of a Sleeping Man-New Jersey https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tomwsulcer]

In the first, conducted by a team at the University of Zurich led by neuroscientist Sara Noya, we learn that the production of certain pieces of messenger RNA -- the first step in the production of proteins of all sorts, and therefore a good measure of gene activity -- is coordinated by the timing of sleep, and thrown off severely when a person is sleep deprived.  The authors write:

[We found that] that forebrain synaptic transcript accumulation [i.e. mRNAs] shows overwhelmingly daily rhythms, with two-thirds of synaptic transcripts showing time-of-day–dependent abundance independent of oscillations in the soma.  These transcripts formed two sharp temporal and functional clusters, with transcripts preceding dawn related to metabolism and translation and those anticipating dusk related to synaptic transmission.  Characterization of the synaptic proteome around the clock demonstrates the functional relevance of temporal gating for synaptic processes and energy homeostasis.  Unexpectedly, sleep deprivation completely abolished proteome but not transcript oscillations.  Altogether, the emerging picture is one of a circadian anticipation of messenger RNA needs in the synapse followed by translation as demanded by sleep-wake cycles.

In the second, written by a team led by Franziska Brüning of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, they found that sleep deprivation had a much larger effect on these chemical circadian rhythms than anyone could have anticipated:

The circadian clock drives daily changes of physiology, including sleep-wake cycles, through regulation of transcription, protein abundance, and function.  Circadian phosphorylation [a process associated with energy activation of proteins] controls cellular processes in peripheral organs, but little is known about its role in brain function and synaptic activity...  Half of the synaptic phosphoproteins [we studied], including numerous kinases, had large-amplitude rhythms peaking at rest-activity and activity-rest transitions.  Bioinformatic analyses revealed global temporal control of synaptic function through phosphorylation, including synaptic transmission, cytoskeleton reorganization, and excitatory/inhibitory balance.  Sleep deprivation abolished 98% of all phosphorylation cycles in synaptoneurosomes, indicating that sleep-wake cycles rather than circadian signals are main drivers of synaptic phosphorylation, responding to both sleep and wake pressures.

 All of which makes it even more unfortunate that we live in a society where the various pressures and distractions make it difficult to get a good night's sleep.  In fact, I've heard people doing what amounts to bragging about not sleeping, as if that was some sort of badge of honor signifying how hard they work or what kind of stresses they're dealing with.

The bottom line, here, is that there is a dramatic connection between not only adequate sleep every night and normal brain function, but between sleep and general health.  Not that it's easy, I get that.  We've all got a lot to deal with in our lives that can interfere with sleeping.  But my point is that we need to start prioritizing sleep as much as we prioritize such healthful habits as exercise and good diet.  Wanting to sleep more isn't laziness.  It's doing what it takes so that when we are awake, we're function at our optimum.

So, on that note, I think I'm gonna take a nap.  If I can stop rerunning brilliant and insightful lyrics like, "Little early birdie came by in his curly whirly, and asked me if I needed a ride" over and over.

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

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Air Jordans

New from the I Swear I'm Not Making This Up department, we have: a company selling "Jesus sneakers."

Brooklyn-based design company MSCHF has launched a new concept in trainers, which are Nike-emblazoned athletic shoes which have several interesting features:

• "Holy water" from the River Jordan injected into the soles
• A crucifix on the shoelaces
• The fabric part is made of "100% frankincense wool," whatever the fuck that is
• An inscription saying, "Matthew 14:25" ("In the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went to them, walking on the sea")

They went on sale on Tuesday, and sold out in a matter of minutes.

Now, for the kicker.  I haven't told you how much they cost.

Three thousand dollars a pair.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It is hard for me to fathom that there are that many people with enough disposable income to blow what for many of us is at least a month's salary on a pair of holy shoes.  I mean, did they think the shoes would actually allow you to walk on water, or something?  Because that at least would be kind of funny, combining loopy religious beliefs with the Darwin Awards.

Turns out, the Chief Commerce Officer of MSCHF, Daniel Greenberg, thought the whole thing was a joke.  He'd been amused by "collab culture," where two companies with unrelated products will team up for some kind of marketing drive (a good example is Uber and Spotify).  MSCHF thought they'd push it one step further, with a collab between a company and a divine entity.  "[W]e wanted to make a statement about how absurd collab culture has gotten," Greenberg said.  "We were wondering, what would a collab with Jesus Christ look like?"

Myself, I don't think they were "making a statement," or in fact, gave a rat's ass about the "absurdity" of collab efforts.  This was a money-making effort, pure and simple, and as such succeeded brilliantly.

There's a lot about this that bothers me, though.  It's not that I'm not sometimes critical of religion; any long-term readers of Skeptophilia know that I don't believe in giving a bye to hypocritical or immoral behavior simply because it comes under the heading "this is part of my religion."  But this isn't criticism of religion, unless you take it as some kind of twisted jab at people wanting to spend lots of money for something that they think will confer a blessing on them.

This is using people's beliefs and devotion to make money.

On the one hand, it's easy to laugh at anyone that gullible, but this is where we run head-on into one of the guiding principles of my life, which is, "Don't be a dick."  I have no problem with skewering sacred cows when it's warranted, but ridiculing people's cherished beliefs for no good reason -- even if you don't share those beliefs -- is nothing more than smug, self-righteous nastiness.

And it's a little hypocritical to lambast multi-million-dollar celebrity preachers like John Hagee and Franklin Graham for their smug, self-righteous nastiness, and then engage in the same behavior yourself.

So I find the whole thing distasteful, and Greenberg's blithe attitude toward using people's beliefs to rip them off is a little sickening.  You might expect, given my staunch atheism, that I would have joined in the laughter at people willing to fork over three thousand bucks for a pair of Jesus sneakers -- if so, sorry, I'm not laughing.  There's plenty about religion and politics and the world in general to criticize, or even to laugh at.  This one is just self-congratulatory cupidity -- and, honestly, says more about the people selling the shoes than it does about the ones buying them.

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

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Service station ghosts, haunted wells, and bloodless cows

I get a lot of odd links sent to me, which I suppose I should expect, given that strange claims are kind of our stock-in-trade here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  I hasten to add that I really appreciate the effort my readers make to keep me informed as to what's going on in the Wide World of Weirdness, so as the talk show hosts used to say, "Keep those cards and letters comin'."

In the last couple of days I was sent links to three stories (one of them was sent to me four times), so I thought I should let my readers know what's going on in ParanormalLand.

First, we have a claim out of Mayfield, County Cork, Ireland, that a ghost has been spotted haunting a service station.

Twice, apparently.  The first time was caught on closed-circuit camera from inside the service station convenience store, where the ghost tossed about a package of cookies and a basket of bananas; the second time was on the CCTV outside the station.  The videos are both on the link provided.  The first one was pretty obvious, although I maintain that someone trying to create a hoopla could easily have accomplished the whole thing using a piece of string tied to the cookie package and banana basket.  As far as the second one goes, I'm... unimpressed.  I've watched it through twice, and frankly, I don't see a damned thing.  There's some repeated blurring, but that looks to me like water on the camera lens (this is southwestern Ireland, after all, so it was probably raining), but nothing that looks even remotely like a "figure of a woman."

That hasn't stopped people from acting like it's incontrovertible proof of the existence of the spirit world.

"I started Wednesday morning and saw biscuits on the ground and thought nothing of it," said shop owner Tom O'Flynn.  "Then I went around and saw a large fruit bowl on the ground so we checked CCTV and it looks as though it was pushed off.  I would have been very skeptical with things like this, but I looked at all angles and I'm at a loss with this...  This was at 12:30 at night and both incidents happened about 10 minutes part.  The bowl was full of bananas, oranges, and apples, and it got pulled over and there was no one around...  Jesus, when I saw it my heart kind of pounded.  I didn't know what to make of it, I looked at all angles and couldn't get my head around it."

Suffice it to say I wasn't quite as taken aback, but then, I wasn't there when it happened.

Then there's an investigation of a "haunted well" near Basildon, Essex, England, where people allegedly burst into tears and want to kill each other.

Called Cash's Well, the place is named after one Edwin Cash, who true to his name tried to make some quick money off "healing waters" from the site in the early twentieth century, but went bankrupt when people reported the well water making them sick.  Since then, the area around the well has gotten the reputation for being haunted (aficionados of ghosts claim that's why the water had the ill effects it did -- it was cursed, or something).  A recent investigation resulted in people confirming feeling wonky when they got near the well -- several reported feeling cold, "goosebumpy," or sad, and one reported they had unexplained violent urges.

The group worked with "spirit guides," who fulfilled their duties to the letter when the investigators got lost looking for the well, and one of the guides said, "Turn left."

Being a rather rabid fan of Doctor Who, I'm not sure I would have responded that that positively.

Anyhow, I was intrigued until I heard the explanation given by Russell (no last name provided), of Essex Ghost Hunters, about the nature of the phenomenon.  "We've all got an aura, which is scientifically proven," Russell told a reporter for Essex Online.  "We've all got a two-inch energy bubble that surrounds us all the time.   When spirits come close they will interact with that bubble, something has moved your aura and it's wobbling.  The two energies pull apart and that's what causes the vibration."

Righty-o.  Wobbly auras and energy bubbles and energies pulling apart.  "Scientifically proven."

Next.

Last, there's the link that's been sent to me (as of this writing) four times, about a rather gruesome situation on a ranch in eastern Oregon, where five cattle have been completely exsanguinated -- and had specific body parts removed -- most bizarrely, leaving no evidence in the way of tire tracks, footprints, or other marks.

The five bulls were all found this summer, missing their tongues and testicles, and -- according to rancher Colby Marshall -- "without one drop of blood."  This is a major loss to the ranch, so it's crazy to assume that the ranchers themselves had anything to do with it; unlike the ghost in the service station, they've got nothing to gain from fifteen minutes of fame, and (again, according to Marshall) lost thirty thousand dollars from the bulls' deaths.  

The Harney County Sheriff's Office has been looking into the incident, and Silvies Valley Ranch -- owner of the dead cattle -- are offering a $25,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  But the whole thing has the investigators baffled, because it's not like accomplishing this would have been easy.  "[The area is] rugged," Marshall said.  "I mean this is the frontier.  If some person, or persons, has the ability to take down a 2,000-pound range bull, you know, it's not inconceivable that they wouldn't have a lot of problems dealing with a 180-pound cowboy."

So employees of the ranch have been instructed to always go out (at least) in pairs, and never to leave the ranch building unarmed.

Of course, given the nature of the crime, the whole "aliens abducting cattle" thing has come up, but there's no evidence of that.  The problem is, there's no evidence at all.  Andie Davis, who with her husband operates a ranch nearby (and who two years also had cattle die under mysterious circumstances), found the absence of marks the most perplexing thing.

"Everything you do leaves tracks," Davis said.

So of the three stories, this is the one I find the oddest and the least explicable.  I'm still not going with aliens -- not without more to go on -- but I have to admit there's no other ready explanation.  Unlike flying cookies and goosebumpy auras, at least this story has some evidence that it's hard to explain away as a hoax or confirmation bias.

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

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness. Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.   Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the top floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.   It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction, Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Strange places

I remember when I took Quantum Physics as an undergraduate, many, many (many) years ago, my professor, Dr. John Matese, was fairly disparaging about the naming of the (then newly-discovered) quarks.  Up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm, he said, were (1) misleading, because the names sound like they tell you something about the particle but don't, and (2) were cutesie, giving laypeople an impression of scientists as being "whimsical."

He said the last word in tones that left us in no doubt about his opinion of whimsy.

At least one of those names is apt, though, and that's "strange."  There's a hypothesis going around -- among serious physicists, I hasten to state, not among the whimsical -- that under sufficient pressure, matter can form which contains strange quarks.  (Ordinary matter is formed entirely of the two lightest-mass quarks, up and down.)  This "strange matter" has the property of being able to convert surrounding matter to strange matter, a little like "Ice-Nine" in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.  And if that's not weird enough, if a hypothesis pieced together from papers by A. R. Bodmer in 1971 and Edward Witten in 1984 is correct, it might be that the ordinary matter you see around us is the fluke; it's "metastable," meaning given the right conditions it could convert to the more stable strange matter, and our regular old atoms and molecules would condense into droplets...

... called "strangelets."

Speaking of cutesie names.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brianzero, Quark wiki, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A paper published in the Journal of Astrophysics last week pushes the "strange matter hypothesis" a step further by suggesting that some of the astronomical objects we see may be strange, rather than ordinary, matter.  One possible place this stuff could live is the interior of neutron stars -- up till now thought to be extremely dense stuff, but the usual sort.  A team made up of physicists Abudushataer Kuerban, Jin-Jun Geng, Yong-Feng Huang, Hong-Shi Zong, and Hang Gong, of Nanjing University, has suggested that such bizarre matter may not just be confined to the cores of neutron stars -- it may be that there are whole planets of the stuff orbiting pulsars and even white dwarfs.

The authors write:

Since the true ground state of the hadrons may be strange quark matter (SQM), pulsars may actually be strange stars rather than neutron stars.  According to this SQM hypothesis, strange planets can also stably exist.  The density of normal matter planets can hardly be higher than 30 g cm−3. As a result, they will be tidally disrupted when its orbital radius is less than ∼5.6×10^10 cm, or when the orbital period (Porb) is less than ∼6100s.  On the contrary, a strange planet can safely survive even when it is very close to the host, due to its high density.  The feature can help us identify SQM objects.  In this study, we have tried to search for SQM objects among close-in exoplanets orbiting around pulsars. Encouragingly, it is found that four pulsar planets completely meet the criteria... and are thus good candidates for SQM planets.  The orbital periods of two other planets are only slightly higher than the criteria.  They could be regarded as potential candidates.  Additionally, we find that the periods of five white dwarf planets are less than 0.1 days.  We argue that they might also be SQM planets.  It is further found that the persistent gravitational wave emissions from at least three of these close-in planetary systems are detectable to LISA [the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna].  More encouragingly, the advanced LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] and Einstein Telescope are able to detect the gravitational wave bursts produced by the merger events of such SQM planetary systems, which will provide a unique test for the SQM hypothesis.

 These planets would be, in a word, strange.  Their densities aren't just "high," as the authors state; they're "really fucking high."  (I realize that descriptor might not pass the editors for the Journal of Astrophysics, but I maintain that it's more accurate.)  For purposes of comparison, gold -- one of the densest familiar substances -- has a density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter.  The material making up a strange planet is predicted to be on the order of 400 trillion grams per cubic centimeter.

A planet with this density would have a gravitational pull so intense that taking one step up onto a hill a centimeter high would require more energy than leaping from sea level to the top of Mount Everest in one bound.

Suffice it to say that walking about on a strange planet would be pretty much out of the question.

Of course, the idea that the planets analyzed by Kuerban et al. are made of strange matter may not turn out to bear up under further scrutiny.  But the fact that it's even possible we've located some large chunks of such an exotic material is pretty fantastic.  Whether it pans out or no, I think we can all agree on one thing:

The universe is a very strange place.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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