The firestarter

It is the nature of the world that sometimes we have to look at all of the available evidence, and not come to a conclusion.

It's tempting to think that science, and the skeptical approach, will always result in answers, but the sad fact is that sometimes we have to admit that (barring the uncovering of further data) we will never have an explanation.  This is something that often doesn't sit well with people, however.  We like understanding, we like everything to be tidy and clear, without loose ends, and the result is that we will sometimes settle for a bogus explanation simply because it feels better than saying, "We don't know."

Such, I believe, is the strange case of Carole Compton, the Scottish nanny who almost ended up spending decades in jail because of an accusation of attempted murder by pyrokinesis (starting fires with your mind) and witchcraft -- surprisingly, only forty years ago.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Compton is from Ayr, Scotland, but had fallen in love with an Italian man she'd met there and followed him back home.  While waiting for him to complete his military service, she took on a job as a nanny for a wealthy family near Rome.  The Riccis welcomed Carole into their home to look after their children, and all went well until a small religious picture fell off the wall as Carole walked by, prompting a maid to make the sign of the cross and raise her eyebrows about what it could mean.

That event was recalled several weeks later when Carole accompanied the Riccis on their annual vacation in the Alps, and a fire broke out in their vacation home, destroying the second floor completely.  Firemen said that the house had a history of electrical problems, and that was undoubtedly the cause.  But the Riccis began to question that explanation when two subsequent fires began in Carole's presence -- one in a trash can and the other in the bedroom of the Ricci's two-year-old son.

Shortly afterwards, the Riccis fired Carole.

Carole was rehired by another family, the Tontis, once again as a nanny.  The grandmother of the family, however, took an instant dislike to Carole, which was intensified to hatred and fear when once again Carole seemed to be the epicenter of bizarre occurrences -- a fire in a mattress, a vase falling from a table and breaking while no one was near it, and objects (including a religious figurine) flying off shelves and walls.  At this point, the word strega (witch) was used, and the talk started in earnest.

But it was all talk until a fire started in another mattress, this time in the room of three-year-old Agnese, the child Carole had been hired to care for.  The grandmother demanded that it be stopped, and the authorities intervened, and arrested Carole for attempted murder.

The media went wild about "the nanny they call a witch."  Some people claimed she was psychotic, and had engineered the incidents; others that there was a poltergeist following her around.  The consensus, though, was that she was possessed, and the demon was visiting its evil on the people she lived with.  It took over a year for her to come to trial (in December 1983), and she was found innocent of the attempted murder charge, but guilty on two counts of arson.  She was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but was released on time served and immediately left Italy to return to her native Scotland.

What really happened in the Compton case?  It hardly bears mention that I'm doubtful about the "poltergeist" and "demonic possession" explanations, not to mention the phenomena of telekinesis and pyrokinesis in general.  According to an article about Compton and other similar cases in The Scotsman, Compton now is living quietly with her husband, Zaroof Fazal, in a town in Yorkshire, and they have three school-age children.  Nothing further in the way of quasi-supernatural events has happened to her.  "What happened to me is something that never goes away," she told reporters.  "It was a dreadful ordeal...  I have a happy life now.  I try not to think about the past."

Not the sort of thing you'd expect if she suffered from Münchausen's-by-proxy, which is another explanation that has been put forward -- that she deliberately attempted to injure her young charges in order to garner attention and/or care.  Compton seemed horrified at the attention she was getting right from the beginning, and even she denied that anything supernatural was going on, although she didn't have an alternate explanation.  During her trial, noted supernatural investigator Guy Lyon Playfair (the man who did the study of the Enfield poltergeist) offered to look into the case, but Compton didn't want him to get involved, claiming that there must be a rational explanation and surely the Italian legal system would realize that.

No such rational explanation has ever been found.

Of the non-paranormal solutions to the case that have been proposed -- Compton being psychotic or suffering from Münchausen's-by-proxy, the fires having a natural cause (nearby electrical shorts, for example), and the falling objects being due to the fact that objects fall down sometimes -- none of them explain the entire story, nor why those events seemed to follow Compton around.  Even the people who accused Compton -- the Tonti grandmother, for example -- steadfastly claimed that the fires erupted and objects fell and broke without Compton touching them.  No one in the Tonti household said that Compton had gone around breaking things and setting fires deliberately; it was only after it got into the courts that this explanation was settled on, because no 20th century European judge would be willing to risk his or her reputation by seriously considering a charge of witchcraft.

So we're left where we started; some weird things happened in Carole Compton's presence in Italy in the 1980s, and no one knows why.

Not a satisfying explanation, by a longshot.  But as skeptics, we have to go as far as the evidence pushes us, and no further.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

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

Trick or tract

Halloween is this Thursday, so you know what that means: pumpkin decorations and skeletons and ghosts everywhere, candy of all kinds for sale in the stores, people excitedly coming up with creative costumes for parties and trick-or-treating, and the extremely religious telling people that indulging in any of the above will doom them for all eternity.

This time the harbinger of fire and brimstone is none other than Ken Ham, who runs Answers in Genesis and is most famous for "Ark Encounter," a museum (to use the term loosely) in Grant County, Kentucky that has as its mission convincing people that a book documenting the beliefs of a handful of Bronze-Age sheep herders is the best resource we have for understanding science.  According to Ham, here's the way it all went down:

• The Earth is only about six thousand years old.  Any evidence to the contrary is either flat wrong or was put there by Satan to fuck with us.
• In a matter of a few weeks, Noah built a boat capable of holding two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, using only hand tools and materials he could find in the desert.   [Nota bene: The Ark Encounter itself, supposed to be a modernized replica of the Ark, took several years and a few million dollars to finish.  And that was using huge work crews equipped with power tools.]
• The dinosaurs died because they missed getting aboard the Ark.  Oh, and before the Fall of Man, the dinosaurs were all peaceful herbivores.  T. rex, apparently, used his Big Nasty Pointy Teeth to munch on carrots.
• It rained enough to cover the entire land surface area of the planet, and after forty days all the water just kind of went away, presumably down a big drain in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or something.
• Afterwards, the kangaroos, dingoes, and wombats hopped, skulked, and waddled their way back to Australia unaided, conveniently leaving behind no traces of their thousand-mile journey.

But other than that, it makes complete sense.

Looks to me like there's an issue here with the lions.  Maybe they're gay lions, I dunno.  But even though I applaud them for coming out of the closet, it would still be problematic with respect to rebuilding the lion population, post-Flood.

So anyway, we're already on shaky ground, reality-wise, with Ken Ham weighing in on pretty much anything.  That didn't stop him from giving the devout some suggestions on how to deal with the upcoming Day of Evil.  "One way you can make the most of this once-a-year opportunity is by giving gospel tracts to children and/or their parents," Ham said.

Yeah, that'll make you popular in your neighborhood.

He also recommended buying (from his online store -- of course) some "million-dollar bills" printed with a picture of a T. rex on one side and a picture of the Ark on the other, with edifying messages such as:

• Have you ever lied, stolen or used God’s name in vain?  If so, you’ve broken God’s law.  The penalty for your crimes against God is death and eternal hell because God is holy and just.
• If you have engaged in lust, this is the same as committing adultery.  God sees you as guilty of sin.  The penalty of sin is death and eternity in hell.
• We broke God's law, but Jesus paid our fine.  Proving He satisfied God's justice, He rose from the dead.  Now God as Judge can legally dismiss our case!

Now wait a moment.  "Legally?"  What does that even mean in this context?  Isn't the whole point of the Bible that God can pretty much do whatever he damn well pleases, and we humans just have to suck it up and deal?  Seems like if God wanted to forgive us, he would have just done it, and not gone through the whole nasty crucifixion business.  So that "Jesus paid our fine" thing has never made a scrap of sense to me.  It's kind of like if your brother pissed your dad off, and your dad spanked you.  Then he says to your brother, "You're forgiven now."  When you understandably object to all of this, your dad says, "Well, I had to spank someone, right?"

In any case, I wouldn't throw away your bags full of Snickers bars and replace them with gospel tracts.  For one thing, it seems like a good way to get your house egged.  Second, warning trick-or-treaters about the dangers of lust seems to me to be targeting the wrong audience, even if you think lustful thoughts are evil, which I don't because that would mean that 99% of humanity is destined for eternal hellfire.

So have fun with your costumes and scary decorations and whatnot.  Honestly, it seems a lot more sensible than all the stuff Ken Ham is trying to get you to believe.  And that's even if you account for the gay lion couple.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

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

Life finds a way

I've dealt more than once here at Skeptophilia with the repeated mass extinctions the Earth has undergone.  Part of this is that I have an admitted fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  These include:

• tornadoes and hurricanes
• lightning
• earthquakes
• volcanoes
• death asteroids from outer space

The latter is thought to have been the prime mover of the Cretaceous Extinction, which occurred 66 million years ago and killed an estimated 75% of the species on Earth, including all of the large dinosaurs (the exception being the lineage that led to modern birds).  Here's a cool, if terrifying, simulation of what it'd be like if the Earth got hit by an asteroid five hundred kilometers in diameter (the Chicxulub Meteorite, which caused the extinction, is estimated to be about a tenth that diameter, so you can scale down your picture of that event accordingly):

But dwelling on that stuff is a little morbid, even if it's kind of awe-inspiring.  So today, I'd like to look at some recent research that looks at how life recovered after the cataclysm -- discoveries that suggest the encouraging idea that even with a catastrophe, life can bounce back amazingly quickly.

A few years ago, Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science were involved in a fossil dig in Corral Bluffs, Colorado, and made a rather astonishing discovery.  Initially the area seemed to be rather fossil-poor, but it had a great many concretions (roughly spherical blobs of cemented sediment).  When Miller and Lyson split one of these open, they found it was full of skeletal remains.

It turns out Corral Bluffs represent sedimentary layers of rock deposited immediately after the collision, so it provides an incredibly detailed record of the years following.  Large animals and flowering plants (especially trees) were hit the hardest by the extinction; despite the prevailing wisdom that "dinosaurs died and mammals didn't," the more accurate statement is "big species were much more likely to die than little ones."  The bottleneck, in fact, seems to have taken out all the mammals larger than your average rat.  (Miller and Lyson found no evidence of mammals larger than six hundred grams that survived the extinction.)  Miller, who is a paleobotanist, concentrated not on the animal remains but the plants -- especially the 37,000 pollen grains he found fossilized in the sediment layers.  And from this, a picture began to emerge of what things were like in the years following the collision, which was described this week in a fascinating paper in Science.

The largest group of plants to come through the bottleneck were ferns, which thrive in disturbed areas and have spores that are pretty damage-resistant.  Unfortunately for the animals, fern leaves and roots are rather low in nutrients, so for a while, body sizes remained small because there simply wasn't enough food around to support big, or even medium-sized, herbivores.  But within a few thousand years -- a flash, evolutionarily speaking -- Fern World was replaced by Palm World, as proto-monocots (the group that contains not only palms, but grasses, lilies, orchids, irises, and a variety of other familiar plant families) evolved to be more robust.  Palms have oily fruit that are high in sugar, and there's a commensurate jump in mammalian body size, with species showing up that weighed five kilograms.

Palms were superseded by the ancestors of today's walnuts and hickories a hundred or so thousand years after that, and in "Pecan Pie World" (as Miller and Lyson call this era), and the higher nutritional quality of those seeds fueled another jump in body size, with the largest ones reaching thirty kilograms (the size of a large dog).  And after seven hundred thousand years, legumes diversified, and the high protein content of these species triggered another growth spurt, topping out at fifty kilograms -- a hundred times larger than the survivors of the collision, in less than a million years.

Nota bene: the growth in size wasn't done yet.  The Oligocene Epoch, from 34 to 23 million years ago, saw the largest land mammals that have ever existed, including the enormous Baluchitherium, a behemoth that could have converted an African elephant into an African elephant pancake:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Waqas-anees2014, Baluchitherium, The Largest Land mammal at Pakistan Museum of Natural History (PMNH), CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Miller and Lyson study offers us a message that is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.  First, the human-caused "Sixth Extinction" that we are almost certainly undergoing as we speak is not going to eliminate life on Earth, and the species that survive will quickly spring back and diversify once we stop doing whatever we can to make the planet uninhabitable.  But the cautionary tale is that no matter what, it won't be what we had.  The diversity of flora and fauna that existed before the Chicxulub Collision was gone forever, and even though "life found a way" (to borrow a phrase from Jurassic Park), what evolved afterward was dramatically different than what was lost.  And, to put not too fine a point on it, the years immediately following the bottleneck were pretty freakin' horrible for all concerned, with an entire planet laid waste, and the animals that weren't directly killed by the impact itself largely facing habitat loss and rampant starvation.

So we shouldn't be so quick to adopt the Pollyanna-ish "it'll all be fine, nature is resilient" attitude toward our current fossil-fuel-crazy, pollution-blind willfully ignorant behavior.  If anything, we should recognize how fragile it all is -- and how, if we push too hard, we're likely to see a collapse of catastrophic proportions.  While we can pretty much count on evolution eventually producing a whole new set of what Darwin called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," there's more than a passing chance that we won't be around to see them.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

Talking to the animals

Language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  The "symbolic" part is because the word (either spoken or written) for a concept is representative of the concept itself, and "arbitrary" because with the exception of onomatopoeic words like bang and swish there is no logical connection between the word and the concept itself.  (For example, the English word dog and the French word chien both have the same referent, but other than learned association there's nothing especially doggy about either word.)

It's been an argument of long standing whether any other animal species have true language.  A 2006 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America strongly suggests that whales have one of the most characteristic features of language -- syntax, the way words are put together to form meaningful sentences.  (What whale songs actually mean is still a matter of conjecture.)  A lot of animal sounds, such as bird songs and dogs barking, are dismissed as "non-linguistic vocalization" -- they are communication, but lack the "arbitrary symbolic" part of the definition of language.

Myself, I wonder.  I can tell when I hear my dog barking or growling whether he:

1. is playing;
2. sees a vicious intruder, like the UPS man;
3. sees an even more vicious intruder, like a chipmunk;
4. sees or hears my wife driving up;
5. is excited because he sees me or my wife get the ball and he knows he's going to get to play fetch, which is his most favorite thing ever;
6. is bored; or
7. wants to come inside because it's raining and he doesn't like getting his little toesies wet.  (He's just that tough.)

Each of those different-toned barks is completely distinct, and certainly they're arbitrary in that the connection between the tone and what it's communicating really has no logic to it.  (An exception is that the "excited bark" and "bored bark" are clearly different in volume and energy level, which you could argue isn't arbitrary.)

Even dog lovers will admit, however, that the set of concepts expressed by barking or growling is fairly limited.  So if you want to call it language, it's pretty rudimentary.  The situation becomes blurrier, however, with animals with a rich vocal repertoire, like parrots and dolphins.  And our sense that we're the only ones with true language was dealt another blow by a study released this week from the University of Zurich showing that primates called common marmosets not only speak regional dialects, when individuals are moved to a different region they learn -- and begin to use -- the dialect of the group they've joined.

"We could clearly show that the dialects of common marmosets are learned socially," said anthropologist Yvonne Zürcher, who co-authored the study.  "If their dialects were genetically determined, moving to a new place wouldn’t cause any change in calls.  The changes can’t be explained by differences in the environment, either."

Which seems to meet the characteristic of arbitrariness.

Again, I'm not trying to imply that marmosets have language in the same sense we do; whatever they're saying, it's unlikely that it has the richness and flexibility of human language.  But the black-and-white, "we have language and no one else does" attitude that has been prevalent for as long as the question has been considered may turn out to be as inaccurate as the "human vs. animal" distinction I still hear students voicing.  The truth is, vocal communication -- from the simplest (such as the hissing of a snake) to the most complex known (human language) -- is a continuum, just as are complexity, intelligence, emotional capacity, and anything else you might think separates us from the rest of Kingdom Animalia.

Which I think is pretty cool.

In any case, I better wrap this up, because Guinness is barking.  I know it's time to play ball.  He just told me so.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

Hello Dolly

Despite my tendency to fall into the "dubious" column with respect to most paranormal claims, I'm always appreciative of anyone who is more of a believer who nevertheless wants to see any evidence analyzed the right way.

That's my impression of The Anomalist, a website I check regularly for news of the weird.  It acts as a sort of clearinghouse for recent stories of odd or unexplained phenomena, but is really good about presenting all sides of the story -- and for calling out bogus claims as such.

Take, for example, some recent stories that appeared there, having to do with the alleged phenomenon of "haunted dolls."

For a lot of us, dolls are right up there with clowns in the "oh, hell no" department.  Their still, unresponsive faces and fixed expressions land right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- we tend to perceive a face that is human-like, but not quite human enough, as being more frightening or repellant than a face that has fewer distinctly human features.  (Think of a doll's face as compared to a teddy bear's.)  So we're already in scary territory for a good many folks.

Add to that the possibility of the doll being possessed, and you're looking at "scream like a little child and run away."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Skiff from New York City, Creepy kid with a piano (194351881), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The first example is a World War II-era ventriloquist's dummy head called "Mr. Fritz" kept in a glass cabinet by its owner.  The owner started getting suspicious when he'd get up in the morning to find the cabinet door open, so he set up a camera to film it when he wasn't around.

The result, even if you're suspicious it's a fake, is pretty fucking creepy.  The glass door swings open, and then Mr. Fritz's eyes pop open -- and then his mouth moves.

After this, the owner apparently took the doll head out of the case and put it in a cabinet "secured by heavy chains." Why this was necessary, given all that happens is the door opens and the face moves, I don't know.  It's not like it had arms and legs and was walking about unassisted, or anything.

Still, I understand the apprehension.  Skeptic though I am, I don't think I'd want to sleep in the same room as that thing, heavy chains or no.

Then we have a British doll named Scarlet, who has been recorded using an "Electronic Voice Phenomena" (EVP) recorder -- and what she supposedly says indicates she should have her prim little porcelain mouth washed out with soap.

In a video of the doll, we get to hear playback of the alleged EVP.  Not only does she say her owner's name (Linzi), she says such things as "fuck off," "you're fucked," "shut the fuck up," and "fuck this."

So apparently Scarlet is even more fond of the f-word than I am, and that's saying something.

Anyhow, I listened to the recording several times -- and I'm just not hearing it.  I could barely make out "Linzi," but all of the alleged obscenities just sounded like white noise to me.  And that's the problem; as is pointed out in The Anomalist, there's a good explanation for a great many alleged EVP claims, and that's apophenia.  The human mind is a pattern-finding machine, which means that sometimes we'll see patterns when there's nothing there but chaos.  (You can think of our tendency to see faces -- pareidolia -- as a special case of apophenia.)

With Scarlet, people are already primed to hear something meaningful, so the static pops, clicks, and hums the EVP recorder plays back are interpreted with this bias.  Especially when we already know what the doll allegedly said -- all of which are listed right there in the article.

Put simply, you can't miss it when I tell you what's there.

The Anomalist provides a link to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer about this very tendency -- looking at particular cases of EVP claims and analyzing why they're probably nothing more than our tendency to impose order on chaos.

So unlike a lot of sensationalized sites about alleged paranormal phenomena, I can hold up The Anomalist as a place that has the exact right approach.  I'm probably still a bit more dubious than the site owners are, but by and large, we both have the same touchstone for accepting a claim -- logic and evidence.

And a bit of healthy skepticism about humanity's capacity both for getting things wrong... and for engaging in fakery.

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

In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

A chat at the pub

When I'm out in a crowded bar, I struggle with something that I think a lot of us do -- trying to isolate the voice of the person I'm talking to from all of the background noise.

I can do it, but it's a struggle.  When I'm tired, or have had one too many pints of beer, I find that my ability to hear what my friend is saying suddenly disappears, as if someone had flipped off a switch.  His voice is swallowed up by a cacophony of random noise in which I literally can't isolate a single word.

Usually my indication that it's time to call it a night.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's an interesting question, though, how we manage to do this at all.  Think about it; the person you're listening to is probably closer to you than the other people in the pub, but the others might well be louder.  Add to that the cacophony of glasses clinking and music blaring and whatever else might be going on around you, and the likelihood is that your friend's overall vocal volume is probably about the same as anyone or anything else picked up by your ears.

Yet most of us can isolate that one voice and hear it distinctly, and tune out all of the other voices and ambient noise.  So how do you do this?

Scientists at Columbia University got a glimpse of how our brains might accomplish this amazing task in a set of experiments described in a paper that appeared in the journal Neuron this week.  In "Hierarchical Encoding of Attended Auditory Objects in Multi-talker Speech Perception," by James O’Sullivan, Jose Herrero, Elliot Smith, Catherine Schevon, Guy M. McKhann, Sameer A. Sheth, Ashesh D. Mehta, and Nima Mesgarani, we find out that one part of the brain -- the superior temporal gyrus (STG) -- seems to be capable of boosting the gain of a sound we want to pay attention to, and to do so virtually instantaneously.

The auditory input we receive is a complex combination of acoustic vibrations in the air received all at the same time, so sorting them out is no mean feat.  (Witness how long it's taken to develop good vocal transcription software -- which, even now, is fairly slow and inaccurate.)  Yet your brain can do it flawlessly (well, for most of us, most of the time).  What O'Sullivan et al. found was that once received by the auditory cortex, the neural signals are passed through two regions -- first the Heschl's gyrus (HG), and then the STG.  The HG seems to create a multi-dimensional neural representation of what you're hearing, but doesn't really pick out one set of sounds as being more important than another.  The STG, though, is able to sort through that tapestry of electrical signals and amplify the ones it decides are more important.

"We’ve long known that areas of auditory cortex are arranged in a hierarchy, with increasingly complex decoding occurring at each stage, but we haven’t observed how the voice of a particular speaker is processed along this path," said study lead author James O’Sullivan in a press release.  "To understand this process, we needed to record the neural activity from the brain directly...  We found that that it’s possible to amplify one speaker’s voice or the other by correctly weighting the output signal coming from HG.  Based on our recordings, it’s plausible that the STG region performs that weighting."

The research has a lot of potential applications, not only for computerized vocal recognition, but for guiding the creation of devices to help the hearing impaired.  It's long been an issue that traditional hearing aids amplify everything equally, so a hearing-impaired individual in a noisy environment has to turn up the volume to hear what (s)he wants to listen to, but this can make the ambient background noise deafeningly loud.  If software can be developed that emulates what the STG does, it might create a much more natural-sounding and comfortable experience.

All of which is fascinating, isn't it?  The more we learn about our own brains, the more astonishing they seem.  Abilities we take entirely for granted are being accomplished by incredibly complex arrays and responses in that 1.3-kilogram "meat machine" sitting inside our skulls, often using mechanisms that still amaze me even after thirty-odd years of studying neuroscience.  

And it leaves me wondering what we'll find out about our own nervous systems in the next thirty years.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

A window into the distant past

I love a good mystery, and mysteries abound regarding human prehistory.

Of course, that's kind of self-evident, given that it's pre-history.  Anything we know is based on inference, from looking at artifacts and other traces left behind for us to find.  And like fossils, we have to keep in mind that what we're seeing is a small percentage -- no one knows how small -- of what was originally out there.  (One of my biology professors said that trying to reconstruct the Tree of Life from the existing fossil record is analogous to reconstructing the entire History of Art from a dozen paintings or sculptures chosen at random from the tens of thousands that have been created by humanity.  This was before the use of genetic evidence for determining phylogeny, so the situation has improved -- but we're still working from inference and very incomplete evidence.)

So that's pretty much where we are with our knowledge of human prehistory.  Which is why when there are eye-opening new discoveries in that field, it always makes me sit up and take notice.

Today we're going to look at three new archeological finds that have given us a new lens into our distant ancestors' lives, and all of which were published in the last week.

First, some new artifacts from Scotland have provided information about one of the least-known European cultures -- the Picts.

The Picts were a collection of (probably) Celtic-speaking tribes that inhabited Scotland prior to its invasion first by the Irish Dál Riata and then by the Vikings.  We know next to nothing about them or their culture.  Even the name of the group isn't native to them -- it comes from the Latin pictus ("painted"), from their habit of going into battle naked, covered with paint.

Which, I have to admit, is pretty damn badass.

But we don't know much else about them, because they left no written records at all.  We assume they spoke a Celtic language, but don't really know for sure; and any suggestion of root words in Gaelic that may have come from Pictish are guesses (such as the claim that place names starting with Pit-, Lhan-, and Aber- come from Pictish words).

So any artifacts that are unequivocally Pictish in origin are pretty amazing.  Like the ones discovered earlier this year by Anne MacInnes of the North of Scotland Archaeological Society.

The face of the stone in the photograph not only has designs and a pretty cool-looking mythical beast, it has an inscription -- in Latin letters -- that may well be a Latin transliteration of the Pictish language.  Which makes it a rarity indeed.

"The two massive beasts that flank and surmount the cross are quite unlike anything found on any other Pictish stone," said John Borland, of Historic Environment Scotland and the Pictish Arts Society.  "These two unique creatures serve to remind us that Pictish sculptors had a remarkable capacity for creativity and individuality.  Careful assessment of this remarkable monument will be able to tell us much about the production of Pictish sculpture that we could never have guessed at."


Then, there's the discovery that was made near the Tollense River, on the Baltic coast of Germany, that indicates the existence of mercenary soldiers -- three thousand years ago.

On a historic -- well, prehistoric -- battleground, a team from the Lower Saxony State Agency for Cultural Heritage discovered, alongside skeletal remains showing war-related injuries, a toolkit brought in by one of the soldiers.  It contains a chisel, a knife, an awl, and a small sword, along with fasteners that seem to indicate its origin in southern Germany -- a distance of about five hundred miles.

"It was a surprise to find a battlefield site.  It was a second surprise to see a battlefield site of this dimension with so many warriors involved, and now it's a big surprise that we are dealing with a conflict of a European scale," says Thomas Terberger, co-author of the study.  "We had before speculated that some of these people might have come from the south.  Now we have, from our point of view, a quite convincing indication that people from southern Central Europe were involved in this conflict."

Suggesting that the man who carried the bag may have been a mercenary, although that is (of course) an inference.  So right around the time King David ruled the Israelites, there were professional soldiers waging war upon either other in northern Europe.

Last, we have a study showing that the Greek islands have been occupied for longer than we'd realized...

... a lot longer.

When most people in North America and Western Europe think of an "old civilization," they come up with Greece, Rome, Egypt, Sumer, China, India, the Inca, the Mayans...  but all of those (venerable and fascinating though they are) only date back a few thousand years.  The Great Pyramid at Giza, for example, was built around 3,500 years ago -- which seems like a lot.

But this new discovery shows that the island of Naxos was inhabited by our ancestors (and/or near relatives) two hundred thousand years ago.

At that point, they weren't exactly human, or at least not what we usually consider to be modern humanity.  These inhabitants of Naxos were Neanderthals, and had crossed into what is now an island during a time when the sea level was considerably lower because a lot of the water was locked up in glacial ice.

"Until now, the earliest known location on Naxos was the Cave of Zas, dated to 7,000 years ago," said project director Tristan Carter, an anthropologist at Ontario’s McMaster University.  "We have extended the history of the island by 193,000 years...  It was believed widely that hominin dispersals were restricted to terrestrial routes until the later Pleistocene, but recent discoveries are requiring scholars to revisit these hypotheses."

The word "Neanderthal" has, in common parlance, become synonymous with "uncultured cave man," and that characterization misses the mark by a mile.  They had culture -- they buried their dead, apparently made music, and may have even had spoken language (DNA studies show that they had the FOX-P2 gene, which is one of the genetic underpinnings of language in humans).  They made artifacts not only of utility but of great beauty:

A Neanderthal Acheulean hand-axe from about 50,000 years ago

Some of the archaeologists associated with the Naxos study even think the Neanderthal inhabitants of the island may not have walked there when the sea level was low -- they may actually have arrived there by boat.

Pretty smart folks, the Neanderthals.

It's also uncertain that they actually represent a different species from us.  Most of us carry Neanderthal genetic markers -- apparently I have three-hundred-odd of them, making me in the sixtieth percentile, cave-man-wise -- so there was definitely interbreeding between them and modern humans.  So they might be more correctly considered a subspecies -- although, as I've mentioned before, the concept of species is one of the wonkiest definitions in biology, and all attempts to refine it have resulted in more exceptions and contradictions than ever.

So probably best just to say that they're part of the family.

In any case, we've got three papers in one week that give us some very impressive new data on prehistory.  Until we invent time travel, this kind of evidence is about all we can rely on to create a picture of what life was like back then.  Which, even with the new information, leaves lots of room for refinement -- and imagination.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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