The problems with falling back

Here in the United States we've just gone from Daylight Savings Time back onto Standard Time, and like a lot of us, it's playing hell with my circadian rhythms.

I'm a morning person, which you'll know if you've ever noticed the timestamp on my Skeptophilia posts.  This means, of course, that by the evening I'm pretty wiped out.  The result is that we have to make sure any social engagements we have are over by nine o'clock, or my wife will look over and find me curled up on the floor in the corner, asleep.

Which may explain why we don't get invited to many social engagements.

Anyhow, a lot of people look forward to the "Fall Back" in November, because it gains them an hour's sleep (for one weekend, at least), and until their bodies adjust to the new schedule they don't feel like they're getting up so damned early.  I have exactly the opposite response.  The "Fall Back" is worse for morning people than for night owls, because now we're waking up even earlier (by the clock), and now it's eight o'clock, not nine o'clock, that our brains start to shut down.  The "Spring Forward" in March is actually easier on me, because it brings the clock into closer sync with my natural body rhythms, even though I do lose an hour's sleep.

But the whole thing still strikes me as a colossally silly idea.  I'm in agreement with whoever compared Daylight Savings Time to cutting the top off of a blanket and sewing the piece onto the bottom to make it longer.

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

A study released this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association looks at some of the physiological and neurological repercussions of jerking around our body clocks.  In "Are Daylight Savings Time Changes Bad for the Brain?", Beth A. Malow, Olivia Veatch, and Kanika Bagai conclude that the answer is "Definitely yes" (thus breaking Betteridge's Law, that says that any headline that asks a question can be answered by the word "No.").

The whole idea of Daylight Savings Time was about saving energy, and eleven years ago a study by the Department of Transportation found that the energy savings accrued from the change is a whopping 0.02%.  On the other hand, in the days following the March "Spring Forward," Malow et al. found that:

• a dramatic jump in the number of strokes;
• a 5% increase in the number of myocardial infarctions;
• a reduction in sleep duration among high school students that persisted for weeks after the transition;
• overall lower quality sleep (as measured by the amount of deep sleep) in just about everyone for at least two weeks after the transition.

This is on top of the fact that most of us sleep like crap anyhow, and it's having terrible effects.  Another study that came out this week, this one in Nature Human Behavior, found a strong link between sleep duration and quality, and the severity of anxiety and stress.  One sleepless night, the researchers found, causes a 30% jump in anxiety -- and like the Daylight Savings Time study, the ill effects persist for days or weeks afterward.  So it's not enough just to say "I'll sleep tomorrow night;" you need adequate sleep every night.

And most of us aren't getting it.

"We have identified a new function of deep sleep, one that decreases anxiety overnight by reorganizing connections in the brain," said study senior author Matthew Walker, a University of California-Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology.  "Deep sleep seems to be a natural anxiolytic, so long as we get it each and every night...  Without sleep, it’s almost as if the brain is too heavy on the emotional accelerator pedal, without enough brake."

"Deep sleep... restored the brain’s prefrontal mechanism that regulates our emotions, lowering emotional and physiological reactivity and preventing the escalation of anxiety," said study lead author Eti Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley's Center for Human Sleep Science.  "People with anxiety disorders routinely report having disturbed sleep, but rarely is sleep improvement considered as a clinical recommendation for lowering anxiety.  Our study not only establishes a causal connection between sleep and anxiety, but it identifies the kind of deep NREM sleep we need to calm the overanxious brain."

We need to start looking at adequate sleep (both in duration and quality) not as a luxury, but a necessity, both for physical and mental health.  Unfortunately, our society isn't structured this way.  The students I used to work with were, almost without exception, chronically sleep deprived, from the demands of school, extracurricular activities, jobs, family, and some effort to have a social life.  But any serious look at rectifying this situation is usually greeted with a shrug and a comment like, "Yeah, I remember I hardly slept when I was that age."

The subtext -- "I got through it, so you can" -- is poisonous.  As my wife puts it, "Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's not a really, really stupid idea."

At least there's hope, from the time-switch perspective; the Malow et al. paper tells us that there are only four states -- Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, and Maryland -- that aren't currently considering proposals to switch to a permanent clock.  Whether it's Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time doesn't matter; the problem is the clock change twice a year.  If those proposals are evaluated using the best available science (I know, our current government doesn't exactly have a sterling track record for making policy decisions based on science, but maybe wiser heads will prevail, this time at least), then there'll be one less thing to worry about with regards to getting adequate sleep.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

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

Girding your loins

In the latest from the False Sense Of Security department, we have guys' underwear that contains a mesh of tiny silver threads to protect their naughty bits from electromagnetic radiation.

It's not like this doesn't have precedent, I guess.  When you get a dental x-ray, the technician always drapes your torso with a lead apron to protect the rest of you from being irradiated.  The difference, of course, is that x-rays are high-energy ionizing radiation, while the radiation that Wireless Armour inventor Joseph Perkins is trying to protect us from is low-energy EM radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, which has not been shown to cause ill health effects (at least not in the intensity that most of us are exposed to).

Perkins, who in his promotional over at IndieGoGo says he has a background in physics, states that there has been a 59% drop in sperm count in men exposed to the EM radiation from a standard laptop, a number I seriously question -- the studies I've seen haven't shown any such thing, although there is some indication that proximity of the testicles to a cellphone in call mode for an hour can cause a decrease in sperm motility.  A study in Norway of guys working near radio transmitter aerials did show that they had lower than expected fertility, but this is a level of radio wave exposure that most of us never see.  There doesn't seem to be any connection between using a laptop or cellphone in ordinary ways and a drop in sperm count, or even an overall lower fertility level.  I mean, think about it.  Given the ubiquity of laptops and cellphones and so on these days, if they were actually causing this kind of drop in fertility, we'd be seeing a pretty serious crash in the number of pregnancies in technological countries.

And I don't think that there's any evidence for that. People, even here in the tech-crazy industrialized world, still seem to be making babies just fine, regardless of what kind of underwear we guys prefer.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacklee; original photograph by Phillip from Miami, USA., BoxerShorts-20070901, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But that doesn't stop Perkins.  His silver-wire-mesh boxer briefs are critical to "keep your troops from getting fried," a phrase that I didn't make up and plays off of every guy's worst nightmare.  The underwear works on the principle of a "Faraday cage," a mesh of conducting wires that blocks electromagnetic radiation, as long as the holes through the mesh are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

So Perkins's Wireless Armour would work for radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, as advertised.  The problem with the whole concept, though, is that the radiation that strikes our bodies under normal circumstances is of extremely low intensity -- according to Lorne Trottier, writing for The Skeptical Inquirer in 2009, "The photon energy of a cell phone EMF is more than 10 million times weaker than the lowest energy ionizing radiation."  Citing a great many controlled studies (and mentioning a few poorly-controlled ones), The Skeptic's Dictionary states, "(T)he likelihood that our cell phones, microwave ovens, computers, and other electronic devices (cause negative health effects) is minuscule."

There is, of course, the problem with laptops causing skin burns -- not from the EM radiation, but from the fact that the heat from the underside isn't dissipating well.  An article from the National Institute of Health warns against having a laptop against your skin for long periods of time with no heat insulation between it and you.  They describe "(a) 24-year-old man (who) presented with an asymptomatic reddish brown pigmentation on the thighs...  After an extensive work-up, burning caused by use of a laptop was observed...  Burning was induced in 3 days by using laptop for 4 h daily."

But silver mesh boxer briefs aren't going to protect you from heat.  Silver is quite a good heat conductor, so if anything, having silver threads in your underwear would make the problem worse.

That's not to say that Perkins's original claim is wrong, of course.  His Faraday-cage skivvies would protect you from the effect of high-intensity radio or microwave radiation, should you ever be exposed to such.  If you were, for example, standing in front of a high-output radio transmitter, and were wearing your Wireless Armour boxer briefs, your "troops would not fry."  The rest of your body, however, would heat up in the manner of last night's leftovers in the kitchen microwave, until you were piping hot on the inside.

Your junk, however, would remain nice and cool, if that's any consolation.

If you'd like, though, Perkins's IndieGoGo page has a place where you can contribute, and receive your very own pair of anti-EMR underwear.  The price varies between £14 (about $23) for a pair with mesh in the front only, and £24 (about $32) for "360º protection."  This seems steep, but remember that they do contain woven silver thread, so I guess they're not cheap to manufacture.

The whole thing strikes me as unnecessary, though, and I think I'll stick with my previous three-pairs-for-ten-dollars boxers from Target, and simply make a practice of avoiding high-output radio transmitters.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

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

The problem with Hubble

In my Critical Thinking classes, I did a unit on statistics and data, and how you tell if a measurement is worth paying attention to.  One of the first things to consider, I told them, is whether a particular piece of data is accurate or merely precise -- two words that in common parlance are used interchangeably.

In science, they don't mean the same thing.  A piece of equipment is said to be precise if it gives you close to the same value every time.  Accuracy, though, is a higher standard; data are accurate if the values are not only close to each other when measured with the same equipment, but agree with data taken independently, using a different device or a different method.

A simple example is that if my bathroom scale tells me every day for a month that my mass is (to within one kilogram either way) 239 kilograms, it's highly precise, but very inaccurate.

This is why scientists always look for independent corroboration of their data.  It's not enough to keep getting the same numbers over and over; you've got to be certain those numbers actually reflect reality.

This all comes up because of some new information about one of the biggest scientific questions known -- the rate of expansion of the entire universe.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

A few months ago, I wrote about some recent experiments that were allowing physicists to home in on the Hubble constant, a quantity that is a measure of how fast everything in the universe is flying apart.  And the news appeared to be good; from a range of between 50 and 500, physicists had been able to narrow down the value of the Hubble constant to between 65.3 and 75.6.

The problem is, nobody's been able to get closer than that -- and in fact, recent measurements have widened, not narrowed, the gap.

There are two main ways to measure the Hubble constant.  The first is to use information like red shift and Cepheid variables (stars whose period of brightness oscillation varies predictably with their intrinsic brightness, making them a good "standard candle" to determine the distance to other galaxies) to figure out how fast the galaxies we see are receding from each other.  The other is to use the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the leftovers from the radiation produced by the Big Bang -- to determine the age of the universe, and therefore, how fast it's expanding.

So this is a little like checking my bathroom scale by weighing myself on it, then comparing my weight as measured by the scale at the gym and seeing if I get the same answer.

And the problem is, the measurement of the Hubble constant by these two methods is increasingly looking like it's resulting in two irreconcilably different values.

The genesis of the problem is that our measurement ability has become more and more precise -- the error bars associated with data collection have shrunk considerably.  And if the two measurements were not only precise, but also accurate, you would expect that our increasing precision would result in the two values getting closer and closer together.

Exactly the opposite has happened.

"Five years ago, no one in cosmology was really worried about the question of how fast the universe was expanding.  We took it for granted," said astrophysicist Daniel Mortlock of Imperial College London.  "Now we are having to do a great deal of head scratching – and a lot of research...  Everyone’s best bet was that the difference between the two estimates was just down to chance, and that the two values would converge as more and more measurements were taken.  In fact, the opposite has occurred.  The discrepancy has become stronger.  The estimate of the Hubble constant that had the lower value has got a bit lower over the years and the one that was a bit higher has got even greater."

The discovery of dark matter and dark energy, the first by Vera Rubin, Kent Ford, and Ken Freeman in the 1970s, and the second by Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter in the 1990s, accounted for the fact that the rate of expansion seemed wildly out of whack with the amount of observable matter in the universe.  The problem is, since the discovery of the effects of dark matter and dark energy, we haven't gotten any closer to finding out what they actually are.  Every attempt to directly detect either one has resulted in zero success.

Now, it appears that the problems run even deeper than that.

"Those two discoveries [dark matter and dark energy] were remarkable enough," said Riess.  "But now we are facing the fact there may be a third phenomenon that we had overlooked – though we haven’t really got a clue yet what it might be."

"The basic problem is that having two different figures for the Hubble constant measured from different perspectives would simply invalidate the cosmological model we made of the universe," Mortlock said.  "So we wouldn’t be able to say what the age of the universe was until we had put our physics right."

It sounds to me a lot like the situation in the late 1800s, when physicists were trying to determine the answer to a seemingly simple question -- in what medium do light waves propagate?  Every wave has to be moving through something; water waves come from regular motion of water molecules, sound waves from oscillation of air molecules, and so on.  With light waves, what was "waving?"

Because the answer most people accepted was, "something has to be waving even if we don't know what it is," scientists proposed a mysterious substance called the "aether" that permeated all of space, and was the medium through which light waves were propagating.  All attempts to directly detect the aether were failures, but this didn't discourage people from saying that it must be there, because otherwise, how would light move?

Then along came the brilliant (and quite simple -- in principle, anyhow) Michelson-Morley experiment, which proved beyond any doubt that the aether didn't exist.  Light traveling in a vacuum appeared to have a constant speed in all frames of reference, which is entirely unlike any other wave ever studied.  And it wasn't until Einstein came along and turned our entire understanding upside down with the Special Theory of Relativity that we saw the piece we'd been missing that made sense of all the weird data.

What we seem to be waiting for is this century's Einstein, who will explain the discrepancies in the measurements of the Hubble constant, and very likely account for the mysterious, undetectable dark matter and dark energy (which sound a lot like the aether, don't they?) at the same time.  But until then, we're left with a mystery that calls into question one of the most fundamental conclusions of modern physics -- the age of the universe.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

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

Gone is gone forever

A month ago I wrote about an alarming study that looks at the population decline amongst American bird species.  We're not talking small numbers, here.  The best overall estimate is that there has been at 25% drop in the number of birds continent-wise, a loss of a grand total of three billion birds.

What surprised me about the response to this news, both to my blog post and to the media announcements in general, is that it can be summed up as, "Oh, that's sad.  Oh, well, what can you do?"  Unfortunate that the little feathery guys at our bird feeders aren't showing up like they used to, but... well, they're just birds, right?  Primarily decorative, and most of the species they're talking about I've never heard of anyway.

The people who were the most alarmed were the ones who were already alarmed about the state of our environment.  I very much got the impression everyone else just kind of shrugged and went about their business at usual.

It brings up a question of how you get people to care.  Not the environmentalists and eco-activists and birdwatchers and Sierra Club members.  Like I said, they care already.  But how do you reach your average person, and get them to see the magnitude of what we're doing to the planet -- and how the possibility is very real that we won't avoid horrible consequences, not just to a few obscure species of animals, but to ourselves?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Drpranjit, The endangered species, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This is the topic of a study that appeared this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, by Stefan Schubert, Lucius Caviola, and Nadira S. Faber, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University.  Titled, "The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction," the study asked individuals both in the United Kingdom and United States to consider the possibility of both human and other-species extinction, and an interesting pattern emerged.

In each of the types of extinction that Schubert et al. asked their test subject to think about, they asked two questions: how bad is it?  And, why is it bad?  What they found was that people tended to think quantitatively.  No matter what species was being considered, the bigger the percent drop, the worse it was.  An 85% reduction was worse than a 60% reduction, a 60% reduction worse than a 35% reduction, and so on.  So far, nothing too shocking.

What is alarming -- to we environmental types, anyhow -- is that this "degree of harm" is scaled up in a fairly linear fashion, all the way up to 100%.  Complete extinction.

Why this is alarming is that people don't seem to recognize the qualitative difference between a 100% loss and a 99% loss.  At least theoretically, if you have even 1% of the individuals left, recovery is possible (although not likely; 1%, for most species, is probably below the minimum viable population, the point at which the natural death rate exceeds the natural birth rate, so a downward spiral is inevitable).

But complete extinction?  Gone completely is gone forever.  And the magnitude of that just doesn't seem to register with most people, even when we're talking about humans themselves as the victims.

The authors write:

Our studies show that people find that human extinction is bad, and that it is important to prevent it.  However, when presented with a scenario involving no catastrophe, a near-extinction catastrophe and an extinction catastrophe as possible outcomes, they do not see human extinction as uniquely bad compared with non-extinction.  We find that this is partly because people feel strongly for the victims of the catastrophes, and therefore focus on the immediate consequences of the catastrophes.  The immediate consequences of near-extinction are not that different from those of extinction, so this naturally leads them to find near-extinction almost as bad as extinction. Another reason is that they neglect the long-term consequences of the outcomes.  Lastly, their empirical beliefs about the quality of the future make a difference: telling them that the future will be extraordinarily good makes more people find extinction uniquely bad. 

Thus, when asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way, participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad.  This could partly explain why we currently invest relatively small resources in reducing existential risk.

Which makes sense (of a sort) of what we started with -- that dire reports on the decline in wild species don't seem to generate much beyond an "aw, that's too bad" response in your average media consumer.  It also makes it clear that if the people who write about the environmental crisis focused on the long-term consequences of our current behavior, rather than just on sad photographs of starving polar bears, we might see a bigger seismic shift in attitudes.

Of course, this doesn't take into account other factors, such as disinformation from corporations heavily invested in business as usual, and the ignorant, self-serving politicians who are in those corporations' pockets.  But since those politicians are elected by us ordinary folk, it's still worthwhile to try to create a change in attitudes that could, perhaps, avert disaster.

It is, after all, in our common interest to do so.  And the Schubert et al. gives us a possible approach to make that point clear to everyone.

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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!]

Freebird

A friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia tagged me in a post on Facebook a couple of days ago, with a link and the single line "Wake up, Sheeple."

The link was to a site that is called, I shit you not, "Birds Aren't Real."  My first thought was that the name would turn out to be metaphorical or symbolic or something, but no; these people believe in Truth in Advertising.

They are really, literally saying that birds are not real.

He's awfully pretty for being imaginary, don't you think?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

On their "History" page, which you should read in its entirety because it's just that entertaining, we find passages like the following:

On June 2nd, 1959 operation “Water the Country” was born.  This was to be the secret code name given to the program from 1959 to 1976, when it was renamed to “Operation Very Large Bird” (the individual in charge of naming the program didn’t want to get into any copyright trouble with the popular PBS show Sesame Street by naming the project Operation Big Bird.)  Within the next 6 years, 15% of the bird population was wiped out.  During these first few years, bird prototypes were released by the hundred million.  The term ‘drone’ was not used at this time, and instead they were referred to as Robot Birds.

It also quotes Alvin B. Cleaver, Internal Communications Director for the CIA, as saying, "We’ve killed about 220 million so far, and the best thing is, the Robot Birds we’ve released in their place have done such a good job that nobody even suspects a thing."

Oh, and I didn't mention that the whole thing is underneath a header that says, "The only way to properly explain this is with words."  Making me wonder if we had another choice, such as interpretive dance.

So anyhow, I'm reading this, and my expression is looking more and more like this:

This has to be a spoof, I'm thinking.  No one in their right mind would believe this.  So I started to look, first on the website itself, then somewhere in the media, trying to find a place where someone, anyone basically went, "Ha-ha, we were just kidding."

But no.

Birds Aren't Real is the brainchild of one Seth McIndoe of Memphis, Tennessee, and to all appearances he's entirely serious.  There are now chapters of the "Bird Brigade" in fifty cities around the United States, dedicated to convincing people that by 2001, the government had replaced all real birds with robotic drones.  "We hope to achieve public unity through disbelief in avian beings," McIndoe says.

When told that some of the people in the Bird Brigade are doing it for the laughs and don't really believe it's the truth, McIndoe just shrugs and says, "We're living in a post-truth era."

Whatever the fuck that means.

He's nothing if not thorough, though.  He's suspicious of each and every bird, from the Bald Eagles soaring the Colorado Rockies to the Song Sparrows nibbling sunflower seeds at your bird feeder.  "I see them every day," McIndoe says.  "Every bird I see I am aware it is a surveillance drone from above sending footage, recordings to the Pentagon."

If you're inclined to agree with McIndoe, I should point out that there's a whole line of "Activism Apparel" on the Birds Aren't Real website, featuring t-shirts (several designs), hoodies, bumper stickers, and baseball caps, so you can advertise your allegiance to this fairly dubious cause.  My favorite one has a picture of Sesame Street's Big Bird and is labeled "Big Propaganda."

So McIndoe, apparently, is less concerned with trademark infringement than the CIA is.

What made me facepalm the hardest, though, was that after perusing the website, I dropped onto social media for a few minutes -- and saw three advertisements for Birds Aren't Real merchandise.  That's how long it took.  I clicked on one site, and five minutes later, I've already been pegged as some kind of Avian Truther.

Or Post-Truther.  Or whatever.

To the friend who started all this, allow me to say: thanks just bunches.  Like I need more crazies aiming their targeted advertisements at me.  I already regularly see ads for items like the SasqWatch (a wristwatch that has a band shaped like a -- you guessed it -- big foot), Cryptids of the World Coasters, a MothMan Running Team t-shirt, and an Ogopogo mug, to name just a few.

So honestly, I guess one more won't hurt.  It'll give me something interesting to wear on my next birdwatching trip.

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

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!]

A tale of a bizarre cocktail party

Today is Halloween, and in honor of that spookiest day of the year, I'm going to tell you a story.

It's a story about something that happened to me about thirty-five years ago, when I lived in Olympia, Washington, and it's definitely in the top five creepiest things I've ever experienced.  I still don't have a particularly good explanation for it, and it still makes me shudder to remember.

I was about twenty-five at the time, working a stupid desk job I hated, and to lighten the daily drudgery I decided on a lark to take an art class at Evergreen State College.  Now, I'll say up front that I'm not much of an artist.  My attempt in my biology classes to draw an animal on the whiteboard led to its being christened by students as the "All-Purpose Quadruped" because no one could figure out if it was a cow, a dog, an armadillo, or whatever.  But even considering my lack of talent, I thought an art class could be fun, so I went for it.

One of the students in the class was Laura L______.  Laura was between thirty-five and forty, at a guess, and in very short order she kind of attached herself to me.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it; I never got the impression she was coming on to me, or anything.  It was more that she hung on my every word as if I was the smartest, most interesting person she'd ever met.  We discovered a mutual interest in languages -- and it was off to the races.

Now, I hasten to state that at twenty-five, I simply wasn't that interesting.  I was a young, naive guy who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and at that point was just kind of flailing around trying to make enough money to pay for rent and groceries.  So as flattering as it was, even then I recognized that there was something weird and over-the-top about Laura's attentions.  Still, it was a sop to my ego, and I didn't do anything to discourage her.

About three weeks into the art course, I wrote a letter to a college friend of mine (remember, this is in the days before email and texting), and along with the usual newsy stuff, I mentioned the art class and "this weird woman named Laura."  "Next time we talk, I have to tell you more about her," I wrote.  Nothing more in detail than that -- a passing couple of sentences that didn't capture how peculiar she was, nor even in what way she was peculiar.

Around that time, Laura asked if my wife and I wanted to come over to her house, that she and her husband were throwing a party for a few friends, and that she'd love it if we came.  I said okay -- again, with a mild feeling of trepidation, but not enough to say "oh, hell no" -- and she seemed really excited that I'd agreed, and was bringing along my wife.

Saturday came, and we showed up at Laura's house.  And... Laura's husband, and the other guests, were all the same kind of way-too-bright-eyed intellectual that she was.  The topics were all over the place -- science, linguistics, art, history, philosophy, you name it.  And just like conversations with Laura, everything I said was met with "that's fascinating!" and "wow, that is so cool!"  Looking at it from the outside, you'd have sworn that I was Stephen Hawking or something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, House party in Denver Colorado, CC BY 3.0]

After about forty-five minutes of this, both my wife and I got freaked out enough that we decided to leave.  We invented some kind of excuse -- I forget exactly what -- and told Laura we had to go.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you can't stay," she said, her forehead creasing with dismay.  "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure, was "so sorry, too," and told her I'd see her next class.  She didn't argue more, but definitely looked disappointed.  My wife and I talked all the way home about how bizarre the evening had been, and how relieved we both were to leave -- even though nothing happened.

Two postscripts are what make this story even creepier.

About three or four days after the party, I got a letter from my college friend.  Best I can recall, the relevant passage went something like this:

I know you'll probably think this is ridiculous, but I felt like I had to say something.  When I read what you said in your letter about your classmate Laura, I got a real premonition of evil.  There was immediately a feeling that she meant you harm.  I know how skeptical you are about this sort of thing, so you'll probably laugh and then throw this letter in the trash, but I felt like I couldn't simply not tell you.

The second thing is that Laura never came back to the art class.

The first time she missed, I just figured she was sick or something (and was actually a little relieved, because I didn't want to get into it with her about why we'd left her party).  But then another class came, and another, and she never showed up.

I never saw her again.

My wife said, "Maybe she realized that she'd missed her chance to get you, and you weren't going to trust her enough to give her another opportunity."

I actually thought, several times, about driving past her house, just to see what I could see (I had no inclination to knock on her door).  But each time, the idea that she might see my car driving past gave me such a chill up my backbone that I didn't do it.  Where she lived wasn't on my way to work or anything, it was quite a bit out of the way, so I never did go back.

To this day, I don't have a good explanation for this.  Were they just weird, over-enthusiastic intellectual types, and it was all just innocent overcompensation for social awkwardness?  Was it a cult?  Were they planning on drugging our drinks or something?  If we'd stayed longer, were they going to drag out a display of Amway products?

I honestly have no idea.  But even though nothing happened -- "strange, extremely happy smart people freak out young couple," is really about the extent of it -- I still can't think of this incident without shuddering.  I've many times considered turning it into a short story or novel, but I have never been able to come up with a convincing ending.

And on that note, I'll end by wishing you a spooky, scary, and fun-filled Halloween.  Just be careful about befriending odd middle-aged women in your art classes.

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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!]

Ten questions, ten answers

I got an anonymous email yesterday, from an address I didn't recognize, with a link to a YouTube video called "10 Questions Atheists Can't Answer," and no other text.

Whenever I get something like this, I always get the feeling that the sender expects me simply to retreat in disarray.  I also have the impression that the people who put together videos like this are being disingenuous -- I wonder very much if they've actually talked to any atheists, or if they just came up with a list of things for which their explanation is "God did it" and they can't imagine anyone would have a different answer than that.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Notas de prensa, Confused man, CC BY-SA 2.5]

So I don't think the sender actually intended me to respond (although I might be wrong about that).  But in the spirit of being a good sport, here are the ten questions, along with my answers.  See if you find 'em convincing.


1.  Do people really believe that science is the only answer to all of life's questions?

Well, no, no one really thinks that, atheists included.  Atheists (and even worse, atheist scientists) don't spend their entire time doing science.  Like everyone else, they have hobbies, fall in love, get angry, play with their pets, feel sad, and experience all the other thousand things that are part of the human condition.  None of these are especially scientific, but it would be a rare person -- atheist or otherwise -- who would say they were unimportant.

And another thing.  The question, as it's phrased, embodies a misconception, and that is that science itself is a belief.  Science isn't a belief, science is a method.  It's the use of evidence, data, and logic to determine understanding.  And we atheists are hardly the only ones who do that.  The religious generally only have a problem with science when it leads to a different answer than their religion does on a particular topic; they're perfectly happy to use the scientific method every day, on everything else.

2.  Why do atheists care if I worship God?

Simply put: I don't.  I don't care even a little bit.  You can believe the universe is ruled by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want to, and I still don't care.  What I do care about  -- a lot -- is when people start telling me what I'm supposed to believe.  Or using their religion to shoehorn unscientific explanations into public school science curricula.  Or pushing religion-based legislation that denies rights to a subset of people they think are "evil" or "an abomination in God's eyes."  Then you can expect me to fight like hell.

Otherwise, believe whatever you want.

3.  Can nothing create something?

I presume you're referring to the Big Bang Theory here, and I have some advice; don't frame scientific questions in such a way that makes it clear you haven't bothered to learn what the scientists are actually saying.  All that shows is that you can't be bothered to do even a half-hour's research on Wikipedia, but would rather come up with ridiculous straw-man arguments than have an intelligent, thoughtful conversation.

4.  How do you know that God doesn't exist?

I don't.  I find the lack of evidence in favor of a deity strongly supports that conclusion, but as with anything, I might be wrong.  That's the nice thing about a scientific approach; if the data contradicts your previous theory, you don't ignore the data -- you change the theory.

5.  What is the origin of life?

As with question #3, there are some really fascinating scenarios as to how this might have happened -- it looks like organic molecules are quick to form abiotically as long as there are raw materials, a source of energy, and no strongly oxidizing chemicals around to rip them apart as fast as they form.  After that, there are a great many scenarios that are possible, and biochemists are looking into them with great interest (one reason being that what they find out could give us a lens into the possibilities of life on other planets).  So once again, you might want to do a little research about the scientific explanations before you conclude science doesn't have one.

6.  Where does our morality come from?

My morality comes from a desire to care for the people around me, care for the environment, and in general, not to be a dick.  The reason I have those morals is because I much prefer it when the people in my life are happy and healthy and I have a clean and habitable planet to live on.  The interesting thing is that there's good evidence that a lot of other animals have at least the rudiments of moral behavior -- reciprocity exists in a lot of primate species, elephants, and even some birds (such as crows and ravens); dogs show an understanding of fair play; and a surprising number of species form strong emotional bonds, and go through profound grief when their loved ones die.  Social species, in general, do whatever it takes to make the social order cohere, so it's perfectly understandable that they wouldn't engage in lying, cheating, stealing, assault, and so on.  No deity required.

7.  If you had evidence of God, would you become a Christian?

Cf. question #4.  If I had incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God, I wouldn't have any choice but to accept that I was wrong and alter my worldview.  But you might want to ask yourself if you'd change your beliefs if you got incontrovertible evidence of a different god -- say, Odin or Zeus or Ra.  If the answer is "of course not, I'm a Christian and that's that," then this question is just more evidence that you're being disingenuous.

8.  If evolution is real, then why are there no transitional forms in the present?

What does this even mean?  From the perspective of someone ten million years from now, all of the life forms on Earth today would be transitional forms.  If you're asking about transitional fossils, then this once again shows you need to do your research.  There are thousands of transitional fossils.  Go talk to a paleontologist, and then we can have the discussion. 

9.  Do you live according to what you believe, or do you live according to what you lack in belief?

Okay, at this point I think you were just running out of ideas, because once again, I have no clue what the fuck this question is asking.  How can you live by a lack of belief?  Do you live according to your lack of belief in unicorns?  Because frankly, I don't give my lack of belief in unicorns much thought, and I suspect you don't, either.

10.  If God exists, will you not lose your soul when you die?

Again, I suppose that's a possibility, if I'm wrong.  Based on what I know, I don't think I'm in much danger, frankly.  And even if there is an afterlife, and the universe is being run by some kind of all-knowing power, I'd think he/she/it would be forgiving of someone who used the brain (s)he was provided with and came to the best and most consistent answers (s)he could.  Frankly, I suspect even the Christian God would prefer an honest, kind, compassionate atheist to a narrow-minded, bigoted, hateful Christian.  (Nota bene: I am in no way saying all Christians are like that.  However, a subset of them are, and I've found that those are the ones who are most convinced they're going to heaven.)

So there are my answers to the ten unanswerable questions.  To the anonymous link-sender, I hope you read my responses with thoughtful consideration.  Not that I'm trying to change anyone's mind, but a little mutual understanding goes a long way.  Certainly better than mischaracterizing an entire group based on faulty assumptions, then proceeding as if that judgment was the truth.

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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!]