Cracking the infinity codes

Okay, I know I'm no genius, but I think I can place myself with confidence in the "above average intelligence" category.

A few things, however, defeat me.  A lot of physics rests on mathematics that I frankly do not comprehend, despite my B.S. in physics and minor in math.  When I look at academic papers from physics journals, and am confronted with such arcane beasts as tensors and cross products and weak isospin, I become tense, my eyes cross, and I become all weak and spinn-y.  (I usually require at least one glass of scotch to recover completely.)

Likewise, the deeper waters of philosophy drown me entirely.  I read the first paragraph of a friend's Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, and said, in a rather thin voice, "That's... nice," and decided forthwith that I should henceforth confine myself to the epistemological and metaphysical questions raised by The Cat in the Hat.

With the exception of the aforementioned, however, I can usually hold my own fairly well in most intellectual pursuits.  So it is seldom that I look at a sample of writing, study it from various angles, think about it, and then still come up completely empty-handed.  Which is what I did when I looked at a website called Infinity Codes that a friend sent me, along with the message, "Curious to see what you'll think of this" followed by an ominous winky-face emoji.

What I thought, after forty-five minutes' increasingly perplexed study, was (to borrow a line from the screamingly funny Latin-language sketch by the inimitable Eddie Izzard), "Quod... the fuck?"  And lest you think that I'm just being lazy -- or, perhaps, that my brain isn't as all-that-and-a-bag-of-potato-chips as I claim it is -- here's a sample, so you can make your own assessment:

PURPOSE and INTENT

-- Finding the spiral thread --

Split into 4 sets of templates the Infinity Codes have been designed to assist re-establishing our connection to the cycles of the cosmos and the earth (macrocosm and microcosm).  The codes are arranged in a fractal sequence in order to reveal the spiral thread of interconnected-ness between us, nature and the universe...

Their purpose is to liberate and inform us with the knowledge of geometric patterns, fractal harmonics and organic ratios of the 13D reality in which we live.  Each graphic has ancient wisdom encoded within it that our ancestors knew and based their systems of time and space measurement upon. 

Living in a non-linear matrix of time and space, which they understood primarily through observing the movements of the 7 visible ‘spheres’ (5 planets + sun + moon), our ancestors were far beyond us in their development.  This enabled them to perceive the fractal design of the tree of life, and our place in it - via the 28 = (4x7), the 365 = (13x28) +1, and 365.242 (1 year).  This created a fractal matrix of the alchemy of the organic + geometric, that could then be aligned to zodiacal + celestial, in an eternal map of the cosmos.

And that's just from the freakin' introduction.

If you go to "What is the context?" -- a question I was certainly asking by this point -- you read the following:

Living in the end times (Solstice Sun aligned with the Galactic Center), beginning of the 21st century (7:7:7), Age of Aquarius geometrically speaking, yet in reality (organically speaking) the Age of Aquarius starts circa 2600ad, information Age, cyber era… calculated from the peak moment of 2012, Dec 21st, Winter solstice!

Well, what strikes me about this is the part about the Sun being lined up with the Galactic Center at the beginning of the 21st century.  Which is true, but can someone explain to me how two points could not be lined up?  I mean, didn't Euclid have something to say about this?  If somehow the Sun and the Galactic Center didn't fall on a straight line, that would be a little odder, don't you think?

And then, we have mystifying illustrations like the following:

Which are pretty, I suppose, but what the hell do they mean?

But if you really want to make your head spin, though, go to the page called "Cosmic Formulas," wherein we get to see the mathematical basis for all of it.  I think.  I mean, as far as I can tell, and applying my reasonably decent background in mathematics, it looks like he's just multiplying random numbers together, adding them to other random numbers, and saying, "So cosmic, right?  Of course right."

I finally gave up after about an hour of messing about on the site.  What finally induced me to quit was when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the monitor screen, and I realized that my expression looked like that on the face of my dog when I try to explain complex and difficult concepts to him, like why he shouldn't dump the garbage and eat the plastic wrapper that the cheese came in.  He tips his head to one side, his brow furrows, and he gets this really... intent look in his eyes.  You can tell that he wants to understand, he's trying his hardest, but it's just not going to happen.

That's the way I looked after an hour of trying to decipher the Infinity Codes.

Maybe you'll be able to make more of it. If so, please enlighten me. I'm perfectly willing to admit when I'm out of my depth, as I was with my friend's dissertation, and acknowledge the better understanding that someone else might bring to bear on a subject.  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that here, there's nothing actually there to understand, and that we all might be left (like Eddie Izzard) saying, "Quod the fuck?"

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

A pandemic of conspiracies

I have to admit that COVID-19 has me a little skittish.

I know all the reassuring bits -- that most people who contract it have few or no symptoms, that the mortality rate is only 2% (contrast that with 70% mortality rate for a monster like Ebola-Zaire), that the flu is worse and we don't panic about that every year.

But.  I've read The Stand and watched Outbreak, and the similarities are alarming, not in the symptoms or severity, but in how the government is handling it.  Outright incompetence, coupled with attempts to muzzle the news media, along with reassurances that are almost certainly false ("a vaccine will be widely available soon").  There was a cluster of cases in Kirkland, Washington -- where I lived for ten years -- and just this morning there was the confirmation of a case...

... in Manhattan.

So at the moment I'm oscillating between "guarded" and "freaking right the fuck out."

At least I keep telling myself to go back to the facts -- what the CDC has discovered about the virus, recommendations for avoiding getting sick, maps of actual cases.  Which is more than I can say for a few other people.

Situations like this always seem to be prime breeding ground for conspiracy theories.  My explanation for this is that people are happier believing that there's a cause for Bad Stuff Happening even if the cause itself is kind of horrifying than they are believing that bad things just happen because they happen.  Global evil is, for some reason, more comforting than simple chaos.

But still.  There are some people who should, in Will Rogers's words, never miss a good opportunity to shut up.

Top of that list is New Zealand-based evangelical Christian preacher Brian Tamaki, of the Destiny Church of Auckland, who said this weekend that COVID-19 wasn't actually a virus, it was an airborne demon, and that therefore True Believers were immune.

"Satan has control of atmospheres unless you're a born-again, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, Holy Ghost-filled, tithe-paying believer," Tamaki said, with special emphasis on the "tithe-paying" part.

"You're the only one that can walk through atmospheres and have literally a protection, the PS-91 protection policy."  PS-91, by the way, isn't a medication.  It's code for Psalm 91, wherein we read, "Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare or the deadly pestilence."

Because that worked out so well for people during the Black Death.

Tamaki, though, was hardly the only one who's been saying that coronavirus wasn't an ordinary epidemic.  The announcement by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic was followed nearly immediately by Donald Trump announcing at a rally that the outbreak is a "hoax" by the Democrats to discredit him.  How the Democrats created a virus in China and then spread it all over the world is a matter of conjecture, but the MAGA-crowd isn't exactly known for their critical thinking skills, so there was an immediate outcry against those evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  Then when someone pointed out that it was odd, if the epidemic was caused by the Democrats trying to gain political advantage, the first states to have confirmed cases were strongly liberal-leaning -- California, Oregon, Washington, and New York.

"No," the MAGAs responded.  "The Democrats did that on purpose!  They're making themselves sick so they can blame it on Donald Trump!"

Because that's how evil we liberals are.  Mwa ha ha ha *cough, hack, sneeze* ha ha ha ha ha.

But no one has a better conspiracy theory (and by "better" I mean "completely batshit insane") than the one my wife found a couple of days ago.  Because a summary wouldn't nearly do it justice, here it is in all its glory:

"Digitized RNA activated by 5G waves."  "Remote assassination."  "Smart dust from chemtrails."  "ID2020."  "Weaponized technology from the Space Force."

And, of course, rejecting vaccines.

Look, I know it's scary.  I know it's natural to try to find reasons for things, because once you see the reasons, you can control the fear.

But that is no excuse for making shit up.

Let's all just calm down, take as many precautions as we can (including, most importantly, wash your damn hands).  Panicking and inventing crazy fairy tales and conspiracy theories doesn't solve anything or help anyone.  There's no reason to overreact.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm off to put on my hazmat suit and enter my underground bunker for the next three months.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

Proteins in space

There's always a danger, when you want to believe something really really really badly, that you'll jump to belief on the basis of questionable evidence.

It's called confirmation bias, and it plagues us all, skeptic and non-skeptic alike.  It's why I've always tried to be more critical of claims that line up with what I want to be true -- because I'm more likely to accept such arguments unquestioningly.

Well, I try to.  It was kind of hard to do when I read a paper by Malcolm McGeoch ((PLEX Corporation), Sergei Dikler (Bruker Scientific), and Julie McGeoch (Harvard Univeristy) that appeared in arXiv last Friday, with the unprepossessing name, "Hemolithin: A Meteoric Protein Containing Iron and Lithium," which you'd think would only be of interest to biochemistry nerds, but had me leaping about making excited little squeaking noises.

Maybe you've already figured out why from the title, but if not, here's the salient bit:

This paper characterizes the first protein to be discovered in a meteorite. Amino acid polymers previously observed in Acfer 086 and Allende meteorites have been further characterized in Acfer 086 via high precision MALDI mass spectrometry to reveal a principal unified structure of molecular weight 2320 Daltons that involves chains of glycine and hydroxy-glycine residues terminated by iron atoms, with additional oxygen and lithium atoms...  Analysis of the complete spectrum of isotopes associated with each molecular fragment shows 2H enhancements above terrestrial averaging 25,700 parts per thousand (sigma = 3,500, n=15), confirming extra-terrestrial origin and hence the existence of this molecule within the asteroid parent body of the CV3 meteorite class.  The molecule is tipped by an iron-oxygen-iron grouping that in other terrestrial contexts has been proposed to be capable of absorbing photons and splitting water into hydroxyl and hydrogen moieties...

Analysis via iron and lithium isotope satellites in mass spectrometry reveals a novel protein motif with iron atoms closing out the ends of anti-parallel peptide chains composed of glycine.  Very high 2H content indicates proto-solar disc or molecular cloud origin. FeO3Fe groups at each end are of a type that could split H2O upon absorption of photons.  The existence of a unique chain length suggests that there could be a functionality conferring a replication advantage.

 They found a protein in a meteorite.  An extraterrestrial protein.  An extraterrestrial protein that appears to be able to perform photolysis -- the fracturing of water using the energy from light.

Like, the first step in photosynthesis in plants.

That was the point when my jaw hit the floor.

One of the barriers to estimating the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is that we don't know how common it is for planets to have conditions supporting a biochemistry.  I say "a" biochemistry because there's no particular necessity that extraterrestrial life have the same chemistry we do.  It's long been speculated, for example, that there could be a biochemistry based upon silicon, which (like carbon) has four valence electrons and is capable of bonding into chains, sheets, and rings.  Like many of us, I first ran into this idea with the episode of Star Trek called "The Devil in the Dark" -- where the intrepid space travelers of the U. S. S. Enterprise were confronted with a life form that used silicon instead of carbon as a biochemical scaffolding, and hydrofluoric acid instead of water as a solvent and carrier -- and so initially, it didn't look alive at all, more like some kind of extremely caustic rock.

Here, though, we don't even need to go as way out as silicon-based life.  Here we have a protein based on amino acids found right here on Earth -- glycine and hydroxyglycine -- coupled with attachment to metal ions, much like many terrestrial proteins (hemoglobin being the obvious example).  If the conditions for biochemical reactions to produce such a protein can be achieved in a proto-solar disc or molecular cloud -- as McGeoch et al. claim -- then carbon-based biochemistry, and probably life, might be a lot more common in the universe than we thought.

On the other hand...

The really far-fetched I-Want-To-Believe streak in me has to wonder if the mysterious protein they found isn't an indication that complex biochemicals can form easily and under a great variety of conditions, but an indication of life.

Like, this protein was produced by a living thing, somewhere out there.

I find it extremely suggestive that the meteoric protein looks like it has the same ability as the photosystem-II array in chloroplasts -- using light to break apart water.  In plants this frees electrons that then are used to store chemical energy as ATP and ultimately synthesize glucose, and therefore underpin virtually every energy-demanding reaction in every life form on Earth.  If I had to pick the one reaction that was the most central to the survival of every terrestrial life form, that'd be it.

The discovery of such a protein in a meteorite is somewhere in that rarified environment just past "mind-blowing."

I'm trying to control myself, here.  I know it's easy to leap to the conclusion that this is evidence of extraterrestrial life, or at the very least, that life is all over the place out there in space.  At the moment, we just have a single bit of protein in a single meteorite.

But it's an alien protein.  One that has a function that, even in the careful diction of the scientists who discovered it, would give it a replication advantage.

Okay, I need to stop writing now, because I feel another bout of jumping around making excited squeaking noises coming on.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

The second biggest bang

There are times in science where -- if you're going to describe something accurately -- you rapidly become lost in superlatives.

That was my reaction to a paper this week in Astrophysical Journal titled, "Discovery of a Giant Radio Fossil in the Ophiuchus Galaxy Cluster," by a team led by Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory.  Here's what the researchers had to say about it:

The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster exhibits a curious concave gas density discontinuity at the edge of its cool core...  Using low-frequency (72-240 MHz) radio data from MWA GLEAM and GMRT, we found that the X-ray structure is, in fact, a giant cavity in the X-ray gas filled with diffuse radio emission with an extraordinarily steep radio spectrum.  It thus appears to be a very aged fossil of the most powerful AGN [active galactic nucleus] outburst seen in any galaxy cluster (pV∼5×10^61 erg for this cavity).  There is no apparent diametrically opposite counterpart either in X-ray or in the radio.  It may have aged out of the observable radio band because of the cluster asymmetry.  At present, the central AGN exhibits only a weak radio source, so it should have been much more powerful in the past to have produced such a bubble.  The AGN is currently starved of accreting cool gas because the gas density peak is displaced by core sloshing.  The sloshing itself could have been set off by this extraordinary explosion if it had occurred in an asymmetric gas core.  This dinosaur may be an early example of a new class of sources to be uncovered by low-frequency surveys of galaxy clusters.

To say that this explosion was huge doesn't even begin to describe it.  The energy output of this outburst puts it in second place ever -- the only event we know of that was more energetic than this was the Big Bang itself.

Its size isn't the only odd thing about it.  "We've seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," said Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of Curtin University's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in an interview at Phys.Org.  "And we don't know why it's so big.  But it happened very slowly—like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."

However slow it was, the explosion blew a hole in the sphere of superhot plasma surrounding the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Study lead author Simona Giacintucci compares it to the pressure from the eruption of Mount Saint Helens blowing off the entire top of the mountain, leaving a crater behind.  "The difference," she said, "is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rogelio Bernal Andreo, Rho Ophiuchus Widefield, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Johnston-Hollitt, who directs the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia, said that despite the enormity of the relic explosion, it was only recently observed because of a drastic improvement in astronomers' ability to observe the skies in the very-low-frequency end of the spectrum.  "It's a bit like archaeology," she said.  "We've been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now."

So there might be other colossal explosion remnants out there just waiting to be found.

What it brings up for me, non-researcher that I am, is to wonder what on earth could have caused a detonation on this scale.  To my knowledge, the explanation is still uncertain, and in fact can't be accounted for by any known natural process.  The lack of a mechanism and the size of the outburst led scientists at first to doubt the measurements were correct.  "People were skeptical because of the size of outburst," Johnston-Hollitt said.  "But it really is that."

And improvements to the Murchison Widefield Array is improving its sensitivity by a factor of ten, which means we're only seeing the beginning of discoveries like this, and who knows what else.  "The Universe is a weird place," Johnston-Hollitt said.

Indeed it is.  Awe-inspiring to the point of bowling over your brain, at times.  Look around you at your house, town, and region, your friends, family, and pets, even the bigger concerns of politics and global conflict -- and realize that on the grand scheme of things, we are minuscule, hardly even a blip on the surface of cosmic space-time.  Humbling and a little scary, isn't it?

But the human brain isn't built to conceptualize such enormities, and it's best not to dwell on it.  On the whole, it's probably better to have another cup of coffee and think about something else for a while.

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One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

Pieces of the mosaic

The diversity you find among birds is really remarkable.

There are differences in bill shape, from the weird angled beaks of flamingos, to the longer-on-the-bottom fish skewers of skimmers, to the absurd (and aptly-named) spoonbills and shoebills, to the pelicans -- about whom my dad taught me a limerick when I was little:

A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his bellican.
He can stash in his beak
All his food for the week,
But I really don't see how the hellican.

Yeah, it's kind of obvious where I got my sense of humor from.

Of course, it doesn't end there.  The impossibly long toes of the South American jacanas (called "lilytrotters" because they can walk on the floating leaves of waterlilies).  The phenomenal wingspan of the albatross.  The insane plumage of the birds-of-paradise.

And the colors.  Man, the colors!  Even in my decidedly non-tropical home we have some pretty amazing birds.  The first time I saw an Indigo Bunting, I was certain that one of my sons had put a blue plastic bird on the bird feeder just to rattle my chain.  There couldn't be a real bird that was that fluorescent shade of cobalt.

Then... it moved.

But nothing prepared me for the colors I saw on my visits to Ecuador, especially amongst the birds of the tanager family.  There are hundreds of species of tanagers in that tiny little country, and because they often travel in mixed foraging flocks, you can sometimes see twenty or thirty different species in the same tree.  These include the Green-headed Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lars Falkdalen Lindahl (User:Njaelkies Lea), Green-headed Tanager Ubatuba, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Black-capped Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Black-capped Tanager JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And the Flame-faced Tanager:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Being a biologist, of course the question of how these birds evolved such extravagant colors is bound to come up, and my assumption was always that it was sexual selection -- the females choosing the most brightly-colored males as mates (in this group, as with many bird species, the males are usually vividly decked out and the females are drab-colored).  If over time, the showiest males are the most likely to get lucky, then you get sexual dimorphism -- the evolution of different outward appearances between males and females.  (This isn't always so, by the way.  Most species of sparrows, for example, have little sexual dimorphism, and even experienced birders can't tell a male from a female sparrow by looking.)

The truth is, however, this is an oversimplified explanation, which I suppose I should expect given how long I've been in science.  Nature is both way more complex and way more interesting than we usually expect.  Just this week a paper was released in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology that looks at another group of birds that look like someone went nuts with a paint-by-number set -- the Australasian lorikeets.

Lorikeets are in the parrot family, and even by comparison to other parrot species they're ridiculously flamboyant.  Take a look, for example, at the aptly-named Rainbow Lorikeet:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dick Daniels (http://carolinabirds.org/), Rainbow Lorikeet RWD, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers, Brian Smith, Glenn Seeholzer, and Jon Merwin of the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ornithology, were curious about how lorikeets balance being bright enough to attract mates while not being so showy they attract the attention of predators -- the latter being in no short supply in Australia and New Guinea, where the birds are found.  Using spectral analyses of museum specimens encompassing nearly the entire diversity of lorikeets, Smith, Seeholzer, and Merwin found out a few things that were absolutely fascinating:

• Virtually all the color diversity in lorikeets is on the underside -- breast, abdomen, and front of the face.  The backs of almost all species are plain green -- making them camouflaged from above and less visible to predators like hawks.
• Some of the range of colors they do have is invisible to the human eye.  A number of species have pigments that reflect strongly in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum, which is visible to birds but not to us -- and presumably, not to many non-avian predators either.  So they can be as flashy as they want in the ultraviolet and still not attract attention from hungry carnivores.
• Each of the patches is under the control of a different set of genes and thus can be selected independently, meaning different species of lorikeets can diverge in terms of the facial color while remaining similar in the coloration on the back and abdomen -- something called "mosaic evolution."

"The range of colors exhibited by lorikeets adds up to a third of the colors birds can theoretically observe," Merwin said.  "We were able to capture variation in this study that isn't even visible to the human eye.  The idea that you can take color data from museum specimens, infer patterns, and gain a larger understanding of how these birds evolved is really amazing."

Of course, I wondered if the same forces might be involved in the evolution of two groups I've actually seen in the wild, hummingbirds and the aforementioned tanagers.  It certainly seems to fit the same pattern -- a wide range of eye-catching colors on the front of the body, and -- especially in the hummingbirds -- largely green on top.

But that's just a guess.  It certainly opens up an interesting line of inquiry into the evolution of other bird groups.  And -- perhaps -- will end up explaining a great many of the other pieces of the biodiversity mosaic.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

Choosing the right path

We're all so familiar with our own mental internal state that it's interesting to consider (1) that not everyone has the same sort of thing going on in their brains, and (2) what's really going on in there is not at all obvious.

I was just discussing the first bit last night with a friend.  She told me that she has entire, back-and-forth conversations in her mind, pretty much constantly.  Asking herself things, musing over answers, as if she was on both sides of a discussion over what to do and how to do it.  Me?  I have a crazy, trippy, disjointed monologue, jumping from topic to topic, as if my skull was occupied by Daffy Duck on speed.  And generally there's a soundtrack, too, usually of whichever song I heard on the radio over the past 48 hours was the most annoying.

It's no wonder I have such difficulty focusing.

Some people are highly visual, and rather than words, they think in pictures.  No internal chatter at all, which is hard for me to imagine.  And I guess it's no surprise I don't think in images much, especially not images of people; being face-blind, I can't picture anyone's face, including my own.  Nada.  I know I have blond-ish hair and blue eyes and short facial hair and a big nose, but I can't put it all together into a composite image the way some people (apparently) do with ease.

Of course, in most ways I get by just fine.  I was asked one time, "If you can't picture your own face at all, how do you know it's you when you look into the bathroom mirror in the morning?"  I stared at the person for a moment, and said, "Because I know there's no one else in the bathroom but me."

I mean, I may be face-blind, but fer cryin' in the sink, I'm not stupid.

But I digress.

Anyway, there seems to be a huge variety of internal experience, which I suppose is what we should expect given the huge variety of outward expressions of that experience.  But that brings us to the second question: what's happening inside our skulls that creates that internal experience in the first place?

Neuroscientists are just beginning to piece together an answer to that question.  We have a pretty good idea of where in the brain certain activity occurs; higher-order processing in the prefrontal cortex, motor coordination in the motor cortex and cerebellum, spatial navigation in the hippocampus, speech production in the Wernicke's and Broca's areas of the cerebrum, and so on.  Even my own particular difficulty, which goes by the medical name prosopagnosia, has been localized to a place called the fusiform gyrus, which in the face-blind simply doesn't respond when confronted with an image of a face.  So we can see it just fine, but we don't recognize who it is.  (It manifests in me as everyone looking vaguely familiar -- so when someone starts talking to me, I can usually slip right into acting like I know who I'm talking to, when in fact I very rarely do until I recognize the voice or pick up context clues.  But I'm good at faking recognition, at least until I get fed up fishing around and say, "I'm sorry, but I have no idea who you are.")

But other than the general locations in the brain where certain functions occur, we're still largely in the dark.  Think about something really simple that isn't in your mind before the question was asked -- for example, what did you have for dinner last night?

Now, where was that information before I asked the question?  How was it encoded?  How did you retrieve it?  Even weirder are those moments when you know you know a piece of information, and it's in there, but you can't get at it -- the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  And why, when you stop worrying at it and start thinking about other things, does the answer spontaneously pop out?  (In the days before Google, when finding out factual information usually required a trip to the library, I was driving myself nuts trying to remember the names of the Three Musketeers.  Athos, Porthos, and...?  It was a full two days later, while I was out for a run and completely thinking about other things, that suddenly my brain went "... Aramis!")

What about when we're trying to make a decision between two alternatives?  For me, I'll bat back and forth between them, then -- quite suddenly -- I settle down into one or the other.  And just last month a paper in Cell has suggested that what's going on in the brain might be exactly what it feels like, only much, much faster.

In "Constant Sub-second Cycling between Representations of Possible Futures in the Hippocampus," a team led by neuroscientist Kenneth Kay of Columbia University found that rats confronted with a choice in maze-running shuttle back and forth quickly (about eight times per second) between patterns of neural firing representing the two choices -- as if they were thinking, "Let's see, I wonder what's down the right-hand path?  Hmm, how about the left-hand path?"

The authors write:

Cognitive faculties such as imagination, planning, and decision-making entail the ability to represent hypothetical experience.  Crucially, animal behavior in natural settings implies that the brain can represent hypothetical future experience not only quickly but also constantly over time, as external events continually unfold.  To determine how this is possible, we recorded neural activity in the hippocampus of rats navigating a maze with multiple spatial paths.  We found neural activity encoding two possible future scenarios (two upcoming maze paths) in constant alternation at 8 Hz: one scenario per ∼125-ms cycle...  Notably, cycling occurred across moving behaviors, including during running.  These findings identify a general dynamic process capable of quickly and continually representing hypothetical experience, including that of multiple possible futures.

There are a couple of interesting things about this.  First, there's the role of the hippocampus; higher-order decision-making is traditionally thought to be the provenance of the prefrontal cortex, although the fact that this decision has to do with spatial navigation is probably why it occurs where it does.  Second, why is the cycling so fast -- each flip lasting, on average, an eighth of a second -- when it feels very much like we're considering each possibility slowly and deliberately?  (Of course, that's assuming that our neurology and experience are both comparable to what's happening in rats, which may be a poor assumption.)

I also wonder what's happening with the consideration of imaginary scenarios.  Being a fiction author, I do that a lot, and I know I spend a great deal of time testing out various ideas and plot twists before settling on the one that I want.  It's quite remarkable when you think about it; we're capable of dreaming up highly detailed and completely counterfactual scenes, and interact with them as if they were real -- deciding which path to take, which of the two magical doors to open.

As author and journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, in her phenomenal TED talk "On Being Wrong," "The most wonderful thing about the human mind is not that we can see the world as it is, but that we can see the world as it isn't."

But this is just the first step of solving that most fundamental of questions in neuroscience, which is how we emulate our experience in our brains.  This is one small piece of the puzzle of human consciousness, the origins of creativity, imagination, and memory, the last-mentioned of which hopefully will solve how I can set a tool down and literally thirty seconds later can't remember where I put it.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

A prehistoric hoax

One of the hazards of becoming more aware of how biased and (sometimes) duplicitous popular media can be is that you finally, de facto, stop believing everything you read and hear.

It's called, of course, being a "cynic," and it's just as lazy as being gullible.  However, because the credulous are often derided as silly or ignorant, cynics sometimes feel that they must therefore be highly intelligent, and that disbelieving everything means that you're too smart to be "taken in."

In reality, cynicism is an excuse, a justification for having stopped thinking.  "The media always lies" isn't any closer to the truth than "I know it's true because I read about it online;" nor is there anything particularly smart about saying "everything you eat causes cancer" or "all of the science we're being told now could be wrong."  All it does is give you an automatic reason not to read (or not to watch your diet or not to learn science), and in the end, all of those are simply statements of willful ignorance.

Take, for example, the site Clues Forum, which has as its tagline, "Exposing Media Fakery."  In particular, consider the thread that was started quite some time ago, but which continues to circulate, lo up unto this very day... entitled "The (Non-religious) Dinosaur Hoax Question."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rauantiques, Psittacosaurus Dinosaur Fossil Skeleton, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And yes, it means what you think it means.  And yes, the "Question" should simply be answered "No."  But let's look a little more deeply at what they're saying... because I think it reveals something rather insidious.

Take a look at how it starts:

Dinosaurs have, in recent years, become a media subject rivaling the space program in popularity and eliciting similar levels of public adoration towards its researchers and scientists. The science of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life is also directly linked to other controversial scientific topics such as evolution, fuel production, climate and even the space program (i.e., what allegedly killed them).

So right from the outset, we've jumped straight into the Motive Fallacy -- the idea that a particular individual's motive for saying something has any bearing on that statement's truth value.  Those scientists, the author says, have motives for our believing in dinosaurs.  Then we're told, at least in vague, hand-waving terms, what those motives are: supporting controversial ideas so people will look up to them, and getting us worried about the climate and the potential for cataclysmic asteroid strikes so they can get funding.  Therefore: they must be lying.  We're never told, outright, that's there's any real evidence the scientists are lying, but the seed is planted, right there in the first paragraph.

Then more reason for doubt is thrown our way when we're told that (*gasp*) scientists make mistakes.  A dinosaur skeleton found in New Jersey, and now on display at the New Jersey State Museum, was reconstructed with a skull based on an iguana, since the actual skull could not be found.  The article, though, uses the word "fake," as if the museum owners and the scientists were deliberately trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.  The truth is that they were simply interpolating the missing pieces -- something that is routinely done by paleontologists.  But the author claims it was more nefarious than that, and that those wily characters gave away the game by admitting what they were up to, right beneath a photograph of the skeleton:

Above is the full-size Hadrosaurus mount currently on display at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.  The posture is now recognized as incorrect.  At the same time the skeleton is fitted with the wrong skull of another type of duck-bill dinosaur.  Signs at the exhibit acknowledge that both the mounted skeleton as well as nearby illustrated depictions of what the living animal looked like are both wrong.  Both are slated for correction at some unspecified future date.

So yet another hole punched in our confidence, with the revelation that (*horrors*) there are things scientists don't know.  Instead of looking at that as a future line of inquiry, this article gives you the impression that such holes in our knowledge are an indication that everything is suspect.

Last, we're told that it's likely the paleontologists are creating the fossils themselves, because fossils are just "rock in rock," leaving it a complete guessing game as to where the matrix rock ends and the fossil begins.  So for their own secret, evil reasons, paleontologists spend days and weeks out in the field, living in primitive and inhospitable conditions, grinding rocks into the shape of bones so as to hoodwink us all:

But, in our hoax-filled world of fake science, doesn't this rock-in-rock situation make it rather easy for creative interpretations of what the animal really looked like?  And, once a particular animal is “approved” by the gods of the scientific community, wouldn't all subsequent representations of that same animal have to conform with that standard?

By the time you've read this far, you're so far sunk in the mire of paranoia that you would probably begin to doubt that gravity exists.  Those Evil, Evil Scientists!  They're lying to us about everything!

Of course, what we're seeing here is the phenomenon I started with; substituting lazy gullibility with lazy disbelief.  All the writer would have to do is sign up for a paleontology class, or (better yet) go on a fossil dig, to find out how the science is really done.

But I've found that people like this will seldom take any of those steps.  Once you suspect everyone, there's no one to lean on but yourself -- and (by extension) on your own ignorance.  At that point, you're stuck.  So actually, there is a difference between gullibility and cynicism.

Gullibility is curable.

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

One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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