Analysis of a cold snap

Almost exactly 12,800 years ago -- and yes, we know it to that degree of accuracy -- there was a sudden plunge in the global temperature.

It's known as the "Younger Dryas" event, after the steppe wildflower Dryas octopetala, which only grows well when the conditions are very cold in winter.  The proxy records (bubbles in ice cores, patterns of glaciation, and types of pollen found in ice and sediments -- such as the aforementioned Dryas) are all in good agreement that in only ten or twenty years, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere plunged, in some places by as much as 6 C.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bjoertvedt, Dryas octopetala IMG 5641 reinrose reinsdyrflya, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That may not seem like very much, but six degrees is huge.  In fact, the word that comes to mind is "catastrophic."  The glaciers that had been receding -- this is, or at least was, an interglacial period -- suddenly began to extend their reach.  The cold period didn't abate for over a thousand years, with enormous impact on the humans around at the time.  The Younger Dryas correlates with the collapse of two of the dominant cultures, the Clovis civilization of North America and the Natufian culture of the Middle East.

But what could cause such a sudden and calamitous change in the temperature?

For years, the culprit was thought to be Lake Agassiz, a colossal freshwater lake that encompassed all five of the Great Lakes (and a lot more square milage as well), which was held back by an ice dam across what is now the Saint Lawrence Seaway.  As the temperature warmed -- remember, interglacial period -- the dam became unstable and finally collapsed, causing a humongous (I'm running out of words for "big," here) outflow of cold fresh water into the North Atlantic.  The result was a drastic slowing of the North Atlantic Meridional Turnover, which powers the Gulf Stream and keeps the Northeastern United States, Great Britain, Iceland, and Scandinavia at least reasonably warm.  The Turnover is caused by saline water (which is denser) sinking south of Iceland, and when the ice dam collapsed and the lake drained, the entire North Atlantic was covered by a sheet of water that was too fresh to sink.  The result: a slowdown of the circulation, and a return of glacial conditions.

Another, more far-fetched possibility is that the Earth got blasted by the shock wave of a supernova in the constellation Vela.  There is good evidence that the Vela supernova was coincident with the beginning of the Younger Dryas -- but connecting this to the drop in temperature is a bit of a stretch for most climatologists.

Recently, a third option has been gaining strength, and that's the fallout from the impact of a comet or meteor.  Here, the idea is that the debris thrown skyward by the impact blocked sunlight and caused a drop in temperature.  The impact hypothesis just got a boost last week with a paper in Scientific Reports, about a microanalysis of sediments from a place called Abu Hureyra that show good evidence of being flash-fried 12,800 years ago.

The sediments were collected decades ago, because the site itself was drowned when the Taqba Dam was put in place in 1970.  Archaeologists figured they better get what they needed from Abu Hureyra before the waters rose, and that included samples of everything they could get their hands on.  And an analysis by a team led by Andrew Moore of the Rochester Institute of Technology found that the bits of rock and other debris from the site dating to -- you guessed it, 12,800 years ago -- were coated with melted glass, indicative of a temperature of at least 2,200 C.

"To help with perspective," said James Kennett of University of California-Santa Barbara, who co-authored the paper, "such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute."

So the impact hypothesis is sounding more and more plausible.  What this kind of research always brings home for me, though, is how fragile the Earth's climate balance is.  Climate change deniers like to point out that there have been climatic ups and downs in the past, and the Earth has recovered; what they seldom add is that those ups and downs often resulted in mass extinctions.  So sure, the temperature rebounded after the Abu Hureyra collision.

A fat lot of good that did for the Pleistocene megafauna, such as mastodons, dire wolves, North American camels, and gomphotheres -- a bizarre North American elephant relative.  The humans didn't do much better; the ones who didn't get cooked and/or flattened by the impact very likely starved to death because of the mass die-off of plants and animals in the years following the collision.  How many made it through the bottleneck, and became our direct ancestors, is unknown, but it probably wasn't many.

So that's our cheery scientific discovery of the day.  A meteor impact triggering temperatures hot enough to melt glass, followed by a shower of debris and a drastic drop in global temperature.  I'd like to think this would be a cautionary tale, showing the effect one event can have on the climate, but at this point I know better.  We've pretended that everything is hunky-dory and ignored the scientists so far, so we'll be fine, right?

Of course right.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

Pearlin Jean

I got into an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, 100% of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never intended to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued with a vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.
• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.
• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean -- first to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new: Brian Greene's wonderful Until the End of Time.

Greene is that wonderful combination, a brilliant scientist and a lucid, gifted writer for the scientifically-inclined layperson.  He'd already knocked my socks off with his awesome The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos (the latter was made into an equally good four-part miniseries).

Greene doesn't shy away from difficult topics, tackling such subjects as relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.  Here, Greene takes on the biggest questions of all -- where the universe came from, how it has evolved and is evolving, and how it's going to end.

He begins with an observation that as a species, we're obsessed with the ideas of mortality and eternity, and -- likely unique amongst known animals -- spend a good part of our mental energy outside of "the now," pondering the arrow of time and what its implications are.  Greene takes a lens to this obsession from the standpoint of physics, looking at what we know and what we've inferred about the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to its ultimate silent demise in the "Heat Death" some billions or trillions of years in the future.

It's definitely a book that takes a wide focus, very likely the widest focus an author could take.  And in Greene's deft hands, it's a voyage through time you don't want to miss.

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

With fronds like these...

One of the most mystifying, and therefore (to me) one of the most fascinating, paleontological finds is the fauna of the Ediacaran Assemblage.

It's intriguing from a number of perspectives.  First, it gives lie to the picture most people have of the evolution of animals, that it was some kind of linear progression.  It's often seen as a climb up the Great Chain of Being, from something like a jellyfish, to something like a worm, to something like a bug, to fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and finally -- at the top, of course -- is the Pinnacle of Evolution: namely, us.

The truth is (predictably) much more interesting.  During the late Precambrian and early Cambrian Periods, in a relatively short amount of time (geologically and paleontologically speaking) all of the ancestors of the major animal groups appeared, as if there was a sudden and drastic push to diversification.  At that point there were proto-arthropods, proto-vertebrates, proto-mollusks, and proto-damn-near-everything-else.

Even more fascinating is that there were a number of animal groups around during that time that are of uncertain affinity to the others, and who apparently left no descendants.  There's the bizarre Anomalocaris, probably related most closely to early arthropods (its name is Greek for "abnormal shrimp"), with two jointed, spike-lined tentacles and a mouth shaped like a pineapple ring.  Opabinia was equipped with no less than five compound eyes and a proboscis like a vacuum-cleaner hose.  Most famous is the aptly-named Hallucigenia ("it creates hallucinations"), a worm-like critter with giant eyes, tube-like legs, and a double row of formidable spines down the back.

All three of these are probably branches of the huge group Protostomia, which are still today the most numerous animals on Earth.  But there are other fossils from the Ediacaran Assemblage that are even more mysterious, and one of the weirdest ones is the group called rangeomorphs.

They were almost certainly animals, although they were sessile (fixed to the seafloor) via stalks, and had weird frond-like structures of uncertain purpose (but which may have been a mechanism either for oxygen extraction or for filter feeding).  So if you were to look at a living one, your initial impression might well be that it was some odd sort of seaweed, and not an animal at all.

A 550-million-year-old fossil of the rangeomorph Charnia masoni, from the Mistaken Point Formation in Newfoundland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smith609 at English Wikipedia, Charnia, CC BY 2.5]

If Anomalocaris, Opabinia, and Hallucinogenia are problematic in terms of their evolutionary affinities, the rangeomorphs are complete ciphers.  They have no obvious connections to any living animal group, and in some ways more resemble fungi, although that too is speculation.  They were apparently quite common during the late Precambrian, so the sea bottom would have been covered with their frilly fronds gently waving in the currents -- but at the moment, exactly what they were is a mystery.

And the mystery just deepened considerably with a discovery that was the subject of a paper last week in Current Biology.  The rangeomorphs had another perplexing and unusual feature -- they were connected by thread-like filaments, some of them up to four meters long, that seem to have hooked populations up into a huge network of interlinked individuals.

The purpose of these filaments is unknown, but it could be that the individuals in a network were all clones, and were functioning as a colonial organism a little like modern corals.  What it immediately put me in mind of was groves of aspens, which look like bunches of individual trees but are all linked underground by a network of rhizomes -- some of the colonies cover many acres, and one in Colorado is said to be over eighty thousand years old.  (This calls into question what we mean by the word "organism;" is each of these trees a separate organism?  Is the whole grove a single organism?  If so, and you dug a trench down the middle and cut the rhizomes, have you just created two organisms?  Like many terms in biology, this word only seems simple until you push on it a little.)

In any case, the rangeomorphs apparently had the world's first social network, but what exactly it was used for we can only speculate at.  They were strange animals to say the very least.  These sorts of discoveries always make me wonder what the Earth looked like back then -- given how infrequent fossilization is, and how unlikely it is for a rock to remain undamaged through all those millions of years, the chances are that for every one species we have a reasonably good picture of, there are hundreds that we know nothing at all about.  The Precambrian water-world of the Ediacaran fauna would have looked a very alien place to our eyes, even though the seeds of all of our modern life-forms -- including ourselves -- were there in those oceans.

Some of those seeds, though, failed to leave behind any progeny, and it seems likely that the rangeomorphs were one of those.  Whatever they were, they certainly show no obvious connections to any modern group, animal or otherwise.  To me this only increases their fascination -- and with it, the hope that further discoveries may shed some light on this and other groups whose origins are lost in the depths of time.

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

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!]

Changing the thermostat

Everyone knows that the human core body temperature is supposed to be around 98.6 F.  At least, that's what we all learned in seventh grade life science, right?

A more curious question is why 98.6 and not some other temperature.  Other mammals need different core body temperatures, but the range is remarkably narrow -- from elephants (97.7 F) to goats (103.4 F), only a 5.7 degree difference overall, and the vast majority of mammal species are in the vicinity of 98-100 F.

In my biology classes, I usually did nothing more than a hand-waving explanation that "our body temperatures are what they are because that's the temperature where our enzymatic and neurochemical reactions work at their optimal rate," but that's a facile analysis at best -- a bit like saying "bake the cake at 350 F because 350 F is the best temperature at which to bake cakes."  It might be true, but it doesn't tell you anything.

Last month we got a better explanation of what's going on than what I used to give (admittedly a low bar).  A paper in Molecular Cell with the daunting title, "A Conserved Kinase-Based Body-Temperature Sensor Globally Controls Alternative Splicing and Gene Expression," by a huge team led by Tom Haltenhof of Freie Universität Berlin's Department of Biochemistry, gives us a window into why we regulate body temperature -- and why things fall apart so quickly when the temperature isn't what it should be.

The team looked at the effects of temperature change not in mammals but in turtles and crocodiles -- which are themselves poikilothermic (known in common parlance as "cold-blooded") but have a temperature-switching mechanism for sex determination.  In crocodiles, incubation of the eggs at a warmer temperature results in males; in turtles, the pattern is the opposite.  (Some lizards have an even odder pattern, where intermediate temperatures result in males, and either low or high temperatures result in females.)

The question was how this was happening.  Something about the temperature must be changing the chemical signaling that guides embryonic development; but how?

Haltenhof's team found that there is a group of enzymes called CDC-like kinases that are extremely temperature-sensitive.  Kinases in general are a hugely important enzyme family that are responsible for phosphorylation, the main way energy is transferred in living organisms.  So if you affect the reaction rate of a kinase, it results in changes in the transfer of energy -- and can have enormous impacts on the organism.

And the CDC-like kinases, Haltenhof et al. found, were acting directly on the DNA, and changing the rate of gene expression.  In crocodiles and turtles, the type of gene expression affected had to do, unsurprisingly, with embryonic development of the reproductive systems.

So far, interesting only to geneticists and herpetologists (and, presumably, to the crocodiles and turtles themselves).  But where it caught my attention was when it was pointed out that the activity of CDC-like kinases is important not only in reptiles, but in humans -- and that overexpression of one of them, cyclin E, is connected with at least one form of cancer.

So this research seems to have implications not only for embryonic development in crocodiles and turtles, but in explaining why our own body temperatures are so tightly regulated.  The authors write: "[CDC-like kinase] activity is likely to also impact on gene expression in pathological conditions such as hypothermia, septic shock, and fever, or in the slightly warmer tumor microenvironment."  And since in general, the core body temperature drops as a person ages, it also made the authors speculate that this could be the key to at least some age-related malfunctions (and perhaps suggest a way to treat them).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 24ngagnon, Thermostat science photo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This also brought to mind another perplexing bit of research that came out in January -- that the average human body temperature is dropping, on the order of 0.03 C per decade.  The standard "98.6 F" was established in 1851 by Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, who determined this by taking the axillary (armpit) temperature of 25,000 people in Leipzig (and you thought your job was boring).  But a recent study with even more measurements found that currently, the average body temperature is almost a degree cooler than Wunderlich's value.

The speculation in that paper is that the drop in temperature is due to a decrease in the inflammation caused by exposure to infectious agents.  If the 25,000 Leipzig residents were a representative sample from the mid-19th century, 3% would have had an active tuberculosis infection, and that's just one disease.  So the lower average temperature today might have to do with our lower incidence of infections of various kinds.

But it makes me wonder what effect that's having on the CDC-like kinases from the first study.  Because during our evolutionary history, the 1850s condition of harboring infections was much more the norm than our current clean, germ-free-ness.  So while losing our collection of nasty bacteria might be overall a good thing, it might have caused a drop in temperature that could affect other reactions -- ones we're only beginning to understand.

That's yet to be established, of course.  But what it does highlight is how important the body's thermostat is.  Only a four-degree drop in core body temperature is a sufficient level of hypothermia to severely endanger a person's survival; likewise, a six-degree increase would be a life-threatening fever that (if survived) could result in brain damage.  We are only beginning to understand how our temperature is regulated, and why the effects of losing that regulation are so drastic.  But what this new research shows is that our body temperature might have far more ramifications for our health than we ever imagined -- and could be the key to understanding, and perhaps treating, diseases that have up till now defied medical science.

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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!]

The closet's a fine and private place

Yesterday I got a DM on Twitter that left me scratching my head a little.

Here's the body of it, verbatim:

I don't mean to be offensive, but why do you make such a big deal of being bisexual?  What your preferences are and who you like to go to bed with are nobody's business.  But because you and other people like you want to push it in everybody's faces, you make it our business whether we want it to be or not. 

Then you complain when people are rude or discriminate, which they wouldn't have done if you didn't put it all on the front page in all caps. 

Think about keeping your private matters private out of courtesy to everyone else who would rather not hear about it.

So there's a lot to unpack here in only three paragraphs.

First, in my experience, when someone starts with "I don't mean to be offensive, but..." they're about to say something offensive.  (Analogous rules apply with phrases like "I don't mean to sound racist, but..." or "I don't mean to sound homophobic, but...".)  But leaving that much aside, there are still a few things that jump out at me.

First, I really didn't think I was "making a big deal out of being bisexual."  It's in my profile, okay. (Nota bene: it's not in all caps.)  I retweet LGBTQ awareness stuff when I see it -- maybe once or twice a day, if that.  Last week I got in a quick, lighthearted exchange with a friend about actor Tom Ellis's role in the series Lucifer, and I said that if the real Lucifer is as gorgeous as Tom Ellis, it really doesn't give me much incentive not to sin.

And that's kind of it.

Mostly what I get involved in on Twitter are discussions with other fiction writers, and (unfortunately) posts about politics.  So it's not like I'm waving a rainbow flag in front of people's faces.

Which brings up the question of why it would be a problem even if I was.  The subtler bit of subtext here is that the writer thinks it's fine for me to be queer as long as no one else knows.  The message is that she's only comfortable when she can pretend that people like me don't exist.  Because the assumption in our culture is you're straight unless you say otherwise, it's not that she thinks all identification by sexual orientation should be a closely-guarded secret; she's perfectly fine assuming that everyone is 100% straight, and therefore engages in the behavior associated with sexually-active 100% straight people.

But my even mentioning that there are folks who don't fall into that category is apparently a problem.  Or, more specifically, it's a problem that I'm one of them and I'm not ashamed of it.  Well, let me say this as explicitly as I can, and as politely as I can manage: that's how I lived for forty-some-odd years, after I realized I was bi when I was fifteen years old and suddenly found myself goggle-eyed over a handsome friend who took his shirt off on a hot day.  That's forty years of shame, coupled with a desperation that nobody must find out about that part of me, that the only way to live was to pretend to be someone I wasn't.

Now?  I have the 100% support of my wonderful wife, friends, and family.  My public coming-out last year spurred at least two people I know of to proudly claim their own identity (something that makes me choke up a little every time I think about it).

So re-enter that closet?  Not just no, but fuck no.

Because you know what?  Now that I'm out, I like being bi.  It gives me twice as many opportunities to openly appreciate the beauty of the human body.  It hasn't damaged my relationship with my wife; if anything, it's strengthened it.  So if you expect me to sink back down into shame and self-loathing because you're uncomfortable with the fact that I'm not uncomfortable...

... it's your problem.  Deal with it.

So anyway.  That was how my day started yesterday, and I decided instead of getting angry, to respond publicly.  Maybe it'll open a few eyes, and if not that, at least it might shut a few mouths.

Because I'll be damned if I'm expected to pretend Tom Ellis isn't drop-dead beautiful.  Yowza.

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

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!]

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!]