Talking to birds

A friend of mine, knowing my interest in linguistics and birdwatching, sent me a link to a fairly mindblowing post on the blog Corvid Research a couple of days ago.  But first, a little background.

Bird communication is generally not considered to be language.  The usual definition of language is "arbitrary symbolic communication that has a characteristic and meaningful structure."  The "arbitrary" bit is sometimes misunderstood; it doesn't mean any sounds can mean anything within a language (something that's obviously not true).  In this context, it means that the sound-to-meaning correspondence is arbitrary, in that the word "dog" is no inherently doggier than the French word chien or the Japanese word inu.  With the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, like "bang" and "swish" and "splat," the sound of the word itself has no particular connection to the concept it represents.

So bird song fails the definition of language on a number of counts.  When the Carolina wrens that nest in our back yard start their outsized calls of "TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE TEAKETTLE" at four in the morning, those vocalizations don't mean anything more than "I'm a male bird in a territory and you need to leave" or, to any available females, "Hey, baby, how about it?"  They're not capable of representational language, in the sense of using a different set of sounds to represent discrete concepts.

The situation blurs considerably when you look at parrots, many of which can learn to mimic human speech convincingly.  An African gray parrot named Alex learned, with the help of cognitive behavior Irene Pepperberg, not only to mimic speech but to understand that it has meaning, connecting sounds to objects in a consistent fashion.  There's no indication that Alex comprehended syntactic structure -- and the jury's still out as to whether he was simply learning to behave in a particular way to get a reward, similar to training a dog to sit or stay or roll over.  (Although -- as you'll see if you watch the video -- Alex did know how to count, at least up to five, which is pretty impressive.)

The blur only gets worse when you consider corvids, the group that contains crows and ravens.  Corvids are widely considered to be among the most intelligent birds, and their ability to problem solve is astonishing.  They do a great many higher-level behaviors, including having a sophisticated sense of play -- such as the crow that used a plastic lid as a sled on a snow-covered roof, doing it for no apparent reason other than the fact that it was fun.  But some research released recently in the journal EvoLang has shown another facet of corvid intelligence; they can apparently distinguish between different human languages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aomorikuma（あおもりくま） , Carrion crow 20090612, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sabrina Schalz (Middlesex University) and Ei-Ichi Izawa (Keio University) studied eight large-billed crows (Corvus macrorhynchos) that were raised in captivity in Japan, cared for by fluent Japanese speakers.  Schalz and Izawa wanted to find out if the birds were able to distinguish that language from another, so they played recordings of people speaking Japanese and people speaking Dutch.  The Japanese recordings didn't elicit much of a response; their attitude seemed to be, "Meh, I've heard that before."  But the Dutch recordings were a different story.  The crows gathered around the speaker, and sat perfectly still, their attention fixed on the sounds they were hearing.

It was clear that they were able to recognize the sound of Dutch as being foreign!

The cadence of a language, and how one differs from another, is a fascinating topic.  It has not only to do with the phonemic repertoire (the exact list of sounds that occur in the language) but pacing, stress, and tone.  The latter is why to non-Mandarin speakers, Mandarin sounds "sing-song" -- the rising and falling pitches actually change the meanings of the words being spoken.  Put another way, the same syllable spoken with a rising tone means something entirely different to the same syllable spoken with a falling tone, something that is not true in non-tonal languages like English (with minor exceptions such as the rising tone at the end of a sentence indicating a question).

Besides the different sounds in the Japanese language as compared to Dutch, the two languages also differ greatly in how words are stressed.  Japanese syllables can differ in length (and in fact, that carries meaning, much as tone does in Mandarin), but they're all stressed about equally.  This is why the way most Americans pronounce the city name Hiroshima is distinctly non-Japanese -- usually either hi-RO-shi-ma or hi-ro-SHI-ma.  The Japanese pronunciation stresses the syllables evenly.  (Try saying the word out loud with no change in syllable stress, and you'll hear the difference.)

So what were the crows picking up on?  I doubt seriously that they were thinking, "Okay, I don't know that word," but was it the sound system differences, the stress patterns, or something else?  Probably impossible to know, although it would be interesting to try to tease that out -- having someone speak Dutch with artificially even stress, or Japanese with non-Japanese syllable stress, and seeing what the reaction is, would be an interesting next step.  If it's the sound repertoire, then the reaction of crows to two mutually-unintelligible languages with similar phonetics, one of which they'd heard and one which is novel -- say, Dutch and German -- should elicit identical reactions.

Whatever's going on here, it's fascinating, and another indication of how intelligent these creatures are.  And it does make me wonder if I should be a little more careful when I'm talking outdoors -- who knows?  Maybe the crows are taking notes of what they overhear, in hopes of eventual world domination.

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Jumbo shrimp

After yesterday's rather humbling post about how easy it is to fool the human senses, today we get knocked down another peg or two with some new research showing our visual perception is beat hands down...

... by a species of shrimp.

You've probably heard the term refresh rate used in regards to computer monitors, but it also applies to our eyes.  The photoreceptors in your retina have to reset after firing, and during that time -- the refractory period -- the receptor cell is insensitive to further stimuli.  I recall finding out about this in my animal physiology class at the University of Washington thirty years ago, and finding out that human photoreceptors reset in about 1/60th of a second.  This is why the flicker in a fluorescent light is barely detectable to the human eye; it's driven by the oscillations of alternating current at a frequency of sixty hertz; and the fact that we have millions of photoreceptors, all out of phase with each other, smooths out the signal and makes it look like one continuous, evenly-bright light.

To a fly, however, which has a refresh rate double ours -- about 120 times per second -- a fluorescent light would look like a strobe, brightening and dimming every sixtieth of a second.

Must be really freakin' annoying.  Yet another reason I'm glad I'm not a fly.

But even they are not the fastest.  A paper in Biology Letters this week describes research into the visual systems of a species of snapping shrimp (Alpheus heterochaelis), which already is badass enough -- it snaps its claws together with such force that it creates a shock wave in the water, stunning its prey.  And this little marine crustacean has a refresh rate of 160 times per second.

So what looks like a blur of motion to other animals is visible as clear, discrete images moving across its field of vision.

Not only that, they have one of the widest ranges of sensitivity to light level known, functioning well with only 1 lux of incident light (the light intensity of late twilight) all the way up to 100,000 lux (direct, intense sunlight).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rickard Zerpe, Snapping shrimp (Synalpheus sp.) (23806570264), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The snapping shrimp isn't the only amazing crustacean out there.  Its cousins, the mantis shrimps (Order Stomatopoda) don't just snap their claws and stun their prey, they actually punch the shit out of them.  They can accelerate their claws at the astonishing rate of 102,000 m/s^2, delivering a force of 1,500 Newtons (equivalent to the Earth's gravitational pull on a 150 kilogram mass).  Not only that, but they move their claws so quickly they overcome the cohesion of the water molecules as they pass through, creating vapor-filled bubbles (a process called cavitation) in their wake.  These bubbles then collapse with astounding force, delivering a second deadly shock wave to the unfortunate recipient.

No wonder the folks in the Caribbean have nicknamed the native species of mantis shrimp "the thumb-splitter."

But wild as that is, it's not why I brought up mantis shrimp.  They have the most sensitive color vision of any animal known.  Humans are (mostly) trichromats, having three functioning types of color receptor in our eyes.  Dogs are dichromats -- they have only two, which is why their color acuity is worse than ours.  A few lucky humans, and a great many bird species, are tetrachromats, having four kinds of color receptors.

Mantis shrimp have sixteen.  They can not only see in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum -- a range of light completely invisible to the human eye -- they can detect polarization angle, and even have sensors for detecting circular polarization, something that is thought to be unique in the animal kingdom.

Why they need this many different kinds of light receptors is unknown, although it probably has to do with predator-prey interactions -- finding lunch and avoiding being made into lunch.  With so many different strategies used by shallow tropical marine species to confound the eye -- shimmering scales, transparency, cryptic coloration, countershading -- having eyes that beat everyone else in sensitivity and range would be a pretty neat adaptation.

So that's yet another excursion into the weird world of sensory perception.  It never fails to fascinate me to think about what a different kind of animal's experience of the world must be like.  As philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out, the only way to know what it's like to be a bat is to be a bat; all of our ideas of echolocation and flight and being nocturnal only gives us the answer to what it's like for a human to think about being a bat.

But even so, and all pondering about the mind/body problem aside, I can't help but wonder what the world looks like to a shrimp.

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

The stone hand illusion

One of the reasons I trust science is that I have so little trust in my own brain's ability to assess correctly the nature of reality.

Those may sound like contradictions, but they really aren't.  Science is a method that allows us to evaluate hard data -- measurements by devices that are designed to have no particular biases.  By relying on measurements from machines, we are bypassing our faulty sensory equipment, which can lead us astray in all sorts of ways.  In astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson's words, "[Our brains] are poor data-taking devices... that's why we have machines that don't care what side of the bed they woke up on that morning, that don't care what they said to their spouse that day, that don't care whether they had their morning caffeine.  They'll get the data right regardless."

We still believe that we're seeing what's real, don't we?  "I saw it with my own eyes" is still considered the sine qua non for establishing what reality is.  Eyewitness testimony is still the strongest evidence in courts of law.  Because how could it be otherwise?  Maybe we miss minor things, but how could we get it so far wrong?

But as I wrote about two weeks ago, even our perception of something as simple as color is flawed, and is mostly a construct of the brain, not a function of what's really out there.  We are ignoring as much as we perceive, making stuff up to bridge gaps, and in general, creating a montage of what's actually there, what your brain decides is important enough to pay attention to, and inferences to fill in the spaces in between.

If that's not bad enough, a scientist in Italy has knocked another gaping hole in our confidence that our brain can correctly interpret the sensory information it's given -- this time with an actual hammer.

Some of you may have heard of the "rubber hand illusion" that was created in an experiment back in 1998 by Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen.  In this experiment, the two scientists placed a rubber hand in view of a person whose actual hand is shielded from view by a curtain.  The rubber hand is stroked with a feather at the same time as the person's real (but out-of-sight) hand receives a similar stroke -- and within minutes, the person becomes strangely convinced that the rubber hand is his hand.

The Italian experiment, which I found out about in an article in Discover Online, substitutes an auditory stimulus for the visual one -- with an even more startling result.

Irene Senna, professor of psychology at Milono-Bicocca University in Milan, rigged up a similar scenario to Botvinick and Cohen's.  A subject sits with one hand through a screen.  On the back of the subject's hand is a small piece of foil which connects an electrical lead to a computer.  The subject sees a hammer swinging toward her hand -- but the hammer stops just short of smashing her hand, and only touches the foil gently (but, of course, she can't see this).  The touch of the hammer sends a signal to the computer -- which then produces a hammer-on-marble clink sound.

After repeating this only a few times, the subject feels absolutely convinced that her hand has turned to stone.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What is impressive about this illusion is that the feeling persists even after the experiment ends, and the screen is removed -- and even though the test subjects knew what was going on.  Subjects felt afterwards as if their hands were cold, stiff, heavier, less sensitive.  They reported difficulty bending their wrists.

To me, the coolest (and freakiest) thing about this is that our knowledge centers, the logical and rational prefrontal cortex and associated areas, are completely overcome by the sensory-processing centers when presented with this scenario.  We can know something isn't real, and simultaneously cannot shake the brain's decision that it is real.  None of the test subjects was crazy; they all knew that their hands weren't made of stone.  But presented with sensory information that contradicted that knowledge, they couldn't help but come to the wrong conclusion.

And this once again illustrates why I trust science, and am suspicious of eyewitness reports of UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the like.  Our brains are simply too easy to fool, especially when emotions (particularly fear) run high.  We can be convinced that what we're seeing or hearing is the real deal, to the point that we are unwilling to admit the possibility of a different explanation.

But as Senna's elegant little experiment shows, we can't rely on what our senses tell us.  Data from scientific measuring devices will always be better than pure sensory information.  To quote Tyson again: "We think that the eyewitness testimony of an authority -- someone wearing a badge, or a pilot, or whatever -- is somehow better than the testimony of an average person.  But no.  I'm sorry... but it's all bad."

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Descent into chaos

There's an interesting concept called sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Here's a simple example.  If you take a deep bowl, and drop a marble into it, it doesn't take any great intelligence or insight to predict what the end state will be.  Marble on the bottom of the bowl.  It doesn't matter how high you drop it from or where exactly it hits the sides first.  After a bit of rolling around, the marble will stop moving at the bottom.

Now, do the same thing -- but with the bowl flipped over.  Where will the marble end up?

Impossible to say, because it is an inherently chaotic system.  You could do it a hundred times and the marble will end up in a different place each time, because its final location depends on exactly the speed and angle of its path, where it hits the curved edge of the bowl, even whether the marble is spinning a little or not.  A system like this is said to be "sensitive to initial conditions" -- therefore unpredictable.  Perturb it a little by altering it in a tiny way, and you get a completely different outcome.

Here's a much cooler example, that I stumbled across in doing research for this post.  It's called a double compound pendulum.  Take two rigid rods, and suspend one so it's free to swing.  Then tie the second rod to the bottom of the first.  Start with the rods pulled horizontal, then let it go.  Can you predict how the whole system will move?

Simple answer: no.  It's a chaotic system.

[GIF is in the Public Domain]

A little mesmerizing to watch, isn't it?

The reason this comes up is because there's decent evidence that the intersection between the Earth's climate and human society is a chaotic system that has at least some degree of sensitive dependence to initial conditions.  If you perturb it, it may not respond the way you expect -- and sometimes small changes in one location can lead to big ones somewhere else.  (This concept was made famous as "the butterfly effect.")

As an example of this, take the research that was released just last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the link to which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday.  In "Extreme Climate After Massive Eruption of Alaska’s Okmok Volcano in 43 BCE and Effects on the Late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom," by a team led by Joseph R. McConnell of the University of Cambridge, we find out about an Alaskan volcanic eruption that may have been one of the significant factors leading to the collapse of the Roman Republic, and its consolidation as an empire -- events that radically changed the course of history in Europe and North Africa.

Geologists on the team identified tephra (volcanic ash) in ice cores from the Arctic that were fingerprinted chemically and shown to come from the volcano named Okmok in the Aleutian Islands.  The dating of the tephra deposit shows that the eruption happened in 43 B.C.E. -- right after the assassination of Julius Caesar, during a time when Rome was in chaos as various political factions were duking it out for control.  The eruption of this volcano halfway around the world is also correlated with the coldest year Europe had for centuries, possibly longer.  Snow fell in summer, crops failed, there were famines and repeated uprisings by desperate and starving citizens.

This sudden drop in temperature was one of the factors that contributed to the realignment of the Roman government as someone emerged who said he knew what to do to fix the situation -- Octavian (later known as Augustus), Julius Caesar's great-nephew.  And he did it, establishing the Pax Romana, quelling the revolts and ushering in two centuries of relative peace and prosperity for Roman citizens (and wreaking havoc on the Gauls, Celts, Teutons, and whatever other tribes happened to be in the way of the Roman Legions).

It helped, of course, that once the volcanic tephra from Okmok settled out, the temperature rebounded, and the first years of Augustus's reign were noted for a beneficent climate and rich crop yields.  Not all of the good bits of the Pax Romana were due to Augustus's skill as an emperor; he got lucky because of conditions he had no control over and could not have predicted, just as the last leaders of the Republic got unlucky for the same reasons.

The point here is that we should be wary of perturbing chaotic systems, which is exactly what we're doing by our rampant dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And what we're seeing over the last decades is exactly the sort of unpredictable response -- some areas experiencing droughts, others floods; deadly heat waves and trapped polar vortexes that drop areas into the deep freeze for weeks; increased hurricanes, tornadoes, and bomb cyclones.  One of the frustrations felt by the people who understand climate systems is that the average layperson doesn't see this kind of  unpredictability as precisely what you'd expect from pushing on an inherently chaotic system.  If you can't make predictions to pinpoint accuracy -- "okay, because the climate is changing, you can expect it to be 95 F in Omaha on July 19" -- it's nothing to be concerned about.

"The scientists don't even know what's going on," you'll hear them say.  "Why should we believe it's a problem if they can't tell us what the outcome is going to be?"

But that's exactly why we shouldn't be messing with it.  Systems that have sensitive dependence to initial conditions are dramatically unpredictable, and get pushed out of equilibrium quickly and sometimes with catastrophic results.

As the leaders in the final years of the Roman Republic found out.

I feel like another figure from the Classical world -- Cassandra -- for even bringing this up.  Cassandra, you may recall, is the woman who was cursed by the gods to having accurate foresight and knowledge of the future, but with the difficulty that whatever she says, no one believes.  The climatologists have been sounding the alarm about this for decades, to little effect.  If you can't accurately predict the outcome, to most politicians, it doesn't exist.

Which makes me wonder if before we try to get our leaders to get on board with addressing anthropogenic climate change, we should require they sit through some lectures on chaos theory.

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

A monumental change

You've probably heard the recent controversy about removing the statues of Confederate officers from prominent positions in the Deep South, with the anti-removal-crowd saying "It's our heritage" and the pro-removal-crowd saying "... but it's celebrating racism."  I don't intend to explore the reasoning behind either position, since I suspect that (1) we all know what our opinions on the issue are, and (2) it's unlikely anything I say would change anyone's mind.  But I do want to offer an alternative, which was (unfortunately) not my idea but the brainstorm of some folks in West Virginia.  They want to replace the statues celebrating the Confederacy with...

... statues of Mothman.

West Virginia high school teacher Jay Sisson explains:

To many West Virginians, Mothman carries more significance than any Confederate general.  In fact, the legend originated in the town of Point Pleasant, when locals spotted a “man-sized bird creature” prior to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people.  Mothman was blamed and retroactively seen as a bad omen that foreshadowed the disaster.  From there, the story of the Mothman spread across the country and became an urban legend of sorts.

Twitter user Brenna (@HumanBrennapede) has an additional reason for preferring Mothman; unlike most Confederate generals, she says, Mothman has "a six-pack and an objectively good ass."  The statue of the creature in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, illustrates this:

And I have to admit she's right that he has quite a shapely posterior.  It does remind me, however, of my days teaching Ancient Greek to high schoolers.  One of my classes complained to me one day that they were sick of learning phrases of limited modern utility like "O Zeus, accept my sacrifice" and "Prometheus's liver is being devoured by an eagle."

"Well, what do you want to learn how to say?" I asked.

One boy said, "How about, 'You have a nice ass.'"

I shrugged and said, "Okay.  It'd be, 'kalein pygian ekheis.'"  (Transliterated roughly into English letters.)

They all laughed, and I added, "I guess if you know how to say, 'you have a nice ass,' you'd better learn how to say 'thank you.'"  So I had them repeat after me, 'sas eukharisto.'"

At this point, the class was in hysterics.  Something seemed off -- it wasn't that funny.  So I turned around...

... and the principal was standing in the doorway.

Fortunately, he has an awesome sense of humor, and joined in the laughter at my obvious discombobulation.  And the students used that as their greeting to each other in the hall for the rest of the school year: "Kalein pygian ekheis."  "Sas eukharisto!"

Never let it be said that I didn't make an impact as a teacher.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I think the Mothman statue idea is brilliant.  It could be applied to lots of other states, too, each of which has its own terrifying and inhuman monster.  Florida could have statues of the Skunk Ape.  Louisiana has the Grunch.  Arkansas has the Boggy Creek Monster.  Kentucky has Mitch McConnell.

You get the idea.

So that would solve the problem of injuring state pride, and focus people's attention away from a bunch of military leaders who (to be brutally frank) lost anyhow.

But I'm not expecting it to catch on.  Inspired ideas usually don't.  Even ones that involve making statues of a creature with "an objectively good ass."

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

I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Along came a spider...

Sometimes there's a discovery that's just so cool that I need to tell y'all about it.  It's not apropos of much except that you never know what science is going to uncover next.

Have you ever wondered why some animals' eyes glow in the dark, and others don't?  I've seen raccoons, cats, and (given where I live, lots of) deer get caught in my car headlights at night, and been fascinated by the eerie reflections from their eyes.

But not all animals do this.  You can shine a bright light into a squirrel's eyes all you want, and you'll never see anything but a pissed-off squirrel.

The reason is a fascinating structure you only find in nocturnal animals called the tapetum lucidum.  This is basically a mirror behind the retina.  When light enters the eye and focuses on the retina, some of it passes through that tissue-thin layer of cells without activating one of the light-sensing structures -- i.e., it gets absorbed without contributing to vision.  If you're a diurnal animal (like us) this is no big deal; most of the time we have light to spare, and in fact a more common problem is too much light, which is why we have a sensitive iris that acts like the shutter on an old-fashioned camera, reducing the aperture so the inside of the eye doesn't get fried.

But nocturnal animals need every photon they can get, so many of them have evolved a tapetum.  Some of the light hitting the retina passes through and gets "wasted" -- but then it hits the tapetum and reflects back through the retina, providing a second opportunity to detect it.  This gives animals with this structure much better dim-light vision -- and makes their eyes glow in headlights.

I got to see another, more surprising, animal with a tapetum when I was on a night hike in Belize some years ago looking for nocturnal birds (many of which also have tapeta, for what it's worth).  We were all wearing headlamps, and the guide pointed out that on the trail there were what looked like hundreds of tiny rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, glittering as the beam of the lamps passed across.

"What do you think those are?" she asked, and her eyes were also glittering -- with mischief.

"No idea," I said.

"Get closer," she said.

I knelt down and peered at the little jewel-like sparkles, and very quickly discovered they were...

... spiders.

"Each species glows a different color," she said.  "We're not really sure why."

Fortunately, I'm not an arachnophobe, but I did stand up rather quickly.

So that brings us to the discovery, which appeared last week in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.  Spider fossils aren't very common, given that they are small and don't have bones or teeth (the most commonly preserved parts), and most spider fossils known have come from amber.  So it was quite a surprise to find a beautifully-preserved fossilized spider in Korea in a formation of chert.  Chert is a sedimentary rock (obviously, since that's pretty much where you find fossils) made up of tiny crystals of quartz.  Most of it comes from the layers of the evocatively-named siliceous ooze that coats the deep ocean floor and is made mostly of the silica skeletons of diatoms, microscopic algae that build shells out of glass.  But some chert forms when water passes through cracks in silica-rich rocks, dissolving bits of it that are then deposited in layers somewhere else.  (This is, essentially, the process that forms petrified wood.)

Here, it preserved this little spider so well that after 110 million years, you can still see its tapetum -- meaning it was a nocturnal hunter, rather like a modern wolf spider.

Without further ado, here he is:

... and the tapeta still reflect light.

"This is an extinct family of spiders that were clearly very common in the Cretaceous and were occupying niches now occupied by jumping spiders that didn’t evolve until later," said Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, who co-authored the paper, in a press release.  "But these spiders were doing things differently.  Their eye structure is different from jumping spiders.  It’s nice to have exceptionally well-preserved features of internal anatomy like eye structure.  It’s really not often you get something like that preserved in a fossil."

So pretty amazing stuff, and my apologies to the arachnophobes in the studio audience.  Hopefully the title of the post was enough to forewarn you.  Me, I think they're cool, although I wasn't as sanguine as my guide in Belize was about getting nose-to- ... um... nose-to-chelicerae with them.  But this illustrates something I've mentioned many times before; science never loses its capacity to astonish us with the complexity and beauty of the natural world.

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

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

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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