Water worlds

Water is one of those things that seems ordinary until you start looking into it.

The subject always puts me in mind of the deeply poignant Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars," which has to be in my top five favorite episodes ever.  (If you haven't seen it, you definitely need to, even if you're not a fanatical Whovian like I am -- but be ready for the three-boxes-of-kleenex ending.)  Without giving you any spoilers, let's just say that the Mars colonists shouldn't have decided to use thawed water from glaciers for their drinking supply.

Once things start going sideways, the Doctor warns the captain of the mission, Adelaide Brooke, that trying to fight what's happening is a losing battle, and says it in a truly shiver-inducing way: "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

Even beyond science fiction, water has some bizarre properties.  It's one of the only substances that gets less dense when you freeze it -- if water was like 99% of the compounds in the world, ice would sink, and lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up.  Compared to most other liquids, it has a sky-high specific heat (ability to absorb heat energy without much increase in temperature) and heat of vaporization (the heat energy required for it to evaporate), both of which act not only to allow our body temperature easier to regulate, it makes climates near bodies of water warmer in winter and cooler in summer than it otherwise would be.  It's cohesive, which is the key to how water can be transported a hundred meters up the trunk of a redwood tree, and is also why a bellyflop hurts like a mofo.  It's highly polar -- the molecules have a negatively-charged side and a positively-charged side -- making it an outstanding solvent for other polar compounds (and indirectly leading to several of the other properties I've mentioned).

And those are the characteristics water has at ordinary temperatures and pressures.  If you start changing either or both of these, things get weirder still.  In fact, the whole reason the topic comes up is because of a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters this week called "Irradiated Ocean Planets Bridge Super-Earth and Sub-Neptune Populations," by astrophysicist Olivier Mousis of Aix-Marseille University, about a very strange class of planets where water is in a bizarre state where it's not quite a liquid and not quite a gas.

This state is called being supercritical -- where a fluid can seep through solids like a gas but dissolve materials like a liquid.  For water, the critical point is about 340 C and a pressure 217 times the average atmospheric pressure at sea level -- so nothing you'll run into under ordinary circumstances.  This weird fluid has a density about a third that of liquid water at room temperature -- way more dense than your typical gas and way less than your typical liquid.

Mousis et al. have found that some of the "sub-Neptune" exoplanets that have been discovered recently are close enough to their parent stars to have a rocky core surrounded by supercritical water and a steam-bath upper atmosphere -- truly a strange new kind of world even the science fiction writers don't seem to have anticipated.  One of these exoplanets -- K2 18b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 110 light years from Earth -- fits the bill perfectly, and in fact mass and diameter measurements suggest it could be made up of as much as 37% water.

So there you are -- some strange features of a substance we all think we know.  Odd stuff, water, however familiar it is.  Even if you don't count the extraterrestrial contaminants that Captain Brooke and her crew had to contend with.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for anyone who likes quick, incisive takes on scientific topics: When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by the talented science writer Jim Holt.

When Einstein Walked with Gödel is a series of essays that explores some of the deepest and most perplexing topics humanity has ever investigated -- the nature of time, the implications of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, the perception of beauty in mathematics, and the ultimate fate of the universe.  Holt's lucid style brings these difficult ideas to the layperson without blunting their scientific rigor, and you'll come away with a perspective on the bizarre and mind-boggling farthest reaches of science.  Along the way you'll meet some of the key players in this ongoing effort -- the brilliant, eccentric, and fascinating scientists themselves.

It's a wonderful read, and anyone who is an aficionado of the sciences shouldn't miss it.

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

Moonstruck

A lot of times, it's the simple, easily-stated questions that are the hardest to answer.

Take, for example, the question of how the Moon formed.  Satellites around planets are common -- Jupiter has 79, for example -- but our own is a bit of an anomaly.  For example, if you make a list of moons in the Solar System in order of mass with respect to its host planet, the Earth's Moon is way out in front.  Its mass is 0.0123 of the Earth's.  Next in line would be Titan, which has a moon mass to planet mass ratio fifty times smaller (0.000237).

It's easy to picture a planet the size of Jupiter or Saturn gravitationally capturing blobs of the coalescing matter during the Solar System's formation, but it's harder to see a small planet like the Earth having the gravitational oomph to snag something the size of the Moon.  Another oddity is that of the sixteen most massive moons in the Solar System, the Moon's orbit around the Earth is by far the most eccentric.  Eccentricity is a number between zero and one that indicates how elliptical an orbit is, with 0.000 eccentricity being a perfect circle.  The Moon's deviation from a circular orbit is twice the next contender (which is once again Titan; whether that's a coincidence or not isn't known).  But the elliptical nature of the Moon's orbit is why its apparent size from Earth fluctuates, and explains why when there's a solar eclipse, sometimes it's total (complete coverage of the Sun's disk) and sometimes it's annular (occurs when the Moon is farther away and has a smaller apparent size, so at totality there's a ring of the Sun's disk still visible).

A third peculiarity of the Moon only became apparent when scientists got their first views of the far-Earth side around 1960, and they discovered that the far side had few maria -- the darker regions that were named for the Latin word for sea because it was thought early on that they might be water-filled oceans.  The largest two, the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms) and the Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers) together cover about 10% of the near-side disk of the Moon, and given that they're dotted with impact craters they seem to be very old structures.  (The first Apollo manned landing, in 1969 in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), showed that the darkness of the maria is due to their being made largely of the dark volcanic rock basalt.)

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Gregory H. Revera, FullMoon2010, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So something odd is going on here, but a research team headed by geophysicist Stephen Elardo of the University of Florida has come up with a compelling answer to at least one piece of it.  The best hypothesis for the formation of the Moon, the researchers say, is the head-on collision of two protoplanets, one about ten times larger than the other (the smaller is estimated to be about the size of Mars).

Wouldn't that have been something to see?  From a safe distance?

In any case, this colossal collision blew both planets to smithereens, creating a whirling cloud of white-hot rocks and dust.  When the debris cooled and re-coalesced, the heavier one (eventually the Earth) had a high enough gravity to sort out the mess and pull the denser elements, like nickel and iron, into the core.  The lighter one (eventually the Moon) didn't, so it was left asymmetrical, with one side enriched in uranium, thorium, and the elements collectively called KREEP (potassium [symbol K], the Rare Earth Elements [such as cerium, lanthanum, dysprosium, and yttrium], and phosphorus [symbol P]).  This combo is what created the maria.  Uranium and thorium are radioactive, and as they decay, they release heat.  One effect of rocks being enriched in KREEP elements is that it lowers their melting point.  This meant that the surface remained liquid much longer -- becoming the flat, dark basalt plains we now can see from Earth.  The other side, being much lower in uranium, thorium, and KREEP, froze solid very early, and the landscape largely lacks maria.

"Because of the relative lack of erosion processes, the Moon's surface records geological events from the Solar System's early history," said study co-author Matthieu Laneuville, geophysicist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in an interview with ScienceDaily.   "In particular, regions on the Moon's near side have concentrations of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium unlike anywhere else on the Moon.  Understanding the origin of these local uranium and thorium enrichments can help explain the early stages of the Moon's formation and, as a consequence, conditions on the early Earth."

So that's one piece of the puzzle.  It brings up other questions, though, such as whether the fact that all this happened on the near-Earth side is a coincidence or was driven by something about the collision that formed the Earth-Moon system.  But whatever the answer to that is, the whole topic is fascinating -- and the violence of our satellite's origin is something to remember the next time you're looking up on a clear, peaceful moonlit night.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for anyone who likes quick, incisive takes on scientific topics: When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by the talented science writer Jim Holt.

When Einstein Walked with Gödel is a series of essays that explores some of the deepest and most perplexing topics humanity has ever investigated -- the nature of time, the implications of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, the perception of beauty in mathematics, and the ultimate fate of the universe.  Holt's lucid style brings these difficult ideas to the layperson without blunting their scientific rigor, and you'll come away with a perspective on the bizarre and mind-boggling farthest reaches of science.  Along the way you'll meet some of the key players in this ongoing effort -- the brilliant, eccentric, and fascinating scientists themselves.

It's a wonderful read, and anyone who is an aficionado of the sciences shouldn't miss it.

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

Through the looking glass

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I attempted to write a post on the odd superstitions surrounding mirrors, but got sidetracked over and over.

In a curious almost-synchronicity, today I ran into an article about how artificial intelligence can learn how to detect mirror-reversed images, even when they don't have such obvious cues as text to go by.  So I figured I ought to give another shot at addressing the topic of mirrors, more seriously this time.

Mirror reversal is a peculiar phenomenon, and I recall when I was in introductory physics in college and we were studying the optics of mirrors and lenses, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why a flat mirror reverses an image right-to-left but not top-to-bottom.

The answer, which many of you probably already know, is that mirrors don't reverse right-to-left, exactly; they reverse back-to-front.  This has the effect of a right/left reversal because it's like you're looking at the object from the other side (imagine the object in question was transparent, but you could still see its contours, and the reasoning becomes easier).

Look, I can prove it to you.  Stand in front of a mirror.  What it seems like is that there is another person who looks exactly like you standing behind a clear piece of glass, at the same distance from the glass as yourself and facing you.  Now, think about what it would be like if you were to join him/her -- go behind the mirror.  To get there, you would have to walk behind the glass and turn 180 degrees about the vertical axis to face you.  If you did that, your left hand would be opposite his/her right hand, and vice versa.  What actually happened is that your reflection didn't do a 180 degree turn.  It was reversed front to back with no rotation at all.  You're seeing yourself not so much reversed as turned inside-out.

Interestingly, there is a mirror that reverses objects top to bottom -- a concave mirror.  It also creates an image that appears to be in front of the mirror, not behind it, and in the right setup, the image seems to be floating in space (which is why the physicists call concave mirror images "real images," and ones that are behind the mirror -- as in flat and convex mirrors -- "virtual images").

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Whether concave mirrors reverse text is left as an exercise for the reader.

But what brought me to the subject of mirrors (again -- although my first attempt was pretty pathetic) is the paper "Visual Chirality," by Zhiqiu Lin, Jin Sun, Abe Davis, and Noah Snavely, of Cornell University, which was presented at the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.  What the researchers did was to use a trainable artificial intelligence program to analyze images, some of which were mirror-reversed and others which were not, to see if it was possible to determine reversal without using such giveaways as text, analog clocks, and so on.

And they got pretty good at it.  Some of the cues it picked up on were of the "oh, yeah, of course" type, such as looking at where the buttons were on a button-down shirt.  (Buttons tend to be on the right side -- although years ago women's shirts used to button from the other side, most shirts for either gender now usually have the buttons on the right.)  Wristwatches were also a giveaway, even when the faces weren't visible; most people wear them on the left wrist.  People carrying phones usually had them in their right hands, probably attributable to the fact that between seventy and eighty percent of us are right-handed.

But there were some curious ones.  Turns out the algorithm figured out that when people are in face-forward photographs but not looking directly at the camera, they usually gaze to the left.  Men with facial hair also were easy for the software to pick out when reversed -- the researchers suspect it has something to do with the way men trim their beards (perhaps also connected to using the right versus the left hand to do so), but what exactly the algorithm was picking up on, the researchers aren't certain.

"It’s a form of visual discovery," said study co-author Noah Snavely.  "If you can run machine learning at scale on millions and millions of images, maybe you can start to discover new facts about the world."

After training, the algorithm was getting the answer right eighty percent of the time even when all the obvious giveaways were removed -- not a bad score.  The study has applications in the analysis of images, and detection of when those images have been doctored or altered.

What it puts me in mind of is the facial asymmetry that most humans have, something well-known to portrait artists.  Take a sheet of paper, and stand in front of your bathroom mirror.  Relax your facial muscles -- try for a neutral expression -- and cover up first one, then the other, half of your face with the paper.  You'll be surprised at how different they look -- angle of the mouth, position of the eyebrows, and so on can vary greatly.  (There was an interesting study a while back that correlated facial symmetry with our perception of beauty -- and found that of the people tested, Denzel Washington had the most perfectly symmetrical face.  It may be that symmetry is an indication of freedom from some genetic flaws that influence skeletal development -- making symmetrical people good bets for producing healthy children -- but that, of course, is speculation.)

Anyhow, it's an interesting finding.  But I'm definitely going to pay more attention next time I trim my facial hair.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Today's post -- retraction

Hi all,

Just as a head's up:

I received several comments & emails (all polite, which I appreciate) setting me straight on the topic of today's post -- apparently there is something to the seizure- and migraine-inducing capacity of the Ravelry website.  So I (and Dr. Bartholomew of Psychology Today) were just plain wrong.

If you want more information, here's a website that gives more accurate information.

I've taken the post down.  My apologies for spreading misinformation, which is exactly the opposite of what I set out to do here at Skeptophilia.  But thanks for the readers who took the time to tell me to look deeper and reconsider what I'd written.

cheers,

Gordon

Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others.  This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior this week, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily. "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating.  I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know.  I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 59-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course.  I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Siesta time

I'm a morning person.

I know this is pretty unusual.  I also know from first-hand experience that night owls tend to hate us morning people, who are up with the sun and at least reasonably coherent by six a.m., if not always showered and fully dressed.  (Hell, I'm retired.  Fully dressed sometimes doesn't happen at all, especially when the weather is warm.)

The result, though, is that I fade out pretty early in the evening.  I'm one of those people who, when invited to a party, seriously consider saying no if the start time is after seven in the evening.  By eight I want to be reading a book, and the times I'm still awake at ten are few and far between.

But the lowest time for me, energy-wise, is right after lunch.  Even when I get adequate sleep, I go through a serious slump in the early afternoon, even if I was chipper beforehand.  (Okay, given my personality, I'm never really chipper.  I also don't do "perky" or "bubbly."  So think about it as "chipper as compared to my baseline demeanor.")

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding the early afternoon a tough time to be productive, or even to stay awake.  As I learned from a paper in The Journal of Neuroscience, the problem is a fluctuation in the brain's reward circuit -- it, like many other human behaviors, is on a circadian rhythm that affects its function in a regular and predictable fashion.

The problem is a misalignment of the putamen (part of the brain's reward circuit) and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which acts as a biological clock.  The putamen is most active when you receive a reward you weren't expecting, and least active when you expect a reward and don't get one.  The cycling of the suprachiasmatic nucleus stimulates the putamen to expect a reward after lunch, and then when it doesn't come -- one in the afternoon is nowhere near quitting time or happy hour, and most people's schedules don't accommodate an early afternoon nap -- the expected payoff doesn't happen.

The result: sad putamen.  Drop in motivation levels.

"The data suggest that the brain’s reward centres might be primed to expect rewards in the early afternoon, and be ‘surprised’ when they appear at the start and end of the day," said neuroscientist Jamie Byrne of Swinburne University.  "[The] brain is ‘expecting’ rewards at some times of day more than others, because it is adaptively primed by the body clock."

Me, I wonder why this priming happens at all.  What sort of reward did we receive in the early afternoon in our evolutionary history that led to this response becoming so common?  Honestly, I wonder if it was napping; an afternoon nap has been found not only to improve cognitive function, but (contrary to popular opinion) doesn't generally interfere with sleeping at night.  Having evolved on the African savanna, where the early afternoon can be miserably hot, it could be that we're built to snooze in the shade after lunch, and now that most of us are on an eight-to-five work schedule, we can't get away with it any more.  But the circadian rhythm we evolved is still there, and our energy levels plummet after lunch.

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

It reminds me of the three weeks I spent in Spain and Portugal a few years ago.  I was astonished at first by the fact that no one ate dinner -- even considered eating dinner -- until nine in the evening.  (On one of our first days there, we went to a restaurant at about eight, and asked the waiter if we could be seated at a table.  His response was, "Why?"  I think he was genuinely puzzled as to why anyone might want dinner at such a ridiculously early hour.)  But once we got the hang of it -- a big lunch with a bottle of fine red wine, then a three-hour siesta during the hottest part of the day, when businesses close their doors so there's nothing much to do but sleep anyhow -- even I was able to stay up late with no problem.

All in all, a very pleasant lifestyle, I thought.

So we now know there is a neurological reason for the early-afternoon energy slump.  Kind of a fascinating thing how much we're at the mercy of our biological clock.  But anyhow, I better get busy and get some chores done.  Time's a-wasting, and I'm guessing by lunchtime I won't be feeling like doing much but hitting the hammock and conking out for a while.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Grotesques

My interest in gargoyles started back in the mid-1970s, when I was a teenager, and my dad and I were watching the 1972 movie of that name.  I was lying on the couch and my dad was in his recliner, and my eyes were fixed on the screen as the main character, the brave and handsome anthropologist Dr. Mercer Boley, hit one of the devilish creatures with his pickup truck while traveling the roads of rural New Mexico at night.

Dr. Boley had been trying to convince his skeptical peers for ages that gargoyles were real, and that the medieval statuary on church roofs had been sculpted from live models.  So when he clobbered one, he figured that was his chance to prove his point.  He loaded up the gargoyle's body in the bed of his truck.

He stopped at a motel for the night, and was worried what someone would think if they walked past his truck and saw a dead gargoyle in the back.  So he did what anyone would do, provided they had the IQ of a peach pit: he carried the gargoyle into his motel room.

Well, if you've ever seen any 1970s horror movies, you know what happened next.  The gargoyle was only stunned, not dead.  The camera angle is looking down the length of Dr. Boley's body, lying in bed under his blanket, and in the deep shadows, a humanoid figure starts to rise up over the foot of the bed...

At that point, my dad, who had a questionable sense of humor but impeccable timing, reached out and grabbed my shoulders and shouted, "THERE'S ONE NOW!"

I'm honestly not sure how Dr. Boley got away, because it took me about ten minutes first to peel myself off the ceiling with a spatula, and then to go look for a change of underwear.  My dad thought all this was drop-dead funny -- which it almost literally was -- and commented later that the movie hadn't been all that good, but the halftime show was brilliant.

Anyhow, I've been interested in these strange critters for a long while, even though I don't think they're sculpted from life.  One of my numerous hobbies is pottery, and I've taken to making ceramic gargoyles.  Here's one of my better efforts:

His expression seems to say, "How the hell did I get up here on this roof?  And why am I naked?"  To which I can only answer that I've been to parties like that myself.

I was a little surprised to find out that what I make aren't technically gargoyles.  The word gargoyle is a cognate to the French gueule (throat), and refers to creepy statues on church roofs that were used as rain spouts.  The statues that I make, and others like it that are devilish winged guys but don't spit out water when it rains, are grotesques.  (The origin of that word, if you're curious, is the Italian opera grottesca, which means "a work of art found in a grotto.")

But that's a technicality.  I did a bit of research and I found out from the art history site My Modern Met that the gargoyle legend apparently started because St. Romain, who was the Bishop of Rouen, France in the seventh century, was credited with saving the town from a hideous, fire-breathing monster called la gargouille.  St. Romain conjured up some saintly power and subdued the beast, which then was burned at the stake.

This brings up the question of the efficacy of burning a creature who breathes fire.  You'd think they'd be more susceptible to drowning, or even to suffocating if you throw a thick blanket over them.  Apparently it worked anyhow, although as I would have predicted the head and neck of the monster wasn't consumed, so St. Romain nailed it up on the cathedral wall as a waterspout.

And thus the tradition was born.

St. Romain and la gargouille, on Rouen Cathedral [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Giogo via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)]

Not all the church fathers were as keen, however.  The prominent twelfth-century Benedictine monk St. Bernard of Clairvaux thought putting them on churches was a bad idea, and said so in no uncertain terms:

What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters before the eyes of the brothers as they read?  What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these strange savage lions, and monsters?  To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man, or these spotted tigers?  I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body.  Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat...  Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities, we should at least regret what we have spent on them.

It didn't have much effect, however.  The use of gargoyles on church roofs went on well into the nineteenth century, when architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc made a name for himself by going around renovating old Gothic cathedrals and basically gargoyling the hell out of them.

I have to say that I approve, and that I like them a great deal better than I do a lot of religious statuary.  I didn't know about the origins either of the word or the legend, so it was fun to find that out.  I'll probably make a bunch more of them, although my wife has instructed me to make some that aren't as creepy as the one pictured above.  Like, puppies and kittens with wings, or something.

I'll see what I can do, although I'm not sure it qualifies as a gargoyle if it isn't at least a little scary.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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