Neurobabble

Confirming something that people like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz figured out years ago, researchers at Villanova University and the University of Oregon have shown that all you have to do to convince people is throw some fancy-sounding pseudoscientific jargon into your argument.

The specific area that Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jessica Evans, Colton Christian, and Sara D. Hodges researched was neurobabble, in particular the likelihood of increasing people's confidence in the correctness of an argument if some bogus brain-based explanation was included. Fernandez-Duque et al. write:

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing?  Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure?  To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types.  Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.  In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial.  Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious “hard sciences” (Experiments 3 and 4).  Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will.  We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline.  

So this may explain why people so consistently fall for pseudoscience as long as it's couched in seemingly technical terminology.  For example, look at the following, an excerpt from an article in which Deepak Chopra is hawking his latest creation, a meditation-inducing device called "DreamWeaver":

About two years ago I got interested in the idea that you could feed light pulses through the brain with your eyes closed and sound and music at a certain frequency.  Your brain waves would dial into it and then you could dial the instrument down so that you would decrease the brain wave frequency from what it is normally in the waking state.  And then you could slowly dial down the brainwave frequency to what it would be in the dream state, which is called theta, and then you even dial further down into delta.

What the hell does "your brain waves would dial into it" mean?   And I would like to suggest to Fernandez-Duque et al. that their next experiment should have to do with people immediately believing claims if they involve the word "frequency."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NascarEd, Sleep Stage N3, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then we have the following twofer -- an excerpt of an article by Deepak Chopra that appeared on Dr. Oz's website:

Try to eat one of these three foods once a day to protect against Alzheimer’s and memory issues.  

Wheat Germ - The embryo of a wheat plant, wheat germ is loaded with B-complex vitamins that can reduce levels of homocysteine, an amino acid linked to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  Sprinkle wheat germ on cereal and yogurt in the morning, or enjoy it on salads or popcorn with a little butter. 
Black Currents [sic] - These dark berries are jam-packed with antioxidants that help nourish the brain cells surrounding the hippocampus.  The darker in color, the more antioxidants black currents [sic] contain.  These fruits are available fresh when in season, or can be purchased dried or frozen year-round. 
Acorn Squash - This beautiful gold-colored veggie contains high amounts of folic acid, a B-vitamin that improves memory as well as the speed at which the brain processes information.

Whenever I read this sort of thing, I'm not inclined to believe it; I'm more inclined to scream, "Source?"  For example, I looked up the whole black currant claim, and the first few sources waxed rhapsodic about black currants' ability to enhance our brain function.  But then I noticed that said sources were all from the Black Currant Foundation (I didn't even know that existed, did you?) and the website blackcurrant.co.nz.  Scrolling down a bit, I found a post on WebMD that was considerably less enthusiastic, saying that it "may be useful in Alzheimer's" (with no mention of exactly how, nor any citations to support the claim) but that it also can lower blood pressure and slow down blood clotting.

So I suppose that the only way to protect yourself against this kind of nonsense is to learn some actual science, and be willing to read some peer-reviewed papers on the subject -- which includes training yourself to recognize which sources are peer-reviewed and which are not.

But doing all this research myself leaves me feeling like I need some breakfast.  Maybe a wheat germ, black currant, and acorn squash stir-fry.  Can't have too many antioxidants, you know, when your hippocampus is having some frequency problems.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Listening to Cassandra

Yesterday's post, in which I skated backward through geologic time into the deep past, alluded to a few really bad times the Earth has been through.  Episodes of trap volcanism, which make the biggest volcanoes you can think of look like wet firecrackers.  Mass extinctions.  Asteroid collisions.

Bad as 2020 has been, the planet has seen worse.

A lot worse.

One awful event I didn't mention, however, is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  It occurred about 56 million years ago.  The gist is that over a period of maybe fifty thousand years, there was a spike of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere -- over 44,000 gigatons (that's 44 trillion tons) of excess carbon dioxide.  The result was a greenhouse-effect temperature surge that was on the order of five to eight degrees Celsius, on average, worldwide.

The results were catastrophic, starting with the extinction of close to half of the species of foraminifera, single-celled organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain and whose calcareous shells were literally dissolved away by increasingly acidic water.  Life eventually bounced back -- it always seems to -- leading to diversification amongst a number of mammalian lineages, including ungulates and carnivores.

But for a while, things were pretty unpleasant.  Unbearably hot, a choking, acrid atmosphere laden with carbon dioxide and methane, and oceans like a sweltering vinegar bath.

Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory just published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at why this sudden and catastrophic event occurred.  What they found out has two conclusions, one of interest only to folks who like geology, and the other which should terrify the absolute shit out of every human being on Earth.

Let's deal with the tame one first.

In "The Seawater Carbon Inventory at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," the researchers, Laura Haynes and Bärbel Hönisch, found that the cause of all this global havoc was a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now the North Atlantic.  The Mid-Atlantic Ridge had only recently formed, and North America was still in the process of separating from Europe.  Today the processes at the Ridge are relatively slow and steady -- London is moving away from New York City at about 2.5 centimeters a year -- because the area at the junction is made up of thin, fragile oceanic crust that is easy to tear apart.

But back in the Paleocene Epoch, the rift was forming underneath, old, cold, thick continental crust, and when that opened up, it was sudden and catastrophic.  Upwelling lava burned through deep layers of sedimentary rocks, not only coal seams but limestone.  Carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere at a phenomenal rate.  If that wasn't bad enough, disturbance of sea floor sediments caused a massive ejection of methane, which is not only toxic but is a powerful greenhouse gas in its own right.

The result: a huge ecological shift causing a mass extinction.  "If you add carbon slowly, living things can adapt," said study co-author Bärbel Hönisch, in an interview with Science Daily.  "If you do it very fast, that's a really big problem."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Which brings us to the second conclusion.  This is the part you should really pay attention to.

The estimated rate of carbon injection that caused all this havoc was on the order of one gigaton per year.  (Estimates from the available evidence are between 0.3 and 1.7 Gt/year, so somewhere in the vicinity of one Gt/year is a ballpark average.)  The current measurements of the rate of carbon injection into today's atmosphere are around 10 Gt/year.

Ten times higher than during the catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event.

I don't like to keep ringing the changes on the same topic, but dammit, we need someone in power to take charge of this situation and at least make a passing attempt to do something about it.  This "Meh, we've always used fossil fuels and it's been fine" attitude is seriously imperiling the long-term habitability of the Earth.  The data from today's atmospheric scientists and climatologists are unequivocal; analogous events in the past (the colossal Permian-Triassic Extinction has also been linked to a massive carbon spike) should be an indicator of where all this could lead.

People cite "economic catastrophe" as a potential result of unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, and use that as a justification for jamming the brakes on any move toward renewable energy.  My response is, if you want to see a fucking economic catastrophe, just keep doing what you're doing.

Economic catastrophe will be the least of our worries.

More and more, people who are warning about the ultimate outcome of climate change -- both actual scientists, and also concerned laypeople like myself -- are seeming like Cassandra, the woman in Greek mythology who was given the power of perfect foresight, but simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her.  I don't know what it will take for elected officials to start listening to today's Cassandras.  Increasingly it's seeming like the only option is voting out damn near every politician currently in office.

The problem is that the political system is propped up by corporate money, with the result that rich donors and lobbyists have a stranglehold on the country.  How to solve that piece of the problem is beyond my ability to parse.

All I can do is keep sounding the alarm, and hope that someone --anyone -- influential is finally listening.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

The depths of time

An article this week in Smithsonian got me to thinking about the scale of history and prehistory.

The topic of the article is fascinating enough on its own.  Archaeologists working in the Nefed Desert of northern Saudi Arabia have discovered tracks of what was pretty close to an anatomically-modern human, fossilized in a dried-up lake bed.  What's remarkable about these tracks is that the best estimate the researchers have for their age is 120,000 years.

This is a surprise for a couple of reasons.  The conventional wisdom is that humans didn't leave Africa until 50,000 years ago, so this would mean our cross-continental walkabout started over twice as long ago as we thought it did.  Also, it points to the Arabian Peninsula as having had a dramatically different climate back then -- along with the human footprints were the prints of elephants, camels, buffalo, and horses, suggesting something more similar to the central African savanna than the current barren desert.

But what this brought to my mind is the vastness of time.  When we think of "old stuff" we tend to lump it all together.  If asked to name something old that humans did, a lot of people would come up with the Egyptian Pyramids -- but these footprints are 24 times older than the Great Pyramid.

So when the person who created these prints was walking across this mudflat, it would be another 115,000 years before the builders of the Great Pyramid were born.

Our minds boggle at big numbers.  The 120,000 year old footprints are still, geologically speaking, recent, still in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Ages.  Ten times further back -- 1.2 million years ago -- you're still in the Pleistocene.  To reach the next age back -- the Pliocene -- you have to go over twenty times deeper into the past, on the order of 2.6 million years ago.

And still, things would be more or less like they are now.  Sure, there were some odd animals lurching about -- the enormous short-faced bear and tank-like armadillo relatives called glyptodonts come to mind -- but a map of the continents wouldn't be too very different from today's.

Ten times further back than that, 26 million years ago (and 25.88 million years prior to the "extremely old" Saudi Arabian footprints), and you're in the Oligocene Epoch, the time of some of the largest land mammals ever, and finally things are looking pretty different.  The aptly-named titanotheres hit their peak size with the Baluchatherium, which was five meters tall at the shoulder.  This is also when the weird little multituberculates bit the dust for reasons unknown, after being one of the dominant mammal groups since the Jurassic Period.

To get back to the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, we have to go a bit over twice as far back as that -- 66 million years, or 550 times older than the Arabian footprints we started with.  T. rex bought the farm during the Cretaceous Extinction, but what's kind of mindblowing is that another of the popular dinosaurs, Stegosaurus, went extinct over twice as far back as that, toward the end of the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago.

Put a different way, in terms of time, you're fifteen million years closer to the Tyrannosaurus rex than he is to the Stegosaurus.

It's why I always get a bit of a laugh when I hear people say the dinosaurs were a colossal evolutionary failure.  The earliest true dinosaurs appeared in the early Triassic Period, something like 240 million years ago, and the last of them (again, other than birds) died at the K-T Boundary, 66 million years ago.  So they were the dominant life forms for 174 million years, roughly seven hundred times longer than humans have been around.

Back another twelve million years before the first dinosaurs was the horrific Permian-Triassic Extinction, caused by a serious Series of Unfortunate Events -- the lockup of Pangaea changing the climate, sea level, and ocean current flow, along with a volcanic event for which superlatives fail me.  It covered virtually all of what is now Siberia, burning through live vegetation and Carboniferous-era coal deposits, spiking the carbon dioxide content of the air, simultaneously boosting the temperature by fifteen or more degrees and turning the oceans into an acidic, anoxic sewer.  By some estimates, 96% of life on Earth died, pretty much because a natural event did accidentally to the world's sequestered carbon reserves what humans are now doing deliberately.

Cautionary tale, that should be, but for some reason it isn't.

Over twice as far back as that -- something like 541 million years ago, or 4,500 times older than the Arabian footprints -- we reach the Cambrian Explosion, the rapid diversification that produced just about every basic animal body plan that exists today.

And that's where we'll stop, although be aware that in a trip back to the formation of the Earth, you would still only be one-twelfth of the way there.

I don't know how anyone can not be impressed by the vast depths of time, and how honestly insignificant and ephemeral we are.  You are the end product of a lineage that stretches back all the way to the beginning, each generation of which lived long enough to reproduce.  As my evolutionary biology professor put it, "Your ancestors all the way back had to be good at two things: surviving and fucking."  (Accurate if a bit crass.) 

What it all makes me think of is where it's all going.  What, if we could look forward, would we see?  120,000 years, 5 million, 50 million, 500 million years from now?  Highly unlikely that humans (or their descendants) will last so long; extinction and replacement are the rule, not the exception.  I expect that whatever we'd see would be as weird to our eyes as the glyptodonts and pterodactyls and stegosaurs are.

But considering what the Earth's ecosystems have gone through in the past, I'm pretty sure there'll still be life of some kind, even in those far reaches of the future.  And I find that a comforting, if humbling, thought.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

Towards zero

Most scientifically-literate types know about the impossibility of reaching the temperature of -273.15 C, better known as "absolute zero."  The way most of us would explain why it's impossible goes back to one formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Since the Second Law says that heat always flows from a hotter object to a colder one unless you put energy into the system (I always called this "the Refrigerator Principle" in my biology classes), once you get near absolute zero it takes exponentially more energy to remove that last bit of heat from the object you're cooling, and to go all the way to zero would require (1) an infinite amount of energy expended to accomplish it, and (2) an infinite heat sink in which to place the extracted energy.  (Despite having been conjectured for over a century, this way of looking at absolute zero was proven beyond question by the mathematics of known physical laws just three years ago.) 

There's another way to look at it, though, which is a little harder to wrap your brain around, because it hinges on one of the most misunderstood laws of physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Developed in 1927 by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle does not mean what I saw someone claim on a woo-woo website a while back that "because of the Uncertainty Principle, we now know that science can't ever prove anything."

What the Uncertainty Principle does tell us is, despite its name, extremely specific.  What it says is for a particle, there are pairs of physical quantities called complementary variables, and for such a pair (call 'em A and B), the more we know about variable A, the less we can even theoretically know about variable B.  The most commonly cited pair of complementary variables is position and momentum/velocity.  If we know exactly where a particle is, we have no accessible information about its velocity, and vice versa.

Note that the Uncertainty Principle is not about the inaccuracy of our measuring techniques.  It's not that the particle has a specific position and velocity and we just don't know what they are, the same as watching a car speed by and thinking, "Okay, it was going so fast, at any given point along the road I don't know exactly how quickly it was moving."  This is a fundamental, built-in feature of the universe.  If I know a particle's position to a high degree of certainty, its velocity is equally uncertain, and in fact the particle exists in a superposition of all possible velocities simultaneously.  The reality is inherently blurry, and the more you home in on one piece of it, the blurrier the rest of it gets.

So what does this have to do with absolute zero?  Well, the temperature of an object is a measure of the average speeds of its constituent particles.  So if you had an object at absolute zero, you'd know the positions of the particles (because they're not moving) to 100% accuracy, and you'd also know their velocities (zero) to 100% accuracy.

About as huge a violation of the Uncertainty Principle as you can get.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study at the University of Vienna that was the subject of a paper last week in Science in which we read about a 150-nanometer bit of silica (made up of around a hundred million atoms) that was cooled down to twelve millionths of a degree above absolute zero.  This turns out to be the true temperature limit for a particle that size; every atom in the particle was in the ground state, the lowest allowable energy a particle can have without violating Heisenberg's law.  The particle was suspended in an "optical trap" -- the easiest way to describe it is they levitated it with lasers -- and then allowed to free-fall so they could observe its behavior.

What the researchers hope to do is to use such experiments to shed some light on the behavior of gravity in the quantum world, something that has been a dream of physicists for a very long time.  While the other three fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have all been shown to be manifestations of a single "electronuclear" force, gravitation has resisted all attempts to incorporate it into a "Grand Unified Theory" that could simultaneously explain the gravitational warping of space and the strange behavior of the quantum world.  None of the candidates for a Grand Unified Theory (the most famous contender is string theory) have as yet panned out, but the search continues -- and the ability to cool particles described in last week's paper give a bit of hope that physicists will be able to isolate and study systems under conditions that make the mathematics tractable.

So that's our quantum weirdness for today.  Thanks to the friend and long-term loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me the link to the study.  I would never claim to say I understand it at any kind of deep level -- after all, no less a luminary than Richard Feynman famously said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."  The fundamental workings of the universe are counterintuitive and mind-blowingly odd, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

That rabbit's dynamite!

After dealing in recent posts with such topics as the catastrophic loss of Arctic sea ice, the role of isolation in depression, and various scientific advances from astrophysics, archaeology, and neuroscience, I'm sure what you're all thinking is, "Yes, but what about BunnyMan?"

BunnyMan is a cryptid I'd never heard of, that apparently haunts the town of Clifton, Virginia, in Fairfax County.  And according to an article over at Mysterious Universe, we're not talking some gentle, fuzzy little Peter Cottontail, here.  BunnyMan is more like the scary evil rabbit from Donnie Darko.

Author Brent Swancer, who is also the person who a while back warned us about giant Sky Jellyfish attacking Japan, tells us that sightings of BunnyMan have been going on for over a hundred years.  The whole thing started with the escape in 1904 of two inmates from an insane asylum, Douglas Grifon and Marcus Wallster, in the woods near Clifton.  Wallster was eventually found, hanging from a bridge railing, with a note saying, "You'll never catch me, no matter how hard you try.  Signed, The BunnyMan."  Grifon was never found.  And thus began a century's worth of mysterious deaths and sightings of guys in bunny suits.

You may be laughing by now.  I know I was.  Swancer, however, seems to be entirely serious, and describes numerous encounters with the long-eared lunatic.  And he tells us that this thing is the most foul-tempered rrrrrodent... -- well, let's hear an example or two in his own words:

Two of the most intriguing and bizarre accounts of the Bunny Man surfaced in 1970.  The first incident occurred on October 19, 1970, when an Air Force Academy cadet by the name of Bob Bennett was allegedly with his fiancée and parked his car on Guinea Road in Burke, Virginia, so that the couple could talk.  It was at this time that they noticed a white figure moving outside of the vehicle.  Moments later, the front window was smashed into a cascade of glass, and an ominous voice warned “You’re on private property and I have your tag number.”  The horrified couple sped away and as they screamed down the road they noticed a small hatchet on the floor of the car.  When questioned later by the police, Bennett would insist that the attacker had been decked out in a full bunny suit, and he told his superiors at the Air Force base the same thing.  As ridiculous as the story sounded, Bennett would continue to insist it was true long after the incident.

Then, later that same year, BunnyMan had another run-in over people trespassing in his private Carrot Patch:

Just two weeks after the Bennett incident, the Bunny Man struck again.  Paul Phillips, a private security guard for a construction company, reported that he had seen a man-sized rabbit in front of a house under construction.  When approached by Phillips, the rabbit was reported to have said “All you people trespass around here.  If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head,” after which it started to furiously hack away at the unoccupied house with an axe.  Allegedly, when the startled Phillips went back to his car to get a firearm, the “bunny” swiftly escaped into the woods and disappeared.

Swancer's article is chock-full of other stories about people meeting this buck-toothed bad guy in northeastern Virginia.  In fact, the Colchester Overpass, the site of numerous suicides by hanging, has also been the site of so many appearances that it's supposedly called "BunnyMan Bridge" by locals who don't mind losing any credibility they might have had.

What strikes me about all of this is the proximity of Clifton, Virginia to the CIA Headquarters in Langley.  The two are only separated by twenty miles, as the rabbit hops, which I'm sure can't be a coincidence.  After all, I've watched historical documentaries in which Fox Mulder and Dana Scully found out about all sorts of horrible things the government was involved in, including alien hybridization experiments.  So the next step, evil-wise, would be hybridizing humans with various animals, some of which would inevitably escape and terrorize the countryside.  Just be glad it was BunnyMan.  It could have been WeaselMan, PigeonMan, or, god forbid, HornetMan.

I've been at this blog for ten years, and by this time, I thought I'd run into every cryptid in the book; but I have to admit, before yesterday I'd never heard of this guy.  So thanks to Brent Swancer for another example of hard-hitting journalism, uncovering the depredations of a vicious rabbit only a stone's throw from our nation's capital.  I feel safer now.  As Elmer Fudd teaches us, forewarned is forearmed.

Swancer ends his article on a cautionary note:

Who, or what, is the Bunny Man?  Is this a case of a ghost, an unsolved crime, a psycho on the loose, some mystery animal, or merely the delusional human psyche working upon its inner fears to create a phantom construct in the real world in the form of scary stories and myth?  The story of a man-sized bunny running around terrorizing, even murdering, people seems to cross over the line from mystery into preposterousness, but many urban legends doubtlessly have their origins in some grain of truth, so who really knows?  For the case of the Bunny Man, no matter how ludicrous it may sound, it might be a good idea to stay away from the Colchester Overpass at night, just in case.

Of course, he misses one possibility, which is "people impersonating a figure from a local legend to stir up trouble," which I think is the most likely solution.  Given the propensity of pranksters to keep such stories going -- consider the copycat phenomenon in the case of crop circles -- it's no wonder that once BunnyMan started being a thing around Clifton, he continued to be seen over and over again.

Any notoriety is better than obscurity, I suppose.

So that's our hare-raising tale for today.  If you're ever down in Fairfax County, keep your eyes open, especially at night.  You might want to bring some carrots along as a peace offering.  I hear BunnyMan has quite a temper.

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

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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

King of the who?

Given yesterday's post on odd coincidences, I thought it was kind of amusing that I stumbled upon the topic for today's post -- more or less by random chance -- immediately after reading two books that touched on the subject.

Both of them are about the Arthurian Legends, which has been an interest for years, so my reading them isn't itself odd.  It's odder, perhaps, that I didn't like either one of them at all.  The first was the novelization of the story from the point of view of Morgaine (Morgan le Fay), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.  I found just about every character in the story somewhere between obnoxious and downright repulsive, and it's hard to stay invested in a novel when I honestly don't give a damn if the characters live or die.  (My distaste was only deepened when I found out about the disturbing allegations against Bradley and her husband made by their children -- allegations which were proven in the husband's case, leading to his being sent to prison for pedophilia and dying there in 1993.)

The second was intended as historical scholarship, and although I'm hardly a qualified expert on the subject, this one seemed to me to face-plant rather badly as well.  Norma Lorre Goodrich's book King Arthur looks at the literary sources of Arthuriana, focusing especially on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory.  Glossing over the fact that the earliest of the three -- Geoffrey of Monmouth -- was still writing a good five centuries after Arthur's time, she goes through intellectual backflips to support her contention that Arthur and his pals weren't from Cornwall and Wales as usually depicted, but from Scotland, more specifically the area around Stirling and Edinburgh.  Like I said, I can't give a knowledgeable opinion about her use of the source material, but I am qualified to say that her attempts at historical linguistics are nothing short of silly.  (They amount to, "if you change this letter to this one, and reverse the syllables, and add a prefix, you can clearly see these two words are the same!")

Oh, and when she mentioned "fifth century Vikings" I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to hurl the book across the room.

Speaking of authoritative sources...

Anyhow, I just stopped reading Goodrich's book last night (didn't finish it and don't intend to), so I was a little startled when, in the course of looking for a topic for today's post, I stumbled quite by accident on an article in Edinburgh Live from only last week about some new archaeological discoveries on "Arthur's Seat," the remains of an extinct volcano overlooking the Firth of Forth.  Researchers have found the site of a village occupied by the Votadini, a rather mysterious Iron Age Celtic tribe who spoke a Brythonic language (i.e. more closely related to Welsh, Breton, and Cornish than to Scots Gaelic), centered around Traprain Law, a hill fort seventeen kilometers east of Edinburgh.

Arthur's Seat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Monniaux, Edinburgh Arthur Seat dsc06165, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which, of course, is exactly the area Goodrich claims was Arthur's bailiwick.  That she's not the only one who thinks there's a connection to King Arthur is evident from the name of the site, although it seems likely that the place was named a long while after Arthur's time by people who thought the Arthurian connection gave the place more gravitas.

Anyhow, the new research on the topic is more grounded in history, and more interesting.  The remains of the village on Arthur's Seat showed some significant fortification, including buildings surrounded by a hundred-meter-long, five-meter-thick rampart blocking the easiest path up to the top of the hill.  Fifth-century Roman silver coins were found at the site, suggesting the Votadini traded with the Romans living in the northern parts of England, although the evidence is their territory was only under actual occupation during a fairly short time in the middle of the second century C. E.

The archaeologists, however, found zero evidence of King Arthur having anything to do with the site.  If, in fact, there ever was a historical Arthur, something the jury is still out on.  The problem is, you can't really base history on a bunch of (way) after-the-fact, quasi-mythological accounts.  One of the best and most exhaustive analyses of the topic -- Francis Pryor's Britain A.D.: A Quest for Arthur, England, and the Anglo-Saxons -- found that the earliest source known that explicitly mentions Arthur, Nennius's Historia Brittonum, was written in the early ninth century, still a good three hundred years after Arthur's (alleged) reign.

Not exactly an eyewitness account, that.

Still, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as cosmologist Martin Rees was wont to say.  There could have been an Arthur messing about in Britain back then.  And there's no doubt that it's at the very least a fascinating legend.

I do still find it funny that I ran across this research literally the day after reaching the limits of my tolerance for Norma Lorre Goodrich's wild speculations on the same place and the same topic.  Not only that, a day after writing here at Skeptophilia on the subject of odd coincidences.  Which you have to admit is kind of meta.  Either it's the universe having a good laugh at my expense, or else I need to re-read my own post about how strange coincidences don't actually mean anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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

It is your mind that bends

Yesterday I was in my car on the way to an appointment in Ithaca, and I was listening to some classical music on satellite radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitar players -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kirkwood123, Matao MC-1 classical guitar 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name, of course, comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside which we all live. 

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619.  It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that... 

I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it... 

So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back.  It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37. Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how Skyrim will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger.  Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went.

My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself "Oh...  So many intelligent people out there...  I would have never been able to write something like that."  

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me...  

I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly something of the sort.  Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong predictions, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed -- yet another example of our old friend dart-thrower's bias.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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