Seeing the light

Picture this: you're walking down a road on a dark, moonless night.  In the distance, you see a light.  How far away is the light?

The problem is obvious.  You can only make a good guess about the distance between you and the light source if you know how bright the light actually is.  A close-by dim light will have the same apparent brightness as a faraway bright light.  (The opposite would be true, too, of course.  You could only estimate the light source's intrinsic brightness if you knew how far away it was.)

That, in a nutshell, is the difficulty with making distance measurements of astronomical objects.  There are three tools, though, that can help to get around this problem.

The first only works for relatively nearby objects.  It's called parallax, and it has to do with the apparent motion of objects when you are actually what's moving.  You've all seen this; when you're driving down the freeway, nearby objects (such as the fence running along the side of the road) seem to zoom past a lot faster than distant ones (such as the mountain in the distance).  To figure out something's distance using parallax, you need two measurements of its apparent position relative to the unmoving background.  Then, using the distance you know that you have traveled, it's a matter of simple trigonometry to figure out how far away the object is.

Even nearby stars, though, exhibit such a tiny parallax that it requires a very long baseline -- such as the position of the Earth between June 21 and December 21.  By that time, it's halfway around its orbit, and the baseline is the orbit's circumference -- about three hundred million kilometers.  However, objects farther away than about ten light years have such a minuscule parallax that it's effectively undetectable.

The second, discovered by astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt in the early twentieth century, is a peculiarity of a type of variable star called a Cepheid variable.  Cepheid variables have a regular rise and fall in brightness, and Leavitt discovered (using fairly nearby ones) that their pulsation rate is directly proportional to how bright they actually are.  And, as I pointed out above, once you know how bright a light source is, you can estimate how far away it is.  (Making Cepheids one of the most commonly used "standard candles" in astronomy.)

The third sprang right from Leavitt's discovery.  When the light from distant galaxies was analyzed, astronomer Edwin Hubble observed something strange; it was red shifted.  Red shift is the electromagnetic version of the Doppler effect -- the wavelengths of light get stretched out (move toward the red end of the spectrum) if an object is moving away from you.  The more the shift, the greater the velocity.  But the kicker occurred when Hubble used  Leavitt's discovery of the relationship between a Cepheid variable's pulsation rate and intrinsic brightness to figure out how far away these galaxies were, and found another interesting correlation; the farther away the galaxy was, the greater the red shift -- and therefore, the faster it was moving away from us.  This led directly to the Big Bang/expanding universe model, and marks the origin of modern cosmology.

There's a fourth method, though, only recently discovered, but which was the technique used in a study that appeared last week in the Astrophysical Journal to determine the distance to five hundred distant galaxies.  It's called echo mapping, and it works like this.

Many, if not all, galaxies have a massive black hole at the center.  Black holes are not amenable to any of the standard methods of distance calculation.  They don't emit light, so even the red shift method won't work.  But one feature of most massive black holes is that they are surrounded by a torus-shaped dust cloud of debris.  The intense gravitational pull of the black hole draws matter into it, heats it up, and causes it to emit radiation in sudden bursts.  That radiation flashes outward and is absorbed by the inner surface of the dust cloud, warming it and creating an infrared signal that is detectable by telescopes on Earth.

Well, we know that light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers per second, and also that light's intensity drops off as a function of the inverse square of the distance from the source (twice as far means four times dimmer, three times as far means nine times dimmer, and so on).  Dust only forms if the temperature is below twelve hundred degrees Celsius -- any hotter and the molecules are torn apart by the thermal energy.  So a large black hole, with a large radiation output, would generate a dust cloud with a larger inner radius -- just as campers sitting around a campfire need to be closer to a smaller fire to be as warm as someone farther from a bigger fire.

So that's all the pieces.  If you know the time between the initial flash of radiation from the black hole and the subsequent infrared signal emitted by the dust cloud, you can figure out the circumference of the dust cloud.  Knowing the circumference tells you how intense the radiation source is (bigger circumference = more intense radiation source).  This gives you the actual luminosity of the accretion disc around the black hole -- and therefore how far away it is.

What never fails to impress me about scientists, and science in general, is the cleverness with which problems are approached.  Some of the best solutions to scientific questions have come from completely out-of-the-box ideas, or (as in the case of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discovery about Cepheid variables) using something that at first appears to be a trivial factoid to illuminate something truly enormous.

I don't know about you, but whenever I see stuff like this, I always think, "I would never have thought of doing that."  I know that part of it is that, being a non-scientist, I haven't been steeped in one subject for years.  But I think the really successful scientists, the ones who make the major breakthroughs, are the ones whose brains are able to bring together what initially appear to be entirely disparate bits of information, and generate a synthesis that is way bigger than the sum of the parts.

In other words, science is primarily a creative act.

A fitting way to end this post is a quote from the brilliant Austrian physicist Lise Meitner:

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One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

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

The illusion of understanding

I've written before about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias that gives rise to the perception that everyone you ask will verify being an above-average driver.  We all have the sense of being competent -- and as studies of Dunning-Kruger have shown, we generally think we're more competent than we really are.

I just ran into a paper from about a long while ago that I'd never seen before, and that seems to put an even finer lens on this whole phenomenon.  It explains, I think, why people settle for simplistic explanations for phenomena -- and promptly cease to question their understanding at all.  So even though this is hardly a new study, it was new to me, and (I hope) will be new to my readers.

Called "The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth," the paper was written by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil of Yale University and appeared in the journal Cognitive Science.  Its results illustrate, I believe, why trying to disabuse people of poor understanding of science can be such an intensely frustrating occupation.

The idea of the paper is a simple one -- to test the degree to which people trust and rely on what the authors call "lay theories:"

Intuitive or lay theories are thought to influence almost every facet of everyday cognition.  People appeal to explanatory relations to guide their inferences in categorization, diagnosis, induction, and many other cognitive tasks, and across such diverse areas as biology, physical mechanics, and psychology.  Individuals will, for example, discount high correlations that do not conform to an intuitive causal model but overemphasize weak correlations that do.  Theories seem to tell us what features to emphasize in learning new concepts as well as highlighting the relevant dimensions of similarity... 

The incompleteness of everyday theories should not surprise most scientists.  We frequently discover that a theory that seems crystal clear and complete in our head suddenly develops gaping holes and inconsistencies when we try to set it down on paper.  

Folk theories, we claim, are even more fragmentary and skeletal, but laypeople, unlike some scientists, usually remain unaware of the incompleteness of their theories.  Laypeople rarely have to offer full explanations for most of the phenomena that they think they understand.  Unlike many teachers, writers, and other professional “explainers,” laypeople rarely have cause to doubt their naïve intuitions.  They believe that they can explain the world they live in fairly well.

Rozenblit and Keil proceeded to test this phenomenon, and they did so in a clever way.  They were able to demonstrate this illusory sense that we know what's going on around us by (for example) asking volunteers to rate their understanding of how common everyday objects work -- things like zippers, piano keys, speedometers, flush toilets, cylinder locks, and helicopters.  They were then (1) asked to write out explanations of how the objects worked; (2) given explanations of how they actually do work; and (3) asked to re-rate their understanding.

Just about everyone ranked their understanding as lower after they saw the correct explanation.

You read that right.  People, across the board, think they understand things better before they actually learn about them.  On one level, that makes sense; all of us are prone to thinking things are simpler than they actually are, and can relate to being surprised at how complicated some common objects turn out to be.  (Ever seen the inside of a wind-up clock, for example?)  But what is amazing about this is how confident we are in our shallow, incomplete knowledge -- until someone sets out to knock that perception askew.

It was such a robust result that Rozenblit and Keil decided to push it a little, and see if they could make the illusion of explanatory depth go away.  They tried it with a less-educated test group (the initial test group had been Yale students.)  Nope -- even people with less education still think they understand everything just fine.  They tried it with younger subjects.  Still no change.  They even told the test subjects ahead of time that they were going to be asked to explain how the objects worked -- thinking, perhaps, that people might be ashamed to admit to some smart-guy Yale researchers that they didn't know how their own zippers worked, and were bullshitting to save face.

The drop was less when such explicit instructions were given, but it was still there.  As Rozenblit and Keil write, "Offering an explicit warning about future testing reduced the drop from initial to subsequent ratings.  Importantly, the drop was still significant—the illusion held."

So does the drop in self-rating occur with purely factual knowledge?  They tested this by doing the same protocol, but instead of asking people for explanations of mechanisms, they asked them to do a task that required nothing but pure recall, such as naming the capitals of various countries.  Here, the drop in self-rating still occurred, but it was far smaller than with explanatory or process-based knowledge.  We are, it seems, much more likely to admit we don't know facts than to admit we don't understand processes.

The conclusion that Rozenblit and Keil reach is a troubling one:

Since it is impossible in most cases to fully grasp the causal chains that are responsible for, and exhaustively explain, the world around us, we have to learn to use much sparser representations of causal relations that are good enough to give us the necessary insights: insights that go beyond associative similarity but which at the same time are not overwhelming in terms of cognitive load.  It may therefore be quite adaptive to have the illusion that we know more than we do so that we settle for what is enough.  The illusion might be an essential governor on our drive to search for explanatory underpinnings; it terminates potentially inexhaustible searches for ever-deeper understanding by satiating the drive for more knowledge once some skeletal level of causal comprehension is reached.

Put simply, when we get to "I understand this well enough," we stop thinking.  And for most of us, that point is reached far, far too soon.

And while it really isn't that critical to understand how zippers work as long as it doesn't stop you from zipping up your pants, the illusion of explanatory depth in other areas can come back to bite us pretty hard when we start making decisions on how to vote.  If most of us truly understand far less than we think we do about such issues as the safety of GMOs and vaccines, the processes involved in climate and climate change, the scientific and ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem cells, and even issues like air and water pollution, how can we possibly make informed decisions regarding the regulations governing them?

All the more reason, I think, that we should be putting more time, money, effort, and support into education.  While education doesn't make the illusion of explanatory depth go away, at least the educated are starting from a higher baseline.  We still might overestimate our own understanding, but I'd bet that the understanding itself is higher -- and that's bound to lead us to make better decisions.

I'll end with a quote by author and blogger John Green that I think is particularly apt, here:

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Waving DNA and four-dimensional dark manifolds

I try to avoid posting about claims that are simply ridiculous, because (1) ridiculous claims are a-dime-a-dozen on the interwebz, and (2) low-hanging fruit has kind of lost its appeal for me.  But every once in a while I happen on something that is so ridiculous that it seems to be almost inspired.

Kind of like an art piece in the Museum of Wackiness.

I learned about this one from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link with the message, "Oh, Gordon, did you know there were 'DNA waves'?  As well as black holes at the center of the earth?"

Well, I couldn't read something like that without clicking the link.  It brought me to the wonderful site RetractionWatch, which is devoted to articles on retractions and errata in scientific publications, something absolutely critical to the scientific process.

This one is a doozy, although the journal that published the original paper -- the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences -- might as well open up a permanent page on RetractionWatch.  The particular paper this post references has the following title, which I swear I'm not making up:

• "A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold."

The paper, apparently, was part of an issue on "Global Dermatology."  What any of this has to do with skin diseases is beyond me.

(Nota bene: there's a link to the paper in the RetractionWatch article, but it requires a login to read it, and no way in hell am I giving the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences my information about anything.  And besides, the original paper may have been taken down by now.  So I'm restricted to the excerpts in RetractionWatch, which admittedly limits my knowledge about the paper itself.)

Fortunately, RetractionWatch was kind enough to include the paper's abstract, which I reproduce here verbatim:

Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth.  We show that the existence of life on the earth may be a reason that this black hole like object is a black brane that has been formed from biological materials like DNA.  Size of this DNA black brane is 109 times longer than the size of the earth’s core and compacted interior it.  By compacting this long object, a curved space-time emerges, and some properties of black holes emerge.  This structure is the main cause of the emergence of the large temperature of the core, magnetic field around the earth and gravitational field for moving around the sun.  Also, this structure produces some waves which act like topoisomerase in biology and read the information on DNAs.  However, on the four-dimensional manifold, DNAs are contracted at least four times around various axis’s and waves of earth couldn’t read their information.  While, by adding extra dimensions on 4 +n-dimensional manifold, the separation distance between particles increases and all of the information could be recovered by waves.  For this reason, each DNA has two parts which one can be seen on the four-dimensional universe, and another one has existed in extra dimensions, and only it’s e_ects [sic] is observed.  This dark part of DNA called as a dark DNA in an extra dimension.  These dark DNAs not only exchange information with DNAs but also are connected with some of the molecules of water and helps them to store information and have memory.  Thus, the earth is the biggest system of telecommunication which connects DNAs, dark DNAs and molecules of water.

I read this whole thing with an expression like this on my face:

This paper was by Massimo Fioranelli et al., which means that it was the product of more than one brain.  (Although this may be questionable as well, as I will describe momentarily.)  And in fact, this isn't the only paper that was retracted by OAMJMS.  They retracted five papers simultaneously -- and four of them were by Fioranelli's team.  Once again, RetractionWatch kindly provided titles and links to the other papers, which you have to see because they're just that wonderful.  The three other Fioranelli et al. papers were:

• "DNA Waves and Their Application in Biology"
• "Recovery of Brain in Chick Embryos by Growing Second Heart and Brain"
• "A Mathematical Model for the Signal of Death and Emergence of Mind out of Brain in Izhikevich Neuron Model"

The fifth paper, by Nicola Zerbinati et al., had an equally entertaining title:

• "New System Delivering Microwaves Energy for Inducing Subcutaneous Fat Reduction: In Vivo Histological and Ultrastructural Evidence."

Which makes me think of someone putting a pork chop in the microwave, and observing that if you turn it on, the fat melts.  I wouldn't recommend it as a method for losing weight, however.

Oh, and apparently, Fioranelli was also the author of a previously-retracted paper attributing COVID-19 to 5G technology.  The man's a veritable fountain of goofiness.

The pièce de résistance of the story, though, is in OAMJMS's statement of retraction, which is too good not to reproduce in full:

An internal investigation has raised sufficient evidence that they are not directly connected with the special issue Global Dermatology and contain inconsistent results.  Several co-authors requested to be excluded from the author list.  As such, we retract these articles from the literature and by guidelines and best editorial practices from the Committee on Publication Ethics.  We apologize to our audience about this unfortunate situation.

So we have:

• co-authors who apparently didn't know they were being listed as such
• apparent surprise that a paper on black holes communicating with your DNA has fuck-all to do with dermatology
• "inconsistent results," which I have to admit sounds more professional than "absolute lunacy"
• figuring out that Fioranelli is nuttier than squirrel shit took an "internal investigation"

The only thing that would have made this better is if the papers had come with a video link showing Fioranelli explaining his theories via interpretive dance.

So you can see how I couldn't resist writing a post about this one.  Opportunities to write about weird ideas from cranks are commonplace; one this bizarre is truly something to be cherished.

But my reaction is probably just due to the black hole at the center of the Earth confusing me by sending waves to add extra dimensions to my dark DNA manifolds.  I hate it when that happens.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Toxic waste

If there's one word related to health issues that makes me cringe, it's the word "toxin."

This term gets thrown around all the time.  I was given a gift card for a massage for my last birthday (which was wonderful, by the way), and afterwards, the masseuse told me that I needed to drink lots of water that day because the massage had "loosened up toxins" and I needed to drink a lot to "flush them from my system."  A while back, I was buying some fresh turmeric root at a local organic grocery, and a lady smiled at me in a friendly sort of way, and said, "Oooh, turmeric!  It's wonderful at detoxifying the body!"

What gets me about the use of "toxin" and "detoxify" is that the people who use those terms so seldom have any idea about what particular toxins they're talking about.  If I was just a wee bit more obnoxious than I am -- an eventuality no one should wish for -- I would have said to the masseuse and the lady in the grocery, "Can you name one specific chemical that massage and/or turmeric releases in my body that I need to be concerned about?"

Chances are, of course, they would not have been able to; even in supposedly informative articles in health magazines, they're just lumped together as "toxins."  The word has become a stand-in for unspecified "really bad stuff" that we need to fret about even though no one seems all that sure what it is.

And then buy whatever silly detox remedy the writer of the article suggests.

This all comes up because of an article I read in Science-Based Medicine called "Activated Charcoal: The Latest Detox Fad in an Obsessive Food Culture," by Scott Gavura.  In it, we hear about people dosing themselves with activated charcoal as a "detox" or "cleanse," because evidently our liver and kidneys -- evolved over millions of years to deal with all sorts of unpleasant metabolic wastes -- are insufficient to protect us.

No, you need "activated charcoal lemonade."

I wish I was making this up, but no.  People actually are adding gritty, pitch-black charcoal to their lemonade, in order to make it "soak up toxins."

The problem here, as Gavura points out, is that activated charcoal is used in detoxification, so there's that kernel of truth in all of the nonsense.  Actual detoxification, I mean, not this pseudoscientific fad-medicine horseshit; detoxification of the sort done in cases of poisoning.  I know this first hand, because of an incident involving a border collie named Doolin that we once had.  My wife and I had visited northern California, and dropped by the wonderful Mendocino Chocolate Company, makers of what are objectively the best chocolate truffles in the entire world.  We bought a dozen truffles of various sorts and brought them home with us, babying them through our travels during high summer.  We got them home successfully, and on the first day back...

... Doolin pulled the box off the counter and ate all twelve chocolate truffles.

As you undoubtedly know, chocolate is highly poisonous to dogs, so off Doolin went to the vet to get a (real) detoxification.  One of the things they did was feed her activated charcoal.  We found this out because on the way back home from the vet, Doolin puked up charcoal all over the back seat of my wife's brand-new Mini Cooper.

Doolin survived the chocolate incident, although she almost didn't survive our reaction to (1) the thousand-dollar vet bill, (2) black doggie puke all over the new car upholstery, and worst of all, (3) not getting our chocolates.  Despite all that, she went on to live another six healthy years, thanks to modern veterinary science and the fact that she was cute enough that we decided not to strangle her.

But I digress.

So charcoal does have its uses.  But you're not accomplishing anything by adding it to lemonade, except perhaps (as Gavura writes) having the charcoal absorb nutrients from your digestive tract, making whatever food you're eating less nutritious.  Because charcoal, of course, isn't selective about what it absorbs -- it'll absorb damn near anything, including vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Facts don't seem to matter much to the alt-med crowd, however, and now there's charcoal everywhere.  Over at the webzine Into the Gloss, writer Victoria Lewis tells us about taste-testing a bunch of different charcoal drinks, and her analysis includes the following insightful paragraph about "Juice Generation Activated Greens":

I decided to drink this ultra-vegetable-filled (kale, spinach, celery, parsley, romaine, and cucumber) juice for breakfast.  It tasted exactly like a super green juice—a little salty but otherwise, totally normal.  I did end up eating some granola afterwards (juice diets have never been for me), but this one felt good and extremely healthy.

Which, right there, sums up the whole approach.  Screw medical research; if consuming some weird new supplement "feels good and extremely healthy," then it must be getting rid of all those bad old toxins, or something, even if it tastes like vaguely lemon-flavored fireplace scrapings.  It's all about the buzzwords, the hype, and the feelings -- not about anything remotely related to hard evidence.

But of course, since now we have renowned nutritionists like Gwyneth Paltrow getting on board, the whole "charcoal juice cleanse" thing is going to take off amongst people with more money than sense.

Makes me feel like I need to go eat some bacon and eggs, just to restore order to the universe.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

The emotional thermostat

For a variety of reasons I've decided to go back to work part time.

Retirement is great, but because the universe has a perverse sense of humor, we found out the week after I retired that our house needed forty thousand dollars of foundation work in order to stop it from sliding down the hill into our creek.  The project involved putting piers under the foundation, meaning holes had to be drilled through and around the foundation down to the bedrock.  The good news, if there's any good news in a scenario like this one, is that we caught it before any serious structural damage was done to the house.

Not that you'd be able to tell from what the interior of the formerly-finished basement looked like once they were done.  The foundation work required stripping the whole thing down to the joists, studs, and cement floor, removing all the pre-existing carpet, tile, walls, and ceilings.  All of which now has to be re-installed.

L to R: Me and my son, mid-demolition.  You can probably see the family resemblance between us.

So needless to say, we ended up with a hefty home improvement loan to pay off.  This was for me the main impetus to getting another job.  So this week I started work helping out seniors with yard work and house work, and providing companion care for people who aren't able to get out much.

I've always been inordinately worried about money.  During the time I was a single dad, I was literally down to nickels at the end of every pay period, and constantly looking for ways to economize.  Putting aside extra against eventualities like unexpected car repairs was pretty much impossible.  I've had a "poverty mentality" ever since, and even though now we're doing okay financially, I still have the constant expectation that the bottom is going to drop out.

It's all part and parcel of how my depression and anxiety seem to operate.  Reality checks (like looking at our bank statement and seeing that we do, in fact, have enough to pay our mortgage this month) don't make a dent in the panicked emotional state I seem to live in most of the time.  The way I've described it is that it's like I have two brains, an emotional one and a rational one, and they are not on speaking terms with each other.

Turns out this is a remarkably accurate description of what's going on.  A study published this week in The Journal of Neuroscience by Mary Kate P. Joyce, Miguel Ángel García-Cabezas, Yohan J. John, and Helen Barbas of Boston University, entitled "Serial Prefrontal Pathways Are Positioned to Balance Cognition and Emotion in Primates," we find out that there is a part of the brain called "Area 32" (not to be confused with Area 51) which links two other reasons, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the subgenual cortex.  The subgenual cortex is connected with emotional expression; the DLPFC is essentially like a thermostat, speaking through Area 32 to the subgenual cortex and allowing emotional equilibrium.

A neurological analog to the "reality check" I mentioned earlier.

But when the DLPFC is quiet for some reason, no longer relaying inhibitory signals through Area 32, the subgenual cortex kind of stages a coup, leading to a runaway emotional reaction. 

Identifying the regions of the brain involved in certain abnormal responses is the first step toward targeted therapy.  I can speak from experience that this is really needed in the case of depression.  I've been through the wringer trying to find an antidepressant that works and doesn't give me horrible side effects -- it took three years to finally get one that seems to blunt the edge of the worst of it.  The strangest part of all this is how unpredictable it is; one person can have excellent results from an antidepressant that is either useless or actually detrimental for someone else, and honestly, no one knows why this is.

Research like this provides some hope that we may be narrowing in on what's going on.  Which is incredible news to people like me who've suffered from depression and anxiety for decades.

But now I need to get this posted and get going.  I've got to get out to my client's garden and finish cutting back her perennials.  All in a day's work.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Penguin walkabouts and sinking continents

One of the wonderful things about writing this blog every day is that it means I'm constantly learning stuff myself.

Today's topic is a good example, and kind of a curious one because it touches on three topics about which I usually credit myself with knowing a good deal, and those are geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  But because of my buddy and twin-separated-at-birth Andrew Butters, whose wonderful blog Potato Chip Math you should definitely subscribe to, I ended up learning some really cool stuff about three subjects near and dear to my heart.

The link Andrew sent me led me to a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society called "Ancient Crested Penguin Constrains Timing of Recruitment into Seabird Hotspot," which analyzes some three-million-year-old (Pliocene Epoch) penguin fossils found on the North Island.  Careful study of these fossils, of a species called Eudyptes atatu, led the researchers to the conclusion that penguins in general might have their origins not in Antarctica, as you might imagine (I know I did), but in the "lost continent" of Zealandia.

(If I can indulge a fourth interest, linguistics, the scientific name Eudyptes atatu comes from Greek and Maori roots, respectively, and means "good diver from the dawn of time."  Which I think is a pretty awesome name.) 

Anyhow, I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Zealandia.  The article Andrew sent (from the site Science Alert) said that Zealandia was a former continent that basically sank.  This sounded a little suspicious to me; Atlantis notwithstanding, continents don't sink.  The edges can be more or less covered with water depending on the extent of polar ice and the sea level, but pieces of continental crust (being thick and relatively cold) just get carried along by whatever plate they're sitting on.  So they can move, split, and join, sort of like a big free-floating game of Tetris with irregularly-shaped pieces and no rules.  But you don't make much new continental crust, and what you've got pretty much is what you're stuck with.  (The Laurentian Highlands of Québec and Ontario, for example, has been around since Precambrian times, dating back 540 million years.)

So the idea of a continent (or most of it) sinking seemed pretty far-fetched to me.  But that, apparently, is exactly what happened.

A map (courtesy of NOAA) showing the former extent of Zealandia, outlined in pink

Zealandia used to be a lush rainforest -- think New Guinea or Borneo -- but subsidence gradually reduced its size, till by the beginning of the Miocene Epoch 23 million years ago, all that remained above sea level were New Zealand and New Caledonia, and the other 93% of it lay beneath the waves.  This greatly increased the distance to the nearest land mass (Australia) and effectively isolated New Zealand entirely, which is why it has such a unique flora and fauna today.

The other continent that Zealandia used to be near was Antarctica, and from their homeland of Zealandia they colonized the (at the time much closer) southern continent, which then slid away because of plate tectonics, moving to its present position near the South Pole and taking the penguins with it.  

But the fossils of Eudyptes atatu strongly point to a New Zealand origin for penguins in general, even though the only ones that have survived there to modern times are the Fiordland Penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus), the Erect-crested Penguin (Eudyptes sclateri), the Snares Penguin (Eudyptes robustus), the Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes), and the Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor).  (You can see from the scientific names that the first three are in the same genus as the fossil species; whether they are descendants, or only cousins, isn't known.)

So that was today's opportunity to learn something about geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  Thanks again to Andrew for alerting me to the research, which I had somehow missed entirely.  Fun stuff, not least because it involves penguins, which are some of the most adorable birds in the world, if I may be allowed to interject a completely non-scientific opinion into the mix.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Little fish

I had an interesting, and rather revelatory, experience this summer.

One of my passions is running.  Well, to be more accurate, I like having run.  While I'm out there, slogging up the hills and dripping sweat, I am most frequently asking myself why the hell I do this, when it is clearly painful, exhausting, and generally unpleasant.  But afterward I always feel better, and every time I've raced I come home and signed up for more races.

As a friend of mine put it, it's a little like the guy who smacks his head on the wall because it feels so good when he stops.

In any case, in May I signed up for the One New York Challenge, a five-hundred-kilometer "virtual race" across New York, the proceeds from which were donated to COVID research.  We had from May 15 to August 31 to finish, and there was a leaderboard that was updated daily to keep track of everyone's submitted mileage and times, so you could see how you ranked against other participants.

Well, this is where the trouble started.  Because I'm not all that great at running -- I'll be up-front about that -- but I am insanely competitive.  So every day I'd enter my miles (I run an average five miles a day, pretty much without exception), then immediately log on to the leaderboard to see how -- or if -- my place had shifted.

I ended up finishing the race way ahead of the deadline, with over a month to spare, crossing the finish line in 827th place overall (out of 6,428 participants), and in 30th place (out of 151) in my age class.

Me after finishing the 499th kilometer

So reason to be proud, right?  Not only finishing the race, but in the top fifteen percent out of everyone and in the top twenty percent in my age class.

But all I could focus on was thinking, "Holy shit.  826 people were faster than me."

Turns out I'm not alone in doing this, self-defeating as it is.  A study this week in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that we feel much better about ourselves when we're big fish in a little pond than when we're little fish in a big pond -- even if our own skill level is the same in both situations.

In "Taking Social Comparison to the Extremes: The Huge-Fish-Tiny-Pond Effect in Self-Evaluations," by Ethan Zell and Tara Lesick of the University of North Carolina, we find out that we pay much closer attention to our in-group ranking (whatever the size and skill level of the group) than we do to how the whole group ranks against other groups.  Put a different way, most of us are much happier ranking higher amongst peers who as a whole are mediocre than ranking lower amongst the elite.

And doesn't just affect our emotional states, it affects how we actually evaluate our own skill level.  The setup of the experiment involved the administration of a verbal-reasoning test to students at a variety of colleges.  Participants were given their scores, and two other pieces of information; how they ranked against other participants from their own college, and how their college ranked against other colleges.  Afterward, each volunteer was asked how they felt about their performance, and to evaluate their own verbal-reasoning ability not just against their peers but in a general, global sense.

Naturally, high scorers at highly-ranked colleges were not only happy with their performance, but felt pretty confident about their skill.  More interesting were the high scorers at low-ranked colleges, and the low scorers at highly-ranked colleges.  The former had the same glowing assessment of their own skills and performance as the high scorers at highly-ranked colleges, while the latter were generally disappointed with their skills and performance -- even when the overall scores of the members of the two groups were similar.

It makes sense, I suppose, given our long history of tribalism.  If Zog is competing against Thak in boulder-throwing, his rival's performance is right there in front of him, immediate and obvious.  It's way less obvious (and often much less important in the here-and-now) if Zog's whole tribe is made up of elite boulder-throwers or if, to put it bluntly, they suck.  I know it's always thin ice to attribute psychological tendencies to evolutionary history, but there's a good argument that the disappointment of the little-fish-big-pond experience is built into our brains by our having evolved living in small, tightly-knit groups.

In my own experience, being a mediocre racer in a very large group slowed me down for a bit, but (fortunately) hasn't stopped me.  Three weeks ago I started a new challenge; to run four hundred miles in 108 days.  (Five hundred kilometers -- 310 miles -- was apparently not enough, for some reason.)  It's for a good cause -- my sign-up money goes to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  And there's swag to look forward to when I'm done, including another badly-needed race t-shirt, to add to the 793 race t-shirts I already own.

Twenty days in, I've already got 25% of the miles completed.  I'm currently 192nd overall (out of 1,716 participants) and 8th in my age class (out of 30).  Which is entirely unacceptable. 

Time to get out running again and see if I can pass a few of these folks.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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