Elephant shrews, babblers, and stilt mice

Because I'm tired of doomscrolling on Twitter and getting more and more discouraged about what's going on in the United States right now, today we're going to focus on: cool zoological discoveries.

In the last few weeks, there have been three papers that look at some amazing research on various animal species.  Let's start with the one in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society that described two new species of the rodent group with the amusing name "stilt mice" -- African mice with extra-long feet they stand upright on (a little like kangaroos).  If this isn't weird enough, they are also aquatic.

It's been a difficult group to study.  One of the stilt mice was known from a single specimen collected in Ethiopia 93 years ago, and had not been seen since.  This new study didn't find any more of that species -- scientists surmise that it was already on the brink of extinction when the specimen was collected -- but found what are probably its closest cousins.

"It's underappreciated how little is known about the biodiversity of small mammals, especially in tropical parts of the world," said Tom Giarla, professor of biology at Siena College in New York and lead author of the study.  "We're not discovering a whole lot of new lions, tigers, and bears, but there's an incredible potential for discovery of new species of small mammals because they're tough to find.  And they're sort of underappreciated animals -- they're really cool when you start to learn about their ecology.  These are semi-aquatic mice, so they're not just your average, everyday rodents."

[Image courtesy of Velizar Simeonovski, Field Museum]

Study co-author Julian Kerbis Peterhans, researcher at the Field Museum, agrees.  "These mice are long-footed, kind of like a kangaroo.  They sit up on their haunches, and they wade through shallow streams with their whiskers on the water's surface detecting movements, like sonar.  They have unusually large brains in order to process this sensory information from their whiskers when they hunt. They're cute, too.  When I caught my first one some thirty years ago, it was the most beautiful African mouse I'd ever seen, it had water repellent fur that's very thick and lush and warm and cozy.  They're incredibly soft, and they have this remarkable snow-white belly."

The second paper appeared in the journal Biotropica, and is a study of a bird called the Sulawesi babbler (Pellorneum celebense) that lives on a number of islands in eastern Indonesia.  What the researchers found was that the babblers were undergoing rapid evolution on the smaller islands in its range -- the birds on smaller islands had a greater amount of sexual dimorphism (physical difference between the sexes) than birds on larger islands.  In particular, the size difference was measurably greater on the small islands of Kabaena, Muna, and Buton.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons A.S.Kono, Pelanduk sulawesi 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What the zoologists think is going on is that on smaller islands, with limited resources, having high sexual dimorphism helps to decrease competition if the resources are partitioned.  Partitioning is seen in a lot of groups of related species -- the wood warblers of my home state of New York are a good example, where you might have six or seven species of small, forest-dwelling, insect-eating birds in the same quarter of an acre of woods.  The way they've "solved" the problem of high competition -- and I put "solved" in quotation marks, because of course the birds didn't figure it out -- is that they each occupy different bits of the habitat.  Blackburnian warblers are usually high up in the treetops, yellow-rumped warblers in the low understory, black-throated-blue warblers in the middle parts of trees, and so on.

It's a remarkably efficient way of decreasing interspecific competition.

But this is one of only a handful of cases I know of where the resources are partitioned between different sexes of the same species.  (The others I'm aware of are some tropical hummingbirds, where the bill shapes of males and females are adapted to fit different species of flowers, and the extinct huia, a bird from New Zealand for whom the male and female bill shape were so different you might well think they're different species.)

The third paper is about the rediscovery of an animal that hasn't been seen for fifty years -- a species of elephant shrew from Somalia.  Elephant shrews are neither shrews nor (obviously) elephants.  They have a superficial similarity to shrews, but genetic analysis has shown that they are actually more closely related to elephants than they are to shrews.  (Another indicator that appearance has little relevance to genetic closeness.)  They're in their own order, Macroscelidia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Galen B. Rathbun, Petrosaltator rozeti-Zootaxa, CC BY 3.0]

In any case, the Somali sengi (Elephantulus revoilii) was known from thirty-nine different specimens in museums, but hadn't been seen in the wild in fifty years -- until now.  A colony of them was discovered in the country of Djibouti, the exact location of which is being kept secret.

The rediscovery, and the genetic information scientists are gleaning from these animals, looks like it's going to force a re-analysis of the taxonomy of the group, with the Somali sengi ended up in its own, new genus (Galegeeska).  The research is ongoing, and we'll undoubtedly be finding out more about these strange little animals of the east African desert.

So that's our news from the zoological world for today.  All in all, a much happier topic than a lot of others I could have chosen.  Better to focus, at least for a while, on the wonderful and multifarious critters out there in the world -- many of which we have just begun to understand.

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

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!]

Lunacy fatigue

Lately, I've felt like I'm living in some kind of computer simulation run by aliens, only the aliens have gotten bored and/or stoned and now they're just fucking with us.

The obvious example is the increasingly unhinged stream of rants from Donald Trump, each of which seems to be designed to carry the message, "You think I sounded insane before?  Just wait till you hear this."  One example will suffice, because I suspect you don't want to read a bunch of Trump quotes, and I certainly don't want to dig them up and have to read them myself.  But this one, cheerfully delivered on the White House lawn and addressed to seniors ("Some of my favorite people," he said) would win some kind of award for bizarre pronouncements.  A direct quote: "You're not vulnerable, but they like to say the vulnerable, but you're the least vulnerable — but for this one thing you are vulnerable."

Sure!  Right!  What?

2020 has been one "hold my beer" incident after another.  I don't know about you, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to remember what it was like before things went loopy -- to be able to go out to a restaurant without a second thought and to a grocery store without a mask, to have enough letters in the alphabet to cover all the hurricanes, and to have Supreme Court nominees who were neither drunk frat boys nor homophobic right-wing religious fanatics.

But that old world has vanished.  I hope it's not forever, and that Election Day will turn us back toward sanity, because a lot of us are suffering from what I can only call Lunacy Fatigue.  We've been bombarded by crazy events to the point that our reaction has become a kind of despairing ennui.

Which explains my reaction to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, about self-proclaimed "prophetess" and virulent Trump supporter Kat Kerr.  Kerr has been here before, most recently because of her attempt to turn aside a hurricane with prayer.  When it didn't work, and the storm slammed the Bahamas, she responded by cheerfully coming up with a reason that God hates the Bahamas.  Other claims from Kerr, which I swear I am not making up, were that when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, "aborted babies had a party in heaven," and that her prediction of the 2018 elections "turning the map red" wasn't actually false because "a lot of the Democrats who were elected are secretly Republicans."

So it's not like we should expect anything rational from her.  She didn't disappoint in that regard, when two days ago she said that God had dispatched a thousand "special-ops angels" to make sure Trump won re-election.  Here's the exact quote, because any summary I could write would blunt the edge of the complete batshit insanity:

I can just tell you this from heaven. Trump is going to win.  We in America are the land of the brave, the free, and the filled with God.  And I can tell you that whole event was filled with the presence of God. And yes, there were 1,000 angels waiting.  You know who these angels were?  I could see them sitting all up in the upper stands and everything, in the seats, and they were white—they just glow with the glory of God.  But they actually were wearing red, white, and blue robes.

And the Holy Spirit said, "These angels are special ops angels that were sent from Heaven back in 2016 to fight on behalf of America, on our president, on his administration, God’s plans that he has for this country."  And they were there to be sent out again right now.  And we all did that.  It was very powerful to see them.  They shoot past us like beams of light, and they were very powerful beings.

Yeah, okay, Kat.  Maybe it's time to stop doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

But it's not really newsworthy that a kook made a loony claim.  That is, after all, what kooks do.  What struck me reading it was how... pedestrian it sounded.  "Special-ops angels dressed in red, white, and blue, shooting past like beams of light?"  *yawn*  I wish I could say it was the weirdest thing that's happened this month, but it's not even the weirdest thing that's happened this week.  (My vote in that regard is that the thing the pundits are talking about most from Tuesday's vice presidential debate is the fly that was sitting on Mike Pence's head for two minutes.)

I've gotten to where I don't even want to look at the news, not because I'm afraid there'll be something upsetting -- that's nearly a given -- but because I'm tired of feeling like I'm trapped in a David Lynch film, where strange things are happening for no apparent reason and everyone's walking around with stunned expressions (what you can see of them behind their masks) wondering what the next random, pointless, chaotic plot twist will be.

I know it's dangerous for the sane people to get inured, because that's when the crazies cinch down control.  And it's not going to stop me from voting.  I'm just feeling a little dazed at the moment.  Maybe that's what happens when you're attacked by special-ops angels, I dunno.

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

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!]

A lens on the past

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.

Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining.  Unrealistic is probably a better choice.  Except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false.  Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals.  Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor.  (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up.  But my point stands.)

But it's not just the prehistorics.  Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer.  But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.

Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies.  I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (The Tree of Knowledge), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down).  I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.

But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy.  That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination.  Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.

The reason this all comes up is a rather horrific discovery in Spain of the site of a battle that took place in the third century B.C.E.  Again, I might be using the wrong word -- this wasn't a battle so much as a massacre.  A settlement near the current tiny village of La Hoya, in the province of Salamanca, was attacked by an unidentified set of marauders and basically slaughtered, their bodies being left to the scavengers.

A team led by Javier Ordoño Daubagna of Arkikus, an archaeological research company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, did the investigation, and came upon thirteen skeletons; nine adults, two adolescents, one young child, and one infant.  All of them showed signs of violent death.  One of the adolescents, a thirteen-year-old girl, had her arm cut off and flung three meters from her body, where it was found -- still wearing the five copper bracelets she'd been wearing when she died.

The fact that the bracelets and other valuable objects weren't taken indicates that whatever the reason for the attack was, it wasn't material profit.

"The nature of the injuries, the presence of women and young children as victims and the context of where the human remains were found on the site all indicated that this was not a battle between anything like matched forces," said study co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. "This was not a battle between noble warriors."

It also puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like.  "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."

In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses.  The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff.  And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species.  Not that we don't still have a long way to go.  But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine, my answer is always "right here and right now."

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

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!]

Brain of glass

Because my other option is to go on a crazed rant about how my country is being run by an amoral sociopath, and about how even given that fact thirty-some-odd percent of Americans still support him and/or idolize him, I decided to look instead at a more cheerful topic: the remains of a young man who got fried by Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 C.E.

That eruption gives new meaning to the word "colossal."  It was what geologists call a Plinian eruption -- named, in fact, for author and philosopher Pliny the Elder, who was also killed that day -- one that instead of producing the fountains of lava you see from volcanoes like Kilauea, produces pyroclastic surges composed of ash and superheated air that can reach speeds of one hundred meters per second and temperatures over a thousand degrees Celsius.

In other words, once you see it coming, it's too late to do much besides sticking your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.

(If you want to watch a fantastic -- if terrifying -- ten-minute simulation of what Vesuvius would have looked like from Pompeii on the fateful day, check this out.)

In any case, the eruption in 79 C. E. killed at least twenty thousand people -- probably more -- and released an unimaginable amount of energy in a very short time, estimated to be one hundred thousand times more than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  The city of Pompeii was basically flattened where it stood, and its inhabitants flash-cooked and then encased in ash, which is why researchers have found molds and casts of human bodies (and one dog), still in the positions they were in when they died.

This discovery, though -- the news of which I once again owe my pal Andrew Butters, author and blogger over at Potato Chip Math -- is unique, and is as fascinating as it is gruesome.  A team at University of Naples Federico II discovered the remains of a twenty-five-year-old man in a temple in Herculaneum dedicated to the Emperor Augustus.  He was face down, still lying where he fell.  But when the researchers took a look inside his skull, they got a surprise.

His brain had turned to glass, so quickly that his individual neurons are still visible.  Pier Paolo Petrone, who led the research, said in an interview with CNN, "The brain exposed to the hot volcanic ash must first have liquefied and then immediately turned into a glassy material by the rapid cooling of the volcanic ash deposit."

Here's how the team explains what happened, in their paper, that appeared last week in the journal PLoS-One:

In AD 79 the town of Herculaneum was suddenly hit and overwhelmed by volcanic ash-avalanches that killed all its remaining residents, as also occurred in Pompeii and other settlements as far as 20 kilometers from Vesuvius.  New investigations on the victims' skeletons unearthed from the ash deposit filling 12 waterfront chambers have now revealed widespread preservation of atypical red and black mineral residues encrusting the bones, which also impregnate the ash filling the intracranial cavity and the ash-bed encasing the skeletons.  Here we show the unique detection of large amounts of iron and iron oxides from such residues, as revealed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and Raman microspectroscopy, thought to be the final products of heme iron upon thermal decomposition.  The extraordinarily rare preservation of significant putative evidence of hemoprotein thermal degradation from the eruption victims strongly suggests the rapid vaporization of body fluids and soft tissues of people at death due to exposure to extreme heat.

Without further ado, here's a microphotograph of the neurons they found:

Vesuvius remains one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, and will have another large eruption at some point -- not if, but when.  And this time, it isn't a couple of towns with twenty thousand folks in the bullseye; right downslope from Vesuvius is the city of Naples, which has just shy of a million inhabitants.

The good news in all this is that volcanologists have gotten much better at detecting the danger signals prior to an eruption -- much better than, for example, the seismologists have of predicting when an earthquake might occur.  But as humans have shown time and time again, we really suck at taking the advice of scientists, preferring instead the reassurances of people who honestly don't know what they're talking about, and the time-honored maxim of "everything will be fine, just like it always is."

Which brings us full circle to Donald Trump and his brazen, idiotic, selfish *Gordon lapses into mumbled obscenities* comment not to be "afraid of COVID" or "let it dominate your life."  Despite the fact that worldwide, a million people have died (i.e. the population of Naples), and twenty percent of those have been in the United States.

Okay, I feel a rant coming on again, so I better stop here. 

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

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 title of this blog post is classified

I think we've all had moments when we were taken in by a prank or a hoax.  Some of them can be pretty clever, and after all, we're only human -- we can't call things correctly all the time.  And when it happens, most of us go, "Wow, what a goober I am!" and laugh a little, and move on -- with, one would hope, a resolution not to fall quite so quickly the next time.

Which is probably why the YouTube video clip that a loyal reader sent me the link to had me torn between guffawing and crying.  Well, not the video itself; the video is a clip from The Onion, that awesome purveyor of satire, about a "Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill" (that doesn't exist) being reviewed by a Representative John Haller of Pennsylvania (who doesn't exist).

What had me twitching were the comments.

Yes, yes, I know, never read the comments section.  I broke the cardinal rule. And now that I've done so, I'm even more worried that we might re-elect Donald Trump for president, because the majority of the commenters appear to be walking, talking, computer-owning, voting Americans who have the IQ of a peach pit.

First, though, let's see what "Representative Haller" had to say:

Congress shall now vote for approval of HR 8791, the Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Bill, as said bill requests emergency response funding up to and including... I'm sorry, this section is classified ... dollars to prepare for a national level terrorist attack and/or attack from CLASSIFIED.  Funding for first responder personnel and vehicles would be doubled if said attack leads to more than 80% of national population being affected by CLASSIFIED.  This funding shall commence with the first attack on CLASSIFIED or the first large-scale outbreak of CLASSIFIED, dependent upon which comes first.  Civilian and military units shall be trained in containment and combat of CLASSIFIED including irradiated CLASSIFIED with possibility of CLASSIFIED airborne CLASSIFIED flesh-eating CLASSIFIED, and/or all of the above in such event as CLASSIFIED spewing CLASSIFIED escape, are released, or otherwise become uncontrollable.

Air Force units may also be directed to combat said CLASSIFIED due to their enormous size and other-worldly strengths.  Should event occur in urban areas...  [*horrified expression*] Jesus, that's... that's CLASSIFIED... far surpassing our darkest nightmares.  Should casualties exceed CLASSIFIED body disposal actions shall be halted and associated resources shall be reallocated to CLASSIFIED underground CLASSIFIED protected birthing centers.  A new Bill of Rights shall be drafted and approved by CLASSIFIED.

Having now reviewed the bill, I ask you to please cast your votes.

Okay, please reassure me; having heard that, you would immediately know that it was fake.  Right?  Right?

Apparently, "wrong."  Here's a comment that appears on the video link:

If you have any intelligence at all or if you are just "awake" you can easily enough fill in the blanks "classified"  Hmmm..  He is basically talking about radiation and disease(s) outbreak and containment, underground facilities and the general population which will evidently be gradually eradicated!  Better get your house in order, light your Lamp and have PLENTY of OIL this is going to be a long, tedious ride until Jesus comes back!  We don't know when, ONLY The Father knows so we should be ready AT ALL TIMES but these things happen FIRST, BEFORE He gets back, so you need to stay ready and "endure" with all you've got!  Remember Jesus IS The ONLY Way!  ~Heads UP!

Well, someone sensible responded to that, to wit:

This was fake video made by The Onion.  Look at the logo in the lower right corner.  Get a grip on reality.

Remember my opening paragraph, about going, "Wow, how silly of me! I got fooled!"  Well, here's the followup comment.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only add [sic] so many times:

It could be a fake, or maybe the onion logo is a replacement over the real logo.  maybe somebody tampering with the video to make its seem like a fake and someone got their hands on it.  The onion logo could be a cover up scheme who knows...  But I will say this, all around us there is blood being shed, crazy earth quakes, murder, war, lies, the death toll is off the chain.  muslims cut the heads off of little children and dance around with the corpses, evil media and music, promotion of violence adultery sexual immorality and greed.  Things are so bad it just is not funny anymore.  Rape is at an all time high and everywhere I turn I see gay people !!!  yo mad people are gay its freaking crazy.  yo we got dudes popping other dudes and little boys in the butt 24/7 365. the immorality these day is off the charts.  anybody who thinks things are ok today has a nothing in between the ear.  you gotta be real stupid not to see that something huge is going to happen.

So evidently I'm one of the ones who has a nothing in between the ear, because I am certain it's a fake.  Look up the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  There is no Representative John Haller.  That alone should be enough, wouldn't you think?

At least one guy agrees with me:

Fuck's sake, people. It's satire.  The Onion, you know?  Satire?  Meaning fake?  Hello? 

But he was immediately shouted down by the likes of the following rocket scientist:

I think it's quite funny that the majority of those saying this is fake all have blank profiles almost as if they were created just to argue the legitimacy of this video...

And the following:

Sounds like they have a plan if theirs a biological outbreak they mite of created something that can be air born and something about flesh eating hmm and if this is true some one must of got their hands on it and preparing in chase they release it on the public for some reason zombie popping in my head head there experimenting rabbits on people and that theirs a part in your brain that could make you so violent that your almost like a ghoul.

Yes!  That's it!  Zombie popping in your head head there experimenting rabbits on people so your almost like a ghoul!  Why didn't I think of that as an explanation?  It's brilliant!

So you see why I don't have a lot of trust in the citizenry of the United States, and their ability to vote in leaders that aren't batshit insane?

We have people here who, even when given repeated reassurances that a video that is obviously a fake is, well, a fake, they still insist that it must all be a giant conspiracy to keep them in the dark about ghouls and radiation and diseases and underground facilities and the Second Coming of Christ.

Whenever I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of idiocy, I find that there are deeper wells that I have yet to explore.  As the quote attributed to Einstein puts it: "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

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

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!]

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.

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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!]