Templar cookie warning

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nabisco creating a hermetically-sealed, bomb-proof vault on the island of Svalbard, with the sole purpose of storing a stockpile of Oreo cookies.  It's a little odd, but on first glance seems innocent enough; in the case of a global cataclysm, the company wants us still to be able to have tasty snacks to enjoy.

It will not surprise loyal readers of Skeptophilia to find out that there are people who ascribe more sinister motives to the company.  And one guy, in fact, thinks that the Oreo cookie vault is in place because when you eat an Oreo, you are unwittingly swearing allegiance to Our Illuminati Overlords, and the Bad Guys want us to continue being able to do that even if civilization collapses.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbgodshaw / Oreo, Vector Oreo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

At least, that is the contention of one Maurice "Moe" Bedard, over at the site Gnostic Warrior.  I looked in vain for any sign that he was joking, but alas, I fear that this guy is 100% serious.  Here's an excerpt from his "About" link on the site:

Let us help you on along your evolving path to enlightenment in order to assist you in connecting with your higher self and who you truly are on the inside.  Our global community is composed of reasonable men, and women of truth who seek to understand the world we live in by seeking the without being trapped by the darkness of lies, conspiracies and the masses who love them. 

Well, that's very nice and all.  But there are a lot of words I could use to describe the cookie claim, and "reasonable" is not one of them.  Here's a bit of it, so you can get the flavor (crunchy and chocolate-y and nice when dipped in milk, of course):

Almost 500 billion have been sold.  In fact, if you were to stretch out all the OREOs ever sold, you could circle the globe with OREO cookies 341 times.  But did any of these billions of people ever notice the hidden Knights Templar symbology etched into a Oreo cookie as they dipped their OREO's in milk; or licked off the white creamy filling from the Cross Pattée emblazoned cookies?

I know I didn't.  He goes on to tell us that the little marks on the cookie's surface are actually crosses and triangles that come right from the symbolism of the Templars.  This immediately brought to mind a quote from Umberto Eco's tour de force novel Foucault's Pendulum, from a conversation in which the two main characters, Casaubon and Belbo, are discussing how to define lunacy:

The lunatic... doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Which is spot-on.  And as far as the crosses and so forth on the surface of an Oreo, the problem is that any geometrically-patterned surface is going to have triangles and crosses and squares and such.  That's what being "geometrically-patterned" means.  If all of this was Illuminati symbology, then kids in math class would be participating in a cult ritual every time they opened a geometry text.

Then he drops the bombshell on us that even the name "Oreo" is full of secrets:

The etymology of the word OREO gives us two words. Or and Eo.  The Hebrew meaning of the word Or is light, and it can also mean dawn, daylight, early morning, lightning, star, sun, sunlight, and sunshine.  The word Eo has a similar meaning from the Greek word ēōs, meaning dawn. 

In the scriptures, we can then find a reference to fallen angels who are called the watchers, whom I believe are connected etymologically to the word OREO.  For example, the Greek word for watchers is ἐγρήγοροι egrḗgoroi, pl. of egrḗgoros, literally "wakeful".  This Greek word for "Watchers" originates in Daniel 4 where they are mentioned twice in the singular (v. 13, 23), once in the plural (v. 17), of "watchers, holy ones".  Hence, the Templars symbology of the OREO cookie and name are dedicated to the Morning Star, or Dawn Star of the morning.  Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphoros (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros), which means "Dawn-Bringer."

All of this brings up a general rule of thumb, which is "don't fuck with a linguist."  My MA is in historical linguistics, and I can say with some authority that you can not simply subdivide a word any way you want, and then cast around until you find some languages with pieces that fit.  If that's the way etymology worked, then I could take Mr. Bedard's first name, "Maurice" and say that we can split it into "Mau" + "Rice."  From there, it's obvious that it derives from the Egyptian word mau meaning "cat"and the Old English word rice meaning, "strong, powerful, mighty."  So it's clear that Mr. Bedard is actually being controlled telepathically by his cat, who is inducing him to write reams of confusing nonsense so as to mislead us puny humans and keep us subjugated, i.e., bringing our Cat Overlords lots of canned tuna.

Actually, if you're curious, the origin of the name Oreo is unknown; the only idea I've seen that holds any water (besides the most likely explanation, which is that it was simply a short and catchy name), is that it comes from taking the "re" from "cream" and sticking it between two "O"s from chocolate, to make a symbolic sandwich.

In any case, I think you can safely enjoy your Oreos.  No worries that you're accidentally ingesting Templar symbology and an abridged version of the name "Lucifer."  So I'm just going to leave this here, because now I have to go off and investigate the claims of a guy who thinks that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and that he's the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation, and is soon to reveal himself and initiate the End Times.  The guy also thinks that Henry Kissinger is the "Second Beast."  This makes you wonder who the "Third Beast" is, doesn't it?  I'm thinking Mitch McConnell.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

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

Kaboom!

Sometimes I have to tell y'all about something not because it's weird or controversial, but purely because it's cool.

Today we're going to look at some very recent research into what happens during a supernova.  The difficulty with studying supernovas is (1) they're rare, (2) it's not easy to generate comparable conditions in the lab, and (3) if you're close enough to them to get a really good look, you'll probably get vaporized and never even get to the peer review stage with your research.  That a supernova is cataclysmic hardly even bears mention; exactly how cataclysmic is hard even to wrap your brain around.  In a short time -- days to weeks -- a supernova releases more energy than the Sun will over its entire ten billion year lifetime.  The energy release of a typical supernova is 100 quintillion yottajoules.

Being a former science teacher, I thought I knew my metric prefixes, but yotta- was one I didn't know.  Kilo-, mega-, tera- I know; on the other end, micro-, nano-, and pico-.  But yotta- I had to look up.  Turns out it's one septillion; one followed by twenty-four zeroes.  So a supernova releases 100 quintillion of those.

Suffice it to say that 100 quintillion yottajoules is a lottajoules.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/L. Calçada, The material around SN 1987A, CC BY 3.0]

Astonishingly, scientists have now been able to recreate in the lab a burst that for a tiny fraction of a second has the energy release of a supernova.  It's so fast that it doesn't blow the lab to smithereens, but it's still pretty spectacular.  Physicist Hye-Sook Park of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory accomplished this by amplifying and then focusing 192 lasers on a tiny target, which implodes and then explodes violently, mimicking for one ten-billionth of a second the conditions that occur the moment a supernova goes kaboom. 

The result is a fantastically energetic plasma -- stream of charged particles -- that can pick up 1,000 trillion electron volts of energy, which (for comparison) is about five hundred times the energy that the particles in the largest accelerators have.  This shock wave of charged particles generates a rapidly fluctuating magnetic field.  "The result is a complex feedback process of jostling particles and fields, eventually producing a shock wave," said team member Anatoly Spitkovsky of Princeton University.  "This is why it’s so fascinating.  It’s a self-modulating, self-controlling, self-reproducing structure.  It’s like it’s almost alive.”

One of the things that Park's group was looking for was a sign of the Weibel instability -- a pileup of charged particles moving in opposite directions, which was predicted to happen as the outflowing plasma from the supernova met the plasma of the interstellar medium.  The instability occurs because the outward surge isn't uniform, so it breaks into streams that interlace with inward-streaming interstellar plasma like the your fingers when you clasp your hands together.  These streamers are moving charges -- i.e., an electric current.  And any electric current generates a magnetic field, which then acts to reinforce the positions, directions, and speeds of the particle streams.

Which is exactly what Park's experiment did.

And not to overload you with superlatives, but the speed of these streams is staggering -- 1,500 kilometers a second, enough to circle the Earth twice in a little less than a minute.  Because the magnitude of the magnetic field is dependent on the current speed, this produces huge field strengths -- in that one ten-billionth of a second, it created a magnetic field of 30 tesla, which is twenty times the strength of the magnetic field in an MRI machine.

One of the coolest things about all this is how excited Park gets when one of her experiments succeeds.  "I still clearly remember the time when I was seeing something nobody’s seen," she said.  "When things go well, everyone nearby knows.  I've heard people say, 'We can hear Hye-Sook screaming.'"

This kind of excitement in discovery is what science is all about -- the thrill of finding out something new about the universe.  It brings to mind the quote by the brilliant German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele: "It is the truth alone that we desire to know, and what a joy there is in discovering it."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Spooky action, weeping angels, and quantum physics

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

Today we'll take a look at two examples of this from the field of quantum physics.  Because quantum physics is plenty weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool.  Let's start with an experiment regarding "quantum entanglement" -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.

There is a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they have altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong.  The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the "Quantum Zeno effect," after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, was therefore an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it:

See what I mean?   You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own, although throwing in a Doctor Who reference does give it an extra special frisson.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is awesome, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Content creation mania

While I don't want to excuse mental laziness, I think it's understandable sometimes if laypeople come to the conclusion that for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.

I ran into a good example of this over at Science Daily yesterday, when I read an article about the modern penchant for "creating content" wherever we go -- by which they mean things like taking photos and posting them on social media, tweeting or Facebook posting during experiences like concerts, sports events, and political rallies, and just in general never doing anything without letting the world know about it.

I'm not a social media addict by any stretch of the imagination, but I know I have that tendency sometimes myself.  I've tried to avoid Twitter ever since the presidential race really heated up, because I very quickly got sick of all the posturing and snarling and TWEETS IN ALL CAPS from people who should know better but apparently have the decorum and propriety of Attila the Hun.  I find Instagram a lot more fun because it's all photographs, and there's less opportunity for vitriol.  Even so, I still post on both pretty regularly, even if I don't reach the level of Continuous Live-Stream Commentary some people do.  (For what it's worth, I'm on Twitter @TalesOfWhoa and Instagram @skygazer227.  You're welcome to follow me on either or both.  Be forewarned if you follow me on Instagram, however, you'll mostly see pics of my dogs, gardens, pottery projects, and various running-related stuff.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The content-creation study, which appeared in the Journal of Marketing and was a team effort between researchers at Rutgers and New York Universities, found that contrary to the usual conventional wisdom that if you want to really enjoy something you should put away your phone, enjoyment and appreciation of experience increases when people are allowed to do things like tweet, Facebook post, or take and post photographs.  "In contrast to popular press advice," said study co-author Gabriela Tonietto, "this research uncovers an important benefit of technology's role in our daily lives... by generating content relevant to ongoing experiences, people can use technology in a way that complements, rather than interferes with, their experiences."

The problem is, this runs afoul of other studies that have shown social media engagement to be directly proportional to depression, anxiety, and disconnection from face-to-face contact with others.  A quick search will give you as many links as you like, to peer-reviewed research -- not just quick-takes in popular magazines -- warning of the dangers of spending time on social media.  Pick any one of these and you'll come away with the impression that whatever facet of social media the study looked at was the root of all modern psychiatric disorders.

Humans, though, are complex.  We don't categorize easily.  Social media might well create a sense of isolation in some and foster connectedness in others.  One person might derive real enjoyment from posting her vacation photos on Instagram; another might berate himself for how few "likes" he'd gotten.  There's also the problem of mistaking correlation for causation in all of these studies.  The people who report social media boosting their enjoyment might well be those who were well-adjusted to start with, for whom social media was simply another fun way to connect with friends and acquaintances; the people for whom it generates depression, anxiety, or addictive behavior could have had those tendencies beforehand, and the all-too-common desperation for "likes" simply made it all worse.  A paper in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking back in 2014 admitted this up front:

During the past decade, online social networking has caused profound changes in the way people communicate and interact.  It is unclear, however, whether some of these changes may affect certain normal aspects of human behavior and cause psychiatric disorders.  Several studies have indicated that the prolonged use of social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, may be related to signs and symptoms of depression.  In addition, some authors have indicated that certain SNS activities might be associated with low self-esteem, especially in children and adolescents.  Other studies have presented opposite results in terms of positive impact of social networking on self-esteem.  The relationship between SNS use and mental problems to this day remains controversial, and research on this issue is faced with numerous challenges.

So I'm always inclined to view research on social and psychological trends with a bit of a weather eye.  Well-conducted research into the workings of our own psychology and sociology can be fascinating, but humans are complicated beasts and confounding factors are legion.  The upshot of the social media studies for me can be summarized in a Marie Kondo-ism: "does it spark joy?"  If posting photos of your pets' latest antics on Instagram boosts your enjoyment, have at it.  If you like pretending to be a color commentator on Twitter while watching your favorite team play, go for it.  If it all makes you feel depressed, anxious, or alone, maybe it is time to put away the phone.

In any case, I'm going to wind this up, because I need to share the link to today's post on Facebook and Twitter.  My public awaits.  And if I don't post on time, my like-total for the day will be low, and we can't have that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Spellcheck eugenics

Yesterday we looked at a website haunted by the ghost of a little girl named "Repleh Snatas," which would be kind of creepy if she'd actually existed; today we continue in an appropriately surreal fashion, wherein we consider a link sent to me by a different loyal reader of Skeptophilia that gives you instructions to see if you're one of the targets of the Illuminati.

In the website Corruptico: All Answers Exist Within Your Actions (whatever the hell that means) a post appeared called "Microsoft Word 'Spell Check' Embedded Eugenic Code," wherein we learn that to tell if you're destined to be executed when the New World Order arrives, all you have to do is type your name into a Microsoft Word document and see if it flags as misspelled.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's how the author explains it:

There’s a program for that. One created by no other than Microsoft Crypto Jew eugenicist himself, Bill Gates.

According to former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s first nephew, Greg T Dixon, a Masonic High School friend and informant deeply connected to Freemasonry, included within Microsoft’s Word “spell check” lies embedded code that filters out the names of people not making the elitist final eugenic cut.  

The program works simply enough, for which anyone, even children, can easily access to check and see their chromosomal eugenic status. All you have to do is type in your last name (surname) to see if it is underlined by a red squiggly line underscoring the surnames of those NOT making the genomic eugenic cut.  

That it [sic], you’re done!

Which brings up a variety of questions, the first of which is, what the fuck is a "Crypto Jew?"  Is this some kind of superhero who runs around with a yarmulke and a black cape, defending liberty by using pieces of matzo like ninja throwing stars?  Because that would be kind of cool.  My wife is Jewish, and if I knew she had a secret identity that involved fighting crime by wearing a mask and slinging kosher food at wrongdoers, it would make her even more awesome.

But considering the claim itself, we're on shakier ground.  Spellcheck?  Really?  It couldn't be that the spellcheck feature includes lists of the more common names, so that you don't get flagged every time you write "Smith?"  I guess I'm fortunate; my own last name is also an English word, so I don't get red-lined.  Lucky thing:

Apparently, many people who are being told they are elite and making the “eugenic cut” are actually not going to be around after the Democide, if the true elites have their way, by proxy, their names were purposely left off of earlier editions of MS Word, and this is why older versions prove more accurate.  

Go ahead.  If you dare, type your surname into MS Word to see your fate, it’s a fun and simple way to see what side of the railroads tracks you’re on.  

Just remember that, if the RED LINE appears, your fate is most likely sealed, and you will probably be killed at a FEMA death camp here very shortly via a hollow point bullet to back of the head.

Well, I'm not sure I would call this "fun," since it involves death camps and gunshots to the head, but it certainly is... interesting.

I do have a few questions, however.  What if your last name gets flagged and your first name doesn't?  This seems kind of unfair for people of Polish descent, such as "John Szczpanski."  Do Our Evil Overlords kill him because of the Szczpanski part, or let him go because his first name is John?

And what about people whose parents were trying to be clever, and gave them first names that appear to be deliberately misspelled?  A few years ago, I taught a girl whose name was "Kaytlynne."  This gets autocorrected to Kaitlyn (in fact, I just had to type it three times to get the Blogspot software to believe me that NO, THIS IS REALLY WHAT I WANT TO WRITE, DAMMIT).  Is this some kind of plot on the part of the parents to get rid of her?  This happens all the time to my wife, whose last name is Bloomgarden.  Autocorrect separates it into "Bloom garden," and then the red lines go away.  Is it telling her, "Maybe you really want to start spelling your name like that from now on.  Hint hint wink wink nudge nudge?"

So anyway, I encourage you to check your own name.  (Sorry for the bad news if you're Polish.)  I'm lucky -- neither my first, middle, nor last name gets red-lined.  Of course, the Illuminati Crypto Jews may change their minds after reading this post.  I'll be able to tell if I start getting mail addressed to "Gordin Bonnetski."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Cracked mirrors and haunted websites

I know there are a lot of reasons why people believe weird shit.  It's tempting to settle on the self-congratulatory solution of "Because they're dumber than I am," but I always hesitate to go there because (1) there are lots of inherent biases in our cognitive systems that you can fall for even if you're perfectly intelligent, and (2) I know all too well that I fall for those same biases myself if I'm not careful.

That said, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describing something apparently some people believe that left me saying, "Okay, that is incredibly stupid."

The link was to a story by Brent Swancer over at Mysterious Universe called "The Bizarre Tale of the Haunted Website."  You should check out Swancer's article, which goes into considerable detail, but the bones of the story are as follows.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little girl whose name was "Repleh Snatas."  Repleh had a birthmark on her face that the locals said was the mark of the devil, and people started looking askance at the entire family.  The dad became convinced that his daughter was possessed, and locked her in a room full of mirrors to drive the demons out (as one does), but every morning when he'd check on her the mirrors were all cracked and she was as evil as ever.  Ultimately he killed the girl and his wife and finally himself.  The locals refused to give any of them a proper burial, but tied the three bodies to a tree all facing in different directions and let 'em rot right there.

Once again, as one does.

But Repleh was not so easily vanquished.  She disappeared into mirrors, and if you look into a mirror at night sometimes it will crack and in the fractured reflection you'll see her standing behind you.  Then someone started a website about her, and it does weird stuff like not loading properly or actually crashing your computer.  Even if it loads it's still freaky, with collages of scary photographs of creepy children and hair-raising horror-movie-style background music.  And if you go there, you risk getting Repleh's attention, because she's still hanging around apparently, and if she thinks you're getting too curious she might kill you.

Reading this elicited several reactions from me:

• "Repleh Snatas" has to be the least convincing fake name I've ever seen.  A third-grader could figure out that it's "Satan's Helper" backwards.  
• The whole girl-in-the-mirror thing is just a variation on the old kids' game of "Bloody Mary," wherein you stare into a mirror at night and say "Bloody Mary" five times, and nothing happens.
• A website not loading properly wouldn't indicate much of anything to me, because my computer does weird things like random slowdowns and page crashes pretty much all the time.  My guess is that it has nothing to do with mirrors or creepy ghost kids, but it may mean that I need a new computer.

I went to the website, which is (unsurprisingly) www.replehsnatas.com, and got the following message:

Before going to replehsnatas.com, there's one more step.  By clicking the button below you'll go through a standard security check, after which you will be redirected to Chrome store and will be given the option to install Secured Search extension.  This extension will offer you a safer web search experience by changing your default search provider.

And my response to that was, "How exactly stupid do you think I am?"  I closed the window, meaning that I never got to see the actual page, but was better than getting whatever malware or virus this was pointing me toward, which would undoubtedly result in my computer running even worse than before.

Despite all this, apparently there are tons of people who think Repleh Snatas is real.  Over on Reddit there's a whole discussion of Repleh and how you shouldn't mess around with her website because she's eeee-vil.  

Even though I wasn't successful at getting into her website, I was able to find a couple of photographs that are said to be of the wicked Repleh Snatas.  (Yes, I know she supposedly lived in the eighteenth century, before the invention of photography.  Stop asking questions.)  Here's one of them:

The only problem is that this is actually a photograph of Princess Juliana of the Netherlands (who eventually became Queen Juliana).  This would be more obvious if the people who created the Repleh website and added the image hadn't photoshopped out the handwritten words "Princess Juliana" which are (I shit you not) written across the top of the original.

Here's the other one:

And this one is a still-shot of the actress Helena Avellano from her movie Moondial.

So old Repleh is kind of batting zero, here.  This has not stopped dozens of people from writing about her on True Tales of the Paranormal websites, which I will leave you to find on your own, and wherein you will read multiple accounts of the evil Repleh showing up in mirrors and generally scaring the bejeezus out of people.

As I said, I'm not usually going to point fingers at people for slipping into occasional credulity, as long as they're open to correcting themselves when they see what is actually going on.  We all do it; it's part of human nature.

On the other hand, to believe in Repleh Snatas, you have to have the IQ of a PopTart.  I've read some unbelievable paranormal claims before, but this one has to win the prize for sheer goofiness.  So my tolerance of people's foibles can only be stretched so far.

So I'm issuing a challenge to the supernatural believers out there: c'mon, folks.  Up your game.  You can do better than this.  Hell, a sufficiently motivated elementary-school student could do better than this.  The quality of your claims has really been falling off lately.  I'm expecting some better material to work with.

Get with the program, people.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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

Getting off the merry-go-round

Today's post is about the outcome of last week's election -- but a part of it you might not have heard about, given the media furore surrounding the race for president.

Last week Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin -- more commonly known as "magic mushrooms."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arp, Psilocybe semilanceata 6514, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The change came about because of a pair of bills, Measure 109 and Measure 110, which (respectively) made the use of psilocybin legal in a therapeutic setting, including for reasons of "personal growth" (i.e. not to treat a specific condition), and decriminalized the possession of small amounts of a wide range of drugs, making it a minor non-criminal offense on par with a traffic ticket.  I'm not going to get into the second measure, by far the more controversial, except to say that Portugal did the same thing in 2001, diverting the money that would have been spent prosecuting and jailing drug users into treatment programs, and saw voluntary addiction treatment rates rise, and drug use amongst adolescents and deaths due to overdose both decline precipitously.

But passage of the psilocybin measure made me say, "About damn time."  Psilocybin was declared a "Schedule I drug" in 1970, meaning it was claimed to have "a high potential for abuse," "no currently accepted medical use," and "a lack of accepted safety."

All of which, in fact, turned out to be false.  It's non-addictive, rarely if ever causes deleterious side effects, and its efficacy for treating depression has been known for years.  Study after study has come out providing evidence that psilocybin works; so many that it's beginning to sound like the studies disproving the vaccination/autism connection, repeating the same protocol over and over, getting the same result, and saying, "SEE, WE TOLD YOU, IT HAPPENED AGAIN.  BELIEVE US NOW?"

In fact, just last week a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that one or two administrations of psilocybin, in a controlled setting, triggered remission of the symptoms of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder for months, possibly years.

This kind of thing is a godsend, because the current state of treatment methodologies for depression resembles a blindfolded game of darts.  I went through three years of considerable hell trying to find an antidepressant that (1) actually mitigated my depression, and (2) didn't give me miserable side effects.  The frustrating part is that an antidepressant that works brilliantly for one person might not work at all for someone else, and no one knows why.  The first two I tried, citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro), both made me sleepy and completely wiped out my sex drive.  The second one, lamotrigine (Lamictal) gave me thermonuclear-level acid reflux.  The worst was sertraline (Zoloft), which I know is a game-changer for some people, but made me feel like I was at the middle of a neural lightning storm.  I couldn't sit still, couldn't sleep, and couldn't stop out-of-control thoughts that included suicidal ideation.

I got off that stuff fast.

I was on the verge of giving up, but my doctor recommended trying one more, bupropion (Welbutrin).  Welbutrin doesn't give me side effects, which is kind of awesome.  I wouldn't say it erases my depression -- none of them really do that, pretty much for anyone -- but it blunts the edge of the worst of it.  On Welbutrin I don't have the crashing lows I used to get, and have experienced with clocklike regularity every four or five months for pretty much my entire adult life.

On the other hand, if psilocybin works for you (which it does for the vast majority), it works.  People report complete remission of symptoms, something I can't honestly imagine.  Best of all, it only takes one dose to get long-term positive effects.  

I take Welbutrin every day; for me it's a maintenance med.  The idea that I could take one dose of something and get off the merry-go-round of self-medication, to be able to throw away the little orange bottle I have to carry around with me when I travel, is incredibly appealing.

I find it somewhere between absurd and appalling that the government has dragged its heels on decriminalizing psilocybin and authorizing its use as a therapeutic.  Okay, fine, regulate it; allow it only under a doctor's orders and a doctor's care.  We can argue about whether recreational drugs should be legal another time.  But here we have something that could dramatically improve the lives of an estimated eighteen million people in the United States -- about seven percent of the population -- addressing the main reason for the sky-high suicide rate, averaging one person choosing to end his/her own life every twelve minutes.

Would I try it?

Damn right I would.  In a heartbeat.

I know whereof I speak about this.  I'm lucky to be alive.  I attempted suicide twice, ages seventeen and twenty, only pulling back from going through with it at the last minute out of fear.  I had another serious period of pretty much continuous suicidal ideation in my mid-thirties, and that time was saved by the knowledge of what it would have done to my kids.  I still struggle some days, but with the love and care of my wife and friends, and a medication that takes away the deepest lows, I'm on an even keel most of the time.  But the worst of what I've experienced I wouldn't wish on anyone, and it's unconscionable that our government is creeping along in addressing a disorder that is a direct contributor to the horrifying statistic that suicide is the second leading cause of death in the United States of people between the ages of ten and twenty-four, and the tenth leading cause of death overall.

It's time to start pushing our leaders into doing something, into following Oregon's lead, and into getting correct information to voters that "decriminalizing drugs" doesn't mean "encouraging everyone to become an addict."  That all current Schedule I drugs aren't the same -- lumping heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, and psilocybin in the same category is somewhere between scientifically inaccurate and downright idiotic.  That people with major depressive disorder should have a choice to try something showing tremendous promise not as a maintenance treatment, but something damn close to a cure.

Please write letters, make calls, get involved.  It could change lives.  Hell, it could save lives.  And I'll end with doing something I rarely do: ask my readers to share this post.  Link it, retweet or repost it, email it.  The word needs to get out there.

If we can get one person out from under the black shadow of depression, help one person to step out into the light, it'll be worth it.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

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