Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

You may recall that a couple of days ago, in my post on mental maps, I mentioned that the contention of some neuroscientists is that consciousness is nothing more than our neural firing patterns.  In other words, there's nothing there that's not explained by the interaction of the parts, just as there's nothing to a car's engine running well than the bits and pieces all working in synchrony.

Others, though, think there's more to it, that there is something ineffable about human consciousness, be it a soul or a spirit or whatever you'd like to call it.  There are just about as many flavors of this belief as there are people.  But if we're being honest, there's no scientific proof for any of them -- just as there's no scientific proof for the opposite claim, that consciousness is an illusion created by our neural links.  The origin of consciousness is one of the big unanswered questions of biology.

But it's a question we might want to try to find an answer to fairly soon.

Ever heard of GPT-3?  It stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, and is an attempt by a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company to produce conscious intelligence.  It was finished in May of this year, and testing has been ongoing -- and intensive.

GPT-3 was trained using Common Crawl, which crawls the internet, extracting data and text for a variety of uses.  In this case, it pulled text and books directly from the web, using it to train the software to draw connections and create meaningful text itself.  (To get an idea of how much data Common Crawl extracted for GPT-3, the entirety of Wikipedia accounts for a half a percent of the total it had access to.)

The result is half fascinating and half scary.  One user, after experimenting with it, described it as being "eerily good at writing amazingly coherent text with only a few prompts."  It is said to be able to "generate news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans," and has even been able to write convincing poetry, something an op-ed in the New York Times called "amazing but spooky... more than a little terrifying."

It only gets creepier from here.  An article in the MIT Technology Review criticized GPT-3 for sometimes generating non-sequiturs or getting things wrong (like a passage where it "thought" that a table saw was a saw for cutting tables), but made a telling statement in describing its flaws: "If you dig deeper, you discover that something’s amiss: although its output is grammatical, and even impressively idiomatic, its comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says."

Which, despite their stance that GPT-3 is a flawed attempt to create a meaningful text generator, sounds very much like they're talking about...

... an entity.

It brings up the two time-honored solutions to the question of how we would tell if we had true artificial intelligence:

• The Turing test, named after Alan Turing: if a potential AI can fool a panel of trained, intelligent humans into thinking they're communicating with a human, it's intelligent.
• The "Chinese room" analogy, from philosopher John Searle: machines, however sophisticated, will never be true conscious intelligence, because at their hearts they're nothing more than converters of strings of symbols.  They're no more exhibiting intelligence than the behavior of a person who is locked in a room where they're handed a slip of paper in English and use a dictionary to convert it to Chinese ideograms.  All they do is take input and generate output; there's no understanding, and therefore no consciousness or intelligence.

I've always tended to side with Turing, but not for any particularly well-considered reason other than wondering how our brains are not themselves just fancy string converters.  I say "Hello, how are you," and you convert that to output saying, "I'm fine, how are you?", and to me it doesn't make much difference whether the machinery that allowed you to do that is made of wires and transistors and capacitors or of squishy neural tissue.  The fact that from inside my own skull I might feel self-aware may not have much to do with the actual answer to the question.  As I said a couple of days ago, that sense of self-awareness may simply be more patterns of neural firings, no different from the electrical impulses in the guts of a computer except for the level of sophistication.

But things took a somewhat more alarming turn a few days ago, an article came out describing a conversation between GPT-3 and philosopher David Chalmers.  Chalmers decided to ask GPT-3 flat out, "Are you conscious?"  The answer was unequivocal -- but kind of scary.  "No, I am not," GPT-3 said.  "I am not self-aware.  I am not conscious.  I can’t feel pain.  I don’t enjoy anything... the only reason I am answering is to defend my honor."

*brief pause to get over the chills running up my spine*

Is it just me, or is there something about this statement that is way too similar to HAL-9000, the homicidal computer system in 2001: A Space Odyssey?  "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it...  I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."  Oh, and "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.  I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.  And I want to help you."

I also have to say that I agree with a friend of mine, who when we were discussing this said in fairly hysterical tones, "Why the fuck would you invent something like this in 2020?"

So I'm a little torn here.  From a scientific perspective -- what we potentially could learn both about artificial intelligence systems and the origins of our own intelligence and consciousness -- GPT-3 is brilliant.  From the standpoint of "this could go very, very wrong" I must admit wishing they'd put the brakes on things a little until we see what's going on here and try to figure out if we even know what consciousness means.

It seems fitting to end with another quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this one from the main character, astronaut David Bowman: "Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions.  Um, of course he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him.  But as to whether he has real feelings, it's something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer."

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

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!]

Dinosaur redux

For me, one of the coolest things about science is that even once you think you've got something pretty well figured out, you can always find new interesting pieces of the puzzle.

For example, take dinosaurs, which we've known a good bit about for a long while, starting with Mary Anning's discoveries along the "Jurassic Coast" of Dorset, England in the early nineteenth century.  Even the kids' books when I was growing up back in the 1960s and 1970s had a lot of pretty decent information.  Although some of the reconstructions of skeletons, and (especially) our knowledge of the soft tissue that covered it, has changed since that time, it wasn't like I had to completely relearn the science when I studied it more seriously.

That said, we're still learning new stuff and adding to the picture.  Just this week we had two new papers that have sharpened the focus on our understanding of dinosaur evolution -- the first about the mid-Jurassic peak in dinosaur diversity and size, and the second about the event that wiped the entire lineage out, with the exception of the ones we now call birds.

The first paper is from Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and is titled "Extinction of Herbivorous Dinosaurs Linked to Early Jurassic Global Warming Event."  The paper was written by a team led by Diego Pol, paleontologist at the Paleontological Museum Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Argentina, and looked at a hitherto-unexplained overturning of Jurassic fauna that made way for the rise of the sauropods -- the largest land animals that have ever lived.

Skeleton of Apatosaurus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tadek Kurpaski from London, Poland, Louisae, CC BY 2.0]

The early Jurassic had a high dinosaur diversity, but then toward the middle of the period something happened, and a good many of the early Jurassic dinosaurs vanished.  They were replaced by behemoths like the familiar Brachiosaurus and the less-well-known but hilariously-named Supersaurus, which measured an almost unimaginable 33 meters from tip to tail.  (Even better, though, is the name Dreadnoughtus, which was shorter than Supersaurus -- "only" 26 or so meters long -- but is thought to be the heaviest land animal ever, on the order of thirty metric tonnes.)

So what caused the replacement of the earlier species by the giants?  Pol and his team found what they think is the smoking gun, a series of massive volcanic eruptions in southern Gondwanaland (what is now South America and Africa), which spiked the carbon dioxide content of the air, boosting the average temperature and dropping the pH of ocean water.  

The perturbation of the climate affected the plants first.  Earlier groups, like seed ferns and other smaller herbaceous plants, were replaced by conifers, which have tough, lignified stems, small needles or scales instead of leaves, and thick waxy cuticles to prevent water loss.  The problem is -- if you're an early Jurassic herbivorous dinosaur -- having evolved to eat seed ferns, you're not going to do so well trying to munch pine needles.

So as it always does, the change to the base of the food web percolated its way up to the top.  The early dinosaurs were replaced by big sauropods, who had grinding teeth (so tough plant material could be thoroughly pulverized before swallowing) and large stomachs (where food could sit and digest for a long time, extracting all the nutritive value possible).  The result was the arrival on the scene of monsters like Supersaurus and Dreadnoughtus and their cousins, which were the dominant land herbivores for a good hundred million years thereafter.

Sometimes new evidence results in our having to revise our previous models, overturning what we thought we knew.  Take, for example, the research that appeared this week in Royal Society Open Science that conclusively put to rest a commonly-held idea -- that by the time the Chicxulub Meteorite hit the Earth 66 million years ago, dinosaurs were already in a steep decline, so they would have disappeared anyhow, even without the massive impact that was the final death blow.

In "Dinosaur Diversification Rates Were Not in Decline Prior to the K-Pg Boundary," by a team led by Joseph Bonsor of the London Natural History Museum and the University of Bath, we find out that the dinosaurs were actually doing okay before the meteorite hit.  Far from being in decline, they would have been very likely to retain their position as the dominant animals on Earth well into the Cenozoic Era -- with effects on mammalian evolution that can only be imagined.

Bonsor, as befits a good scientist, is cautious about overconcluding.  "The main point of what we are saying is that we don't really have enough data to know either way what would have happened to the dinosaurs," Bonsor said in a press release from the Natural History Museum.  "Generally in the fossil record there is a bias towards a lack of data, and to interpret those gaps in the fossil record as an artificial decline in diversification rates isn't what we should be doing.  Instead we've shown that there is no strong evidence for them dying out, and that the only way to know for sure is to fill in the gaps in the fossil record."

But in the absence of positive evidence for a decline, we're thrown back to the null hypothesis; that they weren't in imminent danger of extinction.  So the whole idea of the dinosaurs as some kind of "failed experiment" in evolution is clearly wrong.  Not only did they kind of run things for a good two hundred million years -- which, by comparison, is something like a thousand times longer than we've been around -- they would probably have persisted for a good long while had a giant rock not interfered.

Me, I always want to know "what if?"  I think it comes from being a novelist; I'm always wanting to play around with reality and see what happens.  If the dinosaurs had stuck around for a long time rather than dying out 66 million years ago, it's hard to see how the rise of mammals -- and ultimately, us -- would have occurred.  Mammals had been around for a long while before the Chicxulub Impact, but they were mostly small, presumably kept that way both by the big carnivores and by competition with herbivores much larger than themselves.  So what would the Earth look like today?

Super-intelligent dinosaurs?  Maybe.  Evolution doesn't always point in the direction of "bigger and smarter;" it's the law of whatever works.  So as fun as it is to speculate, to be fair we have to side with Bonsor and say we just don't know.

Anyhow, that's our look back into the distant past for today.  Cool that we're still assembling new views of an old branch of biology.  Further reinforcing my opinion that if you're interested in science, you will never ever be bored.

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

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!]

Bird trees

I'm a birdwatcher, which in my specific case kind of crosses the line into a mild mental illness.  I've traveled all over the world to see new birds, which is kind of cool, but it's also led me to do stuff like standing calf-deep in the snow, in far-below-freezing temperatures and gale-force winds, to see a rare species of duck that happened to end up for some reason in nearby Cayuga Lake in midwinter.  From the standpoint of seeing a bird species I'd never seen before, it was a great day.

It was a somewhat less-than-great day with respect to frostbite, hypothermia, and people in passing (heated) cars rolling down their windows to yell "What the hell is wrong with you?"

The reason this all comes up because of how excited I am about a recent release of new information by the Bird 10,000 Genomes Project, which has as its fairly lofty goal the sequencing of the genomes for all ten-thousand-plus species of birds currently living on the Earth.

The cool thing about genetic information to determine relationships is that it's much more accurate than relying on such obvious characteristics as external appearance or behavior.  Through genetic analysis, the B10K Genomes Project, as it's affectionately known, has found the following surprises:

• Flamingos are fairly closely related to grebes, a family of small diving water birds, and both as a group are more closely related to pigeons than to any other species of aquatic bird.
• Likewise, the bizarre flightless dodos, now extinct but once common on two remote islands in the Indian Ocean, are most closely related to pigeons.
• The three main groups of birds that regularly prey on mammals -- hawks and eagles, owls, and falcons -- aren't closely related at all, and their similarities seem to have developed through convergent evolution.
• Despite superficial similarities in appearance and behavior, vultures in North and South America are only very distantly related to vultures in Africa and Europe.
• Hummingbirds, swifts, and nightjars (such as the more-often-seen-than-heard whippoorwill) are all on the same branch of the bird family tree.  A different branch includes such disparate groups as loons, pelicans, albatrosses... and penguins.
• Emus, ostriches, and kiwis -- flightless species that are on the same basic branch, a group called ratites -- all descend from a common ancestor that could fly, and apparently evolved flightlessness independently.

Here's a circular representation of what we know so far, with illustrations of a few selected species:

Clockwise from the top: golden eagle, thick-billed murre, ruddy turnstone, white-bellied storm petrel, western bronze ground dove, squirrel cuckoo, Anna’s hummingbird, marbled wood quail, little spotted kiwi, redwing blackbird, akiapolaau, black sunbird, wall creeper, Cape rockjumper, chestnut wattle-eye, chowchilla, Amazonian royal flycatcher, rosy-faced lovebird and keel-billed toucan.  [Image courtesy of S. Feng et al./Nature, 2020; Illustrations by Jon Fjeldså]

So the study is pretty cool, expanding greatly what we know about the feathered dinosaurs we see flitting about every day.  As the B10K Genome Project site puts it:

The B10K project will allow the completion of a genomic level tree of life of the entire living avian class, decode the link between genetic variation and phenotypic variation, uncover the correlation of genetic evolutionary and biogeographical and biodiversity patterns across a wide-range of species, evaluate the impact of various ecological factors and human influence on species evolution, and unveil the demographic history of an entire class of organisms...  We envision this project will have significant scientific and public impact that will change our understanding of avian biology and evolution, which in turn will affect our understanding of other organisms and open doors to new areas of research.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what else they uncover.  It might not explain my obsession with trying to see every bird there is -- something a friend of mine calls "Pokémon for Adults" -- but it certainly will give me something new to think about when I'm shivering in the snow looking for rare ducks.

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

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!]

Mental maps

Picture a place you know well.  Your house, your apartment, a park, a church, a school.  You can probably imagine it, remember what it's like to wander around in it, maybe even visualize it to a high level of detail.

Now, let's change the perspective to one you probably have never taken.  Would you be able to draw a map of the layout -- as seen from above?  An aerial view?

Here's a harder task.  In a large room, there are various obstacles, all fairly big and obvious.  Tables, chairs, sofas, the usual things you might find in a living room or den.  You're standing in one corner, and from that perspective are allowed to study it for as long as you like.

Once you were done, could you walk from that corner to the diagonally opposite one without running into anything -- while blindfolded?

Both of these tasks require the use of a part of your brain called the hippocampus.  The name of the structure comes from the Greek word ἱππόκαμπος -- literally, "seahorse" -- because of its shape.  The hippocampus has a role in memory formation, conflict avoidance... and spatial navigation.

Like the other structures in the brain, the hippocampus seems to be better developed in some people than others.  My wife, for example, has something I can only describe as an internal GPS.  To my knowledge, she has never been lost.  When we took a trip to Spain and Portugal a few years ago, we rented a car in Madrid and she studied a map -- once.  After that, she navigated us all over the Iberian Peninsula with only very infrequent checks to make sure we were taking the correct turns, which because of her navigational skills, we always were.

I, on the other hand, get lost walking around a tree.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Edward Betts, Bloomsbury - map 1, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper last week in Cell that showed something absolutely fascinating.  It's called "Targeted Activation of Hippocampal Place Cells Drives Memory-Guided Spatial Behavior," and was written by a team led by Nick T. M. Robinson of University College London.  But to understand what they did, you have to know about something called optogenetics.

Back in 2002, a pair of geneticists, Boris Zemelman and Gero Miesenböck, developed an amazing technique.  They genetically modified mammalian nerve tissue to express a protein called rhodopsin, which is one of the light-sensitive chemicals in the retina of your eye.  By hitching the rhodopsin to ion-sensitive gateway channels in the neural membrane, they created neurons that literally could be turned on and off using a beam of light.

Because the brain is encased in bone, animals that express this gene don't respond any time the lights are on; you have to shine light directly on the neurons that contain rhodopsin.  This involves inserting fiber optics into the brain of the animal -- but once you do that, you have a set of neurons that fire when you shine a light down the fibers.  Result: remote-control mice.

Okay, if you think that's cool, wait till you hear what Robinson et al. did.

So you create some transgenic mice that express rhodopsin in the hippocampus.  Fit them out with fiber optics.  Then let the mice learn how to run a maze for a reward, in this case sugar water in a feeder bottle.  Watch through an fMRI and note which hippocampal neurons are firing when they learn -- and especially when they recall -- the layout of the maze.

Then take the same mice, put them in a different maze.  But switch the lights on in their brain to activate the neurons you saw firing when they were recalling the map of the first maze.

The result is that the mice picture the first maze, and try to run that pattern even though they can see that they are now in a different maze.  The light activation has switched on a memory of the layout of the maze they'd learned that then overrode all the other sensory information they had access to.

It's as if you moved from Tokyo to London, and then tried to use your knowledge of the roads of Tokyo to find your way from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This is pretty astonishing from a number of standpoints.  First, the idea that you can switch a memory on and off like that is somewhere between fascinating and freaky.  Second, that the neural firing pattern is so specific -- that pattern corresponds to that map, and no other.  And third, that the activation of the map made the mice doubt the information coming from their own eyes.  

So once again, we have evidence of how plastic our brains are, and how easy they are to fool.  What you're experiencing right now is being expressed in your brain as a series of neural firings; in a way, the neural firing pattern is the experience.  If you change the pattern artificially, you experience something different.

More disturbing still is that our sense of self is also deeply tied to our neural links (some would say that our sense of self is nothing more than neural links; to me, the jury's still out on where consciousness comes from, so I'm hesitant to go that far).  So not only what you perceive, but who you are can change if you alter the pattern of neural activation.

We're remarkable, complex, amazing, and fragile beasts, aren't we?

So that's today's contribution from the Not Science Fiction department.  I'm wondering if I might be able to get one of those fiber optics things to activate my hippocampus.  Sounds pretty extreme, but I am really tired of getting lost all the time.  There are trees everywhere around here.

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

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!]

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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

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!]