Get thee behind me, Rover

If you live in Japan, own a dog, and have more money than sense, I've got good news for you: you can pay ¥ 31,000 (about US $297) to have a Shinto priest perform an exorcism on your canine companion.

I'm not making this up.  According to an article by E. S. Huffman over at UpRoxx, the D+ Spa in Kagoshima Prefecture is offering a special deal wherein you can come over with Fido, and a certified Shinto priest from the nearby Shingariyu Shrine will get rid of whatever evil spirits your dog has in attendance.

"Seven-year-old, 10-year-old, and 13-year-old dogs need to be careful of their health, as it’s easier in those years for them to get diseases of aging," the D+ website explains.  After all, it couldn't be because by the time dogs get to be ten years old, they're moving into the age bracket euphemistically known as "getting up there in years."

On the other hand, if creaky joints, bad eyesight, and wrinkles are caused by evil spirits that you could actually potentially get rid of, that'd be good news for People Of A Certain Age.  Like myself.  Unfortunately, however, D+ doesn't offer exorcisms for humans yet, only dogs.  And if the whole thing brings up mental images of Linda Blair puking up pea soup all over the place, not to worry; the exorcism ritual only lasts thirty minutes, is apparently calm and peaceful, and afterwards the newly-cleansed dogs get to go for a swim in a dogs-only pool.  Then, according to the website, they "are reunited with their owners for a relaxing meal and champagne."

Me, I'm not so sure it's a good idea to give a dog champagne.  But maybe the bubbles keep the evil spirits from returning, I dunno.

Actual photo from the D+ website of a poodle, settling in for a nice post-exorcism nosh

What comes to my mind, besides "Are you people nuts?  Or what?", is that in my experience all dogs have weird, quirky habits, so if you're attributing canine oddities to evil spirits, then every domesticated dog I've ever met must be possessed.  In my long years of dog ownership, I've known dogs who:

• never figured out that you can't walk through a sliding glass door
• tried to herd our cats
• thought a stuffed toy was a live squirrel and stared at it for hours on end waiting for it to move
• begged for cucumbers but completely ignored us when we were cooking steak
• was barking outside like a lunatic, and upon investigation, it turned out she was barking at a stick
• had a mortal hatred of ping-pong balls
• barked furiously at strangers -- until they walked in the front door, at which point everyone apparently becomes a friend
• would suddenly turn vicious and block the door, growling and snarling, when visitors tried to leave

I sort of doubt that any of this could be fixed by exorcism.  Myself, I've always thought that domestication just makes animals act weird.  In order for a formerly-wild animal to cohabit successfully with humans, it must kind of screw up the mental circuitry on some level.

On the other hand, if you want my vote for a species that really could use some intervention, evil-spirit-wise, I'd suggest looking at cats.  On a recent visit to a friend's house, I met a cat whose preferred mode of expressing affection is to jump on the top of the chair you're sitting in and bite a chunk out of your scalp.  Another friend has a cat who likes to climb into your lap, reach up with both paws, and attempt to give you a nipple piercing right through your shirt.

You have to wonder what a Shinto priest could do about that.

Anyhow, if you're ever in Japan with your dog, consider whether a family outing for a canine exorcism might be right for you.  As for me, I need to sign off here so I can go let my dog out, so she can go stand at the end of our dock and bark at her own reflection in the pond.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

Patterns and meaning

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, LED digital wall clock (Seiko), CC BY-SA 3.0]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

• I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
• 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
• Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences."  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no. 666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

The mad clockwork

I am fundamentally an optimistic person.

I know that might be surprising, given that I frequently write here at Skeptophilia about the absolute mind-bending stupidity humans sometimes come up with.  Even so, I'm firmly of the opinion that most people are decent and kind, and just want what everyone wants -- stability, the basic necessities of life, friendship and family, acceptance, support.  Traveling as much as I have reinforced that; everywhere I've gone, even to places where the culture is entirely different from the one in which I was raised, I've found that friendliness is reciprocated and most people I meet are basically good at heart.

But if there's one thing that I can identify as a pervasive flaw in the human psyche, it's our determination to keep doing things the way we've always done even after it's been demonstrated beyond any doubt that it's not working, or is causing actual problems, sometimes worse ones than the ones we're solving.  Two obvious examples come to mind, and are probably the same ones you'd come up with.  Climate change -- after all, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius told the world about the greenhouse effect in the 1890s, and theorized that burning fossil fuels would boost the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and raise temperatures.  So it's not exactly a new idea.  Scientists have been recommending a severe cutback on fossil fuel use since the 1970s.

And yet here we are.

The other one is of more recent vintage, and is the recommendation by medical professionals to wear masks and avoid gatherings to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.  The sense of this should be obvious when you look at success stories like New Zealand, which effectively eradicated the disease entirely.  But no -- to score political points, even if it's at the expense of thousands of lives, idiots like Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity talk about how "the left" (for that, read "people who would like their friends and family to stay alive") wants to cancel Christmas, and that the suggestion we have virtual get-togethers this year is the equivalent of carpet-bombing Whoville.

The reason the topic of continuing to repeat our mistakes ad infinitum comes up is that I just re-read the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.  

The first edition cover, from 1959

The book takes place after the "Flame Deluge" (the nuclear war that we came so close to back in the 1960s and 1970s) effectively destroyed civilization, sending us back into the Dark Ages.  It's divided into three sections: Fiat Homo ("Let there be man"), Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"), and Fiat Voluntuas Tua ("Let thy will be done").  There is about an eight-hundred-year gap between the sections, and each one has as its main character a monk of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in the deserts of New Mexico; first the meek, earnest Brother Francis Gerard, then the brilliant but conflicted Dom Paulo, and finally the staunch, deeply courageous Abbot Jethrah Zerchi.  And through the course of the book we watch civilization rebuild, to the point that they're on the verge of doing it all again, despite knowing what will happen, despite seeing all around them the effects of the first global nuclear war.

[The image is an Amazon link if you'd like to order a copy]

Near the end of the book is a passage, spoken by Abbot Zerchi, which would be in strong contention for the most poignant lines ever written:

Listen, are we helpless?  Are we doomed to do it again and again and again?  Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an endless cycle of rise and fall?  Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk.  Ground to dust and plowed with salt.  Spain, France, Britain, America -- burned into the oblivion of the centuries.  And again and again and again.

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

I first read this brilliant, beautiful, and devastating novel when I was an undergraduate, and although I kept my copy of it, I never re-read it until I was casting about for something to read a couple of weeks ago and stumbled across it.  And it's still as spot-on as it was when it was written in 1959, back during the Cold War, when kids did nuclear bomb drills by hiding under their desks, and we all pretended that this was somehow preparing for the results of an all-out war.

The threat of nuclear war has fortunately faded, but that tendency to repeat our mistakes hasn't gone away.  We only listen to the scientists when what they say is convenient and won't disrupt our comfortable lives.  We don't even considering changing our course until things have gotten so bad that a course correction is unlikely to have any effect.

And we still tolerate elected officials who don't deserve the title of "leaders," who choose to play politics when the health, safety, and lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people are at risk.

I wish I could find some positive way to end this post, but like the last Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, instead I'm afraid all I can do is stand there in dumb amazement at our determination not to learn from history.  Sure, some of us act; there are those few who are truly willing to walk their talk regardless of the risk, people like Dr. Sandra Steingraber whose fight against the disinformation campaign from the fossil fuels industry has landed her in jail.  People like author, journalist, and dedicated environmental advocate Bill McKibben.  People like the late Wangari Maathai, who virtually single-handedly improved the lot of Kenyan women through her tireless efforts to break the patriarchy's stranglehold on business.  People like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg and Cameron Kasky and Emma González and Jamie Margolin, who have refused to take no as an answer despite the difficulties and personal risks involved.

Activists like them are absolutely critical, and give me hope, but we need more of them.  A lot more.  My intuition is that we're at a crossroads; a point where we're faced with a choice between doing things as we've always done despite knowing, knowing with absolute assurance, that the old ways don't work, and changing what we do even if it's hard.

Let's all dedicate ourselves, today, to making the right choice.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

Sheeple update

Sometimes I have to check in on the r/conspiracy subreddit just to see what new nutty conspiracy theories are out there.  I try to make sure that I've girded my loins and stiffened my spine beforehand, because the level of complete batshit insanity demonstrated by the regular contributors really has to be seen to be believed.  On my most recent visit, I was not disappointed -- there are four truly amazing conspiracy theories there that I was unaware of, if by "amazing" you mean "ideas that you would only come up with if you have a single Milk-Dud where most of us have a brain."

First, we have astronomer Paul Cox inadvertently inducing multiple orgasms in the Planet X crowd by making a joke while analyzing a video of the transit of Mercury across the Sun.  "See that mysterious bright glow on the right side?  What do you suppose that is?" Cox asks, pointing to what is clearly a lens flare.  "Do you think it's the mysterious planet Nibiru?"  He then goes on to say, "We don't cover things up like NASA does."

Well, you don't joke about such matters, not when people like YouTube contributor "EyesOpen37" are listening.  "EyesOpen37" doesn't believe in lens flares.  Nor, apparently, in astronomers having senses of humor.  "EyesOpen37" thinks it's much more likely that a vague, diffuse glow is unequivocal evidence that a huge planet inhabited by our reptilian alien overlords is coming into the inner solar system for a visit, and NASA is desperately trying to make sure that no one finds out about it.

I'll bet Paul Cox is currently banging his forehead against the wall and wishing like hell he'd never opened his mouth.

"I wonder if these guys are using this transit of Mercury to warn us about Nibiru?" muses "EyesOpen37," in a tone of voice that indicates that the answer is obviously "yes."  And the people who posted comments on his YouTube submission agree wholeheartedly. Here's a sampling:

• Thank you so much for uploading this video!! And I'm so glad a reputable person has finally spoke out!  Paul Cox is a good person and so are you to release this info!! :)
• I hope you have this video backed up so you can keep re-posting if it gets deleted!!  WOW!!
• Want to know how it'll end?  Read Revelation 8:8 on. Repent and seek your Saviour.  God bless.
• It's controlled.  How many dead astronomers do we have to date?  Maybe a joke is the only way he can put it out there.  Bottom line....he was deliberate.

Yes, there are lots of dead astronomers. Aristarchus, Hypatia, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmund Halley, Henrietta Swan Leavitt... the list goes on and on.  There's only one possible answer: they were all killed to keep them silent about the Planet Nibiru.

Speaking of dead people, our second conspiracy theory is about how Osama bin Laden is still "alive and well and living in the Bahamas."  And of course, there's nothing that lends credence to a wacko idea like saying "Edward Snowden says so."   (The only thing that's better would be saying "Nikola Tesla says so.")   According to the site Humans are Free, Snowden had the following to say about it:

I have documents showing that Bin Laden is still on the CIA’s payroll.  He is still receiving more than $100,000 a month, which are being transferred through some front businesses and organizations, directly to his Nassau bank account.  I am not certain where he is now, but in 2013, he was living quietly in his villa with five of his wives and many children.  

Osama Bin Laden was one of the CIA’s most efficient operatives for a long time.  What kind of message would it send their other operatives if they were to let the SEALs kill him?  They organized his fake death with the collaboration of the Pakistani Secret services, and he simply abandoned his cover.  

Since everyone believes he is dead, nobody’s looking for him, so it was pretty easy to disappear.  Without the beard and the military jacket, nobody recognizes him.

Of course, at the bottom of the page, we read the following disclaimer:

Note: The original source of this information has not been validated nor confirmed by any other source.

In other words, even though we're not sure if it's true, you're clearly a KoolAid-Drinkin' Sheeple if you don't believe it.

And since bin Laden is still alive, it must therefore follow that lots of other Big Bad Guys are, too.  For our third dip in the deep end of the pool, we go to the site OrionStar 3000, wherein we learn that Josef "The Angel of Death" Mengele is not only still alive, he is also the "Zodiac Killer" who killed seven people in the late 1960s in California.

Now, you might be thinking, "How can Mengele be alive?  He was born in 1911.  He'd be 109 years old by now."  But this just shows that you're not thinking outside the box.  (And by "the box" I mean "anything that makes sense.")  Here's what he looked like in 2001, when he was a mere 90 years old, in a photograph taken at a "Brotherhood of Aryan Nations/KKK/ Bush Fundraiser in Hernando, Florida.":

Which, you have to admit, is looking pretty good for a 90-year-old. Here's Mengele during World War II:

So I think can all agree that's a definitive match.

As far as how Mengele could still be so spry despite his age, we're told, "Mengele looks much younger than he really is due to years of face-lifts, anti-aging hormone injections & alleged cannibalism!"

And if that wasn't enough, we also find out the following alarming stuff:

• [SS Lieutenant Colonel] Otto Skorzeny faked Hitler's death!  Nazi Germany Really Won WWII!
• Hitler lived to be the oldest man in America until he died at the age of 114 years in 2/2004 in the Bethesda, MD Naval Hospital.
• The son of Tesla's illegal immigrant German Born accountant George H. Scherff Sr., SS Nazi spy George H. Scherff Jr. aka: US Navy Pilot: George H.W. Bush murdered his two TBF Avenger crew members by bailing out of his perfectly good airplane.  Bush became a heroin junkie to try to escape his guilty conscience.

Scarier still, this site doesn't have a disclaimer.  So it must all be true, right?

Of course right.

The last entry in our Batshit Crazy Sweepstakes was one that appeared on r/conspiracy almost simultaneously with my being sent the link by my son, who is following in his old man's footsteps in having a nose for sniffing out lunacy.  This one comes our way via the Jerusalem Post, of all places, and is about retired Israeli general Haim Eshed, who for thirty years headed the Israeli Space Security Agency.  During those three decades he appears to have spent his spare time riding on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings, because now he's claiming that there's a "Galactic Federation" that has been in contact with governments all over the Earth, and the earthlings and the aliens have a jointly-operated base on Mars.

Apparently the Federation is largely benevolent, but they'd prefer it if the inhabitants of the Earth didn't know about them, making Eshed's tell-all a little puzzling.  In fact, Donald Trump was warned off revealing the aliens' presence by the aliens themselves.  The Federation members said they preferred to wait until humans "evolve and reach a stage where we will... understand what space and spaceships are."

I must admit that wanting to wait till humans evolve is reasonable if they've been in contact with Donald Trump.  In fact, after talking to Donald Trump, I'm a little surprised that they didn't just conclude "there's no intelligent life here" and nuke the entire planet.

Eshed's decision to flout the Federation's commands becomes more understandable when you find out that he just released a book, entitled The Universe Beyond the Horizon: Conversations with Professor Haim Eshed.  So Eshed's attitude seems to be "fuck secrecy and stern warnings by the Men In Black when there's money to be made."

So that's our fun excursion through CrazyTown for today. I hope you enjoyed it.  Myself, I'm wondering if I can get a hold of any of that anti-aging stuff they're using on Mengele.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to cannibalism.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

The galactic shredder

One of the beliefs of our ancestors that has taken the hardest hit from science is that the heavens are static.

The (apparent) movement of the stars and planets against the backdrop of the night sky seemed so orderly that early astronomers like Ptolemy thought they moved in circles -- the perfect symmetry of the circle seemed appropriate for the divine reaches of the heavens.  It's one of the reasons that comets and supernovas upset everyone so much.  They were unpredictable, coming and going with no warning and no apparent cause, so they had to be portents of evil.

Then along came Tycho Brahe and Kepler and Newton, and science demonstrated that even if the movement of the planets wasn't in perfect circles, they did obey fixed mathematical rules that allowed the religious to breathe a sigh of relief (once they stopped putting scientists under house arrest or burning them at the stake).  Orderliness returned, even if it wasn't the order Ptolemy envisioned.  As Galileo put it, "Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe."

But even that didn't hold.  Edmond Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) discovered that the stars' positions were changing, that the "eternal heavens" weren't so eternal after all.  Einstein and Schrödinger showed us that Newton's vision of the cosmic rule book was wrong, or at least incomplete.  Heisenberg demonstrated that on some level, reality is fuzzy, that there's an inherent uncertainty that isn't an analytical flaw or poor experimental technique, it's built into the system.  If we gain precision in one measurement, we lose precision in another, and there's no way to get rid of the blur because the fundamental stuff of the universe is itself blurry.

Spooky action at a distance.  Quantum entanglement.  Bell's inequality.  Dark matter.  Dark energy.  All topics I've dealt with here before, and all of which emphasize that however far we've come in our understanding of the universe, we still have a deeply incomplete picture of things.

And still the stars turn in their courses, leading us to see permanence where there is none.

All of this disquieting stuff comes up because of a paper that appeared two weeks ago in Nature Astronomy called, "Detection of the Milky Way Reflex Motion Due to the Large Magellanic Cloud Infall."  In it, astrophysicists Michael S. Petersen and Jorge Peñarrubia of the University of Edinburgh have demonstrated that the Milky Way galaxy itself, which we picture as serenely turning in space like some kind of slow, tranquil whirlpool, is actually being torn apart.

The culprit is the Large Magellanic Cloud, an elliptical "satellite" galaxy named for Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who was the first white European to describe it.  The reason something so (relatively) small can have such a large effect is not only its proximity, but its dark matter content, which seems to be disproportionally high.  The authors write:

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the most massive satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, with an estimated mass exceeding a tenth of the mass of the Milky Way.  Just past its closest approach of about 50 kpc, and flying past the Milky Way at an astonishing speed of 327 km s−1 (ref. 6), the Large Magellanic Cloud can affect our Galaxy in a number of ways, including dislodging the Milky Way disk from the Galactic centre of mass.  Here, we report evidence that the Milky Way disk is moving with respect to stellar tracers in the outer halo in a direction that points at an earlier location on the Large Magellanic Cloud trajectory.  The resulting reflex motion is detected in the kinematics of outer halo stars and Milky Way satellite galaxies with accurate distances, proper motions and line-of-sight velocities.  Our results indicate that dynamical models of our Galaxy cannot neglect gravitational perturbations induced by the Large Magellanic Cloud infall, nor can observations of the stellar halo be treated in a reference frame that does not correct for disk reflex motion.

Did you catch that bit about "dislodging the Milky Way disk from the Galactic centre of mass?"

That's scientific-ese for "ripping it to shreds."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 

ESO/VMC Survey, The Large Magellanic Cloud revealed by VISTA, CC BY 4.0

So if anyone thought the Milky Way was a more-or-less permanent structure, this study killed that idea.  "This discovery definitely breaks the spell that our galaxy is in some sort of equilibrium state," said co-author Jorge Peñarrubia, in a press release from the University of Edinburgh.  "Actually, the recent infall of the LMC is causing violent perturbations onto the Milky Way.  Understanding these may give us an unparalleled view on the distribution of dark matter in both galaxies."

As with many studies, this one brings up more questions than it answers.  Why is the LMC moving at such an "astonishing" rate?  (As cautious as most scientists are in their word choice, the fact that they called its speed "astonishing" in a major scientific journal is eye-opening indeed.)  Why does it have enough dark matter to perturb the motions of a galaxy ten times larger, both in mass and in diameter, from a distance of 160,000 light years away?  What ultimate effect will the LMC's swift passage have on the shape of our own galaxy?

For me, it just reinforces something that has come up in Skeptophilia many times; we are very, very, very small in an absolutely enormous universe.  It's both awe-inspiring and a little frightening.  A good thing, probably, that we humans can't stay focused for long on our cosmic insignificance; our day-to-day needs and demands take over pretty quickly, and after all, even the astrophysicists have to fix lunch and renew their drivers' licenses and sleep at night.

But pondering this kind of thing even for a little while is kind of overwhelming, isn't it?  I like to take a quick look, but I don't think our brains are built to stare into the void for any extended period of time.  So if you're looking for me, I'll be huddled under my blankie for the rest of the day.

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

The signature of the creator

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" is justly revered by Trekkies, and also by people who simply like a good story.  The gist -- giving as little in the way of spoilers as I can manage, if you've not seen it -- is that there's a message implanted in our DNA and the DNA of alien species across the galaxy.  No one species has the entire thing, so to find out what it means requires getting tissue samples from all over the place, extracting the piece of the message, then somehow putting the entire thing together to decipher what it says.

A secret code dispersed through time and space, so to speak.

While the quasi-scientific explanation behind the whole thing was a little dubious for those of us who know something about genetics and evolution, it was a hell of a good idea for a story.  A mysterious, super-powerful someone left its thumbprint on life everywhere in the universe, and there the message has sat, waiting for us to become smart enough and technologically advanced enough to find it.

"The Chase" brings up a theological question I've debated before with religious-minded friends; how, starting from outside of the framework of belief, you could tell there was a God by what you see around you.  I often hear "natural beauty" and "love and selflessness" brought up, but (unfortunately) there seems to be enough ugliness, hatred, and selfishness to more than compensate for the good stuff.  Put simply, how would a universe with a divine presence look different from one without?  I've never been able to come up with a good answer to that.  To me, the God/no God versions of the universe look pretty much alike.

Which is a large part of why I'm an atheist.  I'm perfectly okay with revising that if evidence comes my way, but at the moment, I'm not seeing any particular cause for belief in any of the various deities humans have worshipped along the way.

What brings all this up is a paper released last week in arXiv called, "Searching for a Message in the Angular Power Spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background."  The CMB is a relatively uniformly-spread (or isotropic, as the scientists put it) radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang.  In the 13.8-odd billion years since the universe started, the searing radiation of creation has become stretched along with the space that carries it until it has an average wavelength of two millimeters, putting it in the microwave region of the spectrum, and that radiation comes at us from everywhere in the sky.

What the author, Michael Hippke of the Sonnenberg Observatory in Germany, proposed was something that is reminiscent of the central idea of "The Chase."  If there was a creator -- be it a god, or a super-intelligent alien race, or whatever -- the obvious place to put a message is in the CMB.  The minor fluctuations ("anisotropies") in the CMB would be detectable by a technological society pretty much from any vantage point in the visible universe, and so hiding a pattern in the apparent chaos would be as much as having a signature from the creator.

So Hippke digitized the most detailed map we have of the CMB, and then estimated what part of the signal would have been lost or degraded in 13.8 billion years due to quantum noise and interference with the much closer and more powerful radiation sources in our own galaxy.  After some intense statistical analysis, Hippke determined that there should be at least a one-thousand-bit remnant of sense somewhere in there, so he set about to find it.

Nothing.

"I find no meaningful message in the actual bit-stream," Hippke wrote.  "We may conclude that there is no obvious message on the CMB sky.  Yet it remains unclear whether there is (was) a Creator, whether we live in a simulation, or whether the message is printed correctly in the previous section, but we fail to understand it."

Despite how I started this post, I have to admit to being a little disappointed.  It was a clever approach, and no one would be more excited than me if he'd actually found something.  I don't honestly like the idea that we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe -- or, more accurately (and optimistically) that the only meaning is the one we create within it.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty years on Earth, it's that reality is under no particular obligation to order itself in such a way that it makes me comfortable.  

But still, if there had been a message there, how cool would that be?  Even if, as the Cardassian commander Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "it might just be a recipe for biscuits."

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

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

When the volcano blows

If you were wondering what the final act of the 2020 fever-dream theater might be, I have a possible contender.

Geologists have just discovered another supervolcano besides Yellowstone.

Supervolcanoes -- known in scientific circles as caldera eruptions -- are insanely powerful.  The famous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, in Indonesia, was a caldera eruption, but even that was on the small end of things; it blasted 25 cubic kilometers of ash and rock fragments into the air, while the last major eruption of Yellowstone (650,000 years ago) released forty times that much, and covered most of what is now the central United States in a meter or two of ash.

And Toba, another Indonesian volcano, released almost three times more than that, 74,000 years ago -- and some anthropologists think the resulting climate impact nearly wiped out the up-and-coming human race, by some estimates reducing the entire population of humans to only about a thousand individuals.

By comparison, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980 was pretty much a wet firecracker.

So anyhow, why this all comes up is because we thought we knew where most of the potentially huge calderas were located, and geologists have given a great effort to calming everyone down, saying we have a handle on things and will have plenty of warning if any of them show signs of an imminent eruption.

Turns out, we didn't even know one of them was there.

A cluster of six islands in the Aleutian chain -- Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Chagulak, and Uliaga -- have long been known to be stratovolcanoes, conical, explosive volcanoes of the same type as Mount Vesuvius.  What scientists didn't know until now is that apparently, the magma reservoirs of these six islands are not separate blobs, but one enormous blob underlying the entire island chain.

Just like the one under Yellowstone.

Mount Cleveland [Image is in the Public Domain]

The findings, which will be formally presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday, are a little alarming.  According to the press release from Science Daily:

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland, the most active volcano of the group, trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains.  They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Unlike stratovolcanoes, which tend to tap small- to modestly-sized reservoirs of magma, a caldera is created by tapping a huge reservoir in the Earth's crust.  When the reservoir's pressure exceeds the strength of the crust, gigantic amounts of lava and ash are released in a catastrophic episode of eruption...

If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.

So yeah.  That's just marvelous.  Okay, I know, the discovery doesn't mean it's going to erupt any time soon, although it bears mention that Mount Cleveland has erupted 22 times in the past 230 years, and eight of those eruptions were in the last eleven years.  So it would totally be on-brand for 2020 if the whole thing went kablooie.

Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be superstitious or engage in magical thinking or anything.  Given how this year's gone, I think I deserve a little slack, here.  No one will be happier than me if January 1, 2021 comes and the Aleutian Islands still exist, but at present I'm not ruling anything out. 

There we have it -- a supervolcano that we didn't even realize existed.  Just another thing to put in your Box of Anxiety.  Honestly, at the moment I'm more concerned about what Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump and his cronies could potentially do to the United States on the way out the door.  In my experience, assholes can do more damage than ash holes.

Even the super-sized ones.

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

One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

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