The guilt of the instigators

A number of years ago, I was talking with a friend about her recent divorce from a man who was a serial philanderer and emotional abuser, and from whom she had separated more than once, always taking him back when he promised reform.  At that point my own divorce was also recent history, and I asked her what she'd come away with after the experience.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, "I think the biggest lesson I learned is, when someone shows you who he truly is, believe it."

As of the time of this writing, the attempted coup against our government by armed rioters is only twenty-four hours old, and already I'm seeing the distraction campaign by Republicans getting into full swing.  "This isn't who we are," the official GOP Twitter account said.  Rudy Giuliani said "stop the violence" after having called for "trial by combat" only hours earlier.  Ivanka Trump asked for the rioters to leave peacefully -- but when the protests started, had said they are "American patriots."  Brit Hume speculated that they were "leftist Antifa in disguise" despite the fact that there are photographs, and the ones who have been identified are all well-known far-right agitators.  Ted Cruz asked for the rioters to disperse -- but still voted against certifying the results of a legitimate, fair election later that evening.  Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham both made speeches against the riots, the move to question the election, and Trump himself.  Twitter suspended Trump's account for twelve hours, supposedly "pending review for permanent deletion."  Several Trump staffers have resigned, and several more are expected to do so in the next day.  Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of Fox News said that Trump "acted very badly" in saying he loved the rioters and that they were "very special."

And on and on.

The problem is: it's too late.  It's way too fucking late to claim the moral high ground, to act as if they haven't supported an amoral psychopath for four years, making excuses for every insane thing he's done all along the way.  Without the support of these people he never would have been nominated, much less elected.  Especially infuriating is the sudden realization by Twitter and Fox News that they're complicit in violent insurrection -- that between the two of them, they created this monster.  Without Twitter and Fox News, and far-right commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Trump would have remained what he was -- a failed businessman and washed-up reality TV star.

And we've been warning for years that this was coming, that the lies and misinformation and polarization were going to have consequences.  I say "we" because I've been writing about the parallels between Trump's rise and Germany in the 1930s since he was nominated.  I was called an alarmist by people on both sides of the aisle.  The conservatives said Trump was a true patriot who cared deeply for the average American; the liberals said he was an incompetent but that the system of checks and balances was there to keep the reins on him.

But people like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz made sure the checks and balances were never invoked.  They gave Trump carte blanche.  Fox News helped matters along by making sure that any of the innumerable lies and outright insane statements Trump made never got aired, that the loyal viewers only ever saw things that painted him in a positive light.  They created a vision of a man who was a messiah, the only one who could save America from the godless evil liberals...

... and their followers believed it.

Stephen King said -- a long time ago -- "The people who have spent years sowing dragon's teeth seem surprised to find that they have grown an actual dragon."  Trump's enablers created this situation.  Each of them is as culpable as Trump is in what happened on January 6.  They are guilty of the deliberate, calculated deception of a significant percentage of the American citizenry, who were trained to discount every criticism of Trump they heard, and so now... discount every criticism of Trump they hear.

The mealy-mouthed tut-tutting about the violence in the Capitol (and in a number of state capitols as well) can not be allowed to get them off the hook for this.  I'm no expert in jurisprudence, so I am unqualified to weigh in over issues like whether the congresspeople who voted against certification of the election or who instigated the coup attempt could be expelled and/or prosecuted.  But doing nothing -- saying, "Oh, well, it's simmered down, we're okay now" -- will work about as well as when Susan Collins voted against removing Trump after he was impeached early last year, and said, "I think he's learned his lesson."

I guess he hasn't, Senator Collins.

If someone shows you who he truly is, believe it.

Undoing the damage this has done will not be easy or quick.  It'll still be with us long after the windows in the Capitol are replaced, the papers and files that were dumped on the floor are put back, the damage to furniture is repaired.  I don't envy the new administration the work they have ahead.  But if we don't want this to happen again -- which, I trust, is the hope of every American -- we cannot let the ones who did this get away with it.  And I'm not talking only about the participants in the riot.  I'm talking about the ones who created this situation, from Trump on down.  I'm talking about Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, the far-right commentators who built Trump up as a god-figure, the true believers who worship him.  I'm talking about the elected officials who coldly and hypocritically encouraged it -- some of them laughing up their sleeves in private about what a moron Trump is -- because they saw it as a way to fill their own pockets and keep their positions of power.

We need reform, and that doesn't mean accepting that the Democrats have all the answers.  They don't.  It means stopping the continual stream of self-aggrandizing lies.  It means refusing to throw away anything that doesn't immediately appeal to your biases as "fake news."  It means turning off the television and radio and depriving the media that thrives on polarization of the only thing they care about, which is cash from sponsors. 

And it means holding people accountable for what they say or do.  Every damn time.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

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

Looking forward to cataclysm

Is it just me, or do you sometimes get the feeling that people want catastrophes to happen?

I see it every time there's a near pass of an asteroid.  Hysterical notes start showing up all over social media about how "this time it's for real" and "we better get ready" and "make your peace with God" and "how 'bout a planet-sized game of Whack-a-Mole?"  Then, when the asteroid misses by a significant margin -- amazingly enough, just as NASA predicted -- people seem somehow disappointed.

Dammit, they say.  Maybe next time will be the fiery cataclysm I've been so looking forward to.

This comes up because I'm once again seeing all sorts of buzz about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and how the state of Wyoming is about to get blasted into the stratosphere.  Now, to be fair, Yellowstone is an active volcanic area, and previous eruptions have been pretty stupendous.  One that occurred 640,000 years ago blew a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, ash, and pyroclastic debris into the air -- for reference, this is about a thousand times larger than the amount of ash from Mount Saint Helens -- and the resulting fallout blanketed most of what is now the central United States.

I know 640,000 years seems like a long time, but it's not much geologically, and geologists consider another large caldera eruption from Yellowstone a sure thing.  Here's where the problem starts, though, because "a sure thing" doesn't mean "next Tuesday at 4:30 PM."  What it means is that there'll be an eruption some time in the next 100,000 years, give or take, and (this is the critical part) we're seeing no sign of it being any time soon in human terms.

Sapphire Pool, Grand Prismatic Spring Complex, Yellowstone National Park.  The deep blue water in the center is about 90 C and has a pH of 9.  Swimming not recommended.

The pro-cataclysm cadre got their push this time because of an announcement that the Steamboat Geyser has resumed regular eruptions after a three-year quiescent phase.  To be sure, Steamboat is pretty spectacular; its column of hot water and mud is one of the highest ever measured, jetting up to 115 meters into the air.  So having it start up again suddenly after not erupting since early 2018 is understandably going to raise some eyebrows.

What it doesn't mean, however, is that the entire caldera basin is going to go kaboom, as it did 640,000 years ago.  All it means is that underground hotspots come and go in volcanically active regions, and the plumbing system that powers geysers and hot springs shifts around sometimes.  Geologists are seeing no signs of magma movement, which would be the precursor to an actual volcanic eruption.

They're pretty curious, though, about why Steamboat has reactivated so suddenly.  One possibility is that because water in geysers and hot springs is usually laden with dissolved silica and other minerals, a slight fluctuation in temperature can cause a sudden precipitation of crystalline material (in fact, the shorelines of the Yellowstone hot springs are coated with the stuff).  This could, literally, clog the pipes and cause the pressure to release elsewhere, or to build up until it's sufficient to blast the clog to pieces.  In short, we're not sure why Steamboat is active again, but it's virtually certain it's not an imminent eruption.

Honesty compels me to use the word "virtually," and even Michael Manga of the University of California-Berkeley, who is leading the study of Steamboat Geyser, says we can't really be certain of the timing of volcanic eruptions.  After all, massive eruptions are so infrequent that we haven't had all that many opportunities to study the lead-up and see what would be the typical seismological warning signs.  "What we asked are very simple questions and it is a little bit embarrassing that we can't answer them, because it means there are fundamental processes on Earth that we don't quite understand," Manga said.  "One of the reasons we argue we need to study geysers is that if we can't understand and explain how a geyser erupts, our hope for doing the same thing for magma is much lower."

So as befits a cautious scientist, Manga is saying "we're not sure."  But from what we know of volcanoes, it doesn't look at all likely.  So the pro-cataclysm crowd will have to kick at the gravel in disappointment and look for the next opportunity for a large part of the surface area of the Earth to be covered in flaming debris.  

Better luck next time, guys.  Cheer up, maybe there's an asteroid out there heading our way.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

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

Canine illusions

I've always had a fascination for optical illusions.

The enjoyment of bizarre trompe-l'oeil is connected to a persistent theme in my fiction; how do we know what's real?  If something occurs that challenges our notions of how things are, by what criteria could we know if we're seeing reality -- or if it's a malfunction in our frequently errant sensory-perceptual systems?

My favorite optical illusions are ones where even once you know what's going on, your mind just won't accept it.  Our brains, apparently, are very prone to hanging on to a solution to a perceptual anomaly even once it's been conclusively demonstrated that they've got it wrong.  The best example of this I know of is the checker shadow illusion:

In the above image, which square is darker, A or B?

If you know anything about optical illusions, you've probably guessed that they're the same darkness, and you'd be right if you did.  But I'd bet cold hard cash that even once you know the two squares are the same darkness, you can't actually see it that way.  (In fact, if you doubt they are of equal darkness, use some scraps of paper to cover up everything but a vertical strip of the image, to eliminate the green cylinder and most of the checkerboard.  The fact that they're the same will be obvious.  Then remove the paper, and voilà -- you'll be back to seeing A as darker than B.)

Another fine example of this phenomenon is the hollow-face illusion, which seems to occur because our brains have a finely-developed ability to see nuances of other human faces, but the concept of an inside-out face is so far out of anything we typically experience that we just can't process it.  Check it out:

A lot of optical illusions have to do with the fact that we often interpret what we see based upon comparisons, and those comparisons persist even once we know they're inaccurate.  (That's the key to the checker shadow illusion; because we think square B is in shadow, it must be intrinsically lighter in color than square A.)  It's also what made the infamous blue dress/white dress illusion so maddening; apparently it works because we judge something's color not only by the intrinsic frequencies of the light striking our eye, but by comparison to the color(s) surrounding it.  So someone who focuses on one part of an image and judges the rest of the image based upon that will come to a different conclusion than someone who does the same thing but starting with a different part of the image.

A lot of size-based illusions work in a similar fashion, such as the Ebbinghaus-Titchener illusion, in which the question is to determine which of the two orange circles is larger:

You've undoubtedly already guessed that they're the same size, but it's a remarkably persistent illusion even when you know that.  The right-hand circle looks larger because we're judging its size by comparison to the small dots surrounding it; and the opposite holds for the left-hand circle.

The topic of optical illusions comes up because of a cool study out of La Trobe University (Australia), led by psychologist Sarah Byosiere.  Byosiere became interested in optical illusions a few years ago, and wondered whether humans' advanced brains made us fall for them more easily -- we're always calculating, comparing, weighing options, which brings with it some pitfalls -- and whether other animal species might not be fooled.

So she decided to test dogs.  Using copious amounts of dog cookies, she trained some dogs to interact with a touch screen, rewarding the dogs if they touched their noses to the larger of two circular shapes shown.  Once they got good at it, she threw the Ebbinghaus-Titchener illusion at them.

And they fell for it.  Apparently dogs think the right-hand circle is larger, too.

What's even more fascinating is that dogs didn't fall for the Delboeuf illusion...

 ...which you'd think would work precisely the same way.  Getting tricked by the Delboeuf illusion is apparently pretty ubiquitous in humans, which is why restaurants have discovered that a medium-sized entrée looks like a more generous serving in a small plate than in a larger one.  But dogs presented with two plates of food, which differ in the plate size but not in the quantity of food, showed no preference whatsoever for the smaller plate.

As a side note, however, I do wonder if the apparent failure of dogs to get taken in by the Delboeuf illusion isn't because of faulty experimental design.  I know my own dogs don't seem to respond to portion size in their (equal-sized) food bowls.  I can fill one to overflowing and put only a handful of kibble in the other, and my dogs will generally go for whichever bowl is closer.  "Oh, well, I can always go for the other bowl once I'm done with this one," seems to be their general attitude, along with "Any food is a good thing."

Byosiere and her colleagues have expanded their research into other illusions, and I encourage you to go to the link I posted and check out what she and others have done.  She's also started a citizen-science effort called “What the Fluff!?” to study how animals respond to an illusion you probably have seen on YouTube -- where a pet owner holds a sheet up in front of them, and drops the sheet while simultaneously ducking out of sight, and seeing how the pets respond to their owners' apparent vanishing act.  "We’re asking owners to do this at home with their dogs," Byosiere said.  "We’ll be analyzing the footage and seeing if we can make any conclusions about object permanence and violation of expectation in that kind of magic trick."

So if you're inclined, try playing some mind games with your pets, and send her your results.  I may try it with my dogs and see what happens.  My guess is Guinness might fall for it and try to figure out what happened, but our hound Lena, who shows the level of energy and intelligence usually associated with a plush toy, would probably not notice if I mysteriously vanished.  Or if she did notice, she'd kind of shrug and go, "Oh, well, I'm sure he'll be back at some point" and resume the very important nap she'd been taking before I started bothering her.

Either way, it might be interesting to see how they respond.  If you try it, let me know in the comments section what your results were.  And now, I'm off to play a round of Confuse-a-Dog.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

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

The necessity of representation

This past weekend, I got into two apparently unrelated conversations with online acquaintances that at their basis amount to the same thing.

The first revolved around the one and only television series I am at all dedicated to, which is Doctor Who.  I've been a near-fanatical Whovian since my wife persuaded me a few years ago to watch a selection of iconic episodes like "Blink," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," and "Empty Child," resulting in my being hooked for life.  The conversation I got into, which honestly crossed the line into a heated argument, had to do with the choice three years ago of Jodie Whittaker for the Thirteenth Doctor, replacing Peter Capaldi (and a string of eleven other white males stretching back to the series's beginnings in 1963).

The topic came up because of rumors (thus far unsubstantiated, as far as I've seen) that Jodie Whittaker may be leaving the show at the end of this season.  I mentioned how disappointed I'd be if this was true, and how much I liked her portrayal of the character -- that she'd be in my top three Doctors ever -- and this brought up the same "the Doctor is male" nonsense I first saw popping up all over the place when she was chosen.

The choice of a woman, this fellow said, was "virtue signaling."  So, actually, was the choice of an American-born Black actor (Tosin Cole) to play one of the Doctor's current companions, Ryan Sinclair, and British people of Indian descent both for another companion, Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill) and also the most recent regeneration of the Doctor's arch-enemy, the Master (played with brilliantly insane glee by Sacha Dhawan).  The whole thing, said the man I was talking to, amounted to the writers of Doctor Who saying "Look at us, how enlightened we are, having a bunch of people of different races in prominent roles."

My response was that Doctor Who has long been on the cutting edge of representing people of all configurations -- three early examples being in 2005 the character of Captain Jack Harkness giving new meaning to the word "pansexual," two years later the Tenth Doctor pairing up with Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyewan) as companion, and a bit after that, the fantastically badass couple Vastra and Jenny, not only a lesbian romance but an interspecies one.

Nope, he said.  That was virtue signaling too.

At that point I told him I thought all he was doing was making excuses for maintaining the illusion of a straight white male hegemony despite the fact that it doesn't accurately reflect the reality of who is actually out there, and he told me to "fuck off with my leftist agenda" and the conversation ended.

The other, marginally less frustrating conversation centered around my novel released a year ago, Whistling in the Dark.  I was asked a question about Dr. Will Daigle, one of the main characters both in this book and in its sequel Fear No Colors (scheduled for release in March).  The reader said she liked the character just fine, but why did I "choose to make him gay?"  It had nothing particular to do with the plot, she said; nothing he does in the book couldn't equally well be done by a heterosexual person.  Then she asked the question that made me realize immediately the parallel with my earlier discussion with the disgruntled Doctor Who fan: "Did you feel like you had to include a gay character to be politically correct?"

Whenever I'm asked about why I wrote a character a particular way, my usual reaction is to say, "I didn't make the character that way.  The characters come to me the way they are, and I just write it down."  But I realized that the reader's question went way deeper than that, that she wasn't asking me why I gave the character of Aaron Vincent green eyes or the character of Rose Dawson long gray hair she wore in a braid.  She was asking me about inclusion and representation, not just how I visualize characters.

So I said to her, "Okay, tell me some reasons why Dr. Will shouldn't be queer."  And she sputtered around a bit and said, "Well, I didn't mean that, of course."  But having already had my blood pressure spiked by a bigot earlier that day, I decided I'd made my point and withdrew from battle.

I found the whole thing profoundly frustrating, both because of the self-righteousness of the people I was talking to (especially the first one), and because they were seemingly blind to two things.  First, representing diversity isn't just "nice;" it's reality.  As far as the choice of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "When I'm sometimes asked, 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked.  But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Second, representation is important.  How many of us have looked up to characters from fiction, especially ones we found as children, and formed our attitudes of what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, based upon their actions?  Being a white guy I can't speak to the racial and sexist aspects of this, and wouldn't presume to claim a visceral understanding of those perspectives; but as someone who is queer and who hid it (literally) for decades, I can say with some assurance what a difference it would have made to me if there had been positive LGBTQ role models in the books, television, and movies I'd been exposed to when I was a teenager.  Honestly, the only LGBTQ character I can remember from those days is the character of Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) from the brilliant sitcom Soap, but those of you who recall the show will probably remember that Jodie's homosexuality was almost always played off as a joke -- it never came up in any other context than generating a laugh.

Hardly something that would establish queer identity as normal and positive in the eyes of a bisexual fifteen-year-old boy growing up in a conservative, religious culture.

Myself, I've had just about enough of the phrases "politically correct" and "virtue signaling."  In what context is it wrong to avoid being offensive, to include people of all races, ethnic origins, religions (and lack thereof), and sexual orientations?  To create fictional characters who represent the length and breadth of diversity that actually exist in the world?  To break stereotypes like "white men have to be in charge" and "queer people should stay hidden"?

If you want to ask why when the time comes the Fourteenth Doctor should be played as (for example) a Black lesbian woman, you better be prepared to answer the question of why the character shouldn't be.

Anyhow, those are some early-morning thoughts about representation and inclusion.  I wish I'd thought to say all this to the people I was arguing with, but I tend not to be a very fast thinker (thus would make a lousy debater).  It took me a couple of days to let it all stew, and I decided instead to write about it here.

But maybe I'll send a link to this post to my two adversaries, if later on I'm feeling like kicking a hornets' nest.

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

What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

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

Ghost rings and interstellar mysteries

I love a good mystery.  There's something about the phrase "there's something going on here, but we don't know what it is" that immediately makes my ears perk up.  And for someone of that bent, there's no field like astrophysics.

The whole science of astrophysics is a relatively new invention.  Astronomy, of course, has been around for millennia; there are complex star charts made by Chinese astronomers that date back to the eleventh century, and our observations of the constellations and planets goes back to the time of the Babylonians.  

We've been looking up for a long, long time.

The problem, of course, is that looking at the stars from a distance is one thing, but finding out anything about what they actually are when we can't physically go there is quite another.  Even finding out what they're made of was a baffling question with no obvious answer.  Up until (very) recently, our best telescopes weren't sufficient to see any detail at all on even the largest stars; even through the Mount Wilson Observatory Telescope they just look like points of light with no discernible features whatsoever.  

The first step toward seeing more than that came from research by German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer in the early nineteenth century, when he invented the spectroscope -- basically a very well-made prism -- and found that in the light from the Sun there were dozens of dark lines (now called Fraunhofer lines in his honor).  Fraunhofer himself died at the young age of 39 without ever finding out what caused them -- poisoned by vapors from the heavy metals he used in his profession as a glassmaker -- but the research was taken over by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, who showed that the lines were the absorption spectra of specific elements.  Basically, these lines occurred in the light emitted by a heated, glowing gas mixture, and could be used to identify what elements were in the mixture.  In fact, it was through its unique spectral fingerprint within the solar spectrum that British astronomer Norman Lockyer discovered the element he christened helium (after Helios, the Greek sun god) -- the first element that was identified out in space before it was detected here on Earth.

What this did was allow us to study the stars at a distance.  Their spectra told us for certain what stars thousands of light years away were composed of.  Through this new science of astrophysics we found out that most of the ordinary matter in the universe (96%, in fact) is hydrogen and helium; all of the other familiar heavier elements put together make up the other 4%.  It also led directly to the discovery of the expanding universe and the Big Bang when astronomer Edwin Hubble found that the familiar spectral lines of hydrogen in distant stars were red-shifted -- stretched out in the same fashion that the sound waves of a passing train get stretched, lowering the pitch as it passes you.  And it turns out that unlike trains, galaxies have a peculiar relationship between their distance and their speed.  The farther a galaxy is away from us, the more the spectral lines get red-shifted, so the faster it's moving.

The result: the universe is expanding, meaning at one point 13.8 billion years ago, it was coalesced into a single point.  All that, from the lines produced when you heat something hot enough to emit light.

Anyhow, all of this comes up because of a new discovery that has the scientists scratching their heads.  Astrophysicists Anna Kapinska and Emil Lenc were analyzing images from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, and found ghostly rings of radio emission that have no known source.  Here's one of them, dubbed ORC-1 ("odd radio circle"):

In an amusing parallel to the famous (and still unexplained) "Wow!" signal -- a narrow-band radio signal discovered in 1977 and so named because astronomer Jerry Ehman was so taken aback when he found it he wrote "Wow!" in the margin of the printout -- these ORCs have become known as "WTFs" because that's what Kapinska wrote on the photo of the first one she found.  Since then there have been dozens of WTFs found, and they still have no convincing explanation.  There doesn't seem to be anything at the center, such as the pulsars found in the middle of nebulae that are supernova remnants; they aren't star-formers like the Orion Nebula; and they don't show the spectral distortion you see with gravitational lensing, when a distant light source has its light warped around a massive object between it and us.

In short, we still have no idea.  Two Russian scientists have actually (seriously) suggested that we might be looking down the maw of a wormhole -- a thus-far theoretical astronomical object linking two different places in space-time, made famous by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  But that explanation is pretty out there (literally and figuratively), and to be scrupulously honest, at the moment they're still just... WTFs.

So once again, we have a demonstration that however far we've come from our ancestors looking up at the skies and seeing dogs and bears and scorpions and so on, we still have a long distance to cover before we'll have a convincing explanation of whatever we see up there.  I, for one, find that thrilling.  If in the past two centuries we've gone from stars being points of light to being able to detect and analyze radio emissions from billions of light years away, where will we be in another two hundred years?  And during that time, how many mysteries will cause scientists to say "WTF"?

Boggles the mind.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

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

Razor's edge

A few weeks ago, I ordered some replacement blades for my electric razor, and last week I was complaining to a friend that the result was being inundated afterward by advertisements for replacement blades for electric razors.

You'd think the advertisers would have figured out by now that if someone buys something, it generally makes no sense to screech at them immediately afterward to buy the same thing again.  The problem (from the advertisers' perspective) is that there's no way to calculate accurately when would be immediately prior to my needing to replace the blades, which would be the time to do it.  But either way, sending advertisements to me immediately afterward seems kind of silly.

Anyhow, this all comes up because my friend emailed me yesterday with a link and the message, "Hey, maybe you won't need to replace your blades again!"  The link was to a site called "Pyramid Razor Sharpener: It Actually Works! Make Your Own In 10 Minutes!"

This is the first I've seen any pyramid-power bullshit in a while -- the last one I recall was back in 2012, when someone took a photo of one of the pyramids at Chichen Itza and found that it had a mysterious beam of light shooting upwards from it.  It turned out that the whole thing was easily explainable as a common digital camera malfunction, but that didn't prevent the woo-woos from jumping around making excited little squeaking noises about how everything they'd said about pyramids was true after all, take that, you dumb ol' skeptics, etc.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ricardo Liberato, All Gizah Pyramids, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So I suppose it's unsurprising that there is still a lot of latent interest in pyramids lying around, waiting for some unsuspecting nimrod to come along and pick it up.  This at least partly explains the "Pyramid Razor Sharpener" website, wherein we find out how wonderful pyramids are for sharpening razors by having the words "Pyramid Razor Sharpener" thrown at us (no lie) fifteen times.  Here are a few of the other things we learn:

• A pyramid is a "cone shape, but with flat sides and corners."  Which is true in approximately the same fashion as saying that a cube is "a sphere shape, but with flat sides and edges."
• Razor blades and other sharp metal objects become dull not because use wears and blunts the edges, but because of "a crystalline build-up on the blade, static electricity and dehydration."
• It's especially hard on razors to use them for shaving, because the "repeated rubbing of the blade on the face hairs induces an ionic crystal formation of the water molecules upon the skin."
• Pyramids work because "alignment with the magnetic field provides for the naturally present charged particles to be 'entrapped' by the pyramid and their resulting focus at the corners."  Whatever the fuck that means.
• It can't be a different shape than a pyramid (such as a cylinder, which is like a cube shape but with flat circles on the end) because "the particular dimensions of the pyramid cause a concentration, or focus of a negative static charge at one third of its height at an equal distance from the four corners."
• Because we're talking about static charges, here, you shouldn't build your pyramid out of something that conducts electricity.  He suggests cardboard.  (I bet the ancient Egyptians wish they'd realized this before they busted their asses hauling around all of those gigantic rocks.)
• If you put your dull razor under the pyramid, it will become sharp because of ions.  More specifically, the "positive ions of the crystals on the blade are effectively neutralized by the negatively charged ion concentration inside the pyramid.  The crystals are stripped of their bonds and water molecules are released.  This results in the dehydration (this is the same with mummification) of the crystals, which are destroyed.  The blade is now clean and feels sharp once again."  So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

The funny thing about all of this, besides the fact that in order to believe any of it your science education would have had to cease in the fourth grade, is that this guy doesn't appear to be selling anything.  He doesn't wind up by saying "send me fifty bucks, and I'll tell you how!" or "for a hundred bucks, I'll send you a build-your-own-pyramid kit!" or "for the low price of only $199.99, I'll send you my motivational lecture series 'Things I've Learned While Sitting Under a Pyramid,' with a bonus set of ultra-sharp razor blades as a FREE gift!"  He seems to be openly and honestly sharing something he feels to be a legitimate and scientifically-supported life hack, despite the fact that way back in 2005 pyramid power was tested on Mythbusters and found to be (surprise!) completely bogus.

So there's something kind of endearingly earnest about this guy, even though if he thinks that water forms "ionic crystals" he really should sign up for a chemistry class.  (He did say that he'd written his "scientific explanation" of how it works in such a way as "not to sound too sciencey," and I'd say he succeeded at least as far as that goes.)  My general conclusion, however, is that you probably should stick to ordinary strops and knife sharpeners, and/or doing what I did, namely buying new razor blades when yours get dull.  Even if you built your pyramid out of scrap cardboard, you're better off recycling it and finding a different way to "neutralize your positive ions."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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

Time marches on

Happy New Year 2021 to all of my readers, and I hope this one brings you everything you hope for.  Given the shitshow 2020 was, my wishes for the new year are more fervent and heartfelt than they usually are.  Personally, I'd like to finish the novel I'm currently halfway through writing; I'd like to get my 5 K race time down below 27 minutes; and I'd like to get back to lifting weights every day.  On a larger scale, I'd like it if between vaccination and people being smart about social contact, the COVID pandemic starts to wane; and I'd like it if Donald Trump doesn't incite his followers to start a civil war when Joe Biden is inaugurated in three weeks and Trump will finally have to face up to the fact that for the first time in his life, someone told him "no" and there's nothing he can do about it.

I'm hoping all that's not too much to ask for.

But speaking of calendars, milestones, and benchmarks, you may not have heard that apparently there's been a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2021, we should be in 12,021.

The reason for this proposal is that basing the most commonly-used calendar in the world on the beginning of Christianity gives it a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the calendar-running-backwards "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary. So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,021 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E."  (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer [Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,021 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,129, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design was the moral equivalent of assassinating the Three Wise Men while they were on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable." Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the whole thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass, and that's not even considering how breathtakingly hot Chris Hemsworth is.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 A.D., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-4th century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years, and also is what necessitated a reshuffling of the calendar back in the sixteenth century when it was noticed that the calendar dates of holy days had kind of come unglued from what day it was as calculated by the position of the Sun and stars.  But even this proved to be a major balls-up to fix, because (of course) not everyone agreed to implement the new calendar at the same time (Russia and Serbia actually held out until 1918!), so if you asked someone what day it was, it would differ depending on what country they were from.  (This was the reason for one of the most wonderful twists in Umberto Eco's incredible novel Foucault's Pendulum, only one of many fantastic aspects of that brilliant, byzantine labyrinth of a story.)

So anyhow, my point is, trying to make a world-wide major-scale change to calendar-keeping and getting everyone to agree would be entirely too much for us.  Hell, we still have people who can't wrap their brains around concepts like "Earth round, not flat," "vaccines good, diseases bad," and "evolution actually happened."  Changing the calendar, even if there was a good reason to, would be a complete non-starter.

Me, I think if we're really serious about having a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's what I'd call a Zero Year.  And with that thought, I'll end here, and pause only to reiterate my wish that your 13,800,002,021 A.B.B. is a special one.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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