Viral stupidity

My dad used to say that ignorance was only skin deep, but stupid goes all the way to the bone.

There's a lot to that.  Ignorance can be cured; after all, the etymology of the word comes from a- (not) and -gnosis (knowledge).  There are plenty of things I'm ignorant about, but I try my best to be willing to cure that ignorance by working at understanding.

Stupidity, on the other hand, is a different matter.  There's something willful about stupidity.  There's a stubborn sense of "I don't know and I don't care," leading to my dad's wise assessment that on some level stupidity is a choice.  Stupidity is not simply ignorance; it's ignorance plus the decision that ignorance is good enough.

What my dad may have not realized, though, is that there's a third circle of hell, one step down even from stupidity.  Science historian Robert Proctor of Stanford University has made this his area of study, a field he has christened agnotology -- the "study of culturally-constructed ignorance."

Proctor is interested in something that makes stupidity look positively innocent; the deliberate cultivation of stupidity by people who are actually intelligent.  This happens when special interest groups foster confusion among laypeople for their own malign purposes, and see to it that such misinformation goes viral.  For example, this is clearly what has been going on for years with respect to anthropogenic climate change.  There are plenty of people in the petroleum industry who are smart enough to read and understand scientific papers, who can evaluate data and evidence, who can follow a rational argument.  That they do so, and still claim to be unconvinced, is stupidity.

That they then lie and misrepresent the science in order to cast doubt in the minds of less well-informed people in order to push a corporate agenda is one step worse.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says.  "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

Anyone else immediately think of Fox News and OAN?  Deliberately cultivating stupidity is their stock in trade.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Betacommand at en.wikipedia, Stupidity is contagious, CC BY 3.0]

The same sort of thing accounts for the claim that COVID was deliberately created by China as a biological weapon, that the illness and death rates are being manipulated to make Donald Trump look bad, and that masks are completely ineffective.  It's behind claims that there was widespread anti-Trump voter fraud in the last election, that every single mass shooting in the United States is an anti-Second-Amendment "false flag," and just about every claim ever made by Sean Hannity.  Proctor says the phenomenon is even responsible for the spread of creationism -- although I would argue that this isn't quite the same thing.  Most of the people pushing creationism are, I think, true believers, not cynical hucksters who know perfectly well that what they're saying isn't true and are only spreading the message to bamboozle the masses.  (Although I have to admit that the "why are there still monkeys?" and "the Big Bang means that nothing exploded and made everything" arguments are beginning to seem themselves like they're one step lower than stupidity, given how many times these objections have been answered.)

"Ignorance is not just the not-yet-known, it’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you 'not to know'," Proctor says.  "We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise.  Even though knowledge is accessible, it does not mean it is accessed."

David Dunning of Cornell University, who gave his name to the Dunning-Kruger effect (the idea that people systematically overestimate their own knowledge), agrees with Proctor.  "While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise," Dunning says.  "My worry is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s becoming too easy to do so.  We should consult with others much more than we imagine.  Other people may be imperfect as well, but often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their errors."

All of which, it must be said, is fairly depressing.  That we can have more information at our fingertips than ever before in history, and still be making the same damned misjudgments, is a dismal conclusion.  It is worse still that there are people who are taking advantage of this willful ignorance to push popular opinion around for their own gain.

So my dad was right; ignorance is curable, stupidity reaches the bone.  And the deliberate cultivation of stupidity studied by Proctor and Dunning, I think, goes past the bone, all the way to the heart.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

Listen to the hands

I've been interested for a long while in the interplay between our senses -- how all of our sensory organs work together to create our perceptual world.  A simple example -- at least to describe, if not to explain completely -- is proprioception, which is our sense of the position of our bodies.  If you ask your typical biology-teacher-type to explain how we sense what direction is up and what direction is down, (s)he will probably tell you that it's the semicircular canals of the inner ear, that act a bit like a carpenter's level to sense the pull of gravity.  This is the organ that gets fouled up when you spin around and become dizzy, and it's skew signals from the semicircular canals that seem to be at fault in people who get motion sickness.

The truth, of course, is more complicated.  You achieve proprioception not just using your inner ears but at least two other ways -- the tactile sense (i.e. the pressure under the soles of your feet if you're standing, and against your butt if you're sitting), and your visual sense (you can see your surroundings and the position of your body relative to them).  Honestly, you need all three, or your sense of balance gets pretty precarious.  If you doubt this, try a simple experiment -- stand on one leg, close your eyes, and then tip your head backward, thus confounding all of your proprioceptive senses except the feeling of pressure under your foot.  If you can keep your balance more than a few seconds, you're doing well.  (It is strongly suggested that if you try this, you either have a spotter or else surround yourself with pillows.)

This isn't just true of proprioception.  Even more surprising is the McGurk Effect, a bizarre result of the interaction between sight and hearing in determining what someone is saying.  If a person with decent vision and hearing watches a friend speaking and is trying to determine what they're saying, you would think that if the eyes and ears disagree, the ears would win.

But no.  In the McGurk Effect, if you are watching someone say a syllable like "va" but you see them at the same time moving their mouth as if they were saying "ba," you hear "ba."  The eyes overrule the ears.  It's absolutely convincing even if you know what's going on.  (In the video I linked in the previous paragraph, I tried listening to the guy saying "va" and mouthing "ba" over and over, but closed my eyes on every other syllable, I heard "ba va ba va ba va."  Try it.)

A paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B gives us another curious example of this.  It has to do with "talking with your hands" -- something I do incessantly.  In fact, one of my classes once challenged me to deliver my lecture while sitting on my hands.  I lasted about two minutes before saying, in some dismay, "I can't do this."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luisfi, 071228 human hands, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Beat Gestures Influence Which Speech Sounds You Hear," by Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters of the Max Planck Institute for Biolinguistics, we read about how you perceive the stress difference in words that have the same sounds but a different stress pattern -- such as "disCOUNT" (the verb) and "DIScount" (the noun), or "preSENT" (verb) and "PREsent" (noun).  With no visual cues, the test subjects were good at discerning what was said; unsurprising, as in English (and many other languages) stress is an important clue to meaning.

But when a video was added showing the speaker using a "beat gesture" -- the kind of strong, up-and-down motion of the arms many speakers use for emphasis -- it created something the researchers call a "manual McGurk Effect."  The speaker may have said "obJECT," but if (s)he used a beat gesture on the first syllable, the listener heard "OBject."

"Listeners listen not only with their ears, but also with their eyes," said study co-author Hans Bosker, in an interview in Science Direct. "These findings are the first to show that beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear...  Our findings also have the potential to enrich human-computer interaction and improve multimodal speech recognition systems.  It seems clear that such systems should take into account more than just speech."

Communication is subtle and complex, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard to learn a second language fluently.  Words with the same literal definition (denotation) can carry an entirely different emotional or subtextual message (connotation), something it takes a long while for a new speaker to pick up.  (To illustrate this point, my Intro to Linguistics professor said, "Consider how your words would be taken if you told someone 'Have a nice day,' as opposed to 'I hope you manage to enjoy your next 24 hours.'")

But as the Bosker and Peeters paper shows, it's more than just the sounds and how they're interpreted.  Facial movements and gestures of the hands and arms all combine to give us information about not only the emotional content of what's said, but its actual denotative meaning.  This might lie behind why it's so common for people to misinterpret written sentences, as in emails and texts.  If the speaker was standing in front of us, we'd see (s)he was joking, or not; cheerful or angry; speaking literally or being sarcastic.  We need more information than the words alone to understand them properly -- adding another layer to the already complicated affair of perceiving and interpreting our world accurately.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

Vanished into the triangle

My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.

But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft.  My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle."  The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard.  The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.

The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common.  They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching.  Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death.  (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)

One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden

Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related.  Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy.  He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."

Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont.  The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him.  Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.

The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting.  Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories).   I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.

But "voices in the air," amirite?  I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.

The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them.  The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains.  I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap.  (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)

Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance.  Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus.  Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found.  Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend -- she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there.  Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.

So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy.  Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death.  See?  Makes perfect sense.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

The climate teeter-totter

Ever heard of the Grindelwald Fluctuation?

Your first guess might have to do with Harry Potter, or possibly that it's an episode of The Big Bang Theory, but it's neither.  It refers to a sudden, catastrophic dive in average global temperature that occurred in the middle of the already-cold "Little Ice Age," that had started in around 1300 C.E. and didn't really draw to a close until the middle of the nineteenth century.  The Grindelwald Fluctuation was a seventy-year period that was cold even by comparison to that baseline.  It's named after the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, which grew significantly during that time period.  The other results were grim -- crop failures, early (and unusually late) hard freezes, famine, widespread starvation.

I've been interested in the Little Ice Age for a long while, but I hadn't heard about this part of it before.  I started looking at the early parts of this Holocene cold period when I was doing my thesis research for my Master's Degree in linguistics, especially apropos of how it affected migrations (and thus linguistic intrusion) into the British Isles.  The Little Ice Age, though, had much a broader role in major historical events than simply changing where people went -- the Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s, that ravaged populations worldwide and literally wiped some towns off the map, was probably in part kicked off by falling temperatures and less food driving plague-carrying rats indoors, and into contact with humans.

I also have been fascinated by its effects on northern Europe, largely because of how it kind of stopped Viking/Scandinavian expansion in its tracks.  Danes and Norwegians had settled Iceland five centuries earlier, and in fact had even made inroads into Greenland -- then the climate shifted, sea lanes froze over, and weather turned stormy and hazardous, isolating Iceland and destroying the European settlements in coastal Greenland completely.  The thought of being stranded, of being the last colonist left alive in a desolate town knowing no one was coming to rescue me, was such a poignant image that it spurred me to write a piece of poetry called "Greenland Colony 1375"  that earned me the only award I've ever gotten for my writing -- second place in the Writers' Journal annual national poetry contest in 1999.  (If you're curious, you can read it at the link provided.)

The Grindelwald Fluctuation occurred in the midst of what was already the coldest weather humanity as a whole had experienced in recorded history, between the years 1560 and 1630.  The cause isn't certain, but may have to do with three huge volcanic eruptions in the Western Hemisphere (Colima in Mexico, Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, and Huaynaputina in Peru) blowing dust and ash into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing the temperatures to fall.

Hendrick Avercamp, A Scene on the Ice (ca. 1625) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Whatever the reason, it took a bad situation and made it far worse.  A paper in The Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society called "Weird Wether in Bristol During the Grindelwald Fluctuation," by Evan Jones and Rose Hewlett (of the University of Bristol) and Anson Mackay (of University College London), considers historical records documenting the experiences of the people who lived through it.  The paper is well worth reading in its entirety, so I won't steal their thunder by extensive quotes, but here's one of the records they cite, from the year 1607:

November the 20th 1607 began a frost which lasted till the 8th February following at which time the River of Severn and Wye were so hard frozen that people did pass on foot from side unto the other and played gambols and made fires to roast meat upon the ice.  No long trows etc could come to Bristol and when the ice broke away there came swimming down with the current of the tide great massy flakes of ice which endangered many ships that came up the [Bristol] Channel into Kingroad.  The continuance of the frost starved a great number of birds, and made corn sell very dear.

Anyone who knows the climate of coastal southwestern Britain can attest that a hard freeze lasting over three months is unheard of.  The sharp drop in temperature precipitated not only frigid temperatures but violent winter storms -- there's record after record describing catastrophic floods, windstorms, and snowstorms.

If the whole thing puts you in mind of this century's swing of temperature in the opposite direction, the authors want to make sure that point doesn't escape readers.  In the conclusion of the paper, they write:

Links between anthropogenic climate change in the modern world and different types of extreme weather events are now well established.  This could increase the costs of weather‐related hazards for about 350 million people across Europe in the coming decades, accompanied by a 50‐fold increase in weather‐related fatalities.  Such models fit with anecdotal evidence that the world is already experiencing more extreme weather. Recent examples in the United Kingdom include the record temperature highs of December 2019 and the Severn Valley floods of February 2020...

The economic, political and cultural context of the seventeenth century was... very different to that of the twenty‐first century...  Yet, despite these differences, the climate and weather of the early modern period provides a reminder of how destructive climate change and severe weather can be in both the short and long term.

The twentieth and early twenty-first century have had their own climate catastrophes, most of them due to a combination of natural and human causes -- the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985, the catastrophic droughts in Australia from 1939 to 1945 and from 1997 to 2009, the 2019 heatwave in India, and wildfires that have become a nearly annual occurrence in Indonesia.  No one honestly evaluating the evidence has any doubt of the role that anthropogenic carbon dioxide has in these events, nor its role in the general warm-up the entire world is experiencing.

I am tentatively hopeful now that there's an administration in the United States that isn't being run by a combination of crazy people and shills for the fossil fuels industry, but my fear is that even if we brake hard, we're still going to have a bad time of it.  Whether the climatic teeter-totter has truly passed a tipping point is unknown.  Plus, there's the purely pragmatic aspect of whether we could act fast enough to make a difference even in a best-case scenario.  Anyone realistic knows that the chance of every large economy in the world suddenly shucking fossil fuel dependence and going renewable is slim to none.  (It'd be nice, but still.)  

But maybe people will wake up, now that at least here in the United States we have leaders who acknowledge the problem and our role in it.  Any efforts to turn us around are better than nothing; the GOP's embrace of Sarah Palin's mantra "Burn, baby, burn" has done nothing but put us deeper into the pressure cooker.

But maybe -- just maybe -- having a president who is actually capable of reading and understanding a scientific paper like this week's Jones et al. study will give us a desperately needed step in the right direction.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

A lens into the dark sector

I don't really regret the weird, meandering path I took through the educational system -- but I have to admit to a bit of envy when it comes to people who are true experts in their field.

My inveterate dilettantism means I'm reasonably conversant in a lot of areas, but don't really have a deep understanding of anything.  Being a dabbler is neither a bad background to have as a high school teacher nor as a blogger, but it does mean that I often run into topics and think, "Wow, I really wish I could wrap my brain around this."

This happened just yesterday when I happened upon a paper in The European Physical Journal C called, "A Warped Scalar Portal to Fermionic Dark Matter."  My Bachelor of Science diploma in physics should have come with a sticky note appended to it that says, "... yeah, but he pretty much sucked as a physics student."  I struggled in virtually all of my upper-level physics classes, due to a combination of lack of focus and troubles with mathematics that I never figured my way out of.  The result is that I have a degree in physics, but reading an academic paper on the topic loses me after the first couple of paragraphs.

But so much of physics is so incredibly cool that I wish I understood it better.  The paper I took a look at yesterday (it'd be a vast exaggeration to say I "read" it) is a real coup -- if its findings bear out, it stands a good chance of solving two of the most perplexing questions of subatomic physics.

The first is akin to the planetary spacing issue I dealt with here a couple of days ago.  It asks a curious question: why do the fundamental particles have the masses they do?  Photons are massless; neutrinos damn close, but have a very tiny amount of mass; electrons are next (along with their relatives, muons), then protons and neutrons, and on up the scale to very heavy (and short-lived) particles like the "double-charmed xi baryon" which has four times the rest mass of a proton and a half-life so short it hasn't been measured yet, but is probably less than 10 ^-14 seconds (that's a decimal point, followed by thirteen zeros and a one -- better known to us non-physicists as "really, really short").

The other question is one I've looked at here before; the nature of the mysterious "dark matter" that makes up something like a quarter of the known mass of the universe, but thus far has resisted all detection by anything but its mysterious gravitational signature.  We don't know what it's made of, nor how (or if) it interacts with itself or other forms of matter.

I've commented about it that just as the odd constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum regardless of the reference frame of the observer waited around for a genius -- in this case, Einstein -- to explain it, the baffling dark matter is waiting for this century's Einstein to have the requisite insight.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Illustris Collaboration, Illustris Dark Matter and Gas, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the waiting may be over.  A trio of physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz -- Adrian Carmona, Javier Castellano Ruiz, and Matthias Neubert -- have come up with a theoretical framework that, if it bears out, explains both the fundamental particle masses and the nature of dark matter in one fell swoop, by proposing an additional fundamental particle and force that act on matter through a tightly-coiled extra spatial dimension.

A press release at Science Daily describes their research this way:

In a recent paper published in the European Physical Journal C, the researchers found a spectacular resolution to this dilemma.  They discovered that their proposed particle would necessarily mediate a new force between the known elementary particles (our visible universe) and the mysterious dark matter (the dark sector).  Even the abundance of dark matter in the cosmos, as observed in astrophysical experiments, can be explained by their theory.  This offers exciting new ways to search for the constituents of the dark matter -- literally via a detour through the extra dimension -- and obtain clues about the physics at a very early stage in the history of our universe, when the dark matter was produced.

"After years of searching for possible confirmations of our theoretical predictions, we are now confident that the mechanism we have discovered would make the dark matter accessible to forthcoming experiments, because the properties of the new interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter -- which is mediated by our proposed particle -- can be calculated accurately within our theory," said study co-author Matthias Neubert.  "In the end -- so our hope -- the new particle may be discovered first through its interactions with the dark sector."

This, gentle readers, is what is known as "Nobel Prize material."

If, of course, it is confirmed by further research and investigation.  The thing that makes me hopeful is that the theories with the greatest likelihood of success are the ones that explain several problems at once; consider, for example, how the quantum mechanical model simultaneously accounted for the energy levels in hydrogen atoms, the bizarre double-slit experiment, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the collapse of the wave function (most famous for being responsible for the Schrödinger's Cat phenomenon).  A really powerful model has enormous breadth, depth, and explanatory power, and this one -- at least from a preliminary look -- seems to have all three.

But, as I pointed out at the beginning, that's from the point of view of a dilettante.  I'm hardly qualified to assess whether the Carmona et al. paper will withstand scrutiny from the experts or will end up as another in the very long list of ideas that didn't pan out.  So keep your eyes on the news.

It might be that we are about to turn the lights on in the dark sector for the first time ever.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

The necessity of safety

I suppose it's a good sign when what I write grabs me by the emotions and swings me around, and it bodes well for the story having the same effect on my readers.  There are a few scenes that make me choke up every time I read them -- one of which boils down to a single line of dialogue.

In the story, one of the main characters wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his partner, who has gone through some terrible emotional trauma, is crying silently, obviously trying not to wake him up.  He pulls his lover into a hug and whispers, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you.  You're safe in my arms."

What got me thinking about this scene is a conversation I had with some online writer friends, one of whom asked the provocative and fascinating question, "How could you tell someone 'I love you' without using those words?"  My immediate response was "You are safe."  Those words resonate with me for a great many reasons, not least because I virtually never felt safe as a child or young adult.  Everything around me always seemed precarious -- I spent the first half of my life feeling like I was a tightrope walker, always a single misstep from utter ruin, and because of that needed to be constantly vigilant and wary.

It was exhausting.

The pragmatists in the audience might point out that in reality none of us are safe, and technically they'd be right.  Bad stuff can happen any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and as the line from Fight Club says, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."  But still, that feeling of safety and security, that there's someone looking out for you and that your friends have your back, is pretty critical for our emotional health.

These days, a sense of safety is hard to find.  We're still in the midst of a pandemic, trying to guard ourselves against an invisible enemy that can jump from one person to another with frightening speed.  Here in the United States almost a half a million people have died of COVID, and countless others have become desperately ill with complications lasting for months.  Everywhere people are losing their jobs, businesses closing down, schools going entirely virtual.  Health care workers are facing the awful double-whammy of dealing with incredible overwork and the fact that despite their best efforts, some of their patients aren't going to survive.  Add to all that the fact that in many parts of the world we've seen unprecedented social unrest, with deep-seated hatred and prejudice bubbling up nearly everywhere -- and its victims are often people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Security is in very short supply lately.

Three separate studies conducted late last year track the outcome.  The United States Center for Disease Control, Boston University, and Johns Hopkins University independently found that the incidence of anxiety, severe depression, and serious psychological distress has tripled since the start of the pandemic.  Unsurprisingly, the effect was larger in vulnerable populations -- low-income individuals, minorities, people with prior mental health issues, people who have lost friends or family members to COVID.  Most alarming, young adults across the board showed skyrocketing incidence of emotional distress -- the CDC study found that almost two-thirds of the people from eighteen to twenty-four who participated in the study reported experiencing severe depression since the outbreak started, a quarter reported greater use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the stress, and a quarter said they'd seriously considered suicide in the last thirty days.

This is horrifying and alarming.  We already had a built-in mental health crisis ongoing because of the stigma of mental illness and our society's unwillingness to radically revamp the way it's monitored, treated, and covered by insurance.  COVID has taken a dreadful situation and made it much, much worse, and I fear the repercussions will far outlast the pandemic itself.

The worst part is that the nature of the pandemic has taken away the one thing that can make emotional distress bearable; comfort from our friends and loved ones.  I was talking with some friends (online, of course) a few days ago about what we miss most from the pre-pandemic days, and one that came up over and over was "long hugs from friends."  I'm terribly shy by nature, but that one was spot-on.  Even we introverts are struggling with the isolation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smellyavocado, Bromances, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to be going without long hugs from friends for quite some time, and that means we need to be especially assiduous about looking out for each other.  Check in with the people you care about, especially the ones who don't seem to need it, who are used to being the strong, secure, competent ones who put everyone else's needs in front their own.  Okay, we can't have the level of physical and emotional real-time contact we had before, but we can do things to compensate -- Zoom or Skype visits, phone calls, even something simple like a text message saying, "Hi, I was thinking about you.  How are you doing?"

In times like these we have to lean on our friends -- and let our friends lean on us.  Be honest about what you're feeling, and reassure yourself that right now we're pretty much all feeling that way.  If you're having a hard time coping, let the people you love know rather than suffering in silence.  If you are really at the end of your tether, get on the phone -- the suicide prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  There's help to be had if you are willing to reach out for it.

We'll get through this, but if we're to come through as unscathed as possible, it will be because we've banded together and helped each other through.  Don't be afraid to show others you're hurting; it's how you'll get past this horrible low point.

And don't be afraid to tell your friends and loved ones, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you."  It may be a while before we can back it up with a long hug, but for now, it's the best we can do.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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

No wands for you!

In today's contribution from the "So Weird I Couldn't Possibly Make It Up" department, the owner of a magical tools store in England is refusing to sell wands to Harry Potter fans because he says the wands he sells are real magic wands.  Like, that can cast spells and everything.

Richard Carter, owner of Mystical Moments in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, is miffed that he is being approached by customers who want one of his hand-made wooden wands not because they plan on using it for witchcraft, but because they fancy themselves candidates for Gryffindor. 

"J.K. Rowling has obviously done her research but Harry Potter is for children," Carter told a reporter for The Telegraph.  "It has done nothing for business."

Well, obviously not, if you refuse to sell them your wands.  But it's kind of hard to imagine turning away customers throwing cash in your general direction as being a sound business strategy.

"You wouldn't believe how many real witches and wizards there are knocking about," Carter went on.  "You would be amazed.  They know they can come here in reveal themselves without people thinking they're mental...  I don't have customers who have been Harry Potterfied.  If I had someone come in wanting a wand just because they liked Harry Potter I would not sell them one, not matter how much money they were offering."

Which brings up how Carter could tell the Harry Potterfied people from the Potterless variety, since I'm guessing that once the word got out that he wasn't serving the Potterfied folks they wouldn't just walk in and announce what House they got sorted into.  But Carter is way ahead of any people who are thinking of sneaking:

He can tell the Potterfied customers by their aura.

Apparently he can also recognize the ones who intend to use the wand for evil purposes.  No Harry Potter fans or dark witches and wizards, that's Carter's motto.

So that goes double for you, Bellatrix Lestrange.

He seems like he's got a knack for making some pretty cool items, however.  He picks different woods for different uses -- oak for strength, chestnut for love, elm for balance, mahogany for spiritual growth.  Oh, and yew for immortality, because that's always a possibility, even considering that the Sorcerer's Stone is kind of out of the question.

He makes the wands on a lathe, but claims he has no background in wand-making at all.  "I have no training in woodwork.  I use spiritual guidance and don't know how any of the wands will turn out.  All you need for them to work is faith."

It bears mention that my son works on a lathe as part of his job every day -- a glass lathe, not a woodworking one, but same principle.  And he says, "Working on a lathe and expecting the spirits to tell you what to do sounds like a good way to lose a hand."

Carter's been lucky so far, apparently, because as of the time of this post he has both limbs attached and is still doing his thing.  And after making the wands, he anoints them with oil, and then puts them into a locked cabinet until the right witch or wizard comes along.

Predictably, local Hogwarts fans are a bit ticked off.  Slaithwaite Harry Potter enthusiast Mariella May said that Carter's refusal to sell wands to J. K. Rowling fans is like "McDonald's refusing to sell Happy Meals to sad people."  Which is an apt, and strangely hilarious, comparison.

Not everyone has had such a shoulder shrug of a reaction, though.  Fantasy author G. P. Taylor suggested that the shunned fans should take Carter to court.  Which opens up the possibility of Carter defending himself to a judge against a charge of discrimination based on how customers' auras tell him what variety of fiction they believe in.

See what I mean about this being way weirder than anything I could have made up?

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I kind of admire Carter for his purity of purpose.  Isn't that supposed to be one of the guiding principles of good magic, or something?  Everything in balance, don't try to take advantage for your own gain.  So however weird it sounds to a doubter like myself, I hope that the publicity he's getting helps his sales -- only to bonafide witches and wizards, of course.

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

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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