The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to scare myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, four and a half decades later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this. In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes.  He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

  

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

Skipping the comments

A few days ago I was casting about for topics for Skeptophilia, and was perusing that amazing clearinghouse for everything from the profound to the ridiculous, Reddit.

I ran into a link to a Science Daily article about some delightful research that came out of a collaboration between physicists at four different universities in China, which centered on the physics of skipping rocks.  I absolutely love skipping rocks, and whenever I'm by a lake I will spend inordinate amounts of time finding, and then slinging, the most perfectly flat stones I can find, trying to beat my record (which stands at thirteen skips).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Killy Ridols, Stone skimming -Patagonia-9Mar2010, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The math in the original research is way way beyond my ability to understand, despite my bachelor's degree in physics (but to be fair, I kind of sucked as a physics student).  The reader is put on notice that it's going to be rough going immediately, because the first thing the authors do is to define no fewer than 49 different variables they considered in modeling the behavior of a skipping stone.

So I went back to the summary in Science Daily, and found a nicely dumbed-down explanation of what they'd done.  They used an aluminum disk launched by an air compressor in place of the typical round stone and person's arm, with a motorized feature that started the disk spinning at a chosen rate before launch.  Attached to the disk was a set of sensors that monitored the disk while in flight, because -- as you know if you're a rock-skipper -- it can all happen so fast that it's hard to keep track of all-important data like how much the rock's path curves (and which direction), the angle your rock hits the water, and the number of skips you get.

The upshot of it was that the rate of spin is critical, because spinning induces the gyroscopic effect and stabilizes the pitch of the rock as it flies.  Less intuitively obvious, to me at least, is that the vertical acceleration of the rock has to be higher than a certain threshold (which turns out to be about four times the acceleration due to gravity) in order for the stone to bounce.

So I thought all this was pretty cool -- taking a familiar phenomenon and explaining how complex it really is using mathematical modeling.

Then I did what you should never, ever, ever do.

I looked at the comments section.

I swear, I should get fitted out with something like those "Invisible Fence" dog collars, only instead of zapping me when I cross a line on our property, it would zap me when I try to look at the comments section.  Any comments section.  Because I started sputtering with rage almost immediately, when I saw comments like these -- which, for the record, are reproduced here verbatim, because I don't want to write sic over and over:

• This is what scientists do?  Spend their time fucking around throwing rocks in the water.  How about doing stuff that might actually help people.
• I cant believe our tax dollars is going to pay for bullshit "research" like this.
• Whats next, the physics of yoyos?
• Yeah I believe it.  Liberal loonies love this kind of stuff.  Waste of time.
• SMH you can't make this shit up
• Whose approving these grant appliactions?  FFS no wonder nooone trusts scientists to tell the truth when there playing kids games instead of working.

More sensitive readers may want to plug their ears.

WILL ALL OF YOU ANTI-SCIENTIFIC, ILLITERATE YAHOOS KNUCKLE-DRAG YOUR WAY BACK TO YOUR CAVES, AND LEAVE THE INTELLECTUAL COMMENTARY TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE AN ACTUAL INTELLECT?

I mean, really.

First of all, zero American tax dollars were spent on this study, because the entire thing was done in China.  I know we Americans have a regrettable tendency to think "America" = "the entire world," but all you have to do is look at the author affiliation list, or even the line in the Science Daily summary that says the research was done by "scientists from several universities in China."  And while the research itself studied stone-skipping, the model has applications to a lot of important stuff, which you'd have figured out if you bothered to look at the very first line of the original paper: "Although skipping stones seems like a time-honored pastime, an in-depth study of this game is of vital importance for the understanding of the water landing of space flight re-entry vehicles and aircraft, hull slamming, antitorpedo and antisubmarine water entry, etc."

And even if the researchers hadn't pointed out in the introduction to the paper exactly what the potential applications are, I absolutely abhor the attitude that pure research -- investigating a scientific question without regard to immediate utility -- is useless.  It's worth pointing out how many times what seemed like "nothing more than pure research" generated something that turned out to be incredibly important.  Here are a few examples that come to mind:

1. Two researchers, George Beadle and Edward Tatum, were researching nutrition in a mold called Neurospora, and were particularly interested in why some strains of Neurospora starved to death even when given adequate amounts of food.  Their research generated the concept of "one gene-one protein" -- the basis of our understanding of how genes control traits.
2. Charles Richet was studying how the toxin of a rare species of jellyfish affects the body.  His research led to the discovery of how anaphylactic shock works -- and the development of the epi pen, saving countless lives from death because of bee sting allergies, nut allergies, and so on.
3. Wilhelm Röntgen was researching the newly-invented cathode-ray tube, which at that point had no practical applications whatsoever.  That is, he was playing around.  He noticed that when he activated the tube, even though it was completely covered, some fluorescent papers at the other end of the room began to glow in the dark. He had just discovered x-rays.
4. Alexander Fleming was something of a ne'er-do-well in the scientific world. He did a lot of raising of bacteria on plates, and his favorite hobby was to take brightly-colored species of bacteria and paint them on agar media to make pictures.  One day, a mold spore blew in and landed on one of his picture-cultures and spoiled it.  His further messing-about with how the mold spoiled the culture led to the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin.
5. Roy Plunkett was working with gases that could be used to quickly cool vessels in scientific experiments, and after one failure he found that the vessel was left coated with a slick substance.  He eventually named it "Teflon."

See why I get a little impatient?

But I think what gets me most about this whole thing, and comments sections in general, is how people who are obviously ignorant on a subject still feel like their opinions have relevance.  I have a lot of faults, but at least I try not to pontificate on topics I know nothing about.

It once again reminds me of the wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov: "Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

So, that's my maddening excursion of the day.  To the scientists who did the skipping-stone study, I'll say, "Bravo."  To the people who responded to it with sneers and snarls, I'll say, "Until you learn some science, shut the fuck up."  And to the Invisible Fence people, I'll reiterate my request for a Comments-Section Collar.  I bet you could make some serious cash selling those.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

Couplespeak

Like a lot of couples, my wife and I have a great many inside jokes and turns of phrase that amuse us no end but must puzzle the hell out of everyone else.

Part of the reason, of course, is that we've been together for over twenty years, and during that time shared experience has given us a rich reservoir to draw from.  Sometimes, it's a combination of two or more memories that gives words their relevance, and those are even harder to explain should anyone ask.  For example, I ended a series of texts with my wife a couple of weeks ago, "Thank you, Bloopie," and she started laughing so hard she was afraid her coworkers would come in and demand to know what was so funny, which would have required her to explain that it was a combination of bits from Seinfeld and an obscure British spoof of middle school educational videos called Look Around You, and there was no way the explanation would have elicited anything more than puzzled head tilts and questions about why that was even funny.

Another example is why we always laugh when we hear Bill Withers's song "Ain't No Sunshine," the lyrics of which are anything but funny.  This one is at least explainable; when we were in Spain about fifteen years ago we rented a room for the night in a B&B, and the guy in the next room spent what seemed like hours practicing the trombone.  Amongst his Greatest Hits was -- I kid you not -- "Ain't No Sunshine."

He seemed to particularly enjoy the "WOMP WOMP WOMP" part at the end of each line.

The whole subject comes up because of a paper a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Communication, which gave the results of a longitudinal study of communication between couples as they moved deeper -- and subsequently, sometimes out of -- relationships.  Instead of verbal communication, which would have required the participants to recall accurately what they'd said, the researchers used text messages, and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that as relationships progress, the language of the texts becomes more and more similar.

The research, done by Miriam Brinberg (Pennsylvania State University) and Nilam Ram (Stanford University), looked at three parts of electronic communication: syntactic alignment (sentence structure, use of the different parts of speech, use of punctuation), semantic alignment (word meaning, including similarity of word choice where there's more than one way of expressing the same concept), and overall alignment (including features like the use of shortcuts like "omwh" for "on my way home").  They found that at the beginning of a romantic relationship, all three of them converge fairly quickly, and the process of becoming more similar continues -- albeit at a slower pace -- thereafter.

One interesting potential direction for further research is whether both partners shifted their speech, or if one of them moved more than the other.  "There's some research in this area that looks at power dynamics," study co-author Brinberg said, in an interview with The Academic Times.  "For example, in a job interview, the interviewee might make their language more similar to the interviewer to indicate they are more similar to them, or employees may alter their language to match that of their supervisor.  As with those examples, one might wonder if, in romantic relationship formation, there is one person who is changing their language to match the other."

In my own case, it doesn't seem like one of us altered our language use further than the other; more that we both gradually picked up phrases that then had a shared meaning.  The one exception I can think of is that there's been an unequal trade in words from our respective ethnic backgrounds.  My wife, who is Jewish, has a great many words and phrases from Yiddish that are incredibly expressive, explaining why I now use words like bupkis and verklempt and schvitz and schmutz.  Carol has picked up fewer French words from me, although I know that she's used words like macacries (Cajun French for "knick-knacks") even though there's a perfectly good Yiddish word for the same concept (tchotckies).  Other than that, I think most of the French words she's learned from me have to do with cooking, which I suppose makes sense.

But it's a fascinating phenomenon.  Language is much more than flat denotative meaning; there are wide shades and gradations of connotation that can be extremely subtle, one reason why it's so hard to learn a second (or third or fourth) language fluently.  I still remember my Intro to Linguistics professor explaining the difference between denotation and connotation using the example of "Have a nice day" versus "I hope you manage to enjoy your next twenty-four hours."

If there are cultural nuances that would be difficult to explain to a non-native speaker, consider that within those there are additional personal nuances that might be incomprehensible outside of the small number of people in the in-group who "get it," making the interpretation of informal speech a lot more complex than you might have guessed.

So that's our excursion into the subtleties of linguistics for today.  Now, I gotta go get ready for work, and I need to take a shower and wash off the schvitz and schmutz.  Can't show up looking all verklempt.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

Misery loves creativity

I have bad news for those of you who enjoy being creative: a new study has suggested that a key ingredient in crafting timeless masterpieces is unhappiness.

As a fiction writer, I've been fascinated for years with the question of where creativity comes from.  While some of the ideas that have inspired my writing come from readily identifiable sources, a lot of my stories had their genesis in the mysterious "it just popped into my head" phenomenon.  I've talked to a lot of writers about this, and many of them have had the experience of feeling as if their inspiration came, literally, from outside of their own minds.

And like many writers (and artists and musicians) I have had serious dry spells, when the inspiration simply didn't want to come.  I keep writing through those -- I've found that the best way to push through writer's block is to throw some discipline at it -- but I won't say that what I produce during those times has much of the spark I look for when I critique my own work.  The best writing comes during times when the ideas leap into my mind unannounced, from heaven-only-knows-where.

But take a look at this study, which indicates that what I may be missing in my life is a good dose of plain, old-fashioned misery.

Entitled "How Are You, My Dearest Mozart?  Well-being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers Based on their Letters," this paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics by economist and statistician Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark analyzes the letters and diaries of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt, and attempts to correlate the use of words indicating level of well-being with their productivity.

Not only their productivity in quantity, but in quality.  He looked at the timing of composition of works that "made a significant contribution to the classical canon," not just how many compositions they'd been able to churn out per month.  And the highest productivity, both in quality and quantity, came during the times these composers were most likely to use words like "sadness," "hurt," "grief," and "nervous."

"An increase in negative emotions by about 36.7 percent inspires one additional important composition the following year," Borowiecki writes.  "Since depression is strongly related to sadness, and is sometimes even defined as a state of chronic sadness, this result comes very close to previous claims made by psychologists that depression leads to increased creativity."

Factors that tended to decrease creative output were being in a happy marriage and finding a permanent position with its attendant job security.

Don't tell him to cheer up -- maybe he's working on a masterpiece.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

As an aside, I recall hearing a while back on my favorite classical music radio station that there was an inquiry done into which of the famous composers had the most happy, well-balanced lives.  Some were clearly pretty awful -- Robert Schumann, who ended his life in an insane asylum, comes to mind -- but it was interesting that the winner of the happiest life contest was Franz Josef Haydn.

He of the 104 full-length symphonies. 

So Borowiecki's result is certainly not the whole story.  On the other hand, it's made me wonder if the reason I've had the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly recently every time I sit down to get some writing done on my current work-in-progress is because I'm enjoying the beautiful spring weather too much.  Should I tell my wife that I'm sick of her being nice to me and bringing me glasses of wine and giving me shoulder rubs, that it'd be better for my muse if she gave me the silent treatment, or just smacked me in the head every so often?  Maybe even the companionship of my ever-cheerful dog is dampening my creativity.  Maybe I should get a pet that is perfectly content viewing me with sneering disdain, or even ignoring my existence completely.

Like a cat, or something.

As interesting as this study is, I'm not sure that's the approach, frankly.  All of us creative types see ebbs and flows of our output, and the fact that I've had some unproductive moments in the last few months shouldn't concern me.  Nor, I think, should it make me seek out ways to be more miserable.  It might be that the dark side of human existence can generate beautiful works of art, writing, or music -- listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata for a wonderful example of heart-wringing pathos -- but without joy as an inspiration, we'd never have had the "Bergamasca" from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, my vote for one of the most purely exuberant moments in all of classical music.

So it's a mixed bag, as you might expect.  The most creative minds weave the entirety of human experience into their works, and draw on all aspects of emotion to color what they create.  We may be no closer to understanding where creativity itself comes from, but if we can take our pain and sometimes distill it into something beautiful, at least it gives us something to carry us forward when we're at our lowest points.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

I felt the earth move under my feet

Some of you probably recall the highly scientific 1990 nature documentary Tremors, wherein Kevin Bacon has to battle gigantic worms that can tunnel through rock, and which have evolved such sophisticated sensory organs that they can feel your footsteps and follow you until an opportune moment to pop up and eat you for lunch, yet are still stupid enough to die from running into the wall of an aqueduct or launching themselves out of a cliff face in the fashion of Wile E. Coyote being shot from the barrel of an Acme E-Z Cannon.

The reason this comes up is because of a piece of research in the journal Geology, which I can confidently assert would have reminded no one else in the entire world of Tremors, but I'm not responsible for how my brain works, and I figure if on some level you didn't enjoy free association, you wouldn't be here.  Anyhow, the paper is titled "Eruption Risks from Covert Silicic Magma Bodies," which as you can tell from the title has zero to do with giant carnivorous worms, but does have to do with the fact that there seem to be dangerous and undetected pockets of magma underground that can be located by their seismic traces.

(See the connection?  See?  The tagline for Tremors is "They say there's nothing new under the sun, but under the ground...".  I rest my case.)

What spurred the four geologists who wrote the paper -- Shane M. Rooyakkers, John Stix, and Kim Berlo (of McGill University), Maurizio Petrelli (of Università degli Studi di Perugia), and Freysteinn Sigmundsson (of the University of Iceland - Reykjavík) -- were three instances of what they euphemistically call "Unintentional encounters with silicic magma at ~2-2.5 km. in depth," which is science-speak for some people at a drill site looking into the hole and then yelling, "FUCKING HELL WE JUST HIT A MAGMA CHAMBER."  The three sites were on Krafla (in Iceland), Menengai (in Kenya), and Kilauea (in Hawaii), and in each case was a shock because the areas had been studied extensively and the magma chambers they hit hadn't previously been detected.

Magma chambers are usually found by their seismic properties; the sound waves from explosions, and the pressure waves from earthquakes, travel at a different speed in solids than they do in liquids, so by comparing how long it took for those waves to arrive at detectors in different locations, you can infer how much of the intervening material is liquid and how much is solid.  (That's a vast oversimplification, but the gist of it, anyhow.)  Given how good this technique is, geologists thought they had all of the near-surface magma chambers pinpointed, so it was a significant shock to find out that there were some out there that we didn't know about.

Another piece of this that raised red flags for me was that word "silicic" in the title.  Magma usually comes in two flavors, mafic and felsic (or silicic).  Mafic magma is high in magnesium and iron, hardens into dark-colored rocks like basalt, and when it's molten it's highly fluid, like the rivers of lava you probably think of when you picture a volcano.  Felsic magma is high in silica and feldspar, hardens into light-colored rocks like granite and rhyolite, and is very viscous and thick when it's molten -- so volcanoes powered by a felsic magma chamber often build up so much pressure beneath that blob of sticky glop that when they erupt, it's explosive.  (Examples are Vesuvius, Mount Saint Helens, and La Soufrière -- currently erupting on the island of Saint Vincent.)

So an undetected near-surface magma chamber filled with felsic/silicic magma is not good news.  People are walking around without realizing it on top of what amounts to a giant superheated bomb.

The 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

"In traditional approaches to volcano monitoring, a lot of emphasis is placed on knowing where magma is and which magma bodies are active," said study lead author Shane Rooyakkers, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Krafla is one of the most intensely-monitored and instrumented volcanoes in the world.  They've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it in terms of geophysics.  And yet we still didn't know there was this rhyolitic magma body sitting at just two kilometers' depth that's capable of producing a hazardous eruption...  So the concern in this case would be that you have a shallow rhyolitic magma that you don't know about, so it hasn't been considered in hazards planning.  If it's hit by new magma moving up, you might have a much more explosive eruption than you were anticipating."

Which is a lot worse than a bunch of giant carnivorous earthworms.

Anyhow, that's our unsettling piece of scientific research for today.  The good news is that it's not like these magma chambers are scattered about everywhere; they still seem to occur only near active volcanoes.  So it's not like an eruption is likely to take place in the middle of Newark, or anything, which is kind of a shame, because an erupting volcano in Newark would probably be considered urban renewal.  But you never know.  Even Kevin Bacon got taken off guard by what's underground.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

Overlooking simplicity

In the Tao Te Ching, Chinese philosopher (and founder of Taoism) Lao Tse writes, "To attain knowledge, add things every day; to attain wisdom, remove things every day."

There are a couple of interesting pieces to this concept.  First, that knowledge does not necessarily confer wisdom.  The implication is that knowledge (by itself) is less desirable than understanding, and understanding less desirable than wisdom.  If so, this definitely has some bearing on how science is taught in public schools -- often as a list of vocabulary words and definitions that do little more than scratch the surface of what's out there to learn.

Second, that doing a mental decluttering is better than trying to figure things out by jamming more stuff in.  Here, I'm reminded of what happens in my fiction writing when I'm at an impasse.  Slamming my fists against the obstacle almost never works; what frequently does is doing something else entirely, especially something stress-clearing like going for a run or playing with my dogs.  As counterintuitive as it might be, it seems like ceasing to think about the problem at all frees my brain up to figure out a solution.

How exactly that works on a neurophysiological level, I have no idea.

Lao Tse by Nicholas Roerich (1943) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As more support for Lao Tse's observation, consider the paper in Nature this week called, "People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes," by Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales, and Leidy Klotz of the University of Virginia, which looked at another facet of this same issue -- that when approaching a solution to a complex problem, people often fail to consider solutions that require removing pieces of it or ceasing to do certain actions.  The authors write:

Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes.  We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components.  People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives.  Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.  Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load.  Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.

We're so well-trained by years and years of education that the way to find a solution to a problem is to throw more stuff at it that we don't even think of looking at solutions that require simplification.

"Additive ideas come to mind quickly and easily, but subtractive ideas require more cognitive effort," study co-author Benjamin Converse said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Because people are often moving fast and working with the first ideas that come to mind, they end up accepting additive solutions without considering subtraction at all."

Now, there's a caveat here; not all problems have simple solutions.  When I was a teacher, I used to call this the "why don't we just...?" approach.  I remember students saying, "Why don't we just use chemical reactions that absorb carbon dioxide to fix climate change?" (it's completely unfeasible to do this on a large enough scale to help), and "why don't we just pass laws protecting wilderness areas and make mass deforestation illegal?" (not only does this run afoul of private ownership and eminent domain laws, it causes problems with resource acquisition, and ignores the fact that most of the threatened wilderness in the world is outside of the United States and therefore out of our jurisdiction -- not to mention the elephant in the room of global, societally locked-in wealth inequity as the root problem).  

Complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

But the basic idea here is that the answer doesn't always lie in fixing things by doing more stuff, and the human mind doesn't tend to see those kinds of solutions as easily as ones that require further or more intense action.

So give it a try.  When you're facing a difficult problem, give a shot to a Marie-Kondo-esque simplification approach.  What could you remove (or stop doing) that might help solve the problem?  Maybe a mental decluttering would help in a lot of realms other than overcoming writers' block.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to the level of performance art.

A long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday, in the form of an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is apparently getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I spent 32 years working with teenagers, I wish I'd known that "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd hyperactive puppies.  Since I found that yelling "BACK OFF" was seldom effective, it would have been nice if all I'd had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would have been repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

Okay. So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link. But no. In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the grand prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic quantum vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.

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

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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