Finding the quiet

I've recognized for some time that I'm very sound-sensitive.  When I'm around loud, chaotic noise for too long, I get a little frantic, and if I can't get away it can bring on a full-blown anxiety attack.  What I've found interesting is how suddenly the switch can flip between "I'm okay" and "I've got to get out of here now."  In the pre-pandemic days, my wife and a few of our friends used to go to a local bar after Cornell hockey games, and like just about every bar in the world, it was noisy and crowded.  For a while, I'd be fine.  Okay, it wasn't my preferred environment even so, but I was coping.  Then, with a startling suddenness, I'd find I couldn't even hear what my friends were saying -- it was all lost in a gigantic roar of what sounded to me like white noise.

At that point, it was get out or risk a panic attack.

I've often wondered what the difference is between my brain and the brains of people who actually enjoy noisy chaos.  Along the same lines, you might be questioning how I managed to survive for 32 years as a high school teacher, because public schools are kind of inherently loud places.

As far as the latter goes, I coped by taking breaks.  I closed my classroom door during my planning period, and student contact during that time was by prior arrangement only.  I avoided the worst parts of it -- I very early on decided that rules or no rules, I wasn't attending pep assemblies or chaperoning school dances.  Most importantly, I made sure to take rests after the school day was over -- not naps, per se, but silence breaks.  Fortunately, my wife and I live in a big old house out in the country, so after school I usually had a good couple of hours after work to relax and play with my dog and, most importantly, enjoy the comparative quiet.

Turns out I'm not alone.  There are lots of people who have what neuroscientists call SPS (sensory processing sensitivity).  This phenomenon, and how people like me have coped with the extra stress of the pandemic and everything that's come with it, was the subject of a paper in the journal Neuropsychobiology by a team led by Bianca Acevedo of the University of California - Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  In "Sensory Processing Sensitivity Predicts Individual Differences in Resting-State Functional Connectivity Associated with Depth of Processing," Acevedo and her team took test subjects who had been evaluated for their proneness to SPS, and gave them an emotionally evocative task -- looking at faces of people experiencing various strong emotions (positive and negative), and either going from one photograph to the next without a break or doing the equivalent of a mental palate-cleansing in between (counting backwards from a large number by sevens).

They found some fascinating patterns.  People who scored high on the SPS scale showed greater activity during breaks between the parts of the brain called the hippocampus and the precuneus, which are known to be involved in episodic memory consolidation.  From the fMRI studies, highly sensitive people showed a progressive weakening of signals between the periaqueductal gray matter and the amygdala, two parts of the brain controlling our perceptions of anxiety and distress, especially when they weren't given breaks.  Both trends were not as pronounced in people who scored lower on the SPS scale.

"Behaviorally, we observe it as being more careful and cautious when approaching new things," Acevedo said in a press release.  "In a new situation, those with the trait are more likely to hang back and see what happens.  Another broad way of thinking about it, that biologists have been using to understand people’s individual differences in responses to different things, is that the person with high sensitivity will be more responsive, both for better and for worse.  So while people with high sensitivity might get more rattled by uncomfortable situations, they might also experience higher levels of creativity, deeper bonds with others and a heightened appreciation of beauty.  What we found was a pattern that suggested that during this rest, after doing something that was emotionally evocative, their brain showed activity that suggested depth of processing, and this depth of processing is a cardinal feature of high sensitivity."

So SPS isn't all bad.  Besides my weird reaction to loud environments, it also explains why I get overwhelmed when I spend too much time doomscrolling through social media, something that occupied way too much of my time during the Former Guy's administration.  I found that if I didn't go on periodic news fasts, it would effectively short-circuit my ability to concentrate.  So emotional noise can be as debilitating to people with SPS as actual noise is.

"Take a break," Acevedo said.  "For all of us, but especially for the highly sensitive, taking a few minutes’ break and not necessarily doing anything but relaxing can be beneficial.  We’ve seen it at the behavioral level and the level of the brain."

Good advice.  These days we all need to be more cognizant of what helps us to cope with the ramped-up emotional stress we've been exposed to.  For me, listening to a quiet piece of music, walking around outside, or going for a run has the effect of discharging a lot of the built-up anxiety.  It's all a matter of finding what kind of pressure valve works for you.  But as the Acevedo et al. study shows, if the result is a better ability to manage the chaotic world we live in, it's well worth the search.

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

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

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

Mushrooms on Mars

So far loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me four different links to the same underlying story, along with a message along the lines of "Whaddya think of this?"  The links all take various angles on a paper by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph and Xinli Wei in Advances in Microbiology claiming that photos taken by the Mars rover Curiosity show the presence of live fungi.

Without further ado, here are the photos, which are real enough:

[Photos are in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

When I saw the top photo, my immediate thought was that if you think the only way to explain wiping away stuff and having it reappear is if the stuff is a living organism, you need to come take a look at how long furniture in my house remains clean after being dusted.  I'll admit that I'm kind of housework-impaired, and chances are one day I'll go missing and when people come to investigate they'll find me trapped inside an enormous dust bunny, but still, the fact remains that "dirt blows around" seems to be a universal tendency.  Second, the lower photo looks like a fungus or at least fungus spores, but saying "it looks like X, so it is X" is not how science is done.

The claim has generated a lot of hype and also a lot of backlash from actual science types, such as this scathing piece by Tristan Greene over at TheNextWeb, wherein Joseph and Wei basically get their asses handed to them for leaping to an entirely unwarranted conclusion based on a handful of photographs that can be explained by any number of other, more likely hypotheses.  There are lots of microscopic round things besides fungal spores, so without any sort of biochemical analysis there's no way these can conclusively be labeled as alive, much less as terrestrial-type fungi.

Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, however, is not a man to take this sort of criticism lying down.  Saying Joseph is "combative" is a little like saying Stalin had "anger management issues."  He has sued NASA for ignoring his previous claims about life on Mars, sued Springer (the academic publishing company that publishes the journals Nature and Scientific American) for retracting one of his papers, and on his website defiantly proclaims that he has "published major scientific studies in the fields of neuroscience, development, embryology, evolution, quantum physics, consciousness, genetics, and astrobiology."

Funny, if he's an expert in basically everything, how just about every reference to him in actual scientific journals describe him as a "crank," a "kook," and "a self-aggrandizing spotlight seeker."

Then there's the issue of the journal the paper is published in -- Advances in Microbiology.  AiM is one of the journals owned by SCIRP -- Scientific Research Publishing -- a China-based company long associated with predatory, pay-to-play practices:

[T]here may be some strong and honest articles published in SCIRP journals. However, these articles are devalued and stigmatized by association with all the junk science that SCIRP publishes.  The authors of the good articles are being victimized by the publisher’s policy of publishing pseudoscientific articles like “Basic Principles Underlying Human Physiology.”  SCIRP only rarely retracts articles, preferring instead to protect the interests of its customers, the paying authors.

Oh, and apropos of not much, here's the photo of himself he has on his website:

No, I'm not joking.

The issue here goes back to the ECREE Principle; Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Okay, maybe those are Martian fungal spores.  But before you can conclude that, you'd better have some damn good evidence supporting your claim, something more than "we see stuff moving around":

Hundreds of dimpled donut-shaped "mushroom-like" formations approximately 1mm in size are adjacent or attached to these mycelium-like complexes.  Additional sequences document that white amorphous masses beneath rock-shelters increase in mass, number, or disappear and that similar white-fungus-like specimens appeared inside an open rover compartment.  Comparative statistical analysis of a sample of 9 spherical specimens believed to be fungal "puffballs" photographed on Sol 1145 and 12 specimens that emerged from beneath the soil on Sol 1148 confirmed the nine grew significantly closer together as their diameters expanded and some showed evidence of movement.

Look, no one would be more excited than me if the rovers did discover Martian life.  Honestly, it's not that I think microbial life on Mars is all that unlikely.  It's just that you don't support your claims in science by pointing and yelling, "Hey, lookit that!" over and over.  If these are fungal spores, then there are a lot of them, so it's only a matter of time before they'll be detected by the actual rigorous biochemical analysis the rovers are equipped to do.

And I can guarantee that the results will be published in a reputable science journal, not an open-access affair like Advances in Microbiology, and almost certainly the lead author won't be some Disco-Era refugee who claims to be the intellectual equivalent of Stephen Hawking, David Eagleman, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Gregor Mendel put together.

So, sad to say, that's where the issue stands.  If I'm wrong, I will happily eat crow and publish an update and/or retraction.  I'd like to think the firestorm Joseph has ignited will cause him to retreat in disarray, but his motto seems to be "Death Before Backing Down," so I'm guessing this isn't the last we'll hear from him on the topic.  Stay tuned.

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

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

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

Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

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

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

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

The last voyage of the doomed

On May 19, 1845, two ships -- the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror -- set sail from Greenhithe, Kent, England, bound for an exploration of the fabled Northwest Passage, the alleged shipping route that crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean, saving a long and arduous voyage southwest and around Cape Horn (in South America) or worse still, southeast around the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) and thence into the pirate-ridden, and at that time uncharted, waters of the Indian Ocean.

The ships carried a combined total of 134 men, including the 24 officers, under the leadership of Captain John Franklin.  They didn't enter the expedition blindly; they were hardly the first ships to undertake polar exploration, and they knew some of the hazards.  The ships had heavy iron cladding, steam engines both to provide drive when the wind died down and also to provide warmth for the crew, and three years' supply of food.  For the crew's entertainment, they had a library of over a thousand books, which was a good thing because one of the first things Franklin did was to ban swearing and drunkenness.

The problem, as you undoubtedly know, is that the Northwest Passage doesn't exist, at least in the sense of an ice-free route north of Canada.  There is water between Greenland and northern Alaska, but (at least back in the nineteenth century) it was never without a covering of ice, even in midsummer.  But the rumors of a Northwest Passage had grown so large in the imaginations of merchants looking for a cheaper route for transporting goods that finding (nonexistent) open water became a positive obsession.

So Franklin's team took off in May of 1845.  They made a brief stop in Stromness (in the Orkney Islands), then made a thirty-day voyage to reach the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, Greenland, where five of the sailors were discharged due to illness, reducing the officers and crew to 129.  In late June, 1845, the crew were instructed to write their last letters home, which many of them did, voicing hope for a successful conclusion to their expedition.

That was the last any of them were ever heard from.

Some time in the late summer of 1845, both ships became icebound off Beechey Island (in what is now the Canadian territory of Nunavut).  It rapidly became obvious that they would not be getting free before the end of the (sort of) warm season, so they prepared themselves to face the deep freeze of an Arctic winter.

It appears that three of the crew died that winter and were buried on Beechey Island, and that as soon as there was a break in the ice, the ships attempted to move forward again, only to be trapped a second time off King William Island.  Some of them were still alive in 1847 -- Captain Franklin is recorded as having died in June of that year -- and when it became obvious that 1848 was going to be no different, the hundred or so survivors, under the leadership of executive officer Francis Crozier and second-in-command James Fitzjames, set out over the ice on foot to try to reach safety.

Ten years later, a subsequent (and luckier) expedition investigating the Arctic found a piece of paper under a cairn on the coast of King William Island, that said the following:

[25th April 1]848 H.M. ships 'Terror' and 'Erebus' were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, [hav]ing been beset since 12th September, 1846.  The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command [of Cap]tain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69˚ 37' 42" N., long. 98˚ 41' W.  [This p]aper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831–4 miles to the Northward – where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May June 1847.  Sir James Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected – Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men. (

Signed) JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain H.M.S. Erebus.

(Signed) F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain & Senior Offr.

and start on tomorrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.

None of them made it.  Thirty or forty are thought to have reached the northern coast of mainland Canada, but all of them died there, still hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. 

The reason all of this grim stuff comes up is a fascinating paper in the journal Polar Record describing the discovery of the remains of one of the men from the doomed expedition, and the fact that it has been shown to be what's left of Warrant Officer John Gregory, engineer aboard the Erebus.

The DNA evidence from the corpse matched the DNA of one of John Gregory's direct descendants, Jonathan Gregory of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  "Having John Gregory's remains being the first to be identified via genetic analysis is an incredible day for our family, as well as all those interested in the ill-fated Franklin expedition," said Gregory in a press release.  "The whole Gregory family is extremely grateful to the entire research team for their dedication and hard work, which is so critical in unlocking pieces of history that have been frozen in time for so long."

Dozens of other skeletal remains have been located, most of them from Erebus Bay, King William Island, but this is the first one to be conclusively identified.

Better still, facial reconstruction of Gregory's skull has given us an idea of what he looked like:

[Image courtesy of Diana Trepkov and the University of Waterloo]

I can't imagine what it must have been like for these 129 men to spend three years trapped in the ice.  At what point did they completely give up hope of being rescued?  That they retained at least some determination to survive is shown by Crozier and Fitzjames's last-ditch effort to reach safety.  But the whole story is as sad as it is inspiring.  

And now, we have a face to put to one of the men on that last voyage of the doomed.  It's a haunting image, a relic of one of the most tragic attempts to explore the world.  I wonder what else we will learn from the remains that have been discovered -- and if, one by one, we will get to gaze into the faces of those men who died in the frozen wastelands of northern Canada over a century and a half ago.

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

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

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

 

Zombies, asteroids, and apocalypse buckets

Is it just me, or has the Religious Right completely lost the plot?

And surprisingly, I am not referring to their continuing support of Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump.

To be fair, I've never been a fan of the Evangelicals.  I was in college during the height of the Jerry Falwell/Moral Majority years, when they seemed to follow the Puritan doctrine of disapproving of anyone, anywhere, having fun.  But back then, they had a sense of decorum.  I didn't agree with their beliefs, but at least they were consistent and articulate, and were able to sustain some glancing connection to reality.

Now?  To see how the Evangelicals have completely gone off the rails, look no further than Jim Bakker, who despite setbacks up to and including spending time in federal prison for fraud, is back to raking in the dough.  His program The Jim Bakker Show has millions of viewers, and while I'd like to think some of them watch it for the "what the fuck is this guy gonna say next?" factor, I'll bet it's a small minority.

(It bears mention that Jerry Falwell himself, shortly after he forced Bakker to hand over control of his church and shortly before Bakker went to prison, called him "The greatest scab on the face of Christianity in the entire two thousand years of our history."  That assessment doesn't seem to have cost Bakker anything in the way of viewership -- or monetary profits.)

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, that appeared on the YouTube channel Telltale a couple of days ago.  And in it, Bakker is interviewing prominent Evangelical speaker Steve Quayle, and the topic is...

... zombies.

At first, generous soul that I am, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and thought, "Oh, they're using the term metaphorically, for someone who is brainwashed or mindlessly acting under the influence of someone else."  Which would be ironic coming from them, but at least not batshit insane.

But no.  They're talking about literal zombies.  Like Dawn of the Dead. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gianluca Ramalho Misiti from São Paulo, Brazil, Zombie Walk 2012 - SP (8149613310), CC BY 2.0]

Bakker says to Quayle, "Zombies that are on the Earth are a disease like any other disease that affects people, and they become like zombies.  Is that right?"

And instead of saying what any normal person would say to a question like that, which is, "Time to lay off the controlled substances, bro," Quayle responds -- completely seriously -- in such a way as to make Bakker sound almost sane:

Forgive me, but that's only part of the story.  Zombies also have the evil spiritual entity known as demon possession, ok?  Because there is no rationale with a zombie...  The best way to explain zombie bloodlust is this: the appetite of demons expressed through humans.  It should be astonishing to people that the richest people in the world, not all of them but some of them, are into occult ceremonies where they have to drink, you know, blood that's extracted from a tortured child.  Now that's sick, but that's the appetite of demons expressed through humans ...  What I'm saying, Jim, is they can induce zombieism.  At least the appetite for human flesh.

Oh, and you'll never guess how Quayle and Bakker say the rich demon-people are turning their innocent victims into zombies.

Go ahead, guess.  You'll never get it.

They say that the contagion is being introduced into unsuspecting Americans via the nasal swabs they use to test for COVID-19.

I wish I was making this up, but listen to the clip I posted, which comes along with highly entertaining commentary from the guy who runs Telltale.  You will see that I am not exaggerating one iota.

Zombification from nasal swabs.  And yet another reason for the Religious Right not to trust the CDC and the medical establishment, and refuse vaccination.  Which makes it even more likely that the Evangelicals will contract COVID and get weeded out of the population by natural selection.

Speaking of irony.

If zombies aren't bad enough, another guest of Bakker's, one Tom Horn, says that we're going to be hit in ten years by the asteroid Apophis (we're not), that it's carrying an alien virus (it isn't), and that it's the "star Wormwood" mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

Oh, and he pronounces "contagion" as "cawn-tay-jee-on."  Which isn't relevant but is kind of hilarious.

What amazes me here is not that some wingnuts said something loony.  That, after all, is what wingnuts do.  What astonishes me is that the other three people sitting at the table with Bakker kept nodding and frowning, as if this was the most reasonable, rational philosophical discourse they'd ever heard, instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to burst into laughter, say, "You people are out of your ever-loving minds," and walk off the set.

But concerned head-nodding is, apparently, the reaction of the lion's share of Bakker's watchers, who not only now believe that we're at risk from demonic, blood-drinking, flesh-eating zombies and killer cawn-tay-jee-on-carrying asteroids, but have two more reasons to purchase his "Apocalypse Buckets" containing food to tide them over during the End Times (from which apparently he makes money hand over fist).

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for the day.  I'd be discouraged to hear that Bakker has anyone who believes what he says; that he has millions of devoted viewers is kind of devastating.  It points up how far we have to go here in this country to counter the deeply-ingrained irrational, fearful, anti-science beliefs held by a significant number of people who live here -- and, unfortunately, who vote.

It also gives us further evidence that ignorance and fear combined with someone determined to profit off it is a very, very dangerous combination.

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

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

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

 

Cats in boxes

Any cat owners amongst my readers will undoubtedly know about the strange propensity of cats to climb into boxes.  Apparently it works for cats of all sizes:

With apologies to Robert Burns, a cat's a cat for a' that.

In fact, it doesn't even have to be a real box:

I've never heard a particularly convincing explanation of why cats do this.  Some people suggest it's because being in close quarters gives them a sense of security, perhaps a remnant of when they lived in the wild and slept in burrows or caves.  Me, I suspect it's just because cats are a little weird.  I've been of this opinion ever since owning a very strange cat named Puck, who used to sleep on the arm of the couch with one front and one back leg hanging limp on one side of the arm and the other two dangling over the other side, a pose that earned her the nickname "Monorail Cat."  She also had eyes that didn't quite line up, and a broken fang that caused her tongue to stick out of one side of her mouth.  She was quite a sweet-natured cat, really, but even people who love cats thought Puck looked like she had a screw loose.

The topic comes up because of a delightful piece of research that came out a few days ago in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  The paper was titled "If I Fits, I Sits: A Citizen Science Investigation into Illusory Contour Susceptibility in Domestic Cats," by Gabriella Smith and Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere (of Hunter College) and Philippe Chouinard (of LaTrobe University), and looked at data collected from cat owners to find out if cats are fooled by the Kanizsa Rectangle Illusion.

The Kanizsa Rectangle Illusion is an image that tricks the brains into seeing contours that aren't there.  Here's one representation of it:

To most people, this looks like an opaque white rectangle laid over four black hexagons, and not what it really is -- four black hexagons with triangular wedges cut out.  Apparently the brain goes with an Ockham's Razor-ish approach to interpreting what it sees, deducing that a white rectangle on top of black hexagons is much more likely than having the cut-out bits just happening to line up perfectly.  It's amazing, though, how quickly this decision is made; we don't go through a back-and-forth "is it this, or is it that?"; the illusion is instantaneous, and so convincing that many of us can almost see the entire boundary of the rectangle even though there's nothing there.

Well, apparently, so can cats.  And, as one would expect, they sit in the middle of the nonexistent rectangle just as if it was a real box.  The authors write:

A well-known phenomenon to cat owners is the tendency of their cats to sit in enclosed spaces such as boxes, laundry baskets, and even shape outlines taped on the floor.  This investigative study asks whether domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) are also susceptible to sitting in enclosures that are illusory in nature, utilizing cats’ attraction to box-like spaces to assess their perception of the Kanizsa square visual illusion...  [T]his study randomly assigned citizen science participants booklets of six randomized, counterbalanced daily stimuli to print out, prepare, and place on the floor in pairs.  Owners observed and videorecorded their cats’ behavior with the stimuli and reported findings from home over the course of the six daily trials...  This study revealed that cats selected the Kanizsa illusion just as often as the square and more often than the control, indicating that domestic cats may treat the subjective Kanizsa contours as they do real contours.

 It's a fascinating result, and indicative that other animal species see the world much as we do.  It still doesn't explain why cats like to sit in boxes, though.  I think my conclusion ("cats are weird") covers it about as well as anything.  But at least in one way, our perceptual/interpretive centers are just as weird as the cats' are.  I'm not inclined to go sit in a box, but it does make me wonder what our pets would think if we showed them other optical illusions.

I doubt my dogs would be interested.  If what they're looking at has nothing to do with food, petting, or playing, they pretty much ignore it.  Must be nice to see the world in such simple terms.

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

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

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

 

Memory boost

There's one incorrect claim that came up in my biology classes more than any other, and that's the old idea that "humans only use 10% of their brain."  Or 5%.  Or 2%.  Often bolstered by the additional claim that Einstein is the one who said it.  Or Stephen Hawking.  Or Nikola Tesla.

Or maybe all three of 'em at once, I dunno.

The problem is, there's no truth to any of it, and no evidence that the claim originated with anyone remotely famous.  That at present we understand only 10% of the brain is doing -- that I can believe.  That we're using less than 100% of our brain at any given time -- of course.

But the idea that evolution has provided us with these gigantic processing units, which (according to a 2002 study by Marcus Raichle and Debra Gusnard) consume 20% of our oxygen and caloric intake, and then we only ever access 10% of its power -- nope, not buying that.  Such a waste of resources would be a significant evolutionary disadvantage, and would have weeded out the low-brain-use individuals long ago.  (It's sufficient to look at some members of Congress to demonstrate that the last bit, at least, didn't happen.)

But at least it means we may escape the fate of the world in Idiocracy.

And speaking of movies, the 2014 cinematic flop Lucy didn't help matters, as it features a woman who gets poisoned with a synthetic drug that ramps up her brain from its former 10% usage rate to... *gasp*... 100%.  Leading to her becoming able to do telekinesis and the ability to "disappear within the space/time continuum."

Whatever the fuck that even means.

All urban legends and goofy movies aside, the actual memory capacity of the brain is still the subject of contention in the field of neuroscience.  And for us dilettante science geeks, it's a matter of considerable curiosity.  I know I have often wondered how I can manage to remember the scientific names of obscure plants, the names of distant ancestors, and melodies I heard fifteen years ago, but I routinely have to return to rooms two or three times because I keep forgetting what I went there for.

So I found it exciting to read about a study in the journal eLife, by Terry Sejnowski (of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies), Kristen Harris (of the University of Texas/Austin), et al., entitled "Nanoconnectomic Upper Bound on the Variability of Synaptic Plasticity."  Put more simply, what the team found was that human memory capacity is ten times greater than previously estimated.

In computer terms, our storage ability amounts to one petabyte.  And put even more simply for non-computer types, this translates roughly into "a shitload of storage."

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," Sejnowski said.  "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power.  Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

The discovery hinges on the fact that there is a hierarchy of size in our synapses.  The brain ramps up or down the size scale as needed, resulting in a dramatic increase in our neuroplasticity -- our ability to learn.

"We had often wondered how the remarkable precision of the brain can come out of such unreliable synapses," said team member Tom Bartol.  "One answer is in the constant adjustment of synapses, averaging out their success and failure rates over time...  For the smallest synapses, about 1,500 events cause a change in their size/ability and for the largest synapses, only a couple hundred signaling events cause a change.  This means that every 2 or 20 minutes, your synapses are going up or down to the next size.  The synapses are adjusting themselves according to the signals they receive."

"The implications of what we found are far-reaching," Sejnowski added.  "Hidden under the apparent chaos and messiness of the brain is an underlying precision to the size and shapes of synapses that was hidden from us."

And the most mind-blowing thing of all is that all of this precision and storage capacity runs on a power of about 20 watts -- less than most light bulbs.

Consider the possibility of applying what scientists have learned about the brain to modeling neural nets in computers.  It brings us one step closer to something neuroscientists have speculated about for years -- the possibility of emulating the human mind in a machine.

"This trick of the brain absolutely points to a way to design better computers," Sejnowski said.  "Using probabilistic transmission turns out to be as accurate and require much less energy for both computers and brains."

Which is thrilling and a little scary, considering what happened when HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey basically went batshit crazy halfway through the movie.

That's a risk that I, for one, am willing to take, even if it means that I might end up getting turned into a Giant Space Baby.

But I digress.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty exciting, and it's reassuring to know that the memory capacity of my brain is way bigger than I thought it was.  Although it still leaves open the question of why, with a petabyte of storage, I still can't remember where I put my car keys.

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

Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

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