My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from all the way back in 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keith Survell from USA, Bronycon summer 2012 cosplay session, CC BY-SA 2.0]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art; heaven alone knows how many there are now).  They went so apeshit when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended its run in 2019 that EntertainmentOne and Boulder Media teamed up with Paramount Pictures to produce a full-length movie called, I kid you not, My Little Pony: A New Generation, which is scheduled to be released this September.

There is also a subgroup which apparently like to dress up as My Little Ponies and then have sex with each other.  Which I guess is harmless enough if everyone involved is a consenting adult, but open-minded as I am, I really didn't want to investigate further.

Being an author, my internet search history is already fucked up enough as it is.

Anyhow, after discussing the whole phenomenon with my friend, I got to thinking about it, and I decided that I had to see if I could figure out why this show had gained so much popularity amongst adults.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The catastrophe clock

The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine.

We are evolved to look for correlations, probably because those correlations can be awfully useful.  Our habit of noticing patterns and cycles allowed the ancient Egyptians to figure out the timing of the Nile floods, essential for agriculture in a place that was (and is) a desert.  The people of east Africa did the same sort of thing with the monsoons.  In cool climates, knowing when the growing season was likely to start and end was absolutely critical.

The problem is, this same pattern-seeking feature can trick us into seeing illusory patterns in what are, in essence, random data.  Astrology relies on this sort of thing; a particularly common example recently is the freakout people have when Mercury goes into retrograde (an apparent backward motion of Mercury as seen from Earth because of their relative motion; obviously, Mercury doesn't actually start moving backwards).  Supposedly the whole world goes haywire when Mercury starts its retrograde motion, but believing this requires ignoring the fact that (1) Mercury goes into retrograde three or four times a year, for three or four weeks at a stretch, and (2) the world is kind of haywire all the time.  There's no reason to believe that humanity is any loonier during Mercury retrograde than it is at any other time of the year.

Sometimes those illusory patterns can be oddly convincing.  I remember when I was a kid that much was made of the strange coincidence that since William Henry Harrison was elected President of the United States in 1840, every presidential winner in a "zero year" has died in office: Harrison (1840), Lincoln (1860), Garfield (1880), McKinley (1900), Harding (1920), and Kennedy (1960).  Then Reagan (1980) and G. W. Bush (2000) stubbornly refused to die, forcing True Believers to come up with some kind of nonsense about how it was a 120-year curse and expired after JFK's assassination, or something.  Mostly, though, they just retreated in disarray, because it was a peculiar coincidence, not an actual meaningful pattern.

Fortunately, scientists have statistical methods for determining when you're looking at an actual pattern (i.e., whatever is happening occurs with a true cyclicity) and when you're just seeing random fluctuations or scatter in the data.  This can sometimes uncover odd patterns that are clearly real, but result from some as-yet unknown cause -- such as the natural disaster "heartbeat" that was the subject of a paper in Geoscience Frontiers last week.

Geologists Michael Rampino and Yuhong Zhu (of New York University) and Ken Caldeira (of the Carnegie Institution for Science) analyzed the timing of various major geologic events over the past 260 million years -- continental flood basalt eruptions, changes in the direction of plate movement, oceanic anoxia, major glaciations and changes in sea level, and mid-plate volcanism, as well as events like mass extinctions.  And they found that there was a statistically significant cyclicity to those events -- they tend to cluster every 27.5 million years, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years.

Artist's impression of the moment of the Chicxulub Impact 66 million years ago [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA and artist Donald E. Davis]

But detecting a pattern is not the same as determining what's behind it.  There is no known geological or astronomical event that occurs on a 27.5 million year cycle that might be the underlying cause of the periodic nature of catastrophes.  The authors throw out a few suggestions -- that it could be due to the motion of the Solar System relative to the rest of the Milky Way (oscillating above and below the plane of the galaxy, perhaps?), a thus-far unknown phenomenon originating in the motion of magma in the Earth's mantle, or the gravitational disturbance of the Oort Cloud by a massive, extremely distant planet orbiting the Sun.  (This latter idea has been around for a while; my college astronomy professor, Daniel Whitmire, was one of the first to treat it seriously, and he and his colleague John Matese wrote one of the first scholarly papers about the "Planet X" hypothesis.  But don't even start with me about Nibiru and the Annunaki, because I don't want to hear it.)

The upshot of it is we don't know.  But if you were worried, we're only about 7.5 million years past the last peak, so we have another twenty million or so years to go before the next one.  As optimistic as I am about my longevity, I seriously doubt I'll be around to see it.  The catastrophe clock has a lot of ticks left until the alarm goes off.

Which is a good thing.  As interesting as they are, flood basalt eruptions and oceanic anoxia and the rest are not events that would be fun to witness first-hand.

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

Why do we have emotions?

It's a tougher question than it appears at first.  Emotions like joy and camaraderie can certainly act to strengthen social bonds; fear can warn us away from dangerous situations.  But how often do they get in the way?  The gray emotional vacuum of depression, the overwhelming distress of anxiety and panic disorder, and the unreasoning terror of phobias can be debilitating enough to prevent anything like normal day-to-day functioning.

In Projections: A Story of Human Emotions by Stanford University professor of bioengineering and psychiatry Karl Deisseroth, we take a look at case studies of emotions gone awry -- in Deisseroth's words, "using the broken to illuminate the unbroken."  His deeply empathetic and utterly fascinating account takes the reader through what can go wrong in our emotional systems, and the most recent, cutting-edge research in how the neurological underpinnings of our brains create our emotional world.

It is brilliant reading for anyone wanting to know more about where our feelings come from, and who seek to follow the ancient Greek maxim of γνῶθι σεαυτόν -- "know thyself."

Hand-in-glove

One of the more fascinating bits of biochemistry is the odd "handedness" (technically called chirality) that a lot of biological molecules have.  Chiral molecules come in a left-handed (sinistral) and a right-handed (dextral) form that are made of exactly the same parts but put together in such a way that they're mirror-images of each other, just like a left-handed and right-handed glove.

Where it gets really interesting is that although the left-handed and right-handed forms of biologically active molecules have nearly identical properties, they aren't equivalent in function.  Nearly all naturally-occurring sugars are right-handed; amino acids, on the other hand, are all left-handed.  No one knows why this is, but having evolved with this kind of specificity has the result that if you were fed a mirror-image diet -- left-handed glucose, for example, and proteins made of right-handed amino acids -- you wouldn't be able to tell anything apart by its smell or taste, but you would proceed to starve to death because your cells would not be able to metabolize molecules with the wrong chirality.

Chirality in amino acids [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Molecular chirality was used to brilliant effect by the wonderful murder mystery author Dorothy Sayers in her novel The Documents in the Case.  In the story, a man dies after eating a serving of mushrooms he'd picked.  His friends and family are stunned; he'd been a wild mushroom enthusiast for decades, and the fatal mistake he apparently made -- including a deadly ivory funnel mushroom (Clitocybe dealbata) in with a pan full of other edible kinds -- was something he never would have done.

The toxic substance in ivory funnels, the alkaloid muscarine, is -- like many organic compounds -- chiral.  Naturally-occurring muscarine is all left-handed.  However, when it's synthesized in the lab, you end up with a mixture of right- and left-handed molecules, in about equal numbers.  So when the contention is made that the victim hadn't mistakenly included a poisonous mushroom in with the edible ones, but had been deliberately poisoned by someone who'd added the chemical to his food, the investigators realize this is the key to solving the riddle of the man's death.

Chiral molecules have another odd property; if you shine a beam of polarized light through a crystal, right-handed ones rotate the polarization angle of the beam clockwise, and left-handed ones counterclockwise.  So when an extract from the victim's digestive tract is analyzed, and a polarized light beam shined through it splits in two -- part of the beam rotated clockwise, the other part counterclockwise -- there's no doubt he was poisoned by synthetic muscarine, not by mistakenly eating a poisonous mushroom.

Turns out there may be a way to use this hand-in-glove property of biological molecules not to solve a murder, but to detect life on other planets.  As with Dorothy Sayers's synthetic muscarine, organic compounds not produced by a living thing would almost certainly be a mixture of the two chiralities, right- and left-handed.  Because organisms here on Earth are all so incredibly specific about which chirality they need (or create), it's a fair guess that living things on other worlds would have the same choosiness.  And now a technique has been developed to detect molecular chirality in the light reflected from a forest from two kilometers away, by a spectropolarimeter on a helicopter flying at seventy kilometers per hour.

It only took seconds for the detector to tell the difference between light reflected from a living thing and light reflected from something inanimate, like a rock face or an asphalt road.  Now that we're becoming increasingly good at seeing the faint light reflected from the surface of exoplanets, looking for rotation of the polarization angle of that light might be a quick way to see if there's anything alive down there.

"The next step we hope to take is to perform similar detections from the International Space Station (ISS), looking down at the Earth," said astrophysicist Brice-Olivier Demory of the University of Bern and MERMOZ (Monitoring planEtary suRfaces with Modern pOlarimetric characteriZation).  "That will allow us to assess the detectability of planetary-scale biosignatures.  This step will be decisive to enable the search for life in and beyond our Solar System using polarization."

Which is really cool, although as an aside someone needs to explain to whoever is in charge of MERMOZ how acronyms work.

In any case, the whole idea is brilliant, and the possibility that we could detect living organisms on a distant planet just by analyzing the reflected light polarization is mind-boggling.  It's long been the stumbling block in the search for extraterrestrial life; if a planet hosts life, but the living things there are pre-technological, how would we know they're there?  After all, as little as two centuries ago, intelligent aliens would have detected no radio signals coming from Earth, and (of course) we wouldn't have had the capability of detecting any they sent us.

But now, maybe we can tell if there's something alive out there without it having to communicate with us directly.  Like Dorothy Sayers's intrepid detectives, all we have to do is see if the light twists in only one direction, and it might well be case closed.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, that I thought would make a great topic for this week's Fiction Friday: does a good story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest novel ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad." 

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot. 

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A couple that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looked at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  In the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, the episode "Orphan 55" pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me tell you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to see what the lesson was.  Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we'll figure it out.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Two of my most explicitly moralistic tales, the short stories "Last Bus Stop" and "Loose Ends" (both available in my collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows), are about the fragility of life and how we should look after each other because we never know how long we have -- but I think in both cases the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.  

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Megarhino

Yesterday, we dealt with how freaking huge the universe is.  Today, we're going to look at something that, on its own scale, is also freaking huge.  

Paleontologists working at a site in the Linxia Basin, in Gansu Province in northwestern China, found a skull and spine of what appears to be the largest land mammal that ever walked the Earth.  Called Paraceratherium, this thing was distantly related to modern rhinos, something that is apparent from the artist's reconstructions of what it may have looked like, except for being (1) hornless and (2) absolutely enormous, even by rhinocerosian standards.

Paraceratherium stood five meters tall at the shoulder.  That means if you took a typical twelve-foot extension ladder and propped it against one (Caution!  Do Not Try This At Home!), climbed to the top and reached as high as you could, you'd maybe be able to pat it on the back.  Its head was about seven meters off the ground, and it was on the order of eight meters long from nose to butt.

It's estimated to have weighed 24 tons, which for reference, is about as much as six full-grown African elephants.

Indricotherium, one of Paraceratherium's slightly smaller cousins [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator:Dmitry Bogdanov, Indricotherium11, CC BY 3.0]

I don't know about you, but to me that is staggering.  Think of how much energy that thing used just to walk.  Think of the booming sounds it made when it set its feet down.  Think of how loud the vocalizations of that thing could have been.

Also, think about the piles of dung it must have left around.  "It's your turn to pooper-scoop the Paraceratherium" must have been a devastating thing to hear, back then.

Fortunately, there were no humans around to worry about such matters.  Paraceratherium lived during the Oligocene Epoch (between 34 and 25 million years ago), a time when a lot of groups of mammals got really large -- no one knows why, although there does seem to be a tendency for selection toward large body size when the climate is clement and there's plenty of food.  Also, this was the peak of recovery from the devastating Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a climatic spike that had occurred about twenty million years earlier and which coincided with worldwide oceanic anoxia and widespread extinctions, so there was very high biodiversity, and probably equally high competition between species in similar niches.

In any case, that's the current holder of the "Largest Land Mammal Ever" award.  Given how stupendous they must have looked, it's sad they became extinct, although maybe it's just as well.  Imagine what it'd be like with these behemoths stomping around.  We have enough problems keeping deer out of our vegetable garden, I don't even want to think about how we'd keep out a Paraceratherium looking for a quick snack.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

The cosmic whirligig

It seems like whenever I look at the realm of the very large or the very small, I quickly get overwhelmed by scale.

I remember, for example, when a teacher in high school was trying to impress upon us kids how small atoms were, and asked us the following question: if you counted up the number of atoms in a typical raindrop, then someone gave you that many grains of sand, how much sand would you have?

A bucket?  A swimming pool full?  A whole beach full?  All of those, it would seem, constitute a crapload of sand grains.  Surely there can't be more atoms in a raindrop than there are sand grains on a typical beach.

But there are.  By several orders of magnitude.  Her answer was that you'd have enough sand to fill a trench a meter deep and a kilometer across, stretching from New York to San Francisco.  (I've never checked her math, but from other similar analogies, it seems pretty spot-on.)

The same happens when I'm considering things that are very large; as much as I've studied astronomy, I never fail to be blown away simply by how enormous the universe is.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up -- a paper in Nature Astronomy last week by astrophysicists Peng Wang and Noam Liebeskind (of the University of Potsdam), Elmo Tempel (of the University of Tartu, Estonia), Xi Kang (of Zhejiang University, and Quan Guo (of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory) has demonstrated that there are filaments spanning entire galactic superclusters, and possibly longer than that.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The cosmic web, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The presence of these filaments, which seem to be composed largely of dark matter, comes from their effects on the galaxies they pass near.  As if they were the axle of an enormous whirligig, the filaments cause the galaxies to circle around them, drawn in by the gravitational pull.  The existence of the filaments was demonstrated by the fact that the galaxies on one side exhibit a lower than expected red shift and the ones on the other side a higher than expected red shift, meaning one side is moving away from us and the other side toward us -- just as you'd expect if the galaxies were circling some invisible center of gravity.

As with any groundbreaking discovery, it's opened up as many questions as it's answered.  "It's a major finding,” said study co-author Noam Libeskind, in an interview with Vice.  "It's a pretty big deal that we've discovered angular momentum, or vorticity, on such a huge scale.  I think it will help people understand cosmic flows and how galaxies are moving throughout the cosmic web and through the universe... [and] to understand the important scales for galaxy formation and ultimately, why everything in the universe is spinning and how spin is generated.  That is a really, really hard question to solve.  It's an unsolved question in cosmology."

That was my first reaction; what on earth (or off it, in this case) could generate that kind of angular momentum?  Think of the mass of a typical galaxy, and imaging that you tie that amount of mass at the end of a long rope and try to swing it in circles.

That's the quantity of energy we're talking about, here.  Multiplied by the number of galaxies in the universe.

But the upshot is that the universe on the largest scales seems to have an intrinsic spin, and no one knows why.  All I know is that it makes me feel very, very small.

Of course, I'm way larger than the atoms in a raindrop.  So there's that.  Now that my mind is sufficiently blown, I think I need to go huddle under my blanket for a while, because the universe is sometimes a really overwhelming place to live.

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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

 

Through a glass, darkly

I was chatting with my younger son a couple of days ago.  He's a professional scientific glassblower, so anything having to do with the properties, chemistry, or uses of glass is going to interest him automatically.  And this was how he ran into the name of Walter John Kilner.

My son asked me if I'd ever heard of him, which I hadn't, and he suggested I look into him as a possible topic for Skeptophilia.  What I found out was pretty interesting -- straddling that gap between "fascinating" and "crazy."

Kilner, who lived from 1847 to 1920, studied medicine, physics, and engineering at Cambridge University, eventually earning a master's degree as well as a doctorate in medicine.  He had a private medical practice as well as being a "medical electrician" -- then a brand-new field -- at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

So the man was certainly not lacking in brains.  But he veered off into an area that is fringe-y at best, and to this day we don't know if what he was seeing was real.

The basic idea is familiar to us today as the "aura," but what most people mean by that -- some sort of spiritual halo around humans (and supposedly, all living things) that conveniently can't be measured by any known technique -- is several shades more woo-woo than what Kilner meant.  He seems to have latched onto the idea of there being a kind of electromagnetic radiation given off by the human body that was outside the range of human vision, and which could potentially be used as a diagnostic tool if a device was developed that allowed us to see it.

In fact, there is invisible radiation coming from our bodies; it's infrared light, which is light that has a longer wavelength than red light.  (Nota bene: it took me some pondering to get past the misunderstanding that infrared and thermal radiation aren't the same thing.  Thermal radiation can be in any region of the spectrum -- think of the red light given off by a hot stove burner.  The wavelength of thermal radiation is dependent upon the temperature of the source.  Infrared, which can be emitted thermally, is defined by having wavelengths longer than that of visible light, regardless of how it's generated.)

More germane to Kilner and his goggles, although the human eye can't detect it, mosquitoes' eyes can (one of the ways they find us in the dark), and it can be sensed by the "loreal pits" of pit vipers that they use for finding prey at night, not to mention the infrared goggles used by the military, which convert long-wavelength infrared light to shorter wavelengths that we can see.  

So there was at least some scientific basis for what he proposed, and remember that this would have been in the late nineteenth century, when the properties of electromagnetic radiation were still largely mysterious.  What Kilner proposed was that since light is altered when it passes through filters of any kind, there might be a filter that could take the electromagnetic radiation from the aura and convert it to visible light.

His approach was to take thin layers of alcohol-soluble dyes, most derived from coal tar, sandwiched between two sheets of clear glass.  He claimed he found one that worked -- a blue dye he called dicyanin -- but according to Kilner, it was difficult to produce, so he started fishing around for a substitute.

Along the way, he convinced a lot of people that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see the human aura, and generated a huge amount of enthusiasm.  People suggested other blue dyes -- cobalt-based ones, and other coal tar derivatives like pinacyanol -- but the results he obtained were equivocal at best.  Nobody was able to produce dicyanin again, or even figure out what its chemical composition was, which certainly made any skeptics raise an eyebrow.  But to the end of his life, Kilner swore that his dicyanin filter allowed him to see clearly an aura around his volunteers' naked bodies, despite an analysis by the British Medical Journal stating bluntly, "Dr. Kilner has failed to convince us that his 'aura' is more real than Macbeth's visionary dagger."

So what, if anything, did Kilner see?  The easiest answer is: we don't know.

The whole thing reminds me of Kirlian photography -- those familiar (and striking) photographs that result from placing a photographic plate on top of a high voltage source, then adding a flat object of some kind.  This produces a coronal discharge, a purely physical effect caused by the voltage creating temporary ionization of the air molecules.  Pretty much anything works; I've seen Kirlian photographs of coins.  But this doesn't stop the woo-woos from claiming that Kirlian photographs are capturing the aura, and giving it all sorts of spiritual and/or esoteric overtones.

Kirlian photograph of a dusty miller leaf [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In the case of Kilner, though, the effect was never successfully replicated.  This hasn't stopped people from making "Kilner goggles" that you can still buy online, if you've got no better use for your money.  But as far as Kilner himself, he seems to have been entirely sincere -- i.e., not a charlatan or outright liar.  He pretty clearly believed he'd seen something that deserved an explanation.  Whether it was some kind of optical effect produced by his mysterious dicyanin, or a faint blur in the image that he then gave more significance than it deserved, we honestly don't know.  (This is reminiscent of the "canals of Mars," first described by astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, which were clearly an artifact of poor telescope quality -- when the optical equipment improved, the Martian canals mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.)

Another possibility, though, was brought up by my wife; a lot of the dyes and solvents that Kilner used are neurotoxic.  It could be that what he was seeing was a visual disturbance caused by inhaling the fumes from nasty compounds like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, common in the coal tar he was using to prepare his dyes.

The interesting thing is that Kilner completely dismissed the esoteric spin that auras were given during the last decade of his life, primarily by the Theosophists and Spiritualists who were skyrocketing in membership during the first decades of the twentieth century.  Kilner remained to the end a staunch believer in the scientific method, and that anything he'd seen had a purely physical origin that was explainable in terms of the properties of light and electromagnetism.

It's an interesting case.  The fact that in the hundred years since he died, no one's ever been able to replicate his findings, strongly supports the fact that he was simply wrong -- he'd seen something, but it had nothing to do with anything that could be called an aura.  Even so, he's an interesting example of someone who was clearly trying to do things the right way, but his own determination to prove his conjecture blinded him to the obvious conclusion.

Further stressing the truth of Leonardo da Vinci's statement that "We must doubt the certainty of everything that passes through our senses."

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

One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

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