Apocalypse yesterday

I find it simultaneously amusing and terrifying how steeped in self-delusion some folks are.

Now, it's not that I think I'm always right, or free from biases.  Those of you who are regular readers of Skeptophilia will no doubt be aware of my opinion of the accuracy with which our brains function; I'm no more immune to getting things wrong than anyone is.  But still, one thing the scientific, rationalistic point of view does have is a clear protocol for figuring out when you are wrong.  At that point, you have no choice but to reconsider the theory in question.

But some people work the whole thing backwards.  It brings to mind the wonderful quote from Doctor Who in the episode "The Hand of Fear," in which the Fourth Doctor says, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

And at that point their altered facts, miraculously enough, always seem to support their model.  So without any apparent realization that they've just committed circular reasoning, they announce that their claim is vindicated.

Perhaps you remember the whole nonsense ten years ago about the Rapture, that came into the news largely because of the late Harold Camping, extremist religious wingnut extraordinaire.  Camping, you might recall, announced a date for the Rapture, and stated his case so vehemently that more than one of his followers sold all of their belongings and gave away the proceeds, or else used the money to purchase billboard space to warn the rest of us that the End Was Near.  The day before the Day, many of them bid tearful farewells to their loved ones, promising to say a good word in Jesus's ear on their behalf after all the dust settled.

Then, the next day, nothing happened.

So Camping revised his prediction to a new date, six months later.  This time he was right, he said, cross his heart and hope to vanish.  But once again, the faithful stayed put on Earth, and worse still, the Antichrist never showed.  So Camping closed up shop, and two years later, died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 92, disappointed to the last that he hadn't lived to see the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  What fun that would have been!

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

You'd think that sort of failure record (100%) would be a little discouraging to the faithful, wouldn't you?  We keep having predictions of the End Times, and the world refuses to cooperate, and end already.  No Beasts appear, no Antichrist, no Seven Seals; everything just kind of keeps loping along as usual.  Eventually, you'd think people would say, "Hey, you know what?  Maybe we need to reconsider all of this apocalyptic stuff, because so far, it's running a zero batting average."

But no.  They'd never let a little thing like no results change their minds.  And now we have a guy who takes the alter-the-facts approach and pushes it to its ultimate endpoint: he says that the Rapture did too happen, and if you didn't notice, it was your own damn fault.

I'm not making this up.  According to the website Now the End Begins, the holy actually did get Raptured.  Millions are missing, the site says:

Well, we told you it was coming.  Perhaps you were a casual reader of this site, but never got really involved, "too many religious nuts" you said.  Maybe you had a family member who would plead with you night after night to "get right" with Jesus before His return.  "Nah, never happen", you said, "people been saying that for ever. Nonsense!".  But, it wasn't nonsense, was it?  Turns out the religious nuts were right after all.  The Rapture of the Church actually happened.  Now we are gone, and you remain.  Left behind.  I can only imagine the shock - terror - panic - and questions that must be running through your head right now.  My heart breaks for you, and that's why I made this page, to get you through what the Bible calls the time of Jacob's Trouble, the Great Tribulation, and it's moments away from starting.  Are YOU ready?

I... what?

What do you mean "we are gone?"  If you're gone, who is writing for and maintaining the site?  Are you suggesting that Heaven has WiFi and a fast internet connection?  Is the server hosted by the Lord of Hosts?  What do you do if Christ wants to use the Holy Computer while you're updating the website?  Do you tell him, "I'm sorry, Jesus, but you'll have to surf the web another time?"

But my main objection is, if all of those people really had disappeared, don't you think someone would have noticed by now?  Sure, the website tells us.  We all did notice.  And apparently, we're all pretty puzzled about it:

And that's exactly what just happened, and where we have now gone.  Oh, knowing the media as I do, I am sure that there are many attempts to explain it - UFO's, alien abductions, a harmonic convergence, a government program, FEMA camps, cosmic shift, worm holes, and the list goes on and on.  But none of those explainations [sic] really satisfy you, do they?  I mean, it's hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people, right?  Could any one government, no matter how corrupt, really process that many people in the "blink of an eye".  No, they could not.  You know better than that.

I do?  I mean, yes, of course I do.  I'd never fall for the media telling me that hundreds of millions of people were sucked into a wormhole!  That'd just be silly!  I'll believe instead that hundreds of millions of people vanished, and no one has mentioned it in the media at all!

Because, of course, the teensy little problem with all of this is that everyone seems to kind of... still be here.  While I understand that given the circles I travel in, it's understandable that none of my immediate friends and family were Bodily Assumed Into Heaven, you'd think that at least one or two casual acquaintances would be amongst the hundreds of millions who were holy enough to be Raptured.  Strange to say, I haven't noticed anyone in my community vanishing lately.  I really don't think that I'd have missed something like that.  There are even a few I can think of that I'd be happy enough to wave goodbye to, as they floated off into the sky, but no such luck.

The rest of the site consists of suggestions about what to do now that we've been Left Behind (number one piece of advice: don't accept the Mark of the Beast).  But all of that really pales by comparison to the opening bits, wherein they tell us that the Rapture happened while we were otherwise occupied, and we Ungodly Types have yet to notice.

I've said before about the extremely religious that they'll never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their beliefs, but this may be the best example yet.  The whole thing reminded me of the words of George Aiken, Republican senator from Vermont, who said, when it became obvious that the United States was losing the Vietnam War, "The best policy is to declare victory and leave."  Or in this case, don't let the fact that the Rapture didn't happen interfere with your conviction that the Rapture has actually happened.

Bringing to mind a final quote, this one from George Orwell's 1984: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command."

Me, I'm just going to do what the world does, namely, keep moseying along and not worry about it.  Even if the UltraChristian crowd is right, I'm pretty certain to be Left Behind anyhow, a possibility that doesn't scare me much.  I've read the Book of Revelation more than once, and I have to point out that whatever else you can say about it, the apocalypse sounds interesting.  There's the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Beast with Seven Heads and the Star Wormwood and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and various other special offers from the God of Love and Mercy, any one of which would certainly alleviate the boredom around here.  So if the Rapture really has already happened, let's get this apocalyptic ball rolling, okay, people?  The End Times are a-wastin'.

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

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!]

 

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.

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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.

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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!]