Opening statements

There's a claim out there that if a work of fiction doesn't grab the reader on the first page, it never will. The whole "slow burn" approach to writing, which was pretty much universal back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, has been replaced by a necessity to hit the ground running.

My general attitude is that any time someone speaks in categoricals about writing, they're wrong. No, you don't have to only "write what you know." (Although if you're writing from the point-of-view of a character who belongs to a different demographic than you do, it's critical to have someone who is from that demographic read your story and tell you if you got it right.)  Yes, you can effectively write a modern novel that uses long, complex sentences.  No, you don't have to eliminate every single adverb, dialogue tag, semicolon, and use of the passive voice.

And no, it's not required to grab the readers by the shirt collar and scream into their faces by the end of the first page.

Be that as it may, I do appreciate a really snappy opening line.  It doesn't have to be action-oriented; not all books begin with car crashes, sword fights, and sex scenes.  Thinking about some of the best first lines I've read (I'll give a few examples of my favorites in a moment), I'm not entirely certain what it is that unites them, what distinguishes a first-class start from a more mundane one.  Something about unusual wording, a particularly piquant turn of phrase, a sentence that makes your ears perk up and leaves you saying, "wow, that wasn't what I expected, what on earth is going to happen next?"

As a brief aside, I think this is why I love Chris van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  In this one-of-a-kind book, van Allsburg gives an illustration and a single line from fourteen (imaginary) novels, which were left at a publisher's office by the enigmatic Harris Burdick.  Burdick never returned, leaving the editor with fourteen mysteries -- what were the stories that went along with the lines and the illustrations?  It's left for the reader to figure out what they might have been.  (One particularly memorable example; a drawing of a girl and a boy, done in van Allsburg's inimitably beautiful style, standing next to a lake.  The name of the story is "A Strange Day in July."  The line from the story: "He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back.")  I don't overstate my case by saying that every writer should own this wonderful, mysterious, fascinating book.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to pick out some of my favorite opening lines.  These are ones that grabbed me instantly, the first time I opened the books, and stand out to me still as some of the catchiest beginnings ever.  I'll be interested to see if you agree, and if you have some of your favorites you'd like to add.

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse." -- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

"There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood." -- Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot,' or 'That Claudius,' or 'Claudius the Stammerer,' or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius' or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius,' am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled." -- Robert Graves, I, Claudius

"Well, I'm pretty much fucked." -- Andy Weir, The Martian

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." -- Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

"My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1958, at which time I was ten years and seven months old." -- Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

"Here's how it went down." -- Gil Miller, Spree 

"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted." -- Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Just because I can, here are a few of my favorites from my own stories:

"Really, the whole thing started because of Marie-Solange Guidry's cheesecake." -- Periphery

"Claver Road doesn't end, it withers away." -- Descent into Ulthoa

"Darren Ault woke in pitch darkness, which was odd, because he was fairly certain he was dead." -- Lock & Key

"The woman sitting in the high-backed chair in Mr. Parsifal Snowe's office looked faded, like an item of clothing that was run through the washing machine a few too many times." -- The Dead Letter Office

"It had been a completely ordinary day for Duncan Kyle until the moment he fell through the floor of his living room at a little before two in the morning." -- Sephirot

I hope these would make you curious enough to continue reading!

An opening line isn't everything; there has to be a good story to follow.  And of course, plenty of awesome stories have unremarkable first lines.  But crafting a sizzling opening pitch is not a bad thing for a writer to aim for.  Knowing the way that brilliant first lines have stood out in my memory, some of them for many years, makes me all the more cognizant of how powerful a lure that can be to draw readers into the world of the story.

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

Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

We'll discuss this at the meeting

Back in my teaching days, one of my least favorite things was when I realized that there was a faculty meeting after school.

Faculty meetings -- and, I suspect, meetings in general -- were an utter waste of time.  Not only did they take between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half to cover stuff that could have been taken care of in a three-paragraph email, they were frequently preceded by "icebreaker" games like one time (I swear I'm not making this up) holding a single raisin in our mouths for a minute then describing the sensation.  I recall distinctly sitting there thinking, "Dear god, I hope the moderator doesn't call on me."  But the universe being the twisted place it is, of course the moderator called on me.

My answer was to growl at the presenter, "The sensation is like having a raisin in my mouth."

My colleagues, who by and large knew what a grumpy sonofabitch I am, thought this was drop-dead hilarious, mostly because they were imagining what expletives I'd have included if I was just a tad less conscious of decorum and professionalism.  (One of these colleagues emailed me shortly after I retired to tell me that faculty meetings are now way less entertaining because he no longer can place bets on how many minutes it'd take for my face to go from "Impatient But Tolerating It" to "Are You Fucking Kidding Me Right Now?")

The reason all this comes up is because of some research that appeared in the journal The Leadership Quarterly last week that looked at how leaders emerge from leaderless groups.  They varied the composition of the groups -- single-gender vs. mixed-gender, age-grouped vs. mixed-age, even varying it by intelligence, personality traits, and professions of the members.  They then gave the groups tasks to perform, and observed who was most likely to become the group leader (as assessed by the groups' members afterward).

Of all the variables they tested, only one mattered.

The one who became the leader was the one who talked the most.

This idea has been observed in an anecdotal fashion before, and is amusingly called "the Babble Hypothesis."  Because it turns out it doesn't even matter what, exactly, the incipient leader was saying.  The likelihood of becoming the group leader was a function of the number of words spoken, even if what (s)he was saying was complete and utter bullshit.

"I think one take away is the importance of speaking up in group settings," said study lead author Neil MacLaren, of the Bernard M. and Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies.  "For example, if you are in a leadership position the evidence suggests you should play an active role in the conversation.  Taking this finding to extremes is unhelpful because skewed amounts of speaking time are associated with poorer group performance outcomes, but the evidence does seem consistent that people who speak more are more likely to be viewed as leaders."

This explains why I was not looked upon as a leader in our school (although I do think I was well-respected as a teacher).  I rarely spoke at faculty meetings, and that was for one specific reason: if I said something, it would make the meeting last longer.  There were a handful of faculty members who could always be counted upon to raise their hands when the call came for comments or questions on the day's topic, and it's a damn good thing that the evil eye isn't a real thing, because I would always look at them like this:

Not that it ever had an effect.  I have a sneaking suspicion these people actually enjoy meetings, which I have a hard time fathoming.  My attitude toward meetings was that if I was offered a choice of attending weekly meetings for a year or having my prostate examined by Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.

Anyhow, that's today's episode of Bizarre Human Social Behavior.  I have to say that although there are many things I miss about teaching, being retired does have some serious perks.  Now the only meetings I attend are with my dogs, and they seldom talk about such things as Changing Educational Paradigms or Thinking Outside the Box or Restructuring Curricular Frameworks.  All they want to discuss is why their food bowls are empty and whether the weather's nice enough to go outside and play.

That kind of meeting, I can deal with.

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

Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

Earth angel

Having looked recently at such important scientific developments as gravitational lensing by black holes, the evolution of flowering plants, archaeological finds in Finland, and our perception of optical illusions, today I'd like to turn to an even more pressing issue, to wit:

Is the Earth being controlled by mentally-challenged Nordic alien angels?

The Angel of the Annunciation, Alessandro Maganza (ca. 1600) [Image is in the Public Domain]

That is the contention of the author of the site Montalk.net, the link for which was sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, and that introduces the concept thusly:

There is far more to this world than taught in our schools, shown in the media, or proclaimed by the church and state.  Most of mankind lives in a hypnotic trance, taking to be reality what is instead a twisted simulacrum of reality, a collective dream in which values are inverted, lies are taken as truth, and tyranny is accepted as security.  They enjoy their ignorance and cling tightly to the misery that gives them identity.

Yup, that's me, clinging to my ignorance over here.  But what should I believe, then?  We find out a bit under "Key Concepts," which starts out innocuously enough -- some stuff about the nature of God, spirit, souls, and so on, not too very different than you might find on a number of religious or quasi-religious sites.  But then we hit the concept "Evolution," and if you're like me, there's the sense of an impending train wreck:

Evolution

• physical evolution is due to natural selection, random mutation, conscious selection, and conscious mutation
• human evolution is mostly artificial; either DNA mutates to conform to alien soul frequency, or else DNA is artificially altered through advanced genetic engineering by certain alien factions
• because body must match soul, the death of a species means loss of compatible bodies for purposes of reincarnation.  Thus physical life seeks physical survival and propagation of genes.
• the purpose of physical evolution is to accommodate and serve spiritual evolution

If I could evolve consciously, I'd evolve wings.  Great big feathery wings from my shoulder blades.  I know it'd make it hard to put on a shirt, but I kind of hate wearing shirts anyhow, so that's a downside I'd be willing to accept in order to be able to fly.

Speaking of wings and flying, we really get into deep water when he starts talking about angels.  Because according to this guy, angels are real -- again, not thus far so very different, at first, from what a lot of people believe.  But wait until you hear what he thinks angels are.  (Do NOT attempt to drink anything while reading this.  I will not be responsible for ruined computer screens or keyboards.  You HAVE been warned.)

Mankind is unwittingly caught in a war between hidden superhuman factions who select, train, equip their human agents to participate in that war...  There is warring among these beings, indicating they are not all unified.  At the very minimum they are polarized into opposing sides, if not split into numerous independent factions.  Some factions have a strong fascist orientation.

The Nordic aliens are genetically compatible with us, and some of their females have engaged human males for sexual encounters and even long term relationships.  Through interbreeding their genes can enter our gene pool and vice versa.  Therefore some human individuals and bloodlines would have more of their DNA than others, and their angelic alien DNA would likely show under analysis to be basically human, albeit rare and unusual.

So, we could tell that a human had angelic alien DNA because if we analyzed his DNA, we'd find it was... human?

Alrighty then.

We then hear about what these beings are not: these misidentifications include hoaxes (don't be silly), "metaphysical entities," members of the Galactic Federation, and Super Nazis.  So thank heaven for that, at least.

We also get to read lots of stories about alien abductions, many of which include some serious bow-chicka-bow-wow with blond-haired Nordic aliens aboard their spaceships, and which presumably allowed the lucky abductee to claim membership in the Light-Year-High Club.  But then we hear the bad news, which is that the aliens who have visited us, and who have apparently engaged in a great deal of cosmic whoopee with humans, are actually from the shallow end of the angelic gene pool:

The members of the Nordic alien civilization are not all homogenous in standing or understanding.  Composition ranges from a two-tier system of “lower retarded ones” and “higher advanced ones” to caste-like systems with many tiers similar to the Indian caste system.

The retarded members of their kind are the ones who interact with the most advanced of humans.  Why?  Maybe because of their evolutionary closeness, and also because such an interaction could be mutually beneficial.  Despite their seeming superhuman qualities, those aliens who interact most with select humans may, in fact, be the most flawed of their race.

The problem... is that their most flawed ones are not only the creators and users of demiurgic technology, but they are also most involved in human affairs.  This means we suffer their errors, which are graver in consequence than any mistake we could commit, just as our errors are more severe than those possible by animals.  The consequences of these errors and grave transgressions have cascaded back and forth throughout the timeline.  They are now converging toward a nexus point representing the potential for a cataclysmic shift.  Alien factions who were responsible for initiating these consequences are likely the same ones who are now involved in the final outcome.  A thread of continuity exists between the most ancient and modern of human-alien encounters.  The alien disinformation campaign is an effort by one set of such factions to prepare mankind for enthusiastic acceptance of their overt control.

Well, hell.  This is even worse than the Illuminati-in-the-government thing, or the Evil-Reptilian-Alien thing, or even the vaccine-5G-microchip thing.  We're being controlled by mentally-deficient aliens, who can screw things up even worse than plain old humans could?  All because they've come to Earth looking for some hot human/Nordic alien action?

I don't know about you, but I don't like this at all.

There is more on the website, of course, including stuff about the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the North Pole, Adam and Eve, alchemy, dimensional portals, the ether, the Pyramids, zombie computers, and snakes.  I encourage you to peruse it.  I would have read more myself, but it seems a little early in the day to start drinking, and I just don't think I could have managed it without a glass of scotch.

So, anyway, there you have it.  As if we didn't have enough to worry about, now we find out that the rulers of the world are horny blond-haired moronic alien angels, and (worse still) that some of us are descended from them.  I'm guessing I'm not, though.  I am blond, but I've got my family tree pretty well mapped out, and I haven't run into any records that show my great-great-great grandma getting knocked up by the Archangel Derpulus.  That's okay with me, honestly.  If I don't get wings out of the bargain, to hell with it.

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

Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

The attraction of the terrifying

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Babylonian Times) those strange and often scary tales -- like the famous story of the choking Doberman -- were transmitted word-of-mouth and in-person, limiting the speed and scope of their spread.

Now that the world is connected electronically, these bizarre stories can spread like a wildfire.

This has given rise to "creepypasta" -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that spread across the 'web.  (If you're curious, the name comes from "creepy" + "copypasta" -- the latter being a slang term for the practice of copying blocks of text between different social media platforms.)  Some have become pretty famous, and have inspired books and movies; in fact, I've riffed on two creepypasta in my novels, the legend of the Black-Eyed Children (in the Boundary Solution trilogy, beginning with Lines of Sight), and the terrifying tale of Slender Man (in Signal to Noise).

So obviously I have nothing against a good scary story, but a line is crossed when you add, "... and it really happened."  In fact, the topic comes up because of an interesting article by Tom Faber that appeared last week in Ars Technica looking at a specific subcategory of creepypasta -- stories that involve the supposedly supernatural (and terrifying) effects of certain video games.

Not being a gamer myself, I hadn't heard about most of these, but there's no doubt they're pretty scary.  Take, for example, the tale that grew around the Pokémon game "Lavender Town," which has an admittedly eerie soundtrack (you can hear a recording of it on the link provided).  Supposedly, the music contained "high-pitched sonic irregularities" that induced an altered mental state so severe that after playing the game, dozens of children in Japan committed suicide by climbing up on their roofs and throwing themselves off.

Needless to say -- or actually, evidently it does need to be said -- that never happened.  There is no evidence to be had online, from official documents, or in newspapers or television news that gives an iota of credence to it.  Even so, lots of people swear it's all real.  Sometimes these stories become oddly recursive; a game-inspired, supposedly true creepypasta called "Ben Drowned," about an evil spirit trapped in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, became so widespread that a new game -- The Haunted Cartridge -- was published based on it.

So a made-up scary story about a video game that people claimed was real inspired another video game.

Delving through these layers can be tricky sometimes, but what strikes me is how easily people accept that these tales are true.  For a lot of people -- and I reluctantly include myself in this category -- there's a part of us that wants that stuff to be real.  There's something oddly compelling about being frightened, even though if you think about it rationally (which I hope everyone does), there's really nothing at all attractive about a world where ghosts and monsters and zombies exist and video games can make a noise inducing you to kill yourself.

It's like the people, apparently numerous, who think that the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is substantially true.  (I couldn't resist playing with that idea, too, giving rise to my short story "She Sells Seashells" -- which you can read for free at the link -- and I encourage you to do so, because all modesty aside, it's cool and creepy.)  But the question remains about why would you want Cthulhu et al. to exist.  Those mofos are terrifying.  Even the people who worship the Elder Gods in Lovecraft's stories always seem to end up getting eaten or dismembered or converted into Eldritch Slime, so there appears to be no feature of these beings that has any positive aspects for humanity.  Okay, I live in a pretty placid part of the world, where I frequently wish something would happen to liven things up, but even I don't want Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the crew to show up in my back yard.

Despite all this, I still feel the attraction, and I'm at a loss to explain why.  I remember watching scary television and movies as a kid, and not just being entertained but on some level wishing it was real, even though I was well aware of how much more terrifying it would be if it were.  One example that stands out in my memory is the episode of Lost in Space called "Ghost in Space," wherein an invisible creature has arisen from a bog, and Dr. Smith becomes convinced he can communicate with it via Ouija Board.  Okay, watching it now, the whole thing is abjectly ridiculous (although I am still impressed with how they made the footprints of the creature appear in the sand without anything visible there to make them).  But other than being scared, I remember my main reaction was that I would love for something like that to be real.  Because of that, it's still one of the episodes I remember the most fondly, despite how generally incoherent the story is.

So (speaking of incoherent), I'm not even entirely certain what point I'm trying to make, here, other than (1) life would be a lot simpler if people would stop making shit up and claiming it's true, and (2) even people who are diehard skeptics can sometimes have a wide irrational streak.  It's fascinating how attracted we are to things that when you consider them, would be absolutely horrible if they're real.

Yet as the poster in Fox Mulder's office said, "I Want to Believe."

Anyhow, I should wind this up.  Not, of course, because there's anything interesting that I need to deal with.  When the most engaging thing in your immediate vicinity is watching the cows in the field across the road, it's perhaps not surprising that I sometimes feel like a good haunting or invasion by aliens would break up the monotony.

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

Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

Asteroid astrology

I've written more than once about astrology, a slice of woo-woo that has never failed to impress me as the most completely ridiculous model on the market for explaining how the world works.  I mean, really.  Try to state the definition of astrology in one sentence, and you come up with something like the following:

The idea that your personal fate and the course of global events are controlled by the apparent movement of the Sun and planets relative to bunches of stars that are at varying (but extreme) distances from the Earth, patterns which some highly nearsighted ancient Greeks thought looked vaguely like scorpions and rams and lions and weird mythical creatures like "sea-goats."

It definitely falls into the "how could that possibly work?" department, a question that is usually answered with vague verbiage about vibrations and energies and cosmic resonances.

Like I said, all of that is old territory, here at Skeptophilia.  But yesterday, thanks to a loyal reader and frequent contributor, I found out something that I didn't know about astrology; lately, astrologers have been including the asteroids in their chart-drawing and fortune-telling.

Don't believe me?  Listen to this lady, Kim Falconer, who tells us that we should consider the asteroids in our astrological calculations -- but only use the ones we want.  There are too many asteroids, she said, to track them all; "Use the asteroids that have personal meaning to you."

Falconer is right about one thing; there are a great many asteroids out there.  Astronomers currently think there are between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter alone, and that's not counting the ones in erratic or elliptical orbits.  So it would be a lot to track, but it would have the advantage of keeping the astrologers busy for a long time.

As far as which ones to track, though -- this is where Falconer's recommendations get even funnier, because she says we should pay attention to the names of the asteroids.  Concerned about money?  Check out where the asteroids "Abundantia" and "Fortuna" are.  Would you like to find out what changes you can expect in your sex life?  Look for "Eros" and "Aphrodite."  And I'm thinking; where does she think these names came from?  All of them were named by earthly astronomers, more or less at random.  I mean, it's not like the names have anything to do with the actual objects.  For example, here's a photograph of Eros:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Anything less sexy-looking is hard to imagine, especially given all of the craters and pits and warts on its surface.

But that's missing the point, from Falconer's view, and I realize that.  She and her cohort believe that when Auguste Charlois and Gustav Witt discovered the thing way back in 1898 and gave it its name, they somehow were tapping into a Mystical Reservoir of Connectedness and linked it to Quantum Energies of Love.  Or something like that.

But even so, the "choose the asteroids you like" thing more or less comprises drawing up the astrological chart you want and then acting as if what you got is some sort of profound and surprising revelation.  Because, after all, if there are over a million to choose from, there are bound to be some that have names and positions that are favorable to whatever direction you wish your life was taking.  It's a little like drawing up your Tarot card hand by going through the deck and pulling out the cards you like, and arranging them however you want, and claiming that's your reading and that it has deep implications for your future.

Yes, I know that the actual way Tarot cards are read is equally ridiculous.  It was just an analogy, okay?

Anyhow, that's the latest from the world of horoscopes.  But I better wrap this up, because the asteroid Hygiea is currently crossing into the constellation Horologium the Clock, which probably means it's time for me to take a shower or something.

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

Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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

Loop-the-loop

Of all the bizarre and fascinating discoveries physicists have made in the last century and a half, I think the one that twists my brain the most is the effect massive objects have on the space around them.

I use the "twists" metaphor deliberately, because the concept -- commonly called "warped space" -- is that anything with mass deforms the space it's in.  You've probably heard the two-dimensional analogy, to a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline and stretching the fabric downward.  If you then roll a marble across the trampoline, it will follow a deflected path.  Not because the bowling ball is mysteriously attracting the marble; the marble is merely following the contours of the space it's traveling through.

Increase the number of dimensions by one, and you've got a basic idea of what this feature of the universe is like.  We live in a three-dimensional space warped into a fourth dimension, and something passing near a massive object (as with the trampoline analogy, the more massive the object, the greater the effect) will follow a curved path.  Possibly, if the "attractor" is big enough, curved into a closed loop -- like the Moon does around the Earth, and the Earth does around the Sun.

Where it gets even weirder is that the degree of deflection of the moving object is dependent on how fast it's going.  Again, the marble provides a good analogy; a fast-moving marble will not alter its trajectory from a straight line very much, while a slow-moving one might actually fall into the "gravity well" of the bowling ball.  The same is true here in three-dimensional space.  This is why there's such a thing as "escape velocity;" the velocity of an object has to be great enough to escape the curvature of the gravity well it's sitting in, and that velocity gets larger as the "attractor" becomes more massive.

With a black hole, the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.  Put a different way, space around a black hole has been warped so greatly that nothing is moving fast enough to avoid falling in.  Once you get close enough to a black hole to experience that degree of space-time curvature (a point called the "event horizon"), there is no power in the universe that can stop you from falling all the way in and meeting a grim fate called (I kid you not) "spaghettification."

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like.

Why this mind-warping topic comes up is because of a paper that appeared this week in Scientific Reports, describing research by Albert Sneppen, a student at the Niels Bohr Institute, looking at what would happen to light as it passed very near -- but not within -- the event horizon of a massive black hole.  Sneppen came up with a mathematical model showing that it creates an effect so bizarre and unmistakable that it is now being proposed as a way of detecting distant black holes.

Suppose between us and a distant galaxy is a large black hole.  The black hole (being black) is invisible; it can only be seen because of how it interacts with the matter and energy around it.  So the light from the galaxy has to pass near the black hole on its voyage to us.  The particles of light that stray too close follow the curvature of space right into the black hole, as you might expect.  The ones that get close, but not too close, are where things are interesting.

Recall that the Earth follows an elliptical path around the Sun because the Sun is warping space enough, and the Earth is moving slowly enough, that the Earth doesn't slingshot away from the Sun (fortunately for us) but remains "captured," following the shortest path through curvature of the space it's in.  So presumably there is a distance around a massive black hole that would have the same property vis-à-vis light; a distance where light speed is exactly right for it to follow the lines of the intensely curved space it's traveling through and describe a circular (or elliptical) path.

So light at that distance would become trapped, circling the black hole forever.  But what about light from the same distant galaxy that is just a leeeeeetle bit farther away?  And a leeeeetle farther than that?  What Sneppen showed is that this effect would cause the light rays from the galaxy passing progressively farther and farther away from the black hole to make a specific number of loops around the black hole before "escaping."  So of the photons of light from the galaxy that end up after that cosmic loop-the-loop heading our way, some (the ones the farthest away from the black hole to start with) would have circled the black hole only once, some twice, some three times, etc.

What this would do is create multiple images of the same galaxy, strung out in a line.

Check out the drawing by Sneppen's collaborator, Peter Laursen, showing the results of the effect:

So there you have it; this morning's reason to feel very, very small.  I don't know about you, but I think the human species can use a little humility these days,  We need to be reminded periodically that we are tiny beings in an enormous universe, one that is so bizarre that it boggles the mind.  Although I have to say it's impressive that we tiny insignificant beings have begun to understand and explain this bizarreness.  As astronomer Carl Sagan put it, "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

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I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

Unexpected depths

A writer friend of mine on social media asked what I thought was a very interesting question, and one that would be a good topic for this week's Fiction Friday: what is the most memorable line you've ever read?  I've read a good many profound books, but the first thing that came to mind was a line not from a book but from a television show.  In the Doctor Who episode "The Face of Evil," the Fourth Doctor remarks, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they do not alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

The aptness of that quote these days hardly needs to be pointed out.

But there are many others, in books, television, and movies, quotes that somehow stand out for their unexpected depth (sometimes even in otherwise silly settings; the episode "The Face of Evil" was unremarkable in other respects).  Some only gain their punch from the context -- I'm reminded of Eowyn's defiant "I am no man" in Return of the King, immediately before she stabs the King of the Nazgûl right between the eyeballs, and the heartbreaking line at the end of Vanilla Sky when Sofia Serrano says, "I'll see you in the next life, when we both are cats."  Neither has much significance unless you know the story.

But there are a handful of true gems that carry their weight even independent of where they're from.  Here are a few of my choices:

• "Deserves it! I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
• "You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
• "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall." -- Mohandas Gandhi in Gandhi
• "There is no greater agony than having an untold story inside you." -- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
• "Oh, yes, the past can hurt.  But you can either run from it, or learn from it." -- Rafiki in The Lion King
• "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• "Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption
• "Not important?  Blimey.  That's amazing.  You know, in nine hundred years in time and space, I have never met anyone who wasn't important." -- The Eleventh Doctor, Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"
• "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back what you have stolen.  For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great...  You have no power over me." -- Sarah in Labyrinth
• "Live now; make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again." -- Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Inner Light"

Nota bene: If you can watch "The Inner Light" and not ugly cry at the end of it, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  That episode has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on television.

So... there are a few of my favorite profound quotes from fiction.  What are yours?

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

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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