The odds of creation

In today's contribution from the Department of Specious Statistics, the owner of a biblical timeline business and self-proclaimed mathematician has stated that she has calculated the likelihood of the biblical creation story being wrong as "less than 1 in 479 million."

Margaret Hunter, who owns Bible Charts and Timelines of Duck, West Virginia, stated in an interview, "I realized the twelve items listed in the Genesis creation account are confirmed by scientists today as being in the correct order, starting with light being separated from darkness, plants coming before animals and ending with man.  Think of the problem like this.  Take a deck of cards.  Keep just one suit—let’s say hearts.  Toss out the ace.  Hand the remaining twelve cards to a one year old child.  Ask him/her to hand you the cards one at a time.  In order.  What are the chances said toddler will start with the two and give them all to you in order right up to the king?"

Not very high, Hunter correctly states.  "Being a mathematician, I like thinking about things like this," she says.  "Moses had less than one chance in 479 million of just correctly guessing [the sequence of the creation account].  To me, the simplest explanation is Moses got it straight from the Creator."

Righty-o.  This just brings up a few questions in my mind, to wit:

1. Are you serious?
2. Maybe you "like thinking about mathematics," but you seem to know fuck-all about science.
3. There's a town called "Duck, West Virginia?" 

I have to give her one thing; she got the odds of toddler-mediated correct card-ordering right.  For any twelve different objects, the number of possible combinations is 12!  (For non-mathematicians, this isn't just me saying the previous sentence excitedly.  12!, read as "twelve factorial," is 12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 479,001,600.)

 

However, the major problem with this is that we can all take a look at the events in the biblical creation story, and see immediately that Moses didn't get them right.  Here, according to the site Christian Answers, is the order of creation:

1. the Earth
2. light
3. day & night
4. air
5. water
6. dry land
7. seed-bearing plants with fruit
8. the Sun, Moon, and stars
9. water creatures
10. birds
11. land animals (presumably birds don't count)
12. humans

One immediate problem I see is that there was day and night three days before the Sun was created, which seems problematic to me, as the following photograph illustrates:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But of course, the problems don't end there.  Birds before the rest of "land animals?"  Plants before the Sun and Moon?  The plants are actually the ones on the list that are the most wildly out of order -- seed-bearing plants didn't evolve until the late Devonian, a long time after "water creatures" (the Devonian is sometimes called "the Age of Fish," after all), and an even longer time (about 4.5 billion years, to be precise) after the formation of the Sun.  Humans do come in the correct place, right there at the end, but the rest of it seems like kind of a hash.

So even if we use Hunter's mathematics, we run up against the unfortunate snag that if putting the twelve events of creation in the right order has a 1 in 479,001,600 likelihood of happening by chance, then the likelihood of putting them in the wrong order by chance is 479,001,599 in 479,001,600.  Which is what happened.  Leading us to the inevitable conclusion, so well supported by the available hard evidence, that Moses was just making shit up.

You know, I really wish you creationists would stop even pretending that this nonsense is scientific.  Just stick with your "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" approach, because every time you dabble your toes in the Great Ocean of Science, you end up getting knocked over by a wave and eating a mouthful of sand.  And it's becoming kind of embarrassing to watch, frankly.  Thank you.

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

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

Psychic genomics

Before I start today's post, allow me to begin with a disclaimer: I am not claiming psychic abilities are impossible.  I am not hostile to any attempts to demonstrate their existence scientifically.  In fact, I would love it if all of the claims were true, because it would be wonderful fun to telekinetically control Tucker Carlson while he's on the air and make him unable to do anything but sing the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants over and over, or put a deadly and horrific curse on Mitch McConnell so that he suddenly develops a soul or something.

But as my grandma was fond of saying, wishin' don't make it so.  In science the usual progression of things is (1) produce unequivocal evidence that the phenomenon you've observed actually exists, (2) find correlations between that phenomenon and whatever you believe is causing it, and (3) show that those correlations actually do represent causation.

Polish "psychic" Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors, which totally wasn't connected to her fingers by a piece of thread or anything (ca. 1909) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unfortunately, a lot of psychic researchers get the whole thing backwards, which is a little maddening.  Take the story I read yesterday in Mystery Wire about some research by the rather notorious Dean Radin, who has been for decades trying to put psychic stuff unequivocally on a scientific footing.  While, like I said, I have no problem with this as a general goal, much about what Radin does sounds an awful lot like assuming your conclusion and then casting about for incidental evidence to support what you already believed was true.

Turns out Radin was the co-author of a paper in Elsevier called "Genetics of Psychic Ability: A Pilot Case-Control Exome Sequencing Study," that basically looked at genome sequencing people who self-reported a family history of psychic abilities and compared those sequences to people who self-reported no psychic abilities in their family heritage.  And they found differences.

That, unfortunately, constitutes about the sum total of their findings, but Radin et al. proceeded to crow that they'd found a genetic basis for psychic ability.  But amongst the (many) problems, here are a few that jump out right away:

• Out of a sample size of 1,000, only thirteen people reported a family history of psychic stuff.  They then had to actively look for thirteen people who didn't, to use as a control.  This seems like an awfully small sample size from which to draw such a profound conclusion.
• There was no indication that they ruled out other reasons for the similarities.  Given that claims of psychic abilities have at least some tendency to be culture-dependent, isn't it at least possible that the common gene sequences they found were due to similar ethnic background?
• More reputable crowd-based human genomic studies -- such as the one being conducted by 23 & Me -- are still hesitant to assume the commonalities and differences they find in the DNA are causative of phenotype.  Due to the phenomenon of pleiotropy (one gene, many effects) and complicating factors like epigenetics, the most I've seen them say is that (after hundreds of thousands of sequences analyzed) "you have a higher than average likelihood of having trait X."  (Such as when I was told that I am likely to have hair that photo-bleaches in the sun -- which turns out to be true.)
• From their study, they concluded that being genetically psychic is the "wild type" and that we non-psychics are the mutants.  Why, with a grand total of 26 people to compare, they decided this I can't tell, and that's even after reading the actual paper.  Seems to me it's more along the lines of "the modern scientific approach has blunted our perception of the mystical oneness of reality that we once had in the past" stuff that you hear so often from these types.
• As I mentioned earlier, there has yet to be any sort of scientifically admissible evidence that psychic abilities exist, so looking for an underlying cause seems to be a tad premature.

Then, unfortunately, Radin launches off into the ionosphere during an interview with Mystery Wire's writer George Knapp.  He describes another "experiment" (I hesitate even to dignify it by that name) in which a supposed double-blind experiment showed that people who drank tea that had been blessed felt happier than ones who had drunk unblessed tea.  As if this weren't enough, Radin comes up with an inadvertently hilarious explanation:

So we used a little plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, which is in the mustard family.  So it’s got [sic] a little weed.  And a little weed is interesting because its genome was sequenced before the human genome.  And it turns out that like most living creatures around the world have very similar DNA.  [sic again]  So if this plant has a disease that’s genetically based it has an analogue in humans.  [Nota bene: This is where I started laughing.]  So the plants are used for studying genetic diseases without using humans for it.  [NB:  No, they're not.]  So, it also turns out that there are various mutations that are understood about this plant.  And in particular, all living systems on earth have a protein called cryptochrome.  So cryptochrome is interesting because it is a protein that is thought to have quantum properties.  [NB: All molecules have quantum properties.  That's kind of what "quantum property" means -- the behavior of matter and energy on extremely small scales.]  So we thought, okay, let’s get an Arabidopsis plant, that is a particular mutation where it overexpresses cryptochrome, so when there’s blue light on it, the cryptochrome is activated, it overexpresses, it grows more.  So we thought, well, maybe that would be an interesting target, to use for intention, because we think there may be a relationship between observing quantum systems, in this case of protein, and the response to that system.  So again, under double blind conditions, the Buddhist monks have treated water, they have the same water that is not treated, the seeds are grown into two water mediums.  And then there’s a variety of different measures you can take.  One of which is called a hypocotyl.  So the hypocotyl is the point where the stem begins from the seed up to the beginning of the leaves.  So if it’s short and fat, it means that it’s a healthy plant, because it’s not using all of its energy to try to reach the surface or turn upside down or something.  So short fat hypocotyl, we did nine repetitions of the experiment and got extremely significant differences, terms of magnitude is only a matter of a couple of millimeters. [sic]  But so many experiments in such precise results, we can tell there was a really significant difference in growth, better growth with the treated water or the blessed water.

Yeesh.  A hypocotyl a "couple of millimeters" longer constitutes "extremely significant results"?  That rule out all other possible factors, including natural variability and the difficulty of measuring the stem of a small plant to millimeter accuracy?

And as an aside, beginning every other sentence with the word "So" is almost as annoying as the people who use "like" as, like, a punctuation in, like, every, like, thing they say.  What it does not do is make you come across as an articulate intellectual.

Anyhow, I encourage you to read the Mystery Wire article, and (especially) the original paper, which is helpfully included therein.  See if you think I'm being unwarrantedly harsh.  And it's not that I expect scientists -- or anyone, really -- to be completely unbiased; they obviously can't start out from the standpoint that all possible explanations are on equal footing, and they understandably have at least some intellectual and emotional investment in showing their own hypotheses to be correct.

But to say this study lacks dispassionate objectivity is a colossal understatement.  I do have respect for people who investigate fringe phenomena from a scientific standpoint -- the work of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK comes to mind -- but unfortunately, this one ain't it.

So back to the drawing board.  I guess I'll have to keep waiting for McConnell's soul to appear and for Carlson to humiliate himself completely in front of millions of viewers.  Pity, that.

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

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!]

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!]