Unknown unknowns

One of my college physics professors made a statement to his class that was mind-boggling in its inaccuracy.  We'd been learning about the subatomic particles, and he was telling us about the smallest pieces of matter known: quarks.  Physicists had given the different types of quarks fanciful names -- up, down, top, bottom, charmed, strange.  His commentary was something of a sneer: "When scientists spend their times giving ridiculous names to physical phenomena, you know there must not be much in the way of new things waiting to be studied."

Even at the time -- I was about twenty -- it seemed humorless and mean-spirited to claim that just because scientists are having a little fun with naming stuff, they're wasting their time playing around rather than engaging in actual science.  Much later, I ran into Lord Kelvin's statement along the same line, that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement."  

The problem was that Kelvin said this in 1900 -- immediately before Einstein and Schrödinger turned all of physics on its head with the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, respectively.

So saying "there's nothing left to study" is not only arrogant, it's entirely inaccurate.  The preposterous implication is that right now we have a good idea of how much is left that we don't know.  It reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld's much-ridiculed statement about "known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns."  Yeah, he could have phrased it a little better, but honestly, he had a point.  There isn't any way to estimate the extent of what we're not even aware that we don't know.  The only thing we can go by is the history of science -- which pretty clearly shows that every time we think we have everything explained, the universe steps in a with a well-aimed dope slap.

I started thinking about all this because of a press release in Science Alert about a mysterious radio source near the center of the Milky Way that has astrophysicists scratching their heads.  To quell the immediate reaction a lot of folks are having, no one at this point is saying anything about aliens, or at least no one with any credibility.  But the behavior of the source is odd enough even without bringing in the Daleks or the Andorians or the Stenza or whoever your favorite extraterrestrial bad guys are.

The radio source is euphoniously named ASKAP J173608.2-321635.  (I wonder if my long-ago physics professor would have approved of that name as sufficiently serious.)  The radio emissions from ASKAP-etc. are odd in a variety of respects.  The source emits radio waves for weeks, then will suddenly "turn off" for a while before just as suddenly beginning to shine again.  The electromagnetic radiation from it is highly polarized -- the waves line up, all vibrating in the same direction, like a bunch of people creating waves in long springs, and everyone oscillating the springs up-and-down rather than each spring moving in some randomly-chosen plane of vibration.

The source was discovered through a collaboration between the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (that's where "ASKAP" comes from) and the  MeerKAT radio telescope, near Cape Town, South Africa (speaking of whimsical names; the "KAT" part of the name stands for "Karoo Array Telescope;" "meer" is Afrikaans for "more."  It also, of course, riffs on the name of the comical little African mammal of the same name).  This isn't the first time this combo has found something strange.  Earlier this year, they found another yet-to-be-explained interstellar object, the aptly-named "Odd Radio Circles" that have bright edges and dimmer interiors, like giant gossamer soap bubbles.

A MeerKAT image of the center of the Milky Way, as viewed in radio wavelengths

Astrophysicists have considered a number of explanations for these strange objects, and so far, none of them have panned out.  "Possible identifications [include] a low-mass star/substellar object with extremely low infrared luminosity, a pulsar with scatter-broadened pulses, a transient magnetar, or a Galactic Center Radio Transient," the research team writes, "[but] none of these fully explains the observations, which suggests that ASKAP J173608.2-321635 may represent part of a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging surveys."

So once again, we're confronted with how little we know.  We've come a long way, there's no doubt about that; our scientific achievements as a species are pretty damn impressive, especially considering that serious research has only been going on for a couple of centuries of the tens of thousands of years humans have been at least somewhat technological.  But there will always be more mysteries to solve, more puzzles to put together, more questions to ask.

I'll end with a quote from astrophysicist John Bahcall, whose research into the behavior and properties of neutrinos in the 1960s gave us a new window into why stars shine:

I do not personally want to believe that we already know the equations that determine the evolution and fate of the universe; it would make life too dull for me as a scientist…  I hope, and believe, that the Space Telescope might make the Big Bang cosmology appear incorrect to future generations, perhaps somewhat analogous to the way that Galileo’s telescope showed that the earth-centered, Ptolemaic system was inadequate...  Every time we get slapped down, we should thank Mother Nature -- because we're about to learn something important.

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

London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

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

A genetic mixed bag

One of the subtlest features of the evolutionary model, and one often misunderstood even by people who understand and accept natural selection, is what we mean by "selective advantage."

On the surface, it's simple enough; any inheritable feature that confers longer, healthier life or more (and more vigorous) offspring.  The problem is, there are two twists on phenotype that make this a bit more complicated than it seems at first.

The first is that physical expression of genes is seldom unequivocally either good or bad for the organism.  The "unequivocally bad" ones are often discussed in introductory biology classes because they are simple; Tay-Sachs disease, for example, caused by inheriting a particular recessive allele from both parents, kills the brain cells and usually causes death by age four.  But most traits have good features and bad, so the question becomes, "Is this good for the organism on balance?"  One instance is our upright posture and bipedal gait.  It confers some advantages -- two of the more commonly-cited ones are leaving our hands free to manipulate tools, and giving us greater sight-distance for spotting predators.  (Nota bene: no one's sure which of those advantages led to our ancestors walking upright, or if it was something else entirely; saying "these are some of the advantages" is not the same as saying "these were the advantages that drove selection for this trait.")  The downside of upright posture, though -- given that we still have the basic spine shape as our knuckle-walking forebears -- is that humans have some of the worst lower back problems to be found in the animal world, with the only ones having it worse being Bassett hounds and dachsunds.

And the low-slung backs of Bassetts and wiener dogs are hardly the fault of natural selection.

Another complicating factor is pleiotropy -- which is that many genes have multiple effects, often only loosely related to each other.  The classic example of pleiotropy is the connection between coat and eye color, and inner ear development, in cats.  White, blue-eyed cats are frequently deaf -- the same gene that blocks pigment formation (and causes the white coat and blue eyes) hinders development of the cochlea, resulting in deafness.

What makes it even more complex is that sometimes a gene can have a drastically different set of effects depending on whether you have one copy (are heterozygous) or two (are homozygous).  It was long a puzzle of evolutionary science why some deleterious recessive genes are so common.  If having two copies of a gene kills you, effectively removing two copies of the allele from the gene pool, you'd expect the frequency of the allele to decrease over time.  So why do some really nasty genes stick around?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Two examples where we've actually figured out the answer are the genes that cause cystic fibrosis (a horrible lung disease which is one of the more common serious genetic disorders in Caucasians) and sickle-cell anemia (an equally-dreadful blood disorder common in sub-Saharan Africans and African Americans).  While having two copies of either of those genes is certainly awful, having only one is beneficial, giving the individual an advantage over both the ones who have two bad copies and the ones who have two good copies of the allele.  In the case of cystic fibrosis, being heterozygous gives infants a significantly lower chance of contracting infantile diarrheal disease, which in cultures with limited access to medical care is a major killer of babies.  In sickle-cell anemia, having one copy of the allele gives you resistance to malaria -- so in malaria-ridden areas, homozygous recessive people die of sickle-cell anemia, and homozygous dominant people die of malaria.  Heterozygous individuals escape both.

Even seemingly unimportant genes can sometimes have unexpected effects.  It was long thought that the blood-type alleles -- nicknamed A, B, and O -- had no effect on anything other than blood transfusion compatibility.  It was recently discovered that the O blood type allele, which is the most common, confers resistance to smallpox.  So in areas that had smallpox epidemics, the individuals who were type A (the most susceptible allele) were much more likely to die, leaving the type Os at a significant selective advantage.  A map of the incidence of smallpox in Europe and a map of the frequency of the O blood type allele line up almost perfectly.

The reason all this comes up is because of a paper last week in the journal Development that looked at a rather horrifying genetic disorder called holoprosencephaly, where something interferes with prenatal forebrain development.  Affected children end up with malformed brains and multiple facial disfigurements -- cleft palate, cleft lip, and eyes that are extremely close together (in fact, sometimes they're fused).  These babies almost always die in utero.

Geneticists at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine found two mutations that influenced the development of holoprosencephaly, which are called ULK4 and PTTG1.  Both of these genes regulate expression of the ultra-important sonic hedgehog gene, which is responsible for organ formation, nervous system development, and such fundamental features as symmetrical limb placement.  The researchers found that these two genes prevent holoprosencephaly, which you'd think would be enough of an advantage that it would eventually lead them to becoming fixed (everyone in the population being homozygous) except for rare cases of mutations.

Where it gets more interesting is that the researchers found that ULK4 and PTTG1 have other effects besides stopping holoprosencephaly in its tracks.  ULK4 is associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder -- and PTTG1 is linked to cancer.

So like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, it's not as simple as saying "this allele is the good one, and this is the bad one."  And because both of the negative effects of ULK4 and PTTG1 affect individuals later in life, very likely after they have made the decision whether to have kids, the positive effect (surviving gestation) far outweighs the negative ones, at least from an evolutionary standpoint.

As I used to tell my AP Biology classes, "evolution doesn't really give a damn what happens to you after you've successfully procreated."  Harsh, but true in its essence.

So genetics and evolution are, like most things, a mixed bag.  They're a lot more complicated than they may seem at first, enough that it's kind of impressive researchers have been able to figure out how they work.  Considering what could potentially go wrong with development, I'm kind of blown away by how often things go right.  When my first wife found out she was pregnant, I spent the next eight or so months worrying, because I knew enough genetics to realize how bad things could be.  When my older son was born -- completely normal, except that he looks exactly like me, which is unfortunate but not fatal -- it was an incredible relief.

It may not be true that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," but sometimes it can be a bit stress-inducing.

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

London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

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

Birds of unusual size

It's been a while since we've had anything here at Skeptophilia of a purely cryptozoological nature, partly because the ongoing sightings of Bigfoot and Nessie and the Chupacabra and Mokele-Mbémbé and the rest of the crew have been pretty pedestrian of late.  More anecdotal eyewitness accounts, more blurry photographs, zero in the way of hard evidence.  Even one of the recent sightings from Loch Ness -- supposedly showing the Monster's dark, shadowy shape swimming just underneath the water -- was kind of underwhelming, and in fact it took me about five watchings, and having one of the people in the comments section tell me when and where in the video it occurred, for me even to see anything other than a placid Scottish lake on a cloudy day.  When I finally spotted it, it turned out to be a vague little dark smudge moving slowly from right to left, and that was about it.

One of the commenters said, "Oh gosh I'm never going to sleep again after watching this!"  Well, all I can say is it'd take a good bit more than this to keep me awake.  Maybe Nessie knocking on my window at night, or something.  I dunno.

In any case, just yesterday I ran into a cryptid sighting that was curious from a couple of perspectives.  It was reported at Stan Gordon's site UFO Anomalies Zone, which is not just about UFOs but all sorts of Fortean stuff, and allegedly occurred this past April.  A woman in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania reports being dive-bombed by a giant flying creature that sounds more like a pterodactyl than a bird.  She was arriving at an office for an appointment, and beforehand was sitting in her car in the parking lot talking to a friend on her phone, when an enormous creature soared overhead -- so large the shadow looked like a low-flying plane.  It glided up toward the roof of the office building, and landed on the top of the chimney.  Alarmed but intrigued, the woman told her friend what she'd seen, then said she was getting out of her car and to see if she could get a photo.

Here's how Stan Gordon describes what happened next:

[T]he giant bird looked down at her and made eye contact with what she told me were piercing fiery eyes.  The eyes were large and round even from the distance up on the roof.  They were vivid and green-red and orange in color.

The witness stated that the size of the creature was the most amazing thing that she had ever seen.  The moment it looked down she realized that it had made direct eye contact with her she knew she had to run.  She immediately turned and ran in panic and disbelief.  As she turned the corner, she looked back for a second.  The huge, winged creature was gliding toward her at an angle.  It was only about eight feet behind her, and its talons were out.  The woman made it to the door and rushed into the private office and yelled that she was being attacked by a huge bird.

It had a wingspan of between eight and ten feet, she said, and was brown in color -- but she didn't see any feathers, and wasn't sure it had feathers.

What makes this even more curious is that Gordon contacted the man with whom the woman had the appointment, and he confirmed that she had burst into the office in hysterics, saying she was being chased by a giant bird -- and then said that he, too, had seen some kind of giant winged creature in the area on several occasions, but always at a distance.  And he said that after the woman left her appointment, he'd gone outside.  The creature was gone, but he found that several bricks had been dislodged from the top of the chimney, and had fallen onto the roof and onto the ground below.

Edward Julius Detmold, "The Roc Carrying Away an Elephant," from his illustrations of The Second Voyage of Sinbad (1924) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What strikes me as the weirdest thing about this is the location.  I don't know if you've ever been to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, but it is not some kind of remote area with wide-open spaces, few people, and lots of places that a big critter could hide.  It's more or less contiguous with the greater Philadelphia area, and is the third most populous county in the entire state.  (73rd most populous county in the United States as a whole, in fact.)  I've been through that area several times and although there are some farms and green spaces, mostly what I remember is strip malls.  It's kind of solid suburbia between Philadelphia and Reading along I-76.  There might be other places less likely to be inhabited by enormous pterodactyls, but Montgomery County has to be near the top of the list.

But I guess Montgomery County is some kind of hotspot for "thunderbird" sightings.  Stan Gordon thinks they come down from the Poconos to hunt for deer.  I don't know about that, but the only thing I can think of that would be scarier than seeing a giant pterodactyl flying over a strip mall would be seeing a giant pterodactyl flying over a strip mall carrying a deer in its talons.

However terrifying it would be, this once again brings up the question of why other people have all the luck.  Here I am, out in an old house on wooded acreage in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere in upstate New York.  You'd think my name would be on the "People to Visit" list of every cryptid in the eastern half of the country.  Maybe you're thinking, "Yes, but you have two large dogs.  Maybe they keep the cryptids at bay."  To which I respond: you haven't met my dogs.  Lena is sweet, gentle, friendly, and has the IQ of a Pop-Tart.  If a thunderbird picked me up bodily out of our back yard and carried me away, I'd lay odds Lena would sleep right through it.  Guinness the Fierce Pit Bull, on the other hand, is such a complete wuss that he'd hide from a fluffy bunny, much less some humongous carnivorous Cretaceous holdover.  

So counting on them to protect me would kind of be a losing proposition.

Anyhow, I'll issue a challenge: if there are any cryptids reading this, my back yard is at your disposal.  That also goes for any aliens, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and whatnot.  If you're still worried about the dogs, even after the preceding paragraph, I promise to keep 'em inside.  Come on down, and bring your friends.  It'll be a party.  I hope you don't mind if I take pics, though.  After all my disparaging comments about anecdotal evidence, you can't blame me for wanting something more concrete.

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

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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

The name game

This week's Fiction Friday bounces off a question I was asked recently about how I choose names for my characters.  It's an interesting question, and one for which I have no ready answer, which of course won't stop me from burbling on about it for a while.

Most of the time, characters in my stories seem to come with their names pre-assigned.  I know that's not literally true -- but that's what it feels like.  One of the main characters of my work-in-progress, In the Midst of Lions, is named Mary Hansard.  Why?  Beats me. That's just who she is.  It's hard for me to imagine Mary with any other name.

As a brief aside, Mary Hansard is also one of those odd instances when a character kind of waltzes in from offstage and more or less takes over.  She wasn't in my first outlining of the story; but when some of the other characters are walking through a park and run into her, she tells them, "I've been waiting for you."  Why?  Who is she, and how did she know that the others -- who at the point are complete strangers -- would be there?  I was as taken aback by her sudden appearance as (I hope) my readers will be.  I honestly don't know where she came from, but she's turned into one of my favorite characters ever.

Sometimes writing seems more like "channeling" than it does like "inventing."

In any case, back to names.  I think they're pretty critical.  There's no way that the antagonist of C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader could have been quite as weaselly as he was had he not been named Eustace Clarence Scrubb.  Interesting, though, that when his character "reformed" -- and you may recall that he was the protagonist of The Silver Chair, and did quite a commendable job as the good guy -- they started calling him "Scrubb" instead of "Eustace."  "Scrubb," while not a last name I would choose, sounds kind of gruff and hale-fellow-well-met, as opposed to "Eustace," which it's hard to say without whining.  (My apologies to any Eustaces in the studio audience.)

I have only once that I recall completely changed a character's name mid-stream -- in my mytho-fantasy novel The Fifth Day.  The antagonist, who might be one of the most intense, tough-minded hard-asses I've ever written, started out as Tim Spillman.  My writing partner, the wonderful Cly Boehs -- with whom I've been meeting weekly for critique sessions for almost twenty years, and whose judgment I trust implicitly -- said the name just didn't work for the character.  It was too genteel.  And she was right.  Tim Spillman became Jackson Royce, and only when he had that name did he really take off as a character, hard-ass-wise.

Naming conventions in different genres can sometimes engender unintentional humor.  Character names in space-epic type science fiction often contain unpronounceable combinations of consonants, and usually involve apostrophes.  "Ah, my arch-enemy, G'filte of M'nshvitz Five!  It is I, your nemesis, Sh'l'mil of Oy'g'valt!"  Sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels usually rely more on accents, and quasi-Celtic sounding names:  "And then, Lünàavórne drew out the Sacred Sword Gínsü and raised it aloft, praying to Alávúnìël, the God of Random Diacritical Marks."

This cover is not my creation, but I wish it was.  It's from a cover-parody Twitter account called Paperback Paradise who you all must follow immediately.

And then there's romance novels, in which the guys usually have strong names with blatant sexual overtones, such as "Dirk Hardbody," and the women have names that sound like they came from the torrid dreams of a horny seventeenth-century English teenager.  A former member of a writers' group I belonged to was writing a contemporary romance about a perfectly ordinary (although of course drop-dead beautiful) American woman, and the main character was named -- I am not making this up -- "Royalle de Tremontaine."

Which brings up one of the funniest riffs Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever did -- "The Many Names of David Ryder," from the episode "Space Mutiny."  Do not, I repeat, do not try to drink anything while watching this.  You have been warned.

So, you can see that you can go a little off the deep end, character-name-wise.  I tend to keep it simple, unless I'm deliberately shooting for humorous effect.  It helps that I spent 32 years as a teacher, and each year I had about a hundred new sources for names.  (And if you take a look at some of the names of the villains in my novels, it might narrow down the guesses as to which students I disliked the most... heh-heh-heh.)

In any case, this is probably not much help, if you're a writer struggling with name choices.  So here are a few more down-to-earth recommendations:

• Think about what your character's personality is like, and choose accordingly.  First impressions in novels are often formed on the basis of the character's name.  If that name then is at odds with who the character is, like with Tim Spillman/Jackson Royce, it will ring false through the whole story. The bottom line is that readers will respond differently to a Ryan than they will to an Elmer -- as unfair as that may seem to the Elmers of the world.
• Don't go overboard, even if you're writing genre fiction.  The point is to keep your readers immersed in your story, not to have them read the name and snicker -- if that happens, they've been jerked out of the world you're trying to create.  Follow the conventions of the genre, but don't overstep the line, or you'll end up in inadvertent self-parody.
• That said, make your names memorable.  You want people to think about your characters even when they're not reading your book.  Consider some of the most-recognized character names out there -- Bilbo Baggins, Ebenezer Scrooge, Scarlett O'Hara, Dr. River Song, Hercule Poirot, Elinor Dashwood, Jean-Luc Picard, Inigo Montoya, Atticus Finch, Sherlock Holmes, Luke Skywalker... each one of those has something a little different about it that makes it stand out, but is not so odd that it seems ridiculous.  (Contrast that to the protagonist of one of my all-time favorite books, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.  His name is George Orr, but that is such an unmemorable name that despite having read the book several times, I had to look it up just now because I couldn't remember it.)

So give it some thought.  Think about people you know, look in telephone directories and baby name books, and be creative.  Your characters deserve to have names that match their personalities -- don't underestimate the power that a wonderful, or abysmal, name choice will have on your readers' impressions of your story.

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

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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

The voices of the Aztecs

When a region is conquered, one of the first things the conquerors usually do is to suppress (or explicitly outlaw) indigenous languages.

One reason is purely practical -- to eliminate the possibility that the subjugated group can communicate with each other without being understood.  The other, however, is more insidious.  Language is a huge part of culture, and if you want to destroy the native society (or, more accurately, replace it with your own, something euphemistically called '"assimilation"), you must eliminate the most vital part of that culture -- how its members communicate with each other, how they express poetry and ethnic history and local knowledge.

Destroy the language, and you've struck at the heart of the culture itself.

An excellent (if tragic) case in point is Australia.  It is the home of over three hundred languages, 170 of which are indigenous.  (One of the reasons why indigenous Australians dislike the word "Aborigine" about as much as Native Americans do "Indian;" it implies the wildly-incorrect assessment that the entire indigenous population is a single culture.)  What is appalling, though, is that even if you exclude English -- the most widely-spoken language in Australia -- none of the top-ten-most-spoken languages in Australia are indigenous.  (In order, they are: Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian, Tagalog, Hindi, Spanish, and Korean.)  Only a quarter of a percent of Australian citizens speak an indigenous language at home.  Of the 170 indigenous languages that still survive (i.e. with at least some native speakers), all but fifteen are classified as severely endangered, with virtually no one learning them as children.  All of the speakers of those remaining 155 unique languages are elderly, and with the passing of that generation, they'll be gone forever except as a curiosity amongst linguists.

Not all indigenous languages are in quite that bad a shape.  One somewhat more hopeful case is Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs in central Mexico.  The clash of the Spanish and native cultures in the Americas is rightly depicted as the worst of the worst -- between the conquering armies and the self-righteous (and often just as violent) Christian missionaries, only a few decades after conquest there usually wasn't much left of the original language, art, music, and religion.  In the case of central Mexico, however, the conquerors took a more nuanced approach, introducing the Latin alphabet but allowing native speakers to continue using their own language.  In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the missionaries did a decent job writing Nahuatl grammars and dictionaries, and during that time there were hundreds of works written in the language, including administrative documents as well as poetry, stories, histories, and religious codices.  Most striking of all -- and, as far as I know, unique in the history of contact between conquerors and the conquered -- in 1536, only twenty years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco was founded, where bilingual classes were offered to teach Nahuatl to the missionaries and Spanish to the natives.  It wasn't until 1696 that King Charles II of Spain outlawed Nahuatl, but by that time enough of the Mexican Spanish upper-crust spoke Nahuatl themselves that it was pretty much too late to do anything about it.

As a result, there are still 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl in Mexico.  Not bad, considering the moribund nature of most of the indigenous languages in the world.

The reason this comes up is because of a discovery that was the subject of a paper in Seismological Research Letters a couple of weeks ago that was about the intersection between historical linguistics and another fascination of mine -- geology.  A recently-deciphered fifty-page codex in Nahuatl turns out to describe a series of massive earthquakes that hit central Mexico between 1460 and 1542, including one that triggered a flood resulting in the drowning of eighteen hundred warriors.

The codex itself was created by Aztec tlacuilos ("those who write with painting") and is made up of pictograms that predate the adoption of the Latin alphabet by speakers of Nahuatl.  One of the most striking is a combination of four projections like the vanes of a windmill around a central circle, followed by a rectangle filled with dots.  The windmill-like symbol is the pictogram for the word ollin, meaning "movement;" the rectangle is tlalli, meaning "earth."  Taken together, it means "earthquake."  Further, if the central circle is open, it indicates that the quake happened during the daytime, and if it's closed, it happened at night.

You can see the composite pictogram for "earthquake" in the lower right; all the way at the bottom is a depiction of the unfortunate warriors who drowned in the resulting flood.

As far as the timekeeping, the Aztecs -- like many Central American cultures -- were obsessive about the calendar, and had a 52-year calendrical cycle represented by the arrangement of four symbols -- tecpatl (knife), calli (house), tochtli (rabbit) and acatl (reed) -- arranged in thirteen different permutations.  Decoding that system allowed researchers to figure out that the earthquake that killed the warriors took place in 1507.

At night.

It's simultaneously fascinating and sad how few of the world's cultures have left significant traces for us to study, and of course that's largely humanity's own fault.  For example, the campaign of suppression by the Romans two-and-a-half millennia ago eliminated virtually every last trace of Etruscan -- there are over thirteen thousand inscriptions in Etruscan known to archaeologists, and they've been able to decipher only a fraction of them.  I can only hope that the endangered languages of our own time are treated more kindly.  What a pity it would be if in three thousand years, of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken, the only ones our descendants will be able to read are Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

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

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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

Whist, muslin, and bumble-puppy

It's been a while since I've posted on anything of a purely etymological nature, which is kind of a shame.  I'm a bit of a fanatic for words, especially odd words with curious origins.  This has the result that a trip to a dictionary or encyclopedia is never quick for me.  I go to look something up, get distracted by another entry, and then that reminds me of something else to look up, and I'm off on a two-hour birdwalk when I had intended to spend five minutes looking up a definition.  Ah, the pain of being a language nerd.

Speaking of birdwalks: the word "apricot" has taken a rather circuitous path to get to English.  Who knew?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ian Alexander, Apricot Etymology Map, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend and referred to an individual as being a "muckety-muck," and I was immediately accused of making that word up.  I protested that I did not do any such thing.  I've heard the expression "high muckety-muck" since I was a kid; it was one of my mom's pet expressions for someone who was in charge and whose assumption of the mantle of responsibility had turned him/her into a puffed up, arrogant twit.  Now, I was up front with my friend that it was entirely within the realm of possibility that my mom made it up, but that I'd see if I could find out for sure.  So I went to the Linguists' Bible -- the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology -- and lo and behold, she didn't.

The term apparently comes from the trade language Chinook, which was a composite pidgin used by members of various tribes in the Pacific Northwest to communicate, since their home languages were mutually unintelligible.  The Chinook phrase hiu mukamuk, meaning "a man with plenty to eat," got brought into English as "high muckety-muck" with the overtones of someone using his affluence or influence for self-aggrandizement.

I've always found such things fascinating, and so I have become something of a collector for obscure word origins.  I still haven't lived down with my family members the fact that I knew that "juggernaut" came from the name of a god in Hindi (Jaganath), and therefore is not a half-cognate to "astronaut" (which comes from Latin words meaning "star sailor").  The fact that "ignorant" and "agnostic" are cognates always makes me smile a little, and probably would bring an outright laugh from any religious folks -- "i" and "a" both mean "not," and gnosis is the Greek word for "knowledge."  To fire a salvo in the other direction, however, remember that the stock phrase of the stage magician, "hocus pocus" (originally "hocus pocus dominocus"), comes from the Latin phrase hoc est corpus domini -- "This is the Body of the Lord," the words used during the Catholic mass before communion.  Ha.  Take that.

My tendency to lose focus as soon as I open up the ODEE means, however, that looking up a word origin never proceeds in a straight line.  During my recent zigzag path through the Oxford, for example, I discovered another type of cloth that comes from a Middle Eastern city name.  I knew that "gauze" comes from Gaza, and "damask" comes from Damascus, but who knew that "muslin" came from Mosul?  Not me, or not until this week.

And then, there's my favorite new word, which I will find a way to work into a conversation soon.  "Ingurgitate."  Meaning "to swallow greedily."  From the Latin gurges, meaning "whirlpool." 

I also stumbled upon "bumble-puppy."  This charming word doesn't refer to a particularly clumsy dog, but (direct quote), "an unscientific game of whist."  This then necessitated looking up what "whist" was, and I gather from the definition of that word that it's a kind of card game (whose name, apparently, comes from Old Norse).  Card games generally make as much sense to me as integral calculus does to a second grader, so I doubt I'd be able to tell a scientific from an unscientific game of whist in any case.  ("Bumble-puppy" itself, I hasten to add, was marked "origin unknown.")

Then I found that "coracle" -- a little round boat -- wasn't a Latin word, as I expected from the "-acle" ending -- it's from the Welsh cwrwgl, meaning, of all things, "a little round boat."  The Welsh word looks unpronounceable to folks who don't speak the language, but it bears mention that /w/ is a vowel in Welsh (pronounced a bit like the vowel sound in the word "moon").  So cwrwgl would be pronounced "cooroogul" -- making the connection to "coracle" a little more obvious.

And last -- the first recorded use of the word "meringue" was in an English manuscript in 1706.  Sounds French, doesn't it?  I'd have thought so.  I guess it's not, or at least doesn't appear to be.  The ODEE puts it in with "bumble-puppy" as "origin unknown," and given that its first attestation is in England in the early eighteenth century, a French origin doesn't seem likely.

Honestly, none of this information is of the slightest use, but it's amusing and curious, and that's enough for me any day.  Can't be deathly serious all the time, or even most of the time.  Remember that next time you're playing a fast-moving game of bumble-puppy while ingurgitating meringue.

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

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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

Grace under pressure

In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert. She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year.  But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.

What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert.  She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall.  From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone.  It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.

This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names.  She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame.  And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.

She completely fell apart.  She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps.  It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch.  She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.

It was simply awful to watch.  I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me.  I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but nearly thirty years later, I still remember that night.  (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)

I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure."  It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists.  In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point.  Too much pressure, and performance tanks.  There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids.  The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point.  When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles.  And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.

Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.

What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved.  How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for?  Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do.  You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.

But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study just published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.

So do monkeys.

In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff.  And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.

The authors describe the experiments as follows:

Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle).  The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach.  After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target.  The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.

And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor.  What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.

So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history.  This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way.  That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright.  My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was.  I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame.  But I definitely still had moments when I'd think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up.  Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece. 

One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky).  I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded.  I still haven't quite recovered from that moment.

As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work.  Alcohol didn't make me less nervous, it just made me sloppier.  I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects.  Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.

Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do.  They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse).  So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.

So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day.  Monkeys also choke under pressure.  Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication.  For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so.  It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.

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

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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