Stories in music

I was driving to work a couple of days ago, listening to classical music on satellite radio, and I heard Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lennart Sikkema, Canyon River Tree (165872763), CC BY 3.0]

Pretty cool piece of music, but to me the fifth and final movement is something really special.  It's called "Cloudburst" and is a musical depiction of a thunderstorm in the desert.

And the thought occurred to me that you don't need words to tell a story, which I thought would be an interesting topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  Grofé gives us a picture in sounds -- the approach of the storm, lightning, thunder, wind -- then its subsidence (and just like in a real storm, afterward you can still hear the thunder in the distance as it recedes).

This is a pretty well-known piece of music, and is far from the only one that tells a story using music.  Another famous one is Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, depicting the devil playing the fiddle and summoning the dead to dance in the cemetery (xylophones for the bones knocking together!).  Listen at the end for the church bells ringing in the distance to signal the sunrise, and the little musical shiver the devil gives when he knows the day is coming -- followed by a sad, mournful violin solo.  But then, the last few notes seem to promise that he'll be back once night falls again.

Beethoven drew his inspiration from stories as well, and I'm not only thinking of pieces like the Pastoral Symphony.  Check out this amazing performance of his piano solo Rondo a Capriccio: Rage Over a Lost Penny.  (All I can say is that if losing a penny made me come up with tunes like this, I'd be flinging coins all over the place.)

One of my favorite musical depictions is from the incredibly prolific American composer Alan Hovhaness.  His Symphony #50 (he wrote 67 of them, and about 450 other sorts of pieces) is subtitled Mount Saint Helens.  Listen to it -- if that's not a musical version of a volcanic eruption, I don't know what is.

Jean Sibelius wrote a lot of music based upon Finnish folk tales, myths, and legends, but to me none gives as vivid a picture as "Lemminkainen's Return" from the Kalevala Suite.  Lemminkainen is a folk hero, and the piece depicts his triumphant return to his home after a long adventure.  It gallops along, and you can almost see the hero with his long hair flying in the wind, riding his horse through a snowstorm.

One of the funniest pieces in classical music -- once you know the story it's telling -- is Sergei Prokofiev's brilliant Lieutenant Kije Suite.  The story behind it is that during an inspection of a military regiment by the Tsar, he was reviewing the roster and saw that someone had scribbled in the word "Kije" (Russian for "thingamajig"), and mistakenly thought it was the name of a soldier.  No one wanted to correct the Tsar, so they invented a Lieutenant Kije, and waxed rhapsodic about his exploits and bravery, along with romantic vignettes of his courtship of, and eventual marriage to, a beautiful young lady.  But they overdid it -- so much that the Tsar decided that he needed to meet this exemplary military man and paragon of virtue.  Cornered, the leaders of the regiment had to invent a heroic death in battle for Kije so the Tsar wouldn't uncover the deception.

I'll end with one of my favorite pieces, the stunning suite Firebird by Igor Stravinsky.  It tells of the magical Firebird, half bird and half human, who is captured by the heroic Prince Ivan.  She gives him one of her feathers, and tells him he can use it to defeat the evil sorcerer King Katschei.  Katschei keeps his soul hidden in an egg in a casket and thinks he's immortal because of it (shades of J. K. Rowling's horcruxes).  But using the magic of the feather, Ivan forces Katschei and his minions to dance themselves to exhaustion.  He then finds the egg and destroys it, killing Katschei and freeing all of the people he'd magically enslaved -- including the young woman Ivan is in love with.  The end is one of the most joyful, stirring, triumphant pieces of music ever written.

So that's a few of my favorite stories in music.  I hope you enjoyed listening.  What are your favorites?

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

The natural pharmacy

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the discovery and decipherment of a codex written in Nahuatl, one of the languages spoken by the Aztecs (and still spoken in central Mexico).  The study highlighted the fact that language is one of the most critical pieces of culture, embodying a unique way of describing the world.  When languages disappear, that perspective is forever lost.

It's even worse than that, according to another study, that appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a couple of months ago.  In "Language Extinction Triggers the Loss of Unique Medicinal Knowledge," authors Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte of the University of Zürich look at the role of language in preserving information about medicinal plants -- information that might well be encoded in only a single one of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken on Earth.

Cámara-Leret and Bascompte considered indigenous languages in three places -- New Guinea, Amazonia, and North America -- lining up those languages with databases of medicinal native plants.  Specifically, they were looking at whether the knowledge of the medicinal value of native flora crossed linguistic boundaries, and were known (and used) in the cultures of the speakers of different languages.

Some, of course, were.  The use of willow bark as an analgesic was widely known to Native Americans throughout the eastern half of North America.  The sedative nature of poppy sap was also widespread, and has a long (and checkered) history.  (It's no coincidence that these two plants produce compounds -- aspirin and morphine, respectively -- that are part of the modern pharmacopeia.)

Illustration and uses of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) from Dioscurides's De Materia Medica (7th century C.E.) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what about the rest of the myriad species of medicinal plants that have been catalogued?  What Cámara-Leret and Bascompte found is simultaneously fascinating and alarming.  They looked at 12,495 species of medicinal flora native to the regions they studied, and found that over 75% of them were only named and known as pharmacologically valuable in a single language.

Worse, the researchers found that there was a correlation between the languages with the rarest medicinal knowledge, and how endangered the language is.  "We found that those languages with unique knowledge are the ones at a higher risk of extinction," Bascompte said, in an interview with Mongabay.  "There is a sort of a double problem in terms of how knowledge will disappear."

That knowledge isn't purely of interest to anthropologists, as a sort of cultural curiosity.  Consider how many lives have been saved by quinine (from the Peruvian plant Cinchona officinalis, used in treating malaria), vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus rosea, used in treating leukemia and Hodgkin's disease), digoxin (from the foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea, used for treating heart ailments), taxol (from the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia, used in treating a variety of cancers), and reserpine (from the south Asian plant Rauvolfia serpentina, used in treating hypertension).  And that's just some of the better-known ones.  The whole point of the Cámara-Leret and Bascompte study is that the majority of pharmacologically-useful plants aren't known outside of a single indigenous ethnic group -- and when those languages and cultures are lost or homogenized into the dominant/majority culture, that information is lost, perhaps forever.

"There is life outside English," Bascompte said.  "These are languages that we tend to forget—the languages of poor or unknown people who do not play national roles because they are not sitting on panels, or sitting at the United Nations or places like that.  I think we have to make an effort to use that declaration by the United Nations [the UNESCO decision that 2022 to 2032 will be the "Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages"] to raise awareness about cultural diversity and about how lucky we are as a species to be part of this amazing diversity."

I can only hope that it works, at least to slow down the cultural loss.  It's probably hopeless to stop it entirely; currently, the top ten most common first languages (in order: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, and Punjabi) account for almost fifty percent of the world's population.

The remaining 6,490 languages account for the other half.  

I understand the drive to learn one of the more-spoken languages, from the standpoint of participation in the business world (if that's your goal).  You probably wouldn't get very far international commerce if you only spoke only Ainu.  But the potential for losing unique knowledge from language extinction and cultural homogenization can't be overestimated.  Nor can the purely practical aspects of this knowledge -- including the possibility of life-saving medicinal plants that might only be recognized as such by a single small group of people in a remote area of New Guinea. 

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

The cities on the plain

Scary place, this universe of ours.

I've dealt here before with some cosmic-level catastrophes -- supernovas and Wolf-Rayet stars and black holes and gamma-ray bursters and false vacuums -- but the situation's not much better down here on the seemingly peaceful surface of the Earth.  There are weather-related disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as spectacular but less-known phenomena such as convective microbursts, which are not only scary and violent but strike seemingly out of nowhere, producing wind that goes from dead calm to 120 kilometers per hour in under two minutes (and are over equally quickly).  Volcanoes and earthquakes are seldom a surprise with regards to location, but are unpredictable in terms of timing -- although now with better remote sensing techniques, we're getting more accurate at forecasting quakes and eruptions, such as the one currently devastating the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.  (The Ministry of Tourism announced that the island is "still open to tourism," adding, "You must have a valid passport, as well as proof that you are a complete idiot.")

So we're better off than the people in Pompeii in 79 C.E., or the poor folks in 1902 who were the victims of a pyroclastic eruption from Mont Pelée in Martinique, which killed thirty thousand people in less than five minutes.  There were only three known survivors, the most famous of which was in an underground jail cell at the time.  All three escaped with burns and other injuries, but at least didn't get flash-fried like the rest of the city.

I'm pretty lucky here in upstate New York.  We're not in an earthquake zone, even farther from the nearest volcano, very rarely have tornadoes, and although we sometimes get sideswiped by the remnants of an Atlantic hurricane, we seldom get anything serious.  The worst we have to contend with is snow, but even our worst storms (like the "Hundred-Year Storm" of  March 1993, eight months after I moved here from Seattle, Washington, which dropped almost two meters of snow on us in a space of 48 hours) are nowhere near as violent as the killer blizzards they get in the Rocky Mountain states and the upper Midwest.

So I can't complain.  Even though I do sometimes anyhow.

But I guess even in a relatively clement place, you never know what's going to hit you.  Sometimes literally, to judge by a paper this week in Nature by a team led by geologist Ted Bunch of Northern Arizona University, which describes the fate of the city of Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley. 

Never heard of it?  Neither had I, which is surprising considering both its prominence and its ultimate fate.  Up till about 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was the bustling center of commerce for a region inhabited by an estimated fifty thousand people.  

The authors describe it as follows:

The three largest settlements in this area were Tall el-Hammam [TeH], Tall Nimrin, and Jericho (aka, Tell Es-Sultan), urban anchors of three city-state clusters, each surrounded by numerous smaller satellite towns and villages.  At 36 hectares of fortifications (0.36 km2) and an additional 30 hectares of “suburban sprawl,” TeH at its zenith was > 4× larger than Tall Nimrin and > 5× larger than Jericho, and thus, was likely to have been the area’s politically dominant MBA [Middle Bronze Age] urban center for many centuries.  TeH was initially occupied during the early Chalcolithic Period (~ 6600 cal BP) and was a well-established fortified urban center by the Early Bronze Age (~ 5300 cal BP).  The city reached its peak of hegemony during the MBA and dominated the eastern half of the Middle Ghor and most likely, the western half as well.

Then -- suddenly -- the entire city was wiped off the map.  The entire region was abandoned for over six hundred years, and in fact wasn't substantially recolonized for almost a millennium.

So what happened? 

Bunch et al. believe they've figured it out.  In 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was flattened -- by a stratospheric meteorite explosion.

Artist's conception of what the original palace at Tall el-Hammam looked like -- and what's left of it

You may recall the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, an object an estimated twenty meters across that exploded about thirty kilometers above the surface of the Earth, creating a shock wave that damaged houses and injured an estimated 1,491 people.  The 1908 Tunguska Event was even larger, caused by an object an estimated fifty meters across, and blew down trees radially outward from ground zero, destroying over two thousand square kilometers of forest that were (fortunately) far away from any densely-occupied areas.

The one that destroyed Tall el-Hammam is estimated to be larger still -- the researchers suggest a diameter of around seventy meters.  Tall el-Hammam was, quite literally, blown away, the thick walls of the palace sheared off at the foundation.  Mud bricks and roofing clay actually melted.  Mineralogical analysis of the rocks and debris show something kind of terrifying; inclusions of high-melting-point materials like platinum, iridium, and zircon melted as well, indicating temperatures above 2,000 C (and thus ruling out such causes as city-wide conflagrations, which don't get anywhere near that hot).  Quartz granules in the rocks of the area have radial fracture patterns similar to the circular cracks in your windshield when it's hit by a flying piece of gravel, indicating that something big punched the site.

Really hard.

The researchers suggest that the meteor strike at Tall el-Hammam might have been the origin of the biblical story of the destruction of "the Cities on the Plain," most famously Sodom and Gomorrah, although the jury's still out on that.  It would certainly explain the suddenness and totality of the destruction described in the biblical account, although it'd still leave up in the air why Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt.

As an aside, the meteor strike in 1650 B.C.E. is not considered a possible basis of the biblical account of the destruction of Jericho, in Joshua chapter 6; by what we know of the chronology of the history of Judea, the Book of Joshua was written nearly a thousand years later.  And it's worth mentioning that there seems to be no evidence whatsoever of Jericho experiencing a catastrophic collapse (the Bible talks about the walls of the city "falling flat") during that entire time period, leading archaeologist and biblical scholar William Dever to state that the story of the fall of Jericho was "invented from whole cloth" as nationalist propaganda by the leaders of the state of Judah to bolster their reputation as not only the Chosen Ones of God, but as all-around tough motherfuckers.  (I paraphrase Dever's actual analysis slightly.)

Anyhow, the Bunch et al. paper is a tour de force of thorough scientific investigation, and from my (admitted layperson's) perspective, it seems like they've locked down their case pretty tightly.  So now you have something else to worry about, even if (like me) you're far away from raging volcanoes, earthquake zones, and Tornado Alley, not to mention any local gamma-ray bursters and black holes.  Exploding rocks from space.  At least it'd be a quick way to go; considering the level of destruction they describe at Tall el-Hammam, we're talking "loud noise and bright light, look upward for a second, then get blasted to smithereens."

Have a nice day.

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

Shake your tail feathers

My wife and I reset some pavers in our front sidewalk a couple of days ago.  In our area, most of the stone used for paving and wall-building is native slate and limestone, which make up the majority of the bedrock in this part of upstate New York; and given slate's tendency to fracture naturally along parallel planes, it makes an obvious good choice for paving stones.

We used a pry-bar to pull up one big stone -- maybe a meter across and two meters long -- and a piece of it sheared off.  Unfortunate but unavoidable.  When I stopped and picked up the chunk, a flat, triangular piece a little larger than the palm of my hand, I noticed something interesting about it.  It had ripple marks, the clear signature of the muddy environment where it formed.

Seeing this sort of thing always makes me imagine what things were like back then.  The rocks in this area are Devonian in age, on the order of four hundred million years old, at which time this whole area was at the bottom of a shallow sea.  So those ripple marks in my sidewalk paving stone were created by water movements that occurred so long ago it's hard to imagine.  At that point, there was virtually no terrestrial life -- a few plants and insect species had colonized the land, but everything else was still aquatic.  The first dinosaurs were still a good 150 million years in the future.

It's kind of cool the way these sorts of moments thrill me from two different perspectives.  Being a biology teacher (retired now), I find it absolutely fascinating to ponder the grand panorama that is the history of life on Earth, and to consider evolution's role in creating what Darwin famously called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  As a novelist, it never fails to fire my imagination -- to picture what it would be like to stand there on the beach with the bare, treeless Devonian landscape stretching out behind me, looking out over oceans where swam trilobites and bizarre armored fish (ostracoderms) and ammonites, all of which went extinct long, long ago.

The reason this comes up -- besides finding signs of four-hundred-million-year-old ocean waves in my slate sidewalk paver -- is a link sent to me (once again) by the indefatigable Gil Miller, about a fossil discovery found in northeastern China recently.  It's the fantastically well-preserved remains of a little feathered dinosaur from 120 million years ago called Yuanchuavis kompsosoura, which was about the size of a blue jay -- but had a thirty-centimeter-long tail, which is longer than its entire body.

Yuanchuavis kompsosoura

Extravagant tails like this are an interesting case of an evolutionary trade-off.  Modern birds like peacocks have tails so long they're actually a hindrance to flying, but apparently the disadvantages of having such a clumsy appendage are outweighed by the advantage in terms of attractiveness to potential mates (sexual selection).  It's theorized that having elaborate plumage is a way of advertising your overall genetic health.  "Look at me," they say.  "I am so genetically superior I can throw away all sorts of energy and resources on something completely frivolous.  I am totally who you want to have sex with."

Kind of the bird version of driving a Jaguar.

That sort of teleological reasoning, however, is always thin ice when you're talking about evolutionary drivers.  None of that selection is being done because of any kind of conscious weighing of options.  But whatever its basis, we see similar kinds of wild tails in a great many bird species today -- swallowtailed kites, African widowbirds, paradise flycatchers, quetzals, drongos, and a lot of hummingbirds, as just a few examples.  The fact that so many relatively unrelated species have gone down the same path supports the conjecture that whatever is propelling this selection, it's pretty powerful.

Reading the article about this fascinating little dinosaur immediately switched on the other mode, which led me to imagining what it actually looked like when alive, and wondering about its behavior and environment.  Of course, even most well-preserved fossils give you only a hint about what the living creature looked like; all the spots and patterns and colors in movies like Jurassic Park are guesses, as are the behaviors (like the dinosaur with the toxic spit that killed Dennis Nedry).  But here, the preservation is on such a fine scale that the paleontologists do have an idea of what color it was -- traces of pigment-producing cells suggest that the fan part of its tail was gray, and the two long banner feathers in the middle were jet black.

Here, we actually can visualize what it looked like when he was shaking his tail feathers in the early Cretaceous forests.

So that's our imagined trip into deep time for today.  I know I've quoted it here before, but the lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam" are so poignant and so apposite that I will end with them anyhow:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

Hot times

In today's contribution from the Completely Useless Advice department: if you own property in southern Africa, you might want to consider selling it some time in the next ten million years or so.

The reason I say this is because of a paper published a couple of months ago in Nature Geoscience that was once again thrown my way by my pal Gil Miller, who seems to have an inordinate talent at ferreting out truly fascinating stuff I hadn't heard about.  The paper is entitled "A Tree of Indo-African Mantle Plumes Imaged by Seismic Tomography," by Maria Tsekhmistrenko, Karin Sigloch, and Kasra Hosseini (of Oxford University), and Guilhem Barruol (of the Université de Paris), and describes the structure of the mysterious "hotspots" -- upwelling of extremely hot magma from deep in the mantle -- that are responsible for such volcanically-active regions as Hawaii, Yellowstone, and Réunion Island.

These hotspots have long puzzled geologists, because they are quite distant from tectonic plate boundaries, where most of the world's seismic and volcanic activity occurs.  Hawaii is the best-studied hotspot; it was one of the most powerful pieces of evidence of plate movement, back in the 1960s when the theory of plate tectonics was first being studied.  The Big Island of Hawaii is just the easternmost point in a chain that extends way beyond what we usually think of as the Hawaiian Islands; even the westernmost island that pokes up above sea level, Kure Atoll, isn't the end of it.  It continues into the Emperor Seamount Chain, which extends underwater all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia. 

My long-ago geology professor described it as being like pulling a piece of fabric (the Pacific Plate) through an upside-down sewing machine (the Hawaiian Hotspot); the needle of the sewing machine punches regular holes upward through the fabric as it moves through, but the sewing machine itself stays in the same place.  The plates are moving; the hotspot isn't.  (And the angle in the chain of seamounts indicates that at some point in the past, the Pacific Plate changed direction, probably because of jostling against other plates.)

The Pacific Ocean floor, showing the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

What is still mysterious about hotspots is why they happen at all.  We have a pretty decent idea of why the activity along plate margins occurs -- strike-slip faults like the famous San Andreas, where two plates are moving along each other in opposite directions; trenches/subduction zones like Indonesia, where you get both powerful quakes and huge volcanoes; and mid-ocean ridges/divergent zones like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where plates are moving apart and new magma upwells to fill the gaps.  But why would there be a persistent chain of volcanoes out in the middle of a stable plate?

The current paper describes blobs of extremely hot magma originating from the lower parts of the mantle, which rise and then diverge into branches.  The authors write:

Mantle plumes were conceived as thin, vertical conduits in which buoyant, hot rock from the lowermost mantle rises to Earth’s surface, manifesting as hotspot-type volcanism far from plate boundaries.  Spatially correlated with hotspots are two vast provinces of slow seismic wave propagation in the lowermost mantle, probably representing the heat reservoirs that feed plumes...  Using seismic waves that sample the deepest mantle extensively, we show that mantle upwellings are arranged in a tree-like structure.  From a central, compact trunk below ~1,500 km depth, three branches tilt outwards and up towards various Indo-Austral hotspots.  We propose that each tilting branch represents an alignment of vertically rising blobs or proto-plumes, which detached in a linear staggered sequence from their underlying low-velocity corridor at the core–mantle boundary.  Once a blob reaches the viscosity discontinuity between lower and upper mantle, it spawns a ‘classical’ plume-head/plume-tail sequence.

So the Réunion Hotspot is apparently connected to the East African Rift Zone, three-thousand-odd kilometers away.  The EARZ is a developing rift that is ultimately going to shear off the "Horn of Africa," opening a new ocean and creating a new "microcontinent" made up Somalia and bits of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  (As an aside, it's also the site of Olduvai Gorge, where some of the earliest hominin fossils were found.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

"From looking at the core-mantle boundary, you can maybe predict where the oceans will open,” said study co-author Karin Sigloch.  "If the new models are accurate, a few tens of millions of years from now, you may not want to be in South Africa — or, perhaps, on planet Earth at all."

The reason Sigloch says this is that the team's analysis of the "tree" of magma that underlies both Réunion and the EARZ suggests that it's in the process of forming another branch -- another mantle plume -- that will ultimately end up underneath what is now South Africa.  "In tens of millions of years, a blob of nightmarishly gargantuan proportions will pinch off from the central cusp," Sigloch said, in an interview with Quanta magazine.  "This would produce cataclysmic eruptions.  The Deccan Traps [one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever, and which probably contributed to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago] were caused by what we would think of as a solitary mantle plume.  This future mega-blob, though, would be capable of producing volcanism so prolific and extensive that the Deccan Traps would be a firecracker in comparison."

Pretty scary.  But like I said, if you want to visit South Africa, or if you live there, you still have a ten-million-year window to take care of business.  What's interesting from a geological perspective is that up till now, South Africa has been very stable tectonically.  The majority of the country is made of extremely old rock, what geologists call a "craton" -- a chunk of some of the oldest continents on Earth.  A massive flood basalt eruption, like the Deccan Traps, the Columbia River Flood Basalts, and the largest of them all -- the Siberian Traps, implicated in the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction -- would (literally) overturn three billion years of stable geology, with catastrophic results for the entire planet.

So yeah.  That's cheerful.  But since we have ten million years before we have anything serious to worry about, it'd be better if to turn your attention to more pressing concerns, even if you live in Johannesburg.  Like what we're doing to destroy the global ecosystem our own selves by our seeming commitment to burn every last gallon of fossil fuels out there, damn the climate, full speed ahead, and which could make the Earth pretty close to uninhabitable a great deal sooner. 

Which now that I think of it, isn't all that reassuring.

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

The reawakening of Merlin

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about a site in Hertfordshire, England called "Arthur's Seat" that has long been associated with the famous (but possibly mythical) sixth-century king, but which dates from Neolithic times -- over four millennia earlier.

The difficulty with teasing out fact from fiction, when there are scant contemporaneous written records of any reliability, is apparent.  A good many historians think that Arthur is based on a real person, who was a Celtic (or Celto-Roman) chieftain and fought against the first invasions of the Saxons, but the phrase "based upon" is being used in the loosest possible sense.  How many of the other figures in the Arthurian Legend cycle -- Guinevere, Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, the Knights Who Say "Ni" -- were even within hailing distance of reality is unknown, and probably unknowable.

Of course, there are always new discoveries being made, even in an extensively-researched place like England.  The most recent, and the reason the topic of Arthur comes up (again), is a manuscript found in an archive in Bristol, which I found out about because of my friend Gil Miller, who is a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia. 

The manuscript dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and has a few interesting features.  The text is very similar to known copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which formed the basis of Thomas Malory's famous Le Morte d'Arthur.  It has a few curious differences, though, particularly surrounding the relationship between Merlin and Viviane (also called Nimué) -- the Lady of the Lake.

A piece of the Bristol manuscript

In most copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, Viviane writes magic words on her groin, and this binds Merlin to her will, inducing him to have sex with her and teach her all of his knowledge.  Once she's had her way with him as much as she wants and has learned everything she can from him, she puts him into a charmed sleep -- this prevents him from assisting King Arthur in his fight at the Battle of Camlann against his villainous nephew Mordred (or Modred or Medraut), resulting in the deaths of both Arthur and Mordred.  Afterward, Merlin is fated to sleep "until Britain needs him again," at which he'll awaken and use his magic to save the day and make up for allowing Arthur to die.

Merlin, from Howard Pyle's illustrations for The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The new version takes out some of the more risqué bits.  Viviane inscribes the magic words on a ring instead of on her skin, and Merlin is simply bewitched rather than doing the deed with her.  The outcome is the same -- Merlin gets put into a charmed sleep -- but otherwise, the Bristol fragments have been cleaned up a bit by the prudish sorts.  Here's the passage from one of the standard sources:

And the girl [Viviane] made Merlin lie down in her lap, and she started to ask him questions.  She moved around him, and seduced him again and again until he was sick with love for her.  And then she asked him to teach her how to put a man to sleep.  And he knew very well what she was planning, but nevertheless, he could not prevent himself from teaching her this skill, and many others as well, because Our Lord God wanted it this way.  And he taught her three names, which she inscribed on a ring every time that she had to speak to him.  These words were so powerful that when they were imprinted on her, they prevented anyone from speaking to her.  She put all of this down in writing, and from then on, she manipulated Merlin every time that he came to talk to her, so that he had no power over her.  And that is why the proverbs say that women have one more trick than the devil.

What I find interesting about the new manuscripts is that from handwriting analysis, they were written in northern France -- but an annotation in the margin has been identified as an English script style used in the early fourteenth century, so the manuscript somehow made its way to England only a few decades after it was written.

Interesting as it is, it doesn't improve our knowledge from a historical perspective.  The Bristol manuscripts were still written a good seven centuries after Arthur's time, and don't add anything much to the legend, unless you count whether or not Merlin had sex with Viviane.  Back in the British "Dark Ages" -- between the exit of Rome in the fourth century and the consolidation of the Saxon kingdoms in southern and eastern England in the seventh century -- there were damn few records of any kind being kept, and whatever there was didn't survive.  We're relying on folk histories (which intermingle history with legend and mythology) and records that were written way after the fact.

So the sad truth is, we'll probably never know which bits of the story were true and which were not.

But it's still a cool discovery.  I had no idea how much handwriting analysis tells scholars; I didn't realize that it was distinct enough as to time and place that you could confidently say "this was written in northern France in around 1250."

But all I can say is, if Merlin is still in his magical sleep, it's probably time for him to wake up.  I know a few places other than Britain that could use some help from a powerful benevolent wizard.  So if Viviane reads this, allow me to say: Enough already.

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

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!]

Prolix proverbs

I thought I'd have a little fun with this week's Fiction Friday, and throw some word puzzles at you.  It may stretch the definition of Fiction Friday, but oh well.

It's my blog and I'll do what I like.

When I was in high school -- so, many years ago (how many is left as an exercise for the reader) -- my English teacher, Ms. Reinhardt, gave us a set of puzzles: familiar sayings, aphorisms, and clichés in unfamiliar guise.  Amazingly enough, I kept my copy all these years, and just ran across it this evening while searching for something else.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wikimedia Foundation, Puzzly puzzled, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I don't know what their origin is -- I don't think she made them up -- but wherever they're from, they're cool brain-teasers.  (And if anyone does know the source, let me know so I can credit them properly.)  How many of them can you figure out?

1. A lithoid form, whose onward course
Is shaped by gravitational force
Can scarce enjoy the consolation
Of bryophytic aggregation.

2. To carry haulm of cereal growth
The tylopod is nothing loath;
But just one haulm too many means
That dorsal fracture supervenes.

3. When, nimbus-free, Sol marches by
Across the circumambient sky,
To graminiferous meads repair --
Your instant task awaits you there!

4. There is no use in exhortation
To practice equine flagellation,
If vital forces did depart
And still the breath, and cease the heart.

5. That unit of the avian tribe
Whose movements one can circumscribe
In manu, as a pair will rate
Subarborially situate.

6. For none who claims to represent
The Homo species sapient,
Will loiter Einstein's fourth dimension
Or sea's quotidian declension.

7. Faced with material esculent
As source of liquid nourishment
Avoid excess; 'twill but displease
Of culinary expertise.

8. Conducting to the watering place
A quadruped of equine race
Is simple; but he may not care
To practice imbibition there.

9. The coroner observed: "Perpend,
The death of this, our feline friend,
Reflects preoccupation shown
With business other than his own."

10. Of little value his compunctions
Who executes clavigerous functions,
When once from circumambient pen
Is snatched its equine denizen.

Have fun!  (And drop me an email if you want a hint or get stumped and are desperate for answers.)

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

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!]