Character study

Spurred by yesterday's post, about our capacity for forming emotional bonds with fictional characters, a friend asked me who my favorite characters from books were.

"My own books, or other people's?" I asked.

"How about both?" she replied.

A discussion ensued that I thought would make an interesting post for Fiction Friday, so here are my favorite fictional characters (not including movies & television), starting with the ones from other folk's stories. In no particular order:

• Sam Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.  It's been said, and I think it's the truth, that Sam is the real hero of the story -- not Frodo, not Aragorn, not Gandalf.  Over and over the point is made that it's the simple, sweet things in life that the whole War of the Ring was being fought to preserve and protect, and Sam embodies that, as well as a hefty dose of pure courage and loyalty.
• Aomame from Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.  An enigmatic woman with a mission that pulls her between compassion and retribution, Aomame lives in the surreal space Murakami creates -- a world that on first glance is just like ours, but only intersects reality at the edges.  Murakami's book is a tour de force, and Aomame is a brilliant, puzzling, fascinating character of the kind only he can bring to life.
• Hazel from Richard Adams's Watership Down.  If I had to pick one character from fiction who displays the qualities of a true leader, it's Hazel, who leads his intrepid, ragtag band out of one danger and into a greater one, inspiring loyalty from his comrades and in a quiet, understated way bringing out the best in each one of them.  Yes, I know the characters are rabbits.  Doesn't make a difference.  If you haven't read this book, put it on your list.
• Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  I'm hard-pressed to pick between them, because they're a bit like figure-and-ground, complementary opposites who have come together to save the world.  Aziraphale is the angel with a deep compassion for and understanding of human foibles, and Crowley a demon with a heart of gold he tries (unsuccessfully) to hide.  This is one case where the television adaptation is as wonderful as the book -- Michael Sheen and David Tennant as (respectively) the representatives of heaven and hell are absolutely brilliant.
• Speaking of Pratchett, Sam Vimes, the head of the police force in Ankh-Morpork and the right hand man of the Lord Patrician of the City, the machiavellian Havelock Vetinari, in a number of Pratchett's wonderful Discworld series.  Vimes is the stalwart, common-sense-ful anchor of the cast of oddballs who make up the rank-and-file of The Watch,  Ankh-Morpork's police, and he navigates political intrigue and the odd assassination attempt with a weary, almost-but-not-quite-cynical deftness.
• Brother William of Baskerville from Umberto Eco's murder mystery The Name of the Rose.  A fourteenth-century monk with a flair for observation, he's a medieval Hercule Poirot without the little Belgian's overinflated ego.  Brother William is faced with the superstition and fear of the time, and always comes back to rationality -- there is a natural, logical cause for everything, and the world is understandable to anyone who is willing to put some effort into learning about it.  Even when monks are mysteriously dying all around him, and the abbot is blaming the Forces of Darkness, Brother William never deviates from his determination to solve the case through reason and hard evidence.

Now, a handful of my own creations:

• Whenever the question of my favorite character from my stories comes up, the answer is always Callista Lee, the brilliant, eccentric telepath from The Snowe Agency Mysteries (starting with Poison the Well).  Callista is constantly bombarded with others' thoughts, and as a result, shies away from people -- her gift gives her a unique window into the human condition and at the same time pushes her away, leaving her deeply alone.  Her character arc over the entire series is one of my favorite creations.

I always thought that if The Snowe Agency Mysteries were ever made into movies, Tilda Swinton would be perfect as Callista.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, Tilda Swinton (28352184350) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

• Doctor Will Daigle, from Whistling in the Dark and Fear No Colors, the second and third books of the Boundary Solution trilogy.  Will is funny, quick, smart, and profane, but his genial temperament covers a huge heart and a tremendous compassion.  Which is why -- no spoilers -- what he has to do about a third of the way through Whistling in the Dark is one of the most poignant (and difficult!) scenes I've ever written.  I won't tell you more, you'll just have to read it for yourself.
• Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise.  If I had to pick the character whose temperament is most like mine, Tyler would be the odds-on favorite.  A socially-awkward biology nerd who'd just as soon spend his time ear-tagging elk in the Cascade Mountains, Tyler finds himself the center of a terrifying mystery -- and is forced into the role of Unlikely Hero completely against his will.
• The Head Librarian, Archibald Fischer, from Lock & Key.  Fischer (forget he's named Archibald unless you want to be the target of his ire) is the sarcastic, Kurt-Cobain-worshiping, f-bomb-dropping director of the Library of Possibilities, where every possibility for every human on Earth is catalogued and monitored.  The repartee between him and his assistant, the imperturbable Scot Maggie Carmichael, is some of the most fun I've ever had writing.
• Last, Jennie Trahan from my novella "Convection," in the collection Sights, Signs, and Shadows.  Jennie may seem like an unlikely choice -- from the beginning she's the bitchy, eye-rolling foil to the other characters' attempt to stay alive in a Category Four hurricane.  But she's the character who while I was writing the story grabbed the keyboard from my hand and started telling me about why she was so irascible -- and became one of the most compelling, complex, sympathetic characters in the story.

So there you have it, a smattering of characters from different sources who have really resonated with me for one reason or another.  So let's hear your take on this -- who are your favorite characters from fiction?

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series. 
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies.  A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain... I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made a ceramic Dalek, Weeping Angel, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.  

The heartening results are that the pandemic hasn't weakened our bonds to our friends, but there has been a strengthening of bonds to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The pandemic has forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the beloved companion Donna Noble in the last minutes of the episode "Journey's End:"

That was just not fair.  I can't even look at a still shot of this scene without choking up.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Hardwired superstition

Despite my frequent railing against superstition and magical thinking, it's not that I don't see its attractions.  As a teenager and twenty-something I was fascinated with such things as Tarot cards (I actually own no fewer than seven decks, and I haven't been willing to part them with because of how beautiful the designs are), numerology, astrology, and a host of other kinds of woo.  That I eventually threw it all aside (well, figuratively, in the case of the Tarot cards) I attribute to my commitment to a rationalistic view of the world.  I decided in my mid-twenties that I had to establish some criterion for finding what I considered to be the truth, and that logic and evidence seemed a lot more solid than "I fervently wish this was so."

Since my conversion to skepticism, I've found myself looking at True Believers and wondering how they never made the same transition.  We apply the rules of the scientific method in scores of other ways -- "show me how you know this" isn't some kind of odd, esoteric rule only known to Ph.D. candidates (not that I've ever been one of those, but you get my drift).  So how can a person look at the extremely slim evidence for (say) astrology, and not say, "Okay, this makes no sense whatsoever?"

A study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology has given us at least a hint of why some people never leave behind their unsupported beliefs in the paranormal.  Its title -- which breaks the general rule that articles whose titles are questions always should be answered "No" -- is, "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?"  The researchers who conducted the study, Marjaana Lindeman and Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen of the Institute of Behavioral Studies at the University of Helsinki, looked at a group of 258 people and examined how real-world knowledge of science correlated with belief in the supernatural.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found a series of strong correlations:

The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena.  Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of the beliefs were overall physical capability (a factor representing most physical skills, interests, and knowledge) and intuitive thinking style.

Note, of course, that correlation does not imply causation; it is by no means certain that the lack of scientific knowledge caused the belief in the supernatural.  In fact, if that were true, one of the other findings of the study would be less likely:

Nonscientific ways of thinking are resistant to formal instruction… which can affect individuals’ ability to act as informed citizens to make reasoned judgments in a world that is increasingly governed by technology and scientific knowledge.

If superstitious beliefs stemmed from something as simple as a lack of knowledge of the world around us, you'd think that you could eradicate magical thinking simply by enrolling people in a college-level physics course.  The fact that this isn't so makes me wonder if there is something else underlying a tendency toward belief in the supernatural -- perhaps something in the brain wiring -- that both makes a person likely to have less aptitude at science and technical subjects, and also results in a stronger likelihood of belief in the supernatural.  A previous study by Lindeman et al. suggests that this may be so:

We examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity of 12 supernatural believers and 11 skeptics who first imagined themselves in critical life situations (e.g. problems in intimate relationships) and then watched emotionally charged pictures of lifeless objects and scenery (e.g. two red cherries bound together).  Supernatural believers reported seeing signs of how the situations were going to turn out in the pictures more often than skeptics did.  Viewing the pictures activated the same brain regions among all participants (e.g. the left inferior frontal gyrus, IFG).  However, the right IFG, previously associated with cognitive inhibition, was activated more strongly in skeptics than in supernatural believers, and its activation was negatively correlated to sign seeing in both participant groups.

So once again, we have some evidence that what we think and believe might not entirely be a choice -- it might be hardwired into our brains.  If so, despite my toying with paranormal woo as a young person, I might have been destined all along to become the hard-headed skeptic you all know and (I hope) love.

But I'm still not throwing away the Tarot cards.  They're kinda pretty, even if they're almost certainly useless for predicting the future.

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Color my world

Our ability to perceive color is, when you think about it, a peculiar thing.

First, there's the rather hackneyed question of whether we all see color the same way (exclusive, of course, of people who are colorblind).  The way the question is usually phrased goes something like, "How could we tell if when you look at something red, what you see what I call green, but you still call it red because that's what you've learned?"  In other words, if I were to take a look through your eyes and brain, would the colors of objects be the same as what I see?

The answer is: we can't know for sure.  Thus far there's no way for one person to perceive the world through another person's sensory organs and brain.  But the great likelihood is that we all see colors pretty similarly.  All of our visual receptors are put together the same way, as are the visual cortices in our brains.  To assume that even with this structural and functional similarity, each person is still perceiving colors differently, runs counter to Ockham's Razor -- so without any evidence, it seems like a pretty untenable position.

More interesting is the comparison between how we see the world and how other animals do.  Once again, we run up against the issue that we can't see through another's eyes, but at least here we're on more solid ground because we can see that different animals have differently structured eyes.  Dogs, for example, have retinas with a much higher density of rods (the structures that operate in dim light, but only see in shades of gray) and a much lower density of cones (the structures that operate in bright light, and are able to differentiate by wavelength -- i.e., see colors).  Dogs aren't completely colorblind -- their two types of cones peak in sensitivity in the blue and yellow regions of the spectrum -- but they're relatively insensitive to colors outside that.  (This explains why my dog, Guinness, routinely loses his bright orange tennis ball in the bright green lawn -- to me, it stands out from fifty meters away, but he'll walk right past it without seeing it.) 

Then, there are bees and butterflies, which have eyes sensitive not only in the ordinary visible light spectrum but in the infrared and ultraviolet regions, respectively.  There are flowers that look white to our eyes, but to a butterfly they're covered with streaks and spots -- ultraviolet-reflecting markings that advertising nectar to those who can see it. 

A flower of the plant Potentilla reptans, photographed in ultraviolet light.  To the human eye, the flower looks solid yellow -- this is what it might look like to a butterfly.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wiedehopf20, Flower in UV light Potentilla reptans, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But the winner of the wildly complex vision contest is the mantis shrimp, which has sixteen different color receptors (contrasted with our paltry three), rendering them sensitive to gradations of color we aren't, as well as detecting ultraviolet and infrared light, and discerning the polarization angle of polarized light.  How the world looks to them is a matter of conjecture -- but it certainly must be a far brighter and more varied place than what we see.

The reason all this colorful stuff comes up is because of a paper that appeared last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Colors," by Colin Twomey, Gareth Roberts, David Brainard, and Joshua Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania.  The researchers looked at how words describing different colors vary from language to language.  "The color-word problem is a classical one," Plotkin said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "How do you map the infinitude of colors to a discrete number of words?"

And, more central to this research: does everyone do it the same way?  If you showed me a series of gradations from pure blue to pure green, at what point to I switch from saying "this is blue" to saying "this is green" -- or do I call the intermediate shades by a third, discrete name?

What the researchers found was that across 130 different languages, humans tend to group and name colors the same way.  Further, if you give people tiles with varying shades of red and asked them to pick out "the reddest red," the results show remarkable consistency.

Another interesting result of the research was that the sensitivity of our eyes to color variation isn't the same from color to color; we are much better at picking out subtle variations in red, orange, and yellow than we are at seeing differences in (for example) different shades of brown.  The researchers believe this is due to a difference in what they call communicative need; since reds, oranges, and yellows are the colors of ripe fruit, we've evolved eyes that are most sensitive to variations in those colors.  "Fruits are a way for a plant to spread its seeds, hitching a ride with the animals that eat them," Twomey said.  "Fruit-producing plants likely evolved to stand out to these animals.  The relationship with the colors of ripe fruit tells us that communicative needs are likely related to the colors that stand out to us the most...  No one really cares about brownish greens, and pastels aren't super well represented in communicative needs."

So it seems like the great likelihood is that we all see the world pretty much the same way.  Well, all humans, at least.  What the world looks like to a dog, with their better dim-light vision and better motion detection, but far poorer color discrimination, can only be guessed at; and what colors a mantis shrimp sees is beyond the ability of most of us to imagine.

Study lead author Colin Twomey wonders whether the same techniques could be used to study other facets of sensory perception.  "This is something that could be carried to other systems where there is a need to divide up some cognitive space," he said, "whether it's sound, weight, temperature, or something else."

One I wonder about is the sense of taste.  We know that taste differs a great deal between different individuals, not only because everyone likes (and dislikes) particular flavors, and those preferences differ greatly; but there are some people called "supertasters" who are sensitive to minor variations in flavor that the rest of us don't even notice.  (I am most definitely not a supertaster; the joke in my family is that I have two taste buds, "thumbs up" and "thumbs down.")  The daughter of a friend of mine, for example, has amazingly sensitive taste buds, to the point that she can discern whether the coffee was brewed with filtered water or ordinary tap water.

Me, as long as it's brewed with water and not turpentine, I'm fine with it.

But that's all potential future research.  For now, we have a better idea of how each of us colors our world.  And despite our individual differences, the answer appears to be that what you're seeing and what I'm seeing look very much alike.  

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Judgment calls

I had two experiences in the last couple of weeks, one funny and one maddening, both of which at their heart boil down to the same thing.  I work as an aide for a developmentally disabled man, and mostly what he likes doing is going for long walks.  And both of these incidents happened in almost the same place -- a nearby park which is my friend's favorite spot to go on nice days.

The first I kind of saw coming.  We were heading around a bend in the path, and standing there was a guy holding pamphlets of some sort.  As soon as we got in range, he started telling us that he was there to spread Jesus's word, and could he give us some pamphlets to read.  I said, "No, thanks," but the guy wasn't gonna be brushed off that easily.

"We all need to hear the message of the Lord," he said.

I just kind of stared at him.

"It's how we know right from wrong."  He gave me a disapproving scowl.  "For example, St. Paul said that it is a disgrace for a man to have long hair."

I laughed, a little incredulously, and said, "Tell St. Paul he needs to mind his own damn business," and kept walking.

The second, though, just pissed me off.  There's a nice spot in the park down by a marina, where my friend likes to spend some time watching the boats.  He was standing near the water, and I sat on a bench close by.  I pulled out my phone to check my messages -- at the time, a dear friend of mine was in the hospital, and I wanted to see if there were any updates on her condition.

I was looking at my phone -- no texts or updates, unfortunately -- when a woman who was on the path nearby said, "Isn't it too beautiful a day to spend your time with your nose in your phone?"

I looked up at her, trying to figure out how to respond.  I certainly wasn't going to explain my actions to her; I didn't feel like I was obliged to justify myself to a prying stranger.  I finally shrugged and said, "Yeah," and slipped my phone back into my pocket.  Apparently gratified that she had awakened me to the beauty of nature, she went off with a smile.

In both cases, the issue is about judgment, isn't it?  Neither the fact that I have a ponytail nor my checking my text messages in the park is anyone's business but my own; I'm a bit baffled that anyone would even have an opinion on either of those things.  My mom used to say, "My rights end where your nose begins," and I think that's spot-on, but I'd extend it.

My right to pass judgment ends where your nose begins.

It's easy to judge someone harshly when you don't know the full story.  And you seldom ever do.  What does it cost you to start from the assumption that most people, most of the time, are working from good intentions?  I don't mean you should become gullible, or ignore or excuse truly obnoxious behavior; but why do so many people feel like it's required that they have an opinion about everything and everyone, whether or not it concerns them in the slightest -- the vast majority of them negative?

How about we all do our best to focus not on judging people, but on simply being kind?

The Doctor, as always, has things figured out.

You could argue that both the religious guy and the nature woman were themselves acting out of good intentions; the religious guy trying to save me from hell, the nature woman trying to clue me in to what she thought I was missing.  But the fundamental issue here is that neither of them had the least idea who I was, nor bothered to find out.  Without any knowledge of me or my situation, they both were convinced they knew what I needed to be doing better than I did.

The whole incident with the phone reminded me of this photograph that was making the rounds a couple of years ago, did you see it?

It was usually accompanied by a sneery message about teenagers and how they don't care about anything but social media and why would you even be in an art museum if all you want to do is stare at your phone.  Finally, someone who was there at the time tried to set the record straight; these young people were staring at their phones...

... because they were participating in an online self-guided tour about the lives and work of the artists in the museum.

But as far as I'm aware, that didn't cause any sheepish retractions, and I still sometimes see this photo making the rounds to highlight what slackers teenagers are and/or how technology will destroy us all.

Somehow, indignation seems to come far more easily to people than charity does.  

I'll end with another of my experiences -- this one when I was about six.  Something had happened at school -- I don't even recall what -- and I was bristling with annoyance toward some classmate of mine whom I perceived as having wronged me.  As I was walking home I passed the house of our wonderful friend Garnett, who was out working in her garden, and proceeded to her tell my tale of woe, assuming she'd commiserate with me a little.

What she said knocked me back, and I've never forgotten her gentle words to me that day.  "Gordon, I know you're mad at your friend, but whenever you're tempted to be angry, I want you to remember something," she said.  "Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Moving mountains

I live in a place that doesn't change very much, and I mean that not only in the human sense -- rural upstate New York is not exactly a center of urban development -- but even on the geological time scale.  The bedrock here is Devonian shale, slate, and limestone, on the order of three hundred million years old.  At the point this rock was forming, where I'm sitting right now would have been at the bottom of a shallow subtropical ocean.  Since then, things have dried out a tad, and it's no longer anywhere near subtropical.  There have been a few glaciers in the last few million years; the most recent one started to melt back about 75,000 years ago.  This left behind the Elmira Moraine, only thirty miles south of where I live -- a rubble pile that marks the southern edge of where the glacier pushed rocks and debris ahead of it like a plow.  (The gazillions of rocks of various descriptions that I curse every time I try to dig in my yard are gifts from that last glacier -- glacial erratics -- some of them carried hundreds of miles away from where they formed.)

Other than that, I live in a pretty calm part of the world.  It'd be easy to look around and think the world is static, that the way things are now is the way they'll always be.

Not so in some places.  There are areas of the world where people are well aware that the topography can change in an instant from earthquakes or volcanoes.  Unfortunately, geologically-active areas tend to be heavily populated -- the temblor-prone regions because the scenery is often beautiful (think coastal California) and the volcanic regions because the soil is so fertile (like the land near Naples, Italy, in the shadow of the infamous Mount Vesuvius).  But the fraction of the world's population that lives in an area where the land is changing shape quickly is honestly very small, so most of us figure the mountains and lakes and rivers and whatnot aren't going anywhere.

If you were under any illusions about the fact that the Earth is an active place, consider the paper that came out in Nature last week describing the largest underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded -- one that literally caused a mountain to appear where none had been five years earlier.  Check out the before-and-after photos of the ocean floor, from 2014 and 2019:

Even a non-geologist like myself hardly needs the giant red arrow to see the new mountain where there wasn't one before.

The volcano, fifty kilometers off the coast of the island of Mayotte in the Comoros Archipelago (which lie between the northern tip of Madagascar and the coast of northern Mozambique), is thought to be part of the extremely active East African Rift Zone, an incipient divergent fault system that will ultimately tear off the "Horn of Africa" and create a new microcontinent containing all of Somalia and pieces of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  The eruption seems to have begun in May of 2018, when an earthquake of magnitude 5.8 hit Mayotte.  A team of geologists from France was dispatched to see what was going on, and they installed a monitoring system in February of 2019.  They recorded more than 17,000 seismic events in the next three months, as the mountain grew.

A map showing the chronology of the eruption

Ultimately, the series of eruptions added five cubic kilometers of hardened magma to the seafloor -- a new undersea mountain.

"The volumes and flux of emitted lava during the Mayotte magmatic event are comparable to those observed during eruptions at Earth's largest hotspots," the researchers wrote.  "Future scenarios could include a new caldera collapse, submarine eruptions on the upper slope or onshore eruptions.  Large lava flows and cones on the upper slope and onshore Mayotte indicate that this has occurred in the past."

So if you have a beach home in Mayotte, you might want to consider moving.

All of which makes me once again thankful to live in a place as geologically quiet as we do.  The St. Lawrence Valley, about two hundred kilometers north of us, has earthquakes sometimes, and I recently found out that New York City has fault lines that could potentially generate earthquakes, and in fact have done (none, thus far, severe, at least not in recorded history).  

But here, all is tranquil.  Which is fine by me.  Given that an exciting day in upstate New York is when the farmer across the road bales his hay, I always hope for something unexpected, but if it comes to major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, I'd just as soon not be anywhere near.

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Poetry reading

A friend of mine and I were discussing poetry a few days ago, and the inevitable question came up: what is your favorite poem?  After our chat, I started thinking that this would be a good topic for Fiction Friday.

I'm not a poet myself, so I can't claim any particular expertise.  Poetry is a compact, crystallized way to tell a story or evoke an emotion, and I tend to be... a little long-winded.  Thus the fact that I'm a novelist.  I am always in awe of someone who can pull off a truly beautiful or evocative poem, because creating resonance in the reader in such a short form seems like such a challenge.  My own favorite poetry usually has some twist on the use of words, something that spins your brain around a little and makes you see the world in a different way.  That's why I've always loved e. e. cummings.  He has a way of turning simple language on its head to create uniquely surreal beauty.  Two of my favorites are the sweet, joyous "if everything happens that can't be done" and the short but chilling "me up at does."  Another contender is Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful "The Fish," and I would be remiss not to mention Stevie Smith's brilliant "Our Bog is Dood," which seems to make no sense at all until... suddenly... the message is crystal clear, and devastating.

But if I had to pick one only, it would be Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," which (because it was written in 1912) I will reproduce here in full:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

What I love about this poem is that it gives you a piece of a story, and leaves you to imagine what the rest might be.  What had the Traveller given his word to do, and to whom, and why?  Who are the listeners, and why didn't they answer?  The whole thing gives me chills every time I read it, because -- as Stephen King pointed out in his masterful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, sometimes it's better for writers of horror to leave the door closed.  Left to their own, readers can conjure up some really scary explanations for what might be behind it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's my favorite poem, and I hope you'll take the time to check out the links I provided to some other wonderful ones.  Now, let's hear from you: what are some of your favorites?

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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