Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is now long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's okay to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables -- despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

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

Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

Illuminating the beginnings of a mystery

I recently finished reading Adrian Goldsworthy's book How Rome Fell, and was impressed enough with it that (you may recall) it was last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week.  I've always had a fascination for that time and place -- Europe of the "Dark Ages," the mysterious and poorly-documented period between the slow and tortuous collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E. and the consolidation of the Frankish state during the eighth.

Part of the reason for my interest is that it is a mystery.  If you push back much earlier than Charlemagne, you get into some seriously sketchy territory.  The most famous example is King Arthur, whose legendary status is obvious, but whose historicity is dubious at best.  But he's hardly the only one.  Take the account of the founding of the Merovingian Dynasty (immediately preceding the Carolingians, founded by Charlemagne), from the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar:

It is said that while Chlodio was staying at the seaside with his wife one summer, his wife went into the sea at midday to bathe, and a beast of Neptune rather like a Quinotaur found her.  In the event she was made pregnant, either by the beast or by her husband, and she gave birth to a son called Merovech, from whom the kings of the Franks have subsequently been called Merovingians.

I had to look up what a "quinotaur" was.  Turns out it's a beast with the front half of a bull and the back half of a fish.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacques63, Quinotaure, CC BY-SA 4.0

So Merovech's father was either (1) a guy named Chlodio, or (2) a fish-bull-thing.  What's amusing is that the author of the Chronicle of Fredegar seemed to consider these as equally plausible, so decided to include them both.

So if you go much before 750 C.E. or so, the actual facts become so interwoven with mythology and folk history that it's hard to tell what, if any, is real.  (I mean, the issue of Merovech's father is pretty clear cut, but that's the exception.)  When you get back to the second century and earlier, things improve drastically -- we have, all things considered, great records of the Roman Empire at the height of its power -- but as it started to disintegrate, people found that writing stuff down was less of a priority than avoiding starvation or being chopped into tiny bits by the latest group of invaders.

This is why a recent discovery in Turkey is so exciting to me and others who share my interest in that time and place.  At the site of the ancient city of Blaundos, about 180 kilometers east of the Aegean Sea, archaeologists have discovered a necropolis that was used as a burial site during the time when the Roman Empire was heading toward collapse -- from the second to the fourth centuries.  What they're finding is impressive, to say the least.

"We think that the Blaundos rock-cut tomb chambers, in which there are many sarcophagi, were used as family tombs, and that the tombs were reopened for each deceased family member, and a burial ceremony was held and closed again," said Birol Can of Uşak University, who headed the team excavating the site.  "Some of these tombs were used as animal shelters by shepherds a long time ago.  The frescoes were covered with a dense and black soot layer due to the fires that were set in those times.  But [we were] able to clean some of the paintings, revealing the vibrant floral, geometric and figurative scenes painted on the walls.  Vines, flowers of various colors, wreaths, garlands, geometric panels are the most frequently used motifs.  In addition to these, mythological figures — such as Hermes (Mercury), Eros (Cupid) [and] Medusa — and animals such as birds and dogs are included in the wide panels."

The team has only begun to investigate the site; just cleaning the panels to expose the brilliantly-colored art beneath the layers of grime is a slow and painstaking process.  Eventually, the entire complex will be studied and restored.  After that, they're planning on doing DNA and chemical analysis of the remains of the people buried there, hoping to find out their ages and cause of death, nutritional habits, and ancestry.

The latter is of particular interest to me.  When the "barbarian tribes" -- the disparaging moniker which the Romans used to lump together the people of northern Europe, including Celts, Gauls, Goths, Allemanni, Suevi, Marcomanni, Franks, Vandals, and so forth -- began to chip away at Roman territory, the Roman citizens who lived in border regions began to accept the inevitable and "allowed" them to settle.  In some cases, the now-apparently-civilized barbarians were granted Roman citizenship.  (In fact, one of the most famous and powerful Roman military leaders in the fourth century, Stilicho, was a Vandal by descent.)

So finding out the ancestry of the people of Blaundos will be interesting, especially comparing the earliest to the latest remains to see how (or if) the same kind of ethnic melding happened here that was happening in other parts of the Empire.

In any case, the discovery is extremely cool, and may clarify our picture of the beginnings of one of the most mystery-shrouded time periods in the past two millennia.  It'll be interesting to see what more they turn up.  I'm guessing, though, that they're not going to find evidence of women getting knocked up by fish-bull-creatures.  Call me a doubter, but there you are.

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Who the hell is Mary Hansard?

I had a very peculiar thing happen to me while working on my work-in-progress, a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that I swear was not inspired in any way by 2020.  (In fact -- true story -- I first came up with the idea for this book when I was in college.  Which was a lot of years ago.)

The main characters, a bunch of academics who are very used to the easy life, are caught up in a sudden societal collapse.  I'm always interested to think about how perfectly ordinary people would act in extraordinary circumstances; this is kind of the crypto-theme of all my stories, actually.  In any case, these four professors from the University of Washington end up having to flee the rioting and violence on foot, crossing the Washington Park Arboretum, a two-hundred-acre garden south of the campus, on their way to a safe haven.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joe Mabel, Seattle - Arboretum Bridge 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Completely unexpectedly -- not only to them, but to me -- they meet someone in the Arboretum. Here's the scene where they come across her:

Cassandra was the first one to spot her—a woman sitting cross-legged with her back to the trunk of a fir tree, watching them approach with a broad smile on her face.  She was perhaps forty years old, and the most remarkable thing about her appearance was how completely unremarkable she looked.  An oval face, even features, light brown hair in a loose ponytail, neither particularly attractive nor at all unattractive, she was the kind of person you might pass a dozen times a day and never notice.

But here she sat in the Arboretum as the world collapsed around her, apparently unconcerned.

“Oh, hello,” she called out in a pleasant, melodious voice, and waved.

Soren exchanged a puzzled glance with Cassandra, who shrugged.

As they neared, the woman stood, moving a little awkwardly, but with no evident self-consciousness.  Soren jerked to a halt until she raised both hands to show that she was unarmed.  “Don’t be afraid,” she said.  “I mean no harm.  In fact, I’ve been waiting for you all.”

When I finished writing this, I said -- and I quote -- "what the fuck just happened?"  She was not part of the original plot.  The idea was that they'd cross the Arboretum, dodging snipers and rioters, and reach their goal safely.  But suddenly there's this... this person, sitting there waiting for them.

Oh, and her name is Mary Hansard.  Don't ask me where that came from.  Her name came along with her character, waltzing into the story from heaven-knows-where.

I know I tend to be a pantser (for non-writers, authors tend to fall into two loose classes: pantsers -- who write by the seat of the pants -- and plotters -- who plan everything out).  But this is ridiculous.  I honestly had no idea this character even existed.  Afterward, I had to figure out (1) who the hell Mary Hansard was, (2) what role she was going to play in the story, and (3) how she knew the four fleeing professors were going to be coming through the Arboretum.

I would love to know where this kind of stuff comes from.  I mean, "my brain" is the prosaic answer, and is technically right, but when this sort of thing happens -- and it's far from the first time -- it feels like it came from outside me, as if the story already existed out there in the aether and I just tapped into it somehow.

I also know enough that when this occurs, it means something is going really right with the story.  When I've had these sudden shifts in course, following them usually leads to somewhere interesting that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered.  But to say that it's a little disorienting is a vast understatement.

Especially since I knew -- knew for a complete certainty -- that the mysterious, ordinary-looking Mary Hansard would become one of the most central characters in the story.

Here's a bit that comes later, that gives us more information about her -- and how she knew the four would be there in the Arboretum:

Was part of her empathy due to her foreknowledge of what she herself would soon be feeling?

Probably, but just as she’d told Dr. Quaice, that knowledge wouldn’t change anything.  On the other hand, it did bring an odd sort of comfort.  Soren had told her something like that, the day all this started, when he described how he had the courage to cross the Montlake Cut while a sniper was taking potshots at them.  He knew he had to do it, so at that point it became like a thing already accomplished.  His fear was no longer relevant.

That was one advantage of her foresight.  The confusion between future and past meant it was all one thing.  It was the not-present.  And being not-present, it couldn’t hurt her.  If pain lay in the future, it was as removed from her as her memories of a broken arm when she was twelve.  Neither one had any impact on the present as it slowly glided along, a moving flashlight beam following her footsteps through the wrecked cityscape.  The events of the past and the future were frozen, fixed and unmoving, like butterflies trapped in amber.

So much for the idea that authors have the entire story in their heads from the get-go.  Personally, I love it when stuff like this happens -- wherever it comes from.  Writing, then, becomes as much of an act of discovery as it is an act of creation, and all the writer can do at that point is let the horse have his head and hang onto the reins for dear life.

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Relaxing the controls

I've been a musician for over forty years, and I think I'm reasonably good at my instrument, but there's one thing I've never learned how to do: improvisation.

To be fair, the two styles of music I've played the most -- classical, and Celtic folk music -- are not known for incorporating improv.  I took a workshop some years ago about how to free up our playing, and the teacher did a couple of improv exercises with us.  I found them extremely challenging, and even that is probably an understatement.  "Damn near impossible" is closer to the mark.  I've always been wound a little too tightly, and letting go of my inhibitions, just making stuff up and not caring if I make mistakes, is not easy for me.  My reaction was mostly to freeze up, sit there with a panicked look on my face, and pray for my turn to be over.

Now, in my own defense, I think I'm pretty good at playing expressively.  Music for me is very emotional, and being able to express emotion through playing (or singing) is at the heart of performance.  So I think I can play a piece I know evocatively -- but as for doing true improvisational music, taking a basic chord structure and making up a tune on the spot to go with it, I don't know that I could ever learn how to do that fluidly.

My band, Alizé, performing at the Eastman School of Music

So I'm always a little in awe of people who can.  I remember some years ago heading up to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where my band and I were performing a set of French folk tunes for a bunch of students who were mostly studying classical and jazz.  The amusing thing is that we seemed to fall square in the middle of the two groups of students.  The classical students, used to playing exclusively from written music and reproducing it perfectly from the dynamics markings, were kind of boggled by the fact that I and my band members didn't have to plan ahead when to switch from one tune to the next in a medley, when one of us would take a solo, and when we were going to end.  It was all decided on the fly and communicated between us by eye contact and subtle body language.  The jazz players, on the other hand, probably felt what we were doing was rudimentary; in the jazz tradition, improv is pretty much what you're aiming for right from the beginning.  If that wasn't apparent enough, after our session we attended a performance by some of the senior jazz students, where they had a music stand with a set of cards, one of them for the time signature and the other for the key signature, and invited the audience members to come up at random intervals and change one or the other.  As the piece progressed, they had to modulate rhythm and key to match whatever the cards were at the time.  Going from one key to another can be straightforward -- C major to A minor, for example, isn't difficult -- but going from C major to F# minor is a huge jump.  But they did it smoothly, their transitions clean and seemingly effortless, putting to shame our simple tune changing when one of us wiggled his/her eyebrows.

What's clear, though, is any kind of musical flexibility -- being able to play something more than what's on the sheet music -- requires that you get out of your own way and relax.  How good improvisational musicians accomplish that was the subject of a study out of Georgia State University published last week in Scientific Reports that showed the relaxation of control you have to master to improv well is actually reflected by what is happening in the brain.

The researchers hooked twenty-one skilled jazz musicians up to a fMRI machine and had them do one of two things -- either to listen to a standard twelve-bar bebop chord progression and imagine what they might sing to go with it, or actually to improvise the singing on the spot.  What they found was that two places in the brain -- the default mode network and the executive control network -- both changed in activity level during the task.  The default mode network has its highest levels of activity during wakeful rest, what we'd usually call "daydreaming" or "mind wandering."  The executive control network is most active during complex problem solving and accessing working memory.  What the researchers found is that in both groups -- the ones who actually sang to the chord progression, and the ones who imagined it -- the activity in the executive control network decreased and the activity in the default mode network increased.  Further, the cross-talk between the two systems slowed down significantly.

So my sense of improv requiring "getting out of your own way" is pretty close to the mark.  We have to damp down the executive functions of the brain so that the creative parts can be accessed more fluidly.  "We saw that when expert musicians are improvising, the brain is interfering less with their creativity," said study co-author Martin Norgaard.

Myself, I wonder if the same phenomenon explains something I've experienced many times, which is when I've run into a plot problem while working on a novel.  Figuring out "why did that character do that?" or "what happens next?" can often seem intractable.  And I've found that hammering away at it -- presumably using my executive control network -- seldom works.  It's much more productive to put aside the laptop and do something entirely different, like going for a run.  Nine times out of ten, while I'm out there, running along and listening to music, the solution will pop into my head, seemingly out of nowhere.

It's fascinating to see researchers beginning to get a handle on that most mysterious of human abilities -- creativity.  Apparently, wherever creativity ultimately comes from, it requires relaxing the control you have over what your mind is doing.  It's still unknown why it expresses differently in different people -- music, art, dance, or storytelling -- but the idea that the release mechanism might function the same way in all of them is intriguing.

And now, I think I'd better get to work on my novel-in-progress.  I've got a couple of unresolved plot points to figure out that have been remarkably resistant to the beat-it-unto-death approach, so maybe "working on my novel" this morning will look to the outside world like "going for a long run."  Hey, whatever works to get my overactive executive control network to simmer down.

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Tiny timepieces

One of the most mind-blowing revelations from science in the past two hundred years came out of a concept so simple that a sixth-grader could understand it.

You've all observed that the motion of objects is relative.  Picture a train with glass sides (only so you can see into it from outside).  The train is moving forward at 5 kilometers per hour, with an observer standing next to it watching it roll past.  At the same time, a guy is walking toward the back of the train, also at 5 kilometers per hour.

From the point-of-view of anyone on the train, the walking man is moving at 5 kilometers per hour.  But from the point-of-view of the stationary observer outside the train, it appears like the man on the train isn't moving -- he's just walking in place while the train slides out from under him.  This is what is meant by relative motion; the motion of an object is relative to the frame of reference you're in.  We don't observe the motion of the Earth because we're moving with it.  It, and us, appear to be motionless.  In the frame of reference of an astronaut poised above the plane of the Solar System, though, it would seem as if the Earth was a spinning ball soaring in an elliptical path around the Sun, carrying us along with it at breakneck speed.

With me so far?  Because here's the simple-to-state, crazy-hard-to-understand part:

Light doesn't do that.

No matter what reference frame you're in -- whether you're moving in the same direction as a beam of light, in the opposite direction, at whatever rate of speed you choose -- light always travels at the same speed, just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second.  (Nota bene: I'm referring to the speed of light in a vacuum.  Light does slow down when it passes through a transparent substance, and this has its own interesting consequences, but doesn't enter into our discussion here.)

It took the genius of Albert Einstein to figure out what this implied.  His conclusion was that if the speed of light isn't relative to your reference frame, something else must be.  And after cranking through some seriously challenging mathematics, he figured out that it wasn't one "something else," it was three: time, mass, and length.  If you travel near the speed of light, in the frame of reference of a motionless observer your clock would appear to run more slowly, your mass would appear greater, and your length appear shorter.  (Where it starts getting even more bizarre is that if you, the one moving near light speed, were to look at the observer, you'd think it was him whose watch was running slow, who had a greater mass, and who was flattened.  Each of you would observe what seem to be opposite, contradictory measurements... and you'd both be right.)

All of this stuff I've been described is called the Special Theory of Relativity.  But Einstein evidently decided, "Okay, that is just not weird enough," because he did another little thought experiment -- this one having to do with gravity.  Picture two people, both in sealed metal boxes.  One of them is sitting on the surface of the Earth (he, of course, doesn't know that).  The other is out in interstellar space, but is being towed along by a spacecraft at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second (the acceleration due to gravity we experience here on the Earth's surface).  The two trapped people have a communication device allowing them to talk to each other.  They know that one is sitting on a planet's surface and the other is being pulled along by a spaceship, but neither knows which is which.  Is there anything they could do, any experiment they could perform, anything that would allow them to figure out who was on a planet and who was being accelerated mechanically?

Einstein concluded that the answer was no.  Being in a gravitational field is, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as experiencing accelerated motion.  So his conclusion was that the relativistic effects I mentioned above -- time dilation, mass increase, and shortening of an object's length -- not only happen when you move fast, but when you're in a strong gravitational field.  If you've seen the movie Interstellar, you know all about this; the characters stuck on the planet near the powerful gravitational field of a black hole were slowed down from the standpoint of the rest of us.  They were there only a year by their own clocks, but to everyone back home on Earth, decades had passed.

Maybe you're thinking, "But isn't the Earth's gravitational field pretty strong?  Shouldn't we be experiencing this?"  The answer is that we do, but the Earth's gravity simply isn't strong enough that we notice.  If you travel fast -- say on a supersonic airline -- your clock does run slow as compared to the ones down here on Earth.  It's just that the difference is so minuscule that most clocks can't measure the difference.  Even if supersonic seems fast to us, it's nearly standing still compared to light; if you're traveling at Mach 1, the speed of sound, you're still moving at only at about one ten-thousandth of a percent of the speed of light.  The same is true for the gravitational effects; time passes more slowly for someone at the bottom of a mountain than it does for someone on top.  So on any ordinary scale, there are relativistic effects, they're just tiny.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mysid, Spacetime lattice analogy, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that's what brings the whole bizarre topic up today -- because our ability to measure those tiny, but very real, effects just took a quantum leap (*rimshot*) with the development of a technique for measuring the "clocks" experienced by a cluster of atoms only a millimeter long.  A stack of about 100,000 strontium atoms that had been cooled down to near absolute zero were tested to see what frequency of light would make their electrons jump to the next energy level -- something that has been measured to a ridiculous level of accuracy -- and it was found that the ones at the bottom of the stack (i.e. nearer to the Earth's surface) required a different frequency of light to jump than the ones at the top.  The difference was incredibly small -- about a hundredth of a quadrillionth of a percent -- but the kicker is that the discrepancy is exactly what Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts.

So Einstein wins again.  As always.  And if you're wondering, it means your feet are aging slightly more slowly than your head, assuming you spend as much time right-side-up as you do upside-down.  Oh, and your feet are heavier and flatter than your head is, but not enough to worry about.

All of this because of pondering whether light behaved like someone walking on a train, and if someone being towed by an accelerating spaceship could tell he wasn't just in an ordinary gravitational field.  It brings home the wonderful quote by physicist Albert Szent-Györgyi (himself a Nobel Prize winner) -- "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought."

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

It's the most wonderful war of the year

Welp, I guess it's time to dust off my camo and flak jacket and helmet and guns.

The War on Christmas is starting early this year.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  It's not even Halloween and already the right-wing religious nutcakes are bringing back the claims that we non-religious types, and the Democrats in general, are planning to carpet-bomb Whoville or something.  This time it's started with the House Republican Caucus, which tweeted a photo of President Biden a couple of days ago along with the message, "This is the guys [sic] who is trying to steal Christmas.  Americans are NOT going to let that happen."

This year the gist of it seems to revolve around the (genuine) supply-chain problems that have been plaguing the United States for months, and which will probably result in raised prices and some items being delayed in shipping, if not outright unavailable.  I can understand the frustration with this.  On the other hand, complex problems rarely have one cause, and saying "This is Joe Biden's fault!" is just plain idiotic.  How much of it has to do with the current administration's policies, how much of it with leftovers from the previous administration's policies, and how much of it is pure circumstance (e.g. the pandemic) is not a simple question.

Much easier just do say "Biden did it!" and whip up some nice, Christmas-y outrage, despite the fact that Biden himself is a staunch Catholic and would hardly be likely to have secret aspirations to take over the Grinch's job now that the latter's heart grew three sizes.

Of course, "in touch with reality" is not a phrase that is generally associated with these people.  The whole War-on-Christmas trope goes back to 2005, when right-wing radio host John Gibson published a book called, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.  This was sixteen years ago, and every single year since then Fox News has spent inordinate amounts of time screeching about how we secular-minded types are secretly trying to ban Christian holidays, prevent anyone from saying "merry Christmas," and jail people who attend holiday services.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you'll think back carefully, you may recall that in every single one of those sixteen years, Christmas has happened, right on schedule.  People still say "merry Christmas" all they want with no repercussions, and no one has been arrested coming out of church on Christmas morning.

For a "liberal plot that's worse than you thought," odd that it's had zero discernible effect.

This would be honestly be hilarious if these people didn't have so much power over the American psyche.  The mystifying part, though, is that all you have to do is look around to realize that they're either delusional or lying outright.  Merely driving through any random town in America in December should be sufficient to convince you that Christmas is alive and well.  Around here, we have lots of folks who put up holiday displays in their yards with giant inflatable Santas, reindeer with glowing noses, various takes on nativity scenes, and enough lights to disrupt air traffic.  All the local stores start putting out Christmas-related stuff in November or earlier, so the capitalist side of the celebration is still as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Achim Raschka / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), 13-12-16 Christmas house decoration, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is ironic about all this is that I, and a great many non-religious folks I know, all celebrate Christmas.  If I really harbored deep-seated anti-Christian rancor you'd think that avoiding Christmas entirely would be an easy choice for me; not only am I not religious, my wife is Jewish.  Built-in excuse, right there.  Despite that, we put up a Christmas tree most years, always exchange gifts, and send out holiday cards when we can get our act together sufficiently to write them before Christmas Eve.  I do this mainly because (1) I think Christmas trees are pretty, and (2) I love giving people stuff.  I may not believe all the religious side of the holiday, but it's pretty obvious I'm not hostile to it.

The bottom line is -- and I've said this enough times that you'd think the point would be made -- 99% of secular folks, myself included, do not give a flying rat's ass what exactly you choose to believe, nor how you express those beliefs.  You can believe that your life's path is being directed by the divine influence of a magical bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want to.  You can wear a bunny suit everywhere you go, wiggle your nose when you're annoyed, and eat nothing but carrots.  I honestly do not give a damn.

What I object to is when you start saying that the rest of us have to believe in the magical bunny, and want to open all public meetings with bunny-prayers, and demand that public school science classes include a unit on the Theory of Young-Earth Bunnyism.  Then you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

But this isn't being driven by logic and evidence, and never has been.  The people who make a huge deal out of the War on Christmas every year seem to fall into two categories: (1) partisan yahoos who want to stir up outrage against the other side and don't mind lying through their teeth to do it, and (2) truly religious types who also have a wide streak of paranoia and the gullibility to believe what they hear on Fox News.  The rest of us, religious and non-religious alike, usually all get along pretty well.

But I guess that's all beside the point.  Tiresome though it is, if you're an atheist, duty is duty.  Uncle Sam Wants YOU.  (Not that Uncle Sam, I'm talking about Sam Harris.)  I guess when you're called up, you don't really have a choice in the matter.  So, into the breach, may Dawkins protect us, and all that sort of thing.  I'm not optimistic about winning this year, given that we're 0-and-16, but you never know.  If we're lucky, maybe we'll get some supernatural assistance from the ghost of Christopher Hitchens.

Failing that, it'll be up to the magical bunny from Andromeda, and his track record ain't that great, either.

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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

Remembrance of stress past

About eighteen years ago, my wife and I went on a vacation to Hawaii.  The trip was awesome, and we had a fantastic time in Kauai, appreciating the beauty of the Garden Island, where "chill out" is the order of the day and there are signs that say "No shoes, no shirt, no problem."

Then we started on the voyage home.

I won't belabor you with the entire story.  Suffice it to say that it involved:

• two missed connections
• sleeping on the tile floor of two different airports on two successive nights
• a teenager breaching the security checkpoint, resulting in evacuating the entire airport and everyone having to be re-checked-in
• the airline crew "timing out," meaning they had to take a mandatory eight hours of rest while the passengers sat and waited
• a whole case of fine California wine... and no corkscrew
• a blackout that shut down the electrical grid in the entire northeastern United States for a day and a half
• a limo ride ending with the limo overheating and conking out just outside of Scott Run, Pennsylvania

Of course, I'm entirely to blame, because after each increasingly-ridiculous mishap, I said to my wife, "Well, what else could go wrong?"

Never ever say those words.  I'm not superstitious, but in this case I'm convinced that the universe waits for some hapless schlub to say that before dropping a piano on his head.

What is interesting about this whole thing -- besides the fact that in retrospect, it makes a hilarious story -- is that I remember the unpleasantness and stress of the trip back much better than I remember the relaxing and enjoyable vacation we were coming back from.  I'm hard-pressed to recall a single specific detail from being in Hawaii, other than a vague memory of sun, hiking, scuba diving, and drinks with little umbrellas -- but the memories of what it was like trying to return from Hawaii are so vivid it's like they happened yesterday.

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding that stressful experiences stick in our brains better than pleasant ones do.  A study released last week in Current Biology found that pretty much all of us remember trying situations much more vividly than we do positive ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Psy3330 W10, Sleeping while studying, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's more, the researchers who did the study -- a team made up of Anne Bierbrauer, Marie-Christin Fellner, Rebekka Heinen, Oliver Wolf, and Nikolai Axmacher, of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany -- found the underlying mechanism for why awful memories seem to have such durability.  When a memory is connected with a stressful experience, the "memory trace" (neural firing pattern associated with recalling the memory) is linked through the amygdala -- a part of the brain associated with anxiety, fear, anger... as well as emotional learning and memory modulation.

The researchers write:

Recent evidence has further shown that amygdala neurons do not only respond to fearful or stress-related stimuli, but exhibit mixed selectivity as well: their firing may represent various different emotional and social dimensions, depending on task and context.  In humans, amygdala neurons respond to faces and to perceived emotions, and fMRI studies showed that the amygdala represents both fear memories and the subjective valence of odors.  Such multidimensional representations may serve to bind the diverse aspects of an emotional experience into one integrated episode.

Which certainly is the case with my memory of the Hawaii debacle.  My pleasant memories from the holiday -- which took place over six days -- are fragmentary and vague as compared with the memory of the trip back, which took only two days but plays out in my mind as a single coherent story.

When you think about it, it makes evolutionary sense.  Thag and Ogg having a vivid, detailed memory of the nice mammoth dinner they had two weeks ago is far less critical to survival than the memory of where they almost got killed by a saber-toothed tiger.  (That's an oversimplification, of course; complex behaviors are almost never the result of a single evolutionary driver.  But the value of remembering dangerous situations more strongly than happy ones can't be denied.)

The downside, of course, is that really negative memories get seared into our consciousness more or less permanently.  This can result in memory patterns that actively interfere with our ability to live a normal life -- better known as post-traumatic stress disorder.  So getting to the bottom of how this happens in the brain is the first step toward addressing that debilitating condition.

As for me, my silly return-voyage story doesn't cause me any anguish, and in fact, I've told it many times to various friends over pints of beer, to the general amusement of all.  The experience did, however, stop me from ever saying "What more could go wrong?"  Because I've found that not only is there always something else that can go wrong, when it does, you'll remember it forever.

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

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

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