Antique ghosts

I've long been curious how far back beliefs in the supernatural go.

From what we know about ancient religions and mythologies, belief in something that transcends ordinary human experience seems nearly ubiquitous.  I suppose that without adequate scientific model to explain natural phenomena, nor even the tools to study them, deciding that it must be supernatural forces at work is natural enough.  What puzzles me, though, is how detailed some of those beliefs are.  The ancient Norse didn't just say that there was some powerful guy up there causing thunder somehow; they said it was Thor throwing a giant hammer called "Mjölnir" that was forged by the dwarves Brokk and Sindri, but while they were forging it a fly bit Sindri on the forehead and made him stop pumping the bellows (the fly was Loki in disguise, trying to fuck things up as usual), so the hammer came out with a handle that was too short.

So I guess our belief in the supernatural is not the only thing that goes back a long way.  So does our penchant for telling elaborate stories.

A recent analysis of a 3,500 year old Babylonian artifact that had been gathering dust in the British Museum has shown that our belief not only in gods but in ghosts has a long history.  The tablet came to the attention of Irving Finkel, one of the world's authorities on cuneiform and ancient languages of the Mesopotamian region.  And when Finkel took a look at the tablet, he realized the previous translation had been incomplete and at least partly incorrect.  The text is about how to get rid of a ghost -- and the front of it has the faint outlines of a male ghost being led at the end of a rope by a woman.

The gist of the text is that the way to deal with a haunting is to give the ghost what (s)he wants.  In this case, the ghost is horny and wants some female companionship.  How exactly the owners of the haunted house would talk a (living) woman into being the ghost's lover is an open question.

"It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable," Finkel explained.  "You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves.  The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover...  You can’t help but imagine what happened before.  'Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.'  Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives.  Something that everybody knew was the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off...  It’s a kind of explicit message.  There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.  That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic."

The exact details of the ritual are as complex as the story of the forging of Thor's hammer.  You're to make figurines of a man and a woman, then, "... dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions.  You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth.  You give her a golden brooch.  You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.  At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer.  You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper.  You draw the curtain like that of the diviner.  You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night]."

It ends by cautioning, "Don't look behind you."

Once again, you have to wonder how they figured all this out.  Were there other ghosts they tried to get rid of, but they only clothed the female figurine in three red garments, and it didn't work?  Did they serve the beer in alabaster vessels instead of carnelian, and the ghost said, "Well, fuck that, I'm not leaving."  What happens if you use cedar wood instead of juniper?  Most importantly, what happens if you look behind you?

Whatever the source of those details, it certainly demonstrates the antiquity of myth-making.  "All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago," Finkel said.

Here in our modern world, we tend to blithely dismiss such beliefs as "primitive" or "unsophisticated," but it bears keeping in mind that they were trying to explain what they experienced, just like we do.  Our scientific advancements have allowed us to peer deeper, and (more importantly) to make tests of our explanations to see if they fit the data -- but what the beliefs of the ancients lacked in rigor they made up for in a strange and intricate beauty.  And this little tablet gives us a window into a long-gone civilization -- making me wonder what other artifacts are still out there to be discovered, and what else we might be able to learn about the myths and folklore of our distant ancestors.

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

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!]

The burning fields

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a peculiar fascination for things that are huge and powerful and can kill you.

I'm not entirely sure where this obsession comes from, but it's what's driven me to write here about such upbeat topics as giant predatory dinosaurs, tornadoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes, supernovas, gamma-ray bursters, and the cheerful concept of "false vacuum decay" (which wouldn't just destroy the Earth, but the entire universe).  I'm guessing part of it is my generally anxiety-ridden attitude toward everything; after all, just because we don't think there's a Wolf-Rayet star nearby that's ready to explode and fry the Solar System doesn't mean there isn't one.  I know that worrying about all of that stuff isn't going to (1) make it any less likely that it'll happen, or (2) make a damn bit of difference to my survival if it does, but even so I don't seem to be able to just relax and focus on more positive things, such as the fact that with the sea-level rise predicted from climate change, it looks like here in upstate New York I may finally own ocean-front property.

It's also why I keep regular tabs on the known volcanoes on the Earth -- on some level, I'm always waiting for the next major eruption.  One of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes on Earth is in Italy, and I'm not talking about Vesuvius; I'm referring to the Campi Flegrei ("burning fields," from the Greek φλέγω, "to burn"), which isn't far away from the more famous mountain and seems to be powered by the same magma chamber complex that obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 C.E.  Both Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are highly active, and near the top of the list of "world's most dangerous volcanoes."

The problem is, the three million residents of Naples live right smack in between the two, only twenty-odd kilometers away from Vesuvius (to the east) and Campi Flegrei (to the west).  (For reference, Pompeii was nine kilometers from the summit of Vesuvius.)

The Campi Flegrei, looking west from Naples [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baku, VedutaEremo2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem is that volcanoes like these two don't erupt like the familiar fountains of lava you see from Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the current eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands.  The most typical eruption from volcanoes like Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are pyroclastic flows -- surely one of the most terrifying phenomena on Earth -- a superheated mass of steam and ash that rush downhill at speeds of up to a hundred kilometers an hour, flash-frying everything in its wake.  That the Campi Flegrei volcanoes are capable of such massive events is witnessed by the surrounding rock formation called the "Neapolitan Yellow Tuff."  A "welded tuff" is a layer of volcanic ash that was so hot when it stopped moving that it was still partially molten, and fused together into a solid porous rock.

A video of a pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991

The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff isn't very recent; it came from an eruption about 39,000 years ago.  But there are signs the Campi Flegrei are heating up again, which is seriously bad news not only for Naples but for the town of Pozzuoli, which was built right inside the main caldera.

That people would build a town on top of an active volcano is explained mostly by the fact that people have short memories.  And also, the richness of volcanic soils is generally good for agriculture.  Once Pompeii was re-discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with extremely eerie casts of the bodies of people and animals who got hit by the pyroclastic flow, you'd think people would say, "no fucking way am I living anywhere near that mountain."  But... no.  If you'll look at a world map, you might come to the conclusion that siting big cities near places prone to various natural disasters was some kind of species-wide game of chicken or something.

In any case, the good news is that a recent study showed that even if Campi Flegrei is (1) heating up, and (2) eventually going to erupt catastrophically, there's no sign it's going to happen any time soon, and it's pretty likely we'd have plenty of warning if an eruption was imminent.  

But still.  Such phenomena make me feel very, very tiny.  And once again, thankful that I live in a relatively peaceful, catastrophe-free part of the world.  Our biggest concern around here is snow, and even that's rarely a big deal; we don't get anything like the killer blizzards that bury the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states every year.  Given my generally neurotic outlook on life, I can't imagine what I'd be like if I did live somewhere that had serious natural disasters.

Never leave my underground bunker, is probably pretty close to the mark.

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

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!]

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.

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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."

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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!]