The fear loop

I have serious anxiety disorder.  Serious enough that some days, I am barely functional.

I have had it pretty much as long as I can remember.  People who know me only casually might find this hard to believe.  I taught high school science for thirty-two years, with apparent confidence.  I seem pretty good at getting out and doing stuff, trying new pastimes, talking with people.

The reality is that I've just become very skilled at hiding it, and pretending I'm okay when I'm very much not.  Of course, this works well until it doesn't.  Sometimes just an ordinary day's activities are enough that when I get home, I collapse.  And any pressure or stress or unpleasant situation that's beyond what's normal in terms of intensity or duration, and I get dangerously close to panic attack territory.

Like with many sufferers from anxiety, it's coupled with depression.  On its surface, this is kind of odd, because they're almost like opposites -- one a dampened emotional state, the other a heightened emotional state.  Both, though, have the effect of stopping you in your tracks.  Depression tells you "don't bother, nothing you do will make a difference;" anxiety tells you "don't do anything, because whatever you do will make it worse."

[Image is available through the Creative Commons courtesy of Rehab Center Parus http://rebcenter-moscow.ru]

A lot of us with mental and emotional disorders have found them amplified since the pandemic started.  I've always been an introvert (social anxiety being one of the ways my illness manifests), so you'd think that the opportunity to be a recluse would be wonderful; but far from being a welcome respite, I've found the isolation has made things significantly worse.  In the last two years it feels like my world has folded in on itself, leaving me cut off from activities that used to make me feel better.  I was telling my wife just yesterday that I'm vanishing -- I'm a writer who doesn't write (other than Skeptophilia, I've barely written anything since the pandemic started), a runner who doesn't run, a musician who rarely plays.  I've lost my grip on most of the things that define me as a person.

What got me thinking about all this -- other than the fact that I live with it every day -- is a fascinating piece of research that appeared last week in Science.  It looked at the fear response in mice, and found that a specific region of the brain (the insular cortex) seems to act as the mediator for emotional regulation, especially with regards to fear.  What's intriguing is the researchers found that the insular cortex does this based upon feedback from the body.

Think about what happens when you're given a bad scare.  Your heart and breathing rate speed up, your blood vessels constrict (raising your blood pressure), you sweat, you tremble.  At least some of these responses serve a useful purpose; accelerating your pulse and breathing allows you to deliver oxygen to your muscles faster, making the fight-or-flight reaction more efficient and therefore more likely to save your life.  But if it is too powerful, or goes on too long, it can lead to a potentially deadly paralysis.

The insular cortex apparently keeps tabs on your heart rate and other autonomic responses, and moderates your emotional reaction to fear when the physical responses start to ramp up.  It made me wonder if this is why some people -- the ones who often become first responders -- find their brains unusually clear when they're in a dangerous emergency.  They're the ones who can stay calm, pretty much regardless of what's happening -- the ones who "keep their heads when everyone else is losing theirs."

And, of course, it left me questioning if that's what's going wrong in people like me, who take an ordinary, non-emergency situation and let it wind up our emotional state to the point of panic.  "Since dysfunctions of the insular cortex in humans are associated with various types of anxiety disorders, this research opens up exciting new perspectives," said study lead author Alexandra Klein, of the Max Planck Center of Neurobiology, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Can we use behavior and its bodily feedback to actively regulate emotions?  For a long time, neuroscience has ignored the fact that the brain does not work in isolation.  The body also plays a crucial role in emotion regulation.  Our study suggests that we should consider the importance of bodily signals when trying to understand how emotions are regulated."

I can only hope that the discovery of this looped brain-body connection in the regulation of fear might lead to more effective treatments for anxiety disorder, because the ones we have now range from mediocre to useless to actively bad (such as drugs like Xanax that do work to relieve anxiety, but are dangerously addictive if overused). 

I feel like I should add that I'm not bringing all this up to elicit sympathy.  I've blogged before about my own experience with mental illness; then and now, what I want is to add my voice to those trying to destigmatize it.  That, and to encourage you to be careful when you rush to judgment about someone else's behavior.  Keep in mind what a family friend told me when I was about six years old -- which I've quoted here before, but it bears repeating. "Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

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

The rain of glass

A couple of weeks ago I looked at the rather unsettling fact that the seeming benevolence of our home planet is something of an illusion.  As I write this, I'm sitting in a warm house with the calm, clear sunshine sparkling on frost-covered grass, hardly a cloud in the sky, and it's difficult to imagine it ever being any different.  While I don't believe a thoroughly pessimistic outlook helps anything or anyone, it does bear keeping in mind how fragile it all is -- if for no other reason, so that we value what we have.

I started thinking about how quickly and unpredictably a place can go from tranquility to devastation when I ran across a paper that appeared in the journal Geology two weeks ago.  In it, I learned about something I'd never heard about -- a seventy-five-kilometer-wide patch of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile that is covered with shards of black and green glass.

The Atacama Desert is a strange place in and of itself.  Other than the dry valleys of Antarctica, it is far and away the most arid place on Earth; the average rainfall is around fifteen millimeters per year, and there are parts of it that are down in the nearly-unmeasurable range of one to three millimeters.  The few plants and animals that live there have dry-climate adaptations that beggar belief; they get most of the water they need using condensation from fog.  The reason for the peculiar climate is a combination of a more-or-less permanent temperature inversion produced by the South Pacific Anticyclone and the cold, northward-flowing Humboldt Current, combined with a two-sided rain shadow caused by the parallel Andes Mountains and Chilean Coast Range.  It's so dry and barren that it was used by NASA as one of the places to test the Mars Lander's ability to detect the presence of microscopic life.

The aridity is what allowed for the discovery that was the subject of the November 2 paper.  Geologists Peter Schultz (Brown University), R. Scott Harris (Fernbank Science Center), Sebastián Perroud (Universidad Santo Tomás), and Nicolas Blanco and Andrew Tomlinson (Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería de Chile) analyzed the peculiar shards that cover the patch on the northern end of the desert, and found out that they were all formed in one event -- the mid-air explosion of a comet about twelve thousand years ago.

The authors write:

Twisted and folded silicate glasses (up to 50 cm across) concentrated in certain areas across the Atacama Desert near Pica (northern Chile) indicate nearly simultaneous (seconds to minutes) intense airbursts close to Earth’s surface near the end of the Pleistocene.  The evidence includes mineral decompositions that require ultrahigh temperatures, dynamic modes of emplacement for the glasses, and entrained meteoritic dust.  Thousands of identical meteoritic grains trapped in these glasses show compositions and assemblages that resemble those found exclusively in comets and CI group primitive chondrites.  Combined with the broad distribution of the glasses, the Pica glasses provide the first clear evidence for a cometary body (or bodies) exploding at a low altitude.  This occurred soon after the arrival of proto-Archaic hunter-gatherers and around the time of rapid climate change in the Southern Hemisphere.

The dry climate is why we even know about this event.  Cometary collisions almost never leave a crater; given that comets are mostly made of various kinds of ice, the heat of friction from the atmosphere causes them to evaporate and finally explode, creating an airburst but no solid-object impact.  The airburst can be devastating enough, of course.  The 1908 Tunguska Event, the largest such occurrence in recorded history, flattened eighty thousand trees in over two thousand square kilometers of Siberian forest, and registered on seismographs all the way around the world in Washington, D.C.  If Tunguska had happened over a major city, there wouldn't have been a person left alive or a building left standing in the blast zone.

Like Tunguska, at the time and place of the Atacama airburst, there weren't many people in the danger zone.  There was, however, a lot of sand, and the heat from the collision melted it into glass -- indicating temperatures in excess of 1,700 C.  In a climate with ordinary amounts of rainfall, the glass would have been degraded and eroded, but here, it rained out of the sky and then has just kind of sat there for the intervening twelve thousand years.

"It was clear the glass had been thrown around and rolled," study lead author Peter Schultz said, in an interview with Science News.  "It was basically kneaded like bread dough."

The glass shards (the dark bits) in the northern Atacama Desert [photograph by Peter Schultz]

It would have been quite a spectacular thing to witness (from a safe distance), and you have to wonder how the survivors explained it.  "It would have seemed like the entire horizon was on fire," Schultz said. "If you weren’t religious before, you would be after."

So that's our disquieting scientific research for the day.  The reassuring news is that we've gotten pretty skilled at mapping the asteroids, meteors, and comets out there in the Solar System, and none of them seem to be headed our way, at least not for a good long while.  Which is a bit of a relief.  As often as I complain about how dull it is to live in a part of the world where the biggest excitement of the day is when the farmer across the road lets his cows out into the field, this isn't the kind of change of pace I'm really looking for.

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

Shapeshifter

I rarely ever write poetry -- it's not that I don't like it, but more that trying to capture an image, feeling, or story in so few words has always struck me as singularly difficult.  I'm a little in awe of people who are able to create a written work with such tremendous impact in such a small space.

Ars Poetica by Alphonse Mucha (1898) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I have made a couple of forays into the poetic world, though, and for this week's Fiction Friday I'll share one of them.  It's piece I wrote a while back, inspired by one of the most thoroughly amoral people I've ever met.

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

Shapeshifter

Look at him from one angle; he seems bigger.
From another his cleverness glitters like cut crystal.
One face shows righteous outrage at ill-treatment;
Then with no trace of irony another face boasts, laughing, about how
He hoodwinked someone foolish enough to trust him.

Anger in him sizzles like an electric arc.
Look once, twice; it's gone.  Nothing but charm remains.
He hands you a black and bitter drink, his gaze dark with fury;
A moment later, the eyes fill with innocent bewilderment when you refuse to swallow it.
His words soothe, stroke; misdirect; wound.
He speaks sharp-edged contempt
Through a polished smile.

Hold a mirror up to him;
One image.  But a different one
For every person he meets
And a different one each time you meet him.

He slips, he slides, he dances, he weaves and dodges;
No trap can hold him.  Pin him down, he oozes away,
Turns, and smiles at you, eyes flashing triumph;
Unassailable.  You cannot win, and he knows it.

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

Reconnecting the isolates

Determining which languages are related to which is significantly more difficult than you might expect.

English, for example.  Most people know that it's a Germanic language, related not only to German but to Dutch, Flemish, and (more distantly), to the Scandinavian languages.  This shows most strongly in the basic vocabulary; the majority of our common verbs and nouns, as well as pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, have Anglo-Saxon -- i.e., Germanic -- origin.

However, consider the first sentence in this post.  The words which, are, to, is, more, than, you, and might are Germanic; but the more complicated words (determining, languages, related, significantly, difficult, and expect)  -- the ones that carry most of the meaning -- are all Latin in origin.  So is English actually a Romance language?

It isn't, of course, but a superficial look at the language might well push you to reach the wrong conclusion.  Most of our words of Greek and Latin origin were either via the Norman French spoken by the conquerors and ruling class in England who came in during the eleventh century, or later borrow-words that slipped into common parlance from their use in legal, scientific, and religious contexts.  English, in fact, has borrowed words from just about every language it's contacted.  A few interesting ones:

• algorithm (Arabic)
• loot (Hindi)
• torso (Italian)
• ketchup (Malay, by way of Chinese)
• easel (Dutch)
• sauna (Finnish)
• amen (Hebrew)
• chess and checkmate (Farsi)
• coffee (Turkish)
• icon (Greek, possibly via Russian)
• chocolate (Nahuatl)
• hurricane (Taino)
• tattoo (Samoan)

Despite all this, it remains a Germanic language in basic structure, something that is borne out by our knowledge of the history of English-speaking people.

We English-speaking linguists are lucky, because the written records for English and its antecedents are generally excellent.  We have a highly-detailed map of how the language evolved, and even in the case of borrow-words, we can often pinpoint not only where they came from, but when they entered the English language.  Things are far murkier with languages that have a poorer -- or completely nonexistent -- written history.  In that case, we're left with the immense task of using similarities in word roots and syntactic structure as the basis for inferring where a language fits in the overall family tree.

And sometimes even that isn't enough.  There are a good number of languages for which we have been unable to establish a clear relationship to any other; these are called language isolates, and include Basque, Sandawe (a language spoken in Tanzania), Zuni, Huave (an indigenous language in Mexico), Burushaski (spoken by about 100,000 people in Pakistan), and -- amazingly -- Japanese and Korean.

In fact, it's the latter two that are why this topic comes up today.  Both Japanese and Korean are of unclear relationship to each other and to the other languages in the region.  The Japanese writing system is largely borrowed from Chinese; the Japanese kanji is an ideographic script that uses many identical characters to those in Chinese (although the pronunciations, and some of the meanings/connotations, are completely different).  Korean writing, on the other hand, is of known provenance; the script (hangul) is a phonetic alphabet that was invented by the fifteenth-century King Sejong to give the speakers of Korean a standard, easily-learned way of writing the language.

So despite having complex and well-studied writing systems, the historical records of Japanese and Korean don't help us a lot with establishing how they fit in with other Asian language families.  But some research published last week in Nature, which I found out from loyal reader of Skeptophilia Gil Miller, has proposed a solution to the mystery.  Using computational analysis to map out not only the related features between the languages but their degree of separation -- analogous to the genetic bootstrap analysis used by evolutionary biologists to determine when the common ancestor between two species existed -- they figured out that not only are Japanese and Korean distantly related to each other, they're also related to Mongolian, to the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia and Manchuria, and to... Turkish!

"We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates.  So we just looked to see if they correlated," said study co-author Martine Robbeets, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in an interview with New Scientist.  "We all identify ourselves with language.  It’s our identity.  We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile.  Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed."

Her use of the phrase "we just looked" makes it sound simple, but that's undue modesty and a significant understatement.  In practice, determining these kind of relationships is anything but easy, and the Robeets et al. study -- if it bears up under further analysis -- is positioned to solve a linguistic conundrum of very long standing.  The work by Robbeets and her colleagues traces these curious language isolates and their relatives to a common origin in the Liao River Valley of northeastern China, on the order of nine thousand years ago, which is pretty stunning.

It also shows that despite the dearth of records and distance in time, we can still gain new insights into the origins of languages long thought to be a mystery -- and potentially reconnect spoken languages that once were considered oddball isolates, related to no other speech system.

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

Can't win, can't break even

Dear readers,

I'm going to take a short break from Skeptophilia -- my next post will be Thursday, November 18.  I'll still be lining up topics during the time I'm away, so keep those suggestions coming!

cheers,

Gordon

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

One of the most misunderstood laws of physics is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Honestly, I understand why.  It's one of those bits of science that seem simple on first glance, then the more you learn, the weirder it gets.  The simplest way to state the Second Law is "systems tend to proceed toward disorder," so on the surface it's so common-sensical that it triggers nothing more than a shrug and, "Well, of course."  But a lot of its ramifications are seriously non-intuitive, and a few are downright mindblowing.

The other problem with it is that it exists in multiple formulations that seem to have nothing to do with one another.  These include:

• the aforementioned statement that without an energy input, over time, systems become more disordered.
• if you place a warm object and cool object in contact with each other, energy will flow from the warmer to the cooler; the warmer object will cool off, and the cooler one will heat up, until they reach thermal equilibrium (equal temperatures).
• no machine can run at 100% efficiency (i.e., turning all of its energy input into usable work).
• some processes are irreversible; for example, there's nothing odd about knocking a wine glass off the table and shattering it, but if you were watching and the shards gathered themselves back together and leapt off the floor and back onto the table as an intact wine glass, you might wonder if all you'd been drinking was wine.

The fact that all of these are, at their basis, different ways of stating the same physical law is not obvious.

For me, the easiest way to understand the "why" of the Second Law has to do with a deck of playing cards.  Let's say you have a deck in order; each suit arranged from ace to king, and the four suits in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.  How many possible ways are there to arrange the cards in exactly that way?

Duh.  Only one, by definition.

Now, let's say you accidentally drop the deck, then pick it up.  Unless you flung the deck across the room, chances are, there will still be some of the cards in the original order, but some of the orderliness will probably have been lost.  Why?  Because there's only a single way to arrange the cards in the order you started with, but there are lots of ways to have them mostly out of order.  The chances of jumping from the single orderly state to one of the many disorderly states is a near certainty.  Then you drop them again (you're having a clumsy day, apparently).  Are they more likely to become more disordered or more orderly?

You see where this is going; since at each round, there are way more disorderly states than orderly ones, just by the laws of statistics you're almost certainly going to watch the deck becoming progressively more disordered.  Yes, it's possible that you could take a completely random deck, toss them in the air, and they'd fall into ace-through-king, hearts-spades-diamonds-clubs -- but if you're waiting for that to happen by random chance, you're going to have a long wait.

You can, of course, force them back into order by painstakingly rearranging the cards, but that takes an input of energy (in the form of your brain and muscles using up chemical energy to accomplish it).  And here's where it gets weird; if you were to measure the decrease in entropy (disorder) in the deck of cards as you rearranged them, it would be outweighed by the increase in entropy of the energy-containing molecules you burned through to do it.  The outcome: you can locally and temporarily decrease entropy, but only at the expense of creating more entropy somewhere else.  Everything we do makes things more chaotic, and any decrease in entropy we see is illusory.  In the end, entropy always wins.

As my long-ago thermodynamics professor told us, "The First Law of Thermodynamics says that you can't win.  The Second Law says you can't break even."

Hell of a way to run a casino, that.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason this all comes up is a paper that a friend of mine sent me a link to, which looks at yet another way of characterizing the Second Law; instead of heat transfer or overall orderliness, it considers entropy as a measure of information content.  The less information you need to describe a system, the lower its entropy; in the example of the deck of cards, I was able to describe the orderly state in seven words (ace-through-king, hearts-spades-diamonds-clubs).  High-entropy states require a lot of information; pick any of the out-of-order arrangements of the deck of cards, and pretty much the only way to describe it is to list each card individually from the top of the deck to the bottom.

The current paper has to do with information stored inside machines, and like many formulations of the Second Law, it results in some seriously weird implications.  Consider, for example, a simple operation on a calculator -- 2+2, for example.  When you press the "equals" sign, and the calculator tells you the answer is four, have you lost information, or gained it?

Most people, myself included, would have guessed that you've gained information; you now know that 2+2=4, if you didn't already know that.  In a thermodynamic sense, though, you've lost information.  When you get the output (4), you irreversibly erase the input (2+2).  Think about going the other way, and it becomes clearer; someone gives you the output (4) and asks you what the input was.

No way to tell.  There are, in fact, an infinite number of arithmetic operations that would give you the answer "4".  What a calculator does is time-irreversible.  "Computing systems are designed specifically to lose information about their past as they evolve," said study co-author David Wolpert, of the Santa Fe Institute.

By reducing the information in the calculator, you're decreasing its entropy (the answer has less information than the input did).  And that means that the calculator is increasing entropy more somewhere else -- in this case, it heats up the surrounding air.

And that's one reason why your calculator gets warm when you use it.  "There's this deep relationship between physics and information theory," said study co-author Artemy Kolchinsky.  "If you erase a bit of information, you have to generate a little bit of heat."

But if everything you do ultimately increases the overall entropy, what does that say about the universe as a whole?

The implication is that the entire universe's entropy was at a minimum at its creation in the Big Bang -- that it started out extremely ordered, with very low information content.  Everything that's happened since has stirred things up and made them more chaotic (i.e., requiring more information for a complete description).  Eventually, the universe will reach a state of maximal disorder, and after that, it's pretty much game over; you're stuck there for the foreseeable future.  This state goes by the cheerful name the "heat death of the universe."

Not to worry, though.  It won't happen for a while, and we've got more pressing matters to attend to in the interim.

To end on a positive note, though -- going back to our original discussion of the increase of entropy as stemming from the likelihood of jumping from a disordered state back to an orderly one, recall that the chance isn't zero, it's just really really really small.  So once the heat death of the universe has occurred, there is a non-zero chance that it will spontaneously come back together into a second very-low-entropy singularity, at which point the whole thing starts over.  Yeah, it's unlikely, but once the universe is in heat death, it's not like it's got much else to do besides wait.

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

Shame, lying, and Archie Bunker

One of my sensitive spots has to do with embarrassment.  Not only do I hate being embarrassed myself, I hate watching other people in embarrassing situations.  I remember as a kid detesting sitcoms in which a character (however richly deserving) was made to look a fool -- the sensation was close to physical pain.

Of course, it's worse when it's a real person, and worst of all when (s)he doesn't realize what's going on.

This whole wince-inducing topic comes up because of a wonderful academic paper called "Cooperation Creates Selection for Tactical Deception," by Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland).  The paper describes research into the evolution of deception, and is a sterling piece of work, showing how a game-theoretical model of cooperation results in selective pressure favoring "tactical deception" -- better known as lying.

"Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities," the authors write.  "Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature."

It's a fascinating piece of research, and it generated some buzz in the media -- even meriting an (also nicely done) summary in HuffPost Science.

So far, what's the problem?  A well-written paper on how game theory predicts the evolution of behavior, and the media (for once) reporting it as they should.  No cause for wincing here, surely?

Nope.  The winces started once the creationists got wind of this.

The site Creation Evolution Headlines evidently found out about McNally and Jackson's paper -- although whether they actually read it remains to be seen.  Because the piece they wrote in response is called...

... wait for it...

"Evolutionists Confess to Lying."

Yes, you're interpreting this correctly; they think that because the paper supports an evolutionary edge for people who are deceptive, it is equivalent to the evolutionary biologists stating, "Ha ha!  We were lying all along!"

I couldn't make something this ridiculous up if I wanted to.

Don't believe me?  Here is an excerpt.  Make sure you have a pillow handy for when you faceplant.

If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we believe anything an evolutionist says?...  Brooks [the author of the HuffPost piece] has the Yoda complex.  So do McNally and Jackson.  They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity.  No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created.  In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception.  It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment...

Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary world collapses into power struggles.  The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless.  How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?  How can either of them know what is true? 

Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves.  Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

My wincing-at-people-embarrassing-themselves response was activated so strongly by all this that I could barely tolerate reading the entire article... especially given that the Creation Evolution Headlines piece got linked on the Skeptic subreddit by the obviously astonished friend of one of the original paper's authors.  (Of course, you're probably thinking, "If you hate seeing people embarrassed so much, why are you calling further attention to it by writing about it?"  To which I can only respond: touché.  And also, that my outrage over a nice bit of evolutionary research being trashed this way trumped my dislike of watching morons shame themselves.)

Let's just take this a piece at a time, okay?

First, McNally and Jackson didn't say that everyone is lying; they said that some people are lying, and benefit by it, a contention that I'd guess atheists and theists would both agree on.  Second, given that the original research looked at cooperative species -- of which there are many -- why does that somehow turn evolution into "power struggles," into a world of every individual for him/herself?  Do ants in a colony only cooperate because they recognize an "eternal standard of truth?"

And I always find it wryly amusing when the theists claim that we atheists must be without morals because we don't think morality comes from some higher power, and suggest that we aren't to be trusted.  Honestly, devout Christians; if the only thing that's keeping you from running around stealing, raping, and murdering is some Bronze Age book of mythology, I think you are the ones we should be watching out for.

As Penn Gillette more eloquently put it, "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?  And my answer is: I do rape all I want.  And the amount I want is zero.  And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.  The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine."

But as far as the McNally/Jackson paper goes, the creationists are missing the most basic problem with their claim.  Saying that lying is an evolved strategy doesn't mean that we "are unable to distinguish between truth and lies."  If evolutionists were unable to distinguish between truth and lies, IT WOULD BE REALLY FUCKING HARD TO WRITE A SCHOLARLY PAPER ABOUT LYING, NOW WOULDN'T IT?

*pant pant gasp gasp*

Okay, I'll try to calm down a little.

What's the worst about these people is that they don't seem to have any awareness that what they're saying, with apparent confidence, is absolute nonsense.  It reminds me of watching the character of Archie Bunker on the 70s television series All in the Family, who week after week would have conversations like the following:

Mike (Archie's son-in-law): Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Archie: Denmark ain't no state, it's the capital of Colorado.

And, of course, Archie would never admit that he was wrong.  In his reality, he was always right, world without end, amen.

I bet Archie would have loved that article in Creation Evolution Headlines.  And he'd probably look at me and say, as he did to once to his wife, "You don't believe in nothin', Edith.  You're one o' them, whaddyacallem, septics."

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

Prelude to a detonation

Even though in general I don't think synchronicity Means Anything, there's no doubt that it can be pretty peculiar.

For example, it seems like in the last few days the universe has tried to get me to think about volcanoes.  First, Scientific American recently featured in their "New Books" column Robin George Andrews's Super Volcanoes, and given my fascination with volcanoes in general I had to get it (and it impressed me enough that it's this week's book-of-the-week).  Andrews's book goes a long way toward dispelling a lot of the hype around places like Yellowstone (no, it's not on the verge of an eruption), and has a lot of cool interviews with volcanologists, much in the style of the wonderful essayist John McPhee.  Only a couple of days after I started reading it, a friend sent me a link to the Naked Science YouTube video "Supervolcanoes," which seemed to be the anti-Andrews; if I can sum it up, it would be "WE'RE ALL FUCKED RUN FOR YOUR LIFE."  It isn't terrible, and does include some actual science, but the most striking thing about it is a CGI rendition of Yellowstone blowing sky-high which they use over and over and over and over in the fifty-minute-long video, as if they'd paid somebody a hefty sum to do the rendering, and by god, they were gonna get their money's worth out of it.

Then, just yesterday, a (different) friend sent me a link to a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that kind of splits the difference between Naked Science's screaming alarmism and Andrews's breeziness; it looks at the scarily huge Mount Toba volcano in Indonesia, and comes to the unsettling conclusions that (1) it definitely will erupt again, and (2) we probably won't have much warning when it does.

The last significant eruption of Toba was about 74,000 years ago, and was a VEI8 -- the highest ranking on the Volcanic Explosivity Index -- releasing an estimated three thousand cubic kilometers of ash and lava, and causing a worldwide (if temporary) drop in average temperature by about three degrees Celsius.  (For comparison, this is over seven hundred times the volume ejected by the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.)  The eruption blew the entire top of the mountain clean off, and the evacuation of the magma chamber beneath it caused the caldera to collapse.  It filled with water, and is now a beautiful -- and seemingly peaceful -- crater lake, Lake Toba.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Visions of Domino, Indonesia - Lake Toba (26224127503), CC BY 2.0]

The operative word here is "seemingly."  The processes that caused the original eruption, mostly the subduction of the Indian and Australian Tectonic Plates beneath the Sunda Plate, continue to cause massive earthquakes including the colossal (9.2 on the Richter Scale) Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of December 2004, which killed over 225,000 people.  In the case of Toba, the magma chamber has been steadily refilling, and now contains an estimated 50,000 cubic kilometers of magma -- four times the volume of Lake Superior.  This refilling has pushed the entire caldera upward, lifting Samosir Island and the Uluan Peninsula an estimated 450 meters.

It's hard to talk about this without lapsing into superlatives.  The scariest thing about it, though, is that the recent study indicates that such volcanoes can seem quiescent until -- well, until they aren't any more.  "[W]ith few super-eruptions in the last two million years, it is not possible for us to obtain statistically significant values for the frequency of these catastrophic events at a global scale," said study co-author Ping-Ping Liu of Peking University, in a press release from the Université de Genève.  "Our study also shows that no extreme events occur before a super-eruption.  This suggests that signs of an impending super-eruption, such as a significant increase in earthquakes or rapid ground uplift, might not be as obvious as pictured in disaster movies by the film industry.  At Toba volcano, everything is happening silently underground."

The reassuring part is "not as obvious" doesn't mean "without any warning;" the entire Indonesian archipelago is an area of intense study by volcanologists and seismologists, and it's likely there'd be enough anomalous activity to give us at least a hint that an eruption was impending.  Whether we'd do much about it in the form of evacuations is another matter.  Sumatra (where the volcano is located) and the nearby island of Bali are densely populated, and the idea of getting all those people out (to where?) makes the phrase "mammoth undertaking" a significant understatement.  And for those of you who like certainty, the current study doesn't give us any clear idea of exactly when the next big eruption will occur, just that (1) it's inevitable, (2) when it does, it'll be bad, (3) the filling of the magma chamber is still happening, and (4) there are signs that the volcanic activity at Toba and the surrounding regions is speeding up.

"[There's been a] progressive increase of the temperature of the continental crust in which Toba’s magma reservoir is assembled," Liu said.  "The input of magma has gradually heated the surrounding continental crust, which makes the magma cool slower.  This is a ‘vicious circle’ of eruptions: the more the magma heats the crust, the slower the magma cools and the faster the rate of magma accumulation becomes.  The result is that super-eruptions can become more frequent in time."

So there's your cheerful news of the day.  As far as the synchronicity aspect of this, I'm not gonna make much of it.  The fact that two different friends know enough of my obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes to send me the link to the YouTube video and paper is hardly to be wondered at.  As far as the book review, it's no wonder I noticed it given that the tile of the book is Super Volcanoes.  I don't think this is some kind of cosmic warning that we're about to get blown to smithereens.

So if you were looking for an excuse to stay home from work this week, you'll probably have to come up with a different one.

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

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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