The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though,  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that will appear in a book next year called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleaides are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.  

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown two years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleaides was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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

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!]

Requiem for a gentle soul

Seven years ago we were looking for a dog to adopt.  Not too long before we'd lost our brilliant, eccentric border collie mix Doolin, and while we knew there was no replacing that big a personality, we felt like our house needed another canine presence.  Our other dog, Grendel, had gone into a positive decline when his friend died, and although he was beginning to come out of it, he was clearly still lonely.

We started pawing through (pun intended) local rescue and adoption sites, and for a while didn't see anyone who seemed right.  Grendel was great with other dogs, so compatibility wasn't likely to be a problem, and one April day we drove with him to a couple of shelters to see who might need a home.

After a couple of "well, maybes," we ended up at the lovely Animal Care Sanctuary in East Smithfield, Pennsylvania.  If you're ever up that way looking for a dog -- not very likely, I guess, because it's in the middle of rural north-central Pennsylvania -- this is the place to go.  Carol had found a listing for a dog who seemed interesting, a seven-year-old hound mix, so we drove down to meet her.

The first thing we found out about her was that she'd already been adopted three times -- and brought back.  The people at ACS weren't sure why, although they thought one time had been because of problems getting along with another dog who was (their words) "kind of hyperactive."  But we figured we could tell a lot by how she interacted with Grendel when they met, and it'd be obvious quick if the problems had been partly on her side.

We left Gren in the car while we went to meet her.  We were escorted into a meeting room with toys and a dog bed, and waited for the assistant to bring her in.  When the door opened and she came in on a leash, Carol and I said simultaneously, "Oh, my goodness, she is gorgeous."  I'd never seen a dog with those markings.  Apparently she was part bluetick and part redbone hound, and the markings were a blend of both -- patches of black and chestnut-brown, and lots of white with freckles of both colors.

The second thing that became apparent quickly was that whatever the problem had been with the other dog, it hadn't been her fault.  She trotted right up to us, tail wagging madly, as if we'd known her for years.  When we brought Gren in to meet her, there was more tail wagging, as well as the obligatory mutual all-over sniff.  It took us about five minutes to decide she was coming home with us.

We named her Lena.

Me with Lena and Grendel shortly after her adoption

Our dogs seem to accrue nicknames, and in short order Lena got the moniker "Splat:"

Her penchant for digging led to her being called "Pothole:"

Snow, ice, whatever.  Didn't matter.

Other times she was JellyBean (what Carol usually called her), Moaning Myrtle (because of her moans and groans when she was getting an ear rub or a belly skritch), Speed Bump (she had a knack for lying right across door thresholds or across the top of the stairs), Derpy (when she did something unusually silly), and Your Royal Majesty (from her habit of standing at the back door barking when she wanted to be let in right now).

The most striking thing about her, though, was her extraordinary gentleness.  She is far and away the sweetest, most laid-back dog I've ever met.

When Grendel died four years ago and we decided to find her a new friend -- and settled on a big, goofy knucklehead of a pittie mix who's named Guinness but who earned the nicknames "Galoot" and "Crash" really early on -- she tolerated his antics and love for rough play without a hint of a growl.

Like they all do, she got creaky with age.  When she hit ten, she started to get a little arthritic, but most days handled all the staircases in our house without any hesitation.  And even when her health began to get more precarious, early this year, she never lost her exuberant cheerfulness and sweet disposition.

The tail never stopped wagging.

That, in fact, is how we knew something was seriously wrong last week.  She stopped eating, and began to experience other unpleasant symptoms I won't go into.  But the biggest red flag was that she was clearly unhappy.  The tail was down, the eyes downcast, and a gentle probe of her stomach elicited a yelp -- and the presence of a mass that shouldn't have been there.

Three days later, it became obvious she was suffering badly.  As a frail fourteen-year-old, there was no way we were going to put her through surgery, which was unlikely to be successful and certainly would have compromised her quality of life even if it extended the quantity.  And Monday evening, we sat with her as our wonderful vet, Dr. Bonnie, helped to end Lena's pain with us sitting right next to her stroking her head and telling her what an amazing dog she was.

Even though it was the right thing to do, I feel heartbroken.  It's going to be a long time before I stop looking for her to walk into my office in the morning to say hello and get the obligatory ear rub.  Other pet owners will understand how much they become part of the fabric of your family, and how much both pet and owner get from the mutual unconditional love.  Lena was an extraordinary dog, and her loss leaves a hole in our lives.  But despite the pain I'm feeling now, I'm thankful we had the chance to give her seven great years in a warm and loving home.  Although I'm crying now I'll always remember with a smile a calm, sweet, gentle soul with a huge heart, who needed very little to be happy -- and always gave us far more than she ever took.

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

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 book in the bog

It's a sad truth that written records are ephemeral.

The Library of Alexandria burns, taking with it an unguessed number of priceless manuscripts.  Ink fades; some kinds of ink actually degrade the paper and make its demise even faster.  Mildew and mold take their toll if there's even the slightest amount of moisture.  Insects like the taste of the glue used to hold older books together.  And -- in the words of Brother William of Baskerville, the brilliant main character in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose -- "rats like books almost as much as scholars do."

The result is that books and scrolls are better than no written records at all, but are very far from permanent.  This is why the survival of a book of prayers in a peat bog in County Tipperary, Ireland, for twelve hundred years is something akin to a miracle.

I found out about what is now known as the Faddan More Psalter from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and was as fascinated by how manuscript conservationists restored the book (as much as was possible) as I was by its mere survival.  When it was discovered by someone cutting peat, it was so sodden with bog water that no one dared to try opening it.  When they were finally able to pull the pages away from each other, the first words the researchers saw were in ualle lacrimarum ("in the valley of tears"), and they quickly realized that it was a medieval rendering of the Book of Psalms.

That was only the beginning of the restoration effort.  Not only was there the danger of the paper disintegrating when the pages were peeled apart, there was the problem that the iron gall ink used to write the manuscript had in some places eaten right through it, so what the conservationists had was a bunch of loose letters.

[Image by Valerie Dowling and the National Museum of Ireland]

The first three years after the discovery of the book, the priority was drying it out and stabilizing what was left of it.  Dewatering the paper was done first by freeze-drying it, then putting it in a near-vacuum so the water would evaporate without further damaging the pages.

"It was absolutely terrifying," said John Gillis, chief manuscript conservationist at Trinity College Dublin, home of other treasures like The Book of Kells.  "I heard from someone in the British Museum that there was a picture of the mass on the walls in a staff area there with the words ‘if you think you have a bad day ahead …’  You had this nerve-racking scenario of disturbing this material, which meant losing evidence, when the whole point was trying to gain as much information as possible."

Ultimately, Gillis and his team were able to dry out and tease apart the pages of the Faddan More Psalter. "The rewards when you slowly lifted up a fragment, and suddenly beneath this little bit of decoration would appear, particularly the yellow pigment they used. It would kind of shine back at you," Gillis said.  "And you’d go: ‘Wow, I am the first person to see this in 1,200 years.’  So that kind of privilege made all the sleepless nights and racking of the brain worthwhile.  It was the purest conservation I’ve ever carried out.  There is no repair, I’ve attached nothing new.  All I’ve done is captured and stabilized."

What strikes me most about all this is the tremendous patience the conservationists had with letting the book give up its secrets on its own timetable.  Rushing the process would have undoubtedly caused further damage.  The whole restoration process took years, but now we have a glimpse at a book that, amazingly, escaped decaying into nothing while submerged in a bog for over a millennium.

Showing that books, although undoubtedly ephemeral, are more resilient than you might think.  All of which makes me wonder what else is out there waiting to be discovered.

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

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 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."

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

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!]