Beanie protection

Worried about aliens and/or the Illuminati and/or Bill Gates beaming secret subconscious orders directly into your brain?  Want to protect yourself from evil external influences?  Tired of running down to the supermarket every other day to buy a new roll of Reynolds Wrap?

Have I got a product for you.

I was gonna add, "Do you have no idea how electronic technology works?" but then I decided that (1) it was redundant because "no idea about technology" probably overlaps pretty completely with people who answered "yes" to the preceding three questions, and (2) I'm no electrical engineer myself.  But I do know enough to feel relatively confident that no one is trying to 5G my brainwaves or whatnot every time I turn on my phone.

Now, I'm not saying that the tech corporations aren't trying to hack your preferences in non-woo-woo ways.  It's no big secret that all you have to do is to search once for something online, and you will immediately be crushed to death under a million advertisements for the product on every social media platform known.  Sometimes, just saying it is enough; if your phone is on (or, for that matter, Alexa, EchoDot, or Siri), you can assume you're being listened to.  It's not by the Illuminati, though.  Trust me, the Illuminati don't give a flying rat's ass what you are fixing for lunch.  Advertisers, though, do; they care deeply.  In an incident I swear I am not making up, my wife and I were in the car laughing about people who dress their dogs up for Halloween, and I commented that with our dog's long legs and lanky frame, we should get her a Star Wars AT-AT Walker costume.  When I got home, I turned on my computer, got onto Facebook, and...

... the first thing I saw was an advertisement for AT-AT costumes for dogs.

So if they're listening in, it's not to turn you into a mindless automaton, it's to get you to pull out your wallet and order useless shit online.

Which, now that I come to think of it, aren't all that different.

I've also seen claims suggesting that humans are way more perceptive about subliminal messages than they actually are.  A guy on Twitter wrote a sinister post pointing out that the letters in "delta omicron" (the names of two of the COVID-19 variants) can be rearranged to spell "media control," and how that was highly significant.  Because using Greek letter names isn't something scientists do all the time, or anything.  I responded that you could also rearrange "delta omicron" to spell "cilantro mode," "doom clarinet," "erotic almond," and "retail condom," so what's your point?

He responded by blocking me.  You can't win.

In any case, my point is that even if they were able to beam subconscious commands directly into your cerebral cortex (which they can't), they don't need to.  We do the big corporations' bidding just fine as it is.  But in case you're still worried, and even after buying a ridiculous costume for your dog you still have more money than sense, allow me to direct your attention to a site where you can buy...

... an electromagnetic-field-blocking beanie.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Andrew Neel]

The site describes the beanie as follows:

WaveStopper™ uses a proprietary concept that includes a tight mesh of SilverFlex™ fibers carefully woven to create an electromagnetic shield.  The conductivity of SilverFlex™ mesh cancels out the magnetic field of EMFs and as a result reflects the radiation outside the garment.  WaveStopper™ is tested in military-grade laboratories and certified to be blocking over 99% of EMFs including cellphone, 4G, 5G WiFi, and Bluetooth radiation.

In case the guys in my readership think that you're also getting commands beamed directly into your testicles, they also sell Faraday Cage Boxer Briefs.  You probably know that a Faraday cage is a mesh of conductive material that shields what is inside it from electromagnetic fields; they're used routinely to protect electronic equipment from powerful EMFs nearby.  As far as the low-level EMFs we're exposed to daily, the current research strongly supports the fact that they have no harmful health effects.  The World Health Organization has the following to say:

In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years.  Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals.  Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low-level electromagnetic fields.

The upshot of it is that you don't have to worry about Faraday-caging your junk unless you're considering placing it inside a microwave oven and turning it on.

Like I said before, it's not that I am unaware that big corporations are constantly finding new ways to hack your preferences for their own purposes (as are political parties; witness the Cambridge Analytica scandal).  It's just that they're not doing it by 5G-ing your brain.  We give them our information all the time, voluntarily and often without a second thought.  Besides doing Google searches for stuff, we get suckered every day by ploys like the seemingly silly and lighthearted posts that pop up regularly on Facebook and Twitter.  "Your rock band name is the color of your underwear + the last thing you ate for a snack."  "If you reversed the digits of your age, how old would you be?"  "What was the #1 hit song when you were twelve years old?"  "Your stripper name is your grandma's first name + the street you grew up on."  Some of these are clearly fishing for information that is commonly used on security questions; but even the more innocuous ones are trying to find out your demographics, your preferences, and your habits.  Let me put this bluntly: you should never answer questions like these.  Ever.  Maybe some of them are just goofy posts from people wanting to bump up their interaction rate on Twitter, but enough of them are sketchy that you should avoid them all.  Even answering them "I'm not answering this because it's trying to do data mining" just clues in the originator that they have someone who will take the time to answer... and as a result, you'll see more and more such posts.

But about the high-tech fabric to protect your brain and/or balls, my advice is: save your money.  We have much, much bigger things to worry about.  And if you're still concerned about media control (or, for that matter, doom clarinets and erotic almonds), I have a suggestion:

Close the damn social media, shut off your computer and your phone, and go for a long walk.  That'll clear your mind nicely, even without a protective EMF-repelling beanie.

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

I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

Run like a dinosaur

One of my favorite movies, which I have seen I don't even know how many times, is Jurassic Park.

I'm honestly not much of a movie-watcher, but the first time I saw this one, it grabbed me from the opening scene and pretty much never let go.  Besides the great acting (Jeff Goldblum being top of the list... I've been known to swipe his line, "I hate it when I'm always right") and eye-popping special effects, it also gave us a window into something that has been the subject of speculation for centuries: the behavior of extinct animals.

Some of what Crichton, Spielberg et al. came up with was fanciful and almost certainly wrong; a case in point is the frill-waving, venom-spitting Dilophosaurus that ate the villainous Dennis Nedry.  Now, don't get me wrong; it's a great scene, and Nedry deserved everything he got, and more.  But we don't know if the crests of the Dilophosaurus were even retractable; this idea came from an only distantly-related reptile species, the Australian frilled lizard.  And the idea that it had venomous saliva is a complete fiction, given that spit doesn't fossilize all that well.

Dennis Nedry about to become dinner.  That'll teach him for saying "No wonder you're extinct.  I'm gonna run you over when I come back down."

Likewise the terrifying pack-hunting and deliberate, highly intelligent distraction behavior ("Clever girl") of the Velociraptors is entertaining fiction, based upon their relatively large cranial capacity, big nasty pointy teeth, and documented accounts of pack hunters like coyotes using a decoy to drive prey toward its waiting pack mates.  It's unlikely that Velociraptors (or any other dinosaur) were that smart, and I doubt seriously that any of them could figure out how to unlatch a freezer door.

What's cool, though, is that there are some inferences about dinosaur behavior (and the behavior of other extinct animals) we can make from fossil evidence alone.  The iconic scene where Alan Grant and his friends are nearly run over by a stampeding herd of Gallimimus was based upon a set of tracks that may represent exactly what the movie depicts -- a group of small dinosaurs fleeing a larger carnivorous one.  (Some paleontologists still dispute this interpretation, however.)  But the fact remains that we can use fossils to make some shrewd guesses about behavior.

Take, for example, the tracks found recently of a three-toed theropod dinosaur in the Rioja region of Spain.  The species is impossible to tell from the tracks alone, but based upon analysis of the sediment layers, the researchers learned four things:

• The tracks were made on the order of a hundred million years ago, in the early to mid-Cretaceous Period.
• The gait and depth indicates that it was running at about 45 kilometers per hour (right around the top speed Usain Bolt ever achieved).
• Whatever the dinosaur was, it was on the order of two meters tall and between four and five meters from tip to tail.
• Scariest of all, the pattern of tracks showed that as it ran, the animal was accelerating.

So chances are, it was chasing prey.  But there was no evidence to determine whether the prey got away or was turned into a Dennis-Nedry-style all-you-can-eat buffet.

A dangerous time, the mid-Cretaceous.  While a lot of us dinosaur aficionados would love a chance to go back in time and see what it was like, my guess is that once there, most of us would have a life expectancy of under six hours.  So as much as I love Jurassic Park, I'm just fine with not re-creating it.

In any case, it's exciting to know that even though a hundred million years has passed, we can still make some inferences about how these long-extinct animals behaved.  Fossils like the theropod tracks in Spain can give us a window into a long-vanished world, and the fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying animals that inhabited it.

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

I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

Voices from the jungle

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enough, but I think what really captured me was the unique way the language was written.

At that time, very little of the writing had been successfully deciphered, and much of what had been was tentative at best.  In fact, for some time the task was that most daunting of linguistic puzzles; an unknown script coding for unknown sounds in an unknown language.  The surmise that the glyphs primarily represented not just a single language, but two -- the extinct Ch'otli' language and the extant Yucatec language -- didn't help matters.  Complicating things further was the fact that it turns out that similar to Japanese hiragana and kanji, some of the glyphs represent syllables and others represent entire words.  The team effort to completely decipher Mayan glyphs took well over a hundred years, culminating in a paper in 1986 that allowed just about every classic Mayan inscription to be read.

The most daunting thing is that the patterns connecting spelling to pronunciation were convoluted.  Some words had "echo vowels" -- vowels repeated from the previous syllable when written, but not pronounced (e.g. yop, leaf, written using the syllables yo-po).  Other written-but-not-pronounced vowels were "disharmonic" -- not the same as the preceding syllable -- and the rules governing which syllabic glyph to use are abstruse to say the least.  (Of course, in reality, the Mayans have nothing on English for bizarre spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences; consider how -ough is pronounced in the words rough, through, thorough, ought, drought, and hiccough.  I even have an idea of why that mess happened historically, and I still think it's ridiculous.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And, of course, the main difficulty was the paucity of examples of the script, mostly due to the Spanish, who came in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeded to destroy as many of the heathen inscriptions they could get their hands on.  People like Diego de Landa, bishop of the Yucatán in the late sixteenth century, burned just about all the Mayan codices, and his belated efforts to preserve what was known about the script and the languages they represented were half-hearted at best.  Even so, historian and linguist William Gates -- in what has to be preserved forever in the annals of chutzpah -- said, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us... or have learned in the use and study of what he told."

Well, if you count that he destroyed ninety-nine percent of the inscriptions first, then yeah, ninety-nine percent of the remaining one percent were preserved by de Landa and his friends in the Inquisition.

It's heartening, though, that five hundred years later, we find remnants of that lost civilization.  (There are still people who speak Mayan languages today, but it's undeniable the Spanish pretty well obliterated the culture of an entire people.)  Just last week, it was announced that some explorers trying to map out caves in the Yucatán stumbled upon three pieces of pottery dating back to the Late Postclassic Period (1200-1550 C.E.).  One of them was in fragments -- crushed when it was caught in between growing tree roots -- but the other two are in remarkably good condition.  The Mayans had a positive fascination for caves, and thought (like many early civilizations) that they represented the entrance to the underworld, a place called Xibalba (literally, "place of fright").  Just as the Greeks did at the cave of the Delphic Oracle, the Mayans brought offerings and sacrifices into caves to appease the gods and spirits of the nether world, and it's thought these three vessels were probably examples of those ritual gifts.

Even by comparison to other cultures' ideas about the horrors of the afterlife, Xibalba is impressively awful.  The lords of Xibalba seemed to enjoy causing pain and humiliation, and sent human spirits after death into a series of tests in various "houses" -- Dark House (completely pitch black, as you might have guessed), Rattling House (ice cold, with pounding hailstorms), Jaguar House (guess what lived there, and were dreadfully hungry), Bat House (ditto), Razor House (filled with blades that moved around on their own), and Hot House (which was on fire).  Just the names of the gods of Xibalba would be enough to dissuade me from ever going there (not, I suppose, that you had a choice).  There were:

• Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab")
• Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood")
• Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon")
• Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon")
• Chamiabac ("Bone Staff")
• Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff")
• Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon") and Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon") (who teamed up to hide in the dust of unswept parts of your house, then jumped out and stabbed you to death, which is a pretty good incentive to keep the floor clean)

Which definitely makes me wonder who spent their time making this shit up.  I mean, if you're gonna come up with wild tales, at least leave out the sentient razor blades and pus demons.

So it's a fascinating culture, but one I'm rather glad I don't belong to.  The Judeo-Christian hell I had to contend with when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church was bad enough.

Be that as it may, it's pretty cool that Diego de Landa and his ilk didn't silence all of these distant voices from the jungle.  I've been lucky enough to visit that part of the world twice, and the pyramids and stone temples they left behind are awe-inspiring.  Perhaps there are still more relics out there in the rain forest waiting to be discovered -- and which will give us another lens into a vanished civilization.

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

I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

A real cosmic storm

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the show Lost in Space.

Not only did I think the stories were exciting, there was the comic relief from Dr. Smith (overacted by Jonathan Harris) and the fact that I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson (played by Marta Kristen).  Now, with the perspective of time, I'm struck by how ridiculous most of the plots were, and also how fast and loose they played with science, even stuff that was known and understood at the time.  A few of the goofier ones:

• A comet making a close pass to the Jupiter 2, and Professor Robinson explaining how they'd be okay as long as they "didn't get too close to the comet's extreme heat and light"
• An episode where they ended up going faster than the speed of light because of "chemical impurities in the fuel," and the result was going back in time
• A character who was involved in an accident which damaged his heart, so the aliens removed his heart and replaced it with a lettuce heart, thereby turning him into a half-human, half-plant
• An alien who gets the Robot drunk by pouring tequila on his circuit boards

A recurring theme was the sudden appearance of a "cosmic storm."  What about them was "cosmic" was never explained, because usually all that happened is there was about forty-five seconds of wind, which blew around styrofoam rocks and stage props made of cardboard, and the Robot went around flailing his claws and shouting "Danger!  Danger!  A cosmic storm!"  Whatever these cosmic storms were supposed to be, they always heralded the appearance of one or more aliens, which included an extraterrestrial biker gang, a space cowboy, a magician (played by Al Lewis, best known for his depiction of Grandpa on The Munsters), a pirate (complete with an electronic parrot), a bunch of hillbillies (whose spacecraft looked like a wooden shack with a front porch), and in one extremely memorable episode, Brünhilde, who proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place, resplendent in a Viking helmet and riding a cosmic horse who unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic.

What's kind of a shame about all this is that the writers missed an opportunity (well, three seasons' worth of opportunities, really) to use actual science as a plot point.  Because there are cosmic storms, or at least something like them; they're called coronal mass ejections, and occur when a blob of plasma erupts off the surface of the Sun.  Small ones happen pretty much every day, but some of these things are freakin' huge, most notably the "Carrington Event" of 1859, which if it occurred today would have fried satellites and knocked out most of the world's power grid.  (As is, it caused sparking from telegraph lines that resulted in a number of fires.)

It turns out that even the Carrington Event is on the small side of what CMEs are capable of, judging by a paper last week in Nature Astronomy.  Scientists at the University of Colorado were studying a star called EK Draconis, which is rather like the Sun except much younger, and they saw it produce a CME that was ten times more powerful than anything we've ever seen the Sun do.  As it left the surface of the star, the burst of plasma was traveling well over a million kilometers an hour.

Any planet in the way would be in serious trouble.  Some scientists believe that a CME of that magnitude might be part of why Mars has such a thin atmosphere; a large CME aimed in its direction could well have stripped most of its atmosphere away.  

The question, of course, is, whether the Sun is capable of such an outburst.  The answer is "we're not sure, but probably."  Like I said, EK Draconis is fairly Sun-like; but it's far earlier along in its stellar evolution, and is more or less what the Sun looked like 4.5 billion years ago.  So its massive CME could be because it's in its turbulent youth, and the Sun has now settled down into comfortable middle age so it won't be quite so likely to blow plasma in our general direction.  But even so, the Carrington Event shows that the Sun is still capable of some serious pyrotechnics.  At present, there's no way to predict when they'll happen, or where on the Sun's surface; to do significant damage, the CME would have to be aimed toward the Earth.  We do know they're connected with the eleven-year sunspot cycle.  Solar flares and other surface disturbances are more common when sunspots are at their maximum (the next solar maximum is predicted to be in 2024).  But lots of sunspot cycle maximums come and go without any catastrophic CMEs, so there is still no sure way to predict the turbulence that precedes the storm.

The authors write:

Our findings can therefore provide a proxy for the possible enormous filament eruptions on young solar-type stars and the Sun, which would enable us to evaluate the effects on the ancient, young Solar System planets and the Earth, respectively.  Further, it is also speculated that stellar mass loss due to filament eruptions/CMEs can affect the evolutionary theory of stellar mass, angular momentum and luminosity more importantly than can stellar winds.  At present, frequency and statistical properties of CMEs on solar-type stars are unknown, but important insights into these factors will be obtained by increasing the number of samples in the future.

So I think we can all agree that this is much more impressive than Lost in Space-style cosmic storms, even without the alien Vikings and what-have-you.

It also highlights how powerful and unpredictable our universe can be.  On a calm, sunny day, it's easy to forget what a turbulent inferno the Sun actually is.  Me, I think it's a good idea when humans are reminded periodically that on the universal scale, we're really small.  There are potential disasters we can't predict or prevent -- CMEs being one example -- but maybe if we have impressed upon us how vulnerable we are, how dependent on our clement world, we'll finally start taking better care of what we have and averting the disasters we can prevent.

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

I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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

Birds of a feather

The word species has got to be the mushiest term in all of science.

It's one of those situations where you think you know what something means until you start pushing on it.  When humans started to put a serious effort into categorizing other life forms -- Aristotle is usually credited with being the first to do this in a systematic way -- it seemed obvious enough.  Members of a species are similar morphologically.  Put more simply, you can tell a cat from a dog because they look different.

The problem is, this starts to cause problems just about immediately.  What about organisms that look very different, but we still consider to be the same species?  Dogs, in fact, are a good example.  Imagine you're an alien scientist arriving on Earth, and you're looking at a St. Bernard and a chihuahua.  If a human said, "These are the same species," my guess is you'd do whatever passes for laughter on your home world, then get back in your spaceship and fly away after writing "No intelligent life" on the map of the Solar System.

Dogs, of course, aren't the only ones; there are lots of examples in nature of different-looking organisms that are considered conspecific.  So in the 1800s, the definition was revised to, "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing offspring."  This worked until people started to think about mules, which are the offspring of a horse and a donkey (usually considered separate species).  Then, it was pointed out that although alive and well, (most) mules are infertile, so a word was added to take care of that problem: "a group of organisms that are capable of mating and producing fertile offspring."

It only got worse from here.  An awkward difficulty with the above definition is, what about asexual species?  They kind of don't fit in no matter how you look at it.  Oh, well, maybe they get their own version of the definition.  But what about ring species?  This is a group of populations, often arranged in a ring around a geographical barrier (thus the name) where all of them can interbreed except for the ones at the "ends" of the ring  It's been observed multiple times, including a group of salamanders in California, the Greenish Warbler of central Asia, and a ring of gull species -- the latter of which goes all the way around the world.

So do these represent one species, or many?  Within the ring, some of them are interfertile, and others aren't.  And splitting the ring doesn't help; then you're separating populations that are interfertile.  In fact, like asexual species, ring species seem to be unclassifiable with the canonical definition.

It all comes, my evolutionary biology professor said to us, from the desperation humans have to pigeonhole everything.  "The only reason we came up with the concept of a species in the first place," he said, "is because humans have no near relatives."

Of course, none of this sits well with the creationists, because a central tenet of their beliefs is that each kind of life form was created by God as-is and nothing's changed since.  Which is all well and good until you ask, "What do you mean by 'kind of life form'?"  They respond that God created "discrete forms with genetic boundaries to interbreeding," which they call baramins (a neologism coined from the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind").  So the ring species of gulls isn't a problem because gulls are a "kind."  In fact, you can define "kind" in this context as "a classification of life forms that conveniently makes all of the internal contradictions go away.  Now stop asking questions."  

In any case, there really is no good, consistent definition of species that covers all the exceptions.  Even now that we have genetic analysis -- which is currently the touchstone for classification -- it only further reinforces the fact that evolution generates a continuum of forms, and you're asking for trouble if you try to subdivide them.  Only in cases like ourselves, where there are no living near relatives, does it seem clear-cut.

Take the study out of the University of Colorado that appeared in Nature Communications this week.  It's about a trio of species of birds, so being a rather fanatical birder, it immediately caught my eye.  The species involved (and I use that term guardedly, for reasons that will become obvious) are the Common Redpoll, (Acanthis flammea) the Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni), and the Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret), all types of finch with a characteristic red splotch on the forehead.  

Common Redpoll (Acanthis flammea) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cephas, Carduelis flammea CT6, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Lesser Redpoll is only found in Europe, but the other two occur in North America.  They have pretty obvious color differences; the Lesser Redpoll is brownish, the Hoary Redpoll is almost white, and the Common Redpoll is somewhere in the middle, with reddish flanks.  The size differs, as well, with the Lesser at the small end and the Hoary at the large end.

Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carduelis_cabaret.jpg: Lawrie Phipps derivative work: MPF (talk), Carduelis cabaret1, CC BY 2.0]

However, the differences aren't huge.  We get Common Redpolls at our bird feeders in winter fairly regularly, but Hoary Redpolls are a rare sighting in our area.  Every winter I scan the flocks of redpolls looking for whiter individuals, but I still have never seen one.  However, I may be able to cross that one off the list of "species I haven't seen" -- because the current study has shown that despite the differences in appearance, all three are a single species.

Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ron Knight from Seaford, East Sussex, United Kingdom, Arctic Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) (13667519855), CC BY 2.0]

The color and size differences, the researchers found, are due to a "supergene complex" -- a single cluster of genes that work together to produce a specific phenotype.  What's striking is that despite the differences in that gene complex between the three different groups of redpolls, they are otherwise about as genetically identical as it's possible to get.  And... they're all potentially interfertile.

"Often times we assume that a lot of traits can act independently, meaning that different traits can be inherited separately from one another, but this particular result shows that sometimes these traits are actually tightly linked together," said Erik Funk, lead author on the paper, in an interview in Science Daily.  "At least for these birds, they're inheriting a whole group of traits together as one."

Birders tend to hate it when confronted with "lumpers," as they call researchers who merge species together, therefore reducing the number of potential birds to chase after.  They much prefer "splitters," who take previously single species and subdivide them, like another "winter finch," the Red Crossbill (Loxia curvirostra), which according to some taxonomists isn't a single species but several -- possibly as many as seven.  In any case, my point here is that this kind of thing happens all the time.  Like I said at the beginning, we think we have a clear idea of what's meant by a species until we start examining it.

But to me, this only increases my fascination with the natural world.  It's a beautiful, subtle, and complex interlocking web of organisms, and maybe the most surprising thing of all is that we do think it should be simple and easily classifiable.  As usual, our scheme for understanding the world turns out to be woefully inadequate -- and once again, science has come to the rescue by turning a lens on a small and unassuming bird as a way of pointing out how much more we have to learn.

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

As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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

Swearing off

N.B.:  Because this post is about bad language, it contains bad language.  If you're sensitive to such things, be thou forewarned.

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

It's no real secret that I swear a lot.

I recall my mom trying to shame me out of using expletives when I was a teenager.  It didn't work.  Part of the problem was having a dad and a (maternal) uncle who had an amazing and creative command of swear words.  The fact of not being able to cure either her husband or her brother of swearing should have alerted her to the futility of her efforts, but it never seemed to slow her down any.

One of the things she used to say to me was the old saw, "Using that kind of language just shows you don't have the brains to find better words to use."  With the passage of years I've come to realize that despite my fondness for the f-word, there's nothing in particular wrong with my cognitive abilities.  I just find that -- used judiciously, and with an awareness of appropriate context -- it can liven things up considerably.

I thought the whole idea of swearing in fiction would make an interesting topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  In fictional settings, the "context" thing becomes even more important.  Off-color words should be reflective of the character, time, and place, and shouldn't be used to excess, but in that respect they're no different than any other stylistic feature; like humor, or violence, or sex scenes, or whatnot, it can be used skillfully or clumsily.  Overused, swear words completely lose their emotional punch (the last thing an author wants).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Me, I tend to use swear words in my fiction for one of two reasons; to dial up the emotional intensity, or for humorous effect.  The example of the latter that always comes to mind is the character of the Head Librarian of the Library of Timelines, Fischer (don't remind him that his first name is Archibald unless you want to face his ire), from my time-travel novel Lock & Key.  I wanted to create a character who completely messed around with the stereotype of a librarian, so I made him a long-haired twenty-something who loves 90s grunge music, and has a vocabulary for which the word "salty" is an understatement.  The repartee between him, the meek, soft-spoken main character Darren Ault, and Fischer's unflappable, ultra-competent personal assistant Maggie Carmichael, is some of the most fun I've ever had in writing.  This scene occurs just after Fischer whisks Darren back to the Library from fourteenth-century Norway, just before he was about to get chopped into mincemeat by a guy with a sword:

"God damn!" Darren screamed, and backed into a file cabinet, upsetting a precarious stack of manila folders.  The entire pile slithered to the ground, dumping its contents all over the floor and startling Ivan the tomcat, who gave an annoyed hiss and trotted out of the room, every whisker radiating disapproval.

"Good afternoon to you, too," Fischer said, from his seat behind his desk, and then looked him up and down.  "You’re filthy."

"Oh, don’t even start with me."  Darren glared at Fischer.  He was still clutching the wooden box to his chest as if it were a shield.

"Whoa, you’re a little grumpy.  Who pissed in your cornflakes?"

"I haven’t had any cornflakes.  All I’ve had is tasteless porridge, and dumplings that are like compressed tasteless porridge balls, and dried fish that has too much taste, if you get my drift, and I haven’t even had a decent cup of coffee in days, and a Norwegian guy with a sword just tried to chop my head off, and if you’re planning on getting me to change my clothes and sending me off to Kentucky without having a good night’s sleep in a real bed, then you can go fuck yourself!"

Fischer’s pale eyebrows rose.  "I don’t think I’ve heard you swear before.  I didn’t know you knew how."

He goggled at Fischer for a moment, and then screamed, "Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

Maggie appeared in the door of the office, and she looked at him, mild surprise registering in her eyes.  "Ah, Mister Ault, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.  I suggest you pay close attention to Fischer’s command of the art of the curse word.  He’s a master."  She paused.  "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Maybe it's just me, but that scene wouldn't have been nearly as funny if I'd figured out how to write it without swear words.

An amusing aside about Lock & Key.  I was at a book signing a while back, and a woman came up and said, "I read your book Lock & Key, and I liked it, but the character of the Librarian sure does use the f-bomb a lot."

I deadpanned, "I know.  I tried to talk to him about it, and he told me to fuck off."

Well, at least I thought it was hilarious.

So like all other words in the English language, the key is in knowing how to use them.  There's no virtue in avoiding bad words in fiction just because they're bad.  In fact, sometimes not using them is the worse choice.  I know a guy who wrote an (otherwise wonderful) novel about military men in the 1940s, and he is such a prude that he made all of them have squeaky-clean vocabularies -- and there was no mention of sex.  Ever.  The story's good, but the characters come across as artificially sanitized, so the whole thing feels a little off.

As I said earlier, use the vocabulary that is appropriate to that time, place, and character.  Salty language is like actual salt; don't go overboard with it, but used sparingly, it can really improve the flavor of a story.

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

As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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

Warp six, Captain!

Being a skeptic and a scientist does not mean you are immune to the emotional side of life.

Well, at least I'm not.  It may well be that I was attracted to science as an antidote for the fact that I'm the kind of person who, under the least provocation, will get pretty overwrought about things.  Science seemed like an escape from having emotion swing me around by the tail all the time.

Still... there are times when my reaction even to a science story is more emotional than it is cerebral.  Consider, for example, the link my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math) sent me yesterday, which says that... scientists have created the first ever warp bubble.

My skeptical brain immediately gave it the wry eyebrow and said, "Well, maybe.  How many times have we had our hopes dashed before?".  On the other hand, my emotional brain started jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  It's been my dearest wish since I was a kid either to have aliens visit (as long as they're not Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, or the Vashta Nerada), or to have practical interstellar flight and go there myself.  And ever since Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed back in 1994 that faster-than-light warp drive was at least theoretically possible, I've been desperately hoping that it would eventually become feasible as well.

Science adepts amongst my readership might be thinking, "Wait a second.  Doesn't the General Theory of Relativity forbid FTL travel outright?"  The answer, of course, is yes, but Alcubierre seems to have found a loophole; that you won't break the relativistic speed limit if the way you do it is by curving space behind and in front of you, creating a stretch in the fabric of space-time, and then riding that curve in much the way that a surfer rides a big wave.  (I know, it's way more complicated than that, but I'm not going to go into deeper details for the very good reason that the mathematics in the original paper loses me after the first paragraph.)

In any case, "theoretically possible" and "actually feasible" are two very different things, and the first analysis of Alcubierre's proposal found that it's completely impractical because it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to create the curvature needed.  It's a little like Archimedes's boast, "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I could move the world."  Well, okay, Archie, but (1) that's a really fucking long lever, and (2) there is no place to stand.

But otherwise, works fine.

(N.B.: Yes, I know Archimedes was just trying to make a point about the usefulness of levers.  It applies just as well to issues of feasibility.  If he can use the example, so can I.)

Anyhow, all the "yes, buts" seemed to put Alcubierre's idea on the shelf -- until ten years later, when physicist Harold White reworked Alcubierre's equations and showed a way to accomplish warping space with far less energy.  Even so, the theory of creating a warp bubble seemed very far removed from practical application.  But now...

... White seems to have done it in the lab.

*brief pause to stop jumping up and down and squeaking*

[Image from LSI]

Working at the labs of Limitless Space Institute, White announced this week that he'd created a small, transient warp bubble that met the criteria laid out in his theoretical paper from fifteen years ago.  White said, "Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities [a microscale structure in which the warp bubble supposedly occurred] helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing."

He cautioned that this was only a first-step proof-of-concept, that it didn't mean we'd be zooming off to Alpha Centauri day after tomorrow.  However, he said his experimental findings lined up so well with the theoretical predictions that it was impossible not to consider this a fantastic breakthrough.  "This is a potential structure we can propose to the community that one could build that will generate a negative vacuum energy density distribution that is very similar to what’s required for an Alcubierre space warp," White said.  "It is early to ask questions about some type of actual flight experiment.  In my mind, step one is to just explore the underlying science at the nano/micro scale.  Crawl, walk, run."

I just hope the "crawl" and "walk" stages move along, because dammit, I want to see this happen.  I'm 61, so at this point (unless we also get some serious life-lengthening strategies soon) I've got maybe thirty more years, forty if I'm really lucky and take after my Great-Aunt Clara, who lived to be 101.  I've been waiting for this ever since I was seven and first heard Captain Kirk say, "Warp six, Mr. Sulu!"

I'm trying my best not to get too worked up about it.  These things have a way of running into serious snags.  It's a little like the person who quipped, "Artificial intelligence is five years in the future, and always will be."  Even so, reading this was a rush.  Maybe it will come to naught; that's certainly happened before.  But maybe... just maybe... we've finally met the real Zefram Cochrane.

He's named Harold White.

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

As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

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