That healthy glow

You may recall that a few days ago, I posted about a company that sells beanies and boxer briefs designed to protect you from the supposed ill effects of 5G, and electromagnetic fields in general.  The upshot of my post was that the low-level EMFs we're exposed to in the ordinary course of things have never been shown to cause harm, so at best such purchases are a waste of money that could be more productively used for other purposes, which in my opinion includes using it to start a campfire.

I choose the words "at best" deliberately, because in one of those weird synchronicities that happen sometimes, I ran into an article just yesterday on the BBC News that said there's another reason to avoid these products.  You ready?

It's because some of them are...

... wait for it...

... radioactive.

My reaction upon reading this was, and I quote:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, wheeze* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I mean, you can't make this stuff up.  The Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection found that nine products from a company called EnergyArmor -- all of which allegedly protect you from the dangers of 5G and electromagnetic radiation -- themselves give off enough ionizing radiation that the agency recommended owners stop wearing them immediately, put them aside (preferably in the original packaging and away from close proximity to people and pets), and call the company to ask for a refund.  

This includes the amusingly-named Quantum Pendant™, which you can tell is extremely quantum because it says "Quantum Pendant" about eighty times on the box.

Why this pendant is any more quantum than anything else, given that all matter -- including dogs, avocados, umbrellas, cow shit, and Mitch McConnell -- is made up of the same set of subatomic particles that obey the same rules of quantum physics, is never explained.  My guess is they have no idea themselves.  The original claim ("low-level EMFs are harmful") has nothing to do with science, and as I've remarked before, it's very hard to logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

Also, in this case, the fact that lots of gullible people are willing to hand over their hard-earned cash for this nonsense is a hell of an incentive to make it sound sophisticated.

So the purported health benefits of anti-5G-wear is offset fairly dramatically by the (real) hazard of wearing something radioactive against your skin.  Sad to say, but we appear as a species not to have progressed very far from when Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and found that radium salts glowed in the dark, from which people immediately concluded that these were soothing healing rays that could be used to treat damn near everything, and this includes a guy who (I am not making this up) fixed a radium-infused gizmo onto a jock strap, presumably to jazz up his sex life.

Didn't work.  Poor slob died of bladder cancer.

That, of course, was over a hundred years ago, and science has learned a lot since then.  Unfortunately -- and this is the sad part -- people in general apparently haven't.  There are still folks who prefer to believe foolishness over evidence-based research.  As my dad used to say, you can fix ignorant, but you can't fix stupid.

But the timing of the product recall in the Netherlands was just too wonderful not to comment upon.  And maybe this will wake a few people up.  I'm not really holding out that much hope, though.  The 5G-blocking-stuff manufacturers will probably just put the Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection on their (long) list of groups that are in on the conspiracy, joining the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, and the National Institute of Health.  I'm probably in there somewhere, too, most likely on their "shill" list.  Which, by the way. makes me wonder where the hell my Shill Check™ is.  You'd think that all of my scorn would earn me something.

Maybe it was delayed in the mail.  The Post Office is probably on to the conspiracy and is preventing us shills from getting paid.  You know how it goes.

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

I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

Catty behavior

Ever heard of the cui bono principle?

Cui bono? is Latin for "who benefits?"  It's been used for centuries as a central question in criminal cases; to figure out who's guilty of a crime, the first thing to determine is who benefitted from it.  But it is also critical to questions of evolutionary biology.  There are behaviors in the biological world that seem unnecessarily risky, or even suicidal, and it's hard to imagine how they'd be selected for.

So... who benefits?

Take, for example, the strange behavior of certain ants.  Ground-dwelling ants, when threatened, usually have one of two responses; rush out and try to sting or bite whatever's threatening them, or move downward (and underground) to hide.  But some ants were observed to have a third, and bizarre, response: faced with a threat, they climb upwards on plant stems, and then just docilely sit there -- and, frequently, get eaten (along with the plant) by herbivorous animals.

The reason for this weird behavior is positively grotesque.  It turns out that the seemingly-suicidal ants were infected with a brain parasite called a lancet worm (Dicrocoelium dendriticum) that, in order to complete its life cycle, has to pass through the digestive tract and liver of a ruminant (sheep, cow, or goat).  So the worm reprograms the ant's brain to make it do something that will ultimately end up with its being turned into lunch.  

Too bad for the ant.  But cui bono?  The worm, of course.  It hijacked the ant's brain to make it an unwilling participant in the worm's life cycle.

This is hardly the only example of the cui bono principle, and far from the creepiest one.  Ready to get completely skeeved out?

You may know of the pathogen Toxoplasma gondii in its connection to the recommendation by doctors that pregnant women not clean cat litter boxes.  The pathogen, which is neither a bacteria nor a virus but a protist, is carried by cats and excreted with the urine; and a pregnant woman who contracts toxoplasmosis risks birth defects in her unborn child.

Toxoplasma, however, is found in other animals besides cats, and in fact it was some recent research into hyenas that brought it to mind today.  A study out of the University of Colorado that appeared in Nature Communications a few months ago showed that wild populations of hyenas have a high rate of infection, and the weirdest result is seen in infected hyena cubs.  They, like the unfortunate ants, have a behavioral consequence of infection; they become bold, and seem to lose their perception of lions and other predators as dangerous.  They're far more likely to be killed than healthy, uninfected hyena cubs -- which, of course, benefits the pathogen because it then passes on to the lion.  The pathogen, in essence, is programming its host to engage in behavior that will make it more likely to jump to another host.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons New Jersey Birds, Spotted hyena cubs in Limpopo, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So, a weird and gruesome outcome of being infected with a tropical disease, right?  Nothing for us humans to worry about, right?  Well, what you may not know is that there is a significant likelihood that you have toxoplasmosis right now.  In fact, if you have ever owned a cat, the probability stands close to 100%.

A study done a while back by Kevin Lafferty, of the University of California, suggests that as many as three billion people may have a dormant Toxoplasma infection.  Yes, dear readers, you read that right; that's three billion with a "b," as in a little less than half of the human population.  Turns out that Lafferty's research indicated that when you get toxoplasmosis, you get flu-like symptoms for a couple of days, and then the symptoms abate -- but for most of us, the protist goes dormant, and we carry around the parasite for life.

This is creepy enough, but wait'll you hear what it does to you.

Lafferty's research showed that in mammalian hosts, the Toxoplasma organism invades, and becomes dormant in, the host's brain cells.  Not only hyenas become bolder around predators; mice and rats do, as well, aiding in the passage of the germ between rodents and domestic cats.  Lafferty's study, though, goes a step further, and looks at what latent Toxoplasma infection does to humans -- and he found  it seems to cause significant personality changes.

Now, it doesn't make us have a high affinity for cats, which would make sense, and would explain Crazy Cat Lady Syndrome, in which some people think it's normal to own thirty cats, and somehow seem immune to the truly cataclysmic odor that their houses attain.  No, what actually happens is more subtle.  Apparently, if you have Toxoplasma, you're more likely to be neurotic.  People who tested positive for antibodies for Toxoplasma scored far higher on personality assessments in the areas of guilt-proneness, anxiety, and risk of depression.  These effects were so pronounced that Lafferty speculates that it could account for certain differences between cultures.

"In some cultures, infection is very rare," Lafferty said, "while in others, virtually everyone is infected.  The distribution of Toxoplasma gondii could explain differences in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work, and rules."

I find this speculation fascinating.  The idea that my neuroses might not be due to my genes or upbringing, but because I'm carrying around a parasite in my brain, doesn't create the level of Icky-Poo Factor that you might expect.  Of course, I'm a biologist, and so I'm at least on some level accustomed to thinking about creepy-crawlies.  But the idea that some sort of a microorganism could affect my behavior strikes me as weirdly interesting, particularly since I've had at least one cat in my household for a significant chunk of the past forty years.

So, maybe our personalities aren't as static as we'd like to think -- they can be influenced by a great many circumstances outside of our control.  Add parasite infestations to that list.  And if that whole idea upsets you too much, take comfort in the fact that Lafferty's research has spurred medical researchers to try to find a drug that can destroy the germ.  Nothing's been certified for human use so far, so don't cancel your appointment with your therapist just yet, but there are a couple that are looking promising.  What's uncertain is whether, if the pathogen were eradicated, it would reverse the changes in the brain -- if, for example, nervous, neurotic people would find themselves less anxiety-prone -- or if the alterations in the brain are more or less permanent.  But I, for one, would volunteer to give it a try, once (or if) the medication becomes available.

Until then, you should probably shouldn't worry.  What's a few brain parasites among friends, after all?  In fact, just forget I brought it up.  Relax, go and sit in your recliner, and pet your cat, Mr. Fluffkins, for a while.

You'll feel better.  Trust me.

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

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!]

Menagerie

For this week's Fiction Friday, here's an odd little short story I wrote a while back when I was pondering what my life would be like without the anxiety and emotional ups-and-downs I've dealt with since I was a child.  Would you simply delete unpleasant feelings if you could?  And if so, would you end up losing more than you gained?

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

Menagerie

“Your body is completely relaxed.  You are tranquil, floating, totally comfortable.”  Fay Devillier’s soothing voice was the only sound in the room, other than the soft breathing of her client who sat, legs crossed, on a yoga mat, hands on his knees, eyes closed.

“You can still hear my voice, and are able to respond to my questions.  You are not asleep, just very, very relaxed.  Do feel relaxed, Jesse?”

Jesse Goldman’s lips opened, just a little, and he said, “Yes.”

“Excellent.  Now, without losing your sense of peace and relaxation, I want you to become aware of your anxiety.  Picture it.  Keep it in front of your attention.  But your anxiety is not you.  It is something you are curious about, something you are observing.  Think of your anxiety as an animal, some small animal in front of you.  It can’t harm you.  You are watching it.  Can you see it?”

“Yes,” Jesse said again.

“What do you want to say to it, Jesse?”

“Get out of my body,” Jesse said, his voice barely audible.  “I don’t want you any more.”

“That’s very good.  How did your anxiety-animal react when you said that?”

“It didn’t like it.  It’s glaring at me.”

“But you know it can’t hurt you, right?  It can only go back into your body if you let it.”

“Yes.”

“Good.  Now, go deep into your breathing.  Let your vision of the anxiety-animal fade away.  Give your attention to your breathing.”

Jesse sat quietly for several minutes, breathing.

“When you are ready, let your awareness rise like a bubble rising in water.  Expanding, floating to the top.  When it reaches the top, open your eyes.  You will awake feeling no anxiety, only peace.”

In a few moments, Jesse opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and then smiled.  Fay, seated in the lotus position in front of him, smiled back.

“How do you feel, Jesse?”

“Great.”  He stretched, his back cracking pleasantly.  “That was awesome.  I’m not feeling jittery any more.”

“Now, remember, you may feel your anxiety trying to sneak back in.  When you do, just close your eyes and breathe.  What you did today, you did—not me.  You can go into yourself any time you want.  Any bad feeling you have, you can banish this way.”

Jesse nodded. “I’d like to try to get rid of a few others.  I have other feelings I’d like to get rid of.”

“We can work on those next time.”  She reached out and touched his shoulder.  “But just remember that you don’t have to try to tackle everything at once.”

***

Jesse rode the bus back to his apartment feeling lighter than he had in months.  Maybe years.  Anxiety had been part of his life as long as he could remember.  The nervous clutch in the belly, the sweat breaking out on the skin, the heart racing—all were familiar sensations, sure to come any time he was faced with a challenge he thought he couldn’t achieve, which was often.  This probably explained why Jesse, the prep-school-educated only child of a lawyer father and a doctor mother, was working for twelve dollars an hour as an aide in the public library.

When he got back to his apartment, he met his roommate, Dale Warren, leaving for work.

“Hey, Goldman.  What did you think of the hypnotist chick?”

“Pretty good,” Jesse said.

“Told you.  Rachel said she was amazing.”

“Tell Rachel thanks for recommending her.”

“We’re going to see a movie tonight.  I’ll tell her.”  Dale grinned.  “Rachel’s friend Sarah is still available, dude.  You think the hypnotist could help you get over your being too big a wuss to ask her out?”

Previously, such a question would have made Jesse’s heart give a nervous little gallop, but now, all he felt was calm.  He gave his roommate a confident smile.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I think she might.”

Jesse had two hours before his shift began at the library, so he went into his bedroom, figuring he’d take a quick nap—his feeling of relaxation was really extraordinary.  He hadn't felt this good in a long, long time.  He was caught between astonishment and happiness at the well-being that washed over him.  He felt like he could actually sleep soundly, something that had never been easy.  But when he opened his bedroom door, all thoughts of sleep vanished.

Sitting in the middle of his bed was a squirrel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nickomargolies at English Wikipedia, Common Squirrel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The squirrel was just sitting there, shivering.  It didn’t look cold, it looked more like it had a disorder of the central nervous system.  Its entire body was vibrating, almost as if it were being subjected to periodic electric shocks.

Was this what rabies looked like?  Then he glanced over at his window, which was closed.

So how had it gotten into his room?

Then he realized two other things, in increasing order of bizarreness.  First, he didn’t feel at all alarmed by the fact that there was an apparently diseased squirrel in the middle of his bed, and second, the squirrel looked a lot like the way he had imagined his anxiety during hypnosis.

Without taking his eyes off the animal, he reached over and picked up his tennis racket, which was leaning against the wall behind the door.  He walked slowly toward the bed, and then extended the racket, and poked the animal in the side with the end of it.

“Shoo,” he said.

The squirrel looked up at Jesse and said, in a high-pitched but perfectly clear voice, “Fuck off.”

Jesse dropped the racket.

“You talk?” Jesse said.

The squirrel just gave him a sour look, and its face twitched.

“Are you the animal I visualized when I was at the hypnotist?”

“Bright guy.  Got it in one.”

A thought floated through his head, wondering why he wasn't freaking out about this.  Any normal person would be beyond freaking out by this point.  “How can you be real?”

“You did it,” the squirrel said, a bitter tone in its voice.  “You figure it out.”

“I’m having a hallucination.”

“Suit yourself.”

“So, you really are real, then?”

“Look, I’m not going to spend my time discussing existential issues with you.”  The squirrel looked up at him.  “Say, you got some of those anti-anxiety meds you always pop like candy?  I could use a couple.”

Jesse frowned.  “Is this… is this why I feel so much better?  Because you’re not inside me any more?”

“Oh, sure.”  The squirrel's voice cracked as its body shook.  “Lord it over me.  Think about how I feel.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Jesse said, and then realized that he didn’t actually feel very sorry at all.  “But you were the one making me upset, making it so I couldn’t cope.”

“Seriously?  That’s what you think?”  The squirrel snorted.  “Try again, buster.”

Jesse sat down on the edge of the bed.  “Well, whatever. I feel better, so I really don’t care if I’m hallucinating you or not.  Now, move over, because I’m taking a nap.  I feel like I could sleep for days.”  He set his alarm clock for two hours.  “But I still have to go to work, so I’d better just make it till eleven o’clock.”

***

Jesse woke up, after one of the soundest, most refreshing sleeps he could remember, just before his alarm went off.  The squirrel had moved to the top of his bookcase, where it sat, shivering and glaring at him.  Jesse changed into his work clothes, and twice had to stop himself from breaking into whistling.  He did feel a twinge of guilt about the squirrel’s apparent discomfort, and didn’t want to rub it in its face too obviously.

While on a break at the library, he called Fay Devillier, and asked if she had any openings later in the week—that he felt so much better, he wanted to see her more than once a week.  She sounded pleased, and surprised, but cautioned him against being too aggressive.

“Don’t push things too fast, Jesse.  I’m happy you feel our work has been helpful, but slow and steady is best.”

“No, I really want to try this again.  Can we?”

“I have an opening Thursday at ten.  Can you make that?”

“Yes.  And I know just what I want to work on.”

***

“Shyness is not necessarily a bad thing,” Fay said, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning.  “What we think of as negative or unpleasant emotions can sometimes serve a purpose.”

“It’s a problem to me,” Jesse said.  “I can’t face asking a girl out.  I’m totally awkward at parties.  I hate it.”

“Well…”  She sounded hesitant.  “If you find it to be that big an impediment to your life…”

“I do.”

***

When Jesse returned to his apartment, he was not really all that surprised to see that there was a little bird sitting on his dresser, which put its head under its wing when he looked at it.  The squirrel was splayed out on its back on Jesse’s pillow, a cool, wet washcloth on its forehead, its body still wracked by tremors.

He barely gave them a glance.  He went to his telephone and picked it up, and dialed a number he’d written on a slip of paper next to his nightstand.

“Hi, Sarah?  This is Jesse Goldman—I’m Dale Warren’s roommate.  I was wondering… would you like to go catch a movie or something tonight?”

***

Fay Devillier looked at Jesse doubtfully, as he walked into her office at ten o’clock sharp the following Tuesday.

“You look… good, Jesse,” she said tentatively.

“I feel great.  Hey, I’ve already had two dates with Sarah.  She’s great.  I haven’t had a panic attack in over a week.  I’m doing awesome.”

“That’s good.  I mean… yeah, that’s good.”  Fay paused and shook her head.  “Look, I have to tell you that I have some misgivings about this.  You seem like you’re… changing too fast.  Like you’re imposing your will over your problems—forcing yourself to make big changes quickly.  I’m worried that it won’t be permanent, that you could have a setback.”

“I’m not.  And it’s not me imposing my will, or at least in the way you mean—that I’m somehow just submerging my feelings.  Your hypnotherapy hasn’t made me able to control my bad feelings—it’s taken them away.  I had therapy for years that was designed to help me control my feelings.  It never worked.  What you’ve helped me to do is to remove the feelings entirely.”

“Feelings aren’t bad things, in and of themselves,” Fay said.  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Feelings are there for a reason.”

“They’re making it too hard for me to do what I want to do.”

Fay looked at him uncertainly.  “Are you sure…” she began, and then stopped.

“I’m sure.  I want to do it again.”

She bit her lip.  “Once more.  Only once.  And then you need to sit back, and let yourself just be for a while.  The whole point of this isn’t to tear yourself apart, you know.”

“Maybe not.  But I sure don’t mind tearing away the parts of me that cause me pain.”

Fay frowned at him, and then took a deep breath.  “All right.  One more time, then.  What will it be this time?”

“Fear.”

***

Jesse caught only a glimpse of the rabbit’s white tail as it zoomed under the dresser when he walked into his bedroom at a little before noon.

The bird was standing in front of the mirror on his dresser, both wings over its eyes.

The squirrel had somehow opened the bottle of Southern Comfort Jesse had sitting on top of his bookcase, and lay next to a mostly-empty glass in an alcoholic stupor.  It was still shivering.

This was awesome.  No fear.  No anxiety.  No shyness.

Of course, there were other parts of him that he could sure do without.  Wouldn’t it be nice not to be angry at his parents any more for all of the head trips they put on him when he was a kid?  Wouldn’t it be great not to feel sad any more about his beloved grandma dying last year?  Wouldn’t it be easier if he didn’t feel jealous of Dale for being better-looking than he was?

He lay back on his bed, and cupped his hands behind his head.

Fay said she wasn’t going to help him any more, that what he was doing was dangerous.  But he didn’t feel afraid to do it, so what exactly was the problem?  He peered over at the rabbit, which had poked its whiskered face out from under the dresser.  As soon as he turned its way, it dashed back into the dark space and disappeared.

He closed his eyes.  Focused on his breathing, made each breath deep and deliberate.  He concentrated on the air moving in and out of his chest, felt his heart beating more slowly as relaxation seeped through his body.

Anger. Sadness. Jealousy. Pain. Loss. Grief. Rage. Laziness. Destructiveness. Greed.

How much better it would be, how much more peaceful and quiet and calm, without any of them.

Jesse Goldman sank back, descending, his awareness pulling one emotion, then another, then another, out into the sunlight for him to watch and then to banish, until finally there was nothing left, nothing but an empty beam of sunlight with only a few particles of dust swirling in it to give it substance.

***

Dale Warren got home from work at a little after seven.  He dropped his lunchbox on the counter, chucked his keys onto the coffee table, then went over to check voicemail.  He’d left a message with Rachel about going to a party that evening—a yes from her would make what had been an otherwise fairly boring day have at least the promise of a good end.

The voice on the only message, however, wasn’t Rachel’s.  “This is Jessica McVeigh,” came a pinched, annoyed female voice.  Dale recognized the name of Jesse’s boss at the library.  “Jesse, where are you?  Louise is sick today, and we’re short-handed.  Call me when you get this.”

Dale frowned.  Missing work without calling in wasn’t like Jesse.  It wasn’t like him at all.  He went to Jesse’s bedroom, and knocked on the door.

“Yo, Goldman, you in there?”

There was no response, so Dale opened the door.

Jesse Goldman was lying on his bed, his hands still behind his head, a beatific smile on his face.

“Goldman?” Dale said, and walked over to the bed, and shook his roommate’s arm.

Jesse didn’t awaken, didn’t even stir.  His chest still rose and fell, slowly, rhythmically, the only thing that showed that he was still alive.

And that was when Dale noticed that he and Jesse were not alone in the dimly-lit bedroom.  In every corner, on every surface, there was an animal of some kind.  A large snake was coiled around the base of Jesse’s floor lamp, its forked tongue flicking, watched him through lidless eyes.  A monkey sat beside the bookcase, systematically tearing up one of Jesse’s old college chemistry textbooks.  A basset hound, its long ears drooping, gazed at Dale for a moment, then gave a heartfelt sigh and curled up in a pile of dirty clothes on the floor next to the bed.  A packrat was scurrying back and forth, picking up objects in its mouth, and bringing them back to pile them up in the corner by the window.  It already had a small stack of coins, several paper clips, a flash drive, a keychain, and Jesse’s wristwatch.  There were others animals there, too—he could make out several different kinds of birds, a frog, a scorpion, a lizard of some sort, and most alarmingly, what appeared to be a black panther, sitting inside the closet, looking out at Dale through the half-open door.  As their eyes met it gave a low, throaty, dangerous-sounding growl, and Dale caught a glimpse of white teeth.

Dale backed toward the door, his heart jittering uncertainly against his ribs.

“Jesse?” he said again, his voice coming out as a squeak.

A squirrel raised its head from a spot on the bookcase, and regarded Dale through bloodshot eyes.  “Don’t bother,” the squirrel said.  “He can’t hear you.  He thought he’d be better off this way.  Moron.”

Dale turned and ran out of the room, and was dialing 911 when he heard the squirrel’s shrill voice call after him, “Don’t blame me.  I tried to tell him.”

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

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!]

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!]