Footprints in the snow

So far this winter my upstate New York village has been lucky; despite repeated winter storms roaring through northeastern North America, we've received a mere dusting as compared to the thick blankets of snow folks have gotten pretty much all around us.  My buddy in Dieppe, New Brunswick, posted photos of the piles he and his family had to shovel to get out of their driveway, and I've seen similar pics from coastal New England, as well as south of us in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Here, though?  We've had a few really cold days, and a bit of persistent snow on the ground, but other than that, it's been pretty mild.  In fact, this morning the sun came out for a bit, and it's supposed to get well above freezing by mid-day, so what snow we have is beginning to melt -- although at this time of year I figure the comparative warmth is only a tease.

Watching the effect that the sun had on footprints I made yesterday while hauling firewood, as they widened from the clear indentations of a human wearing ridge-soled Timberland boots into diffuse, open blobs, put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England.  Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale for a chilly winter day.

Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow.  The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon.  On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.  There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other.  The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across.  Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor.  On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.

What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles.  The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water.  Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down).  The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*).  The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.

The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the bootprints in my front yard.  The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.

A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand

The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack.  The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work.  The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path.  The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."  

Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.

Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman.  A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams.  The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash.  The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.

Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.

Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings grew less frequent.  Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist).  With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker.  As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest.  It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.

The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories.  I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue."  Still does, in fact. Enough that I hope that the fitful January sun will soon eradicate my bootprints in the front yard completely -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.

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

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

Figure and ground

One of the most fundamental unanswered questions in physics is why there is something instead of nothing.

I don't mean this in an existential sense, although now that I come to think of it, it's about the most existential question there is.  But this isn't asking if there is some sort of final cause for the universe, be it a Creator or whatever other spin you could put on it.  No, this is a purely scientific question, and one which has defied all attempts to answer it.

The basic problem stems from the issue of antimatter.  You probably know that for every particle, there is a corresponding antiparticle that has the same mass-energy but opposite properties -- protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons (anti-electrons), neutrons and antineutrons, and so forth.  Brought into contact, matter and antimatter undergo mutual annihilation, and all of that mass is converted to gamma rays with an energy release as determined by Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2.

So far, nothing particularly surprising, especially if you've watched any of the various iterations of Star Trek, with their starships powered by an "antimatter core" brought into contact with matter in a controlled way and using the energy released to propel the ship.  (And, just about every other week, having a "warp core breach" leading to an uncontrolled matter-antimatter explosion, a catastrophe averted each time only minutes before the credits roll.)

Here's the rub, though.  All of the current models of the Big Bang suggest that at the beginning of the universe, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts, like the energy equivalent of figure and ground.  They then should have collided, releasing the energy as photons, ultimately resulting in a universe that has zero matter of either kind except for the transient "virtual" particle pairs that are created from photons and more or less instantaneously come back together again, mutually annihilating and producing more photons.

Why, then, is there an imbalance?  Why do we see all this left-over matter -- the planets and stars around us -- instead of a universe filled with nothing but photons?  (Yes, I know, if that were the case we wouldn't be there to "see" it.  Just play along, okay?)

Some have suggested that distant galaxies might be antimatter; after all, at a distance you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  But the problem with that is if this were true, there would be an interface somewhere between the supposed antimatter galaxy and the nearest matter galaxy, and at that interface there would be constant collisions of matter and antimatter -- so you'd see a sort of curtain of gamma-ray production representing the boundary.  We see no such thing anywhere we look.  From the observational data we have, it appears that all of the visible objects in the universe are made of ordinary matter.

Nota bene: Observational data also do not support that a planet made of antimatter would have identical people with opposite personalities, such as Evil Spock With A Beard.

So physicists surmised that if the processes during the Big Bang did produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, perhaps the asymmetry came from the particles themselves -- i.e., the antimatter particles don't have exactly identical-but-opposite properties from their matter equivalents, but some small difference that made the matter particles either more numerous or more likely to survive.

Well, a paper last week in Nature appears to have ruled that out as well.

Researchers at CERN working on the Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) looked at the oscillations of a single antiproton trapped in a magnetic field, and compared those oscillations with the equivalent from an ordinary proton.  After taking data from over 24,000 of these pairs, they found that the measured properties of the two are absolutely identical -- to an accuracy of 1.6 billionths of a percent.

That pretty much settles it, I'd think.

However, this means the original question still stands.  What caused the imbalance?  Is there still a possibility that some of the most distant galaxies -- possibly ones on opposite side of the 330-million-light-year-wide Boötes Void -- might be made of antimatter?  It's possible, but we've seen nothing to support that as an explanation.  Or that there's a "multiverse" with equal numbers of matter and antimatter galaxies all "separated causally" (i.e., so far apart they can't even potentially interact), so the entire thing is balanced, but only on the biggest scales?  The problem with that is if they are causally separated, then they've never been in contact in such a way as to be able to interact or influence each other, so it's hard to imagine how they'd have been created by a single event at one space-time location.  Also, in such a model, it's not even theoretically possible to obtain any information about these supposed antimatter regions, because they're beyond the distance limit from which we could observe them.  This puts the issue outside of what is even potentially verifiable by observational data, so as a hypothesis -- to use Wolfgang Pauli's acerbic quote -- "it's not even wrong."

Which leaves one of the biggest puzzles in physics still unanswered.

But it's this kind of conundrum that drives science, and had pushed us toward understanding some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.  It might be frustrating, but that's the way research works.  As Richard Feynman put it, "I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

The eccentric heavens

For a lot of people, the most disquieting thing about science is the way it's moved humanity farther and farther from its position as the center of the universe.

It's why the heliocentric model met with such resistance.  That the Earth was at the center, and all celestial objects move in circles around it, seemed not only common sense but to fit with the biblical view of the primacy of humans as being created in the image of God.  Copernicus and Galileo ran afoul of the church because their findings contradicted that -- especially when Galileo was the first to see the four largest moons of Jupiter (now known as the "Galilean moons" in his honor), and it was clear they were circling Jupiter and not the Earth -- meaning there are celestial objects that don't obey the model of the entire universe being geocentric.

Another blow was dealt to this idea when Johannes Kepler used data by Danish observational astronomer Tycho Brahe to show that the planets weren't even in circular orbits -- i.e., the heavens were not neat, tidy, and divine, with everything moving in "perfect circles."  That idea didn't die easily.  It'd been known since the time of Ptolemy (second century C.E.) that perfectly circular orbits with the Earth at the center didn't produce predictions that matched the actual positions of the planets, so Ptolemy and others tried desperately to salvage the model by having them move in "epicycles" -- smaller circles that loop-the-loop around a point that itself travels in a circle around the Earth.  But that didn't quite do it, either.  Instead of scrapping the model, Ptolemy introduced epicycles around the epicycles, resulting in an orbital pattern so complex it's almost funny (but still, supposedly, "perfect").

The Ptolemaic model of the universe [Image is in the Public Domain]

But that didn't quite work either, even if you followed Copernicus's lead, put the Sun at the center, and adjusted the planetary orbits accordingly.  The discrepancies bothered Kepler until he finally had to concede that the objects in the Solar System didn't move in circles around the Sun, but in "imperfect" ellipses with the Sun at one focal point.  A measure of how far off the orbit is from being circular -- the "flatness" of the ellipse, so to speak -- is called the eccentricity.  Some planets have very low eccentricity; their orbits are nearly circular.  Of the planets in the Solar System, Venus has the lowest eccentricity, at 0.0068.  Mercury has the highest, at 0.2056.

There's no reason why it couldn't go a lot higher, though.  Comets have highly eccentric orbits; Halley's Comet, for example, has an orbital period of 76 years and an eccentricity of 0.9671.

Could an actual planet have a very eccentric orbit?  Yes, but it would create the climate from hell, hot when it's at the perihelion of its orbit and freezing cold when it's at the aphelion.  Even the old Lost in Space looked at this possibility; very early on, the Robinsons find that the average temperature on the planet where they're stranded is dropping, and the Robot figures out this is because the planet is in a highly elliptical orbit.  This means, of course, that if they survive the intense cold, they're in for a period of intense heat when the planet reaches the other side of its orbit.  Unfortunately, this clever plot point got fouled up because the writers evidently didn't know the difference between a planet's rotation and its revolution, so when the peak cold and peak heat come, it only lasts for a few minutes.  For example, in a highly dramatic scene, the intrepid family take shelter under reflective tarps when the planet's sun is at its closest, and some of the tarps burst into flame, but five minutes later, things are cooling off.

Disaster averted, unless you count the traumatic eye-rolls experienced by viewers who knew even the rudiments of astronomy.

The reason this comes up is because of the discovery of an exoplanet with the highest eccentricity known.  A paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics last week describes a planet orbiting a red dwarf star about 188 light years away, which is over twice the size of the Earth, and has an orbital eccentricity of about 0.5.  This means that in its 35-day orbit, the average temperature fluctuates between -80 C and 100 C -- a frozen wasteland at aphelion and a boiling blast furnace at perihelion, with brief periods in between where the temperature might be tolerable.

"In terms of potential habitability, this is bad news," said Nicole Schanche, an astronomer at the University of Bern and lead author of the paper, in what has to be understatement of the year.

So the whole "Goldilocks zone" issue for finding habitable exoplanets -- an orbital distance resulting in temperatures where water could exist as a liquid, which isn't too hot or too cold, but "just right" -- isn't as simple as it sounds.  The average temperature might be in the right range, but if the planet has an eccentric orbit, the average may not tell you much.  It's like the old quip that if you have one foot encased in ice and the other one in a pot of boiling water, on average you're comfortable.

Not only that, but there's the problem of tidal locking -- when the rotation and revolution rate are equal, so the same side of the planet always faces its sun.  Once again, this might result in an average temperature that is reasonably good, but only because one side is getting continuously cooked while the other is in the deep freeze.  It might be possible to live on the boundary between the light and dark sides -- a place where the planet's star is forever on the horizon -- but there, you'd find a different problem.  Because of the process of convection, in which fluids flow in such a way as to distribute heat evenly, on that twilight margin there'd be catastrophic upper-level winds from the hot to the cold side and equally strong ones at the surface from the cold to the hot side, putting that thin zone smack in the center of the Convection Cell from Hell and rendering even that area effectively uninhabitable.

So we're lucky to live where we do.  Or, more accurately, if the Earth had any of the aforementioned problems, we wouldn't be here.  But this further reinforces my awareness of what a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and scarily inhospitable place the universe is.  And whether there are other places out there that are as clement as the Earth, where life as we know it could evolve and thrive, remains very much to be seen.

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

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

A Miocene storage place

No matter how long you've been interested in a subject, there's always more to learn.

That's why I was delighted to run into an article yesterday in Science Advances describing the discovery of a "Lagerstätte" from Australia.  The paper had the word "Miocene" in it and was full of photographs of fossils, so I figured it must have something to do with paleontology, even though Lagerstätte sounds like a place to hide beer.

Actually, as a brief etymological aside, the word does share a common root with lager beer.  Lagerstätte is German for "storage place" and refers to a paleontological site full of fossils showing exceptionally fine preservation; the beer name comes from Lagerbier ("stored beer"), so named because it was cold-fermented after storage in a cool, dark place.  So as unlikely as it sounds given their definitions, the two words share a common root.

Anyhow, this particular Lagerstätte (dammit, now that I've learned the word, I'm gonna use it) is in a spot called McGraths Flat, about twenty-five kilometers northeast of the town of Gulgong (itself about three hundred kilometers northwest of Sydney).  What is most remarkable about it is not only the exceptional state of preservation of the fossils -- down to the soft parts that usually don't fossilize well -- but the range of organisms represented, all the way from microorganisms and spores up to flowers, fruit, leaves, and branches of dozens of different species of plants, insects and spiders, fish, and even the feather of a bird (of unknown species, but probably something sparrow-sized).  Like the other fossils, the feather is amazingly well-preserved -- enough that you can still see the feather's melanosomes, the pigment-bearing cells, the arrangement of which allowed the researchers to conclude that the bird it came from was dark-colored and iridescent, like today's grackles and starlings.

The site dates to about fourteen million years ago, putting it squarely in the middle of the Miocene Period.  The Miocene was an interesting time, geologically and climatically.  It's the period that saw the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia, raising the Himalayas, as well as enough subduction off the western coast of South America to fuel the developing volcanoes of the Andes Range.  Even more dramatic was the eruption of the Columbia River Flood Basalts in what is now eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, releasing enough lava that it filled up the valleys east of the Cascades like water filling a bathtub.  (The Columbia River Formation is not only the most recent flood basalt province, but -- amazingly -- the smallest; it's dwarfed by both the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps, which are thought to have played a large role in the Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous Extinctions, respectively.)

Interestingly, it's an Eocene Period basalt deposit that seems to be what allowed for the phenomenal state of preservation at McGraths Flat.  Around 37 million years ago -- so, 23 million years before the lowland swampy forest that eventually became the Lagerstätte -- there was an eruption of iron-rich basalt nearby, and by the mid-Miocene the rock was eroding.  The seep water became a nearly saturated solution of goethite (iron oxide-hydroxide), which then precipitated in fine layers over the organic remains, producing fossils with a level of detail you rarely ever get to see.

A few of the amazing fossils from McGraths Flat (New South Wales, Australia).  The one in the upper left is the bird feather, one of the few vertebrate fossils identified.

The climate worldwide at the time was largely warm and dry, although throughout the period there was a cooling trend which would ultimately lead to the Pliocene and Pleistocene Ice Ages.  The habitat at McGraths Flat, though, was thought to be wetter than average -- probably similar to today's lowland forests in places like New Zealand.  The plants weren't so different from what you find today; eucalyptus, acacia, casuarina, various members of the Protea, Myrtle, and Laurel families.  Transported back there, you probably wouldn't notice a great deal of difference from what you see today.  A botanist would recognize that the species were different from modern ones -- but by fourteen million years ago, the families of plants and animals would be substantially the same ones you find in eastern Australia now.

The authors write:

Reduced precipitation in the Miocene triggered the geographic contraction of rainforest ecosystems around the world.  In Australia, this change was particularly pronounced; mesic rainforest ecosystems that once dominated the landscape transformed into the shrublands, grasslands, and deserts of today.  A lack of well-preserved fossils has made it difficult to understand the nature of Australian ecosystems before the aridification.  Here, we report on an exceptionally well-preserved rainforest biota from New South Wales, Australia.  This Konservat-Lagerstätte hosts a rich diversity of microfossils, plants, insects, spiders, and vertebrate remains preserved in goethite.  We document evidence for several species interactions including predation, parasitism, and pollination.   The fossils are indicative of an oxbow lake in a mesic rainforest and suggest that rainforest distributions have shifted since the Miocene.  The variety of fossils preserved, together with high fidelity of preservation, allows for unprecedented insights into the mesic ecosystems that dominated Australia during the Miocene.

This discovery gives us an astonishingly vivid picture of a landscape from fourteen million years ago -- all because of a fortuitous nearby rock formation.  It also gives us an excuse for using the word Lagerstätte when talking to our friends, which I hope you all will.  I definitely am gonna.  Which probably explains why so many people suddenly realize in mid-conversation with me that they have pressing engagements elsewhere.

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

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

Streams of sound

Even though it's not the area of linguistics I concentrated on, I've always been fascinated with phonetics -- the sound repertoire of languages.  There's more variation in language phonetics than a lot of people realize.  The language with the smallest phonemic inventory seems to be Rotokas, spoken on the island of Bougainville (east of Papua-New Guinea), which has only eleven distinct sounds.  The Khoisan language ǃXóõ, spoken in parts of Botswana and Namibia, is probably the highest, with around a hundred (depending on how finely you slice them), including twenty or so "click consonants" and four different tones (i.e., speaking a vowel with a rising or a falling tone can change the meaning of the word -- a characteristic it shares with Thai, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, and to a lesser extent, Swedish and Norwegian).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Snow white1991, Phonetic alphabet, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The result is that languages have a characteristic sound pattern that can be picked up even if you don't speak the language.  Check out this video from a few years ago, illustrating how American English sounds to a non-English-speaker:

Then, there's the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol," written by Italian singer Adriano Celentano -- which uses gibberish lyrics with American English phonetics to create a pop song that doesn't make sense -- but to an English-speaking American, sure sounds like it should:

What brings this topic up is some research out of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest that appeared in the journal NeuroImage this week, that looked at how dogs hear human language.  We can identify the phonemic repertoire of languages we're familiar with, even if we don't speak them.  Can dogs?

Turns out, amazingly, the answer is yes.

"Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary to join the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University for my postdoctoral research," said lead author, neuroscientist Laura Cuaya.  "My dog, Kun-kun, came with me.  Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish.  So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian.  We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference.  But maybe dogs do not bother.  After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds.  We designed a brain imaging study to find this out."

What they did was to use fMRI technology to look at the brain activity in the primary and secondary auditory cortexes (the main parts of the brain involved in the recognition and processing of sounds) of the brains of seventeen dogs, including Kun-Kun.  First, they compared the response the dogs had to language vs. non-language -- the latter being just random strings of phonemes.  Turns out, dogs can tell the difference, giving lie to the old claim that you can say damn near anything to a dog and as long as you say it in a pleasant tone, they won't be able to tell.

Then, they compared the response the dogs had to speech in the language they were familiar with, and speech in an unfamiliar language -- and it turns out dogs can distinguish those, as well.  So it's not the "naturalness" of the sound flow, which might have been the issue with the nonsense phonemic strings in the first experiment.  But somehow, dogs are picking up on the overall sound pattern of the language, and can tell the one they're familiar with from ones that are unfamiliar, even if the words and sentences they're hearing are ones they've never heard before.

"This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages," said Attila Andics, senior author of the study.  "It is exciting, because it reveals that the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human.  Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs’ specialty, or general among non-human species.  Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case.  Future studies will have to find this out."

So your ability to identify spoken languages based upon how they sound, even if you don't understand the words, is shared by dogs.  Makes you wonder what else they understand.  I've had the impression before that when my dog Guinness gives me his intent stare and head-tilt when I'm talking to him, it's because he is really trying to understand what I'm saying, and maybe that's not so far from the truth.  If so, I'm going to be more careful what I say around him.  He already gets away with enough mischief as it is.

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

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Sonata for Ghost Violin

A few years ago, I was spending the night in a hotel, and every time I went down the hall that led to my room, I kept hearing music.  It wasn't the piped-in elevator music you sometimes hear; it was something classical, and was faint, as if it were coming from a distance.  It was probably someone watching an orchestral concert on television, but although I tried, I could never figure out where it was coming from.

When I got home, I started thinking about that experience, and it spurred me to write this odd little short story.

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

Sonata for Ghost Violin

Luke Reilly was fifteen the first time he heard the music.

He was sitting in his high school biology class, and at first he thought that he was hearing the band playing in the music room down the hall.  It didn’t sound like band music, though.  He could hear a piano, and what sounded like a violin, playing some complex piece in a minor key.  It was far more polished than the high school band ever sounded.

He looked around.  Mr. Dennis, the biology teacher, was droning on about genes and Punnett squares as if they were the most interesting thing ever, and if he heard the music, he was ignoring it.  Luke glanced at his classmates, whose faces registered a spectrum of emotion from boredom to interest.  No one had that odd frown that seems universal when someone hears something incongruous, and so Luke simply tuned it out and tried to return his attention to Mr. Dennis’s lecture.

The music faded out toward the end of the period, and if it was present at all during lunch he couldn’t hear it for the noise in the cafeteria.  It came back during seventh period English, and he asked the girl sitting next to him if she knew where the music was coming from.  The English wing was on the other side of the school from the band room, so even if it was the band playing, it wasn’t likely it could be heard from that far away.

The girl gave him a quizzical look, and said, “What music?”

Luke said, “I thought I heard some music playing,” and then smiled and shrugged it off.  He was letting his imagination get the better of him.

He heard it again that evening, during dinner, and was on the verge of asking his dad whether he’d left the television on when he recognized it as the same odd, dark melody he’d heard earlier.  He started paying more attention to it.  He could hear the violin, weaving in and out of the piano’s steady, shimmering undercurrent of sound.  It faded as he listened, came back again for about five minutes, and then fell silent just as the family got up from the table and began bringing plates into the kitchen to be washed.

In the weeks that followed, Luke found the music coming back again and again.  It was always the same piece.  It faded at different points, picked up at different points, but it never changed to a new melody.  He never heard the beginning of it, and he never heard it end.  It just played for a while, and then fell silent, as if he was walking past a concert hall and hearing fragments of their performance, but no complete piece.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

At first, he listened for it, and he found himself tensed, trying to force his ears to pick up the sounds of the musical instruments against the backdrop of whatever ambient noise was present.  But it never came when called.  It was there, or it wasn’t.  It didn’t seem to matter where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with.  He heard it playing when he was eighteen and was in the process of happily losing his virginity to Kelly Trent on the rug in front of a fireplace in her parents’ living room, and afterwards he thought, “At least they could have played the Hallelujah Chorus for me, or something.”  The fact that he could joke about it—to himself, at least—is an indication of how ordinary it had come to seem to him.

Still, he never told anyone about it.  When he married, at age twenty-three, the music was playing during his wedding ceremony, the minor key counterpoint jarring against the organist’s strident pounding out of the Mendelssohn Wedding March.  He heard it off and on during the following ten years, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes only little snatches of it interspersed by weeks of silence.

It was there—or it wasn’t.  And that was that.  A sonata for ghost violin and spectral piano.

When he was thirty-six years old, and a rising star in the real estate business, a father of three children, he began to notice that the music was getting louder.  He still was able to tune it out most of the time.

Except at night.  He would lie awake for hours, there in the dark with Vanessa sleeping next to him, with the music that only he could hear whirling around him.  This was the point that he began to wonder if he should tell someone about it—Vanessa, perhaps, or maybe even a therapist.

But what would he tell them?  He looked over at his clock, whose glowing red face said 2:30 a.m., then listened as the violin and piano played a glittering arpeggio of notes.  Could he tell a therapist that he heard music that wasn’t there?  What could they possibly do about that?  It wasn't like he was crazy, or anything.

But over the next few weeks, Luke found himself having to ask people to repeat what they’d said.  The music was getting loud enough to drown out softer sounds, and after having been asked to repeat something three times, one of his coworkers said, “Reilly, I think it’s time for you to get your ears checked.  You’re going deaf, buddy.”  But Luke didn’t want to explain that it was not deafness.  He heard just fine.  In fact, he could hear so well that he was hearing things that everyone else couldn't.

One June morning in that year, after yet another sleepless night, he couldn’t bear it any more.

He left home that morning, and kissed Vanessa goodbye.  Once he got to his car, he called into the office and said that he was sick, that he wouldn’t be in to work that day.  He had no idea who in the office he was talking to, or what they’d said in response.  The piano and violin were jangling painfully in his skull, drowning out all the other sounds in the world.  When he was passed by an eighteen-wheeler, its compression brakes growling, he was barely aware of it.  He left the main highway, took a road up into the hills, to a nature preserve twenty miles out of town.

To where there was silence.

But, of course, there wasn’t silence there.  The quiet of the park just made the percussion of the piano hammers on the strings sound louder, the drawing of the bow across the violin seeming to play its notes by vibrating his backbone in resonance.  He left his car, stumbling up a trail into the trees, his hands clamped over his ears—not that it helped.

Crescendo.  Luke fell against a dark, damp tree trunk, not able to hear himself screaming in pain, and the bark of the tree tore skin from his back as he slithered to a sitting position.  He looked frantically around, hoping for some obvious way to kill himself—a cliff to jump from, a lake to drown himself in—but all was peaceful and safe, and quiet to everyone but him.

He unclamped his hands from the side of his head, looking with horror at the blood that had flowed from his ears, staining his palms crimson.  His eyes rolled upwards as he lost consciousness.

***

The music was still whirling around him when he opened his eyes.  Unfamiliar faces looked down on him—men and women in fancy dress.  Overhead was a chandelier, and a turn of his head showed tables with food, immaculately-dressed waiters dispensing wine, unperturbed by the fact that one of the guests had fainted.

“Honey,” a woman said, fanning his face, a worried crease on her forehead.  Dangling emerald earrings swung from her earlobes, catching the light in flashes.  “George.  Are you okay?  We were dancing, and you clapped your hands over your ears and collapsed.”

“George?”  His voice sounded foreign, alien.  Some other man's voice.  Still, the music swirled in the air, the same familiar pairing of violin and piano he had known for the past twenty years.  But at least it was at a comfortable volume now.  He struggled to sit up.

“No, George, wait, we’ve called the paramedics,” the woman said.  “Just stay lying down.  You’ll be fine.”

“My name’s not George,” he said.  “It’s Luke.  Luke Reilly.  Who are you?”

The woman gave a frightened glance at the people who were standing near her, and then looked down at him and tried to smile.  “I’m Marie.  Your wife.  Marie.”  She stroked his face.  “You’ve been unconscious for about five minutes.  But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

And as he looked up, from one strange, unknown face to another, the music finally ended.

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

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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

Fishmobile

I know Life Follows Art, and all, but somehow I didn't expect the Art to be a sketch from Monty Python.

If you're a Python fan, you might remember a bit between Michael Palin and John Cleese, where Cleese plays a guy in the office that issues pet ownership licenses, and Palin is a guy who wants to get a license for his pet fish, Eric.

After being told that there are no licenses for pet fish, the following conversation takes place.

Cleese: You are a loony. 

Palin:  Look, it's a bleedin' pet, isn't it?  I've got a license for me dog, Eric.  I have a license for me cat, Eric. 

Cleese:  You don't need a license for your cat. 

Palin:  I bleedin' well do, and I've got one!  Can't be caught out, there. 

Cleese:  There's no such thing as a bloody cat license. 

Palin:  (places a piece of paper on the counter)  What's that, then? 

Cleese:  This is a dog license with the word "dog" crossed out and "cat" written in in crayon. 

Palin:  Man didn't have the right form.

Well, it turns out that they got the kind of license wrong, is all.  You don't need a license to own a fish, but the fish itself might need a license to drive a car.

In a paper that you'll think I'm making up, but I'm not, four researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) have created a little car for a goldfish -- that is driven by the fish.

Dubbed the "Fish-Operated Vehicle" (FOV), it's a small plastic aquarium on four wheels, with a steering mechanism controlled by the orientation and fin-movement rate of the fish.  They then attached a food pellet dispensing device, so that the fish got fed whenever it moved its little car toward a pink stripe on the wall.

The authors write:

[The fish] were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.  These results demonstrate how a fish was able to transfer its space representation and navigation skills to a wholly different terrestrial environment, thus supporting the hypothesis that the former possess a universal quality that is species-independent.

Which is cool, and all, but it does make me wonder: how did they even think of doing this?  You know, this is the reason I'd never have made it in research science.  This isn't Thinking Outside the Box, this is Thinking in a place where the Box wouldn't even be visible through a powerful telescope.  I can't imagine in a million years being a behavioral scientist, and thinking, "Hey, I know!  Let's teach a fish how to drive a car!"

In any case, it's kind of cool that fish can be trained.  You have to wonder what's going through their tiny brains once they find out they can control where the car goes.  I'd like to think that it's the fish version of "Yeeeeee-haw!"

But what's next?  Maybe I can get them to come teach my dogs to mow my lawn.  It's about time they learn a useful skill.  (The dogs, not the researchers.)  On the other hand, now that I think about it, knowing my dogs they'd probably just use the lawn mower as a way of further terrorizing the local squirrels, so maybe it's better if they stay with all four feet on the ground.

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

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

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