The catalyst

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a class called Modern American Literature.

To say I was a lackluster English lit student is something of an understatement.  I did well enough in science and math, but English and history were pretty much non-starters.  I took the class because I was forced to choose -- one thing my high school had going for it was that each student developed his/her English program from a smorgasbord of semester-long classes, which ranged from Mythology to Sports Literature to Literature in Film to Syntax & Semantics -- but that semester I kind of just closed my eyes and pointed.

So Modern American Literature it was.

One of the assignments was to choose one from a list of novels to read and analyze.  I found that I didn't have a very good basis to make my decision, because although I'd heard some of the titles and recognized a few of the authors' names, I didn't really know much about any of them.  So once again taking my "what the hell does it matter?" approach, I picked one.

It was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Over the next two weeks, I read it, and I can say without any exaggeration that I've never seen things the same way since.

The story is set in 1714 in Peru, and opens with an accident.  Five people are walking on a rope bridge across a chasm when, without any warning, the ropes come loose and all five fall to their deaths in the river below.  A Franciscan friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses the disaster -- in fact, he'd been about to cross the bridge himself -- and this starts him wondering why God chose those five, and no others, to die that day.  

So Brother Juniper embarks on a quest to try to parse the mind of God.  There had to be some discernible commonality, some factor that united all five victims.  God, Brother Juniper believed, never acts at random.  There's always a reason for everything that happens.  So surely the devout, with enough prayer and study, should be able to figure out why this had occurred.

He searches out people who knew the victims, finds out who they were -- good, bad, or middling, young or old, devout or doubting.  What circumstances led each of them to decide to cross the bridge at that time?  Each was brought to that point by a series of events that could easily have gone differently; after all, if God had wanted to spare one of them, all he would have had to do was engineer a five-minute delay in their arrival at the bridgehead.

Or, in Brother Juniper's own case, speed him up by five minutes, if he'd been destined to die.

In either case, it would have been easy for an omnipotent power to alter the course of events.  So that power must have had a reason for letting things work out the way they did.

But in the end, after going into the histories of the five victims, and considering his own life, he realizes that there is no discernible reason.  There's no logic, no correlation, no pattern.  His conclusion is that either the mind of God is so subtle that there's no way a human would ever be able to comprehend it, or there are no ultimate causes, that things simply happen because they happen.  He feels that he has to communicate this to others, and writes a book about what he's learned...

... and it is promptly labeled as heresy by the Inquisition.  After a trial in which the Inquisitors attempt unsuccessfully to get Brother Juniper to recant what they perceive as his errors and lack of faith, he is burned at the stake, along with all the copies of his book.

It's a devastating conclusion.  It rattled me badly; I spent weeks afterward thinking about it.  And I never looked at the world the same way afterward.

Burned at the Stake, woodcut engraving by Ottmar Elliger (early eighteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason I bring this up is a bill that just received Senate approval in Florida that would prohibit schools from using curricula that causes students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."  On that basis, I would never have had the opportunity to read Wilder's book when I was in eleventh grade, solely because it made me uncomfortable.

This idea is so completely wrong-headed that I hardly know where to start.  One of the purposes of good books (not to mention honest instruction in history) is to shake you up, make you reconsider what you'd believed, push you to understand things that sometimes are unsettling.  I don't consider my own writing High Literature by any stretch, but I think that any book, regardless of genre, succeeds only by virtue of how it makes you think and feel.  If you reach the last page of a book and haven't changed at all since you opened it, the book has failed.  As my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, said, "If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

And this may make you feel "discomfort and anguish."  But sometimes that's what we need to feel.  Note that I'm not saying you have to overhaul your political and religious beliefs every time you read a book, but if it doesn't even make you think about them, something's wrong.  As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, you might leave the class on the last day of school with your beliefs unchanged, but don't expect to leave with them unchallenged.

It's the difference between teaching and indoctrination, isn't it?  Odd that indoctrination is supposedly what this bill is designed to prevent, when in reality, that's exactly what it accomplishes.  Don't consider our history critically; if something from the past makes you feel uncomfortable, then either don't teach it or else pretend it didn't happen (which amounts to the same thing).  Everything our forebears did was just hunky-dory because they were Americans.  

How far is that from the Deutschland über Alles philosophy of the Nazis?  Small step, seems to me.

We should be reading books that upset us.  Not only does this allow us to understand the past through the eyes of an author who sees things differently than we do, it opens our own eyes to how we got where we are -- and how we can make sure atrocities don't happen again.  Books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Richard Wright's Native Son, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying succeed because they do make us upset.  (All of the above, by the way, have a history of being banned by school boards.)

Good books should make you respond with more than just a self-satisfied "yes, we are all awesome, aren't we?"  They should be catalysts for your brain, not anesthetics.  It's not fun to realize that even our Founding Fathers and national heroes weren't all the paragons they're portrayed as, and our history isn't the proud parade toward freedom the sponsors of the Florida bill would like you to believe.  But discomfort, just like physical pain, exists for a reason; both are warnings, signaling you to think about what you're doing, and do something to fix the problem.  We gain nothing as a society by accepting sanctimonious ease over the hard work of understanding.

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

A geological champagne bottle

I've always found the idea of an unstable system fascinating, even before I knew the name to put on it.  As a kid I liked to do things like build towers of stones and see how high I could get them before they'd teeter and collapse, and got quite good at creating a multi-tiered house of cards.  (Can't do it any more -- I drink too much coffee to have the steady hands I did at age twelve.)  What I found interesting was that up to a point, such systems tend to self-stabilize; touch your tower of stones gently, and sometimes it'll jostle a bit then settle back into its original position.  But introduce too much energy into it, and it destabilizes fast.  After that, every bit of the collapse feeds more energy into the process, until all you have left is a pile of chaotic rubble.

This phenomenon of a tipping point -- the point where the system crosses the line between stable and unstable -- is a special case of a wider phenomenon called hysteresis, which is the dependence of a system's state on its history.  If something has started a trend in the past, sometimes it takes far less energy to keep it going than it did to get it started in the first place.  Think, for example, of popping the cork on a champagne bottle.  The amount of force you have to exert to push the cork up the bottle neck stays the same until... suddenly... it doesn't.  Once the frictional force between the cork and the neck is exceeded by the force exerted by the pressure in the bottle, the system changes state fast.

Bang.

Lots of systems act this way, but none quite as alarmingly powerful as a volcanic eruption.  Take, for example, what happened to Anak Krakatau, an island in the Sunda Strait in the Indonesian archipelago.  This island was the site of the stupendous 1883 eruption of Krakatau (more commonly, but less correctly, spelled Krakatoa), one of the largest in recorded history.  But volcanoes seldom stop at one eruption; the magma chamber feeding them doesn't just empty and go away.  The same processes that caused the first eruption eventually rebuild the volcano and generate subsequent outbursts.  Anak Krakatau ("Child of Krakatau" in Indonesian) emerged in 1927 from the giant caldera left by the eruption forty-four years earlier, and continued to grow and produce steam, ash bursts, and lava flows afterward.

An eruption of Anak Krakatau in 2008 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then in 2018, the entire island collapsed.  I'm not overstating.  It lost two-thirds of its above-sea-level volume, and the summit dropped from 338 meters above sea level to 110.  This sudden cave-in generated a two-meter-high tsunami that killed over four hundred people and displaced forty thousand, mostly along the coastline of Sumatra and Java.  Geologists knew the potential of the island to generate another deadly eruption, and even that there was a potential for collapse, but no one saw it coming on the day it happened.  No warning, everything's quiet, then...

Bang.

The sudden collapse of Anak Krakatau was the subject of a paper this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters which studied the lead-up to the event, looking at whether there were signs in the preceding months that might have tipped geologists off to what was going to occur.  And... scarily... there weren't.  Just like the cork in a champagne bottle giving you no warning when it's going to pop.  The authors write:

The lateral collapse of Anak Krakatau volcano, Indonesia, in December 2018 highlighted the potentially devastating impacts of volcanic edifice instability.  Nonetheless, the trigger for the Anak Krakatau collapse remains obscure.  The volcano had been erupting for the previous six months, and although failure was followed by intense explosive activity, it is the period immediately prior to collapse that is potentially key in providing identifiable, pre-collapse warning signals... [Our research] suggests that the collapse was a consequence of longer-term processes linked to edifice growth and instability, and that no indicative changes in the magmatic system could have signalled the potential for incipient failure.  Therefore, monitoring efforts may need to focus on integrating short- and long-term edifice growth and deformation patterns to identify increased susceptibility to lateral collapse.  The post-collapse eruptive pattern also suggests a magma pressurisation regime that is highly sensitive to surface-driven perturbations, which led to elevated magma fluxes after the collapse and rapid edifice regrowth.  Not only does rapid regrowth potentially obscure evidence of past collapses, but it also emphasises the finely balanced relationship between edifice loading and crustal magma storage.

This put me in mind of another geological phenomenon that results from a similar kind of champagne-cork effect; kimberlite eruptions, which I wrote about here last year, and which apparently have the same no-warning-then-boom behavior.  (These are the eruptions that produce diamonds -- and, once you read my post, you'll be glad to hear that they are thought to be a feature of Earth's distant past, and very unlikely to happen now.)

It's easy for us to look around and think everything we see -- not only the geology, but the climate, the global ecosystem, society itself -- is stable, and any perturbations will set up a feedback that will return everything to "normal."  The problem is, for a lot of systems, there is no "normal."  They're stable up to a point -- but if pushed beyond that point, unravel fast.  Some of these phenomena, like the caldera collapse that struck Anak Krakatau four years ago, are powerful and unpredictable, and other than evacuating people, there wouldn't have been anything we could have done to prevent it even if we had known.  But we'd damn well better not close our eyes to the analogy between this event and the bigger picture.  It's easy and convenient to believe that "everything will be fine because it's always been fine," but that kind of thinking gives people license to keep poking at things, heedlessly pushing on the superstructure and acting like it has infinite resilience.

Then, without any warning, where you had an orderly stone tower, all you have left is a pile of rocks, dust, and debris.

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

Escaping the mill

Content warning: this post is about the mistreatment and neglect of animals.  There's nothing graphic or gratuitous, but if you're sensitive to such things and would prefer not to read about them, you may want to sit this one out.

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

I'm going to do something today that I almost never do: use this blog to plead with you, directly and personally, to do something.

I'll say it straight out.  If you are considering getting a pure-bred pet, please please please do some research and make sure that the breeder the pet comes from is reputable and treats their animals humanely.

This, unfortunately, rules out the lion's share of the pure-bred puppies and kittens you find at most of the big-chain pet stores.  You can often find "bargains" there -- pedigreed pets that will cost you one-half to one-third what you'd pay to a good breeder -- but that money saved comes at a terrible cost.

I'm not referring to the fact that most "puppy mills" and "kitten mills" don't do much in the way of screening for genetic health.  (An example is the most common congenital problem in large dog breeds, hip dysplasia.)  I'm also not going to get into the wisdom and logic of pure breeding as a practice in and of itself; perhaps that will be a topic for another day.

The reason you should never purchase puppies and kittens from unknown or questionable sources is because of the way disreputable breeders treat the animals they own.  Pure-bred dogs and cats owned by these people are used for one thing: producing income.  They are only valuable as money generators.  Dogs and cats who have been selectively bred for centuries for their ability to connect emotionally and bond to humans are kept isolated in cages, rarely if ever allowed to play with humans or the other animals confined in the same facility, and once their useful life as reproduction machines is over, they are either euthanized or given up to rescues.

The owners of puppy and kitten mills are usually pretty good at dancing on the line between neglect and outright abuse.  The difficulty for regulatory agencies is proving that they've crossed that line; it's time-consuming and often expensive to bring a suit against owners unless the case is clear-cut (which it seldom is).

An example -- and the reason this topic comes up -- is my new dog, Cleo.  I mentioned here that I got her from a rescue a month ago.  She's a pure-bred Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed that looks a little like a cross between a dog and a fox.  She spent her first four years with a breeder who should, in my opinion, never be allowed within a hundred meters of a dog for the rest of his life.  When Cleo was a puppy, she injured her left eye, and the injury was ignored until it looked like it might be life-threatening.  By that time, it was bad enough that she had to have the eye removed.  If that's not bad enough, her owner apparently decided the way to stop the dogs from barking was to bang on their cages with a metal pipe.  The result is that Cleo is terrified of loud noises -- even closing a cabinet door makes her startle.

It's taken her a month to begin to understand that she's not going to be locked up any more.  Her first three weeks with us, she became panicked whenever she saw a door closing.  We'd leave the door into the back yard open for her -- despite the fact that it's winter -- and at first, we thought it was kind of funny that she'd walk inside, then turn around and walk back out, then in, then out, sometimes for twenty minutes before she'd commit.  It became much less amusing when we figured out why she was doing it.  She's beginning to learn that she can go outside (or back inside) whenever she wants to, and doesn't need to freak out that once the door closes, she'll be stuck for hours or days.

She's also having to figure out how to play.  One really positive thing is that she and our other dog, a big galumphing galoot of a pittie mix named Guinness, hit it off right away.

Best buds.  Yes, the dogs have their own couch.  No, we don't spoil them at all, I don't know what you're talking about.

It was simultaneously heartwarming and heart-wrenching to watch her and Guinness romping in the snow two days ago.  We got our first big snowfall of the winter on Monday, and it quickly became obvious that she'd never had the opportunity to play in the snow before.  I spent a half-hour standing at my kitchen window watching them galloping around -- the contrast between Guinness's ponderous trot and Cleo's spring-loaded, gazelle-like bounce was hilarious.

Cleo's first time playing in the snow -- Monday, January 17, 2021

The emotional scars from her past aren't going to go away quickly, and I'm well aware that we are going to have to be patient, gentle, and reassuring to her, until she becomes convinced that she's in a safe place with people who love her.  The thing I've said to her the most often, when something panics her and she freezes, shivering uncontrollably, is, "You don't have to be afraid, little one.  You're safe.  No one will ever hurt you again."  I know she can't understand the words, but I think she's beginning to understand the intent.  She spends a lot of time sitting next to me, dozing, pressed against my leg -- making up for all those lonely, desolate years when she was never touched with love and compassion.  We're lucky that her mistreatment didn't make her scared of all humans.  Instead it's left her craving someone to trust and to bond with, and she's fortunate we're here to be that.

And so are we.  She's a sweet, gentle, funny little girl, who is beginning to learn how to be playful -- yesterday evening she bounced around in the living room, barking at her rawhide chew, tossing it up in the air, play-bowing and tail wagging furiously, and she kept checking in with us as if she couldn't quite believe we were letting her have fun with it.

So I'll reiterate my plea to be careful where you buy your dogs and cats from.  No animal, ever, should be treated the way Cleo was.  I know that it's not the fault of the puppies and kittens for sale in stores that they came from mills, and they need homes too, but the flow of money to disreputable breeders has got to be stopped.  Put pressure on pet stores to certify that their animals came from breeders who treat them kindly.  Put pressure on state legislators to pass laws cracking down on breeders who neglect the animals they own.  Donate to the Humane Society or the SPCA.  If you don't want to do a cash donation, then volunteer at your local shelter, or call them and find out what supplies they are in need of.

Consider adopting a pet from a rescue.  Yes, it means you'll probably have to work with your new friend to overcome what happened in the past.  But I'm writing this right now with Cleo snoozing peacefully in my lap, safe and warm and secure, and she is returning to me in love and devotion everything I've given her and more.

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

The legion of ghosts

One of the questions I get asked the most often, in the context of skepticism and critical thinking, is, "What would it take to change your mind about the paranormal?"

My answer is that all it would take is one piece of hard evidence, observed under controlled conditions by unbiased researchers, that wasn't explainable by means of known, natural causes.

This may seem overly rigorous, and nothing more than a reason to discount all claims of the supernatural and forthwith stop thinking about any of it.  But really, what else could I say?  I've seen too many instances of people trying to be fair but honestly misinterpreting the evidence, as well as people exaggerating claims, relying on nothing but personal anecdote, falling victim to confirmation bias and dart-thrower's bias, or -- worst -- simply making shit up.

The difficulty, of course, is that some of those claims (well, not the last kind, obviously) might be true.  So how could we tell?  Might I, and other hard-headed skeptics, be discounting real phenomena in an overzealous attempt to winnow out the wheat from the chaff?

Let's look at one example that has some interesting features, and see if there might be something to it -- or if, as skeptics, we have to shrug our shoulders and put it in the "we dunno, but probably not" column.

One of the first big cities I spent any time in, on my first trip to England, was the lovely old city of York.  (I started out in Blackpool, but my general attitude was that the best thing you can do in Blackpool is get the fuck out of Blackpool.  No offense to any, um, Blackpudlians in the studio audience.)  Anyhow, like many old European cities, York plays host to a lot of claims of hauntings, and one of the most curious surrounds the Treasurer's House, near York Minster Cathedral.

The site has been the home of the Chief Treasurer of York Minster since the eleventh century, but of the original structure (and the first major overhaul, done in the twelfth), all that's left is one external wall and some masonry.  However, the house, in some form, has been continuously occupied since it was built in 1091, even if its original builders wouldn't recognize the place.

The Treasurer's House, York, England [image licensed under the Creative Commons Seasider53, Treasurer's House York, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Where it gets interesting, from a paranormal perspective, is that the house was built right on top of one of the main roads used when Britain was a Roman province.  However, that's not as impressive as it sounds, when you consider how many Roman roads there are in England:

Eboracum, in the north part of England, is the Roman settlement that ultimately became the city of York. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roman.Britain.roads, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Be that as it may, apparently the old road runs right underneath the house's foundation, and excavation in the basement uncovered four marble pedestals from pillars dating to second-century Roman occupation, one of which was left in place and the other moved to become a base for a modern column in the main hall.

So this at least provides some basis -- if, perhaps, not credence -- to an apparition seen in the house's basement multiple times, most famously in 1953, when a plumber, Harry Martindale, was called in to work on installing a central heating system.  Martindale, so the story goes, was standing on top of a ladder when he heard a noise, and turning in the direction of its apparent source saw something horrifying -- a man on horseback wearing "Roman-looking armor" coming right through the wall.  The horseman was followed by a group of men wearing helmets, green tunics over red kilts, carrying round shields and either short swords or spears.  They looked, Martindale said, tired, dirty, dejected, and miserable.  Several of them appeared to be ill or wounded, and the implements they carried (one of which was a long metal trumpet) were battered and dented.

Martindale, understandably, fell off the ladder.  The soldiers appeared to take no notice of the terrified young man in their midst.

Weirdest of all was something that Martindale noticed, and initially thought simply their short stature; looking more closely, he saw that he wasn't seeing their entire bodies, but their legs were seemingly cut off mid-calf, as if they were wading through the floor and not walking on it.  When they reached an area that had been excavated as part of the heating project, he saw that their lower legs and feet were actually there -- it looked as if they were walking on a surface forty centimeters below the floor.  They were wearing leather sandals, he said, with straps winding around their calves almost to the knee.

As he watched, they approached the wall across the room and went right through it, and one by one, vanished.

Martindale, scared out of his wits, ran up the stairs, right into the house's curator, who took one look at the white-faced young man and said, "By the look of you, you've seen the Romans!"

So, that's the core of the story.  Now, for a closer look at what we know.

First, Martindale turns out to be a pretty credible witness, as such things go.  He left the plumbing business (I would have, too), became a policeman, and died in 2014.  He told the story many times, and never changed a single detail -- and, most interestingly, refused several lucrative offers of payment for interviews and television appearances.

Second, there's the thing about the ghosts (if such they were) walking through, not on, the basement floor.  Further excavations done after Martindale's experience found the remains of the old Roman road -- forty centimeters underneath the current floor.  The ghosts, true believers say, were unaware of their current surroundings (including, fortunately, Martindale himself) and were walking on the road as it was fifteen centuries ago.

Third -- one of the criticisms of Martindale's claim is that the battle equipment and dress were wrong -- for one thing, the shields used by the Roman armies in Britain were square, not round.  But according to several sources I've seen (including the ones linked) it was discovered much later that in the fifth century, at which point the Romans were getting the snot beat out of them by the Angles and Saxons and were in the process of evacuating the entire island, York was defended by not by regular army but by a group of reserves -- who would have been dressed and armed exactly the way Martindale described, including with round shields.

Okay, so what do we conclude about all this?

Here's the difficulty.  The legend of the ghostly legion was well known by then; witness the curator's reaction.  It's unlikely that Martindale knew nothing of the house's reputation.  So as reliable as most sources consider Martindale to be, we have to admit the possibility that either (1) he made it up for reasons unknown or (2) got spooked by the stories of the haunting and let his imagination get the better of him.

On the plus side of the ledger, though, are the details of the apparitions themselves.  You'd think if someone were to make up a story about seeing ghostly Roman legionaries, they'd be the more conventional way we picture them -- shining armor, plumed helmets, and so on.  The fact that they appeared to be coming from a battle where they'd been battered to smithereens is a curious twist, but certainly consistent of what we know was happening in the north of England in the fifth century.

Also an odd feature is the thing about walking on the old road surface rather than the current basement floor, which strikes me as something no one would think to make up.  And Martindale himself was not prone to wild fancies.  He was apparently a plain-spoken, solidly blue-collar man, not college educated, and not the kind you'd think of as a spinner of strange tales.  (If I, for example, were to claim there were ghosts in my basement, my being a speculative fiction author would clearly weigh against my credibility.  We authors can come up with some bizarre stuff sometimes.  Still, I have to add that if I were to come up with a hoax-ghost-sighting story, there's no way even I would have thought of having them walk on a buried road surface.)

Still, it remains that we only have anecdotal evidence to go by.  The cellar is not open to the public (although tours are give of the rest of the house), but a CCTV was set up there to see if any ghosts, Roman or otherwise, would show up -- and so far, has captured nothing.

So you can label me "unconvinced but interested."  I'm not going to jump to a supernatural explanation until we've ruled out all the natural ones, or better yet, when we have hard, scientifically-sound evidence.  I think it was said best by, of all people, C. S. Lewis, in the person of his hard-headed skeptical character Andrew MacPhee in That Hideous Strength: "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

Even spookier action

Once again, I've had my mind blown by a set of experiments about the behavior of subatomic particles that teeters on the edge of what my layman's brain can understand.  So I'm gonna tell you about it as best I can, and I would ask that any physics types in the studio audience let me know about any errors I make so I can correct 'em.

You're undoubtedly aware of the quote by Einstein having to do with "spooky action at a distance," which is how he viewed the bizarre and counterintuitive features of the physics of the very small such as quantum superposition and entanglement.  Both of these phenomena, though, have been explained by the model that particles aren't the little pinpoint masses we picture them as, but spread-out fields of probabilities that can interact even when they're not near each other.

But that still leaves intact the conventional view, certainly the common-sense one, that one object can't affect another unless the field generated by one of them intersects the field generated by the other, whether that field be gravity, electromagnetism, or either of the two less-familiar nuclear forces (strong and weak).  Not as obvious is that this influence is generally transmitted by some sort of carrier particle being exchanged between the two -- although the carrier particle that transmits the gravitational force has yet to be discovered experimentally.

This is one of the main reasons that unscientific superstitions like astrology can't be true; it's positing that your personality and life's path are affected by the position of the Sun or one of the planets relative to a bunch of stars that only appear to be near each other when viewed from our perspective.  Most of those stars are tens to hundreds of light years away, so any influence they might have on you via the four fundamental forces is about as close to zero as you could possibly get, because all four of them dramatically decrease in intensity the farther away you get.  (As Carl Sagan quipped, at the moment of your birth, the obstetrician who delivered you was exerting a greater gravitational pull on you than Jupiter was.)

So the bottom line appears to be: no interaction between the fields generated by two objects, no way can they influence each other in any fashion.

But.

In 1959, two physicists, Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm, published a paper on what has come to be known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect.  This paper concluded that under certain conditions, an electrically-charged particle can be affected by an electromagnetic field -- even when the particle itself is shielded in such a way that both the electric field and magnetic field it experiences is exactly equal to zero, and the particle's wave function is blocked from the region that is experiencing the field.

So that leaves us with one of two equally distasteful conclusions.  Either the measured electric and magnetic fields in a region don't tell us all we need to know to understand the electromagnetic potential a particle is experiencing, or we have to throw away the principle of locality -- that an object can only be influenced by the conditions in its local environment.

(Nota bene: in physics, "local" has a rigorous definition; two phenomena are local relative to each other if the amount of time a cause from one can precede an effect on the other is equal to or greater than the amount of time it would take light to travel from the position of the cause to the position of the effect.  This is the basis of the reluctance of physicists to believe in any kind of superluminal information transfer.)

What's more troubling still is that this isn't just some theoretical meandering; the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been demonstrated experimentally.  So as bafflingly weird as it sounds, it apparently is a built-in feature of quantum physics, as if we needed anything else to make it even crazier.

But maybe this is just some weirdness of electromagnetism, right?  Well, that might have been believable...

... until now.

In a paper three days ago in Science, five physicists at Stanford University -- Chris Overstreet, Peter Asenbaum, Joseph Curti, Minjeong Kim, and Mark Kasevich -- have demonstrated that the same thing works for gravitational interactions.

This is bizarre for a variety of reasons.  First, the Aharonov-Bohm effect is just bizarre, in and of itself.  Second, as I mentioned earlier, we don't even have experimental proof that gravity has a carrier particle, or if perhaps it is just a description of the curvature of space -- i.e., if gravity is a completely different animal from the other three fundamental forces.  Third, and weirdest, the equations governing gravity don't mesh with the equations governing the other three forces, and every effort to coalesce them and create a "Grand Unified Theory" has met with failure.  Combining the gravitational field equations with the ones in the quantum realm generates infinities -- and you know what that does.  

"Every time I look at this experiment, I’m like, 'It’s amazing that nature is that way,'" said study co-author Mark Kasevich, in an interview with Science News.

"Amazing" isn't how I would have put it.  In Kasevich's situation, I think what I'd have said would have been more like, "Holy shit, what the hell is going on here?"  But I'm kind of unsubtle that way.

So what it seems to indicate to me is that we're missing something pretty fundamental about how forces work, and that this is an indication that there's a serious gap in the theoretical underpinning of physics.

(Nota bene #2: I still think astrology is bullshit, though.)

It's tempting for us laypeople to just throw our hands up in despair and say, "Okay, this stuff is so weird it can't be true."  The problem is, if you buy into the methods of science -- which I hope all of us do -- that's the one response you can't have.  The experimental evidence is what it is, whether you like (or understand) it or not, and if it contradicts your favorite model of how things work, you have to chuck the model, not the evidence.  Or, as Neil deGrasse Tyson more eloquently and succinctly put it, "The wonderful thing about science is that it works whether or not you believe in it."

So it looks like we're stuck with this even-spookier-action-at-a-distance, as counterintuitive as it sounds.  Objects can interact with each other gravitationally even when the gravitational field produced by object #1 is exactly zero where object #2 is currently sitting.  And this is about the limit of what I can explain, so if you ask me to clarify further, I'm afraid my response will be a puzzled head-tilt much like what my dog gives me when I tell him something he just can't comprehend, like why I don't want to go outside and play ball with him when it's subzero temperatures and snowing.

But I'll end on a more academic note, with a quote by the famous biologist J. B. S. Haldane, that I've used before in posts about quantum physics: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."

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

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

Easy as A, B, C

There's an unfortunate but natural tendency for us to assume that because something is done a particular way in the culture we were raised in, that obviously, everyone else must do it the same way.

It's one of the (many) reasons I think travel is absolutely critical.  Not only do you find out that people elsewhere get along just fine doing things differently, it also makes you realize that in the most fundamental ways -- desire for peace, safety, food and shelter, love, and acceptance -- we all have much more in common than you'd think.  As Mark Twain put it, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

One feature of culture that is so familiar that most of the time, we don't even think about it, is how we write.  The Latin alphabet, with a one-sound-one-character correspondence, is only one way of turning spoken language into writing.  Turns out, there are lots of options:

• Pictographic scripts -- where one symbol represents an idea, not a sound.  One example is the Nsibidi script, used by the Igbo people of Nigeria.
• Logographic scripts -- where one symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful component of a word; the word unconventionally, for example, has four morphemes -- un-, convention, -al, and -ly).  Examples include Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Cuneiform script of Sumer, the characters used in Chinese languages, and the Japanese kanji.
• Syllabaries -- where one symbol represents a single syllable (whether or not the syllable by itself has any independent meaning).  Examples include the Japanese hiragana script, Cherokee (more about that one later), and Linear B -- the mysterious Bronze-Age script from Crete that was a complete mystery until finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the mid-twentieth century.
• Abjads -- where one symbol represents one sound, but vowels are left out unless they are the first sound in the word.  Examples include Arabic and Hebrew.
• Abugidas -- where each symbol represents a consonant, and the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks (so, a bit like a syllabary melded with an abjad).  Examples include Thai, Tibetan, Bengali, Burmese, Malayalam, and lots of others.
• Alphabets -- one symbol = one sound for both vowels and consonants, such as our own Latin alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, Greek, Mongolian, and lots of others.

To make things more complicated, scripts (like every other feature of language) evolve over time, and sometimes can shift from one category to another.  There's decent evidence that our own alphabet evolved from a pictographic script:

Note, for example, the evolution of our letter "A," from a cow's head (so presumably the symbol originally represented an actual cow or ox), becoming a stylized representation of a horned animal, and finally losing its pictographic character entirely and becoming a representation of a sound instead of an idea.

Not only do scripts evolve, they can be invented.  (Obviously, they're all invented, but most of the ones we know about are old enough that we don't know much about their origins.)  Cyrillic, for example, was an creation of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I, but he based it on three sources -- Greek, Latin, and Glagolitic (a script used to write Old Church Slavonic), so it wasn't an invention ex nihilo.  The syllabic Cherokee script, however, was invented in the early nineteenth century by the brilliant Cherokee polymath Sequoyah, to give his people a way to write down their own history (a script that became one of the first written languages of the Indigenous people of North America).  In fact, it's a recently-invented script that brought this topic up today; a paper last week in Current Anthropology looks at a writing system I'd never heard of, the Vai script of Liberia, invented by a collaboration of eight people in 1833 from motivation similar to Sequoyah's.  Like Cherokee, it's syllabic in nature:

The paper looks at the interesting fact that even in the short time since its invention, Vai has evolved -- the symbols have simplified, and the script has "compressed" -- similar-sounding syllables eventually being represented by the same symbol.

"Visual complexity is helpful if you're creating a new writing system," said the study's lead author, Piers Kelly, of the Max Planck Institute, in an interview with Science Alert.  "You generate more clues and greater contrasts between signs, which helps illiterate learners.  This complexity later gets in the way of efficient reading and reproduction, so it fades away."  Also, as more and more people learn the writing system, it becomes regularized and standardized -- something that happens even faster when people switch from pen-and-paper to some kind of technological means of reproducing text.

It's why the recent tendency for People Of A Certain Age to bemoan the loss of cursive writing instruction in American public schools is honestly (1) kind of funny, and (2) swimming upstream against a powerful current.  Writing systems have been evolving since the beginning, with complicated, difficult to learn, difficult to reproduce, or highly variable systems being altered or eliminated outright.  It's a tough sell, though, amongst people who have been trained all their lives to use that script; witness the fact that Japanese still uses three systems, more or less at the same time -- the logographic kanji and the syllabic hiragana and katakana.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts, now that Japan has become a highly technological society.  My guess is at some point, they'll phase out the cumbersome (although admittedly beautiful) kanji, which requires understanding over two thousand symbols to be considered literate.  The Japanese have figured out how to represent kanji on computers, but the syllabic scripts are so much simpler that I suspect they'll eventually win.

In any case, it's fascinating to see how many different solutions humans have found for turning spoken language into written language, and how those scripts have changed over time (and continue to change).  All features of the amazing diversity of humanity, and a further reminder that "we do it this way" isn't the be-all-end-all of culture.

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

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 Hourglass

Folks who have read a lot of my stories will recognize Flanagan's Irish Pub as a setting for a number of different scenes, and the friendly blonde bartender Valerie who works there has shown up as a recurring minor character in several of my books and short stories.  It's based on a real pub -- the Rongovian Embassy to the United States, in Trumansburg, New York -- now several years defunct, but a fixture for decades in this part of the Finger Lakes.

The idea for "The Hourglass" came to me out of the blue one October day, as I was picturing the interior of the Rongo (as locals called it), and suddenly I had a powerful image of two twenty-somethings, strangers, coming into the bar and both ordering a pint of Guinness.  This starts a conversation... about what? I had to write the story to find out.

The result is a story-within-a-story that is one of the twistiest things I've ever written, and I submit it to you for this week's Fiction Friday, along with a question: what do you think happened at the end?

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

The Hourglass

Chad Tarlow consulted his watch.  Seven thirty.  Plenty of time for a pint.  Only one, as usual, both because the beer he liked was expensive, and also because he needed to be lucid when he got back to his apartment.  He still had about five hours of reading and writing to do for his graduate classes, and he’d seen the results of writing papers in an alcohol-induced fog.  He only had two semesters left and he’d have his master’s degree and his teaching license.  No sense screwing it up now.

He sat at the bar, and gave a smile to Valerie, the cute bartender.  Valerie, he knew, was taken, in a long-term relationship with a guy who worked for the college as some kind of environmental researcher.  No use to hit on her.  He did a slow look around the bar, to see if there were any other prospects, but Flanagan’s was pretty dead. Oh, well, it was not like he had time for a girlfriend anyhow.  He sighed, and turned back to find a foamy pint of Guinness waiting for him.

“Saw you come in,” Valerie said, grinning and wiping her hands on a towel.

“I’m getting predictable.” 

“Nothing wrong with knowing what you like.”  She headed off to the other end of the bar to pour a drink for an elderly man who looked like he’d already had one too many.

The door opened, letting in a rush of cool autumn air, and a few dead leaves.  Chad looked up from his pint and saw, with a pang of disappointment, that the newcomer was a young man.  He was perhaps twenty-five, with tousled curly hair, dark eyes, and an angular jaw that was in need of a shave.  He stopped for a moment, and glanced around the place as if looking for someone.

No single women here tonight, bud.  Hope you weren’t counting on getting any.

The man seemed to consider leaving, then with a little shrug came up to the bar, shucked his windbreaker and woolen scarf, and hung them over the back of the barstool two down from where Chad sat.  Valerie came over wearing her usual friendly smile.  “What can I get you?” 

“You have Guinness on tap?”

“Yup.”

“A pint, then.”  He slid a ten-dollar bill toward her and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on the bar.

She drew the pint, and while it was settling she gave him his change.  “You from around here?  Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“I live in Skaneateles.  My first time in here.”

She slid the pint toward him. “Nice town, Skaneateles.” 

“That it is.”

Valerie went to attend to the elderly gentleman, who was waving at her in a rather woozy fashion, leaving Chad and the newcomer with their pints and the awkward silence that always descends between people who are strangers but who are forced to be near each other by circumstance.

“What do you do in Skaneateles?”  Chad finally said, feeling that he couldn’t just sit there without saying anything, drink his beer, and then leave.  But once said, it sounded ridiculous – an empty sentence, like “Have a nice day.”

But the newcomer smiled faintly, and said, “I’m a writer.”

“Really?  What do you write?”

“Novels.  Science fiction, mainly, and some fantasy.  Mostly speculative stuff.”

“That’s cool.”  Chad swiveled a little towards him.  “I’ve always wondered how writers think of their plots.  Especially you science fiction guys.  I mean, you not only have to make up your plot and characters and all, you have to invent a whole world.”

The man smiled again, and took a sip of his pint. “I get asked that a lot.  By the way, my name’s Aaron.”  He extended his hand, which Chad shook.

“Chad.  I’m a grad student in education.  Heading toward teaching physics in high school – provided, of course, that I can get a job.”

Aaron nodded.  “Not easy, these days.”

“But you work from home.  Pretty cool.  You just write stories, and your customers come to you.”

He looked down.  “Something like that.”  He glanced over at the window for a moment, again seeming like he was looking for something or someone.  Then he turned back toward Chad.  “It’s usually the plots that get me stuck.  It can take a long time to work out plot points, because in science fiction, everything’s got to hang together.  The readers immediately pick up on it if there’s an inconsistency.”

“How do you work it out when you get stuck?”

Aaron shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Usually the solution just comes to me sooner or later.  I’m not sure from where.  But when I get badly stuck, sometimes it takes weeks to figure my way through it.”  He paused.  “In fact, I’m trying to work something out right now.  It’s why I went for a drive today – to try to clear my brain and see if I could figure out how the story should go.”

“What are you stuck on?” 

“You want me to tell you?” Aaron's dark eyebrows lifted a little.  “I don’t want to bore you.”

“It won’t bore me.  Look, dude, I have several hours of reading educational philosophy when I get home.  Anything you could come up with would be fascinating by comparison.”

Aaron laughed.  “All right.  It’s a time travel story.”

“Okay.”

“But the time travel isn’t really the point.  I mean, it’s not like The Time Machine, where it went into the fictional technology and all.  Even though it depends on being able to reverse the hourglass, this story focuses more on an ethical dilemma.  And I want to make sure that the story works out the right way.  You know, not corny or trite.  And I’m not sure what to do.”

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Himbeault, Hourglass , CC BY 2.0]

“So, when does the character travel to?”

Aaron took another pull on his pint.  “Here’s the deal.  The main character is a nice guy, but he had a really shitty childhood.  His mother was a complete whackjob.  Borderline personality, controlling, manipulative.”  He gestured with one hand.  “The kind of woman who should never be allowed to have children.  But like a lot of borderlines, she appeared normal enough on first glance.  In fact, she was kind of a magnetic personality.  Most people figured out soon enough that she was psycho.  She lost job after job, and so on.  And made her son’s life miserable.”

“Poor kid,” Chad said.

“Right?  The main character’s father was a decent guy, kept trying to help his wife, even though she was kind of beyond help, and stayed in the marriage to shield his son as much as he could.  But the mom was nuts enough that it didn’t really help.  And when the main character was seventeen, his mom had a total flip-out and killed his dad.  She ended up in jail.”

“Wow.  Seriously heavy stuff.”

“Yup.  So, anyway, that’s the setup.  That’s all in the past, in the story.  The reader just finds out about it in the first few chapters.  The son grows up, and he’s got a shitload of baggage from what he went through as a kid.  I mean, graduating from high school – mom’s in jail for killing dad.  The kind of thing most kids never have to deal with.”

“I hope not.  I don’t know what I’d do if something like that happened to one of my students.”

“I guess it happens sometimes.  Teachers got to deal with all sorts of stuff they wish they’d never had to see.  In fact, in the story, it’s the main character’s teachers, and some of his dad’s relatives, that save him.  So, anyway, he grows up, mostly normal, but has all of this psychotic stuff in his past.  Then, time travel is invented.  Scientists find a way to send people backwards, forwards, whatever you want.  And the guy gets an idea; what if he goes back in time, and stops his mom from meeting his father?”

“Seriously?  Like Back to the Future, only in reverse?”

Aaron smiled.  “Sort of like that.  He knows that if he does that, he’ll save his father from twenty years in a horrible relationship, that will end with his being shot to death by the woman he’d married.  But of course, you see the dilemma.”

“If he succeeds, he’ll cease to exist.”

Aaron nodded.  “And I have to be able to answer the question, confidently enough that what my character does makes sense.  You know?  If I’m not sure, I won’t be able to write it convincingly.  So, I guess the question is: do you save someone decades of unhappiness and an early death, at the cost of your own life?  Or do you save your own life even if it means someone you care about will be miserable?”

“The father might have been just as miserable had he not met the mom,” Chad said.  “You never know.”

“That’s true.  But even so.  What should he do?”  Aaron held up one hand, palm upwards.  “It’s just a story, after all.  I can make it come out whatever way I want.”

“Is the main character happy with his life?  I mean, if he’s screwed up himself, maybe he’d be better off, you know… not existing.  Kind of a clean suicide.”

“I didn’t want to make it that clear-cut.  That seemed too corny.  Like, he’s just wanting out, so he goes back in time to kill himself painlessly and save dad the trauma as an added benefit.  In the story, he’s kind of ordinary.  Some days good, some days bad.  He’s got some memories and shit to deal with, yeah – but he’s not, like, despondent or anything.”

“Wow,” Chad said.  “That’s a really interesting question.  I can see why you’re stuck.”

Aaron smiled, and took another drink.  “A puzzler, isn’t it?”

“Well, here’s an idea.  Maybe he should go back in time, you know… and present the idea to the dad.  Tell him what is going to happen.  Let the dad decide.”

“That’s kind of a cop-out.”

“Yeah, but, you know, see if the dad thinks all the misery would be worth it, to have a kid.”

“How could the dad judge that?  You know, condemn himself to twenty years of misery, and knowing he’d be killed at the end of it by the woman he’d married?  Do you really think anyone would be willing to do that voluntarily?”

“I don’t know,” Chad said.  “Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t know our futures.”

“Believe me,” Aaron responded, with some vigor, “since I started working on this story, I’ve thought about that many times.”

Chad finished his pint.  “Well, I’ve got to get going.”

“Educational philosophy waits for no man.”  Aaron gave him a smile.

“Nope.  And, with luck, once I’m actually teaching I’ll never have to read this crap again.”

This got a laugh. “That’s why I stick to writing science fiction.  People actually want to read it.”

Chad stood up, and shook Aaron’s hand.  “Good luck with your story.  I think it’s an interesting idea.  I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

“I hope so,” Aaron said.

Chad picked up his backpack from next to the barstool, and said goodbye to Valerie.  As he was approaching the door, it opened, admitting another gust of cool air.  A woman walked in – slim, with shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling blue eyes.  She glanced his way, and smiled.

No boyfriend in tow.  Okay, did he really need to stop at one pint?  He had time for another, right?

Chad opened his mouth to say something to her – his usual pickup line was, “Can I buy you a drink, or would you prefer to break my heart?”, which worked about fifty percent of the time, and in the other half of the cases just resulted in an eyeroll.  But something in him seemed to stall.  The words would not form, and the smile died on his lips.

The woman walked past him, and up to the bar. Chad turned to watch her.  And up on a shelf, behind the bar, was something he had never noticed before – a large hourglass in an ornate wooden frame, filled with white sand.  Valerie turned away from the elderly gentleman, who was finally paying his tab and seemed to be trying to determine if he could successfully stand up.  The woman sat down on one of the barstools at the otherwise empty bar, crossed her legs at the ankles, and rested her elbows on the polished mahogany top, smiling at Valerie and saying something too quietly for Chad to hear.  Valerie smiled, and turned – and then picked up the hourglass and flipped it over.

Chad watched the stream of sand spilling downwards for a moment, a distant expression on his face, like someone just waked from dreaming.  Then he walked out, alone, into the windy October night.

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

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!]