It's all becoming clear

The phenomenon of transparency is way more interesting than it appears at first.

I remember thinking about the concept when I was a kid, the first time I watched the classic horror/science fiction film The Invisible Man.  Coincidentally, I was in high school and was in the middle of taking biology, and we'd recently learned how the human eye works, and Claude Rains's predicament took on an added layer of difficulty when it occurred to me that if he was invisible -- including his retina -- not only would we not be able to see him, he wouldn't be able to see anything, because the light rays striking his eye would pass right through it.  Since it's light being absorbed by the retina that stimulates the optic nerve, and Rains's retinas weren't absorbing any light (or we'd have seen them floating in the air, which is kind of a gross mental image), he'd have been blind.

So an invisibility potion isn't nearly as fun an idea as it sounds at first.

It wasn't until I took physics that I learned why some objects are transparent, and why (for example) it's harder to see a glass marble underwater than it is in the air.  Transparency results from a molecular structure that neither appreciably absorbs nor scatters light; more specifically, when the substance in question has electron orbitals spaced so that they can't absorb light in the visible region of the spectrum.  (If not, the light passes right through it.)  Note that substances can be transparent in some frequency ranges and not others; water, for example, is largely transparent in visible light, but is opaque in the microwave region -- which is why water heats up so quickly when you put it in a microwave oven.

The second bit, though, is where it really gets interesting.  Why are some transparent objects still clearly visible, and others are nearly invisible?  Consider my example of glass in air as compared to glass under water.  You can see through both, but it's much harder to discern the outlines of the glass underwater than it is in air.  Even more strikingly -- submerge a glass object in a colorless oil, and it seems to vanish entirely.

The reason is something called the index of refraction -- how much a beam of light is bent when it passes from one transparent medium to another.  A vacuum has, by definition, an index of refraction of exactly 1.  Air is slightly higher -- 1.000293, give or take -- while pure water is about 1.333.  The key here is that the more different the two indices are, the more light bends when crossing from one to the other (and the more the light tends to reflect from the surface rather than refract).  This is why the boundary between air and water is pretty obvious (and why those amazing photographs of crystal-clear lakes, where you can see all the way to the bottom and boats appear to be floating, are always taken from directly overhead, looking straight down; even at a slight angle from perpendicular, you'd see the reflected portion of the light and the water's surface would be clearly visible).

Likewise, the more similar the indices of refraction are, the less light bends (and reflects) at the boundary, and the harder it is to see the interface.  Glass, depending on the type, has an index of refraction of about 1.5; olive oil has an index of 1.47.  Submerge a colorless glass marble in a bottle of olive oil, and it seems to disappear,

The reason all this comes up has to do with the evolution of transparency in nature -- as camouflage.  It's a pretty clever idea, that, and is used by a good many oceanic organisms (jellyfish being the obvious example).  None of them are completely transparent, but some are good enough at index-of-refraction-matching that they're extremely hard to see.  It's much more difficult for terrestrial organisms, though, because air's lower index of refraction -- 1, for all intents and purposes -- is just about impossible to match in any conceivable form of living tissue.

Some of them come pretty close, though.  Consider the "skeleton flower," Diphylleia grayi, of Japan, which has white flowers that become glass-like when they're wet:

The transparency of the flower petals is likely to be a fluke, as it's hard to imagine how it would benefit the plant to evolve a camouflage that only works when the plant is wet.  An even cooler example was the subject of a paper in the journal eLife last week, and looked at a group of butterflies called (for obvious reasons) "glasswing butterflies."  These are a tropical group with clear windows in their wings -- but, it turns out, they're not all closely related to each other.

In other words, we're looking at an example of convergent evolution and mimicry.

The study found that some of the clear-wings are toxic, and those lack an anti-glare coating on the "windows."  This makes the light more likely to reflect from the surface, rather than pass through; think about the glare from a puddle in the road on a sunny day.  Those flashes of light act as a warning coloration -- an advertisement to predators that the animal is toxic, distasteful, or dangerous.

The glasswing butterfly Greta oto of Central and South America [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons David Tiller, Greta oto, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The coolest part of last week's paper was in looking at the mimics; the species that had the transparent windows but weren't themselves toxic.  Unlike the toxic varieties, those species had evolved anti-glare coatings on the windows, so the mimicry was obvious in bright light -- but in shadow, the lack of glare made them seem to disappear completely.  In other words, the clear parts act as a warning coloration in sunshine, and as pure camouflage in the shade!

Even more amazing is that a number of only distantly-related species have stumbled on the same mimicry -- so this particular vanishing act has apparently evolved independently more than once.  A good idea, apparently, shouldn't just be wasted on one species.

So that's today's cool natural phenomenon, which I hope I've clarified sufficiently.  There seems truly to be no end to the way living things can take advantage of physical phenomena for their own survival -- as Darwin put it, to generate "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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

Cliffs of ice and rivers in the sky

One of the most frustrating things is that instead of meeting the challenges we have and then moving forward, we seem to be fighting the same battles over and over and over.  It's like running on a treadmill, except instead of getting aerobic exercise, all you get is high blood pressure and an ulcer.

It will come as no surprise that I'm once again referring to anthropogenic climate change, which has such a mountain of evidence behind it that there is no argument any more.  Or there shouldn't be.  But all it takes is Some Guy On The Internet making a comment that amounts to "Nuh-uh, is not," and all of the science deniers give him a standing ovation and say, "See, we told you."

The latest in the long line of unqualified anti-science types acting as if their pronouncements somehow outweigh actual research is a tweet from Matt Thomas claiming that the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia in 2020 exceeded all of the human-generated carbon dioxide ever emitted.  Thomas said, "This volcano just spewed more CO2 than every car driven in history.  Climate change is natural.  Taxing us into poverty isn’t the answer."

Despite the fact that this isn't just false, it's false by several orders of magnitude, it immediately started a Greek chorus of "Climate change is a hoax!" from all the self-appointed climatologists on Twitter.  The tweet got over a hundred thousand likes, and the video link he provided got millions of views.  I've seen it posted on social media dozens of times myself, always to shouts of acclamation.  Very few people responded the way I did, which was to say, "You, sir, are a dangerous idiot."  It seems like a lot of the people who actually trust science have been wearied to the point of exhaustion, and we're just not taking the bait any more.

And it's not like the numbers aren't out there to confirm Thomas's dangerous idiocy.  Anyone with a computer and access to scientific databases on the internet can check his figures, and see that he's not just in left field, he's so far away he couldn't see left field with a powerful telescope.  In an average year, all the volcanic activity in the world releases about 0.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide; the carbon dioxide released in one year from vehicular exhaust is ten times higher than that.  (Note that this is all the emissions from all the volcanoes in a year, as compared to vehicular emissions in a year; Thomas was claiming that one volcano exceeded the emissions of all the automobiles ever created.  I guess if you're gonna lie, you may as well make it a doozy.)

So instead of trusting Some Guy On The Internet, let's look at what the actual science is saying.  How's that for a novel idea?

Just last week there were three studies that in a sane world, would alarm the hell out of everyone, but for some reason, have barely caused a blip on the radar.

First from the University of Tsukuba (Japan), we have a study showing that a scary meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river is predicted to spike in frequency, especially in east Asia.  Atmospheric rivers are pretty much what they sound like; narrow, fast-moving bands of extremely humid air, that undergo what's called adiabatic cooling when they run into land that has a higher elevation.  This forces the air upward, causing the volume to expand and the temperature to drop -- and all of that moisture condenses as rain or snow.

We're not talking insignificant amounts of water, here.  An atmospheric river, propelled by a typhoon a thousand kilometers to the east, struck Henan Province in China last year.  The amount of rainfall they received is, honestly, hard to imagine.  In three days the city of Zhengzhou got sixty centimeters of rainfall -- about equal to its average annual precipitation.  In some places in the region, the rainfall rate exceeded twenty centimeters per hour.  Over three hundred people died in the floods, and the damage was estimated at twelve billion dollars.

And this phenomenon isn't limited to east Asia.  Want it brought home to you, Americans?  This same phenomenon has been known to strike other places with strong on-shore air currents driving into lowland areas bounded by steep climbs in elevation -- like the Central Valley of California.

The second study is from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and found that current models support that Greenland -- one of the world's largest repositories of land-bound ice -- has a delayed response to warming.  Meaning that even if everyone suddenly wised up and cut greenhouse emissions and the temperature stabilized, the Greenland Ice Cap would continue to melt.

For centuries.

The response of Some Guy On The Internet to this was a viral YouTube video showing an ice cube melting in a cup of water, wherein the water level in the cup did not change, captioned,  "A little science lesson for the IDIOTS at the global warming conference," once again to rousing applause, despite the fact that this particular SGOTI neglected the fact that the meltwater that matters is from ice that starts out on land.

That almost no one raised this objection makes me despair for the state of science education in American public schools.

Scariest of all was the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union warning that the Thwaites Glacier -- an on-land mass of ice about the size of Florida -- is in imminent danger of collapse.  And I do mean imminent; we're not talking "by 2100."

The prediction is that the collapse could come some time in the next three to five years.

The leading edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

What's going on is that Thwaites is held back by a floating ice shelf, the bottom of which is caught against the top of an undersea mountain.  The recent study looked at the rate of warm water infiltration and melting on the underside of that ice sheet, and found that the area of ice that's caught -- the part that's providing the friction holding the whole thing in place --  has decreased drastically.  It's like putting a chuck underneath the tire of a car in neutral sitting on an incline.  It doesn't move -- until you remove the chuck.  After that, the car rolls forward, and continues to accelerate.

If the ice sheet holding Thwaites back buckles, the entire glacier will start to slide.  Dumping this much ice into the ocean will raise sea levels by something on the order of sixty centimeters, inundating coastlines and low-lying areas and displacing millions of people.

Although the studies have improved in terms of detail, none of this is new information.  Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades.  Increasingly they're taking the role of Cassandra -- the figure from Greek myth who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.  The situation isn't helped by deliberate anti-science propaganda from the corporations who stand to lose financially if fossil fuels are phased out, and "news" services who are funded by those same corporations.

And, of course, by a populace who has been brainwashed to pay more attention to Some Guy On The Internet than to the hard data and sophisticated models generated by trained scientists.  But wearing blinders only works for so long.

Once you're up to your neck in sea water, it will be a little hard to argue that the scientists have been lying all along.

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

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 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.

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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!]