Sweet synchrony

I really am extraordinarily lucky.

Following the breakup of my (all things considered) disaster of a first marriage, I had pretty much figured that was it for romantic entanglements.  Then in November of 1999, a mutual friend introduced me to a woman named Carol who loved travel, dogs, birdwatching, music, the outdoors, and red wine, saying that there was no way two people so similar shouldn't get together.  With some hesitation -- both due to my earlier decision to avoid dating, and a hefty dose of social awkwardness -- I asked her out.

It soon became obvious we were soulmates.  We'd only been dating for six weeks when I said, just making a joke, "I'm going to take a trip to Iceland -- want to come with me?"  I was fully expecting her to say, "Iceland?  Why the hell would anyone go to Iceland?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

Our courtship was, in many ways, a comedy of errors, appropriate enough in retrospect given the screwball comedy our life together has turned out to be.  Our second trip overseas, to Belize, was great fun -- till we (and everyone else in the camp where we were staying) simultaneously got food poisoning.  It only lasted twelve hours, but was absolutely the sickest I've ever felt.  I won't go into gruesome details, but I'll just say that after we recovered, Carol remarked that if two people can coexist in a small cabin while elbowing each other out of the way every fifteen minutes to make it to the bathroom in time, without one of them killing the other, it has to be a match made in heaven.

I agreed.  After two more years of wild adventures (and no repeats of the Belize incident, fortunately), in July of 2002, we decided to make that match permanent.

Kind of amazing how well I clean up, honestly.

Now, almost twenty years later, we've only discovered more and more ways we're similar.  I can't tell you the number of times one of us has said something completely random, and the other has looked shocked and said, "I was just about to say exactly the same thing."  We are alike in good ways and bad -- we've also frequently remarked about how our less-praiseworthy habits reinforce each other.  This is particularly obvious when it comes to tidiness.  We've been told that our décor style is called "shabby chic."  I don't know about the "chic" part, but we've got "shabby" locked up.  Our approach to housekeeping can best be described as "There appears to have been a struggle."

But along the way we've had a huge amount of fun, even if finding out visitors are coming induces a panicked frenzy of vacuuming, mopping, sweeping away cobwebs, and putting away piles of books, art work, pottery, dog toys, and weird assorted souvenirs from various trips that have been strewn about for months.  But you can only do so much.  Even afterward, our house looks like a poorly-maintained museum.

On a trip to Canada a couple of years ago, while visiting an antique store.  The cobbler's bench in front of us is now our coffee table.

The adventures have never stopped.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Mevagissey, Cornwall, England

I still periodically find it baffling that she puts up with my rather squirrelly personality, navigating my yo-yoing moods with apparent aplomb.  All I know is what I started out with: I am damn lucky.

And I found out just day before yesterday that our rapport forecasts a long and happy future.  According to a study of 154 couples published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, couples who have the kind of spark Carol and I have tend to gain both in satisfaction and longevity.

"Couples in the study varied greatly in... measures of positivity resonance, with some couples showing dozens of moments of emotional and physiological synchrony and others showing few or none," said psychologist Robert Levenson, of the University of California - Berkeley, who co-authored the study.  "We focused on those fleeting moments when you light up together and experience sudden joy, closeness and intimacy.  What we found is that having these brief shared moments, known as ‘positivity resonance,’ is a powerful predictor of how healthy we’re going to be in the future and how long we’ll live."

Which is cheering.  Even more fascinating is that that resonance goes all the way down to the physiological level -- couples who scored high on the assessment not only synchronized such obvious social cues as smiling and laughing, their heartbeats and breathing synchronized, as did their blood levels of such powerful (positive) mood regulators as serotonin and oxytocin.

So this all bodes well for Carol and me.  That said, I have to say that there are ways we're not alike; for example, our approach to shopping.

Carol will comparison-shop for paper towels.  I, on the other hand, am so impulsive I'm flat-out dangerous to have by your side when there's a big purchase.  Part of it is that I loathe shopping so much that I'll do damn near anything, including paying twice as much as I should, just to get it over with.  I really related to the anecdote that humor writer Dave Barry tells, when he and his wife were looking for a house to buy:

Dave Barry:  This is just perfect!  I love it!  I think this is ideal, don't you, dear?

His wife:  We're still in the real estate office.

In any case, the similarities vastly outweigh the differences, and even our unfortunate shared tendencies, not to mention our differences, are ameliorated by the fact that we're both pretty accepting of each other's foibles.  So the Levenson et al. study is really immensely cheering.  I'm looking forward to many more years together, traveling, playing with dogs, drinking wine, and navigating our way through the chaos of our shabby chic lives.

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Should've seen that coming

Self-proclaimed psychics hated James Randi, the venerable debunker of all things paranormal, who died in October 2020 at the honorable age of 92.  On one hand, it's obvious why; he loathed charlatans, especially those who in plying their trade rip off the gullible to the tune of thousands of dollars.  But honestly, there's a way in which Randi shouldn't have been so detested by the psychics.  After all, he wasn't saying, "Your claim is false and you're lying," he said, "Show me under controlled conditions that you can do what you say you can do."  Which you'd think is fair enough.  Given how many people out there claim to have paranormal abilities, it seems like at least one or two of them would have made a credible case (especially since the James Randi Foundation was offering a million dollar prize for the first person who could succeed).

But no.  Not one single person ever met the minimum criteria for scientifically-admissible evidence; in fact, very few psychics even took the bait.  A few of them said they wouldn't put themselves in the situation of having to demonstrate their ability in a situation where Randi's "atmosphere of suspicion and distrust" would interfere with the psychic resonant energy fields (or whatever), but most of them wisely decided to stay silent on the matter and ignore the challenge completely.

And it worked.  Being a psychic is as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gunnshots (Don), Psychic reading, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Of course, since what the psychics do is make predictions, we don't even need Randi's method to check and see if there's anything to their claims; we can merely look back at the yearly predictions, and see what percentage of them were correct -- and if that hit rate exceeds what we'd expect from pure chance.

Which is exactly what a group of skeptics in Australia did.  The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project, which just announced their results last week, analyzed 3,800 predictions made in the past twenty years by 207 self-styled psychics, and put each into one of five categories:

• Expected (such as Simon Turnbull's prediction in 2000 that "one area that is going to do fantastic stuff is the internet, specifically areas like shopping.")
• Too vague to call (such as Sarah Yip's statement in October 2020, "Who will win the U.S. election? … the numerology shows that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have a chance of winning the next U.S. presidential election.  It is still up to the people to decide.")
• Unknown/unverifiable (the smallest category, comprising only a little over two percent of the candidate claims)
• Correct
• Flat-out wrong (my favorite of those is Sarah Kulkens's 2007 claim that "Using anti-gravity to lift heavy objects will become a reality instead of a dream.")

The results are interesting, to say the least.  The "flat-out wrong" category amounted to 53% of the total, which doesn't seem too bad until you look only at the claims that were either verifiable and correct, or verifiable and wrong -- at which point the "wrong" category balloons to 83%.

Not a very impressive showing.

This gets even worse when you consider the major world events that every one of the 207 psychics involved in the study missed entirely.  These included:

• the 9/11 attacks
• the 2003 burn-up on reentry of the space shuttle Columbia
• the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed over 200,000 people
• the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster
• Notre Dame Cathedral burning down in 2019
• the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

You'd think that events of this magnitude would have caused at least a small disturbance in The Force, or whatever the hell they claim is happening, but no.  The psychics were as caught off guard as the rest of us.

I'm all for keeping an open mind about things, but at some point you have to conclude that a complete absence of hard evidence means there's nothing there to see.  On one hand, I understand why people want psychic abilities to be real; it gives some kind of plan or pattern to what seems otherwise like a chaos-riddled reality.  But as my grandma used to tell me, "Wishin' don't make it so."  I've never found that the universe is under any obligation to conform to what I'd like to be true.

Or, as science writer and novelist Ann Druyan said, much more eloquently:

[Science] is a never-ending lesson in humility.  The vastness of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant.  This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong.  What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe.  But how do we tell the difference?

I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that prevent us from having a complete experience of nature.  Here it is, the basic rules of the road for science: Test ideas by experiment and observation.  Build on those ideas that pass the test.  Reject the ones that fail.  Follow the evidence wherever it leads.  And question everything, including authority.

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Fox on the run

Seems like for each of the last few years, we've said, "Well, at least next year can't be as bad as this year was!"  Then, somehow, it is.  Or worse.  As a friend of mine put it, "I'd like to find out who started this worldwide game of Jumanji and punch the shit out of him."

And of course, with so many things going wrong, people start casting about for some kind of underlying cause (other than "humans sure can be assholes sometimes").  I wasn't surprised, for example, that the extremely Reverend Pat Robertson said the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a sign that the End Times were beginning.

Well, "not surprised" isn't exactly accurate, because I honestly thought Pat Robertson was dead.  What is he, like 124 years old?  In any case, once I realized that he's still alive, his reaction wasn't surprising, because he thinks everything is a sign of the End Times.  I have this mental image of him shuffling around his house in his bathrobe and jamming his little toe on the leg of the coffee table, and shouting, "And the Lord sayeth, 'When thou bangest thy toe on the furniture, prepare ye well, for the Four Horsemen are on their way!  Can I get an amen?"

So I suppose it's natural enough to look for a reason when things start going wrong, even though in my opinion, Pat Robertson is nuttier than squirrel shit.  But in any case, now we have another candidate for an explanation besides the End Times as predicted in the Book of Revelation:

The Japanese Killing Stone spontaneously split in half last week.

If you haven't heard of the Japanese Killing Stone, well, neither had I until I read that it had fallen apart.  Its Japanese name is Sessho-seki (which literally means "killing stone"), and it's near the town of Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, in central Honshu.  The story is that there was a beautiful woman named Tamamo-no-Mae, who was actually a kitsune (an nine-tailed fox spirit) in disguise.  She was working for an evil daimyo (feudal lord) who was trying to overthrow the Emperor Konoe, but she was exposed as a fox spirit and killed by the warrior Miura-no-Suke, and her body turned into a stone.

But her evil influence didn't end there.  Tamamo-no-Mae's spirit was locked inside the stone but kept its capacity for inflicting harm, and anyone who touched it died.  The site of the stone is cordoned off; the Japanese government says it's because the area is volcanic and there are sulfurous fumes that could be dangerous.

Sessho-seki [Image is in the Public Domain]

To which I respond, "Sure, that's the reason.  Mmm-hmm."  I mean, really.  What am I supposed to believe?  That there are purely natural dangers caused by understood geological processes, or that the spirit of an evil nine-tailed fox woman has been trapped inside a rock that can kill you when you touch it?

I know which one sounds the most plausible to me.

Tamamo-no-Mae and Miura-no-Suke, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1849) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So anyway, apparently people are freaking out that the rock spontaneously split in half, despite the authorities saying, "A small crack had appeared naturally some years ago, and grew deeper until finally the stone fell apart."  The idea is now that the Sessho-seki has split, it released the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae, who will proceed to wreak havoc once again.

My response is: go ahead, Foxy Lady, do your worst.  My guess is anything you could do would pale in comparison to what's already going on in the world.  It'd be kind of an anticlimax, wouldn't it?  You wait for centuries, trapped inside a rock, concocting all sorts of evil plans, and then the rock breaks and releases you, and you explode out and start causing trouble, and... no one notices.  

Tamamo-no-Mae: Ha ha!  I am free!  I shall cause chaos wherever I go!  The weather shall go haywire!  Wars will break out!  The evil shall go unpunished!

Us:  Is that all?

Tamamo-no-Mae:  Um... what do you mean, is that all?  Isn't that bad enough?

Us (laughing bitterly):  Look around you.  You think you can do better than this?

Tamamo-no-Mae (horrified):  Oh.  Oh, my.  Okay... um... do you think you could get some Superglue and help me put this rock back together?

Us:  Yeah, it'd probably be for the best.  Can you take us with you?

Anyhow, if things start getting worse, and you're wondering what's the cause, maybe it's the depredations of an evil nine-tailed fox spirit from Japan.  And after all, the whole "End Times" thing is getting a little hackneyed, don't you think?  Especially since the evangelicals have been predicting the End Times several times a year for hundreds of years, and nothing much has happened.  Not even one Apocalyptic Horseperson, much less four.  So at least this would be a new and different reason as to why everything's so fucked up lately.

Makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard, although there's still something to be said for "humans sure can be assholes sometimes."

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The anchor and the lifeline

129 years ago, Bertha Viola Scott was born in the little town of Wind Ridge, in Greene County, Pennsylvania.  She was the fourth child of Thomas Iams Scott and Nancy Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Donahoo) Scott; they would go on to have four more.

Her life wasn't easy, pretty much from day one.  Thomas Scott was a ne'er-do-well, with a reputation as a philanderer, and was gone from the home more often than he was there.  Lizzie was a kind person and a good mother, but in 1903 -- when Bertha was ten -- she died in a typhoid epidemic.

Thomas Iams Scott and his mother, Mary (Iams) Scott, ca. 1915

"Lizzie," Nancy Elizabeth (Donahoo) Scott, ca. 1880

The seven Scott children -- one of them, Clarence, had died as an infant -- were farmed out to various uncles and aunts.  Bertha and her two older sisters, Roxzella Vandell Scott ("Zella") and Fannie Elinore Scott ("Fan") decided they had to look after the younger ones to make sure they were being treated fairly, and became the surrogate mothers to their siblings.

Top row, l. to r.: Zella (Scott) Knoderer and her husband Cecil Clair Knoderer

Bottom row, l. to r.: Donald Jacobs (the Scott children's first cousin), Bertha Viola Scott, Albert Romer, and his wife Fan (Scott) Romer (ca. 1912)

In around 1914, when Bertha was 21 years old, she and a younger sister (Florence, then age twelve) upped stakes and moved to southern Louisiana.  I've never known why it was they made the move; to my knowledge, no one else came with them.  They were dirt poor, so it definitely wasn't a pleasure excursion.  It may have had something to do with the beginning of World War I, but if so, I don't know what.  In any case, both of the young ladies met and married someone from Louisiana -- Bertha married a small equipment repairman named Alfred Joseph Bonnet in 1915, and Florence a man from New Orleans named Kirby Lodrigues in 1924 -- and both of them lived in the state for the rest of their lives.

Alfred was a gentle, soft-spoken man, fifteen years Bertha's senior.  They had two children, both sons; Raymond Joseph in 1916, and Gordon Paul -- my father -- in 1919.

My Grandma Bertha and my dad, ca 1927, along with some of their numerous pets

Life didn't get a great deal easier for them.  In 1940, Alfred -- then 61 years old -- died of a sudden and massive heart attack.  My grandmother was widowed at only 47.

My grandfather, Alfred Joseph Bonnet, ca. 1930

My grandmother had no particular training that would have qualified her for a job -- she wasn't well educated, and had gone from the abject poverty of her youth right into a marriage in an unfamiliar place -- so she took on a position as housekeeper for a Catholic priest, an eccentric, cigar-smoking Dutch expat named Father John Kemps.  She finally became not only Father Kemps's housekeeper but his general manager, and he needed one.  He was a bookish, multilingual polymath who couldn't be counted upon to remember where he'd put his shoes, and my grandma took over the oversight of the household, the parish affairs, and Father Kemps's personal life, eventually pretty much running the place singlehandedly.

Bertha and Father Kemps, on a trip to visit Father Kemps's family in the Netherlands (ca. 1960) -- he convinced her to don some traditional clothing and pose like they were in a portrait by one of the Old Dutch Masters

My father joined the Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II, and spent the next 25 years bouncing from military base to military base, never staying in one post for more than three or four years.  He married my mom, a full-blooded Cajun from Raceland, Louisiana, in 1943, and two years later my sister and only sibling, Mary Margaret, was born.  Mary was born with Rh-incompatibility syndrome, and only lived three days.

It wasn't until fifteen years later that I came along -- a surprise, apparently, sometimes referred to as an out-and-out mistake.  In an eerie repeat of his own grandfather, my father was gone through a good bit of my early childhood, but in this case not by choice.  He was stationed in Reykjavik, Iceland when I was a year and a half old, and back then families rarely accompanied service members on overseas assignments.  My mom and I moved back home and lived with her father and stepmother.

This set up a fractious relationship, and honestly, it never improved much.  My parents were kind of an odd couple in a lot of ways -- my dad reserved, quiet, with a quirky and offbeat sense of humor; my mother artistic, emotional, and volatile.  Having an unplanned child suddenly show up when my dad was 41 and my mom 40 didn't improve matters any.  When I was eight, my dad retired from the military and came back home to Louisiana -- and my parents sent me to live with my grandma for a year and a half.  The reason they gave was that they were working on building a house and didn't want a little kid getting in the way, but I think it was probably just as much that they didn't quite know what to do with me.

However, it did forge a strong relationship between me and my grandma.  She became my anchor.  She was a tough, no-nonsense type, but loved dogs and cats, music, and talking about family history, all of which I shared.  My passion for genealogy started when I was about twelve, and she told me about her childhood and her own parents and grandparents, and I decided to write it all down.

My grandma, Bertha (Scott) Bonnet, as I remember her (ca. 1975)

In a lot of ways, that relationship with my grandma kept me going during my turbulent and difficult teenage years, and I remained close to her up through college.  I moved out of state in 1982, and kept in touch with regular letters -- my grandma loved receiving letters -- and when she died four years later, at the age of 93, it felt like a lifeline had been cut.

Now, 36 years later, I still cherish my memories of her, and the anniversary of her birth (March 4) always makes me think about her.  Her story is an inspiration -- that despite the cards stacked against you, you can still stay strong and survive.  My grandma started from deprivation and poverty, and beginning with the pact she made with her sisters to protect their younger siblings after their mother died, she lived life fiercely protective of the people she loved and uncompromising in her own ideals.  

I can only hope that I have lived my own life with the courage, devotion, and determination she showed in the face of adversity, and that she'd be proud of who I've become.  I still miss you, Grandma.  Happy birthday.

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Into the hothouse

In the last week the northern United States has been swept by a couple of significant winter storms that not only dumped a ton of snow all over the place but drove temperatures down (especially in the upper Midwest) to levels that can only be described as "really freakin' cold."  A friend of mine in northern Minnesota told me that one evening, the wind chill in her home town dropped to -40 C.  While it didn't get that cold here in upstate New York, it definitely was chilly enough to feel like -- whatever the calendar of equinoxes and solstices might say -- we are still a long way off from spring.

And of course, cold weather always creates the same response in the science deniers, and this was no exception.  Just a couple of days ago someone I know posted a photograph of a guy bundled up in about twelve layers, completely covered with snow, with the caption, "Still believe in global warming?"  This was followed by comments that can be summed up as "the scientists say we're actually in a heat wave, how stupid do you have to be to fall for that, hurr durr hurr."

I find it kind of amazing how willing people are to post on social media statements that basically amount to shouting, "look at me, I'm a complete ignoramus."  The evidence supporting global climate change is overwhelming.  Amongst informed individuals, there is no argument any more.  The only people who are still holdouts are the ones who have a vested interest in convincing you that there's no problem -- e.g. the fossil fuels industry, the auto manufacturers, and the elected officials who are in their pockets -- and the people who get their information solely from Fox News.

The "it's cold so global warming is a hoax" attitude is appalling in another way, however.  Even the relatively rudimentary understanding of climate mechanisms we had three decades ago recognized that a global increase in average temperature didn't mean the mercury would rise uniformly across the planet, so to believe that shows you've read zero actual scientific research on the topic for over thirty years.  Climate is a phenomenally complex system, and even if we're sure that the average temperature has risen drastically and will continue to do so -- which we are -- it isn't going to lead to any sort of smooth change.  It's a little like what happens when there's an automobile accident on a busy highway.  Some of the effects are predictable -- such as a slowdown or outright stoppage in the lanes upstream of the accident.  But it doesn't slow everyone on the highway at the same time or at the same rate.  And it leads to a lot of less-predictable ancillary effects, such as a slowdown in the opposing lanes because of rubberneckers and increased traffic on secondary roads because of people trying to circumvent the accident site.

But even that is way easier to model than climate is.  Climate results from interactions between the atmosphere, the land, and bodies of water, and is affected by a number of different factors besides temperature -- air humidity, wind speed, elevation (such as when a mass of air is pushed upward into a mountain ranges), the reflectivity of the surface (i.e, high reflectivity due to snow or ice cover on either land or water tends to slow down any increase in air temperature), air pollution levels, and position of the jet stream.  The result is a system that is extremely complex to model accurately, and which can act quickly and unpredictably when disturbed.

Even so, climatologists have done amazingly well at developing accurate models, and if anything, they've erred on the side of a conservative estimate of what's happening.  Here are a few recent bits of research to illustrate my point.

First, a study out of Rice University three years ago predicted an increase in the intensity of "blocking systems" -- high-pressure air masses that stall and prevent frontal movement behind them.  This can lock in weather patterns for days or weeks.  An example is the catastrophic rain and flooding currently striking Australia, which has been stuck in place because of a high-pressure zone in the Tasman Sea.  The result has been that some areas have received an entire year's worth of rain in four days.

A photograph from Brisbane last week [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Universal Deus, Rowing sheds at west end, Brisbane, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The rainfall is powered by evaporation from the oceans, and that increases with higher sea surface temperatures.  A study published this week in PLOS-Climate describes a thorough survey of worldwide oceanic temperatures, and found that half of the surface area of the Earth's oceans have exceeded record heat thresholds since 2014 -- not just once, but breaking records over and over.

"Climate change is not a future event," said Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who led the research team.  "The reality is that it's been affecting us for a while.  Our research shows that for the last seven years more than half of the ocean has experienced extreme heat.  These dramatic changes we've recorded in the ocean are yet another piece of evidence that should be a wake-up call to act on climate change.  We are experiencing it now -- and it is speeding up."

As I mentioned earlier, an overall average temperature increase can lead to opposite effects depending on where you are.  The same sea surface temperature rise that's created the blocking system and caused devastating flooding in Australia is currently weakening the south Asian monsoon -- the weather pattern that brings the summer rains on which the entire Indian subcontinent depends for agriculture and drinking water.

"Our work strongly suggests that sea surface temperature plays a dominant role in shaping the Indian Summer Monsoon's variability in South Asia," said Yiming Wang, of the Max Planck Institute, who led the study.  "Higher surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean during the Last Interglacial period could have dampened the ISM intensity...  Changes in the hydrological cycle will affect agricultural land, natural ecosystems, and consequently the livelihoods of billions of people.  We therefore need to improve our understanding of the control mechanisms of summer monsoon rainfall to better predict weather extremes such as droughts and floods and devise adaptation measures.  Time is of the essence, especially if ocean warming continues at the rate it is."

Last -- and highlighting how complex these models can get -- a team of scientists from ETH Zürich, the University of Bern, and the University of Tasmania looked at how the increase in ocean surface temperatures can endanger huge marine ecosystems.  They modeled what happened during the summer of 2013, when a mass of surface water nicknamed "the Blob" got stuck in place off the Pacific Coast of North America for two years.  The result was a massive die-off of marine organisms, including an estimated million sea birds.

What the researchers found was that two things also occurred during the formation of the Blob -- a drop in oxygen saturation and an increase in acidity.  So the effect wasn't solely due to the temperature increase.  As I said earlier, it's a complicated system of interlocking causes and effects, and altering one thing inevitably destabilizes everything else.  "To assess the risks of these kinds of events, we urgently need to study the chain of different environmental factors leading to such extremes more closely -- and not only in individual regions, but also at the global level," said study lead author Nicolas Gruber.  "When marine life is confronted with multiple stressors at once, it has difficulty acclimatising.  For a fish species that's already living at the upper end of its optimal temperature range, an added oxygen deficiency can mean death."

One thing I feel obliged to point out is that other than the first cited study (on blocking systems), all of the research I've mentioned in this post was published in the last week.  The data is coming in so fast that it's hard to process, and every bit of it is pointing to the catastrophic (and accelerating) effects of climate change.  Whether it's too late to stop it isn't known; some of the more pessimistic scientists think we've already crossed the "tipping point," where even if we cut off fossil fuel use cold, it won't halt the warm-up.

At this point, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to remain ignorant about what's happening to our planet, much less to post idiocy like "I'm cold so the world isn't warming up."  (As Stephen Colbert put it a few years ago, "In other good news, I just had dinner so there's no such thing as world hunger.)  I understand that everyone can't be an expert; I'm not an expert, myself.  But it's not beyond anyone's ability to read at least the summaries and abstracts of the research.  Not to do so is pure willful laziness.

And it also puts you in the position of sharing some of the blame for our slow, inexorable slide into the hothouse.

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May this house be safe from tigers

One thing I find to be somewhere between amusing and maddening is the length to which people will go to hang on to their cherished notions.

I mean, on some level, I get it.  We all have our own opinions and biases, myself very much included, and it can be pretty jarring to find out we're wrong about something.  But presented with evidence against what we believe, at some point we just have to say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong, then," and revise our worldview accordingly.

Or, more apposite to today's post, when there's a complete lack of evidence for what we believe.  I was thinking about this because of an article in the Sun Journal about Loren Coleman.  Coleman's name should be familiar to any aficionados of cryptozoology; he's been hunting cryptids for decades, and in fact in 2003 founded the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.  He's not some kind of fanatic; he does respect the hard evidence, and has been unhesitating in calling out fakes for what they are.  In fact, the Skeptical Inquirer -- a hard sell if ever there was one -- said, "among monster hunters, Loren's one of the more reputable."

Coming from the Skeptical Inquirer, this was damn close to a love letter.

On the other hand, there's the second half of this quote, which is where we run into trouble.  "...but I'm not convinced that what cryptozoologists seek is actually out there."  This, to me, is the problem with cryptids; considering the sheer number of people out there looking, by now something should have surfaced other than easily faked footprints and blurry photographs.  It's why I don't take my usual "hold the question in abeyance" approach on this topic -- I've moved over into the "probably not" column.  At some point, you have to assume that zero evidence means there's nothing there to see.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pikes peak highway big foot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Coleman, of course, has devoted his entire life to hunting cryptids, so he's a classic example of the sunk-cost fallacy; once you have thrown enough of your time, energy, and money into something, it becomes nearly impossible for you to admit you were wrong.  So when Kathryn Skelton, reporter for the Sun Journal, asked Coleman point-blank why there's been no scientifically admissible evidence of Bigfoot despite thousands of people searching for him over the last hundred years, Coleman came up with an explanation that should go down in the annals of confirmation bias:

The problem is most of the cryptid hunters are male.

"I have a feeling that there’s something in the pheromones in males that are driving Bigfoot from them," Coleman said, apparently with a straight face, "and most of the success that’s occurring is with small groups of women that are having contact with no guns, maybe not even cameras, and really not getting all excited because they don’t find evidence right away.  Jane Goodall and every other primatologist that’s had success has been female, and I think that’s going to be the future."

So all those years I spent back-country camping in the Pacific Northwest, little did I know that I was chasing the Bigfoots away with my manly pheromones.

My reaction upon reading this was to say, "Oh, come on."  This kind of argument makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.  It put me in mind of the old joke:

A guy has a friend who, every time he comes for a visit, tosses a pinch of glitter into the air and says, "May this house be safe from tigers."  After doing this a half-dozen times, the guy finally says to his friend, "Um... why are you saying, 'May this house be safe from tigers?'  There isn't a tiger within a thousand miles of here."

The friend gives him a serene smile and says, "Sure works well, doesn't it?"

Now, allow me to say that if any of the cryptids that people are out there searching for do turn out to be real, no one would be more delighted than me.  If there ever was incontrovertible proof of (for example) Bigfoot, the scientists would be trampling each other trying to be the first one to publish a paper about it.  So I'm not hostile to the idea per se, and neither, I suspect, are most scientists. 

But how long do you hold out in the face of exactly zero evidence?  And by "evidence" I don't mean eyewitness accounts, or even photos and videos.  Photos and videos are way too easy to fake, and to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson on the subject of eyewitness testimony, "In science, we need more than 'you saw it'...  The human brain and sensory systems are rife with ways of getting it wrong.  Now, maybe you did see something; if so, bring back a piece of evidence that can be studied in the lab.  Then we can have the conversation."

So as much as I understand Loren Coleman's reluctance to give up on his favorite topic, there comes a time when a skeptical person kind of has no choice.  And coming up with some loopy explanation that the Bigfoots are running away because of the researchers' testosterone fumes does not help your case -- or your credibility.

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Return to sender

One of the hardest things about understanding quantum physics is that it is so fundamentally different from the way things act on the macroscopic level.

Even a layperson's grasp of the subject -- leaving aside all the abstruse mathematics -- requires one to jettison every expectation that the everyday objects we see and interact with will behave in the same fashion as the "objects" (as it were) on the subatomic level.  I put the word "objects" in quotes advisedly; the word "particle" brings to mind a hard, discrete little lump of matter, and that's still how they're drawn in science books:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Richie Bendall, Atomic structure of Lithium-7, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reality is far weirder, and far harder to picture; particles, all the way down to photons of light, aren't little miniature bullets zinging around, they're actually smeared-out fields of probabilities.  The reassuringly solid matter we, and everything else, are made of turns out to be (at its basis) composed of something that is ephemeral, not even existing at one particular location in any real sense.

But it bears mention that however bizarre this is, it is not just a wild guess.  The predictions of quantum mechanics have been tested every which way from Sunday, and each time, the results have been spot-on.  So it may be unsettling, it certainly is counter-intuitive, but if we buy the methods of science at all, we have to conclude that whether we like it or not, this is what reality is.

Take, for example, the quantum boomerang effect, which I only found out about a couple of days ago because of some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara.  The idea here, so far as I understand it -- and I will once again throw in the caveat that I'm not much better than a layperson myself, so bear with me -- has to do with what occurs when electrons in a substance are given a repeated kick of energy.

Picture, for example, something that spins freely on an axle, like a fan.  Imagine taking a fan (Nota bene: Mr. Safety says unplug it first!), and giving a regularly-timed tap on the blades with one finger.  The fan would absorb the energy, overcoming any resistance in the axle due to friction, and the blades would begin to turn; if you timed it right, you could get it spinning at a decent clip.

So far, nothing odd.  Now, imagine an analogous situation on the subatomic level.  Suppose you had a substance with atoms arranged in a lattice, but there are some defects in the lattice -- impurities, gaps, and so on.  In a metallic lattice, electrons are fairly free to move (this is why metals make good conductors); but the defects inhibit electron transfer, just as friction was working against you in turning the rotor blades.  Here, though, something completely different happens when you disturb the system.  If you give the lattice regular pulses of energy, the electrons are jolted out of their position, but they don't keep moving -- they immediately turn around and settle back down in their original positions.

Thus the nickname "the boomerang effect."

"It's really a fundamentally quantum mechanical effect," said physicist David Weld, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There's no classical explanation for this phenomenon...  In a classical system, a rotor kicked in this way would respond by constantly absorbing energy from the kicks.  Take a quantum version of the same thing, and what you see is that it starts gaining energy at short times, but at some point it just stops and it never absorbs any more energy.  It becomes what's called a dynamically localized state."

The explanation, Weld says, lies in the dual particle-wave nature of subatomic particles.  Because matter on the smallest scales has both particle-like and wave-like properties, it's going to exhibit some weird properties as compared to the solid stuff we see around us.  "That chunk of stuff that you're pushing away is not only a particle, but it's also a wave, and that's a central concept of quantum mechanics," Weld said.  "Because of that wave-like nature, it's subject to interference, and that interference in this system turns out to stabilize a return and dwelling at the origin."

So we can add that to our list of weird and counterintuitive behavior on the quantum level.  The universe is a strange, compelling, beautiful place, and the more you study it, the stranger it gets.  Me, I kind of like that.  I don't mind that things aren't as they seem.  How boring things would be if our "common sense" got it right every single time.

Even if I don't fully understand it -- even if I never fully understand it -- I'd much prefer that the cosmos never loses its ability to astonish us.

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