Talking to the animals

We just got back from a week-long trip to visit friends in Seattle, which meant boarding our two dogs with a local kennel.  We know and trust them -- we've used them for years -- and they love our dogs, quirks and all.  So we can leave them and be sure that they're in good hands.

Guinness, for the most part, has no problem with kenneling.  He knows he's going to get treats and play time, so for him it's kind of like sleep-away summer camp.  He jumps right into the car like it's going to be a great big adventure.

Cleo, on the other hand.

Our little Shiba Inu rescue was caged during much of her four years with an abusive breeder, and she has an absolute terror of being locked up.  She's relaxed considerably since we got her in December of 2021 -- especially once we installed a dog door so she can go in and out of our big fenced back yard whenever she wants -- but she still freaks out when the door closes behind her.  And she gets very, very wary when she knows we're going to pick her up and put her in the car (for example, on trips to the vet).  She's really snuggly and friendly if it's on her terms -- but if she knows she's going to be restrained, good freakin' luck.

Cleo in a calm moment

So we've tried everything we can think of to (1) lower the stress surrounding the situation, and (2) make it easier to get her when we absolutely have to.  Bribing her with food barely works; she's the least food-motivated dog I've ever met.  Calm talk has zero effect.  And my wife pointed out to me that my tightly-wound personality comes through in my voice, that if I say in as friendly and non-threatening a manner as I can, "Hey, Cleo, c'm'ere!  Want some cheese?" she not only isn't gonna respond to the bribe, she knows that I'm up to something.

I've tried whatever I can, but I don't seem to be able to help having it show when I'm anxious about something, like when we have to drop the dogs off at the kennel by 9 AM, and it's 8:45, and we're chasing Cleo all around the back yard.  At first, I was a little reluctant to believe that Cleo is really that sensitive to subtleties in my tone of voice, but after a few frustrating hour-long battles to come closer to her than ten feet, I have to admit Carol's got a point.

And some research out of the University of Copenhagen that appeared last week in the journal BMC - Biology bears out her contention that domestic animals are way better at picking up on vocal tone than anyone thought.  It's an odd claim, when you think about it; why should domesticated animals -- even ones like dogs, who have been in association with humans for tens of thousands of years -- recognize human social signals?  Even between closely-related primate species, the same signal can mean entirely different things.  For example, smiling is a sign of friendliness amongst humans, but smiling to a chimp is basically baring the teeth, and is considered an indicator of aggression or fear.

But the research seems unequivocal.  And they weren't even working with dogs; they primarily worked with pigs and horses.  They even controlled for the possibility that animals might learn certain words and have associations (positive or negative) that come along with them, something that is certainly true of most dogs.  (Say "do you want to play fetch?" to Guinness and he immediately turns into the canine ping-pong ball.)  What the researchers did was to hire a trained actor and gave him various gibberish phrases, with the instruction to speak them in a variety of differing tones.  They then recorded the animals' reactions on a lot of benchmarks -- ear position, facial tension, pupil dilation, and so on.

The animals had no problem picking up on the actor's emotional tone.  "Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them," said Elodie Briefer, who co-authored the study.  "They react more strongly -- generally faster -- when they are met with a negatively charged voice, compared to having a positively charged voice played to them first.  In certain situations, they even seem to mirror the emotion to which they are exposed."

So Carol, apparently, is spot-on about Cleo picking up the tension in my voice.  The open question is what I can do about it.  Even when I'm aware of it and trying to moderate it, it apparently comes through loud and clear.  At least this is the last time for a while that we're going to kennel them, she doesn't have any upcoming vet appointments, and maybe just time and trust-building will convince her that whatever happens, she's safe.

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Stepping into Pride

A dear friend of mine sent me a message a couple of weeks ago.  It was a recommendation to watch a recent Netflix series, and read the graphic novel that inspired it.  "Trust me on this," she said.  "This is the story you and I both needed when we were teenagers.  You'll love it... but you might want to have kleenex handy."

The show (and book) are called Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.  And my friend was right on all counts.

It's the story of two boys in an all-male school in England -- one of them gay (and out), the other bisexual (and, at least at the beginning, closeted).  The story of their deep friendship, mutual attraction, and eventual falling in love is sweet, beautiful, and charming.  I'm not usually someone who picks up young adult fiction, and even less romance fiction; but Heartstopper had me in the palm of its hand right from the beginning.  The "kleenex" part of my friend's comment wasn't because it's in any sense a tragedy; there are (of course) some bumps in the road, and a few of the couple's classmates are bigoted, homophobic assholes, but by and large, it's a heartwarming and upbeat story about overcoming inhibitions, finding happiness, and being open to the world about who you are.

The tears that well up when I even think about the story of Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring are, for me and my friend both, largely because of how long she and I lived in fear and shame.  We were denied the opportunity to explore that part of ourselves; not only to relax and have fun dating, but even to figure out what it meant and get comfortable with who we are.  It was longer for me.  At least she came out publicly as a lesbian fairly young.  It took me until I was fifty-two even to come out to friends.  That's thirty-seven years of being terrified that anyone, even the people who loved me, would find out that I'm attracted equally to men and women.

The first few years, it was not only fear of ridicule or ostracism, it was fear for my safety.  Southern Louisiana in the 1970s was not a safe place for LGTBQ kids.  I know four people in my graduating class (not counting myself) who came out as queer later in life, and none of them even gave a hint of it until after graduation.  If you think it's a significant likelihood that you'll get the shit beaten out of you in the locker room if people find out, why in the hell would you not keep it a secret?

Things are better now.  Thank heaven.  My last year of teaching, three years ago, there were several kids I knew who were out as queer or trans.  But we still have a very long way to go.  A teacher friend of mine in Texas has had to create an Amazon wish list of books that have characters that are queer, non-Christian, or are people of color, because in her state, school district after school district are taking those books off library shelves, denying kids access even to finding out that there are people who aren't straight, white, and Christian.  Apparently, now it's considered "woke" (how I have come to fucking hate that word) to provide a way to say to non-majority kids, "Hey, it's okay.  You are okay.  Be who you are."

Ugly bigotry, while less than what I experienced when I was a teenager, still is all too common.  Just in the last week I saw two posts on social media that made that nauseatingly clear.  One said, "If I ever see a 'trans woman' in the girls' bathroom, I'm going to punch him in the face and tell the judge I identify as the tooth fairy."  The other said, "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and any other genders you pulled out of Uranus."

Hurr-hurr-hurr.  It sure is funny to threaten one of the most marginalized groups of people in the United States with violence, and to deny that anyone other than cis/heterosexual people even exist.

Still and all, we're making progress.  Slow and incremental steps, but progress.  My teacher friend's extensive Amazon wish list was cleared out and is on the way to her as we speak -- it took less than twelve hours for her friends to purchase every damn book she asked for.  I may have been late to the game, but I now can say to anyone, "I'm queer/bisexual" and not give a flying rat's ass what they think about it.  Florida governor Ron DeSantis pushed for sanctions on Disney, the state's premier attraction and biggest money-maker, because they balked against his pet project, the "Don't Say Gay" bill -- and Disney responded by opening a new line of queer-themed merchandise called the "Pride Collection," which is about as close as a corporation can come to a collective raised middle finger.

Tomorrow is the first day of Pride Month, and there's a lot to feel good about.  Even so, in a lot of places, it seems like we're regressing, not progressing.  Irrespective of my own sexual orientation, I don't understand why, exactly, people are so determined to control what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes.  Why it's just fine to have young adult fiction with heterosexual romances and marriages, but even depicting a queer couple is "ramming wokeness down everyone's throats" and "turning kids gay."  Why the GOP, who pride themselves on their "get the government out of the private sector" stance, are A-okay with the government trying to stop businesses from establishing policies ensuring acceptance and equal rights for LGBTQ employees and customers.

Pride lasts for one month, but pride lasts forever.

So, yeah.  I cried hard during the scene when Nick and Charlie kiss for the first time.  I'm not ashamed of that.  It's okay to get all emotional when a scene is sweet and touching, which this surely was; it is not okay that some of my tears were because of the fact that at that age, I would never have had the courage, nor even the opportunity, to experience such a thing.  Hell, there was no queer fiction accessible back then, neither books, nor television, nor movies.  I didn't even know such relationships existed.  Note, by the way, that this lack of positive role modeling didn't make me any less queer; all it did was make me ashamed and terrified of being queer.  (Due to my completely dysfunctional upbringing, I was also terrified of having a relationship with a girl, but that's another story entirely.  Suffice it to say that during much of my life, I have been very, very lonely -- and am fantastically fortunate to be in the warm, nurturing, loving marriage I now have.)

It's kind of summed up in the poignant line from Nick, when he realizes he needs to claim his identity, and his chance for love: "I wish knew you when I was younger, and that I'd known then what I know now."

In conclusion, to the increasing number of straight people in the world who are 100% accepting of us non-straight types, thank you.  To my queer friends, keep being strong, keep being defiant, keep being who you are, and happy Pride Month.

And to the homophobes, you can take your ugly, antiquated bigotry and shove it up your ass.

Sideways.

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An encounter with Charybdis

At the center of our seemingly tranquil galaxy, there's a black hole massive enough that it significantly warps spacetime, swallows any matter that gets close enough, and in the process emits truly colossal amounts of radiation.  Named Sagittarius A*, it was discovered in 1954 because of its enormous output in the radio region of the spectrum.  [N. B.  Throughout this post, when I refer to the black hole's radiation output, I am not of course talking about anything coming from inside its event horizon; that's physically impossible.  But the infalling matter that gets eaten by it does emit electromagnetic radiation before it takes its final plunge and disappears forever.  Lots of it.]

This thing is a real behemoth, at an estimated four million times the mass of the Sun.  There is a lot of interstellar dust between it and us -- after all, when you're looking at the constellation of Sagittarius, you're looking down a line going directly along the plane of the galaxy toward its center -- but even without the dust, it wouldn't be all that bright.  Most of its output isn't in the visible light region of the spectrum.  This doesn't mean it's dim in the larger sense; not only are there the radio waves that were the first part of its signal detected, but it has enormous peaks in the gamma and x-ray part of the spectrum as well.

Earlier this month, the European Southern Observatory released the first actual photograph of Sagittarius A*:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons EHT Collaboration, EHT Sagittarius A black hole, CC BY 4.0]

How could something that enormous form?  We have a pretty good idea about how massive stars (over ten times the mass of the Sun) become black holes; when their cores run out of fuel, the gravitational pull of its mass collapses it to the point that the escape velocity at its surface exceeds the speed of light.  At that point everything that falls within its event horizon is there to stay.

But we're not talking about ten times more massive than the Sun; this thing is four million times more massive.  Where did all that matter come from -- and how did it end up at the center of not only our galaxy, but every spiral galaxy studied?

A step was taken in our understanding of galactic black hole formation by a team of astronomers at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, in a paper that appeared this week in The Astrophysical Journal.  It's long been known that most large galaxies are attended by an array of dwarf galaxies, such as the Milky Way's Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.  (Which, unfortunately, are only visible in the Southern Hemisphere.  This is why they're named after Magellan.  Typical of the Eurocentric approach to naming stuff; clearly indigenous people knew about the Magellanic Clouds long before Magellan ever saw them.)  It's also known that because of the gravitational pull of the larger galaxies, the smaller ones eventually collide with them and merge into a single galaxy.  In fact, that even happens to big galaxies; gravity has a way of winning, given enough time.  The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, which are about the same size, will eventually come together into a single blob of stars, but what its final shape will be is impossible to predict.

As an aside, there's no need to worry about this.  First, it's not going to happen for another four and a half billion years.  Second, when galaxies (of any size) collide, there are relatively few actual stellar collisions.  Galaxies are mostly empty space, and when they merge the stars that comprise them mostly just pass each other without incident.

But not the black holes at their centers.  Those, being the center of mass of the entire aggregation, eventually slam together in a collision with a magnitude that's impossible to imagine.  And the team at UNC found out that this is one of the ways that galactic black holes become so large; they discovered that even dwarf galaxies have central black holes, and when they get swallowed up, that mass gets added to the central black hole of the larger galaxy.

Sagittarius A* sits in the middle of the whirling vortex of stars, like the sea monster Charybdis in Greek mythology, sucking down anything that comes close enough -- including, apparently, other black holes.  The celestial fireworks with a collision between two large black holes, such as the ones in the Milky Way and Andromeda, must release a fantastic amount of energy.

Wouldn't that be something to see?

From a safe distance, of course.

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Social media dissociation

I suspect that many of my readers will resonate with my desire to fritter away less time on social media.

I don't mean the actual "social" part of social media.  I have friends whom I seldom if ever get to see, and especially since the pandemic started, visiting online is about my only opportunity.  I greatly value those conversations.  What I'm referring to is the aimless scrolling, looking for new content, any new content.  Trying to find a distraction even though I know that a dozen other things, from listening to some music, to playing with my dogs, to going for a run -- even weeding the garden -- will leave me feeling better.

But -- once again, as I'm sure many of you can attest -- it can be exceedingly hard to say "enough" and close the app.  It was one thing when your connectivity had to be via a desktop or laptop computer; but now that just about all of us (even me, Luddite though I am) are carrying around our social media addiction in our pockets, it's way too easy to say "just a few more minutes" and drop back into the world of scrolling.

One effect I've noticed it's had on me is a shortening of my attention span.  Something has to be absolutely immersive to keep my attention for over five minutes.  Two of my favorite YouTube science channels, the wonderful Veratasium and physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's awesome Science Without the Gobbledygook, have videos that average at about ten to twelve minutes long, and man... sometimes that is a struggle, however fascinating the topic.

I don't like this trend.  I won't say I've ever had the best of focus -- distractions and my wandering mind have been issues since I was in grade school -- but social media have made it considerably worse.  Frequently I think about how addicted I am to scrolling, and it's a real cause of worry.

But then I start scrolling again and forget all about it.

That last bit was the subject of a study from the University of Washington that was presented last month at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.  In, "'I Don’t Even Remember What I Read': How Design Influences Dissociation on Social Media," a team led by Amanda Baughan looked at how social media apps are actually designed to have this exact effect -- and that although we frequently call it an addiction, it is more accurately described as dissociation.

"Dissociation is defined by being completely absorbed in whatever it is you're doing," Baughan said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But people only realize that they've dissociated in hindsight.  So once you exit dissociation there's sometimes this feeling of: 'How did I get here?'  It's like when people on social media realize: 'Oh my gosh, how did thirty minutes go by?  I just meant to check one notification.'"

Which is spot-on.  Even the title is a bullseye; after a half-hour on Twitter, I'd virtually always be hard-pressed to tell you the content of more than one or two of the tweets I looked at.  The time slips by, and it feels very much like I glance up at the clock, and three hours are gone without my having anything at all to show for it.

It always reminds me of a quote from C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters.  While I (obviously) don't buy into the theology, his analysis of time-wasting by the arch-demon Screwtape is scarily accurate:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.  As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.  You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.  You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him.  You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.  You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.  All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here [in hell], "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

That last line, especially, is a fair knockout, and it kind of makes me suspicious that social media may have been developed down in hell after all.

Baughan, however, says maybe we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves.  "I think people experience a lot of shame around social media use," she said.  "One of the things I like about this framing of 'dissociation' rather than 'addiction' is that it changes the narrative.  Instead of: 'I should be able to have more self-control,' it's more like: 'We all naturally dissociate in many ways throughout our day -- whether it's daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram, we stop paying attention to what's happening around us.'"

Even so, for a lot of us, it gets kind of obsessive at times.  It's worse when I'm anxious or depressed, when I crave a distraction not only from unpleasant external circumstances but from the workings of my own brain.  And it's problematic that when that occurs, the combination of depression and social media create a feedback loop that keeps me from seeking out activities -- which sometimes just means turning off the computer and doing something, anything, different -- that will actually shake me out of my low mood.

But she's right that shaming ourselves isn't productive, either.  Maybe a lot of us could benefit by some moderation in our screen time, but self-flagellation doesn't accomplish anything.  I'm not going to give up on social media entirely -- like I said, without it I would lose touch with too many contacts I value -- but setting myself some stricter time limits is probably a good idea.

And now that you've read this, maybe it's time for you to shut off the device, too.  What are you going to do instead?  I think I'll go for a run.

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Unexplainable malarkey

A regular reader and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a link yesterday, with the message, "Oooh, look!  Another company has discovered that it can sell bogus woo-woo stuff using your favorite words -- frequency, field, energy, and vibration!"

Regular readers undoubtedly know how pissed off I get when people use scientific words and can't even be bothered to look up the actual definitions.  It's even worse when they use said misused scientific words to rip people off, although clearly some of the responsibility lies with the consumers, because after all, they could also bother to look up the actual definitions if they wanted to -- caveat emptor, and all of that sort of thing.

So, anyway, I clicked the link, and it brought me to a site called "Unexplainable Frequencies."  My first reaction was that I don't see how a frequency can be unexplainable.  I mean, it's either 638.7 Hertz or it isn't.  In any case, even from the title I knew this site was gonna be good for a few faceplants.  Here's the banner headline on the homepage:

LIFE IS FREQUENCY

Everything In Existence Has It's Own Frequency Signature. Every Person, Every Animal, And Every Planet Vibrate At it's Own Rhythm. Pure Direct Frequencies Can Help You Heal, Grow, And Change.

Evidently, one of the things that "Pure Direct Frequencies" doesn't do is to help you to learn the difference between "it's" and "its," and that you Don't Need To Capitalize Every Word To Make Your Point.  But maybe I'm just being picky, here.

Further down the page, we find out that we can purchase mp3s ("hundreds of thousands sold," they tell us, which makes me despair for the human race).  These mp3s contain sound recordings with "frequencies" that supposedly  help us to accomplish things in a variety of areas, including:

• Manifestation
• Wealth
• Visualization
• Astral Projection
• Lucid Dreams
• Spirit Guide
• Chakra Work
• Remote Viewing
• Psychic/ESP
• Christ Consciousness
• IQ Increaser

So, I decided to listen to some sound samples.  I picked "IQ Increaser," because heaven knows some days I could use some help in that department.  The description said:

Our custom IQ/ Memory Booster recording is in a category of it’s [sic] own, and is one of our top rated products for good reason.  We begin the session by penetrating your body’s own unique energy field with a low vibrational frequency designed to create feelings of “total knowingness.”  You will begin feeling connected and well rounded within the first few minutes.  You may confuse your new disposition with overconfidence but as you will soon see it’s intended.  Change requires confidence you can’t achieve your desired result unless you believe it’s inevitably going to happen.

We’ll then begin blasting your brain with a frequency directly related to Intelligence.  In fact those with brain functions operating in this range are considered geniuses.  This will help your brains [sic] capacity for learning and understanding complex concepts.  In addition to boosting your intelligence this portion of your session can aid arthritis pain, stop involuntary eye movements, and regulate the pulses in women.

Midway through the recording you will begin reflecting on your session and without realizing it you will be recollecting fine details about the past ten minutes.  We manipulated your brain into a higher memory state through frequency and tone.  You will remember things more easily and think deeper than you ever knew you could.  You’ve only unlocked the ability you’ve always had.

You’ll then begin feeling more in tune to what’s really happening around you and enjoy feelings of enlightenment.  You wont realize its happening but we’ve been channeling vibrations towards your cerebral cortex.  You’ll begin to feel your forehead getting warmer and tingling in your spleen.

Your session concludes with another fortifying frequency associated with the functioning of the cerebral cortex.  We want to encourage your brain to store information more efficiently.  When your session concludes we encourage you to try memory games to test your new found ability.  You will notice a considerable difference between your memory skills before and after use.

All of this sounded pretty hopeful, although I wasn't sure how I felt about having my spleen tingle. Nor is it clear why it only helps women with their pulse.  Maybe guys' hearts are tuned to a different unexplainable frequency, I dunno.  But either way, I figured it was worth the risk.  So I started the clip, and closed my eyes.

The Astral Sleep by Jeroen van Valkenburg (1998) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jeroen van Valkenburg artist QS:P170,Q91911584, The Astral Sleep, CC BY 2.0]

After about 45 seconds, I had an amazing experience!  I said, "Huh."  And I stopped the clip.  Listening to "IQ Increaser" is about as interesting as reading a telephone book.  It turned out to be a bunch of slowly shifting electronic keyboard noises that just kind of go on and on.  I experienced no spleen tingles, my forehead is still the same temperature, my cerebral cortex is still un-vibrated and lacking in total knowingness, and my thinking processes seem as fuzzy as ever, although that last one may be because I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.  I can't imagine listening to this stuff for an hour -- it gives new meaning to the word "monotonous." It sounds like music that was rejected by Music From The Hearts Of Space on the basis of being too ethereal.

The best part of the whole site, however, is the "Testimonials" page.  To listen to these people talk, you'd swear that listening to the keyboard noises caused major life changes, or at least multiple orgasms.  Here are a couple:

"I bought this mp3 to help me visualize and calm my mind's chatter.  I was surprised how quickly my brain winded down and melted away, leaving me in a perfect visualization state.  This recording did what it claimed."

"I been playing this frequency for a few days now in the background when I relax and it certainly does do something weird to my mind.  I will continue to play it regularly."

Myself, I don't think see how your brain melting is a good thing.  But I suppose it had to already be partly melted in order to purchase this malarkey.

But here's my favorite:

"I been listening to the astral projection custom session and I can sometimes feel my body tingling and starting to shift around.  I think I will be traveling the astral plane before I know it.  Thank You Unexplainable Frequencies!"

So, evidently, there are at least a few people who have achieved positive results, although my own personal opinion is that anything they accomplished by listening to "Unexplainable Frequencies" could have been accomplished without them.  Sorry if you're one of the Satisfied Customers, but "Unexplainable Frequencies" is a lot of pseudoscientific horseshit.

Anyhow, that's today's heaping helping of woo-woo.  More people using words about which they obviously don't have the first glimmer of understanding.  I suppose we should look on the bright side, however; I never saw that they used the word "quantum."

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Monkeying around with the truth

I don't think I'll ever understand the conspiracy theorist mindset.

It's not, mind you, that I think conspiracies never happen.  It's just that the vast majority of them get found out or otherwise fall apart through gossip and sheer ineptitude.  Humans are lousy at keeping secrets -- and the more people are in the know about the secrets, the faster they get found out.  If you don't believe me (hell, maybe I'm one of the conspirators and am trying to fool you -- mwa ha ha etc.), check out this study I wrote about last year that actually showed there's an inverse relationship between the number of people in a conspiracy and how fast it collapses.

Also, if there were a successful conspiracy -- the likelihood of it being figured out by stupid people is fairly low.  Which was my reaction when I read that the recent outbreak of monkeypox is already being branded a left-wing fabrication by people like Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who amongst (many) other things buys into the idiotic claim that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, and that the voter fraud that put Joe Biden into office was the work of "seditious Jews."

So it's pretty clear that Wendy Rogers has spent too much time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  But being crazy and stupid doesn't, unfortunately, make you quiet, so it came as no surprise to me that she is now saying the following about the monkeypox outbreak:

• Monkeypox is an invention of the Democrats to compensate for falling approval ratings and to "reestablish tyrannical control" over rights and freedoms.  (Unfortunately for Rogers, monkeypox was discovered in 1958.)
• The fact that the virus is spreading much faster than monkeypox usually does should make us suspicious about "what Gates, Fauci, and the rest of the so-called 'public health experts' have been up to for the last few years."  (Which ignores the fact that viruses are excellent at evolving to become more transmissible.  Oh, but wait, she doesn't believe in evolution, either.)

Then her followers started yapping along with her, and adding to the foolishness:

• Monkeypox is a side-effect of the COVID-19 vaccine.  (It's not.)
• It's a complete fake; the entire outbreak is a hoax.  (It's not.)
• Okay, maybe it's not a hoax, but it's only spreading in Blacks and gay people.  (It's not.)
• Just like COVID-19 is the same thing as the flu, monkeypox is the same thing as shingles.  (It's not, and it's fucking not.)

Unfortunately, the last bit was made considerably worse when someone found a photograph on a Mumbai-based website that was labeled as monkeypox, but was actually a photo of a shingles rash that had been taken from the website of the Queensland Health Department.  The Mumbai health website apologized for, and fixed, the error as soon as they found out about it, but by then it was too late.  Honestly, the confusion was understandable; they do look similar, and you probably know that the causative agent in shingles is the chickenpox (varicella) virus, which is in the same genus (Orthopoxvirus) as monkeypox.

Thus the similarity.

But did I mention that they are not the same thing?  

Monkeypox virus [Image is in the Public Domain]

I know whereof I speak; last year, because 2021 wasn't already enough of a shitshow, I got shingles.  It was pretty mild as such things go, but still hurt like hell, giving me the characteristic "electric zaps" of pain.  But -- unlike monkeypox -- I had no fever, no swollen lymph nodes, none of the other warning signs that it was anything but ordinary shingles.

And, most significantly, when I took a week's worth of aciclovir, it went away.  As shingles does.  As monkeypox does not.

But I'm not expecting any of this to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, especially not Wendy Rogers, who appears to have a half-pound of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain.  As I've mentioned before, once you've decided everyone's lying to you, you're unreachable.  Anyone who tries is either a dupe or a shill, so What I Already Believed q.e.d.

Or, put another way, you can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into.

What's most upsetting, though, is how many people immediately jump on the bandwagon with horseshit like this.  Epidemics and outbreaks are scary, I get that.  We live in a big, chaotic, unpredictable world.  But sometimes stuff just happens.  Everything isn't a plot, a conspiracy, wheels within wheels.

But with people like Wendy Rogers, that's not good enough.  Not only does attributing everything bad to some grand conspiracy appeal to her mindset, it also allows her to scapegoat the people she already hated.

For me, I'd rather side with Carl Sagan, as he expressed the philosophy in his wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Golden years gold medal

You've probably heard the old joke about a man going in for major surgery.  "Doc," he says, right before the anesthetic is administered, "I gotta ask... after this surgery, will I be able to play the piano?"

The surgeon smiles reassuringly and says, "Of course you will."

"Awesome!" the man says.  "I've always wanted to play the piano!"

That's what came to mind when I read an article in Science called, "Will You Keep Winning Races Into Old Age?  Your Cells Hold Clues," by Tess Joosse.  I'm hoping that like the aspiring pianist, old age will put me into the winner's bracket, because since I started running semi-competitively forty years ago, I've yet to win a race.  I train, I run regularly, but I'm still (and probably always will be) a solid middle-of-the-packer.  The closest I've ever come was about three years ago, when I came in third in my age group.

To be scrupulously honest, there were only six people in my age group.  But I'll take my little victories wherever I can get them.

Me last year, about to not cross the finish line first

Be that as it may, I'm still in there trying.  I'm 61, and I know that regular exercise is essential not only for continuing physical health but mental wellbeing.  In fact, on June 8 I'm running in the Ithaca Twilight 5K, a wonderful race down the footpaths along Cayuga Lake, and because I'm recovering from a series of health setbacks I've lowered my sights to simply getting across the finish line without having to be carted over it in a wheelbarrow.

Even though the "will you keep winning?" part of the headline of the article struck me as funny, the research itself is pretty cool.  Russell Hepple, a biologist at the University of Florida, wondered what was going on with people who are still competitive racers even into old age -- such as his father-in-law, who holds the record time for an eighty-year-old in the Boston Marathon.  Hepple and his colleagues did an assay on the muscle tissue of world-class senior athletes and a group of non-athletes, and found no fewer than eight hundred proteins that were produced in amounts that were significantly different between the two groups.  Some were higher in the athletes; others were lower.  But one obvious patterns was that over half of the proteins the study found were ones that are expressed by, or otherwise affect, the mitochondria.

For some reason, the factoid "the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell" is one that sticks in the minds of just about everyone who has taken high school biology, but the way they work is actually pretty amazing.  Your mitochondria are actually symbiotic single-celled life-forms living inside your cells -- they even have their own DNA -- and they have evolved a complex series of chemical reactions (collectively known as aerobic cellular respiration) to break down glucose and store its energy in a molecule called ATP, which is the direct driver of damn near every process living things do.  The amount of ATP created and the rate at which it's used are in an incredibly tight balance; it's estimated that you produce (and consume/recycle) your body weight in ATP every day, which amounts to ten million ATP molecules per second, per cell.

So it's no surprise that octogenarian racers have better mitochondrial function than the rest of us slobs.  In fact, the study found that 176 of the proteins studied were unique to elite senior athletes; how much of that is because of a lucky combination of genes, and how much is because their continuous training has triggered protein production that in non-athletes tapers off or stops entirely, isn't known.

Also an open question is whether administering one or more of these proteins would boost aerobic exercise capacity in older people who aren't athletes (but would like to be).  Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging, who co-authored the study, has proposed trying this in mice and seeing if it does increase endurance and stamina, without any untoward side effects.

In any case, I suspect that no matter what I do, I'll never be a gold medalist.  That's okay with me.  I love running for running's sake, and the race community (at least around here) is super supportive of everyone regardless of their level.  (At a race I was in a while back, a twelve-year-old boy had posted himself just past the finish line, and was high-fiving each runner as they crossed.  When I stumbled my way across, he grinned at me and said, "Well done, Shirtless Tattoo Guy!"  That, to me, encapsulates the spirit of racing in my area.)

But I'll be interested to see where this research leads.  Anything I can do to stave off decline (physical or mental) as I get older is a good thing.  Until then, though, I'll keep running, and keep being okay with finishing in the middle of the pack.

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