Out of the ashes

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C. E. and its destruction of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum make for a story that is as fascinating as it is horrific.

Vesuvius is a stratovolcano, built up from layer after layer of hardened lava (the "strata" of the name).  Stratovolcanoes usually produce felsic lava -- high in silica content -- making the molten rock thick, viscous, and resistant to flowing.  The results are explosive eruptions, not the cascading rivers of lava you see in shield volcanoes such as Kilauea, which produce mafic lava that is low in silica and flows readily.

The eruption of a stratovolcano is catastrophic.  Unlike the Hawaiian shield volcanoes, which certainly can cause significant property damage but seldom loss of life, stratovolcanoes fling chunks of rock around, generate huge amounts of ash, and -- worst of all -- can create pyroclastic flows of superheated air that can move at a hundred kilometers per hour and incinerate everything in their path.  It was a pyroclastic flow from Mount Pelée that killed almost thirty thousand people in only a few minutes on the island of Martinique in 1902; one of three people in the city of Saint Pierre who are known to have survived only did because he was being held in an underground jail cell.

The combination of rock ejection, ash clouds, and pyroclastic flows are sometimes called Plinian eruptions after the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who died during the eruption of Vesuvius.  If you don't mind being a little freaked out by the power of nature, check out this ten-minute video simulation of the 79 C. E. eruption, from the perspective of a person in Pompeii:

The reason the topic comes up is because of a paper that appeared last week in Scientific Reports about some research done by a team led by Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Copenhagen.  Scorrano and his team found two human skeletons, one male and one female, that -- despite being covered by scorching-hot ash and then entombed for almost two thousand years -- contained enough intact DNA to analyze.

The man's, in fact, was complete enough to do a whole-genome analysis, including a Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA study.  The results were interesting, if not surprising; his DNA was similar to that of modern Italians from the region, although both his Y DNA and mtDNA showed markers most commonly found on the island of Sardinia.  

So he likely had ancestry on both sides of his family from Sardinia.  He also, apparently, had tuberculosis.  The woman's skeleton, which contained only fragmentary DNA, showed signs of significant osteoarthritis.  Serena Viva of the University of Salento, who co-authored the study, said, "This could have been the reason for which they waited for it all to finish, maybe in the security of their home, compared to other victims who were fleeing and whose remains were found in open spaces."

The ruins of Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ElfQrin, Theathres of Pompeii, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Scary stuff, that.  I have to say I'm glad I don't live in Naples; I wouldn't be able to sleep with Vesuvius looming over me, even though it's shown no signs of an imminent catastrophic eruption.  I actually thought the same thing when we were in the Pacific Northwest last week, not only because of nearby stratovolcanoes like Mount Rainier, but because the entire area is at risk of enormous earthquakes because of plate movement along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. 

I know the risk during any given week is extremely low, but it did make me a bit nervous anyhow.  Sometimes a little knowledge can be a lot scary.

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

Islands in the sky

About fifteen years ago, I fulfilled a lifelong dream to go to Ecuador, a country I've been fascinated with since I was a kid.  I'm a fanatical birder, and that tiny country is home to no less than one-sixth of the world's nine-thousand-odd bird species, including over three hundred different kinds of hummingbirds.  (Where I live, in upstate New York, we have exactly one, and it's only here in the summer.)

It was when I was reading up on the hummingbirds in the Ecuadorian bird guide before leaving on the trip that I noticed something odd.  A number of the species had extremely narrow ranges.  A good example is the exquisite Violet-tailed Sylph (Aglaiocercus coelestis):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Violet-tailed Sylph 2 JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Violet-tailed Sylph is only found in a narrow band a couple of kilometers wide on the Pacific slope of the Andes.  North-to-south, though, its range spans over sixteen hundred kilometers.  The reason for this bizarre geographical distribution is obvious if you consider the topography; the range of the Violet-tailed Sylph, and the majority of the other hummingbirds, is driven by altitude, so their ranges run in thin strips parallel to the Andes Mountains.  A lot of it has to do with food specialization; they're nectar-feeders, and many of them have bills shaped to fit only a single species of flower.  Many tropical plants are very temperature- and moisture-sensitive, and that depends strongly on altitude, so they have equally restricted ranges.  In the case of the lovely little Sylph, its food sources are mostly found in the cloud forests that run along the mid-slope of the Andes at an elevation of about a thousand meters.

The combination of phenomenal overall biodiversity with extremely narrow ranges that you find in Ecuador draws some parallels with the fascinating ecological model called island biogeography studied in the 1960s by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson.  They were trying to find patterns to explain why some islands (such as Trinidad) have extensive and diverse ecosystems, and others (such as Tristan da Cunha) have very low diversity.  They found two factors that made the most difference; island size and the proximity of the island to the nearest mainland.

The dependence on island size is easy to see; the bigger the island, the more resources there are, and the greater the number of species it can support.  The proximity factor comes from the likelihood of immigration (defined as a new species arriving and becoming established); more distant islands are farther away from a source of new species.  The math gets a little complicated, but the basic gist is that islands end up in an equilibrium between immigration and extinction, and that equilibrium results in a predictably higher number of species on larger islands that are closer to the mainland.

Where this gets interesting is that the mathematical model even works for metaphorical islands -- marshes surrounded by desert, isolated springs and lakes, hydrothermal vents on the floor of the deep ocean, and -- as with our hummingbird -- narrow ecosystems in mountain ranges that are restricted by altitude.  In fact, it's this last one that got me thinking about this topic in the first place; last week, a really cool study by a team led by Martha Kandziora of Charles University (Prague) looked at diversity in African "sky islands," ecosystems high up on mountains that are defined by cold temperatures, low rainfall, and harsh sunlight.  The authors write:

Tropical alpine floras are renowned for high endemism, spectacular giant rosette plants testifying to convergent adaptation to harsh climates with nightly frosts, and recruitment dominated by long-distance dispersal from remote areas.  In contrast to the larger, more recent (late Miocene onward) and contiguous expanses of tropical alpine habitat in South America, the tropical alpine flora in Africa is extremely fragmented across small patches on distant mountains of variable age (Oligocene onward)...  Although some of the mountains are old... most lineages appear to have colonized the afroalpine during the last 5 or 10 My.  The accumulation of species increased exponentially toward the present.  Taken together with recent reports of extremely low intrapopulation genetic diversity and recent intermountain population divergence, this points to a young, unsaturated, and dynamic island scenario.  Habitat disturbance caused by the Pleistocene climate oscillations likely induced cycles of colonization, speciation, extinction, and recolonization.

One of the things driving the study is that these regions are seriously threatened by anthropogenic climate change.  While species like the Violet-tailed Sylph could potentially respond to warming trends by moving farther up-slope, the African sky islands have nowhere to go.  If the climate gets significantly hotter, the great likelihood is that these ecosystems with their unique and bizarre flora will simply disappear.

Tragic to think that we're losing biodiversity and in many cases only poorly understand what's being lost.  Perhaps these odd species with their extreme specialization and tiny ranges don't have much impact on our day-to-day lives, but without them, we would live in a sadly impoverished world.

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

Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Onesimus

I remember running into the idea of changing trends in name popularity when I saw a New Yorker comic back in the seventies.  It showed a typical first grade class photo, including the teacher, and the caption said, "Top row: Steve, Steve, Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve.  Middle row: Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, and Steve.  Bottom row: Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Mrs. Bertha Q. Wackenhorst."

Interestingly, as that particular trend goes, during my last ten years of teaching, I had only a handful of Jennifers in my classes, and barely any Steves.  But I bumped into a more recent iteration of the same phenomenon with a photo of five handsome, affluent-looking white college guys, all smiles and tans and perfect hair.  The caption read, "Left to right: Hayden, Trayden, Kayden, Grayden, and Brayden."

In my own case, I was named after my father, but he was named by his mom, who allegedly said -- and having known her well, I can easily hear her saying it -- "He may be stuck with a French last name, but he damn sure is going to have a Scottish first name!"  Which is how I ended up with an odd amalgam that is still strangely fitting of my actual roots.

Things get even more complicated when you start throwing in other languages.

Names come and go, something that really became apparent when I started doing research into genealogy.  Various relatives and ancestors from my family tree include Ulysse, Anicet, Roxzella, Orsa, Laodice, Odressi, Donathilde, and Hiram.  A friend of mine, for whom I did some genealogical digging, descends from a guy named Onesimus Futch, which sounds like an insult.  ("How dare you, you onesimus futch!")  

My wife's family is largely Eastern European Jewish, and she has Avish, Baruch, Gittel, Scholem, Chaia, Dvora, and Mordechai.  The really weird ones, though, are in my wife's non-Jewish ancestry, which hailed from England and goes back to the Anglo-Norman nobility.  She has an ancestor named, I kid you not, Marmaduke de Thweng.  Another was Johanna Ufflete.  But by far my favorite is Benedicta de Shelving, which would make a great name for the patron saint of interior decorators.

Always keep in mind that however strange your name is, it could be worse.

The topic comes up because of some recent research out of the University of Michigan which looked at naming trends both in children and in pets, and found that it could be modeled using a concept from evolutionary genetics called frequency-dependent selection.  The idea here is that the success of a specific phenotype -- and thus its trending toward becoming more or less common -- depends on how common it already is.  It can go either way; in positive frequency dependence, the trait has better success the more common it is.  (A good example is warning coloration, where a poisonous or venomous species advertises its presence with bright colors; the tactic only works if there are enough dangerous, brightly-colored individuals that predators learn to leave them alone.)  There's also negative frequency dependence, where the success of common phenotypes is poorer.  (An example is apostatic selection in a species of common British garden snails that have a variety of color patterns; studies showed that predators favored the more familiar-looking ones, so rare color patterns had a better survival rate.)

Naming trends tended to show a negative frequency dependence; when names become common, new parents (or new pet owners) tend to choose something more distinctive (or else spell it differently, which is why I had students named Michaela, Mikayla, Mikaela, Makayla, and Mekayla, fortunately not all in the same class).  Names become trendy for a while, but following the time-honored principle of "I want to be unique, just like everyone else," if the trend peaks too high, it goes into an equally precipitous fall.

"This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity," said study co-author Mitchell Newberry.  "If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then it's going to create a lot of new things.  Every time a new thing is created, it's promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population."

Still, something that is too odd never does catch on.  I've seen the name Trasimond in nineteenth century Cajun French records, but I've never known one in real life, and that particular name seems to have always been a bit of an outlier.

You have to admit, though, that it's kind of euphonious.  Better than Onesimus Futch, anyhow, not to mention the unfortunate Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop.  Given those as choices, I'll stick with Gordon.  I might even stick with Marmaduke de Thweng.  At least that one has a certain insouciance.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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