The myth of the moral high ground

I had a big sign on my classroom wall that said, "Don't believe everything you think."

It's an important rule-of-thumb to keep in mind.  Far too many people become completely convinced that whatever has popped into their brain must be the truth -- sometimes to the point that they don't question it.  Especially if the "truth" under consideration appeals to a conjecture that they've already fallen for.

It's our old friend confirmation bias again, isn't it?  But instead of using slim evidence to support the claim, here you don't need any evidence at all.  "That seems obvious" is sufficient.

Which brings me to two studies that blow a pair of neat holes into this assumption.

In the first, a study by IBM's consulting arm looked into whether it's true that millennials -- people who reached their majority after the year 2000 -- are actually the entitled, lazy twits that many think they are. Because that's the general attitude by the rest of the adult world, isn't it? The stereotype includes:

• having been taught by an emphasis on "self-esteem" that there's no reason to push oneself, that "everyone should get a prize" just for showing up
• being idealists who want to save the world without doing any actual work
• being narcissistic to the point of unwillingness to work on a team
• having a severe aversion to criticism, and an even stronger one to using criticism constructively
• having no respect for authority

And the study has shown pretty conclusively that every one of these stereotypes is wrong.

Or, more accurately, they're no more right about millennials than they are about any other generation.  According to an article on the study, reported in The Washington Post:

The survey... didn't find any support for the entitled, everybody-gets-a-trophy millennial mindset.  Reports of their doting parents calling bosses to complain about performance reviews may be out there, but, on the whole, IBM's survey shows a different picture.  Millennials list performance-based recognition and promotions as a priority at the same rate as baby boomers do, and they cite fairness, transparency and consistency as the top three attributes they want in a boss.  Someone who "recognizes my accomplishments," meanwhile, comes in at only sixth place... 

If there's any big takeaway about millennials from IBM's study, it's that they want pretty much the same thing most employees want: an ethical and fair boss, inspirational leadership and the opportunity to move ahead in their careers.  Where there were differences, they tended to be relatively small.

At the risk of sounding cocky -- because I'm as prone to this bias as anyone else is -- I have to say that I wasn't surprised by its findings.  I worked with teenagers for 32 years, and despite the frequent "kids these days!" and "we never got away with that when I was in school!" grousing I heard from my colleagues, my general attitude has always been that kids are kids.  Despite the drastic differences in cultural context between today and when I started teaching, there have always been lazy kids and hard-working kids, motivated kids and unmotivated kids, entitled kids and ones who accepted responsibility for their own failings.  The stuff around us changes, but people?  They remain people, with all of their foibles, no matter what.

The second study hit near to the quick for me.  It revolved around a common perception of atheists as angry ranters who are mad at the whole world, and especially the religious segment of it.  I've been collared about this myself.  "Why can't you atheists be more tolerant?" I've been asked, more than once.  "You just don't seem to be able to live and let live."

But according to a paper in The Journal of Psychology, the myth of the angry atheist is just that -- a myth.  The study's authors write:

Atheists are often portrayed in the media and elsewhere as angry individuals.  Although atheists disagree with the pillar of many religions, namely the existence of a God, it may not necessarily be the case that they are angry individuals.  The prevalence and accuracy of angry-atheist perceptions were examined in 7 studies with 1,677 participants from multiple institutions and locations in the United States.  Studies 1–3 revealed that people believe atheists are angrier than believers, people in general, and other minority groups, both explicitly and implicitly.  Studies 4–7 then examined the accuracy of these beliefs.  Belief in God, state anger, and trait anger were assessed in multiple ways and contexts.  None of these studies supported the idea that atheists are particularly angry individuals.  Rather, these results support the idea that people believe atheists are angry individuals, but they do not appear to be angrier than other individuals in reality.

Of course, there's a logical basis to this stereotype; it's the militant ranters who get the most press.  And not only do the angry individuals get the greatest amount of publicity, their most outrageous statements are the ones everyone hears about.  It's why, says Nicholas Hune-Brown, the public perception of Richard Dawkins is that he's the man who "seems determined to replace his legacy as a brilliant evolutionary biologist with one as 'guy who’s kind of a dick on Twitter'"

Once again, we should focus on the outcome of the study -- that atheists are no more likely to be angry than members of other groups.  It isn't saying that there aren't angry atheists; it's saying that there are also angry Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on.  The perception of atheists as more likely to be intolerant and ill-tempered is simply untrue.

[Image courtesy of photographer/artist Emery Way]

So back to my original point.  It behooves us all to keep in mind that what we assume to be true may, in fact, not be.  How many times do we all overgeneralize about people of other political parties, religions, genders, sexual orientations, even appearance and modes of dress?  It's easy to fall into the trap of saying "All you people are alike," without realizing that what seems like an obvious statement of fact is actually simple bigotry.

It may be impossible to eradicate this kind of bias, but I'll exhort you to try, in your own mind, to move past it.  When you find yourself engaging in categorical thinking, stop in your tracks, and ask yourself where those beliefs came from, and whether they are justified.  And, most importantly, whether there is any hard evidence that what your brain is claiming is true.

And if the answer to either of the latter questions is "No," then take a moment to suspend your certainty.  Look at the people you'd been judging without needing to make a judgment.  Get off the moral high ground.  I think you'll find that empathy and tolerance are, in general, a far better perspective from which to view the world.

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The fall of the Guidestones

Ten years ago I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia about the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument that since 1980 has stood on a hill in Elbert County, Georgia.  People have called it "America's Stonehenge," which in my opinion gives it more gravitas than it deserves.  It's got a set of ten inscriptions that seem to fall into two categories: (1) not bad ideas but impossible to achieve (such as "Unite humanity with a living new language") and (2) vague pronouncements that seem to be attempting profundity but don't quite get there (such as "Prize truth -- beauty -- love -- seeking harmony with the infinite"). 

The building of the monument was funded by one "R. C. Christian," almost certainly a pseudonym.  But a pseudonym for whom?  No one knows for sure, but there's some speculation it it's either Ted Turner or a white supremacist doctor from Fort Dodge, Iowa named Herbert Kirsten.  The mystery adds to the site's appeal, and it became quite a tourist attraction, attracting thousands of visitors per year.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Quentin Melson, Georgia Guidestones in Elbert County, GA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, it also attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists and evangelical wingnuts, who promptly proclaimed it as (respectively) an icon of the Evil New World Order and a manifesto from Satan himself.  Both of these impressions were enhanced by one of the inscriptions, which recommends keeping the human population at five hundred million "in perpetual balance with nature," a move that would probably be highly unpopular with the other seven billion humans on the planet. 

This is how it came to the attention of one Kandiss Taylor, unsuccessful candidate for governor of Georgia, whose motto "Jesus Guns Babies" made her the target of hundreds of posts on social media such as the following:

She was also brutally lampooned by the inimitable John Oliver in one of the funniest segments he's ever done.  You should take seventeen minutes right now to watch this, but do not, I repeat, do not attempt to drink anything while doing so.  You have been warned.

Anyhow, Taylor, who apparently gets most of her exercise doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, said that the Guidestones are satanic in origin, and that if she became governor, her first action would be to have them destroyed.  She received immediate support from loony Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of course she did, who said that the Guidestones "revealed a world genocide plot," if you can apply the word "plot" to a message engraved in enormous letters on a giant rock on top of a hill outside of Atlanta.

But all of this is just a lead-up to what happened this week.  On Wednesday, an unknown person blew up one of the Guidestones and did enough damage to the others that they had to be demolished.  A car was captured on surveillance footage leaving the scene right after the bomb went off, but so far, no suspects have been identified.

This, of course, prompted conspiracy types to stop chewing on the straps of their straitjackets long enough to engage in some triumphant, and long-overdue, "I told you so"s.  Kandiss Taylor tweeted, "God is God all by Himself. He can do ANYTHING He wants to do.  That includes striking down Satanic Guidestones."

Apparently, though, sometimes The Almighty needs help from a random wacko with dynamite and some county workers with bulldozers, and "ANYTHING" doesn't include putting Kandiss Taylor in office, given that she lost the Republican gubernatorial primary to Brian Kemp after receiving only 3.4% of the popular vote.  Even with that poor showing, however, Taylor has refused to concede, claiming that she actually won but was cheated out of the election by voter fraud.

Because of course she did.

After reading all this, I've come to the conclusion that one of the two following conclusions has to be true:

1. The aliens who are running the computer simulation we've all been trapped in for the last six years have gotten bored and/or drunk, and now they're just fucking with us.
2. A significant percentage of Americans are absolutely batshit insane.

What's most striking about the Guidestones, though, is that things in this country are crazy enough that a story which can be summarized as "Unknown bomber destroys weird monument that far-right nutcake politician thinks is a message from Satan" hardly creates a blip on the radar.  Are things this bad elsewhere?  Or is my assessment correct, that somehow the United States has cornered the market on whackjobbery?  It's getting to the point that I'm concerned my readers from other countries are judging me just because I'm American.  I'm going to be taking a trip out of the country next month, and I'm wondering what I should tell people.

Maybe I could pass for Canadian.  Although I wonder if I have the capacity for sustaining that level of niceness.  I suspect I'd tolerate stuff for a while, then something would make me say, "Are you fucking kidding me right now?", and the people nearby would slowly turn to stare at me, in the fashion of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but instead of pointing and shrieking, they'd point and yell, "AMERICAN!!!!!"

Anyhow, if option one was correct, I'd like the aliens just to give it a rest for a while.  I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.  Maybe I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, and things have always been this weird, but even so, I'm undergoing lunacy fatigue.  So let's just have some normal news, of the kind Walter Cronkite used to deliver, for the next few weeks.  Thanks ever so.

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Setting the gears in motion

A couple of weeks ago, I was out for a run on a local trail, and I almost stepped on a snake.

Fortunately, here in upstate New York, we don't have any poisonous snakes.  Unlike in my home state of Louisiana, where going for a trail run is taking your life into your hands.  It was just a garter snake, common and completely harmless, but it startled the hell out of me even though I like snakes.  What's interesting, though, is that in mid-stride I did a sudden course correction without even being consciously aware of it, put my foot down well to the snake's left (fortunately for it), and kept going with barely a stumble.  I was another three paces ahead when my conscious brain caught up and said, "Holy shit, I almost stepped on a snake!"

Thanks for the lightning-fast assessment of the situation, conscious brain.

It's kind of amazing how fast we can do these sorts of adjustments, and some recent research at the University of Michigan suggests that we do them better while running -- and more interesting still, we get better at it the faster we run.

Running apparently triggers a rapid interchange of information between the right and left sides of the brain.  It makes sense; when you run, the two sides of your body (and thus the two sides of your brain) have to coordinate precisely.  Or at least they have to if you're trying to run well.  I've seen runners who look like they're being controlled by a team of aliens who only recently learned how the human body works, and still aren't very good at it.  "Okay, move left leg forward... and move the right arm back at the same time!... No, I mean forward!  Okay, now right leg backward... um... wait..."  *crash*  "Dammit, get him up off the ground and try it again, and do it right this time!"

But to run efficiently requires that you coordinate the entire body, and do it fast.  (In fact, a 2014 study found that a proper arm swing rhythm during running creates a measurable improvement in efficiency.)  The University of Michigan study that was published this week identified a particular kind of neural cross-talk between the two brain hemispheres when you run.  They call these patterns "splines" (because they look like the interlocking teeth of a gear wheel) and found that the faster you run, the more intense the splines get.

"Previously identified brain rhythms are akin to the left brain and right brain participating in synchronized swimming: The two halves of the brain try to do the same thing at the exact same time," said Omar Ahmed, who led the study.  "Spline rhythms, on the other hand, are like the left and right brains playing a game of very fast—and very precise—pingpong.  This back-and-forth game of neural pingpong represents a fundamentally different way for the left brain and right brain to talk to each other."

Me and some other folks at a race last month, splining like hell

"These spline brain rhythms are faster than all other healthy, awake brain rhythms," said Megha Ghosh, who co-authored the paper.  "Splines also get stronger and even more precise when running faster.  This is likely to help the left brain and right brain compute more cohesively and rapidly when an animal is moving faster and needs to make faster decisions."

More fascinating still is that the researchers found spline rhythms during one other activity: dreaming during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep.  So this could be yet another function of dreams -- rehearsing the coordinating rhythms between the two brain hemispheres, so that the pathways are well established when you need them while you're awake.  

"Surprisingly, this back-and-forth communication is even stronger during dream-like sleep than it is when animals are awake and running," Ahmed said.  "This means that splines play a critical role in coordinating information during sleep, perhaps helping to solidify awake experiences into enhanced long-term memories during this dream-like state."

So that's the latest news from the intersection of two of my obsessions, neuroscience and running.  It'll give me something to think about in a few minutes when I go out for my morning run.  Maybe it'll distract me from obsessively scanning the trail for snakes.

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Miasma and misrepresentation

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about woo-woos is the fact that they will take incorrectly or incompletely understood scientific research and pretend that it supports whatever goofy idea they are currently promoting.

It's why the creationists immediately go for the holes in scientific knowledge as support for the universe being six thousand years old (the "God of the gaps" idea), throwing in an occasional bit of actual science as support, and ignoring the vast ocean of evidence that completely discredits their claim.  It's why the homeopaths talk about vibrations and quantum states as if they understood what those terms mean, stopping with Deepak Chopra in their quest to find out what the scientists themselves have to say on the matter.

I ran into an especially good (or bad) example of this yesterday, when I bumped more-or-less accidentally into a concept from the woo-woo canon called "Inherited Miasma."  Here's what the Ascension Glossary has to say about inherited miasma:

Miasma is a psycho-spiritual inherited distortion created by trauma, abuse, fear based belief systems and Soul Fragmentation which, over time, was genetically encoded in human DNA, and resulted in various forms of dis-ease [sic] or imbalance.  These dis-ease patterns were then encoded and passed down in Negative Ego behaviors or DNA code from generation to generation from the genetic alteration made from the NAA influence.  Levels of the passed down distorted or flawed DNA would result in a dissipation of the original form of the disease.  The manifested diseased energy and its physical body pattern would sometimes skip generations.  The dissipated energetic pattern (cellular memories from the Ancestry or Family of Origin) of the original disease would then manifest in future generations in lesser or hybridized forms.

Which sounds pretty scary, especially when you find out that "NAA" stands for "Negative Alien Agenda," which, we are told, consists of the plans of a bunch of alien psychic parasites to use us as a food source.

If you descend from people who were oppressed at some time in history (who doesn't?), not to worry; you can get past all of this:

When one awakens, one will then need to decide what you want to energetically “wear” - as everything you inherited in your family (and the collective human race) does not have to become a part of your self-defined identity.  As you observe and take responsibility for what you are inhabiting (this is your fleshly body) and being accountable to the current station of your life circumstances, one can participate with healing your genetic and miasmatic relationships that reside as energetic memory in your flesh.  In most cases if you pay attention to the various patterns (attitudes, ideals, emotional intelligence) in your current Bio-Family dynamic, you will know these archetypal patterns extend to other lifetimes as well as hold relevant information and clues to what you agreed to heal (types of collective human miasma) while you incarnated on planet earth during the Ascension Cycle.

So yeah.  That's a relief.

What is maddening about this is that these wingnuts don't have any evidence to support their claims, and they don't need to; the claim itself is so vague that you could decide that damn near anything you experience comes from "miasma."  Headache?  It's because one of my ancestors got punched in the face.  High blood pressure?  My ancestors experienced stress that is now encoded in my genes.  No specific, testable, potentially falsifiable statements, just an evil influence stalking us from our long-dead relatives.

Convenient, no?

Miasma by Robert Seymour (1831) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, now for the really maddening part.  These folks have latched on to some actual science as support for their silly pseudoscience.  A relatively recent discovery in genetics is that some variations in a population are not due to changes in the DNA itself, but due to changes in the transcriptional potential -- the degree to which certain genes are expressed.  Called epigenetics, this phenomenon often has to do with the amplification or silencing of genes in parents or even grandparents, which then affects how the children (or grandchildren) express their own copies of the genes.  It's kind of a weird twist on the ideas of Lamarck -- that in certain cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.

A fascinating example of this phenomenon was the subject of an article in Scientific American a while back.  A study has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have elevated levels of stress hormones.  The leader of the research team, Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found that children were influenced in utero by the stress their mothers were experiencing:

It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol.  The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats.  The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults.  This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

Note how precise the language is.  No hand-waving psycho-spiritual inherited distortions; a specific claim that elevated cortisol levels in a pregnant woman can affect her child's ability to transcribe a gene related to cortisol metabolism.  Measurable, testable, and based in comprehension of the actual science.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the "inherited miasma" people love epigenetics, the same way the homeopaths love quantum physics, because at a quick read the science appears to support their crazy stance.  They read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on the topic (I swear, from some of the stuff I've seen, they can't have done any more than that), and then blather on about how inheritance doesn't require DNA, our ancestors' spirits are still influencing our lives, karma, reincarnation, and off the edge of the cliff they go.

Look, it's not that I'm some kind of elite scientist myself; one of my faults is that my knowledge is a light year across and an inch deep.  I'm a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante, or whatever other related epithet you want to throw at me.  But when I talk about something, I take the time to read what the actual non-dilettantes have learned about it, rather than picking up a ten-dollar word or two and then pretending I'm claiming something valid.  Anyone else can do the same.  What these people are doing is not only misleading, it's lazy.

And frankly, I'm glad that there's no such thing as inherited miasma.  I've done a good bit of genealogical research on my family, and some of the people I descend from went through some seriously awful times, which, given that they were mostly French and Scottish peasants, is perhaps not too surprising.  On the other hand, one of my ancestors, one Alexander Lindsay of Glamis, Scotland, apparently lost his soul to the devil in a game of dice.  So maybe there's something to it, after all.

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Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, which I don't, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my current house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I now live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'? Maybe Mars being in Sagittarius is why my one dog woke me up barking like hell at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of War and muscly centaur dudes with bows and arrows made him feel like he needed to defend our house.  I'm not sure from whom.  Knowing him, it was probably an unusually vicious chipmunk, or something.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets.  But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."  So maybe my dog was just doing barking meditation, or something.

But sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect.  This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says.  Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart. Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.  That should "debunk" the problem, all right.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  Yeah, that'd work.  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being woken up at three AM.

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It is your mind that bends

Two days ago, I was in my car on the way to a go for a walk with a friend, and I was listening to classical music on the radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, with absolute assurance, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitarists -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Kirkwood123, Matao MC-1 classical guitar 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name, of course, comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside which we all live. 

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619. It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that.

 
I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it...

 
So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back.  It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37. Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how a video game we both play will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger.  Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went.

 
My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself  "Oh.. So many intelligent people out there... I would have never been able to write something like that." 

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me...

 
I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

Dart-thrower's bias rears its ugly head once again.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  (In fact, just a month ago I stumbled upon the obituary of a professor we'd both known, and sent it to him, and he responded, "Um... Gordon... I sent this to you in February."  Even after he told me that, I honestly had no memory of it.)  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly an example of dart-thrower's bias, similar to the 619-noticer.   Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

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The climatic teeter-totter

Want a take on something familiar that will (probably) turn your mental image of it on its head?

Picture dinosaurs.  Not just the dinosaurs themselves, but where they are -- the terrain, plant life, and so on.  I'm guessing you probably came up with something like this:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ABelov2014 (https://abelov2014.deviantart.com/), Wessex Formation dinosaurs, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Lush, steamy, wet, sort of like today's Amazon rainforests.  It's no surprise Jurassic Park was set on a (fictional) island, Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica.

And we know for certain that part of the "Age of the Dinosaurs" had a lot of these characteristics.  The global climate from the mid-Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous was largely warm and moist.  But a new study, published last week in Science Advances, suggests that the dinosaurs may have come to prominence not because of their adaptation to warm climates, but because of their resistance to cold ones.

Just about everyone knows about the KT (Cretaceous-Tertiary) Extinction, that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs, and is now attributed with near certainty to the impact of the Chicxulub Meteorite sixty-six million years ago.  Most people also have heard about the biggest mass extinction ever, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, that by some estimates wiped out between eighty and ninety percent of life on Earth, 252 million years ago.  Surprisingly few people have heard about the End-Triassic Extinction -- surprising because it caused nearly as much decrease in biodiversity as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction would 135 million years later.

One of the reasons that this event doesn't get much attention is that the wipeout seems to have been gradual rather than sudden and dramatic, as both the Cretaceous-Tertiary and Permian-Triassic Extinction were.  "Gradual," of course, is in human terms; in geological or paleontological terms, it happened pretty damn quickly, over a period of about eight hundred thousand years or so.  The cause isn't as well understood as either of the other aforementioned extinction events, but seems to have been because of a climatic rollercoaster that first cooled the climate dramatically, and then warmed it up even more.  The cause is thought to have been the opening up of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a line of enormous volcanoes that split what had been the supercontinent of Pangaea in half and opened up the Atlantic Ocean.  Eventually the province became the modern Mid-Atlantic Ridge (which is still driving North and South America away from Europe and Africa at a rate of about 2.5 centimeters a year).

The climate had already been cooling during the late Triassic, and sea levels fell as seawater got locked up into polar ice caps and glaciers.  The eruptions of the CAMP initially dropped the temperature even more, favoring cold-adapted animals and plants.  But just as we've seen from modern volcanic eruptions, the "volcanic cold snaps" we get from sunlight-blocking effects of the ash and debris being launched aloft eventually rebound into a warming event because of the pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere.

That's what happened here, only on a huge scale.  The climatic teeter-totter tilted first toward significant cold and then into a warm, wet period, and the big winners in both scenarios were the dinosaurs.  We know about their ability to tolerate heat; like I said, mostly that's the kind of environment we picture them living in.  But their ability to weather a cold period seems to have been due to an adaptation their amphibian cousins didn't have: feathers.

We always tend to associate feathers with flight, for the very good reason that birds use them for that purpose.  But what we have here is a great example of preadaptation (sometimes shortened to preaptation), in which a trait evolved in one context gains another, unrelated, function and experiences a whole bunch of different selective pressures.  Feathers, which are modified reptilian scales (look at a snake scale under a microscope and you'll see the similarity), started out as heat-trapping devices; cold-adapted birds like penguins still use them that way.  Once small arboreal dinosaurs began to use feathered limbs as aids to gliding when they jumped from branch to branch, all of a sudden they became seriously well-adapted for something else, and opened the road to modern birds.

The more well-preserved dinosaur fossils we find, the more species we find that had feathers -- including the ones that didn't fly.  Even pterosaurs, which we usually picture as having leathery wings, were apparently covered with something very much like fur or fine down feathers.  (In fact, one of the small pterosaurs of the late Jurassic is called Sordes pilosus, which roughly translates as "hairy devil.")

So the initial temperature drop at the end of the Triassic Period favored dinosaurs with insulation -- then when the temperature rebounded into jungle conditions in the early Jurassic, the competition (in the form of large amphibian species) were mostly extinct, and the dinosaurs really took off, one branch of them using their feathery innovations for something entirely different.  

I always find it wryly funny when people think of dinosaurs as being some kind of "failed experiment" or "evolutionary dead end," when they were actually the dominant life form for 185 million years, which is almost six hundred times longer than modern humans have existed.  In fact, most studies have flatly contradicted the notion that "dinosaurs were already declining and then the meteorite impact finished them off" -- all indications are that they were doing just fine when Chicxulub hit.  Odd to think of it, but if it hadn't been for that catastrophic impact and horrifying extinction, our own ancestors would very likely never have thrived and spread -- and dinosaurs of some form might still be the dominant animal life on Earth.

But as far as the end-Triassic climate yo-yo goes, it just shows that when the external conditions change, what was a disadvantage can suddenly become an advantage, and what was an advantage can become a disadvantage -- or an advantage of another sort.  If things change fast, so can the winners and losers.

In this case, favoring a group that would go on to rule the planet for another 135 million years.

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