Seeing in a different light

One of the most influential teachers I've ever had was my high school biology teacher, Jane Miller.  She had a way of making just about everything interesting, from biochemistry to the parts of the cell to the parts of the human body.

I still recall one time she completely boggled my mind.  It was when we were studying the anatomy and physiology of the eye, and she told us that the human eye could only perceive a tiny little slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The rest -- radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays -- are all light, just like visible light, differing only in frequency and wavelength.  It's just that our eyes aren't built to be sensitive to these other parts of the spectrum.

Further, because of the way light refraction works, the structure of our eyes would have to be different if they could detect different frequencies.  To see in the radio region of the spectrum, for example, we would need to have eyes larger than wagon wheels.  Which would be a little cumbersome.

Nevertheless, there are animals that can see at least some parts of the spectrum we can't.  Mosquitoes can see in the infrared region -- one of several ways the little buggers find you in the dark.  Bees can see into the ultraviolet, and in fact some bee-pollinated flowers have coevolved to reflect in the ultraviolet region.  These flowers might look white or solid-colored to our eyes, but to a bee, they're spangled with spots and stripes -- advertisements that there's nectar inside.

"But... does that mean there are other colors, ones we can't see?" I asked Ms. Miller.  "What color would ultraviolet light be?"

"No one knows," Ms. Miller said.  "You'd have to be a bee to find out."

Mind = blown.

While we still don't know what these other regions of the spectrum would look like to animals that can perceive them naturally, we now have devices that can take photographs sensitive to different frequencies -- effectively converting this invisible (to us) light into visible light so we can see the patterns made by light sources emitting in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  This, in fact, is why this subject comes up; just last week, the James Webb Space Telescope returned stunning photographs of the Phantom Galaxy (M74), not only in the visible light region of the spectrum, but in the infrared.  Here's what it looks like to our eyes:

And here's what the same galaxy would look like if our eyes could see in the infrared:

We really are only sensing a vanishingly small part of what's out there -- and we are fortunate to live in a time when our devices are allowing us to get a glimpse of what the world would look like to eyes different from our own.

I don't know how anyone wouldn't be awestruck by the photos being taken by the JWST.  We need to be reminded of the grandeur and majesty of the universe, not only for our aesthetic appreciation, but to force us to realize the pettiness of our own small concerns against the backdrop of the galaxies.  A little humility goes a long, long way.

So check out the ongoing updates from NASA/JPL.  I bet you'll have your mind blown over and over again -- just like mine was back in tenth grade biology when I first realized that everyone doesn't see the world the same way.  Because that's a great thing to be reminded of, too -- that our narrow little viewpoint isn't universal.  It's what I tried to capture in the final conversation between the character of Duncan Kyle and the enigmatic Sphinx, in my novel Sephirot -- when Duncan is trying to argue that of course what he's seeing is real:

"It's a matter of practicality," Duncan said, an edge of anger in his voice.

"No," the Sphinx replied.  "It is a matter of Duncan Kyle deciding that he knows what is possible and what is impossible.  Who appointed you the Arbiter of Truth?"

"Isn't that what all humans do?"

"It's what they stop doing," the Sphinx said, "if they want to know what the Truth actually is.  You really think your puny, nearsighted eyes, your weak ears, your dull and calloused skin, can sense everything there is to sense?  That your feeble brain can know everything there is to know?  How arrogant of you."

"I never thought of it that way."

"So a man who cannot prove that he isn't a reflection of a reflection, who doesn't know whether he is flesh and blood or a character in someone else's tale, sets himself up to determine what is possible."  She chuckled.  "That's rich."

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Quack

When I saw a headline over at Science News that contained the phrase "Ancient Demon Ducks," I knew I had found my topic for the day.

The article turned out to be about some recent research into a group of birds called dromornithids, which lived in Australia for about twenty million years, only becoming extinct about forty thousand years ago (thus overlapping the earliest ancestors of the Indigenous Australians by a short period).  Besides being referred to as "the demon ducks of doom" (I'm not making that up), these birds are also called mihirungs, from the Djab Wurrung words mihirung paringmal, meaning "giant bird."

Giant they certainly were.  Stirton's thunderbird (Dromornis stirtoni) reached three meters tall and could weigh over five hundred kilograms.  This puts it in second place to the much more recent Madagascar elephant bird (Aepyornis spp.), which could reach two hundred kilograms heavier than that, and still existed only a thousand years ago.

A reconstruction of Dromornis stirtoni [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.de), Dromornis BW, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I realize this doesn't look much like any duck you've ever seen, but apparently genetic analysis of fossils has established that the dromornids are most closely related to modern waterfowl.  Once again showing that appearance is not a very good indicator of genetic relationships.

The current research finds that the mihirungs may have been done in by a trait in common with several other large bird species -- slow growth rate.  The mihirungs, along with the elephant birds, the dodo, and the great auk, seem to have reached maturity slowly, in the case of mihirungs perhaps as long as fifteen years.  Time to maturity is inversely proportional to minimum viable population, the smallest number of individuals that (if conditions remain stable) could potentially stay in equilibrium or even increase, because if something starts killing them off, the population can only recover if the remaining individuals can reach sexual maturity fast enough to reproduce and replace the ones that have died.  The remaining large bird species -- ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, for example -- are all much faster to reach reproductive maturity, and have many more offspring at a time.  The slow-growing, slow-reproducing mihirungs just couldn't deal with a spike in the death rate.

And what caused that spike seems to be the same thing that did in the elephant birds, dodos, and great auks; overhunting by humans.  Eggshells of mihirungs have been found that show signs of having been cooked, and there is Indigenous art from the earliest human settlers of Australia that appear to show mihirungs amongst other animals that were targets of hunting.  So sad to say, but the weird "demon ducks of doom" were probably themselves doomed by the arrival of humans.

You have to wonder what the world would look like if humans had never come on the scene.  It's not only weird big species like the dromornids that might still be around; right where I live we'd almost certainly have passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), once the most common bird in eastern North America, hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century; and the pretty little Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), slaughtered because of their habit of eating fruit crops and declared extinct in 1939.

What's gone's gone, of course, and we should be putting our time and effort into conserving what we still have; but I can't help but wish we'd been more careful all along.  Well over 99% of all the species that have ever lived have become extinct for one reason or another, so in the long haul, extinction is unavoidable; to paraphrase Fight Club, on a long enough time scale, the survival rate of species in general is zero.  Still, it's amazing to think of what once was -- including the five-hundred-kilogram demon ducks of Australia.

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When the volcano blows

The human-inhabited part of the world dodged a serious bullet in January of 2022, when the colossal Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption took place.

Unless you're a geology buff, you might not even remember that it happened, which is kind of astonishing when you consider it.  The undersea eruption created an upward surge of water that was ninety meters tall, twelve kilometers wide, and the wave it generated displaced a volume of 6.6 cubic kilometers.  The tsunami started out nine times as high as the one that devastated Japan in 2011.

After that, a steam explosion -- caused when cold seawater rushed into the collapsed magma chamber after the eruption -- generated an atmospheric pressure wave, producing a second (and faster-moving) set of tsunamis.

The whole thing is hard to talk about without lapsing into superlatives.

The Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai eruption [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The fact that this enormous eruption only caused five deaths and ninety million dollars in damage -- compared with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which killed twenty thousand and caused over two hundred billion dollars in damage -- is due to its remote location in the Tonga Archipelago.  Had it occurred closer to heavily-inhabited coastal locations, it could have been catastrophic.

This analysis of the Tonga eruption came out right around the same time as a study out of the University of Cambridge looking at how woefully unprepared we are for a large eruption in a populated area.

"Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years. That's a roll of the dice," said study co-author Lara Mani.  "Such gigantic eruptions have caused abrupt climate change and collapse of civilizations in the distant past...  Hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped into asteroid threats every year, yet there is a severe lack of global financing and coordination for volcano preparedness.  This urgently needs to change.  We are completely underestimating the risk to our societies that volcanoes pose."

You might be wondering which are currently considered by volcanologists to be the most potentially dangerous volcanoes in the world.  Generally, these top the list:

• Mount Vesuvius/the Campi Flegrei system in Italy, which destroyed Pompeii in 79 C. E. and threatens the modern city of Naples
• Mount Rainier, southeast of the city of Seattle, Washington
• Novarupta Volcano in Alaska, which could produce climate-changing ash eruptions
• Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which has a history of violent eruptions -- and over twenty million people live less than a hundred kilometers from its summit
• Mount Saint Helens -- famous for its 1980 eruption, this volcano has been rebuilding since then and still poses a significant threat
• Mount Agung and Mount Merapi in Indonesia, part of the same volcanic arc that includes Krakatoa
• Mount Fuji in Japan -- scarily close to Tokyo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world

The whole thing is kind of overwhelming to thing about, especially given the question of what we could do about it if we knew a massive eruption was imminent.  Consider the failure of the United States government to act effectively prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- and there we had several days to do something, during which meteorologists correctly predicted the massive strengthening that would occur prior to landfall, and knew pretty accurately when and where it would occur.  With a volcanic eruption, generally geologists know one is coming at some point, but the ability to predict how big and exactly when is still speculative at best.

Imagine, for example, the reaction of the three-million-odd residents of Naples and its environs if the scientists said, "You need to evacuate the area, because there's going to be an eruption of some magnitude or another, some time in the next six months."

So the problems inherent in dealing with this threat are obvious, but (says the Mani et al. study), that's no reason to close our eyes to it, or refusing to consider possible solutions that may seem to be outside the box.  "Directly affecting volcanic behavior may seem inconceivable, but so did the deflection of asteroids until the formation of the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2016," Mani said.  "The risks of a massive eruption that devastates global society is significant.  The current underinvestment in responding to this risk is simply reckless."

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No butts about it

The early Cambrian Period was known for having some weird-looking animals, but even by Cambrian standards, Saccorhytus coronarius was pretty bizarre.

The name is a Greek and Latin composite that means, more or less, "wrinkled bag with a crown," and as disparaging as it sounds I have to admit it's pretty accurate.  The reconstruction of it from various fossils makes it look like a design for a new Pokémon that was rejected on the basis of being too outlandish:

One thing you'll notice about it is that it has no anus.  This, by itself, isn't as odd as it sounds; whole phyla of animals, notably Cnidaria (which includes jellyfish and sea anemones) and Platyhelminthes (flatworms) only have one opening in their digestive tract, meaning once they finish digesting their dinner, they spit the undigested bits out of their mouths.  This lack of a nether orifice has made poor Saccorhytus the butt of many jokes, and in fact I was going to title this post "Assless chaps" but was informed that the more prudish members of my readership might take that the wrong way.

Be that as it may, the spikes combined with its other weird features made it hard to classify.  The first Saccorhytus fossils seemed to have additional holes near the mouth, which initially were thought to be openings for gills but later turned out to be  places where spines had broken off during fossilization.  This has altered our understanding of where it fits on the animal family tree; initially, the supposed gill slits suggested it might be related to deuterostomes (including starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and vertebrates).  The fact that this was an artifact of fossilization, coupled with some new research, has placed it instead amongst the Ecdysozoa.  Ecdysozoa is Greek for "animals that get undressed" (speaking of undignified scientific names) because of their ability to shed and regrow their exoskeletons, and includes the familiar phyla Arthropoda, Nematoda, and Tardigrada, as well as less-well-known groups like Priapulida ("penis worms"), which takes "undignified names" to the next level.

Here's the current best-supported arrangement for known animal groups, with the Saccorhytus's branch shown in red:

So that's today's news from the No Ifs, Ands, or Butts department.  (Sorry, I'll stop with the middle-school humor.  Probably.)  Saccorhytus isn't a close relative of ours, but more allied to insects and roundworms.  Still, the lack of a hind end means it's not exactly a comfortable fit in that group either.  Of course, "if you haven’t got an anus," said study lead author Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol, "you’re not going to be very comfortable anywhere."

Okay, look, that one wasn't my fault.  The scientist himself said it.

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Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely,

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos.  Predictably, like the person who sent me the links, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak."

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there.

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

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Anatomy of a verbal slap

A few weeks ago, a buddy and I were out for a walk on one of the local woodland trails.  It's a popular trail with bikers, runners, and hikers, running about fifteen kilometers down to Cass Park in the city of Ithaca.  To set the scene -- it's a well-maintained, broad path, and where we were was one of the widest parts of the trail, maybe three or four meters across or so, level and flat, with no obstructions of any kind, and a mown grassy shoulder on either side.

We were walking along chatting, and I heard a noise behind us.  I turned, and two runners were approaching, so we got off the trail to let them by.  Because of where we were, it was fastest to get out of the way if he stepped off to the left and I stepped off to the right; which we did, giving the two runners the entire path to themselves.  They didn't even have to slow down their pace.  But as they passed, one of them half-turned and snapped out some words to us, which I didn't catch.

I said, "I'm sorry, what?"

She gave a harsh sigh, turned around, and snarled, "It's rude to split the trail!  Learn some etiquette!"  And without waiting for a response, she and her friend took off at a run again.

I was speechless, for several reasons.  First of all, I've been a runner for forty years, and I've never heard anyone talk about "splitting the trail."  I didn't even know that was a thing.  As far as I've ever heard, unless there's a race going on, there's no particular etiquette about sharing a trail except for "get out of the way as quickly as you can and let the faster person pass."  The trail in question is heavily used, especially on nice days, and most everyone has no problem dealing with minor slowdowns and very infrequent traffic jams when several people end up at the same place at the same time.

But the gaffe that my friend and I committed -- which, allow me to reiterate, hadn't even required the two runners to slow down -- was apparently serious enough that we were accused of being "rude" and "lacking in etiquette."

What's oddest about all of this is my reaction to it.  You'd think I'd have gone through all the rational responses I just outlined, and would have immediately dismissed what she said as completely unreasonable.  Less charitable but perhaps still justifiable would have been laughing and saying, "What an asshole!" and forthwith forgetting about the incident entirely.  But in fact, it kind of ruined my morning.  I know I can be a bit of a golden retriever at times -- I have a tendency to want to be everyone's friend, sometimes at the expense of standing my ground even when I should -- but this seemed to go beyond even my usual desire not to ruffle feathers.

This ten-second interaction with a woman I had never seen before and haven't seen since left me feeling like I'd been slapped in the face.

It turns out I'm not alone.  We all react that way -- in fact, in some new research by a team led by Marijn Struiksma of Utrecht University, we find out that the response is so strong that it still occurs even when the insult is carried out under completely contrived, artificial circumstances.

What Struiksma and her team did was to hook up 79 volunteers to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which measures scalp conductance (and thus is a measure of the electrical activity of the brain).  They were then presented with various written statements, some of which used the participant's name and some of which used a different name.  Some were insults (e.g. "Linda is a horrible person"), some were positive (e.g. "Linda is an impressive person"), and some were neutral but factually correct (e.g. "Linda is Dutch").  And what the researchers found is that the volunteers had a strong emotional reaction to the personally-directed insults -- even knowing ahead of time that it was just an experiment, and those statements were not the honest opinion of any real person.

"Our study shows that in a psycholinguistic laboratory experiment without real interaction between speakers, insults deliver lexical ‘mini slaps in the face,’ such that the strongly negative evaluative words involved that a participant reads, automatically grab attention during lexical retrieval, regardless of how often that retrieval occurs," Struiksma said.  "Understanding what an insulting expression does to people as it unfolds, and why, is of considerable importance to psycholinguists interested in how language moves people, but also to others who wish to understand the details of social behavior."

If a contrived "insult," delivered in writing to a person who knew it was just part of a psychology experiment, can create a measurable neurological reaction, how much more are we affected by nasty comments in real-life situations -- even passing ones from total strangers, like the woman who accused me of being rude on the trail because I didn't get out of her way in the fashion she required?  It all brings home how important it is simply to be kind to each other.  Yeah, maybe I should grow a thicker skin; I'll admit that I can be pretty hyper-sensitive sometimes.  But honestly, what does it cost anyone to start from the assumption that most of us are doing the best we can?  You never really lose anything by cutting people some slack.

I'll end with a quote from the Twelfth Doctor from Doctor Who.  Twelve is not my favorite incarnation of the Doctor, but man, Peter Capaldi can deliver a monologue like no one else.  And this one -- about how even in extreme situations, the most important thing is the simplest of all -- seems like a good place to conclude this post.

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Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do.  Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why they would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, about all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

It's why I was so puzzled by the link a loyal reader sent me yesterday to an article in The Epoch Times called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles, Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... what was causing all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a flying rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the bad guys.

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

Vertue sat down on a large stone, and stared off into the distance.  "I believe that I am mad," he said presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a single reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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