An explosion of understanding

One of the reasons I love science is its capacity for inducing wonder.

Albert Einstein said it best: "Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift."  Being able to look around you and think, "Okay, now I understand a little bit more of the universe" is nothing short of a thrill.

I recall having that feeling when I first learned about the Cambrian Explosion, a sudden increase in biodiversity that occurred about 540 million years ago, and which produced virtually all the animal phyla we currently have today.  I think it struck me that way because it was so contrary to the picture I'd had, of evolution slowly plodding along, from something like a jellyfish to something like a worm to something like a fish, through amphibians and reptiles and mammals, finally leading to us as (of course) the Pinnacle of Creation.  That view, it seems, is substantially wrong.  While there has been great change on many branches of the family tree of life, all of the basic branches diverged right about the same time.

Fascinating, too, that there were also a variety of branches that left no living descendants, that are so bizarre to our eyes that they look more like something from a science fiction movie.  There's Dickinsonia:

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Verisimilus at English Wikipedia, DickinsoniaCostata, CC BY-SA 3.0]

... and Anomalocaris, shown here as a model of what it might have looked like when alive:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

... and the aptly named Hallucigenia, which could be straight out of a fever-dream:

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Scorpion451, Hallucigenia Reconstruction Current 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0]

... and my personal favorite, five-eyed, vacuum-cleaner-hose-equipped Opabinia:

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Opabinia BW, CC BY 3.0]

If you'd like to find out more, I encourage you to read Stephen Jay Gould's awesome book Wonderful Life, which will tell you about these four creatures and a great many more besides.

The reason I bring this up is that some research out of Oxford University has elucidated not only the structure of these odd creatures, but the environment in which they lived.  Having fossils from 540 million years ago that were sufficiently intact to determine what they'd looked like while alive is amazing enough; but being able to determine anything about the conditions under which they lived is downright astonishing.  But that's just what Ross Anderson and Nicholas Tosca, of the Department of Sedimentary Geology at Oxford, and their team have done.

Their paper, which appeared in the journal Geology, described microscopic mineralogical analysis of the Burgess Shale of Canada and the Ediacaran Assemblage of Australia, two of the finest deposits of Cambrian Explosion fossils in the world.  And what the geologists found allowed them to make a guess at where the likes of Opabinia and the rest lived: warm, shallow ocean ecosystems that had water rich in iron.

The iron content allowed the formation of the mineral berthierine, which is not only distinctive in its origins, but has an anti-bacterial effect that halted decomposition and prevented decomposition.  This resulted in the phenomenally well-preserved fossils both sites are known for.

"Berthierine is an interesting mineral because it forms in tropical settings when the sediments contain elevated concentrations of iron," Anderson said.  "This means that Burgess Shale-type fossils are likely confined to rocks which were formed at tropical latitudes and which come from locations or time periods that have enhanced iron.  This observation is exciting because it means for the first time we can more accurately interpret the geographic and temporal distribution of these iconic fossils, crucial if we want to understand their biology and ecology."

The whole thing is tremendously exciting.  To not only have an idea of the appearance of these animals, but to be able to picture them in something like their actual habitat, gives us a glimpse of a world five times older than it was during the heyday of the dinosaurs.  It's breathtaking to think about.

I'll end with a quote from another scientist -- Brian Greene, the physicist whose lucid writing about modern physics in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos inspired an equally brilliant NOVA series.  Greene says: "Science is a way of life.  Science is a perspective.  Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable -- a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional."

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Egyptian light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media stating that the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is pretty outlandish right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the latitude of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is the units used in all the measurements in the claim.  The second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  *glares at fellow Americans*)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have expressed the speed of light -- even assuming they could figure it out -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

Oh, and while we're at it, the first person to slice a circle up into 360 degrees -- the basis, of course, of our system of latitude -- was Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B.C.E.  Which, not to put too fine a point on it, was two-thousand-odd years after the Great Pyramids were built.  So to sum it up: what we're being asked to believe is that the ancient Egyptians sited the Great Pyramid based upon a quantity they didn't know how to measure, expressed in terms of three units that hadn't been invented yet.

Makes perfect sense.

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  In fact, this is only one of dozens of examples of pseudoscientific metrology, which is the general name for claims that the measurements of ancient structures have some relevance to scientific findings.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were cool people, and the pyramids they built are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies, and as they were dragging the semi-conscious Smoot home, they decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

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A strange attractor

We've had a sudden warm, sunny spell -- very unusual for mid-April in upstate New York, where the weather can remain chilly well into May and we've sometimes had snow on Mother's Day.  One thing you have to say for upstaters; we don't waste these opportunities when they come.  There was a steady stream of runners and cyclists on the road past my house, and as for me, I spent the day working in the front yard putting in some new raised-bed gardens.  The result was (1) some landscaping that's going to be gorgeous when it's full of flowers in a couple of months, (2) sunburned back and shoulders (not severe, fortunately, but a little redder than they should be), and (3) sore muscles.

The cloudless skies continued into yesterday evening, which brought me outside once again -- this time to enjoy a glass of wine and watch the stars.  As I sat there, the darkness deepening around me, I was once again astonished by how beautiful a clear night sky is.  It amazes me that anyone can look up into the star-spangled blackness and not be awestruck.  I looked at those hundreds of little pinpoints of light -- each one actually a blazing sun, some of them orders of magnitude bigger than our own -- and wondered, as I have so often before, which of them have planets, and which of those planets might host life.

Then, it struck me how little of the universe I'm actually seeing.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall my posting this image of the Milky Way, but it's worth seeing again:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Milky way map, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I know it's hard to read the text, so I encourage you to go to the site where it comes from, and spend some time zooming in on it.  In particular, find the little circle in the lower center that's labeled "Naked Eye Limit."

Every individual star you have ever seen without a telescope is inside that little circle.

Even our own galaxy is largely a mystery to us.  There's an enormous black hole at its center called Sagittarius A* ticking and purring (I can't help hearing that in Carl Sagan's memorable voice), which we know of by its x-ray and gamma ray signature; much of what else we know was either discovered in the last century using powerful telescopes, or else is inferential.

Amongst the inferential bits is one of the oddest mysteries in astrophysics; the Great Attractor.  The Great Attractor is the apparent center of gravity of the Laniakea Supercluster, a huge assemblage that contains not only the Milky Way and its nearby companions, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, but one hundred thousand other galaxies, each containing something on the order of one hundred billion stars.  (Once again invoking Carl Sagan's voice for emphasis.)

If your mind boggles at this, so does everyone's.  Or should.  But the weirdest thing is that we have no idea what the Great Attractor actually is.  It is "inconveniently placed," as one astronomer put it (well aware that stating it that way is about as ridiculously anthropocentric as you can get).  Between us and it is the center of the Milky Way, so we can't currently see it, and won't be able to for another hundred million years, at which point the Solar System will have orbited around the galactic center and will be pointing toward whatever the Great Attractor is.  It may be a huge collection of galaxies, with enough mass to gravitationally attract everything in the region; it may be something odder.

We simply don't know.

And if that's not enough for you, it was recently discovered that the Great Attractor itself is moving toward something even bigger, the Shapley Supercluster, which is the largest gravitationally-bound structure we know of.

At that point in my musings, my glass of wine was empty, and I felt minuscule enough for one night.  Sitting there, looking up into the vastness of space, left me (as it always does) with a keen awareness of the insignificance of all of our little Earth-bound problems.  It didn't, and doesn't, bother me; being overawed by the grandeur of it all is hardly a bad thing.  It's comforting to know that as we toil through our busy little lives down here, overhead the majestic cosmos still soars, extending in every direction farther than we can see, or even imagine.

I think I'll go outside again this evening.

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The stowaways

Aficionados of the Star Trek universe undoubtedly recall the iconic character Jadzia Dax.  Dax was a Trill -- a fusion of a humanoid host and a strange-looking brain symbiont.  The union of the two blended their personalities, resulting in what was truly a new, composite life form.

Star Trek is amazing in a lot of ways, not least because of their attention to current science and an uncanny prescience about where science is heading.  It turns out that we're all composite life forms.  We carry around something like 39 trillion bacterial cells in and on our own bodies -- the vast majority of which are either commensals (neither helpful nor harmful) or are actually beneficial -- a number that is higher than the number of human cells we have.  Each of our cells also contains mitochondria, which are the descendants of endosymbiotic bacteria that have inhabited the cells of eukaryotes for billions of years, and without which we couldn't release energy from our food molecules.  Plants have not only mitochondria but chloroplasts, yet another species of bacteria that like mitochondria, have their own DNA, took up residence in their hosts billions of years ago, and have been there ever since.

But as we saw in yesterday's post -- about a gene in the retinas of our eyes that we swiped from bacteria -- the rabbit hole goes a hell of a lot deeper than that.  By some estimates, between five and eight percent of our genomes are endogenous retroviruses -- genetic fragments left behind by viruses that spliced their DNA into ours.  Like our bacterial hitchhikers, a good many of these are either neutral or beneficial; for example, the production of bile, estrogen, and several proteins essential for the formation of the placenta are all directly affected by endogenous retroviral genes.  A few do seem to be deleterious, and have roles in certain cancers, autoimmune diseases, and neurological disorders like ALS and schizophrenia.

What brings this topic up is a study this week from the University of Innsbruck that found these stowaways everywhere they looked.  A comprehensive genetic analysis of single-celled organisms found no fewer than thirty thousand viral genes -- ten percent of the microbial genome!

This calls into question what exactly we mean by the word organism.  The canonical definition is "an individual life form of a species."  But is there any such thing?  The ostensibly individual life form called Gordon who is currently writing this post is made of (at least) equal numbers of human cells and cells from different species of bacteria, without many of which I'd be sick as hell, or possibly even dead.  Remove the symbiotic mitochondria from within my cells, and I'd definitely be dead -- within minutes.  Deeper still, at a minimum, one in twenty of the genes in my "human DNA" comes from viruses and bacteria.

Looked at closely, I'm as put together of spare parts as the Junk Man in Lost in Space.  Fortunately, I appear to run a bit more smoothly most days than he did.

In any case, calling me "a single organism" is so far from accurate it's almost laughable.

Honestly, it's kind of cool how interconnected everything is.  Back in the days of the first serious taxonomist, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, scientists had the idea that all living things were categorizable into neat little cubbyholes.  Not only is that incorrect on the species level (something I wrote about in detail a couple of years ago), it's not even true on the individual level or on the level of genomes.  Life on Earth is a huge, tangled skein of threads.  The whole thing puts me in mind of a quote from John Muir: "Tug at a single thing in nature, and you find that it is hitched to everything else in the universe."

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Stolen glance

Charles Darwin eloquently expressed his own struggle with imagining how the vertebrate eye could have evolved.  If you spend any time reading the writings of creationists or proponents of intelligent design (not recommended unless you have an extraordinary tolerance for pretzel logic), you'll find a quote from The Origin of Species:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

This quote causeth much crowing and fist-bumping amongst the holy, lo unto this very day, usually followed by something like "Even Darwin admitted that evolution by natural selection doesn't work."

It's wryly amusing, given the degree to which anti-evolutionists cherry-pick the scientific evidence they accept and the (much larger amount of) evidence they ignore completely, that this quote is itself cherry-picked, as you'd find out if you went on to read the next two sentences of the book:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.  Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

So the argument -- if I can dignify it by that name -- of the anti-evolutionists boils down to our old friend Argument from Incredulity: "I can't imagine how it could have happened, therefore it must be God."

The truth is, we understand the evolution of the eye pretty well.  Lots of animals (for example, flatworms) have light-sensitive spots; and as Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in his tour-de-force defense of evolution The Blind Watchmaker, once you have any kind of light-sensing ability at all, incremental improvements can result in some amazingly complex structures.  The eye isn't "irreducibly complex" -- the intelligent design cadre's favorite phrase -- at all; simple photosensitive spots led to "cup eyes" which led to eyes like a pinhole camera, and so on.  In fact, the whole process has been repeated more than once.  Complex eyes have evolved independently at least three times, possibly more.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kamil Saitov, Human eye iris 5, CC BY 4.0]

The vertebrate eye is a particularly interesting case.  The transparent proteins in the lens, appropriately named crystallins, were found in 1988 by molecular biologist Joram Piatigorsky to come from the same genes that produce heat-shock proteins, enzymes that protect other proteins against damage from fluctuating temperature.  Take heat-shock proteins and assemble them in layers, you get a lens.  This is an example of exaptation (also called preaptation or preadaptation), where a gene, protein, or structure that evolved in one context develops a function giving it an entirely different use, and that use kind of moves in and takes over.

It's another example of exaptation in the eye that is why the whole topic comes up; in fact, it's not only exaptation, it's exaptation of a gene that was borrowed from another organism entirely.  A paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at a protein in all vertebrate eyes called IRBP (interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein), without which our sense of sight wouldn't work.  When light strikes your eye, protein-bound complexes containing retinol (a derivative of vitamin A) absorb the energy, causing them to kink.  This triggers a neuron to fire, sending a signal to your brain.  However, something needs to unkink the complex, thus resetting the switch so it can respond to the next photon to come along.

That's what IRBP does.  Without it, your retinal cells would be able to respond exactly once, then they'd shut down permanently.

This week's paper found something astonishing.  The gene that codes for IRBP doesn't exist in our nearest invertebrate relatives, nor in any other group studied, with one exception -- certain species of bacteria.  What apparently happened is that the common ancestor of all vertebrates swiped a gene from bacteria that coded for a pepsidase -- an enzyme that breaks down and recycles proteins.  This kind of gene-stealing isn't uncommon.  (I did a post a few years ago about a pair of viral genes that seem to be critical for our forming memories, if you want another good example of this phenomenon.)  But like the heat-shock proteins becoming crystallins, the pepsidase made by the gene our ancestors grabbed was useful for something else -- unkinking the protein complexes in our rapidly-evolving eyes.

So our eyes work not only because of proteins gaining additional functions, but because we stole a gene from bacteria.

"Horizontal gene transfer can help to endow organisms with new functions," said Julie Dunning Hotopp, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Sciences.  "Once these genes take root in a new species, evolution can tinker with them to produce totally new abilities or enhance existing ones.  It is the biological equivalent of upcycling that happens in my Buy Nothing Group."

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Missives from the sixth dimension

Generally speaking, there are two things that rapidly identify a claim as the work of a crank: (1) saying that it explains everything; and (2) saying that it overturns all previous theories and models in one fell swoop.

Now, that's not to say there haven't been ideas that have blown away previous theories.  The heliocentric model of the Solar System, the germ theory of disease, Darwinian natural selection, genes and the role of DNA in heredity, Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theories on electricity and magnetism, plate tectonics, relativity -- all of them were earthshattering, and each one caused a complete revision of what we thought we knew.

But you know what stands out about them?  How rare they are.  There might be a handful of others I've missed, but if you just count the ones I've named, from the earliest (the Copernican heliocentric model) in about 1520 to today, that's nine honest-to-goodness scientific revolutions in five hundred years.

Also, given the precision of our instruments and the rigor with which science is approached -- itself a relatively new thing -- the likelihood of our having missed something major that will "rewrite the textbooks" is pretty low.  (There may be one exception -- incorporating "dark matter" and "dark energy" into our model for physics.  There's a fair chance that when they're figured those out, we might see a revolution of no less magnitude than Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  Of course, it's also possible that we'll account for them by physics we already know about.  Which it'll be, only time will tell.)

My point is, if there is an overturning of current scientific models, it's likely that the anomalous data and its explanation will come from within the realm of science, and not from a layperson waving his or her hands around.  And it will be a rare, headline-making event.

So the fact that there are hundreds of websites that claim to outline some major flaw in a current scientific model, and propose a solution to it, means that most likely all of them are wrong.  (As a commenter put on one of them I saw a while back, "Here are your next steps: (1) Write this up as a formal academic paper.  (2) Submit to peer review.  (3) Collect Nobel Prize.  After you've done all that, come back and we'll talk.")

Most of these sites, therefore, are ringing the changes on the same crazy claims.  But every once in a while there'll be one that is so out there, so bizarre, that it has merit simply on the basis of how creative it is and how earnest its creator seems to be.  Which is why today I'm going to tell you about: Mosheh's Unifying Field Theory.  Which, as he points out right in the title, is not only a Unifying Field Theory, it's a God Theory.

Whatever that means.

I encourage you to visit the website, because there's no way I can excerpt enough here to give you the full experience, but here's one sentence so you can get the flavor:

There is the suggestion given by evidence, and if energy was removed from a 3D space, then rather than just shrinking, it could be reduced into a 2D plane, and if energy was removed from a 2D plane, then "it" would become 1 dimensional, and if more energy was removed, it would become a zero dimensional object, not being zero, as in not existing, but zero as in having no potential energy, a zero energy state.

Right!  Sure!  What?

And I just have to include one of the illustrations, which are amazing:

My favorite part is in the lower right corner, wherein we learn that dinosaurs evidently evolved not only into birds but into "Grey Aliens."

There are so many other delightful features of this website that I don't want to spoil them, so you'll just have to go there and take a look.  I think my favorite part is under the "General Theory Outline" page, where he draws four-, five-, and six-dimensional objects.  If only the mathematicians had realized years ago that it was this easy!

So Mosheh's "dimensional field theory" is so wacky as to be kind of charming.  He's a crank, yes; he's wrong, almost certainly; but you have to admire his creativity and chutzpah.  As for me, I'm going to go back and poke around some more, and see if I can figure out what he means by saying that "an object's four-dimensional spin is made up of time and something."

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Do a little dance

If you spend any time on social media, you've undoubtedly seen the Serbian Dancing Lady.

She appears in short clips, taken at night, almost always when no one else is around.  She appears to be middle-aged, and wears a dress -- sometimes rather plain, sometimes ornate-looking.  She always starts out with her back to the camera, and is doing a dance with her arms outstretched, a kind of side-to-side shimmy that some have compared to steps from Balkan folk dances.  The person filming her approaches, calls out to her something like, "Hey, what are you doing?" or "Are you okay?" -- both, you have to admit, reasonable questions to ask someone out dancing alone in the middle of the street at night.  The Dancing Lady sloooooowly turns...

... then charges at the person filming her with a knife.

Here's a compilation of a few of the video clips:

She's always seen in the Zvezdara municipality, near Belgrade, we're told.  The police know about her and are "very concerned" but have been unable to apprehend her or even figure out who she is.  You are then solemnly advised that if you see her, you shouldn't speak, approach, or make eye contact with her.  

Just run.

I did a bit of digging, and I found out that claims of the Serbian Dancing Lady go back to 2019, when some probably deranged person was out in Zvezdara stumbling about and lunging at cars and passersby.  Some of the footage on YouTube and TikTok seems to date from these early sightings.  Then there's not much until this February, when a TikTok user called @aatc13 posted a clip of her with the caption "be careful guys," and in a couple of weeks it got 78 million views.

Explanations, as usual, vary.  Some people take the more prosaic approach that she's a violently insane person who somehow has eluded the police.  Others claim that she's an evil spirit, demon, or witch, and that if she pursues you, you'll never be seen again, which raises the awkward question that if that's true, who's posting the videos?

In any case, since the post in February, you can't get on TikTok without seeing a new clip of the Serbian Dancing Lady.  Some are just reposts, but what's struck me is that the vast majority of these are different people in different places wearing different clothing.  So are there multiple Serbian Dancing Ladies?  There'd have to be, to account for all these videos.  In fact, there are so many videos, with new ones popping up every day, that you get the impression the women in Serbia do nothing at night but dance by themselves on the street and wait for someone to come up and film them.

Serbian woman's boss: Here, can you get this paperwork done this morning?

Serbian woman: I'll try, but I'm pretty tired today.  Rough night.

Serbian woman's boss: Too much dancing?

Serbian woman: You got that right.  Spent six hours shimmying on the street, and not a single person asked me if I was okay.  I haven't had a good chase in two weeks.  Not gonna lie, it's kind of discouraging.

Serbian woman's boss: That sucks.  Well, better luck tonight.  

Serbian woman: Thanks.  I'm keeping my knife sharp, just in case.

The sudden alarming proliferation of different Serbian Dancing Lady videos is undoubtedly because the whole thing would be so easy to stage.  Unlike (for example) Bigfoot videos, you don't even need an elaborate costume; just a long dress and a scarf.  All you have to do is get a female friend to dance for a few seconds on the street while you video her, then have her slowly turn toward you and give chase while you feign alarm and run away.  Done.  Anyone could make and upload their own Serbian Dancing Lady videos in under three minutes, and that's even if they don't live in Serbia.

Not that I am in any way recommending this, mind you.

So my suspicion is that while the original 2019 video might be of some actual deranged person, the recent ones are very likely all hoaxes.  Just as well.  It'd suck if this spread to the United States, because we've got enough to deal with over here.  Last thing we need is demonic dancing ladies accosting people on the street.

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