Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing shit up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural, now that we're getting into hurricane season, that somebody inevitably comes up with the solution of stopping hurricanes by shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea decided the best approach would be firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with hurricanes was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of them, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind.  The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

And that's not even taking into account that releasing lots of radioactive fallout into an enormous, rapidly moving windstorm is a catastrophically stupid idea.

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but even a moderate hurricane could kick our asses.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of the natural world could remind us that we are, honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade (as it were), these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest, quintessentially American, suggestion for controlling the weather, as envisioned by people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, the whole discussion has left me in the mood to blow stuff up.  At least vicariously.  Maybe I should go watch the wonderful video of the amazing (and real) "Barking Dog Reaction," since if I actually blow something up, my wife will probably object.  

That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

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Grammar wars

In linguistics, there's a bit of a line in the sand drawn between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.  The former believe that the role of linguists is simply to describe language, not establish hard-and-fast rules for how language should be.  The latter believe that grammar and other linguistic rules exist in order to keep language stable and consistent, and therefore there are usages that are wrong, illogical, or just plain ugly.

Of course, most linguists don't fall squarely into one camp or the other; a lot of us are descriptivists up to a point, after which we say, "Okay, that's wrong."  I have to admit that I'm more of a descriptivist bent myself, but there are some things that bring out my inner ruler-wielding grammar teacher, like when I see people write "alot."  Drives me nuts.  And I know it's now become acceptable, but "alright" affects me exactly the same way.

It's "all right," dammit.

However, some research from a paper in Nature shows, if you're of a prescriptivist disposition, eventually you're going to lose.

In "Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change," Mitchell G. Newberry, Christopher A. Ahern, Robin Clark, and Joshua B. Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania explain that language change is inevitable, unstoppable, and even the toughest prescriptivist out there isn't going to halt the adoption of new words and grammatical forms.

The researchers analyzed over a hundred thousand texts from 1810 onward, looking for changes in morphology -- for example, the decrease in the use of past tense forms like "leapt" and "spilt" in favor of "leaped" and "spilled."  The conventional wisdom was that irregular forms (like pluralizing "goose" to "geese") persist when they're common; less frequently-used words, like "turf" -- which used to pluralize to "turves" -- eventually regularize because people don't use the word often enough to learn the irregular plural, and eventually the regular plural ("turfs") takes over.

The research by Newberry et al. shows that this isn't true -- when there are two competing forms, which one wins is more a matter of random chance than commonness.  They draw a very cool analogy between this phenomenon, which they call stochastic drift, to the genetic drift experienced by evolving populations of living organisms.

"Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, who co-authored the study.  "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.  The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember.  But chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution."

So in the ongoing battles over grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling change, the purists are probably doomed to fail.  It's worthwhile remembering how many words in modern English are the result of such mangling; both "uncle" and "umpire" came about because of an improper split of the indefinite article ("a nuncle" and "a numpire" became "an uncle" and "an umpire").  "To burgle" came about because of a phenomenon called back formation -- when a common linguistic pattern gets applied improperly to a word that sounds like it has the same basic construction.  A teacher teaches, a baker bakes, so a burglar must burgle.  (I'm surprised, frankly, given how English twists words around, we don't have carpenters carpenting.)

Anyhow, if this is read by any hard-core prescriptivists, all I can say is "I'm sorry."  It's a pity, but the world doesn't always work the way we'd like it to.  But even so, I'm damned if I'm going to use "alright" and "alot."  A line has to be drawn somewhere.

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The celestial lighthouse

Last week I did a piece on three weird astrophysical phenomena -- odd radio circles, high-energy neutrino bursts, and fast blue optical transients -- all of which have thus far defied explanation.  And this week, a paper came out in Nature about a recent discovery adding one more to the list of unexplained celestial curiosities -- one which has the alien intelligence aficionados raising their Spock-like eyebrows in a meaningful manner (although I hasten to point out that there is no evidence that either this one, or the other three I mentioned, have anything to do with you-know-who).

However, the most recent discovery is downright bizarre.  To understand why, a bit of background.

There are many more-or-less understood phenomena in astrophysics that result in a sudden surge in electromagnetic output from an astronomical body.  Some are aperiodic, or at least infrequent, such as fast radio bursts, which were discovered back in 2007 by astrophysicists Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic.  These are quick, transient pulses in the radio region of the spectrum, and are now thought to be due either to neutron star mergers or starquakes on the surface of magnetars.

Then there are the repeating ones, such as the fast blinking on-and-off of pulsars.  These are the rapidly whirling cores of collapsed massive stars, which funnel out beams of high-energy radiation aligned with the poles of their magnetic fields; because of the star's rotation, the beam appears to pulse, in some cases dozens of times a second.  They were discovered back in 1967 by the brilliant astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, but because no one could figure out what might create a repeating signal that regular, and also because Burnell was a woman in a field almost entirely dominated by men, her discovery was derisively referred to as LGM ("Little Green Men"), and assumed to be from some sort of prosaic terrestrial source.  It was only when more of them were found that astronomers began to take her seriously.  In 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the development of radio astronomy, and in particular, for the discovery of pulsars...

... to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle.  Note who wasn't included.  Burnell has graciously stated that she "feels no bitterness toward the Nobel Committee," but in her place, I sure as hell would have.

The paper in Nature, however, describes an object that doesn't seem to fit any of the known types of electromagnetic pulses.  Called GPM J1839-10, it releases energy in the radio region of the spectrum.  But in terms of periodicity, it's somewhere between pulsars (which are so regular they've been proposed as celestial clocks) and fast radio bursts (which are apparently aperiodic).  GPM J1839-10 is slow -- its signal reaches a peak about every twenty-two minutes -- but it's not precisely regular.  The four hundred seconds centering on that twenty-two minute mark is when the peak is most likely to come, but sometimes the window will pass with no peak.  The length of the pulses is also variable, usually between thirty and three hundred seconds in length.  And unlike both fast radio bursts and pulsars, the amplitude of the peak is quite low in energy.

As science writer John Timmer put it in Ars Technica, "The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior... consists of precisely zero items."

What's weirdest is that going back through the records of astronomical observations, this object has been doing its thing for three decades, and only just now is attracting attention.  The astrophysicists thus far have no good explanation for what it might be.  It sits out there in space, slowly flashing on and off like some sort of interstellar lighthouse, and the the flat truth is that at the moment, no one has the slightest idea what it might be.

Of course, "We don't know" opens the door for a certain group of people to say "We do!"

As I've said before, no one would be more delighted than me if we did come across evidence of an extraterrestrial signal, but I strongly suspect this ain't it.  For one thing, the semi-regular blips it's putting out don't appear to contain any information; put a different way, the pattern isn't complex.  It could be a beacon, I suppose, but how you'd tell the difference between an alien-built celestial lighthouse and a star of some sort that is sending out pulses of radio waves is beyond me.  With nothing more to go on, by far the greater likelihood is that there is some natural explanation for this slowly-pulsing object -- we just haven't found it yet.

Even so, it's intriguing.  I've always loved a mystery, and this certainly is one.  It's possible that we've missed other objects of this type; the kind of detailed repeated scans of the sky in the radio region of the spectrum that it would take to detect a pulsation this slow have only begun to be done with any kind of thoroughness.  Like with Burnell's discovery of pulsars, it took finding others before astronomers had enough data to start putting together an explanation.

But if no others are found, what then?  It'll be added to the list of astronomical mysteries, of which there are plenty.  It's a big old universe, and filled with wonders, many of which we are only just beginning to understand.

And those are cool enough without the aliens.  Although, of course, I wouldn't object to the aliens as well.

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Pas de deux

Ever heard of Antichthon? 

Sometimes called "Counter-Earth," Antichthon is a hypothesized (now known to be nonexistent) planet in the same orbit as Earth, but on the other side of the Sun.  And, therefore, invisible to earthbound observers.  It was first proposed by the fourth century B.C.E. Greek philosopher Philolaus, who argued against the prevalent geocentric models of the day.  Philolaus thought that not only was there another planet on the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth, he believed that the Sun and all of the planets were orbiting around a "Central Fire" exerting an unseen influence at a distance.  Thus, more or less accidentally, landing something near the truth, as the entire Solar System does revolve around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

None of Philolaus's ideas, however, were based upon careful measurements and observations; another popular notion of his time was that celestial mechanics was supposed to be beautiful, and therefore you could arrive at the right answer just by thinking about what the most elegant possible model is.  (Nota bene: I took a class called Classical Mechanics in college, and what I experienced was not "beauty" and "elegance."  Mostly what it seemed like to me was "incredibly difficult math" and "intense frustration."  So honestly, maybe Philolaus was on to something.  If I could have gotten a better grade in Classical Mechanics by dreaming up pretty but untestable claims about planets we couldn't see even if we wanted to, I'd'a been all over it.)

Anyhow, Antichthon doesn't exist, which we now know for sure both because probes sent out into the Solar System don't see a planet opposite the Earth when they look back toward the Sun, and by arguments from the physics of orbiting bodies.  Kepler showed that the planets are in elliptical orbits, so even if Antichthon was out there, it wouldn't always be 180 degrees opposite to us, meaning that periodically it would peek out from behind the Sun and be visible to our telescopes.  Plus, an Earth-sized planet across from us would experience gravitational perturbations from Venus that would make its orbit unstable -- again, meaning it wouldn't stay put with the Sun in the way.

But there's no particular reason why there couldn't be two planets in the same orbit.  Way back in 1772, the brilliant astronomer and mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange found that there were stable points that small bodies could occupy, under the influence of two much larger orbiting objects (such as the Sun and the Earth).  There are, in fact, five such points, called "Lagrange points" in his honor:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xander89, Lagrange points simple, CC BY 3.0]

And you can see that L3 is actually directly across from the Earth -- so Philolaus was before his time.  (Once again, though, not because he'd done the mathematics, the way Lagrange did.  It was really nothing more than a shrewd guess.)  In fact, there are three points that could result in a stable configuration of two planets sharing an orbit -- L3, L4, and L5.

The reason all this comes up is that scientists at the Madrid Center for Astrobiology have found for the first time a possible candidate for this elusive configuration -- around a T-Tauri type star called PDS 70 in the constellation of Centaurus.  The pair of planets, which appear to be gas giants, one of them three times the size of Jupiter, take 119 Earth years to circle their parent star once.

"Planets in the same orbit have so far been like unicorns," said study co-author Jorge Lillo-Box.  "They are allowed to exist by theory, but no one has ever detected them."

The discovery is so unusual that -- understandably -- the scientists are hesitant to state too decisively that it's proven.  Their paper, which appeared in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, indicates that they will continue to gather data from the ESO (European Southern Observatory) and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile through 2026 to bolster their claim.

In any case, it's fascinating that a strange guess made 2,400 years ago by an obscure Greek philosopher, then shored up with rigorous mathematics by a French/Italian astronomer 250 years ago, has finally been shown to exist -- two planets locked in a celestial pas de deux, 370 light years away.  

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Drawing the line

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a YouTube video for my facepalming pleasure a couple of days ago, and being a generous sort, I wanted to share the experience will all of you.  The video is called "Nazca Lines Finally Solved!  The Answer is Amazing!", and is well worth watching in its entirety.  But if you understandably don't want to spend seven minutes of your life watching the video that you will never, ever get back, I'll provide you with a capsule summary and some editorial commentary from Yours Truly.

The Nazca Lines, you probably know, are a series of geoglyphs in southern Peru, which are large enough that their overall shape really can't be discerned except from the air.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The relative impossibility of seeing the pattern except from above has led to wingnuts such as Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods fame) to propose that they were made to signal aliens visiting Earth from other planets.  Why aliens would be impressed by our drawing a giant monkey on the ground, I have no idea.  It also bears mention that Nazca is hardly the only place in the world that has geoglyphs, and none of them have much to do with flying saucers.  There's the Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorsetshire, England, for example, who is really really glad to see you:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PeteHarlow, Cerne-abbas-giant-2001-cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Be that as it may, the guy in the video, one Damon T. Berry, thinks the Nazca lines are trying to tell us something.  What?  Well, he starts out with a bang by saying that "the universal language is constellations."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Given that the constellations are random assemblages of stars that would look completely different from another vantage point in space, it's hard to imagine anything "universal" about them except that they're, by default, part of the universe.

What Berry tells us then is that each of the glyphs has a code that points at a particular destination.  He starts with the glyph shaped like a bird, and then talks about birds representing flight (okay, I'm with you so far), and some of the glyphs being runways for flying machines (why the hell you'd make a runway shaped like a monkey, I have no idea), and then goes into a long part about how it's significant that the bird has four toes on one foot and five on the other.

"It is a bird," Berry says.  "It appears to be a bird.  But think like an alien.  Look closer at its feet."

I'm not sure why thinking like an alien involves looking at feet.  Maybe the aliens have some kind of weird foot fetish.  I dunno.

Anyhow, what does the fact of its having nine toes mean?  It means, Berry says, that "this is not a bird.  This is a constellation."  In fact, it's the constellation Aquila, a grouping of stars in the northern hemisphere which evidently looked like an eagle to some ancient Greeks who had just polished off their second bottle of ouzo.  The nine toes correspond to the nine brightest stars in the constellation, he says.

Then he moves on to another bird glyph, this one of a hummingbird.  Berry tells us in astonished tones that this bird has the same number of toes on each foot, as if that was an unusual condition or something.  He then says, and this is a direct quote: "The clue lies elsewhere... in the wings.  And the elongated wings are meant to draw your attention... to the wings."

I had to pause the video at this point to give myself a chance to stop guffawing.

We're then directed to count the feathers, and he comes up with eleven.  He includes the tail, but I'm not going to quibble about that because otherwise we'll be here all day.  He says that the number eleven can only mean one thing: the glyph points to the "constellation Columbia."

For the record, the constellation is actually Columba, not Columbia.  Cf. my comment about not quibbling.

The fact that Columba "has eleven stars" means there's an obvious correspondence.  Well, I have two things to say about that.

1. Do you really think that there's nothing else in the universe that is made up of eleven parts?
2. There are way more than eleven stars in Columba, it's just that the shape of the constellation (identified as a dove by the aforementioned ouzo-soaked Greeks) is generally outlined using the brightest eleven stars, just as Aquila was with the nine brightest as earlier described.

He then goes on to analyze the monkey glyph, and once again makes a big deal about the number of fingers and toes, which add to fifteen.  This points to the "constellation of the monkey," which he draws for us.  It's fortunate that he does, because as I do not need to point out to any astronomy buffs out there, there is no constellation of the monkey.  As far as I can tell, he just took some random dots and connected them with straight lines to look vaguely like a monkey.

Whether ouzo was involved, I don't know.

He finishes up by basically saying that aliens are out there and will be coming to visit us from those constellations.  At this point, I started shouting at my computer, "You can't be 'from a constellation!'  The stars in a constellation have nothing to do with one another!"  This caused my dog, Rosie, to come into my office and give me the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement, meant to communicate the one concept she's capable of hosting in her brain ("What?").  I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her, that I was mad at the silly man on YouTube, and she accepted that and toddled off to interact with something on her intellectual level, like a dust bunny.

Anyhow.  At the end we're told we can learn more if we just watch his longer and more in-depth production, available on Amazon Prime, but I don't think I'm gonna.  I've heard enough.  Me, I'll go back to trying to figure things out through science instead of pulling random correspondences out of my ass.  Call me narrow-minded, but it seems in general like a better way to understand the universe, even if it doesn't involve counting an animal's toes and acting like it means something significant.

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Smile, and the world smiles with you

In the menagerie of weird creatures from urban legends we have such entities as the Men in Black, Slender Man, the Black-eyed Children, not to mention older creatures of the night such as the Evil Serial Killer With A Hook For A Hand that has been scaring the absolute shit out of kids around campfires for generations.

I just ran into a new member of the zoo yesterday, thanks to crypto-maven Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe.  Called "Grinning Man," he's a tall guy in an old-fashioned suit and fedora, with a creepy smile on his face.  His skin is supposedly "plastic-like," so believers think he's only masquerading as a human.  Redfern says he's an operative of the Men in Black; me, I'm thinking more of The Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

But Grinning Man isn't followed around by guys with long, flailing arms who rip your ribcage open and steal your heart.  Apparently, Grinning Man just kind of stands there... grinning.  Thus the name.  Redfern tells the tale of a California family who saw a UFO while out driving, and the following day had a visitor.  He writes:

It was while one of the teenage children was sat [sic] on the porch and playing music that she caught sight of a man on the other side of the road.  He was dressed completely in black, aside from a white shirt.  He even wore black gloves, on what was a bright, summer day.  The girl was particularly disturbed by the fact that the man sported a weird grin and was staring right at her.  So unsettled was she that she went back into the home and told her father of what had just happened.  He quickly went to the door but – no surprise – the smiling MIB was gone.

John Keel, of "Mothman" fame, describes another encounter, this one near Point Pleasant, West Virginia (home of the original Mothman story):

[A] sewing machine salesman claims to have been stopped on a highway by a strange looking automobile.  A man appeared from a hatch on the side of the vehicle, and a tall, bald man wearing a blue metallic suit approached the man.  He could see the "man" had "slightly elongated" eyes and a demented grin that could be seen glinting in the cars headlights.  The grinning man identified himself as Indrid Cold, and the two had a bizarre telepathic conversation before the entity left, saying they would see each other again.

"Indrid Cold," eh?  A cousin of Mr. Freeze, perhaps?

Now that I think of it, the resemblance is pretty striking.

But unlike Mr. Freeze, "Indrid Cold" was a true alien, Keel said:

The salesman, Woodrow Derenberger, would go on to claim that Indrid Cold would visit him, and would reveal that he was an alien from a planet called Lanulos, situated in another galaxy.  Derenberger claimed to have visited Cold on his homeworld, and met many other beings like Indrid Cold in his travels.  He would write a book about his experiences, but would lose his job, his wife and some say his sanity in the years after, dying in 1990, some saying his obsession with his grinning friend cost him his life.

So that's kind of unfortunate.

Once again, we have the common thread that Grinning Man doesn't seem to do anything.  He doesn't freeze people, he doesn't abduct their children (like Slender Man), he doesn't threaten to kill them if they talk to the authorities (like the Men in Black), etc.  So as extraterrestrial villains go, he's pretty lame, although I have to say in all honesty that if I looked out of my window at night and saw a creepy, pasty-faced guy in a fedora grinning back at me, I'd probably have an aneurysm, so I guess that counts for something, evil-wise.

Anyhow, that's latest member of the Pantheon of Creepiness.  As I've mentioned before, it's kind of amazing that given how long I've been writing Skeptophilia (twelve years as of last November), I still run into weird beliefs I'd never heard of before.  I still think for pure terror, you can't beat the Black-eyed Children, which is why I wrote a trilogy of novels based on the legend (Lines of Sight, Whistling in the Dark, and Fear No Colors).  Whether I did the Children justice is up to you to decide.

But maybe I'm thinking about this wrong.  Maybe Grinning Man is grinning because he is planning something he hasn't carried out yet.  If so, he'd better get at it, because Derenberger's encounter with "Indrid Cold" happened back in the 1960s.  If he wants people to keep being scared of him, he probably should wipe the silly smile off his face and get on with it.

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Start your day with kindness

When I was in my twenties, my parents got into watching the television series Cops.

Me, I never could see the draw.  The plot was the same every time:

• Bad guys do bad stuff.
• Cops get involved.
• Bad guys get arrested or shot.  Or both.
• Repeat x100.

I like my entertainment to have a few more in the way of unexpected twists.  But that's just me, apparently.

Anyhow, there came a point that Cops went into syndication, and on one station, it played every single night.  And my parents had it on.

Every single night.

At this point, I should explain that my parents, especially my mother, had a tremendous suspicion of the unknown.  If there's a word that means the opposite of "adventurous," that was my mom.  As an example, when I made my first trip overseas -- a one-month cross-country hike of England, from Blackpool to Whitby -- her last words to me on the night before I left were, "Don't trust anyone."

I know about correlation not implying causation and all, but I can't help but wonder how much her view of the world as a scary, unsafe place was reinforced by watching a television show that every single night showed the worst of humanity.  I'm guessing the causation probably went both ways -- she gravitated toward the series because she already had that attitude, and the series acted to reinforce the attitude, and round and round it went.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom, 101 Non-Emergency Number - Cops and Robbers (8264612462), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Whatever the cause, her lack of comprehension of how I could possibly want to travel to Dangerous Foreign Countries Inhabited By Dangerous Foreign People (like the English, for fuck's sake) only got worse as she got older.  When we took our first trip to Ecuador back in 2001, not only going to (gasp!) South America, but (1) doing so three months after 9/11, and (2) bringing along both of our sons, at that point ages 11 and 13, she was aghast, but at least knew by then that it'd be futile to try to talk me out of it.

This all comes up because of a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology called, "Rude-Colored Glasses: The Contaminating Effects of Witnessed Morning Rudeness on Perceptions and Behaviors Throughout the Workday."  While on first glance, the study may not seem to have much to do with an overall perception of the world as dangerous, the two are connected.  The study shows pretty clearly that the behavior we are exposed to (or expose ourselves to) colors how we see everything -- and that the effect can last far beyond the time immediately after the incident in question.  The authors write:

Using an experimental experience sampling design, we investigate how witnessing morning rudeness influences workers’ subsequent perceptions and behaviors throughout the workday.  We posit that a single exposure to rudeness in the morning can contaminate employees’ perceptions of subsequent social interactions leading them to perceive greater workplace rudeness throughout their workday.  We expect that these contaminated perceptions will have important ramifications for employees’ work behaviors.  In a 10-day study of 81 professional and managerial employees, we find that witnessed morning rudeness leads to greater perceptions of workplace rudeness throughout the workday and that those perceptions, in turn, predict lower task performance and goal progress and greater interaction avoidance and psychological withdrawal.

I can vouch for this from my own personal experience.  When the first thing I'm faced with in the morning is a news story about how horrible people are, or -- worse -- someone online being awful to me or to a friend, I'm set up to be grouchy and irritable for the rest of the day.

However. I've found that the reverse is also true.  When I'm in a sour mood and something unexpectedly good happens, my frame of mind can flip just as quickly.  All of which is yet another indication that we should strive to be as polite and kind as we can; you never know whose life you may be touching.

And I think the same thing applies more globally to the people, media, and general context we're exposed to every day.  If you allow yourself to be constantly bombarded by rudeness, negativity, and bad news, it's kind of inevitable that you'll eventually get swallowed up by it.

I'm not trying to turn us into some modern-day version of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide -- smiling blandly and chanting, "Everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  We shouldn't blind ourselves to the ills of society.  (Witness yesterday's post about the urgency with which we should be addressing climate change.)  But this is no excuse for meanness and cynicism.  Looking at the world honestly, and keeping in mind that the vast majority of people are kind, compassionate, and friendly, are equally important.  You certainly aren't going to do yourself or the world any favors by allowing yourself to be driven to the conclusion that humanity is irredeemably evil.

As author Ken Keyes put it, "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

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