Rose-colored glass

My wife, Carol Bloomgarden, is an amazing artist, and participates in art shows all over the northeastern United States.  (Her work is called micrography -- it's drawings made from patterns of tiny handwritten text.  You can, and should, check it out at her website.)  Because showing framed art work requires moving lots of stuff around -- not only the work itself, but the canopies, frames, and stands on which to display it -- I frequently accompany her to her shows.

My usefulness is best summed up in a line from a t-shirt a student of mine used to wear: "I May Not Be Very Smart, But I Can Lift Heavy Objects."

In any case, in between setup and breakdown, I usually have lots of time to wander around the show and see what the other artists are selling.  Last year, one of the booths belonged to a very talented jeweler who made jewelry out of (amongst other things) fragments of Roman glass.

Carol hinted at me that she loved this jeweler's work, so for her birthday I got her a necklace and matching set of earrings made from chunks of turquoise-colored glass dating to about 300 C.E.

The Romans were outstanding glassmakers, and a lot of their work survives (unfortunately, much of it in fragmentary form).  And one curious thing about a lot of Roman glass is that it has a patina -- an iridescent sheen on the surface, sometimes refracting light and creating a metallic or rainbow appearance.  There is nothing in the existing writing from that era indicating that those effects were created deliberately; it seemed to be some sort of byproduct of the aging of the piece.

Fourth century C.E. Roman glass from a glassworks in Syria, showing the gold patina over pale green glass [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of its creator, Marie-Lan Nguyen]

Researchers in materials science at Tufts University became curious about how these coatings were produced, and did microscopic analysis of the surfaces of pieces of Roman glass.  They came to a surprising conclusion; the gold, silver, or rainbow-colored coatings were (1) naturally produced after the pieces were buried, and (2) were photonic crystals -- regular, periodic microlayers of precisely-arranged molecules, of the same sort used in semiconductors and solar cells, which have the effect of generating light interference and an opalescent or iridescent appearance.

It turns out that the interaction between the glass surface, rainwater, and the minerals in the soil results in a very slow, orderly deposition of thin films on the artifact's surface, and in two thousand or so years, you have something truly spectacular.  "It's really remarkable that you have glass that is sitting in the mud for two millennia and you end up with something that is a textbook example of a nanophotonic component," said Fiorenzo Omenetto, who co-authored the study.  "While the age of the glass may be part of its charm, in this case if we could significantly accelerate the process in the laboratory we might find a way to grow optic materials rather than manufacture them."

"This is likely a process of corrosion and reconstruction," said Giulia Guidetti, also a co-author.  "The surrounding clay and rain determined the diffusion of minerals and a cyclical corrosion of the silica in the glass.  At the same time, assembly of 100 nanometer-thick layers combining the silica and minerals also occurred in cycles.  The result is an incredibly ordered arrangement of hundreds of layers of crystalline material... [so] the crystals grown on the surface of the glass are also a reflection of the changes in conditions that occurred in the ground as the city evolved -- a record of its environmental history."

So here we have another example of the kind of fascinating crossover you see in the very best science -- in this case, between materials science and archaeology.  With possible applications to engineering.  

I know I'll think about this study every time Carol wears her Roman glass jewelry.  

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Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, almost thirteen years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.  Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a post at the website Crystal Life gives us the answer.

Entitled "A Visit With the Nature Spirits," the author admits that pareidolia does occur:

How do you see nature spirits in trees?  You use pareidolia, a faculty of the mind that enables you to see patterns in objects where none supposedly exist.  It’s how we see faces and shapes and animals in water, rocks, and tree trunks.  Conventional psychology regards this faculty as pure imagination, but if it is used in a certain way, it can open you up to subtler realities of which conventional psychology is unaware.

Okay, so far so good.  So how do we tell the difference between imagining a face (which surely we all do from time to time), and seeing a face because there's a "nature spirit" present?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there.  She gives an example:

“Trees like to express their environment,” she [a like-minded person she was talking with] observes, and so create forms, such as burls, in their bark to reflect what they experience.  I could see the figures she described, although my immediate impression had been that of an energy like that of an octopus.  Atala explained that various people will see different images and aspects of the trees’ energy.  Overall her experiences of the nature spirit were more visual (she took many photographs), while mine were more kinesthetic.  It’s possible that with the pine tree, I was simply picking up certain tendrils of energy that it was extending toward me.

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding her correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Nature Spirit turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a Nature Spirit -- it's just that the Spirit used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the link, if you haven't already done so, it includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that she took, and that are at least mildly entertaining, including one of a guy "coming into rapport" with a tree.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lauren raine, Greenman mask with eyes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  It's akin to a ghost hunter saying, "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  Here's how the main character, the enigmatic Mrs. Miller, describes it:

"For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" Mrs Miller said.  "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me.  It can thrust itself forward.  It makes me see it.  It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on Crystal Life gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and the paranormal define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day, but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.

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The legacy of the seafarers

One of the (many) things I find fascinating about science is how often research involves crossing the boundaries between disciplines.  Ideas from one realm cross-fertilize with ideas from somewhere else, and the result is often unexpected and eye-opening.

Of course, to be honest, a lot of those boundaries are artificial constructs in the first place.  I run into this all the time as a book sorter for our local Friends of the Library used book sale.  Is a donated book anthropology?  Or sociology?  Or gender studies?  You can probably think of examples of books that could plausibly go in any of the three.  The same is true for a lot of books and scholarly papers.  Many of them -- often some of the best ones -- represent a drawing together of ideas from disparate sources, and blending them together to get something fresh and new.

The reason this comes up is because of a study sent to me by a friend and frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia, that combines genetics, linguistics, and archaeology.  Led by Andrés Moreno-Estrada of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity in Guanajuato, Mexico, the team used genomic studies, patterns of languages, stone building techniques, and even such things as the distribution of certain food crops (like sweet potatoes) across the Pacific to reconstruct the movements of the extraordinary explorers who settled those islands centuries ago.

I mean the "extraordinary" part quite literally.  What these people did is almost unimaginable.  The Pacific is enormous.  The islands of Polynesia are widely-spaced specks of land, some only a few square kilometers in area, separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometers of open ocean.  In nothing more than hand-built wooden canoes, these people launched out into the sea, somehow using natural phenomena (like patterns of clouds and the movements of seabirds) to find their way from one island to the next.  How many of them died trying is unknown and unknowable; but that any succeeded is astonishing.  And enough did succeed that one at a time, they settled all the habitable islands between Samoa and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) -- a distance of 6,600 kilometers.

I don't know about you, but I can't even begin to imagine what kind of incentive it would take for me to jump into an open canoe, leave behind home and family, and try to paddle my way to a hoped-for speck of land five hundred kilometers away.  I've done a lot of traveling, including to some pretty exotic places, but that'd be a big old nope for me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Eccles (Gringer, Polynesian Migration, CC BY 4.0]

The team used not only genetic evidence from current residents of the islands, but archaeological evidence -- especially the habit of the Polynesians of building stone monoliths.  The most famous ones are the giant stone heads on Rapa Nui, but the Polynesian culture took this art form wherever they went.  Monolithic human statues are found all across the Pacific, and even in the ones on the distant Marquesas Islands, you can see the connection with the iconic moai.

What's coolest is that the pattern of the linguistic evolution and the map of the genetic relatedness between the people on the islands of Polynesia line up pretty much perfectly.  Put more simply, more closely-related people speak more closely-related languages, and therefore both the languages and the people who speak them diverged from a more recent common ancestor.  The alignment of the genetic and linguistic studies supports the usefulness of both for determining patterns of migration -- and clearly could be applied to studying the history of other cultural groups.

Anyhow, the whole thing is pretty amazing, and a great example of what happens when you have creative hybridization between research in different fields.  A fascinating study of the legacy of the fearless seafarers of Polynesia who set off into an uncharted ocean -- and ended up colonizing islands all the way across the Pacific.

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A whole lot of nothing

Anybody have any ideas about what this is?

I've shown a bunch of people, and I've gotten answers from an electron micrograph of a sponge to a close-up of a block of ramen to the electric circuit diagram of the Borg Cube.  But the truth is almost as astonishing:

It's a map of the fine structure of the entire known universe.

Most everyone knows that the stars are clustered into galaxies, and that there are huge spaces in between one star and the next, but far bigger ones between one galaxy and the next.  Even the original Star Trek got that right, despite their playing fast and loose with physics every episode.  (Notwithstanding Scotty's continual insistence that you canna change the laws thereof.)  There was an episode called "By Any Other Name" in which some evil aliens hijack the Enterprise so it will bring them back to their home in the Andromeda Galaxy, a trip that will take three hundred years at Warp Factor 10.  (And it's mentioned that even that is way faster than a Federation starship could ordinarily go.)

So the intergalactic spaces are so huge that they're a bit beyond our imagining.  But if you really want to have your mind blown, consider that the filaments of the above diagram are not streamers of stars but streamers of galaxies.  Billions of them.  On the scale shown above, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are so close as to be right on top of each other.

What is kind of fascinating about this diagram -- which, by the way, is courtesy of NASA/JPL -- is not the filaments, but the spaces in between them.  These "voids" are ridiculously huge.  The best-studied is the Boötes Void, which is centered seven hundred million light years away from us.  It is so big that if the Earth were at the center of it, we wouldn't have had telescopes powerful enough to see the next nearest stars until the 1960s, and the skies every night would be a uniform pitch black.

That, my friends, is a whole lot of nothing.

What I find most mind-bending about the whole thing, and in fact what sent me down this particular (extremely deep) rabbit hole this morning, is that the location of the filaments is thought to reflect quantum fluctuations in the matter immediately after the Big Bang, when the whole universe was only a fraction of a centimeter across.  As inflation took over and the universe expanded, those tiny anisotropies -- unevenness in the composition of space -- were magnified until you have filaments which are densely filled and gaps where there is almost nothing at all, and the universe resembles a Swiss cheese made of stars.

Of course, I'm using "densely filled" in a comparative sense.  The cold vacuum of space between the Sun and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, really doesn't have much in it.  Dust, comets, possibly a rogue planet or two.  But even this is jam-packed by comparison to the Boötes Void and the others like it, wherein it is thought there are light-years of space without so much as a single hydrogen atom.

All of which makes me feel awfully small.  Our determination to act as if what happens down here is of cosmic import is shaken substantially by looking up into the night sky.  It's smashed to smithereens by considering the scale of the largest structures in the universe, which are threads of billions of stars making up a latticework -- and between which there is nothing but eternal silence and such profound darkness that it contains not even a single star close enough to see.

I don't know about you, but that makes me want to climb back under the covers and hug my teddy bear for a while.

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Room for exploration

As a followup to yesterday's post, about my generally dubious take on the claim of a Mexican scientist that he'd discovered fossilized alien bodies, today we're going to look at why we haven't run across aliens yet.  As big as the universe is, it seems like we should have heard from someone by now.  What are we, a bad neighborhood, or something?  Do the aliens go zooming by the Earth, making sure their windows are rolled up and their doors are locked?

I mean, Elon Musk alone would be justification for their doing so, but it's still kind of disappointing.

I've discussed the Fermi Paradox here at Skeptophilia before -- and the cheerful idea of the Great Filter as the reason why we haven't heard from alien life.  As I explained in a post a while back, the explanation boils down to three possibilities, nicknamed the "Three Fs."

We're first, we're fortunate, or we're fucked.

Being an aficionado of all things extraterrestrial, that has never sat well with me.  The idea that we might be all alone in the universe -- for any of the three Fs -- is just not a happy answer.  

Yes, I know, I always say that the universe is under no obligation to act in such a way as to make me happy.  But still.  C'mon... Vulcans?  Time Lords?  Ewoks?  G'gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs?  There's got to be something cool out there.  With luck, lots of cool things.  The Dentrassi, the Ood, Quantum Weather Butterflies, the Skithra, Andorians, the Vashta Nerada...

Okay, maybe not the Vashta Nerada.  But my point stands.

The Andromeda Galaxy [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Adam Evans, Andromeda Galaxy (with h-alpha), CC BY 2.0]

So I was considerably cheered yesterday when I ran into a study out of Pennsylvania State University that attempted to estimate what fraction of the universe we actually have surveyed in any kind of thorough fashion.  The authors, Jason Wright, Shubham Kanodia, and Emily G. Lubar, write:

Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found.  Tarter et al. (2010) and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans.  Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined.  Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. (2010) haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans.  With this article we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries.  We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.

The actual analogy Wright and his colleagues used is that saying our current surveys show there's no intelligent life in the universe (except for here, which itself seems debatable some days) is comparable to surveying 7,700 liters of seawater out of the total 1.335 billion trillion liters in the world's oceans.

So basing a firm conclusion on this amount of data is kind of ridiculous.  There could be intelligent alien species out there yelling, "Hey! Earthlings!  Over here!  We're over here!", and all we would have to do is have our radio telescopes pointed a couple of degrees off, or tuned to a different wavelength, and we'd never know it.

Which is pretty cool.  Given the fact that my all-time favorite movie is Contact, I'm hoping like hell that people don't read Wright et al.'s paper and conclude we should give up SETI because it's hopeless to make a thorough survey.  When I think about what poor Ellie Arroway went through trying to convince her fellow scientists that her research was valid and deserved funding... yecch.  And if anything, the current attitudes of the government toward pure research are, if anything, worse than those depicted in the movie.

But despite all that, it's awe-inspiring to know we've got so much room to explore.  Basically... the entire universe.  So my dream when I was a kid, sitting out in my parents' yard with my little telescope, that as I looked at the stars there was some little alien boy in his parents' yard looking back at me through his telescope, may one day prove to be within hailing distance of reality.

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The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

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Rapture redux

If it hadn't been for a sharp-eyed loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I might well have missed the fact that the Rapture is going to happen next Tuesday.  Which would have sucked.  I hate it when the world ends and I only find out afterward.

Because, of course, the Day of Doom is very likely to come and go without fanfare, which is what's happened the previous 5,382,913 times they've predicted the Rapture or Armageddon or the Rise of the Antichrist or the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers, or various other cheerful scenarios dreamed up for our edification by the God of Love.  Each time, I pop my popcorn, open a bottle of beer, get out my lawn chair...

... and nothing happens.

[Image courtesy of Pat Marvenko Smith via Flickr Creative Commons]

It's a pity, honestly.  I live in rural upstate New York, where if you are waiting for something exciting to happen, you're going to have a long wait.  Yesterday the news around here was dominated by the fact that the main highway through this area is going to be closed for a time for repaving, requiring a detour that will mean we are no longer in the Middle of Nowhere, we're in the Middle of Nowhere + two or three extra miles.  So I can say with some confidence that for most upstaters, if the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns showed up, we'd be thrilled to have something to alleviate the boredom.

Which brings up a question I've always wondered about, ever since I was a kid and first stumbled upon the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation; why would the Beast have three more crowns than he has heads?  To me, the crown-to-head ratio is most logically one-to-one.  Does he trade out crowns from day to day, and as he's getting ready for another busy day of terrorizing the populace, he stands there staring into his closet trying to pick out which ones he's going to wear?  Or does he have two crowns on three of his heads, and only one on the rest?  That's the way I recall picturing it, and it bothered the absolute hell out of me, because it seemed arbitrary and asymmetrical, and as a kid I was just the slightest bit tightly wound.  It was only later that I realized that I wasn't supposed to like the Beast, and if something about him grated on my nerves, that was probably all part of the Infernal Plan.

But I digress.

Anyhow, this time around, the Rapture has been predicted by a self-styled YouTube prophet who goes by the handle Generation2423.  He certainly seems sincere enough, but then, they all do, don't they?  Rapture prediction has been a game among that particular slice of the devout for centuries.  Generation2423, though, isn't generating the buzz that (for example) Harold Camping did, back in 2011.  Camping publicized the incipient End of the World so much he got a ton of people to do stuff like sell all their worldly goods and quit their jobs.  Then -- as it always does -- the day came and went, and everyone just went on loping about the place un-Raptured, doing their thing.  Undaunted, he rescheduled the Rapture for six months later, and that day too passed without any calamities.  Camping finally died two years afterward, disappointed to the last that he never got to enjoy seeing the Star Wormwood fall upon the rivers and lakes, and cause everyone who drinketh of the water to die in horrible agony.

Oh, what fun that would have been for him.

What's wryly amusing about all this is that the evangelicals who shriek the most loudly about the End Times are the same ones who claim to follow a man who is supposed to "come like a thief in the night" and who said "no one knoweth the day or the hour."  (Matthew 24:42-44)  The result is that they have about the same stealthiness level as these guys:

On the other hand, I have to admit that this time around, the lead-up to the big day has been a lot more subdued than usual.  Like I said, I damn near missed it.  Once alerted to what's coming, though, I did find a good bit about it online, especially on Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, and I did see a few people who found Generation2423's prediction genuinely scary.  One poor woman on TikTok said she was so terrified she felt nauseated, and was devastated she'd never get to see her kids grow up.  And I have to admit I felt a little sorry for her.

On the other hand, what always baffles me is the reaction of people like this after the prediction fails to pan out.  Because in a sane world, you'd think the True Believers would go, "Oh, what goobers we were to fall for such a ridiculous claim!  I shall learn some critical thinking skills right now!"  But that never happens.  Regular readers might recall that earlier this year, I wrote about the classic study done by psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, who back in 1954 infiltrated a doomsday cult.  When the predicted Day of Reckoning came, the cult members assembled in the home of the leader, praying like mad for fortitude to face the upcoming cataclysm.  At around 11:30 PM, the leader -- presumably concerned by the fact that all was quiet -- went into a back room, alone, to pray.  Then he came out just before midnight to announce the amazing news: God had told him he was rewarding their faithfulness and prayers by postponing the end of the world!

And there was much rejoicing.  Contrary to what you might expect, the result was that the cult members' belief became more fervent, because after all, how else could you explain the fact that their prayers had been granted?  Further illustrating the truth of the quote from Jonathan Swift: "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into."

In any case, if you have plans for next Wednesday, I wouldn't worry about it.  Myself, I don't have any plans, but that's because I never do.  Assuming I'm still here Wednesday morning, I'm thinking I might head on down to Route 96 and see how the repaving is going.  That's about all the excitement I can handle.

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