The strange tale of Christopher Round

When I was maybe twelve years old, the highlight of school was getting the monthly Scholastic Books sale flier.

It had dozens of books, at prices that seem ridiculous by today's standards -- on the order of $0.99 for a paperback.  Even back then, I loved scary stories, and it's through Scholastic that I got my first copies of collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.

Back then, in 1972, I saw a book in one month's flier I just had to get. It was called Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt. J. Hurwood, and at that point was a new release.  When it arrived a few weeks later, I read it eagerly, simultaneously scaring the absolute shit out of myself and running for the first time into such classic tales as the canine ghosts of Ballechin House, the screaming skulls of Calgarth, and the weirdly open-ended story of Nurse Black.

There was one story in the collection, though, that struck me as more sad than frightening.  It was titled "The Tragic Ghost of Cambridge University," and made enough of an impression that when I bumped into a reference to it yesterday on a website called "Ghosts that Haunt Seven Cambridge Colleges and the Stories Behind Them," I recognized it immediately -- and went to dig up my copy of Haunted Houses (yes, I still have it) that I hadn't looked at for something like thirty years or more.

It tells the tale of an academic fellow named Christopher Round, who was pursuing a degree in classics at Christ's College.  He was brilliant but shy, one of those sorts whom you barely notice until he says something, and then it turns out to be perceptive and interesting, much to your surprise.  This was why his classmate Philip Collier -- similar to Round in intellect, but outgoing, genial, and strikingly handsome -- outshone Round in just about every way you can imagine.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The wub, Christ's College, Cambridge - First Court 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

No one else in their class was even close to the same caliber, but when it came to a competition, Round always came in second.  Even after graduation (both with honors -- but guess who got first place?), the rivalry continued, because both of them were accepted as Fellows of Christ's College.

Both applied for a professorship in Greek.  Once again, Collier won, and Round was forgotten.

All through this, their interactions were at least superficially friendly.  Round wasn't the combative type in any case, and it's doubtful that Collier even realized the damage he was doing.  From the outside, it looked like a perfectly ordinary relationship -- outgoing guy and his quiet, second-fiddle sidekick.

The final straw came when Round fell in love with a woman named Mary Clifford.  Mary was high society, and beautiful, and for a time it looked like things were at last going to turn in poor Christopher Round's favor.  But fate had other plans in store.  Mary's parents took her on a trip to Italy, and while traveling she bumped into a fellow Brit who was on holiday...

... Philip Collier.

When she returned, she reluctantly told Christopher Round that she'd fallen madly in love with his rival, and in fact, had accepted a proposal of marriage.  Round was devastated, but his habit of making light of his anger and jealousy once again triumphed.  He forced a smile and wished Mary well.  Relieved that he'd taken it so easily, Mary went her way, feeling like disaster had been averted.

But only a few weeks later, Round was walking back to his flat past the Fellows' Swimming Pool when he heard a noise.  Coming from the other direction was Philip Collier -- staggering drunk.  As he watched, Collier stumbled and fell in.  Although a good swimmer while sober, Collier was flailing, and reflexively Round looked for some way to help him.  There was a long wooden pole with a hook on the end lying along the hedge, used for catching things out or pushing them along the surface of the pool, and he picked it up, intending to hook Collier's clothing and help him out.

Then he thought, "Why should I do this?"  And before he could stop himself, he struck Philip Collier in the temple with the hook, and watched as his rival sank beneath the water and drowned.

Round expected to shine now that the man who had eclipsed him his entire adult life was dead, but it didn't happen.  Instead, he was consumed with remorse.  Mary Clifford, for her part, didn't go running back to him; it's uncertain if she was so sunk in grief herself that she couldn't think of romance, or if she perhaps suspected Round's role in Collier's death.  No legal investigation was ever launched.  Collier's death was ruled as accidental, so there was no worry about a hangman's noose looming in the future.

But Christopher Round was never to be the same.  He threw himself into academics, but even without Collier there to outshine him, he was unable to stand out.  He lived the rest of his life in obscurity, and his role in his rival's death only became known because he wrote out a full confession, with instructions that it was only to be unsealed fifty years after his death.

But his sad, remorseful ghost still haunts Christ's College, especially the grassy lawn by the swimming pool where Philip Collier died.  To this day, students see his stoop-shouldered figure at night, dressed in nineteenth-century garb, walking heavily along the pool, and finally disappearing without trace behind the yew hedge.

Good story, isn't it?  It's a staple in the "true tales of hauntings in Britain" books and websites, often alongside the more famous tales I alluded to at the beginning of this.

But there's just one thing more you might want to know.

It's fiction.

I'm not saying this because I'm being my usual snarky, skeptical self.  The tale of Christopher Round and Philip Collier is the subject of a novel called A College Mystery by Alfred Ponsford Baker, published in 1918, and there is no indication anywhere in the book that Baker thought it was a true story.  Worse still, for those who want it to be real, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a mention of the story anywhere before the publication of Baker's book.  And a thorough scouring of Christ's College records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows no one named Christopher Round or Philip Collier, not only as Fellows (which surely would have been recorded -- especially Collier, who supposedly was appointed as Professor of Greek) but even as students.

So what is conveniently left out of the account in Hurwood's Haunted Houses -- and just about every other recounting of the story of Christopher Round -- is that the whole thing comes from a work of fiction.

It's funny how the urban legend tendency works, isn't it?  Something that might have started as an up-front made-up story that no one really takes seriously grows through accretion and somehow gains the veneer of veracity.  And once that happens -- once it's told somewhere as a True Tale of the Supernatural -- few people even think to check into the story's antecedents and see if it holds any water.

Just as well.  Christopher Round's sad, ill-fated, and ultimately tortured life is better off as a fictional tale, and even the murder victim Collier doesn't come off as very praiseworthy.  Makes a good story, though -- even if the whole thing seems to have sprung from the mind of a British novelist.

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Hold on a moment

A couple of days ago I was in one of those First World Problems situations that is nonetheless extremely annoying: I was stuck on hold.

In this case, I was trying to get through to my auto dealer's service department, which was Experiencing Higher Than Average Call Volume.  It always is, even though any statistician could explain why that's impossible.  Anyhow, after being assured that My Call Is Extremely Important To Them, I was treated to twenty minutes of on-hold music.

It'd be one thing if it'd been some light classical music, or even smooth jazz, although the latter is really not my thing.  The on-hold music my auto dealership chose was some sort of weird electronica that sounded like a robot getting a blowjob from a dial-up modem.  There were random beeps and boops that were at least vaguely melodic, but it was accompanied by a synthesized percussion track that did nothing but go SHWACK-SHWACK-SHWACK over and over and over.

Presumably this is meant to be entertaining to the on-hold person.  Me, I wanted to throw the phone across the room.  On the other hand, if I'm being completely honest, I have that reaction to telephones in general.  If I were to rank my preferred means of long-distance communication, in order, they would be:

1. email
2. text
3. direct message on social media
4. literally every other form of communication ever invented, including carrier pigeon and Pony Express
5. telephone

I have a Pavlovian response to the telephone ringing.  However, unlike Pavlov's dogs, when the bell rings I don't salivate, I swear loudly.

But I digress.

The phenomenon of on-hold music has been the subject of a good bit of research.  It's been around for a while; it was the brainchild of one Alfred Levy, who back in 1966 discovered it more or less accidentally when the telephones in the factory he owned started picking up a broadcast from the radio station next door, and customers on hold mentioned how nice it was not to have to wait in silence.  (He patented the idea, and here we are.)  In 2002, a study by Guéguen et al. found that music triggered people to underestimate the actual time they'd spent on hold.  Presumably this is an indication that the on-hold person found the experience more pleasant than waiting in silence would have been.  

This generates a problem, though; musical tastes vary dramatically.  So how do you decide what to treat your on-hold customers to?  A person who prefers Chopin preludes might not appreciate being forced to listen to "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.

(Personally, I'd like either one.  I have ridiculously eclectic tastes in music.  When I put my iTunes on shuffle, it can cause musical whiplash as it goes from Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach cello sonata directly into Linkin Park.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Parkinson, Man speaking on mobile phone, CC BY 2.0]

The solution was to use what the industry has nicknamed "beige music" -- tracks that are bland and inoffensive.  In a classic example of aiming for the middle and missing everybody, the unfortunate result is that by offending no one, it annoys the fuck out of just about everyone.  (Seriously; is there anyone out there who actually likes on-hold music?)  There's also the problem that music licensing fees are expensive, so rather than paying for music that's at least reasonably pleasant, many businesses go for the cheapest option, like one local place that simply cycles through the same eight bars of monotony for as long as you're on hold, only pausing periodically to remind you that Your Call Is Still Very Important To Us, No Stop Rolling Your Eyes Really We're Serious It Is.

Me, I'd vastly prefer silence to "beige music."  If I want to listen to music when I'm on hold, I can pull up iTunes and make my own choices.  Despite the research, I am always in a significantly worse mood after being subjected to a half-hour of Yanni or Kenny G than I would be simply left to my own thoughts.  After all, if I'm on hold, I know I'm going to be waiting for the Next Available Customer Representative; that's kind of the point.  Having to wait for the NACR, and simultaneously being forced to listen to music I hate, doubles the unpleasantness.

Maybe I'm unusual in this respect, I dunno.  If you believe Guéguen et al., there must be at least a few people who prefer on-hold music over silence.  It's possible that since I detest telephones anyhow, for me there's nothing that would improve the experience short of ending it sooner.  But unfortunately, on-hold music is here to stay, so I guess I'll have to continue putting up with nondescript smooth jazz, looped monotony, and the soundtrack to robot porn.

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Internet expertise

What is it with people trusting random laypeople over experts?

Okay, yeah, I know experts can be wrong, and credentials are not an unshakable guarantee that the person in question knows what they're talking about.  But still.  Why is it so hard to accept that an actual scientist, who has a Ph.D. in the field and has done real research, in general will know more about the topic than some dude on the internet?

The topic comes up because of a conversation I had with my athletic trainer yesterday.  He is pretty knowledgeable about all things fitness-related -- so while he's not a researcher or a scientist (something he'd tell you up front), he's certainly Better Than The Average Bear.  And he ran into an especially ridiculous example of the aforementioned phenomenon, which he was itching to show me as soon as I got there.

Without further ado, we have: the woman who thinks that the amino acid L-glutamine is so named because it is important for developing your glutes:

And of course, it must be right because she heard it from "the TikTok Fitness Girls, and they don't lie."

The whole thing reminds me of something I heard every damn year from students, which is that the ingredient sodium erythorbate in hotdogs and other processed meat products is made from ground-up earthworms, because "earthworm" and "erythorbate" sound a little bit alike.  (Actually, sodium erythorbate is an antioxidant that is chemically related to vitamin C, and is added to meat products as a preservative and antibacterial agent.)

But to return to the broader point, why is it so hard to accept that people who have studied a subject actually... know a lot about the subject?  Instead, people trust shit like:

• Noted scientific researcher Gwyneth Paltrow recommending coffee consumption... which she wants to administer by squirting it up your ass.
• Another noted scientific researcher, Kim Kardashian, suggesting combating wrinkles and other visible signs of aging by withdrawing blood from your arm and injecting it under the skin on your face.
• A claim that chemotherapy actually causes cancer.
• A person who recommends using crystals to treat illness in dogs.
• Selling people charcoal-based "detoxifying juice cleanses" -- which have the unfortunate side-effect of absorbing important substances you may have ingested, like vitamins, minerals, and medications.
• A belief that you'll die if you eat more than seven bananas in a day, which started out as a joke told in an interview by British comedian Karl Pilkington that then got out way of hand.
• "Ear candling," which is sticking a lit candle in your ear in an attempt to suck out the earwax.  There are two confirmed cases of people falling asleep while ear candling and setting their houses on fire, and dozens of people who've ended up in the emergency room after dripping hot wax down their ear canals.
• The practice of "perineum sunning," which unfortunately is just what it sounds like.  You take off all your clothes and expose your butthole to direct sunlight, which is supposed to rotate the tires on your energy meridians or something, but in actuality risks a sunburn that I'd rather not even think about.

And I feel obliged to make my usual disclaimer that I am not making any of the above up.

I wonder how much of this attitude, especially here in the United States, comes from the egalitarian mindset being misapplied -- that "everyone should have the same basic rights" spills over into "everyone's opinion is equally valid."  I recall back when George W. Bush was running for president, there was a significant slice of voters who liked him because he came across as a "regular guy -- someone you could sit down and have a beer with."  He wasn't an "intellectual elite" (heaven knows that much was true enough).  

And I remember reacting to that with sheer bafflement.  Hell, I know I'm not smart enough to be president.  I want someone way more intelligent than I am to be running the country.  Why is "Vote Bush -- He's Just As Dumb As You Are" considered some kind of reasonable campaign slogan?

I think the same thing is going on here -- people hear about the new health miracle from Some Guy Online, and it sounds vaguely plausible, so they give more credence to him than they do to an actual expert (who uses big complicated words and doesn't necessarily give you easy solutions to your health problems).  If you don't have a background in biological science yourself, maybe it sounds like it might work, so you figure you'll give it a try.  After that, wishful thinking and the placebo effect do the rest of the heavy lifting, and pretty soon you're naked in the park sunning your nether orifice.

There's a willful part of this, though.  There comes a point where it crosses the line from simple ignorance into actual stupidity.  To go back to my original example, a thirty-second Google search would tell you that L-glutamine has nothing to do with your glutes.  (In fact, the two words don't come from the same root, even though they sound alike; glutamine comes from the Latin gluten, meaning "sticky," and glutes comes from the Greek γλουτός, meaning buttocks.)  To believe that L-glutamine will develop your glutes because the TikTok Fitness Girls say so, you need to be not only (1) ignorant, but (2) gullible, and (3) uninterested in learning any better.

And that, I find incomprehensible.

I'll end with the famous quote from Isaac Asimov, which seems to sum up the whole bizarre thing about as well as anyone could: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

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Folie à deux

One of the long-standing unanswered questions in medical science is the role of the mind in physical health.

A well-known example is the placebo effect, the reduction or elimination of symptoms in an ill person from taking a "medicine" with no active ingredients.  Less known, but also well documented, is the nocebo effect, where someone believes they will come to harm, often from supernatural means -- as in voodoo curses -- and then actually does.  (Placebo and nocebo come from Latin, and mean "I will please" and "I will harm," respectively.)

The mechanism by which this could occur is poorly understood at best.  We do know that in situations of high emotional or mental stress, the body produces hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which can have long-term deleterious effects (thus the connection between stress and inflammatory diseases), but it seems like there must be more to it than that.

And that's not even as complicated as it gets.  Consider, for example, folie à deux -- also called shared psychosis -- when two people experience the same strange delusions.  How this happens and the mechanism by which it works are unknown, and the results can be nothing short of bizarre.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of its creator, Chitrapa]

The best example I've ever heard of folie à deux is the case of June and Jennifer Gibbons.  The two were identical twins, born in 1963 in Yemen to British subjects originally from Barbados.  By 1974 the girls, their parents, and three other (completely normal) siblings were living in Haverfordwest, Wales, where their father worked as a Royal Air Force technician and their mother was a homemaker.

The twins started exhibiting odd behavior as toddlers.  They rarely spoke except to each other, and their conversations were conducted in a largely invented language based in part on a sped-up version of Bajan Creole.  (Siblings inventing their own private language isn't that uncommon, and is called idioglossia; but here, the twins seemed entirely unwilling to speak in English, nor to anyone but each other.)

The parents, and the girls' teachers, tried everything they could think of to break this strange link.  Sending them to separate boarding schools completely backfired; both girls became catatonic, refusing to eat or move until they were reunited.  The one way they would let anyone else know what was happening in their minds was through writing.  Given a gift of diaries when they were sixteen years old, they began writing elaborate stories -- but filled with violence and disturbing imagery.

In 1981, following a string of petty crimes they were accused of, the twins were committed to Broadmoor Hospital, where they were eventually to spend twelve years.  And this is where things took an even more peculiar turn, because they told the staff at Broadmoor that the only way one of them would live a normal life is if the other died.  It didn't matter which; to break the spell required one of them to die, after which the other would go on to speak, act, and live normally.

In 1993, they were transferred to Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales, and upon arrival, Jennifer was found to be unresponsive.  She was admitted to the hospital where she lingered, comatose, for a week, but finally died due to what an autopsy found to be acute myocarditis (inflammation of the heart).  Strangest of all, there were no drugs, poisons, or infectious agents in her system that could be found to explain the illness, and the inquest ended with a finding of "ultimate cause of death unknown."

A week after her sister's death, June told a therapist, "I'm free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me," and described the moment of Jennifer's death as hitting her "like a tsunami."  She was monitored by psychiatric services for several years, but eventually was discharged, because -- exactly as the sisters had predicted -- the survivor had begun living an entirely normal life.  By 2008 June had a flat near her parents in a small village in western Wales, and was working and socializing like any ordinary person would.

What on earth could have caused this bizarre situation?

The simple answer is "we have no idea."  There is nothing in what is known of the Gibbons family's background that could account for it; judging by statements from the twins' siblings, they seem to have been a completely ordinary working-class family.  Strangest of all is the circumstances that severed the connection between Jennifer and June.  Did Jennifer Gibbons actually "will herself to die" to free her sister, or was there something more sinister going on?  What was the nature of the link between them -- and how can we account for the medical and psychological manifestations of it?

Once again, there are no clear answers.  We're left with more questions -- particularly, how the mind creates the world of perception we live in, and how it can go so drastically wrong for certain unfortunate people.  The treatment of psychiatric illness is certainly far better than it was even forty years ago, when the Gibbons twins started their decade of life in Broadmoor, but we're still largely in the dark about how the mind works -- and how it can so profoundly affect the body in which it resides.

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Cups and scrolls

I recently finished the outstanding novel The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the events of The Iliad, focusing on the doomed love affair between Achilles and Patroclus (it's told from Patroclus's point of view).  The best novelizations of history and historical fiction -- other examples that come to mind are Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven -- don't just tell a story but actually transport you back into a different time and place.  They succeed at portraying the underlying humanity we share with all people, however far back you go, while communicating the fascinating otherness we experience when immersed in a different culture.

It's this same curiosity about other times and places that explains why I'm fascinated with archaeology.  The idea of seeing, or even touching, an item that was handled by people hundreds or thousands of years ago is an absolute thrill.  This is why I was so excited to read two wonderful pieces of research sent my way by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

The first one is why I started this post with The Song of Achilles, because it's a study of an artifact called Nestor's Cup, a 2,800 ceramic vessel with the inscription, "I am Nestor's Cup, good to drink from.  Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him."

As an aside, I'm not sure that getting the hots for Aphrodite would, in the long run, be a good thing.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey the gods mostly come across as petulant, willful, and perpetually horny teenagers, and mortals were generally better off avoiding getting noticed by them.  As far as Nestor himself, he's over and over called "a great and wise counselor," but if you know the story, this comes across as a little weird because Nestor is the one who convinced Agamemnon to take the Achaeans into battle (with disastrous results), and was also the one who gave Patroclus the advice that ended up getting him killed.

So if Nestor handed me a cup and said, "Hey, drink this and Aphrodite will be ready to hop in bed with you!" I doubt I'd be all that inclined to take him up on it.

Be that as it may, the artifact itself is fascinating.  It was found in a burial site in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on the island of Ischia (currently owned by Italy).  It may have originally been used as a drinking vessel, as per the inscription, but in the eighth century B.C.E. it was buried along with the ashes of three adults, and various other fancy and expensive items.

"Our research rewrites the history and the previous archaeological interpretation of the tomb, throwing new light on funeral practices, culture and society of the Greek immigrants in the ancient West Mediterranean," said study co-author Melania Gigante.  "Pithekoussai is widely considered one of the most important archaeological findings of pre-classical Mediterranean archaeology."

The other story comes from an even more famous site -- Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was destroyed by a catastrophic pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  Wealthy communities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were mostly inhabited by the Roman upper crust, who were well-read and owned extensive libraries.

Unfortunately, Roman books and scrolls -- being made of parchment or paper -- would have been incinerated during the eruption, as the material in pyroclastic flows can easily reach a temperature of 1,000 C.  However, the temperatures rose (and then dropped) so fast, and the remains then blanketed by ash, that the scrolls in the libraries weren't burned to cinders but instead were carbonized in situ, where they were found, still rolled up, when the ruins were excavated.

The problem is that these blackened cylinders are exceptionally fragile.  Unrolling them would immediately cause them to crumble into tiny fragments.  So while there might be traces of the ink left behind, how could you ever open them up to see it?

It was impossible... until now.

Using a non-invasive laser imager and a complex machine-learning algorithm, archaeologist Luke Farritor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has succeeded in discerning a single word -- πορϕυρας, meaning "purple" -- in a proof-of-concept that gives antiquarians hope of reading at least some of Herculaneum's damaged scrolls.

The most exciting part is that the majority of the documents we have from the Greeks and Romans are copies of copies of copies that finally made their way into medieval libraries.  The inevitable errors (not to mention deliberate editing) from this kind of literary Game of Telephone mean that we really have no idea how close our versions are to the originals.  If we could read the scrolls of Herculaneum, this would bring us one step closer to seeing what the ancients actually wrote, as well as opening up the thrilling possibility of recovering works that were thought to be lost forever.

So that's the news from the world of antiquity.  My thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the links.  Now I think I'll sit and drink my coffee (from an ordinary, non-Aphrodite-summoning mug) and ponder what it was like to live thousands of years ago, and see -- at least faintly -- through the eyes of the ancients.

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The firehose

There's some weird stuff going on with M87.

M87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo.  It was discovered and catalogued in 1781 by French astronomer Charles Messier -- the "M" designation in many of the brightest nebulae and galaxies comes from their listing in the Messier catalogue -- but the telescopes of his time weren't good enough to make out much detail.  Even through better telescopes it looks like an uninteresting fuzzy blob, mostly because it's 53 million light years away.

This belies its magnitude.  It contains over a trillion stars, and is orbited by around fifteen thousand globular clusters (compare this to the Milky Way's paltry two hundred or so), and has a ginormous black hole at its center with a mass 2.4 billion times that of the Sun.  It is this black hole that you undoubtedly remember from the famous photographs in March of 2021:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Event Horizon Telescope, A view of the M87 supermassive black hole in polarised light, CC BY 4.0]

So this is impressive enough as is.  But then the astronomers and astrophysicists starting noticing that the black hole itself was behaving... oddly.

Three weeks ago, a team led by Yuzhu Cui of Shanghai Jiao Tong University published a paper in Nature showing that the black hole at the center of M87 was not only spinning (which isn't at all unusual; most black holes spin) but was precessing.  If you've ever played with a gyroscope, you've seen precession; get it started spinning, and for a little bit it'll stand upright, but then it starts to wobble, and its spin axis traces out a cone that gets wider and wider as the spin rate goes down because of friction.  The Earth precesses, with a period of about 26,000 years, meaning that Polaris wasn't the North Star a few thousand years ago, nor will it be a few thousand years in the future.  Twelve thousand years ago, the North Star was the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra, made famous as the home of the benevolent aliens in the brilliant movie Contact.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tauʻolunga, Precession N, CC BY-SA 2.5]

So precession of a spinning body isn't that unusual, either, but considering the angular momentum of a 2.4 billion solar mass object, it's kind of surprising that the M87 black hole is precessing fast enough to be observable from 53 million light years away.  But it is -- and its period of precession is only eleven years!

This means that the fountain of radiation and debris being shot out along its spin axis is flailing around like the jet from a loose firehose.  

Then, a new paper -- still in the preprint stages -- has added another bizarre twist.  A team of astrophysicists led by Michael M. Shara, Curator of Astrophysics for the American Museum of Natural History, has found that wherever that wildly-precessing jet nozzle is aimed, there's a higher rate of stars going nova.  Novae are explosions less violent than supernovae (those actually blow the unfortunate star to smithereens); they seem to occur mostly when white dwarf stars accrete matter from nearby dust clouds or by stealing it from a binary star partner, triggering instability and a sudden flare-up.  Here, though, the mechanism isn't understood.  Whether the jet of debris from the black hole is compressing the stars that get in the way and triggering detonation, or if it's simply that the material itself is getting caught by white dwarfs and causing the novae, isn't known.

But it's quite a mental image, isn't it?  A careening jet from a spinning supermassive black hole blasts away at stars in its path, and makes them blow up.

Leaves me feeling glad we live in the tranquil outer reaches of our own galaxy.  I know the Milky Way has its own massive black hole at the center, but out here in quiet stellar suburbia, we're pretty insulated from all that craziness.

I'm perfectly happy hearing about the wild gyrations of M87 -- from a safe vantage point 53 million light years away.

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Drawn together

Convergent evolution occurs when only distantly-related species are under the same selective pressures, and evolve to look alike.  A particularly good example of this is the North American flying squirrel (a rodent) and the Australian sugar glider (a marsupial).  Put them side-by-side, and they're hard to tell apart, and both have the distinctive kite-like flap of skin between the forelegs and hind legs, allowing them to catch a breeze and glide from tree to tree.

It's important to emphasize that while convergent evolution can result in organisms being similar in appearance or habits, it doesn't ever cause them to fuse into a single species.  Flying squirrels and sugar gliders maintain major differences in their genetic make-up, skeleton, dentition, and so on -- so however close the resemblance, they're still two separate species.

Convergence is actually fairly common in the natural world, which is why appearance is such a poor guide to determining who is related to whom.  There are only so many solutions to the problems posed by living in a particular environment, so it's inevitable that different lineages will happen on the same ones.  Flying, for example, has evolved independently at least four times -- birds, bats, pterodactyloids, and insects.  The structure and mechanics is different in each, which is indicative that they were independent innovations.

I was thinking about convergent evolution this morning as I read a paper in the journal Geodiversitas about the discovery of a remarkable fossil in Colombia.  It's the best-preserved and most complete skeleton ever found of Anachlysictis gracilis, a Miocene apex predator that belonged to a group called the sparassodontids.  (The name comes from the Greek σπαράσσειν, to tear to pieces, and ὀδόντος, tooth -- an indicator of how scary these animals were.)

Here's a photograph of the skeleton:

[Image courtesy of Daniella Carvalho and Aldo Benites-Palomino]

My guess is that looking at this, you're immediately reminded of the saber-toothed cats such as the famous Smilodon, which also were around during the Miocene Epoch but reached their pinnacle a few million years later, during the Pleistocene.  Surprisingly, this parallels my earlier example of the flying squirrel and sugar glider -- the saber-toothed cats were true felids, and thus placental mammals, while Anachlysictus and the other sparassodonts were marsupials.  The two species were drawn together by the forces of convergent evolution.  If you're a predator, having big nasty pointy teeth is a pretty good adaptation regardless what taxonomic group you belong to.

These striking carnivores were present in South America during what is called the "splendid isolation," prior to the tectonic shift that formed the Isthmus of Panama and allowed for the Pliocene Great Biotic Interchange.  South America had developed a unique biota, including not only the sparassodonts but a variety of other marsupial groups, most of which are now extinct.  Even the South American placentals didn't do so well, and were outcompeted (or hunted to death) by North American migrants.  Not long after the formation of Central America, a great many of the South American groups -- not only the sparassodonts, but the glyptodonts, litopterns, astrapotheres, pyrotheres, and xenungulates -- were gone forever.

The new fossil discovery will allow paleontologists to make some deductions about not only its anatomy, but its behavior. "In a future study we will address all the other bones in its body, which include various sections of the spine, ribs, hip, scapulae -- what we call 'shoulder blades' for humans -- and bones in its legs," said Catalina Suarez, of the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, who led the research team.  "This will allow us to explore aspects of how it moved, the position in which its neck held its head, whether it was a runner, whether it could climb, whether its hands could hold objects more easily, as many marsupials do when feeding, or whether it was a bit more difficult, as it is for example for a dog or a cat."

It's fascinating to learn more about these long-extinct animals, whose ecological role would be taken over by predatory placental mammals like wolves and the various big cats.  Even if they're extinct, their bones still have a story to tell -- of a saber-toothed marsupial who hunted in the forests of Colombia thirteen million years ago.

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