Brane teaser

After my diatribe a couple of days ago about the misuse of the word dimension, I got into a discussion with a friend that can be summed up as, "Okay, then how are we supposed to picture spaces with more than three dimensions?"

Well, the simple answer is that we can't.  Our brains are equipped to manage pictorial representations of three dimensions or fewer.  We can try to get a handle on it via analogy -- a particularly masterful example is Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which considers a two-dimensional character named A. Square, who has as hard a time picturing a third dimension as we do a fourth.  When a three-dimensional sphere passes through Flatland, A. Square perceives it as a series of successive two-dimensional slices -- a circle that appears out of nowhere, grows larger, then shrinks and finally vanishes.  The implication is that if a four-dimensional object -- a hypersphere, perhaps -- were to pass through our three-dimensional world, we'd see something similar; a projection of successive "slices," a sphere popping into existence, expanding, then contracting and vanishing.

But the fact remains that these are ways of thinking about a concept that is, honestly, beyond our ken.  It's the problem that plagues many of the deep models of physics -- something that can be described clearly and accurately by the math is nevertheless impossible to visualize.  It's a bit like the situation with quantum mechanics; the math is astonishingly precise and makes spot-on predictions, but if you ask most physicists, "So what physical reality is the math describing?" the answer you'll get is a slightly embarrassed "we don't know."  (If they don't say "Shut up and calculate.")

It's a serious sticking point with people like myself, who understand best when we can picture what's going on.  It was when I hit that spot in my undergraduate studies -- when the professor said, basically, "The math is what's real, here, don't bother trying to visualize it because you can't" -- that I decided that a career in physics was not in the cards for me.

Despite that, I have continued to be intrigued with notions like quantum indeterminacy and higher-dimensional space, even though when I read about them I often have an expression on my face like the one my puppy has when I explain a complex concept that is beyond his comprehension, such as why he shouldn't eat the sofa.  I'm currently reading a wonderful book about the topic of extra dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, called Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, which does an outstanding job of bringing the topic down to a level we eager-but-not-so-bright puppies can understand.  (And if you want more, she has an appendix with mathematical notes elucidating the topic in a deeper and more precise fashion.)  

One of the more fascinating topics she goes into is the concept of a brane -- a cross-section of a higher-dimensional space a bit like A. Square's expanding-and-contracting circles.  The name comes from the word membrane, because (like a cell membrane) a two-dimensional brane can be a boundary on a three-dimensional space.  The surface of the Earth's ocean, for example, can be seen as a two-dimensional brane (not only acting as a boundary, but oscillating up and down into the three-dimensional space on either side).

Of course, you're not limited to two-dimensional branes in three-dimensional space.  A generalized name for branes in p dimensions is called a p-brane, which was one of my father's favorite insults (albeit spelled differently).  

A two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional projection of a six-dimensional structure called a Calabi-Yau manifold.  Yeah, my head hurts, too. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andrew J. Hanson, Indiana University., CalabiYau5, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Where it becomes more interesting, and unfortunately far harder to picture, is when you consider the idea from some physicists -- Randall has been one of the lead researchers in this field -- that our own three-dimensional universe is a three-brane within a higher-dimensional space.  There is a tantalizing suggestion that this model may explain some of physics's most persistent mysteries, such as why the gravitational force is so weak compared to the other three.  If we are actually living in a three-dimensional slice, the gravitational force within our bit of space may leak across into the higher dimensions,  weakening its intensity and perhaps influencing other branes within the space (which might give physicists a way of finding evidence for the conjecture).

There's even the suggestion that the Big Bang may have occurred because of collision between two three-branes in a multi-dimensional hyperspace -- a model called ekpyrotic cosmology.  

But we're still up against the problem that it's impossible to answer the question, "But what does it actually look like?"  The mathematics is crisp and clear; any picture we come up with is, by comparison, incomplete and inaccurate.  Take, for example, a hypercube, a symmetrical four-dimensional structure that can be described mathematically but is impossible to visualize.  All we can do is consider what projections of it -- shadows, so to speak -- look like in three dimensions.  Here's a particularly mesmerizing projection of a rotating hypercube:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jason Hise, 8-cell-orig, CC0 1.0]

So we're kind of ending where we started.  All of this is just a teaser, really -- a brief excursion into a subject that is just now being investigated by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet.  If the mathematics of branes and higher dimensions and whatnot is beyond you -- it certain is me -- we're left with trying to get a faint glimmer of understanding via analogy.  Which only gets you so far.

But at least it gives us something our branes -- um, brains -- can handle.

****************************************

The electric landscape

In his remarkable TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?," neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the concept of the umwelt -- the part of the available stimulus space sampled by a particular animal's senses.  A simple example is the thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes are sensitive to -- the familiar ROYGBIV of the rainbow.  There's plenty of electromagnetic radiation outside of that slice; gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves are all ordinary photons, just like visible light is.  It's just that our eyes aren't sensitive to those frequencies, so they're outside of our umwelt.

The umwelt also has to do with the relative weighting of senses; how big a part of our sensory world a particular experience constitutes.  Most humans have a sense of smell, but my dogs live in a far richer olfactory world than I do.  But even how those inputs are utilized -- i.e., what kind of information they provide for making sense of the world -- can vary greatly.  Bats and dolphins use hearing in much the same way as we use our eyes, creating "sonic landscapes" of the objects around them.  What's kind of amazing, though -- and one of the main points of Eagleman's talk -- is that humans can train their brains to use other "peripherals" (as he calls them) to learn about the world, such as blind people who have learned to navigate the space around them by making clicking noises and listening for echoes from nearby obstacles.

It's always been fascinating to me to consider how the world would look to a night-flying echolocating bat.  Do they "see" their world through their ears and auditory cortex?

The topic of how other animals perceive their worlds -- and how different it could be from what we experience -- comes up because of a paper this week in the journal Nature about how elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii), which live in murky streams in west and central Africa where eyesight doesn't serve much purpose, develop their visual picture of the world (including locating prey) using electric fields.  And not only do they gain information by creating and sensing electrical signals, they enhance those pictures using the signals created by nearby members of their species, making them one of the only known animals that relies on collective signal production and sensing.

Gnathonemus petersii [Image is in the Public Domain]

"Think of these external signals as electric images of the objects that nearby electric fish automatically produce and beam to nearby fish at the speed of light," said Federico Pedraja of Columbia University, who headed the study. "Our work suggests that three fish in a group would each receive three different "electrical views" of the same scene at virtually the same time."

The elephantnose fish's capacity for working in groups is a little like humans out on a search at night with flashlights.  One person with one flashlight would have a small illuminated field of view, but if there were twenty people it would go much faster, not only because of greater manpower, but because each person wouldn't be restricted to what is revealed by only their own flashlight beam.  Just as with twenty different flashlights in the night rather than a single one, in the case of elephantnose fish, the electrical fields produced by their neighbors clarify the picture they all receive.

"In engineering it is common that groups of emitters and receivers work together to improve sensing, for example in sonar and radar," said Nathaniel Sawtell, who co-authored the study.  "We showed that something similar may be happening in groups of fish that sense their environment using electrical pulses.  These fish seem to 'see' much better in small groups...  [They] have some of the biggest brain-to-body mass ratios of any animal on the planet.  Perhaps these enormous brains are needed for rapid and highly sophisticated social sensing and collective behavior."

To return to my original point -- how would the world look to an elephantnose fish?  Surely nothing like what we see.  Some sort of topography of electrical field strength, perhaps, creating an image of the obstacles they have to maneuver around, the prey they seek, and the predators they need to avoid.  But really, there's no way to know.  We're all trapped within our own umwelt.  I can't even imagine what the world is like for my dogs, who are a great deal more similar to me than these fish are.

To perceive the world like another living being does, you'd not only have to come equipped with their sensory systems, but put the information together using their brains.  We can only speculate, with all the inevitable biases that come from being locked in our own ways of knowing.  But this study did at least give us a hint of how different the world could appear -- if we were odd little fish living in muddy African rivers.

****************************************

Dimensional analysis

As long-time readers of Skeptophilia know, it really torques my lug nuts when people take perfectly good scientific terms, re-define them however the fuck they like, and then pretend what they're saying makes sense.

The list of terms this has happened to is a long one, and includes frequency, resonance, quantum (lord, how they do love the word quantum), and vibration, to name a few.  But there's none that bothers me quite as much as the rampant misuse of the word dimension.

Part of the reason this one gets to me is that the basic concept of a dimension is so simple that you'd think it'd be hard to get wrong.  If you go to the Wikipedia article about the term, you will read in the very first line, "In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  The space we live in is three-dimensional because to define the location of a point, you need to know where it lies referent to three directions -- up/down, back/front, and right/left.

This hasn't stopped people from taking the term and running right off the cliff with it.  And it's not a new phenomenon.  I remember an episode of the abysmal 1960s science-fiction series (heavy on the fiction, light on the science) Lost in Space called "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension," wherein Will Robinson was kidnapped by a pair of evil aliens who looked like the love children of Matt Gaetz and Herman Munster.

These aliens told Will they were "from the fifth dimension," which makes about as much sense as if your Uncle Fred told you he was from "horizontal."  Be that as it may, after they captured Will they revealed to him their nefarious plan, which was to use his brain to power their spaceship.  Things looked bad, but Will defeated them by (I swear I am not making this up) feeling sad at them, which caused their spaceship to blow up.

So using the word "dimension" as a fancy way of saying "a mysterious place somewhere" goes back a long way.  But because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I just read what has to be the single most ridiculous example of this I've ever seen.

And that includes "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension."

It's an article in Your Tango called "The Theory That Claims We Visit Other Dimensions While We Sleep," by NyRee Ausler.  Which brings up another misused word that really bothers me, which is "theory."  A theory is not "this crazy idea I pulled out of my ass just now," and nor does it mean "a guess that could just as easily be right as wrong."  A theory is model with strong explanatory and predictive power, and which fits all the available data and evidence we have at hand.  When the creationists say, breezily, "Evolution is just a theory," that is not some kind of point in their favor; all it shows is that they have no idea what the word actually means.

After all, we call it "music theory" and that's not because we think music may not exist.

But I digress.

Anyhow, back to NyRee Ausler.  It will come as no shock to find out that she answers her question, "do we visit other dimensions while we dream?" with, "Yes, of course we do."  The way we know, she says, is that the laws of physics aren't the same in dreams as they are in reality.  I can vouch at least for that much.  I dreamed last night that I was out working in my garden, and I kept accidentally digging up plants and knocking things over and generally wreaking havoc, but then when I was done not only was everything back to normal, but the flowers were in full bloom despite the fact that it's currently early March in upstate New York, meaning we have at least a month and a half before we'll be seeing any colors other than gray and brown.

In any case, her point that "dreams are fucking weird" hardly needs further elucidation, but she goes on to say that the reason for all this is that dreams take place in another dimension.  And then she launches into a brief description of -- I shit you not -- string theory, which is a mathematical model of subatomic physics requiring ten spatial dimensions, all but three of which are thought to be (very) submicroscopic and "curled up."  The analogy commonly used is an ant on a garden hose -- it can go along the hose (one stretched-out dimension), or around the hose's circumference (one curled-up dimension).  The string theorists claim that three of the dimensions in our universe are of the stretched-out variety, and seven are curled up so tightly that we don't experience them on a macroscopic scale, but influence quantum phenomena such as how particles interact at very high energies.

And yes, what NyRee Ausler is saying is that when you dream, you are somehow visiting these extremely tiny, curled-up dimensions, and that's why dreams are peculiar.  Once again, acting as if these extra dimensions were places, not just mathematical constructs describing spatial coordinates.

But it gets even better than that, because she goes on to tell us what each of those dimensions are like, one by one.  I direct you to the original link if you want to read about them all, but here's one, just to give you the flavor:

The sixth dimension consists of a straight line of possible worlds.  Here, you get an opportunity to access all possible worlds that started with the same original conditions, like the Big Bang Theory.  It is known as the "phase space" in a set of parallel universes where everything that could have happened in our pasts, but did not, occurred in some other universe.  The sixth dimension exists in the same space and time as the one we occupy, an overlay of our universe or a 3-D space containing every possible world.

Right!  Exactly!  What?

What made me laugh the hardest is that she tried to give her article an extra soupçon of scienc-y-ness by mentioning Calabi-Yau manifolds, an extremely complex concept from higher-dimensional algebraic geometry, because lobbing in a technical term you obviously don't understand clearly strengthens your argument.

I know it's probably a waste of energy for me to spend my time railing about this, but there are people who will read this and think it's actual science.  And that bugs the absolute hell out of me.  The thing is, her article is not just wrong, it's lazy.  As I demonstrated above, all you have to do is to take the time to read the first paragraph of a damn Wikipedia page to see that what Ausler is claiming is blatant horse waste.

But science is hard, and technical, and to really understand it requires reading peer-reviewed journal articles and learning terminology and mathematics.  Easier to blather on about string theory and dimensions and (*snerk*) Calabi-Yau manifolds as if you knew what you were talking about, and hope that enough people click on the link that the ad revenue will pay for your groceries next month.

So anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent me the article.  I did get a couple of good laughs out of it, but the overall teeth-grinding I did while reading it probably resulted in net damage to my emotional state.  Pseudoscience will be with us always, springing up like mushrooms after a summer rain.  Or like my garden flowers on a chilly, wet day in March, at least in my sixth-dimensional dreams.

****************************************

Arts and sciences

Behind every art is science.

Of course, you can produce beautiful art without knowing any scientific details; the Renaissance masters created gorgeous paintings without knowing the exact chemical composition of their paints.  It's amazing, really, that they accomplished what they did, combining their astonishing talents and aesthetic senses with materials developed using what amounted to trial-and-error.

I wouldn't consider myself an artist, but I do play around with clay, and I've gotten the chance to geek out over the scientific side of pottery -- specifically, glaze chemistry.  Glazes are generally made of four ingredients -- a glass-former (usually some form of silica), a flux (which lowers the melting temperature of the mix and make it flow), a refractory material (to give it stability and viscosity), and a colorant.  One of the first things I learned when I started making pottery, though, is not to assume the final product after firing to 1200 C will be the same color as the raw glaze; in fact, the reverse is usually true.  Here's a kiln load, coated with various raw glazes, before firing:

And the same kiln load after firing:

The changes that occur during firing always strike me as something very like alchemy.  Even knowing a bit about how they work -- and what I know is, honestly, little more than a bit -- there's still an unpredictability about glazes that make them fun, exciting, and occasionally exasperating to work with.

I was reminded of my trials and tribulations -- and occasional triumphs -- with glaze chemistry as I was reading a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Nexus a couple of days ago.  Called "Marangoni Spreading on Liquid Substrates in New Media Art," and written by San To Chan and Eliot Fried of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, this paper looks at the creation of intricate and beautiful fractal patterns using little more than acrylic ink and paint, water, and rubbing alcohol.

The technique involves applying tiny droplets of thinned acrylic ink onto a painted surface.  The irregularities in the surface draw the liquid away from the point where it is applied, and the design develops as you watch, creating branching patterns resembling snowflakes, neurons, or lightning.  Just as with ceramic glazes, the exact mix of the various ingredients can drastically change the results.  The process works because acrylic paints and inks are thixotropic, meaning that their viscosity changes when they're stirred or shaken (a common thixotropic substance is ketchup -- which is why you have to shake it or it won't pour).  The water and alcohol change the viscosity, and in combining the ingredients there's a sweet spot where the mixture is viscous enough to hold together into threads on the painted surface but not so viscous that it doesn't move.

"In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces," said San To Chan, who co-authored the study.  "One of them is surface tension -- the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond.  In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet.  Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre.  This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears -- the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting."

"We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil," said Eliot Fried, the study's other co-author.  "If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments.  The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, traveling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern."

I love knowing the science behind the arts (although I must admit that the mathematics in the paper about dendritic art lost me pretty quickly).  It was great fun, for example, that the fiddler in the band I was in for ten years was a physics professor at Cornell University and taught a class called The Physics of Music -- she more than once told me things about how my instrument worked that I honestly hadn't known (such as why flutes go sharp when they warm up).  

I don't know about you, but knowing the science of how things work enhances my appreciation for their beauty.  I've loved Bach's music ever since I first heard it as a teenager; but now, understanding how fugues and canons are constructed makes my wonderment over pieces like the astonishing A Musical Offering that much more profound.  Likewise, my knowing a little about glaze chemistry enhances my enjoyment of the beauty of the results.

Science itself is beautiful.  And when you combine it with art and music, you have something truly magical.

****************************************

Mouse tales

Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- Muridae -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.

And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the Sulawesi snouter, Hyorhinomys stuempkei.  It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.

Hyorhinomys stuempkei [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kevin C Rowe and Museum Victoria, Hyorhinomys07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology.  

It's about its name.

Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, stuempkei, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, an exhaustive study of Order Rhinogradentia.  The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants.  However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi).  Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well.  Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives.  Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll.  Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist Gerolf Steiner, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.

Sad story, yes?

However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.

Some questions you might be asking yourself:

1. If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?
2. And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?
3. Those island names don't sound very Polynesian.  ("Annoorussawubbissy"?  Really?)
4. Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.
5. How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?
6. Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia?  Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?
7. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor).  However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.

Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.

However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke!  And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an hommage to Steiner and his masterful monograph.

Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.

****************************************

The songs of the ancestors

My grandmother was born in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, a little village in the Allegheny hill country in the southwestern corner of the state.  It's a beautiful region, whose first European settlers came in the eighteenth century from Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some later influxes from Germany and eastern Europe.

It's also got more than its fair share of poverty.  The soil is rocky and poor, and farming was never really going to work for more than the barest subsistence.  Until the coal boom of the 1880s, and then the discovery of natural gas there in the 1920s, a lot of people -- my grandmother's family included -- did little more than scrape by.  Despite her hardscrabble roots, and far more than their fair share of troubles, my grandma was always proud of the people she'd come from.  I remember spending many hours as a child listening to her stories of growing up there, and how proud she was of her Scottish ancestry.

One constant thread for her, and one I've inherited, was music.  She knew scores of old ballads, which I now know were carried across the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland and Northern England by my grandmother's ancestors and others like them -- "Annie Laurie," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Barbara Allen," "The Four Marys," and "Lord Randall" amongst them, all songs I still love not only for their nostalgia but because they're honestly beautiful.  A study by British historian and musicologist Cecil Sharp found that many songs and tunes that still persist both in the Appalachians and in the Scottish lowlands have actually changed less in their western versions; put another way, the Appalachian musical tradition preserves virtually unchanged the musical culture from its English and Scottish roots three centuries ago.

As fascinating as this is (and however important for my own personal family history), this is far from the most astonishing example of persistence in musical tradition despite distance, time, and hardship.  In fact, the reason this comes up is an article last week in Smithsonian Magazine that was sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a song still sung in Sierra Leone that was preserved close to perfectly in the Gullah Geechee culture of the Sea Islands in Georgia.

Here are the bare bones of the story -- but you really should read the entire account at the link above, because it's amazing.

In 1933, a Black linguist and anthropologist named Lorenzo Dow Turner was studying the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.  Gullah is a creole -- a language formed by the mixture of other languages, sometimes beginning so that people of different languages could communicate with each other for purposes of trade, but eventually solidifying into a true complex language with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon.  In the case of Gullah, its roots come from various West African languages and English, but due to the remoteness (and difficulty of travel) of the region where it's spoken, it's had a couple of hundred years to go its own way.

Yoruba musicians [Image licensed under the Creative Commons 4toscenethesis, Mirror Children, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, Turner was doing a linguistic analysis of Gullah, and came across a native speaker who knew a song she said had been passed down to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother.  It wasn't in Gullah; only a few words were clearly from that language.  The woman herself didn't know what the lyrics meant, only that she was singing it as her great-grandmother had.

Well, a Sierra Leonean student of Turner's recognized the lyrics as being in the Mende language -- spoken by about a third of the citizens of modern Sierra Leone, and which is related to other West African languages such as Mandinka, Bambara, and Susu.  It wasn't until much, much later that Yale University anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner's account, and together with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma set out to see if they could find the song's roots...

... and they found, in the remote village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, a woman who sang an almost identical version of the song.

Here are the lyrics in Mende:

A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka
Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei
Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee
Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia

 And the English translation:

Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.

I don't know about you, but my reaction was... wow.

That not only a song, but a song that powerful, was preserved for over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic is truly extraordinary.  And in the Sea Islands, without even knowing what the words meant.  Gullah and Mende have some shared vocabulary, but not nearly enough that they're mutually intelligible -- making the song's persistence in coastal Georgia even more astonishing.  And you have to wonder if that little village in Sierra Leone is the place from which the Gullah singer's ancestors were kidnapped and transported by the horrific Atlantic slave trade.

Music is one of the things that is common to the human experience, and the songs of a people are part of their cultural memory.  I'll never cease being grateful to my my grandma for instilling in me early the love of music, and for her teaching me the songs she'd grown up with.  It's a tie to my ancestors a long way back.  Our cultural roots are as much a part of our lineage as our DNA -- something British singer Rose Betts celebrates in her lovely song "Irish Eyes," which you should all put on your playlists:

It's essential that we sing -- new songs and old, the ones written yesterday and the songs of the ancestors first sung centuries ago.  The music is the important thing, whatever it is.

Whatever you choose to sing, just keep singing.

****************************************

Jesus in Japan

We'll end the week on an appropriately surreal note.

Every once in a while, I'll run into an off-the-wall claim that admits of no particularly obvious explanation.  For example: have you heard about the town of Shingō, Japan, in Aomori Prefecture on the northern tip of the island of Honshu?  If you have, I'll bet it's for one reason:

It's where Jesus was buried.

There's a sign there that identifies the burial site:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

According to the claim, Jesus skipped town on the eve of the crucifixion, leaving his brother Isukiri to be tortured and executed in his place.  Isukiri makes no appearance in the Bible, the people of Shingō admit; that's because he was intended to take Jesus's place right from the get-go, and needed to keep his identity secret.  The claim also helpfully explains the years of Jesus's life before his public ministry started, at age thirty or so.

He was in Japan, of course.

How he got to Japan from Palestine is never really explained.  Last I looked, they're not all that close together, and in between lie such special attractions as the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and Siberia.  But despite all this, Jesus made the trip three times -- on the way out when he was a twenty-something, then back to Jerusalem when he started preaching, and then a final time to get out of what Pontius Pilate et al. had planned for him.

So while things didn't end so well for Isukiri, Jesus made out pretty well. He married a local girl, became a rice farmer, fathered three children, and lived to the ripe old age of either 106 or 114, depending upon whom you believe.

And because he had progeny, some of his descendants still live there in Shingō.  The Sawaguchi family, specifically, claims descent from Jesus, something that they don't seem to think is all that amazing.  Jesus, they say, didn't perform any miracles once he arrived in Shingō.  He just changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku, and settled down to be a nice guy and a solid citizen of the village.  Which takes some of the gravitas out of being a direct lineal descendant of the Son of God.

I find all of this pretty peculiar.  What could possibly be the origin of this story?  It seems to have gained traction with Kyomaro Takenouchi, who in 1935 announced that he had found some ancient manuscripts that tell the whole story.  (They also, apparently, tell about Atlantis and the fact that humans are descended from aliens.  But another time for that, perhaps.)  There's an Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents, which explains them thusly:

More than two thousand years ago, the Takenouchi Documents were rewritten by Takenouchino Matori (Hegurimo Matori) into modern Japanese characters Kana mixed with Chinese characters.  The original documents were believed to have been written in Divine characters.

 
The historical facts recorded in the Takenouchi Documents are extraordinary.  Among them are the Sumera-Mikoto came to Earth from a higher world on Ameno-ukifune, the world government was located in Japan and the Sumera-Mikoto unified the world.  The great holy masters of the world, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Shakyamuni Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu were born from the five-colored races which branched off from the Japanese race and all went to Japan for study and training.  These facts may seem absurd and contrary to our prevailing understanding of world history.  However, the archaeological research of recent years has gradually revealed the true existence of ultra ancient civilizations which are all mentioned in the Takenouchi Documents.

So all the cool holy people came from Japan, or at least studied there.  Got it.

Of course, it's not like we can study the documents themselves.  The originals were confiscated by government officials during World War II, and subsequently destroyed in an air raid.  Which, of course, is simultaneously unfortunate for the skeptics and convenient for the true believers.  And it leaves the Association for the Study of the Takenouchi Documents free to say any damn thing they want to about them, but also brings up the question of what exactly the Association is Studying.

But there's more to it than just some probably spurious documents, and the tale seems to predate Takenouchi's "discovery."  What's more interesting is that not only do the people in Shingō mostly seem to accept the story as true, they participate in some curious rituals -- such as marking newborns' foreheads with black crosses, and sewing "Star of David-like patterns onto babies' clothing."  All, if you believe the tale, a cultural memory from two thousand years ago.

Even so, I'm not buying it.  Cultural contamination, whether deliberate or unwitting, is simply too easy to do (consider two examples I've looked at here at Skeptophilia -- the cult of John Frum and the Sirius B story from the Dogon).  Which is more likely -- that Jesus Christ made three trips to and from Japan, on foot, or that in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century some Christian guy from the West ended up in Shingō and got the whole crazy tale started?

In any case, it's made for a considerable tourist attraction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of photographer Jason Hill]

So that's our weird claim for the day.  Jesus in Japan, and the crucifixion of Isukiri, Jesus's less-known, and extremely unlucky, brother.  If I'm ever in Japan, I'll make a point of checking it out.  At least it's safer for tourists than visiting Jerusalem, these days.

****************************************