Spin doctor

Yesterday's post, which featured a guy who claims he has revolutionized physics with a model starting from the axiom that 1 x 1 is actually equal to 2, prompted a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link accompanied by the note, "Yeah, okay, Gordon, but what about this, huh?  What about this?"

The link was to the page of a guy named John Mandlbaur, a South African "investor and successful businessman" who at least admits up front that he is "not an academic."  This, when you start looking into his claims, is putting it mildly, because he is also claiming to have revolutionized physics, this time starting from the statement that the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum is wrong.

At least he, unlike the guy in yesterday's post, is denying something that you learn in high school, not in third grade.

This, however, doesn't make his claim any more sensible.  Angular momentum, you may recall from physics class, is in the simplest case (like whirling a weight tied to a lightweight string in a circle above your head) the product of three quantities; the mass, the tangential velocity, and the radius.  And what the conservation law says is that in a closed system that quantity doesn't change.  (Remember the "closed system" part, because that'll become important in a moment.)

The most common example of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum is the way figure skaters' rotational rate increases when they bring their arms in.  By reducing their effective radius, the velocity has to increase in proportion to keep the aforementioned product constant.  Most kids have seen this in effect, too; whirl a weight on a string, and if you pull the string to decrease the radius of the circle, the weight spins faster.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gyroskop, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is where Mandlbaur starts leaping about making excited little squeaking noises, and telling us that this can't be true.  He goes through a "thought experiment" wherein he argues that angular momentum isn't conserved, because if you reduce the radius (pull on the string to decrease it to, say, one percent of its original length) the rotational velocity would have to increase by a ridiculous amount.  Because we never see that happen, the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum must be wrong.

What this ignores is the "closed system" part I mentioned above.  Angular momentum is conserved if there is no external torque -- which there damn well would be if you have a mass moving that fast, produced by the air resistance.  Plus, there's the little issue of the centripetal force -- put simply, how hard you'd have to pull on the string.  Centripetal force is defined by the formula F = mass x velocity^2 / radius, so as you can see, as the velocity rises and the radius decreases, both contribute to it becoming progressively harder and harder to hang on to the string.  Since the way this force is transmitted into the weight is the tension in the string, eventually the string breaks, and the weight goes flying off in a direction tangent to the circle until it meets an opposing force, like the windshield of your neighbor's car.

A physicist named Val Rousseau did a much more thorough takedown of Mandlbaur's claims, and I won't steal his thunder by repeating all of his careful debunking.  Suffice it to say that Mandlbaur doesn't stop with trashing the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum; he also says that Newton's Second Law, the Work-Energy Principle, both Laws of Relativity, and all of quantum mechanics are also wrong.

Oh, and light actually has mass.

What's interesting about Mandlbaur is how combative he is.  Anyone who criticizes his work is "childish" and is engaging in "character assassination" or a "blatant ad hominem."  Sorry, dude, saying "you are wrong" is not an ad hominem when you are, in fact, wrong.  To say the experimental evidence lined up behind all of the laws he's happy to jettison is "mountainous" is the understatement of the year.

And yet... he has fervent followers.  He's a "maverick," they say, a courageous knight taking on the dragons of the hidebound scientific establishment.

I've never understood the compulsion people have to follow someone simply because they're anti-establishment.  Surely, it matters more if they're right.  Right?  By itself, being anti-establishment doesn't make you a knight, it makes you Don Quixote, tilting at windmills because you've decided they're monsters.

And if what you're claiming could be refuted in a high school physics classroom, I'm afraid you don't have a lot of cause to brag about how fearless you're being.

In any case, I urge you to take a look at Rousseau's site.  I'm deliberately not linking Mandlbaur's webpage because I'd prefer not to give him any additional traffic; you can find it if you're so inclined.  And if any of you are getting ready to @ me about how "the scientists have been wrong before!", don't waste your time.  Sure, they have, no question about that.  They were wrong about continental drift -- until the plate tectonics model was proposed.  They were wrong about the luminiferous aether -- until Einstein came along.  They were wrong about what caused malaria, cholera, and typhoid -- until the Germ Theory of Disease.  They were wrong about how inheritance worked -- until Mendel wrote his book about statistical genetics, and eventually a whole group of scientists uncovered the roles of DNA and RNA.

Get my point?  Sure, the scientists have been wrong sometimes, but they fixed it by coming up with a better theory.  Science works as well as it does because it self-corrects.  If your model doesn't fit the facts, it's superseded by one that does.  On the other hand, if you want to claim the current model is wrong, you damn well better be able to show that what you're proposing to replace it fits the experimental data better than the one you're planning to trash.

So once again, we have a blowhard crank (okay, maybe that was an ad hominem... oh well) who thinks he knows better than all of the physicists from the last four hundred years.  I'm guessing if he finds out I wrote this, I'm going to get a stinger of a response, but I'm ready.

Just about every physicist from Newton on down has my back.

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

The flood of nonsense

I'm going to say this straight up, in as unambiguous a fashion as I can manage:

Given the widespread availability of fact-checking websites, there is absolutely no excuse for passing along misinformation.

The topic comes up today because I recently ran into three claims online, which I present here in increasing order of ridiculousness, and in almost no cases were they accompanied by anyone saying, "But I don't think this is true."  I'm hoping that by highlighting these, I can accomplish two things -- putting a small dent in the number of people posting these claims on social media, and instilling at least a flicker of an intention to do better with what you choose to post in the future.

The first one I've mostly seen from my fellow Northeasterners, and has to do with a spider.  Here's the most common post I've seen about this:

This statement -- which is almost verbatim the headline used by a number of supposedly-reputable news sources -- is wildly misleading.  When you look into it, you find that the species in question is the joro spider (Trichonephila clavata), and while they are pretty big for a spider (the leg-span can be around ten centimeters), nothing else about them is dangerous.  They're native to China and Japan, where people live around them in apparent harmony; while they do have venom, like all spiders, it's of low toxicity.  They're actually rather docile and reluctant to bite, and if they do, it's no worse than a bee sting.

And, for fuck's sake, they can't fly.  Flying requires wings, and if you'll look closely at the above photograph, you will see they don't have any.  Their tiny young do what is called "ballooning" (again, something many spider species do), creating a few silk threads and then catching a breeze to travel to a new locale.  So while they're definitely an invasive exotic species, and ecologists are concerned about their potential for out-competing native spider species, they pose about as close to zero threat to humans as you could get.

So put away the goddamn flamethrowers.

The second claim has to do with the information you can get from the color of caps on your bottled water.  The idea here is that bottled water distributers have coded the caps -- blue caps are used for spring water, black caps for alkaline water, green caps for flavored water, and white caps for "processed water."

It's the last one that gave me a chuckle.  I damn sure hope the water you're drinking has been processed, and that Aquafina isn't just filling water bottles from the nearest river, screwing the caps on, and calling it good.  Apparently the impetus for the claim is that because consuming "highly-processed" food has been associated with some health issues, anything "processed" is bad for you, so you should avoid those bottles with white tops.

The whole thing, though, is complete nonsense.  There's no correlation between bottle top color and... anything.  All bottled water has been filtered and sterilized (and thus "processed").  And if you need a particular bottle top color to tell if you're drinking flavored water, there are some other issues you might want to address, preferably with your doctor.

The third, and most idiotic, of the claims I heard about from my friend, the wonderful writer Andrew Butters.  Like me, Andrew is a thoroughgoing science nerd, and frequently finds himself doing facepalms over some of the stupid stuff people fall for.  He sent me a link to a video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about an actor named Terrence Howard, who recently wrote a book about his new model for physics that proves pretty much everything we'd thought is wrong.  The basis of his model -- I swear I am not making this up -- starts from the proposition that 1 x 1 is actually equal to 2.

So Howard clearly (1) failed third grade math class, and (2) apparently has been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  And his "theory" (it makes me cringe even to use the word) would have vanished into the great murky morass of claims by unqualified laypeople to revolutionize all of science if it hadn't been for Joe Rogan, who gave the guy a platform and treated him as if he was the next Einstein.

Hossenfelder's takedown of Howard (and Rogan) is brilliantly acerbic, and is well worth watching in its entirety.  One line, though, stands out: "Joe Rogan isn't stupid, but he thinks his audience is."  Rogan's take on things is that Howard's ideas haven't caught on in the scientific community because the scientists are acting as gatekeepers -- rejecting ideas out of hand if they come from someone who is not In The Club.  This, of course, is nonsense; they aren't ignoring Howard's book because he's not a scientist, they're ignoring it because his claims are ridiculous.  This is not scientists acting as unfair gatekeepers; they simply know what the hell they're talking about because they've spent their entire careers studying it.

I had decided not to address Howard's claims, feeling that Hossenfelder did a masterful enough job by herself of knocking him and Rogan down simultaneously, and that anything I could add would be superfluous.  And, of course, given that Hossenfelder is a physicist, she is vastly more qualified than I am to address the physics end of it.  But since Andrew sent me the link, I've now seen Howard's claims pop up three more times, always along with some commentary about the Mean Nasty Scientists refusing to listen to an outsider, and this is why we don't trust the scientists, see?

Which, of course, made me see red, and is why you're reading about it here.  There's no grand conspiracy amongst the scientific establishment to silence amateurs; as we've seen here at Skeptophilia more than once, dedicated amateurs have made significant contributions to science.  No scientist would refuse to look at a revolutionary idea if it had merit.  Terrence Howard might well have mental problems, and be more to be pitied than censured, but Joe Rogan needs to just shut the hell up.

And for the love of Gauss, that 1 x 1 = 1 can be derived in one step from one of the fundamental axioms of arithmetic.

So.  Anyhow.  I need to finish this up and go have a nice cup of tea and calm down.  But do me a favor, Gentle Readers.  If you see this kind of nonsense online, please please puhleeeez don't forward it.  If you feel comfortable doing so, tell the original poster "this is incorrect, and here's why."  And if you run into any odd claims online, do a two-minute fact check before you post them yourself.  Snopes and FactCheck.org remain two of the best places to find out if claims are true; there's no excuse for not using them.

Let's all do what we can to stem the tide of misinformation, before we all drown in it.

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

Altered flow

John McPhee's wonderful book The Control of Nature describes three attempts to alter naturally-occurring geological processes: the shift of the course of the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya River (which would leave New Orleans without a port); the lava flow from the 1973 eruption of Eldfell Volcano on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, which threatened to seal off the main town's only harbor; and the ongoing problem with landslides in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, which have been exacerbated by people's insistence on building multi-million-dollar homes in steep-sided canyons.

Of the three, only the Icelanders had a success story.  They halted the lava flow by pumping cold seawater onto it, and stopped it before it closed off the harbor completely; the tongue of solidified rock actually created a useful seawall.  The other two were, and still are, drastic failures.  The levee/spillway system in Louisiana, intended to keep the Mississippi in its channel and prevent it from switching over to the Atchafalaya's shorter and more direct path to the Gulf of Mexico, has caused more silting of the channel and subsidence of the land, both of which were direct contributors to the severity of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.  California still deals with landslides, despite their best efforts to contain them with various slope stabilization devices -- and rich people are still building their mansions right in harm's way.

33% is not a great success rate, but it's pretty reflective of our attempts to control natural processes.  It's not that I'm saying what we do has no effect; the unfortunate part is most of what we've tried hasn't worked, or has actually made the situation more dire.  The obvious example (anthropogenic climate change) is only one of many examples of times we've messed around with things and come off very much the worse.

Although we're unique in the animal world in being able to control our environments to some extent, we're still very much at the mercy of the natural world.  Big, sudden cataclysms -- events like major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods -- are the most obvious examples, but sometimes slow, gradual processes can alter the course of history just as profoundly.  The fall of the Roman Empire, about which I've written a couple of times recently, may well have been triggered by a climatic shift causing freezing drought in the central Asian steppes, inducing the Huns to migrate west and starting a domino effect of invasions.  Certainly the rising and lowering of sea level as ice ages came and went altered migration patterns; both Australia and the Americas were colonized during periods when the areas now at the bottom of (respectively) the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Bering Sea were dry land.

The idea that climate has been a major driver for history has gone out of vogue, and is sneeringly referred to as "climate determinism" despite the fact that (1) there's no denying the vagaries of climate have had obvious and dramatic effects, and (2) no one has ever claimed that climate was the only thing affecting the course of events.  Consider, for example, some new research out of the University of Southampton that came out in Nature Geoscience this week.

Life in Egypt has always been dicey -- the valley of the Nile is thickly-inhabited, but go more than a few miles east or west from it and you're in marginally-inhabitable desert.  We all learned in elementary school how the ancient Egyptians survived by learning how to manage what are always called the Nile's "life-giving floods" through irrigation channels and catchment basins, but the truth is, all it took was a dry year or two and the entire civilization was in deep trouble.

The situation changed -- for once, for the better -- about four thousand years ago, when the Nile shifted course and created the floodplain around Luxor.

The reason was the same as what John McPhee explains about the Mississippi, but with a happier outcome.  As rivers flow, they pick up sediment, and when they reach the sea and the water velocity slows down, that sediment is deposited on the river bottom.  This raises it, creating an impediment to water flow, slowing down the water further and making it drop more sediment, and so on and so forth.  Eventually the delta becomes impassible, and the water is forced into another channel (unless people step in and try to stop it, like what is happening with dubious success in Louisiana).

In southern Egypt, though, the switch in paths brought the flow of the Nile out over a broad, flat plain that prior to that had been high and dry.  The outflow into the Mediterranean moved east as well, and the outgoing river broke up into dozens of outflow channels.  This proved extraordinarily beneficial to the people living all along the river's northern half.  "The expansion of the floodplain greatly enlarged the area of arable land in the Nile Valley near Luxor (ancient Thebes) and improved the fertility of the soil by regularly depositing fertile silts," said Benjamin Pennington, who co-authored the paper.  "The Egyptian Nile we see today looks very different from how it would have been throughout much of the last 11,500 years.  For most of this time, the Nile was made up of a network of interwoven channels that frequently changed their course.  Around four thousand years ago, the Nile abruptly shifted and there was rapid floodplain aggradation, where the river began depositing large amounts of sediment, building up the valley floor.  This created a more expansive and stable floodplain."

The result was that the New Kingdom -- which included the reigns of famous pharaohs such as Ahmose I, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun -- had the resources to become one of the significant political powers of the region.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mohammed Moussa, Ramses II in Luxor Temple, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Like McPhee's one-out-of-three success rate for humans trying to control nature, however, it bears keeping in mind that for every example of a natural event benefitting humans, there's one that didn't turn out so well for us.  The collapse of classical Mayan civilization in the eighth century C.E. was largely triggered by a prolonged drought; the onset of the Little Ice Age in the fourteenth created a perfect storm of conditions that fed into the Black Death killing one-third of the population of Europe.

However confident we are in our comfortable high-tech world keeping us safe, it's always good to remember how tenuous it is -- and the fact that in the long haul, Mother Nature is still very much in charge.

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

Lingua franca

Here's a question I wonder if you've ever pondered:

Why do the Spanish and French speak Romance languages and not Germanic ones?

It's not as weird a consideration as it might appear at first.  By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the last part of the fifth century C.E., the entire western part of Europe had been completely overrun by Germanic tribes -- the Franks, the Burgundians, and especially the Visigoths.  This latter group ended up controlling pretty much all of southern France and nearly the entirety of Spain, and their king, Euric, ruled the whole territory from his capital at Toulouse.  It was Euric who deposed the last Western Roman emperor, poor little Romulus Augustulus, in 476 -- but showing unusual mercy, sent him off to a (very) early retirement at a villa in Campania, where he spent the rest of his life.  That he felt no need to execute the kid is a good indicator of how solidly Euric and the Visigoths were in control.

So the Germanic-speaking Goths more or less took over, and not long after that the (also Germanic) Franks and Burgundians came into northern France and established their own territories there.  The country of France is even named after the Franks; but their language, Franconian, never really took hold inside its borders.

Contrast this to what happened in England.  The Celtic natives, who spoke a variety of Brythonic dialects related to Welsh and Cornish, were invaded during the reign of the Emperor Claudius in the year 43 C.E., and eventually Rome controlled Britain north to Hadrian's Wall.  But when all hell broke loose in the fifth century, and the Roman legions said, "Sorry, y'all'll have to deal with these Saxons on your own" and hauled ass back home, the invaders' Germanic language became the lingua franca (pun intended) of the southern half of the island, with the exception of the aforementioned Welsh and Cornish holdouts.

All three places had been Roman colonies.  So why did France and Spain end up speaking Romance languages, and England a Germanic one?

The easier question is the last bit.  Britain never was as thoroughly Romanized as the rest of western Europe; it always was kind of a wild-west frontier outpost, and a great many of the Celtic tribes the Romans tried to pacify rebelled again and again.  When the Romans troops withdrew, there weren't a lot of speakers of Latin left -- exceptions were monasteries and churches.  Most of the locals had retained their original languages, and when the British Celts told the troops "Romani ite domum" (more or less), they just picked up where they'd left off.

The problem was, when the Angles and Saxons started arriving in huge numbers over the next two centuries, there wasn't a single dominant language there to stand up against them -- just a bunch of various dialects spoken by tribes that never were all that numerous, and didn't get along very well with each other anyhow.  So the West Germanic language the invaders spoke became the common language, eventually evolving into Old English.

The situation was different in France and Spain.  By the fifth century, those had both been solidly Roman for three hundred years.  The Celtic/Gaulish natives were by this time thoroughly subjugated, and many had even thrown their lot in with the conquerors, rising to become important figures.  (One example is first century B.C.E. writer and polymath Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, who despite his Roman name was from the Celtic Vocontii tribe in the western foothills of the Alps.)  Business, record-keeping, and administration were all conducted in Latin; most of the cities were predominantly Latin-speaking.  

The Germanic tribes who swept through western Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries had an interesting attitude.  They didn't want to destroy everything the Romans had built; they just wanted to control it, and have access to all the wealth and land.  They didn't even care if the Roman town-dwellers stayed put, as long as they acknowledged the Goths' overlordship.  (Which almost all of them did, given that there were no other options.  Practical folks, the Romans.)

The invading Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians had no written language we know of, so when they settled in to rule the place -- and most importantly, to do business with the local landowners -- their only real option was to learn Latin.  Latin became the prestige language, the language you learned if you wanted to go places, much the way English is now in many parts of the world.

The result was that Latin-derived Old French and Old Spanish were eventually adopted by the Germanic-descended ruling class, ultimately being spoken throughout the region, while the opposite pattern had happened across the Channel in England.  Interesting that the Franks gave their name to the country of France and its language, but the only modern language descended from Franconian is one spoken two countries northeast of there -- Dutch.

It's always fascinating to me to see how chance events alter the course of history.  You can easily see how it could have gone the other way -- the Visigoths might have been more determined to eradicate every trace of Romanness, the way so many conquerors have done.  Instead, they saw the value in leaving it substantially intact.  Not because they had such deep respect for other cultures -- they weren't so forward thinking as all that -- but because they recognized that they could use the Roman knowledge, language, and infrastructure for their own gain.  The result is that my Celto-Germanic ancestors spoke a language derived from Latin, even though by that time it was about the only Roman thing about them.

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

The oasis

I've always thought it was astonishing that anything short of extremely cold-adapted species could make it through an ice age.

During the last major glacial period, which peaked about twenty-one thousand years ago, the spot where I'm sitting right now was under a thirty-meter-thick layer of ice.  In fact, the hills about fifty kilometers south of us -- the Elmira Moraine -- marks the terminus of the glacier, where rocks, gravel, and soil that had been pushed forward by the advancing ice sheet got left behind as it melted.  During this period, the average global temperature was 6 C colder than it is now, and so much water was locked up as ice that the sea level was over a hundred meters lower than it is today.

My picture of how species survived (excluding the aforementioned cold-lovers) was that everything shifted range toward lower latitudes as the temperature cooled and the ice advanced, then reversed the process as the glacial period ended and the ice receded.  Species that couldn't shift quickly enough, or for which the climatic changes happened too fast to adapt, became extinct.  But according to a paper last week in Science Advances, the picture may not have been quite so simple.

One clue that our understanding was incomplete had to do with genetic diversity.  For a lot of species, we have a pretty good understanding of how quickly genetic mutations accrue, so looking at the genetic makeup of various populations within a species gives you an estimate of how long ago they had a common ancestor.  (And also tells you how closely each of those populations are related to the others.)  And in Europe, the populations of warmth-loving tree species like oaks suggested strongly that modern individuals weren't all descended from southern survivors which gradually expanded their ranges back northward as the glacial period ended twenty-odd-thousand years ago.  Their genetic diversity was too high for that to be plausible -- and some of the northern populations of modern oaks seemed to be a genetic cluster only distantly related to their southern cousins.

Fossils from the Czech Republic strongly suggest that what happened was that patches of the original forest were able to survive, clustered around hot springs that even at the height of the glacial period never froze over.  Geologist Jan Hošek of the Czech Geological Survey, who was lead author of the paper, found fossils of warmth-loving tree species preserved in geyserite -- a sedimentary rock produces by hot water dissolving and then depositing layers of opaline silica on exposed surfaces.  The hot springs created an oasis covering an estimated fifty square kilometers.  Not huge, but enough that a population of oaks and other temperate woodland plants (and presumably the animals they hosted) were able to survive the worst of the cold.

Artist's conception of the hot spring refugium [Image credit: artist Jiří Svoboda]

Being a warmth-lover myself, I always find it astonishing that species made it through some of these climatic extremes.  Not only the cold ones, of course; episodes like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the global temperature was 8 C above what it is now, can't have been pleasant, either.  But the recent discoveries show that given even a small refuge, living things will hang on despite all odds.

As Ian Malcolm famously put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."

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

Inside the bubble

A couple of nights ago, my wife and I watched the latest episode in the current series of Doctor Who, "Dot and Bubble."  [Nota bene: this post will contain spoilers -- if you intend to watch it, you should do so first, then come back and read this afterward.]

All I'd heard about it before watching is that it is "really disturbing."  That's putting it mildly.  Mind you, there's no gore; even the monsters are no worse than the usual Doctor Who fare.  But the social commentary it makes puts it up there with episodes like "Midnight," "Cold Blood," and "The Almost People" for leaving you shaken and a little sick inside.

The story focuses on the character of Lindy, brilliantly played by Callie Cooke, who is one of the residents of "Finetime."  Finetime is basically a gated summer camp for spoiled rich kids, where they do some nominal work for two hours a day and spend the rest of the time playing.  Each of the residents is surrounded, just about every waking moment, by a virtual-reality shell showing all their online friends -- the "bubble" of the title -- and the "work" each of them does is mostly to keep their bubbles fully charged so they don't miss anything.

The tension starts to ramp up when the Doctor and his companion, Ruby Sunday, show up unannounced in Lindy's bubble, warning her that people in Finetime are disappearing.  At first she doesn't believe it, but when forced to look people up, she notices an abnormal number of them are offline -- she hadn't noticed because the only ones she sees are the ones who are online, so she wasn't aware how many people in her bubble had vanished.  At first she's dismissive of Ruby and downright rude to the Doctor, but eventually is driven to the realization that there are monsters eating the inhabitants of Finetime one by one.

Reluctantly accepting guidance from the Doctor, she runs for one of the conduits that pass under the city, which will give her a way out of the boundaries into the "Wild Wood," the untamed forests outside the barrier.  Along the way, though, we begin to see that Lindy isn't quite the vapid innocent we took her for at first.  She coldly and unhesitatingly sacrifices the life of a young man who had tried to help her in order to save her own; when she finds out that the monsters had already killed everyone in her home world, including her own mother, she basically shrugs her shoulders, concluding that since they were in a "happier place" it was all just hunky-dory.

It was the end, though, that was a sucker punch I never saw coming.  When she finally meets up with the Doctor and Ruby in person, and the Doctor tells her (and a few other survivors) that they have zero chance of surviving in the Wild Wood without his help, she blithely rejects his offer.

"We can't travel with you," she says, looking at him as if he were subhuman.  "You, sir, are not one of us.  You were kind -- although it was your duty to save me.  Screen-to-screen contact is just about acceptable.  But in person?  That's impossible."

In forty-five minutes, a character who started out seeming simply spoiled, empty-headed, and shallow moved into the territory of "amoral" and finally into outright evil.  That this transformation was so convincing is, once again, due to Callie Cooke's amazing portrayal.

What has stuck with me, though, and the reason I'm writing about it today, is that the morning after I watched it, I took a look at a few online reviews of the episode.  They were pretty uniformly positive (and just about everyone agreed that it was disturbing as hell), but what is fascinating -- and more than a little disturbing in its own right -- is the difference between the reactions of the reviewers who are White and the ones who are Black.

Across the board, the White reviewers thought the take-home message of "Dot and Bubble" is "social media = bad."  Or, at least, social media addiction = bad.  If so, the moral to the story is (to quote Seán Ferrick of the YouTube channel WhoCulture) "as subtle as a brick to the face."  The racism implicit in Lindy's rejection of the Doctor was a shocking twist at the end, adding another layer of yuck to an already awful character.

The Black reviewers?  They were unanimous that the main theme throughout the story is racism (even though race was never once mentioned explicitly by any of the characters).  In the very first scene, it was blatantly obvious to them that every last one of Lindy's online friends is White -- many of them almost stereotypically so.  Unlike the White reviewers, the Black reviewers saw the ending coming from a mile off.  Many of them spoke of having dealt all their lives with sneering, race-based microaggressions -- like Lindy's being willing at least to talk to Ruby (who is White) while rejecting the Doctor (who is Black) out of hand.

When considering "Dot and Bubble," it's easy to stop at it being a rather ham-handed commentary on social media, but really, it's about echo chambers.  Surround yourself for long enough with people who think like you, act like you, and look like you, and you start to believe the people who don't share those characteristics are less than you.

What disturbs me the worst is that I didn't see the obvious clues that writer Russell T. Davies left us, either.  When Lindy listens to Ruby and rejects the Doctor, it honestly didn't occur to me that the reason could be the color of his skin.  I didn't even notice that all Lindy's friends were White.  As a result, the ending completely caught me off guard.  As far as the subtle (and not-so-subtle) racist overtones of the characters in the episode, I wasn't even aware of them except in retrospect.

But that's one of the hallmarks of privilege, isn't it?  You're not aware of it because you don't have to be.  As a White male, there are issues of safety, security, and acceptance I never even have to think about.  So I guess like Lindy and the other residents of Finetime, I also live in my own bubble, surrounded by people who (mostly) think like I do, never having to stretch myself to consider, "What would it be like if I was standing where they are?"

And what makes the character of Lindy so horrific is that even offered the opportunity to do that -- to step outside of her bubble and broaden her mind a little -- she rejects it.  Even if it means losing the aid of the one person who is able to help her, and without whose assistance she is very likely not to survive.

For myself, my initial blindness to what "Dot and Bubble" was saying was a chilling reminder to keep pushing my own boundaries.  In the end, all I can do is what poet Maya Angelou tells us: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then, when you know better, do better."

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

The emperor of books

In my novel The Scattering Winds, set seven hundred years in the future, an inquisitive and adventurous young man stumbles upon a relic of the distant past -- a library that somehow survived the cataclysms of our own time, and all the vagaries of circumstance in the following seven centuries.  When he starts going through the treasure-trove of books that have survived, he's struck by the tragic and devastating fact that what was preserved and what was lost was merely a matter of luck, and that for every precious title still in existence, there were a hundred others for which every copy had been destroyed forever.

My inspiration for writing this was that this is, honestly, the situation we're already in.  The vast majority of works from the ancient world are long gone, lost through violence, mishap, and the fact that before the invention of the printing press, making additional copies of books was a long and arduous process, so many of them only ever existed in the form of a copy or two in some monastic library somewhere.  We extol the works of authors like Sophocles and Euripides, but it bears keeping in mind that most of their writing no longer exists.  Our understanding of their work is as fragmentary as if we tried to comprehend the depth and breadth of Shakespeare using only five randomly chosen sonnets, Timon of Athens, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

It's curious, though, how sometimes circumstances conspire to allow a work to survive.  This is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, looking at how sheer luck resulted in the rediscovery of the single extant copy of the first century B.C.E. philosopher Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), the concepts of which were pivotal to the development of science during the Renaissance.  There's another example of this phenomenon, though, which I wonder if you've heard of.  Just about everything we know about the fifth century C.E. turmoil, which resulted in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the near-collapse of the Eastern one, is due to the efforts of a single man -- Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus of Byzantium, who reigned from 913 to 959.

Constantine was the son of Emperor Leo VI "the Wise" and his mistress, Zoë Karbonopsina ("Zoë of the Coal-Black Eyes"), and so he was "born to the royal purple" (that's what his mouthful of a sobriquet means).  When his mother gave birth to him, she insisted on doing so in the Purple Room of the Imperial Palace to emphasize his royal-purple origins in fact as well as symbolically.

Constantine was one of those people who probably shouldn't ever have been involved in politics.  He had a reputation for being smart, honest, generous, and kind, which certainly wasn't (and isn't) a combination that does all that well in office.  He was far more interested in history than he was in administration (a leaning I definitely understand), but was fortunate to have capable ministers who took care of most of the duties of office for him.  All in all, his reign went far better than other times there's been a bookish scholarly type on the throne.  King Henry VI of England comes to mind -- during whose chaotic reign the English got their asses handed to them repeatedly in wars with the French, and the War of the Roses broke out on the home island.

That Constantine fared better is largely due to his smart choices of helpers.  Fortunately for us, because this left him free to pursue his passion, which was saving old manuscripts.  He realized how much of the work of ancient writers had been lost in the paroxysms of the fifth and sixth centuries, so he set about pulling together and recopying everything he could find of what was left. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wooofer, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (2), CC BY-SA 4.0]

The result was a 53-volume set called Excerpta Historica, which contained everything from fragments to whole books by hundreds of ancient authors, some of whom have no other surviving works.  These include Polybius, Nicolaus of Damascus, Dexippus, Eunapius, Peter the Patrician, Menander the Protector, John of Antioch, Thucydides, Xenophon, Diodorus of Sicily, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Arrian of Nicomedia, Iamblichus, Appian of Alexandria, Cassius Dio, Socrates of Constantinople, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Sozomen, Philostorgius, Procopius, Agathias of Myrina, Theophylact Simocatta, John Malalas and Malchus of Philadelphia.

To name a few.

Two of the historians that Constantine included were Priscus and Zosimus, who lived in Constantinople in the fifth and early sixth centuries (respectively), and from whose writings we know as much as we do about the events leading up to the fall of the Roman Empire.  Imagine it -- without Constantine's preservation of these two writers' histories, we might only know that there had been this huge empire surrounding the Mediterranean, and then... something mysterious happened, and it collapsed.

It does leave you wondering, though, what other major events in history we know nothing about, because any records chronicling them have been lost over the years.  The sad fact is that the depredations of time in the last thousand years continued after Constantine's death, and even of his original 53 volumes, we only have four left -- we only know of the 49 lost volumes from references in other works, and can only speculate about what we might have learned from them.

But at least we have the four that survived.  Without the work of a brilliant, book-loving Byzantine emperor, our knowledge of the ancient history of Europe would be even more incomplete than it is.  And like my main character in The Scattering Winds, from these fragments we can get at least a glimpse into a long-gone world that otherwise we'd know almost nothing about.

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