Birdwalking through life

I have sometimes compared the sensation inside my brain as being like riding the Tilt-o-Whirl backwards.

I've had a combination of an extremely short attention span and insatiable curiosity since I was a kid.  I still remember when I was about ten and my parents splurged on a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, figuring (rightly) that it would come in handy during my education.  What they didn't figure on was my capacity for getting completely and inextricably lost in it.  I'd start out looking up some fact -- say, what year James Madison was elected president -- then get distracted by a nearby entry and head off toward that, and before you knew it I was sitting on the living room floor with a dozen of the volumes open to articles having to do with a string of only vaguely-connected topics.  I could start out with James Madison and end up in an entry for the flora and fauna of Cameroon, with no real idea how I'd gotten from one to the other.

That facet of my personality hasn't changed any in the intervening five-odd decades.  I still birdwalk my way through the world, something regular readers of Skeptophilia undoubtedly know all too well (and if you are a regular reader, thank you for putting up with my whirligig approach to life).  Now, of course, I don't need an Encyclopedia Brittanica; the internet is positively made for people like me, to judge by the winding path I took just yesterday.

It all started when I was doing some research into the origin of the word cynosure (meaning "something attention-getting, a guidepost or focal point") for my popular feature "Ask Linguistics Guy" over on TikTok.  I was pretty certain that the word came from the Greek κυνός, meaning "dog," but I wasn't sure of the rest of the derivation.  (I was right about κυνός, but for the rest of the story you'll have to check out my video, which I'll post later today on TikTok.)

But while looking up cynosure my eye was caught by the preceding entry in the etymological dictionary, cynocephaly.  Which means "having a dog's head."

Fig. 1: an example of cynocephaly.  Of course, he's kind of cyno-everything, so it probably doesn't count.  And if you are thinking that I'm only using this as an excuse to post a photograph of my extremely cute puppy, you're on to me.

A more common usage of cynocephaly is someone who has a dog's head and a human body, and it was apparently a fairly common belief back in the day that such beings existed.  In the fifth century B.C.E. the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus wrote a book in which he claimed that there was a whole race of cynocephalic people in India, which he was free to say because he'd apparently never been there and neither had any of his readers.  Other writers said that the Cynocephali lived in Libya or Serbia or Finland or Sumatra; you'd think the fact that none of those places are close to each other would have clued them in that there was something amiss, but no.  There was even a discussion in the ninth century, launched amongst the church fathers by a theologian named Ratramnus of Corbie, about whether dog-headed people would have eternal souls or not, because if they did, it was incumbent upon the Christians to find them and preach the Gospel to them.

As far as I know, this discussion came to nothing, mostly because the Cynocephali don't exist.

In any case, this got me on the track of looking into the attitudes of the medievals toward dogs, and my next stop was the story of Saint Guinefort.  If you've never heard of Saint Guinefort, I'm sure you're not alone; he was never officially beatified by the Catholic Church, because he's a dog.  The legend goes that a knight near Lyon had a greyhound named Guinefort, and he left his infant son in the care of the dog one day (that's some solid parenting, right there).  Well, when the knight returned, the cradle was overturned, and Guinefort's jaws were dripping blood.  The infuriated knight pulled his sword and killed the dog, assuming Guinefort had killed the baby.  Only then did he think to turn the cradle over (a real genius, this knight) -- and there was the baby, safe and sound, along with a dead viper covered with dog bites.  So the knight felt just terrible, and erected a shrine to Guinefort, who was venerated in the area as a saint, despite the local priests saying "Hey, you can't do that!" and even threatening to fine people who came there to pray.  The whole episode supposedly happened in the thirteenth century -- but people were still bringing their sick children to be blessed by Saint Guinefort in the 1940s!

From there I started looking into folklore surrounding protectors of children, and after several more jumps that I won't belabor you with, I ended up reading about the mythical monster called Coco (or Cucuy) from Spain and Portugal.  The Coco is a hooded figure that is supposed to haunt houses with children, sometimes appearing only as a stray shadow cast by no physical object.  (Shades of the pants-wettingly terrifying Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Identify Crisis," which if you haven't watched I highly recommend -- only don't watch it while you're alone.)

Fig. 2: "Wait a moment... whose shadow is that?"  *shudder*

Anyhow, the idea is that El Coco particularly goes after disobedient children, so the legend probably started as a way for parents to get their kids to behave.  The problem with these kinds of stories, though, is that it's a fine line between scaring kids enough to obey the rules and scaring them so much they refuse to sleep, which is why there are lullabies about keeping the Coco away.  Some are barely better than the legend itself:

Duérmete niño, duérmete ya...
Que viene el Coco y te comerá

(Sleep child, sleep or else...
Coco will come and eat you)

I don't know about you, but that would have pacified the absolute shit out of me when I was four years old.  I would have been so pacified I wouldn't have closed my eyes until I was in my mid-twenties.  Then there's this one, from Portugal:

Vai-te Coco. Vai-te Coco
Para cima do telhado
Deixa o menino dormir
Um soninho descansado
Dorme neném
Que a Coco vem pegar
Papai foi pra roça
Mamãe foi trabalhar

(Leave Coco. Leave Coco
Go to the top of the roof
Let the child have
A quiet sleep
Sleep little baby
That Coco comes to get you
Daddy went to the farm
Mommy went to work)

Because there's nothing like "hey, kid, your parents are gone, so you're on your own if the monsters come" to get a child to settle down.  Maybe they should have hired a greyhound or something.

Fig. 3: Que Viene el Coco, by Goya (1799).  The mom looks like she's about to say, "You can have the kids, I'm getting right the fuck outta here."  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In the "See Also" listings at the bottom of the page for El Coco was an entry for Madame Koi-Koi, who sounded interesting (and whom I had also never heard of).  So that was my next stop.  Turns out Madame Koi-Koi is -- and I am not making up the wording -- "one of the most popular boarding school ghosts in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa."  Myself, I wouldn't have thought there were enough boarding school ghosts to turn it into a competition, but shows you what I know.  Supposedly Madame Koi-Koi is the ghost of a wicked teacher who was killed by her own students because of her cruelty, and now she haunts schools.  She always wears high heels -- "Koi-Koi" is apparently imitative of the sound her heels make on the floor -- so at least you can hear her coming.  Her favorite thing is to corner students in the bathroom for some reason, especially at night.

Getting up to pee at two a.m. is a fraught affair, in many African boarding schools.

Anyhow, I suppose I've recounted enough of my wanderings.  I'd like to tell you that I stopped there and then went and did something productive, but that would be a lie.  But at least you have a sense of what it's like in my head 24/7.

I hope you enjoyed the ride.  At least you can get off.

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

Measure for measure

In yesterday's post we looked at one bizarre human obsession, which is drawing lines all over the place and pretending they represent something real.  Today we're going to look at another, which is our penchant for quantifying everything.

Certainly, accurate measurement is critical in science; data, for the most part, is numerical, and most models these days are mathematical representations of reality.  But still, there's a strange aspect to it, which British science historian James Burke got at in his brilliant series The Day the Universe Changed:

[T]he structural view of things at the time controls what science does at every level.  From the cosmic questions about the whole universe, to what bits of that universe are worth investigating, to how far you let the questions take you, what experiments to do, what evidence you can and can't accept.  And down at that detailed level, the control still operates, because it even tells you what instruments you should use.  And of course, at this stage, you're looking for data to prove your theory, so you design the kind of instruments to find the kind of data you reckon you're going to find.  The whole argument comes full circle when you get the raw data itself.  Because it isn't raw data.  It's what you planned to find from the start.

He goes on to make the important point that true leaps in understanding occur when the unexpected occurs, and some piece of the data doesn't fit with the existing model; then (assuming the data are verified and found to be correct), there's no choice but to revise the model -- or trash it entirely and start over.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But what this has done is created a morass of different units of measurement, and I'm not referring solely to my own country's pig-headed insistence on avoiding the use of the metric system.  Imperial units -- feet, miles, pounds, quarts, and so on -- are certainly cumbersome (check out this hilarious video if you want to find out just how awkward they are), but they're not the weirdest ways that humans have chosen to subdivide the natural world.  So for your edification, here are a few of the stranger units of measurement I've run into:

• the micromort -- defined as a one-in-a-million chance of death.  For example, smoking a cigarette and a half increases your chance of dying by about one micromort.
• a jiffy is 1/60 of a second, from the vertical refresh period on NTSC analog video hardware running on American (60 Hertz) alternating current.  So next time someone tells you, "I'll be back in a jiffy," you can confidently respond, "I seriously doubt that."
• so many people in Britain publicly compared the areas of geographical regions to the size of Wales that it led to a unit of area, the nanowales -- one billionth the area of Wales, or about 20.78 square meters.
• the Sverdrup, named after Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup, at least has its basis in metric units.  It's a unit of flow rate, equal to one million cubic meters per second.  Being as huge as it is, you might imagine it has limited utility -- in fact, it's pretty much only used in oceanography and meteorology.  (For reference, the flow rate of the Gulf Stream varies between 30 and 150 Sverdrup, depending on where you measure it and what you consider its boundaries to be.)
• the dolor is a unit of pain.  One dolor is equal to the difference between two levels of pain that is just noticeable.  The subjective nature of pain has resulted in it not being widely accepted in the medical community.
• a millihelen is a unit of beauty, named after Helen of Troy -- the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
• when I taught dimensional analysis in physics, I had students practice converting from one set of units to another -- a useful skill when doing science.  I always made a point of having them convert velocities from meters per second to furlongs per fortnight, which firmly cemented in their brains that I have a screw loose.  (For what it's worth, a furlong is 660 feet, or about 201.17 meters; a fortnight is fourteen days, so 1,209,600 seconds.  Thus, the speed of light is about 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight, a factoid you can bring out at the next cocktail party you attend, especially if you want people to find ways to avoid you for the rest of the evening.)
• one mickey is the smallest resolvable movement possible with a computer mouse.  Most of them have a sensitivity of about five hundred mickeys per inch.
• a Smoot is a unit of length, named after Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot.  The story is that one day in 1958, Smoot got falling-down drunk, and his buddies (who were also snookered but not as badly as Smoot was) were basically dragging him home, and decided to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge in Smoot-lengths (about 170 centimeters).  The bridge, they found, was 364.4 Smoots in length plus a little bit, so there's now a plaque saying "364.4 Smoots and an ear" on the bridge.  (Smoot went on, I shit you not, to be the chairperson of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization.  Talk about being destined for a particular career.)
• the weirdest unit of volume I've ever heard of is the Hubble-barn.  This combines the Hubble length -- the radius of the known universe -- with a unit of area called the barn, which is used to measure the scattering cross-section of atomic nuclei and is equal to 10^-28 square meters.  One Hubble-barn is the volume of a rectangular solid that has a square face with an area of one barn stretching across the entire known universe.  If you do the calculation, it's way less volume than you'd think -- on the order of 13.1 liters.
• last, we have the ohnosecond, which is the time elapsed between making a mistake and recognizing it, such as pressing "send" on an email describing details of some illicit but highly pleasurable activities you want to experience with a coworker with whom you're having a clandestine dalliance, and realizing too late that you forgot to change the "to" line from "Reply All."

So there you have it -- some ways to measure the world, some serious, some not so much.  In any case, I'd better wrap this up.  So far I've had only about 0.02 Hubble-barns of coffee, so I'm moving at a velocity of around a furlong per fortnight.  I should post this, and hope that there are at least a few ohnoseconds between hitting "Publish" and seeing what I've wrought.

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

The disappearing island

Sometimes I don't understand my fellow humans at all.

Take, for example, our habit of drawing imaginary lines all over the place and then pretending those lines should have an impact on what can do.  Over here, you have to follow one set of rules; walk ten meters to the west and cross an invisible line some random person made up, and you have to follow a completely different set of rules.  You want to purchase liquor, own a gun, marry someone of the same sex, gamble, get decent health care or a good education?  Whoa, you first better figure out where the lines are and make sure you're on the right side!  In order to cross some lines (legally, at least) you have to have a specific little booklet and let a grim and humorless person stamp it first.  Try to get across without a booklet and stamp, and boy, are you in trouble.  In fact, some people take these invisible lines so seriously they'll kill anyone who tries to cross.

This kind of behavior may well explain why the aliens take one look at Earth and then warp right the fuck out of the quadrant.

One of the weirdest examples of this phenomenon has to do with an on-again, off-again island in the central Mediterranean, about halfway between Tunisia and the island of Sicily.  You probably know this is a tectonically-active region -- Sicily is the home of Mount Etna -- so there are a number of small volcanic islands and seamounts dotted around the place.  One of these is called (depending on whom you ask) Empedocles Seamount or Graham Island or Île Julia or Isola Ferdinandea.

The reason for the multiple names is that prior to 1831 it had been a submarine volcano, on the order of six meters below sea level at lowest tide.  But then it erupted (as volcanoes are wont to do) and suddenly the peak of the seamount was above sea level.

That's when the fun began.

In August of that year, British sea captain Humphrey Fleming Senhouse saw the newly-formed island (at that point pretty much just a bunch of hot rocks barely poking up out of the water), and in the fine old British tradition of spotting a place and saying "Mine!", claimed it for the British crown.  He named it Graham Island after Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty.  The problem was, French geologist Constant Prévost was also nearby studying the volcanoes in the region, and when the island appeared he thought King Louis Philippe I of France might fancy having a bunch of rocks, so he claimed it for France (and named it Île Julia, supposedly because it appeared in July).  But it wasn't long before the Sicilians, who after all were nearest to the place, said, "The hell you say" and claimed it for their own, renaming it for a third time Isola Ferdinandea (after King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies).

As far as I know, the Tunisians decided to leave well enough alone and didn't get involved.

A page out of Constant Prévost's field journal, showing the eruption of whatever-its-name-is [Image is in the Public Domain]

Diplomatic wrangling ensued.  One of of the concerns surrounded whether this was a sign of increasing volcanism, and if it might ultimately link up Sicily with Tunisia, and where would they draw the invisible lines if that happened?  The British were adamant that they wanted it for its strategic location, and drew up plans for building a naval base there.  The French, more luxury-minded, started thinking about a holiday resort.  The Sicilians mostly just said the Italian equivalent of "But... but it's ours," to no particular effect.

It's uncertain what the ultimate outcome of the dispute would have been, because within a few months it became obvious that Graham/Julia/Ferdinandea Island was shrinking.  It turned out that the eruption had mostly produced tephra -- a loose, porous, crumbly rock that doesn't withstand erosion.  Like, at all.  In January 1832 it was reported as barely visible, and by that summer the island had disappeared entirely.  The French, British, and Sicilians all sort of kicked at the dirt and said, "Awww, rats" in an embarrassed sort of way, and then toddled off to look around for other arbitrary and pointless things to fight about.

So at the moment it's back to being Empedocles Seamount, with its peak about eight meters below water level.  Amazingly, though, the dispute is still bugging people.  In November of 2000, some Sicilian divers went down and planted a marble plaque with a Sicilian flag on the top of the seamount, with the idea being if it ever surfaces again the Sicilians will already have laid claim to it.  The plaque has an inscription that reads, "This piece of land, once Ferdinandea, belonged to and shall always belong to the Sicilian people."

Within six months, the combination of waves and tectonic activity fractured the plaque into twelve pieces.  

The whole affair made me think about the quote from Voltaire: "God is a comedian playing to an audience which is afraid to laugh."

But more to the point: is it just me, or is this kind of behavior seriously weird?

I think we accept it just because it's so common, but really, I find myself much more in sympathy with a lot of the Indigenous peoples, who when they first ran into Europeans (whose capacity for invisible line-drawing is second to none) couldn't even understand what the invaders meant when they said "this land is mine now."  The land was here long before you were born, and will still be here long after you're dead.  What does it mean to say it's "yours"?  And it's more bizarre than that when you start factoring in things like mineral rights.  Okay, legally I own 3.5 acres of land.  Do I own what's underneath it?  If so, how far underneath?  Do I own a gradually narrowing conical chunk of material extending all the way to the Earth's center?

What the fuck would that even mean, that I "own" something that I'll never see, never touch, and is in fact physically impossible to reach?

I dunno.  Apparently it makes sense to other people, so maybe I'm the weird one.  All I know is when I think about things like this, and other stuff we argue incessantly about -- like what comprises ninety percent of politics -- I'm hoping the aliens will at least slow down their passage by Earth long enough to pick up a passenger.

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

Old New England

What do you know about the founding of New England?

No, not that New England, the other one.  Although there are some significant parallels, notably a king in a completely different country granting settlers land despite the fact that he didn't own it and it inconveniently happened to be already occupied by someone else.  (Hardly the only time this has happened, of course.  See the history of South and Central America, Indonesia, India, and pretty much the entire continent of Africa for other notable examples.)

This particular New England is on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine and Russia.  According to three medieval manuscripts -- the French Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis, Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, and the Icelandic Játvarðar Saga -- it was founded in the late eleventh century by a group of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon noblemen who, after the Norman Invasions of 1066, didn't like that the country had been taken over by a bunch of Frenchmen, so decided to up stakes and leave.  There's some indication that they were led by prominent English thegn Siward Barn, who had been imprisoned by William the Conqueror, and after being released in 1087 disappears from the records entirely.

This, apparently, may have been because he went to Constantinople.

The English group was mostly made up of powerful and wealthy landowners; after the Conquest, the peasant class pretty much went on with their miserable lives just as before, only with new kings and masters.  Most of them probably reacted to William's accession to the throne the same way these guys did:

"King of the who?"

In any case, Siward and his disaffected noblemen decided to take off for greener pastures (figuratively, not literally, as it turned out) and sailed to the Mediterranean, sacking the city of Ceuta near the Straits of Gibraltar, and pillaging and plundering their way from Mallorca to Menorca to Sicily (which at that point was also being run by the Normans).

It was in Sicily where they found out that Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenos was in trouble from Muslim invaders (and also from the goddamn Normans, who just would not mind their own business), so they decided to head over to Constantinople and give him a hand.  The battle went poorly for the Muslims (ultimately they'd come back and pretty much take over the place, but this was a significant setback, at least for the time being); the Normans were routed completely, and limped back to Sicily to regroup and figure out who they would annoy next.  Alexius was grateful enough to tell the English they could stay in Constantinople permanently if they wanted.  Siward said thanks but no thanks -- figuring, probably correctly, that he'd remain in a subservient position if they stayed there, and after all that was why they'd left England in the first place -- and asked Alexius if he had any other deals to offer.

Alexius said "Sure do," and described a region on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea that Siward and his friends could have.  This was ignoring the aforementioned minor details that (1) Alexius didn't own the land in question, and (2) someone else did.  So it was no skin off his nose either way.  But Siward thought that sounded just ducky, and after all they'd already proven to everyone they could pillage with the best of 'em, so they took off for the spot in question, wiped out the people who lived there, and settled down.

They called the spot "New England."  They named some towns they founded "London," "York," and "Sussex," amongst others named after "other great towns in England."  Eventually they intermarried with the local population (what was left of it), and were assimilated into the Byzantine, and ultimately the Russian, Empires.

The most reliable of the three sources, Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, spells out in detail how it all went down:

[They] went into voluntary exile so that they might either find in banishment freedom from the power of the Normans or secure foreign help and come back and fight a war of vengeance.  Some of them who were still in the flower of their youth travelled into remote lands and bravely offered their arms to Alexius, emperor of Constantinople, a man of great wisdom and nobility...  This is the reason for the exodus of the English Saxons to Ionia; the emigrants and their heirs faithfully served the holy empire, and are still honored among the Greeks by the Emperor, nobility, and people alike.

It's a pretty fantastic story, but is it true?

As amazing as it sounds, it appears to be.  It's attested in three unrelated sources -- details differ some, but they all substantially agree on the main points.  Further, linguist Ottar Grønvik found distinctive West Germanic -- i.e., Anglo-Saxon -- words, morphology, and syntax in Crimean Gothic, a Germanic language spoken in the region until the sixteenth century.  Most strikingly, there are still place names on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea that seem to come from this settlement; notably a Londina River and a town named Susacho (from "Sussex" -- later renamed Novorossiysk by the Russians).

None of which is proof, of course.  My training as a linguist impressed upon me the danger of taking chance sound or spelling correspondences as hard evidence of an etymological common root.  But I have to admit that the case still seems pretty strong to me.

So there you have it; a New England that pre-dated the more famous one by five centuries.  It'd be interesting to do some DNA testing of the people who live there now and see if there are any discernible traces of English ancestry.  Not that it's likely to happen soon; the coast of the Black Sea is once again a pretty dangerous place to wander around.  But curious to think that almost a thousand years ago, some Anglo-Saxon long-distance soldiers-for-hire may have settled there, never to see Merrie Old England again.

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

A Jurassic wake-up call

About 183 million years ago -- during the Toarcian Age, one of the subdivisions of the early Jurassic Period -- there was a sudden and puzzling extinction.

Things had been recovering nicely after the End-Triassic Mass Extinction, eighteen million years earlier.  While dinosaurs were not yet at the peak they would hit in the later Jurassic, they were well on their way to taking over the place.  The temperatures were cool -- there's evidence of widespread glaciation during the ten million years prior -- but by and large, everything seemed to be coping just fine.

Then, suddenly, wipeout.

It wasn't as big as some of the truly dramatic mass extinctions the Earth has experienced, but that doesn't mean it was insignificant.  Marine invertebrates got clobbered, dropping both in diversity and in overall numbers.  Over ninety percent of coral species went extinct.  Two entire orders of brachiopods died; bivalves, ostracods, and ammonoids survived, but with greatly reduced populations.  Coelophysid and dilophosaurid dinosaurs got wiped out completely.  Seed ferns and lycophytes declined sharply, to be replaced by cycads and conifers.

Fossil seed fern [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of it occurred rapidly -- the current estimates are less than five hundred thousand years, which is a snap of the fingers geologically.

So what happened?

The culprit seems to have been the Karoo-Ferrar Large Igneous Province, an enormous volcanic formation (estimated at about three million square kilometers) now underlying much of southern Africa, eastern Antarctica, and southwestern South America.  At this point, Gondwana -- the southern half of the supercontinent of Pangaea -- had just begun to break up, and this massive series of eruptions was part of the process of rifting.  But what caused the extinction was not the eruption itself -- it was the sudden spike of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which swung the climate from a glacial period to a hothouse.  A study released last week by a team at Duke University found evidence of a twenty thousand gigaton carbon dioxide pulse, triggering not only a drastic temperature increase, but widespread ocean acidification and anoxia.

According to the study, during the event, eight percent of the global seafloor -- an area three times that of the United States -- became completely anoxic.  The pH dropped so much that animals with calcium carbonate exoskeletons literally dissolved.  Rainfall patterns shifted dramatically, impacting terrestrial biomes as well.  By the time things began to recover, it was a changed world, all in a matter of a half of a million years.

Ready for the punchline? 

Today's rate of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is over two hundred times what it was during the Toarcian Extinction Event.

Twenty thousand gigatons in five hundred thousand years is a lot, and had a devastating effect on the world's ecosystems; we've put two thousand gigatons into the atmosphere in the past two hundred years.  

Is it any surprise why the scientists have been trying like hell to get everyone's attention?

"We just don't have anything this severe [in the geological record]," said paleoclimatologist Michael Kipp, who co-authored the study.  "We go to the most rapid CO2-emitting events we can in history, and they're still not rapid enough to be a perfect comparison to what we're going through today. We're perturbing the system faster than ever before.  We have at least quantified the marine oxygen loss during this event, which will help constrain our predictions of what will happen in the future."

None of this is meant to stun people into giving up.  We have got to get a handle on this.  Yes, we've crossed several benchmarks the climate scientists have warned us about.  But every tenth of a degree's further increase we can prevent will mitigate the effects of what we're doing.  We have got to stop electing politicians who shrug their shoulders about anthropogenic climate change, most strikingly Florida's belligerent and willfully stupid Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a law striking any mention of climate change in state statutes, banning offshore wind turbines, and deregulating natural gas production, transport, and use.  

In one of the lowest-lying, most hurricane-prone states in the country.

Maybe it will take our getting slapped hard to wake us up; we don't have a good record of addressing problems that aren't right in front of our faces.  Events like the massive heat dome that just cooked the southern, central, and northeastern states are just the beginning, and are easily forgotten once they pass.  They're predicting a vicious hurricane season, fueled by a central Atlantic with a surface the temperature of bath water, but we've seen dire predictions before and gone on our way as if nothing was amiss.

So how many lives will it cost before that wake-up call is finally listened to?

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

One of the missing

I had a discussion with a friend of mine a few days ago about one of the most frustrating things -- especially for those of us plagued with insatiable curiosity -- which is when we have plenty of reliable information about a situation, but not enough to figure out what actually happened.  As skeptics, we have to be willing sometimes to say "We don't know, and may never know" -- but that doesn't make it a pleasant way to conclude matters.  Famously, that's the situation we're in with Jack the Ripper.  Despite the number of books out there that have titles like The Ripper Murders SOLVED!, if we're being honest, there just isn't enough hard evidence to reach a definitive answer.  I've dealt with several less-known (but still fascinating) examples here at Skeptophilia -- the downright bizarre Devonshire footprints, the unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser, and the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich are three that come to mind immediately.

In each case, we know for certain that the events took place; i.e., they're not hoaxes or tall tales.  But despite in-depth inquiries by skeptical investigators, in the end we're still left with highly unsatisfying question marks.

Another example of this frustrating phenomenon revolves around the American writer Ambrose Bierce, most famous for his war stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," and "One of the Missing."  He was also a prolific writer of horror fiction; his short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" were profound influences on H. P. Lovecraft -- places like Lake Hali and Carcosa, and gods like Hastur, appear in the Cthulhu Mythos stories over and over, and a lot of people don't know that they originally came from Bierce rather than from Lovecraft.

Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children.  He grew up with a deep love of books, and intended a career as a journalist, but the Civil War intervened.  He was a staunch abolitionist and enlisted on the Union side, fought at the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Shiloh, and nearly died of injuries received at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  His experiences during the war shaped not only his writing but his outlook.  Bierce was afterward deeply suspicious about the motives of his fellow humans, trusting very few people (and no one completely).

Ambrose Bierce in 1866 [Image is in the Public Domain]

His later life also shows a profound restlessness.  He spent time in San Francisco, Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, London, and Washington, D.C., never content to stay in one place for very long.  And these personality traits -- distrust of others, and a fundamentally restive nature -- both play into the most fascinating thing about Bierce, which is his mysterious disappearance.

In October of 1913 he left Washington to take a tour of Civil War battlefields.  He's documented as having passed through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico at El Paso.  Mexico was at that point in the middle of a revolution; earlier that year President Francisco Madero and Vice President José Maria Pino Suárez had both been deposed and assassinated, and the country was an unsafe place by anyone's standards.  This didn't dissuade Bierce.  In his final letter, posted in December 1913 from the city of Chihuahua to his friend Blanche Partington, he said, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination...  Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.  To be a gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"

He was never heard from again.

United States consular officials investigated the matter.  After all, the disappearance of an American citizen, and a prominent one at that, was serious business, even if he'd gone to Mexico of his own free will.  Members of Pancho Villa's senior staff claimed that Bierce had been in Chihuahua, but had left the city voluntarily and no one knew where he was.  Oral tradition in Coahuila is that he was executed by firing squad.  As for his friend, Blanche Partington, her belief was that Bierce had staged the whole thing, doubled back through Arizona, and finally committed suicide somewhere near the Grand Canyon.  No reliable reports of him -- alive or dead -- exist after December of 1913; no further trace of him was ever found.

His disappearance has been the subject of much speculation, as well as a number of works of fiction, something that no doubt would have pleased Bierce no end.  (A few of them worked on the premise that Hastur and the rest of the gang were real, and didn't like the fact that Bierce had given away their existence, so they whisked him out of the desert to Carcosa so he couldn't reveal any more of their secrets.)  Ironic that in the end, Bierce himself -- perhaps intentionally -- became one of the missing.

And as frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave Bierce's story.  He very likely died somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914, but how and why we probably never will know.  Nor can we be certain of whether he was a victim of the Mexican Revolution, took his own life (as Blanche Partington believed), or died of thirst and starvation out alone in the desert.  As with the examples I began with, we're left with a mystery -- and in the absence of further evidence, as good skeptics that's where we must conclude matters.

But given his secrecy and distrust of his fellow humans, perhaps that's what Bierce would have wanted anyhow.

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

Primed and ready

One of the beefs a lot of aficionados of the paranormal have with us skeptics has to do with a disagreement over the quality of evidence.

Take, for example, Hans Holzer, who was one of the first serious ghost hunters.  His work in the field started in the mid-twentieth century and continued right up to his death in 2009 at the venerable age of 89, during which time he not only visited hundreds of allegedly haunted sites but authored 120 books documenting his experiences.

No one doubts Holzer's sincerity; he clearly believed what he wrote, and was not a hoaxer or a charlatan.  But if you read his books, what will strike anyone of a skeptical bent is that virtually all of it is comprised of anecdote.  Stories from homeowners, accounts of "psychic mediums," recounting of old tales and legends.  None of it is demonstrated scientifically, in the sense of encounters that occur in controlled circumstances where credulity or outright fakery by others can be rigorously ruled out.

After all, Holzer may well have been scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that the people he worked with were.

I'll just interject my usual disclaimer; none of this constitutes disproof, either.  But in the absence of evidence that meets the minimum standard acceptable in science, the most parsimonious explanation is that Holzer's many stories are accounted for by human psychology, flaws in perception, and the plasticity of memory, and the possibility that at least some of his informants were exaggerating or lying about their own experiences.

As an illustration of just one of the difficulties with accepting anecdote, consider the phenomenon of priming.  What we experience is strongly affected by what we expect to experience; even a minor interjection ahead of time of a mental image (for example) can alter how we see, interpret, and remember something else that occurred afterward.  A simple example -- if someone is shown a yellow object and afterward asked to name a fruit, they come up with "banana" or "lemon" far more frequently than someone who was shown a different color (or who wasn't primed at all).  It all occurs without our conscious awareness; often the person who was primed didn't even know it was happening.

This becomes more insidious when it starts affecting how people understand the world around them.  To take another lightweight example, but which gets at how claims of the supernatural start, take the currently popular "paranormal game" called "Red Door, Yellow Door."  "Red Door, Yellow Door" is a little like the game that all of us Of A Certain Age will remember, the one called "Bloody Mary."  The way "Bloody Mary" works is that you stand in front of a mirror, stare into it, and chant "Bloody Mary" over and over, and after a moment, nothing happens.

What's supposed to happen is that your face turns into the blood-dripping visage of a woman, or else you see her over your shoulder.  Most of us who tried it, of course, got what the paranormal investigators call "disappointing results."  But "Red Door, Yellow Door" moves even one step further from verifiable reality,  because the whole thing takes place in your mind.  You're supposed to lie down and close your eyes, while a friend (the "guide") massages your temples and says, "Red door, yellow door, any other color door" over and over.  You're supposed to picture a hallway in your mind, and as soon as you've got a clear image, you give a hand signal to the guide to stop chanting.  Then you describe it, entering doors as you see fit and describing to the guide what you're seeing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons dying_grotesque from Richards Bay, South Africa, Red Door (3275822777), CC BY 2.0]

Thus far, it's just an exercise in imagination, and innocent enough; but the claim is, what you're seeing is real -- and can harm you.  Because of the alleged danger, there are a variety of rules you are supposed to remember.  If a room you enter has clocks in it, get out fast -- you can get trapped permanently.  If there are staircases, never take one leading downward.  If you meet a man with a suit, open your eyes and end the game immediately, because he's evil and can latch on to you and start following you around in real life if you don't act quickly enough.

Oh, and to add the obligatory frisson to the whole thing: if you die in the game, you actually die.

What's striking about "Red Door, Yellow Door" is that despite the fact that its claims are patently absurd, there are huge numbers of apparently completely serious people who have had terrifying experiences while playing it -- not only manifestations during the game, but afterward.  (If you search for the game, you'll find hundreds of accounts, many of them warning people from ever playing it because they were so traumatized by it.)  The thing is, what did they expect would happen?  They'd been primed by all of the setup; it's unsurprising they saw clocks and eerie staircases descending into darkness and evil guys in suits, and that those same images haunted their memories for some time after the game ended.

And if a silly game for gullible teenagers can do that, how much more do our perception and memory get tainted by how we're primed, especially by our prior notions of what might be going on?  Hang out in graveyards and spooky attics, and you're likely to see ghosts whether or not they're there.

As I recounted in Monday's post, I've been fascinated by tales of the supernatural since I was a kid, and on some level, I'm like Fox Mulder -- "I Want To Believe."  But the fact is, the evidence we have thus far just isn't enough.  Humans are way too suggestible to rely entirely on anecdote.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it most succinctly: "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  When you have something tangible we can bring back to the lab and analyze, then we can talk."

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